Chapter 9
Cowardice is a choice
In the dream, Gwen longed for a fate so simple and final as death.
Instead, no matter how badly she was wounded, no matter how many times she fell, the fight went on.
No matter how many times she slew the dragon, it came back, again and again.
Like a hero in an ancient myth who had offended the gods, she was condemned to fight the beast in her nightmares, over and over, for all eternity.
She killed it, and it rose again. She maimed it, or put out its one remaining eye, or severed a limb or wing, and when she turned, or blinked, or took her eyes away for a single moment, the creature was somehow whole again.
Whole, but changed. She’d killed it so many times that it was beginning to decay, its green-bronze skin sagging. Part of its cheek was missing, the brutal teeth bared through the ragged gap in a horrible, perpetual grin.
The only thing that never changed was the dragon’s eye.
A force so natural as decay could not touch that orb of molten gold.
Every night that eye was there, waiting for her to be so foolish as to sleep.
It stared at her, through her, into her, and ruthlessly shredded her soul.
Under its stare, she chose, night after night, to give in, to give up, and fall into the inky depths of madness.
In her most recent dream, she’d driven her sword between the dragon’s armoured plates and felt, rather than heard, its chuckling rumble of a growl vibrating back through her arm.
Its eye found her, and the terror swelled up to grip her, driving out everything she was until the only thing left of her soul was fear.
She was flung aside as it lifted one scaled foot to crush her, as it had crushed her helmet in the dark confines of the mine.
She had thought, when she saw her flattened helm, that her painstakingly crafted armour looked no more substantial than a prop made for a stage melodrama.
Now, she realised she herself was no more than a bit of paper and paste.
Nothing. Just a girl frozen by her own fear, dressed in costume armour, realising too late that she was no hero.
A moment longer and she’d have to look into the monster’s eye, let it tear away all hope and leave her falling endlessly into despair – and, as always, she knew she couldn’t face it. So she ripped herself from sleep and woke with a muffled shriek.
As soon as she heard Isobelle’s light step move away from her door, Gwen slipped out of bed, threw on yesterday’s dress, and buckled on her sword.
She paused in the hallway. It wasn’t too late.
She could knock on Isobelle’s door, because she knew the other girl hadn’t gone back to sleep.
She could still ask Isobelle to comfort her.
Isobelle would tell her some story from her childhood, or weave a new one about some place they’d go, and Gwen would replace the locks and chains keeping her pit of fears shut, and be able to pretend all was well again.
But for how long? How long until the dragon burst free of those chains once more, and dragged her down into that abyss?
Isobelle could help her wallpaper over that dungeon door that led down to the pit of Gwen’s fears, but she couldn’t stop the dragon growing stronger every time Gwen pretended she couldn’t hear it clawing at her from deep inside her own heart.
Gwen sighed and slipped out of the inn, keeping to the shadows as much as she could. Her breath steamed in the frigid air. She cast a glance back up towards the darkened windows, trying to figure out which was Isobelle’s. No movement stirred behind any of them – Isobelle must have gone back to bed.
Finally deeming it safe to step out of the shadows, she made her way down towards the water.
All Galanty-Uponne-the-Sea was sleeping.
The moonlight washed the colour out of the last of the autumn flowers in their window boxes, the cobblestones swept clean by a light freezing drizzle earlier in the evening.
The glimpses of the silver sea between the houses were like glass, perfectly still. The world might have been a painting.
If only the serenity of her surroundings mirrored her thoughts.
Her entire body felt like it was on fire, limbs itching for action, to run or fight, but the harbour, as she emerged from the clustered houses, was quiet.
No monsters. Not even a restive fish or ripple of wind broke the glass-smooth swells that glided in to break against the jetties.
Gwen put a hand on the hilt of her sword anyway, taking comfort from its familiar shape – the sword she’d made with her own hands, the one she’d spent so many years engraving, the one that had played a starring role in all her younger fantasies of becoming a knight.
But what good was a sword against a monster that existed only inside her mind?
‘Gwen?’
The voice made her startle and she whirled, her heart trying to plummet and soar all at once. But the girl standing some distance away was not Isobelle, and Gwen swallowed the lump in her throat, trying to catch her breath.
‘Tabitha? What are you doing out here?’
‘I couldn’t sleep, and I saw you from my window.’ The young witch hesitated. Her hair had been leached of its colour by the moonlight, and her faded clothing made her seem like an apparition, melding into the shadows. ‘Do you mind? I can go.’
Gwen opened her mouth to accept that graceful offer of solitude, but the words that came out instead were, ‘No, I don’t mind.’
Tabitha came up alongside her and leaned back against one of the pilings of the dock. The silence stretched, broken only by the soft susurration of the waves.
‘I keep thinking I’ll turn a corner and see some sign of my mother,’ Tabitha murmured, gazing out towards the town. ‘But I don’t even know where she lived – my memories are too hazy.’
Gwen glanced at her. ‘You’re thinking she was one of the sorceress’s victims?’
Tabitha’s face was troubled. ‘Maybe. Lord Bingleton’s story was just that – a story. Where are all the other witches who would’ve lived in this area? And why did the paladins leave so quickly after the evil was vanquished?’
