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I certainly hadn’t been paid that excessively, but then, I supposed the standard of living was much lower in my day. I’d never hungered or lacked for shelter or comfort. Same basic thing, I supposed. There was no point in being bitter that the budget for the newer generation was more luxurious than in my heyday.
The training proceeded apace. Ellie took two weeks to reach a mastery of the staff sufficient to convince me to let her graduate to edged weapons. Blade proficiency took a bit longer, but she came every day, training her pretty little heart out . . . first with a dull practice blade against a post, then against me. That was humiliating.
For her, of course.
The fourth time I disarmed her without breaking a sweat, she got a mulish, angry look as she swiped up the fallen sword. “I thought you said you don’t kill a dragon with swords!” she spat. “Why do I have to—”
“Because I said so,” I interrupted. Sometimes I love being old. “Now shut up and fight.” It was the closest she’d come yet to real complaints, and I wasn’t surprised; by this time, I’d been a screaming banshee, shouting abuse at Godric like a fishwife at a wandering husband. It was hard bloody work, especially since we conducted our business out in the desert, far from prying eyes and passing motorists curious about what a pair of women might be doing with medieval weapons in the hot sun.
She settled into a fighting stance, with a firm two-handed grip on her sword, and advanced. This time she was a little better; it took me three parries to find an opening, but this time I didn’t settle for stripping away her sword; I slammed the point of my weapon hard into her chest, knocking her back to the ground. She lay there on the dusty soil, blinking up at the desert sun, and tears trickled out of her eyes to cut clean lines through the dirt on her face. She was weary, sweaty, and so very young.
I hesitated for a second, then slammed my sword blunted point down into the sand hard enough to make it stand upright and reached down to offer her a hand. She stared at it for a second, gasping for breath, and then gripped it and let me haul her to her feet. Sand showered out of her clothes in an ocher flow and clung to her sweaty skin in clumps.
“You need all your skills,” I said. “Strength. Agility. Quickness of body and mind. Discipline. Patience. Ruthless dedication. That is why I’m teaching you. Not how to chop wood with a sharp edge. Any fool can do that.”
She thought about what I said. I could see the wheels turning. Over the past few weeks, she’d impressed me as much for her thoughtfulness as for her athleticism, which was considerable. I wondered how bright the girl really was. Brighter than most modern simpletons, I would guess; she questioned everything, accepted nothing without turning it this way and that. One would almost think rhetoric was still a skill possessed by the common man.
I reached in my pack, tossed her a bottle of water, and opened one for myself. We sat in the shade of a spiky bush—one of the few around—and swigged. She didn’t speak at first. Neither did I.
Eventually, she said, “The dragon. The one who’s left. You haven’t told me anything about him.”
“You’re not ready,” I said. “Learning about dragons is the last thing you do.”
“Why?”
I almost smiled. She asked why more than any child I’d ever known. “Because I say so.”
“Mrs. Martin—”
“Lisel,” I said.
Her cheeks colored slightly. “Lisel.” It sounded stilted and forced. “Why is knowing about him dangerous?”
“I didn’t say it was dangerous. It’s distracting.”
“Why?” Her huge eyes were fixed on me in challenge.
I surrendered, for the first time. “All right. I’ll tell you about Karathrax, but it doesn’t mean you can cut your training short to go after him.”
“Yeah, I know. Luke had to go back to Yoda, too. No jumping the gun.” I had no idea what she was talking about. Her flush deepened. “Sorry. Go on.”
“It’s not known how old Karathrax is,” I said. “He was in the earliest records handed down among the Dragonslayers. What is certain is that he was the cleverest of all of them, and the most patient. He waited once for fifty years, pretending to be mortally injured, simply to destroy the Dragonslayer who wounded him.”
Ellie’s eyes got even wider. “How many people has he killed?”
“In general? Thousands, certainly. The destruction of several medieval cities was ascribed to Karathrax, as the dragons began to wage a coordinated war against the Dragonslayers. He’s been responsible for the death of almost a dozen of us, over the centuries.”
“But before you.”
“I’m just the last one left alive,” I said. “I wasn’t the only one when I was chosen. I was one of almost a hundred. By the time Karathrax was the last, so was I.”
She said nothing to that. We drank our water in silence, and then she finally ventured, “But he must have done something terrible, right? I mean, not just being a dragon. Something to make us hunt him down like this.”
“Are you deaf? I said he killed thousands. Destroyed almost a dozen Dragonslayers!”
“I know,” she said softly. “But that’s war, kind of. They were fighting for their survival. Why were we killing them in the first place?”
She understood nothing. Nothing at all. The water in my mouth suddenly turned from sweet to bitter, and it was all I could do to choke it down. “Never you mind,” I said sharply, and got to my feet. My aches and pains, accumulated slowly over all the centuries, reminded me yet again of the years. “Get up and fight.”