Gwen studied the other girl thoughtfully. ‘Once the sea monster is dealt with,’ she said, managing to keep her voice even, ‘perhaps we can go find where the local records are kept, see if we can dig something up about your mother.’
Tabitha sighed. ‘That might be my best option. Every time I try to ask the people here what they know of that time, they come over all strange, like …’
‘Like Rosamund the innkeeper did.’ Gwen sighed, rubbing her thumb over the engraved hilt of her sword. ‘There’s certainly something odd going on.’
‘Is that what’s keeping you from sleeping?’ Tabitha asked, eyeing Gwen sidelong.
Gwen had the uneasy feeling that Tabitha knew her answer already. Perhaps that was why, when she spoke, the truth came out this time. ‘I had a nightmare.’
‘You get them often?’
Gwen cast her a sharp glance. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Your face. You have a grimness about you, a tightness when you say the word “nightmare”.’ Tabitha gave her a wan, wry smile. ‘I am quite familiar with nightmares.’
Gwen let go of the sword hilt and folded her arms across her chest. ‘It’s always the same dream,’ she admitted in a low voice. ‘I see the dragon I fought – the one that’s earned me all this fanfare. I fight it, and …’ Her voice caught, and she fell silent.
Tabitha waited, then said quietly, ‘Do you not think talking about it with Isobelle might help? It is hard to speak our fears aloud, but she … cares for you. Admires you, admires your bravery.’
‘We care for each other.’ Gwen glanced at Tabitha, and saw only understanding there, and perhaps a little bit of envy – no shock or judgement. Perhaps Tabitha had seen the nature of Gwen and Isobelle’s relationship from the start. ‘But she sees me as a knight. A hero.’
‘Are you not?’
‘What good is a knight who cannot move or speak for fear?’ Gwen replied bitterly. ‘In my dream, I am frozen, just as I was that night. In my dream, the dragon …’ But still she could not say it.
In her mind’s imagination, the dragon’s eye loomed up before her, huge and all-encompassing, swallowing hope, light, love … She lurched away from the memory so violently her body jerked.
Tabitha’s hand came to rest on Gwen’s shoulder, her touch warm and kind.
‘I can’t tell her,’ Gwen murmured. ‘I can’t tell her what really took place between the dragon and me. She’ll never look at me the same way.’
Tabitha squeezed her shoulder gently. ‘The dragon is gone,’ she said. ‘You killed it.’
‘But in my dream it comes back,’ Gwen whispered.
‘Over and over, no matter how many times I face it, it always comes back. It never dies, because I can never bring myself to … to look at it … What it did to me, it’s still doing it to me.
They say I am a dragonslayer, that I defeated the beast.’ Her mouth felt dry as sand.
‘But I think it defeated me. I just haven’t finished falling yet. ’
A sound, no more than a soft scrape, made both girls stiffen and turn towards the darkened houses beyond the harbour.
Gwen’s hand had gone automatically to her sword.
She scanned the shadows, searching for the source of the noise, straining for the sight of some fleeting silhouette darting from concealment.
The sound had been that of a shoe scraping against the packed-earth street.
Gwen shifted her weight and glanced uneasily at Tabitha. ‘This town puts me on edge. I’d better go back, but thank you, Tabitha. I hope we can help you find some sign of what happened to your mother.’
‘Fear is not cowardice,’ Tabitha said, straightening. ‘We cannot help but fear – cowardice is a choice.’
Gwen bade her a hasty farewell and hurried back towards the inn. She saw no one along the way – perhaps that scraping sound had simply been an animal on some midnight mission, and not a person following her at all.
As she slipped back into her room and slid under her richly embroidered blankets, Tabitha’s words kept echoing in her mind.
Cowardice is a choice.
Tabitha didn’t know the full truth any more than Isobelle did.
In that moment, when the dragon’s eye had consumed her, Gwen had felt herself dangling over the edge of oblivion, faced with a choice: to hold on, to keep fighting, to cling to every last shred of hope she could find … or to let go and give in.
Gwen had chosen to fall.
Coward, she thought bleakly, staring at the ceiling of the grand Dragonslayer’s Suite.
So we’re all caught up now, yes?
You probably remember where we were: out on a tiny ship in the charming harbour of Galanty-Uponne-the-Sea, the rising sun illuminating the cliffs, geese trundling across the sky providing some misleading pastoral charm, in contrast to all the screaming and tentacles.
Dear reader, I could see you were most vexed when I paused at the start to go back and recount the manner in which we came to this place, but I think you’ll agree now it was the right call.
Now, you know why Isobelle was acting with such supreme confidence – to conceal the doubts and desperate fear that lurked beneath.
The determination that this had been – that this must have been – a good choice.
For of course it was she who followed Gwen the night before, and overheard Gwen confessing to Tabitha that which she could not tell her beloved.
It was her fashionable shoe that scraped softly across the ground, her breath that was so carefully held.
You know as well, why Gwen froze at a most inconvenient moment face to face – or face to tentacle – with her foe.
You know that this fight is not just a battle against a sea monster, but a battle for Gwen’s very soul as a knight.
But it is also a battle against a sea monster – probably best not to forget that amid all the delicious tension and angst.
As we resume, you might want to duck.