Isabeau did not reply.

  “Do you, Isabeau?” I repeated. Still nothing. “Isabeau?”

  Hearing no reply again, I went over by the dragon’s head to find Isabeau standing as immobile as the men she’d turned to stone when I first met her on the Isle of Sorcery. Her gaze was locked on the dragon’s jewel-like eyes.

  I seized her by the arm. “Isabeau! Are you awake?”

  “Lovely,” she murmured.

  “Well, it doesn’t smell lovely,” I said.

  “The more I look, the more I see. Depths upon depths! Colors without name, without count!” Still rapt in contemplation, she reached her hand toward the dragon’s mouth.

  Not waiting to see whether its teeth would harm her, I dragged her to the river and pushed her into the shallows.

  Isabeau flailed and splashed, then emerged shaking off water like a dog. “It’s cold! What did you do that for? You pushed me in and I’m COLD!”

  “Back to yourself, thank God,” I said. “You were walking in dreams.”

  She waded out, wringing the end of her gown. “Don’t look in its eye.”

  “I wasn’t planning to,” I said. “Look, this brute was killed with a crossbow-bolt in the chest. That means it’s possible to pierce it there. I can cut it into pieces small enough to drag into the river and float downstream.” I surveyed the dragon’s massive middle. There might be some footholds near the wing-joint, I thought; but when I tried clambering up, I found neither a handhold nor a toehold very high above the ground. Well, I thought, I have to start somewhere; braced on the wing, I stabbed as high as I could reach above my head. Some sort of greenish bile spurted out and splashed me in the eyes. “Oh, for the love of—whoa!”

  The ground fell away beneath me. I found myself suspended in midair, alone in the clouds with nothing in sight but a vast, heaving blueness far below me. “Holy saints!” I’d never had so much empty air beneath me before; the sight made me queasy.

  Suddenly the wind beneath me shifted, dropping me downward so abruptly that my stomach turned inside-out. Eyes watering, head reeling, I doubled over and vomited—and found myself kneeling on solid ground between a stinking dead dragon and a puddle of puke. “Yecch.”

  “So much for cutting up the dragon and floating it downstream,” said Isabeau.

  “Maybe if we went back to town, I could get some better gear to protect myself from the bile, or blood, or whatever that greenish stuff is,” I said.

  “Even if you wrap yourself from head to toe, how can you put that poison into the river? How many people downstream must fish from that water or drink it?”

  “All right: no using the river. It will be hard to drag this carcass across the rocks. Do you know a spell to move it?” I said, a tad hopelessly. Isabeau had been formidable in the Isle of Sorcery where I first met her, but she was still learning how to use magic outside her native island. In the spring landscape around us, I didn’t spot any of the plants embroidered on her dress, where she stitched images of herbs she’d learned to use in sorcery.

  She surveyed the dragon bleakly. “I studied the magic of living things: how to attract or repel, kill or heal, transform or restore them to proper form. This dragon is stone-dead.”

  “Dragons must die like anything else,” I mused. “Why isn’t the world littered with their corpses? Surely nothing eats them if they bleed poison. Even the wolf, the raven, and the bear that feast after battle would be hard pressed to clear this battlefield.”

  “Something must eat them,” Isabeau said. “It’s not only proud beasts like the wolf that feast after battle. Humbler creatures come to the banquet of carrion.” She closed her eyes, spread her arms, and composed her body in a stillness that had nothing of rest in it, almost an attitude of prayer. She hummed soft and high, almost inhumanly shrill. The sound rose till I almost wanted to clap my gauntleted hands over my ears—though I stopped myself for fear of getting dragon bile in there.

  They came from every direction, by ones and tens and hundreds. Common flies such as might swarm to a dead rat came pelting toward the dragon till they were as thick in the air as chaff on a threshing floor. I could not see through the storm of flies, but I could hear the horses we’d left grazing by the roadside snort in irritation. I could feel flies passing through my hair, and I wished I still had my helmet on till I imagined what it would feel like to have the nasty things inside it. As the flies kept coming, I heard hoofbeats pounding away. Blast! We’d lost the horses. Not that I could really blame Cloudmane and Fury, but I didn’t look forward to our own retreat on foot.

  At last the air cleared. Isabeau still stood with her arms outstretched toward the dragon, which seethed with flies.

  “Will they—?”

  Isabeau cut me off with a glance that felt like a slap. I shut up and let her do whatever it was she was busy doing.

  An eternity later, the flies began to lift, and once again the air was thick with wings. Isabeau turned her hands palm-down, then slowly raised them, humming deep in her throat. The massive hulk of dragon, once black with flies, now looked whitish, quivering with a million writhing tails.

  “Oh, for the love of Heaven. Maggots?” They looked bigger than any I’d ever seen, but then, I’d never seen maggots that had a dragon to feed on.

  As if I had summoned them, the foul things began to wriggle toward me. “Isabeau, why are they doing that? Make them go back to the dragon!”

  Isabeau, still rapt in her spell-casting, did not answer.

  It seemed unknightly to flee from something so contemptible, so when they got within arm’s reach of me, I slashed with my sword. The sharp odor of dragon bile filled the air. The others devoured the fluid that ran from the dead ones.

  Larger and larger they grew, ankle high, knee high, waist high. Some advanced on me, others still crawled on the dragon, but they all seemed to jerk about aimlessly, as senseless as my own movements must have been when the dragon-bile got in my eyes.

  One enormous maggot stuck its front end into my face. When I cut it down, it burst into flame. Then, one after another, the maggots around it came to feed on the flaming bile that ran from its wound, till the ground was thick with engorged, burning maggots. Beneath them on the ground, last autumn’s dry grass caught fire.

  I seized Isabeau around the waist and propelled us both into the water.

  “What are you doing? Augh! It’s cold! Again!”

  “Look around you!” I pointed at the blazing mess. “If we’d stayed on dry land, we’d be burnt bacon. I just have to hope they can’t boil us in the water. Those things are full of liquid fire.”

  “Really?” Isabeau, being Isabeau, looked curious rather than horrified. “I wish I had a good-sized flask, a strong stopper, and a pair of tongs. What a shame such rare specimens should go to waste! But why are they leaving the cadaver?”

  “How should I know why those maggots from the depths of Hell do anything?”

  “Calm yourself,” Isabeau said. “They’re not from Hell; they’re common fly spawn. The dragon flesh did something to them.”

  “I’m not surprised. It did something to me,” I said. “It made me dream I was a dragon flying over the water.”

  “Interesting. If they leave any of the dragon behind, I’d like to take a sample for alchemical study.”

  “If they leave us behind,” I said ruefully, and waited, soggy and cold, for the fires on the bank to subside. Unnaturally huge flies took wing from the dragon’s cadaver and flew drunkenly in all directions, some upside-down. Occasionally a pair would crash into each other and burn. Others fluttered clumsily away. But the dragon corpse still filled the pass.

  “It looks like they left quite a large sample,” I said, “but what would you keep it in? I’m not sacrificing a waterskin for dragon bile.”

  “That might be a problem,” Isabeau conceded.

  “Enough subtlety,” I said. “Time for brute force.” I made my way across scorched grass to the dragon’s tail, which wound into the rocks and rubble at the foothills of the mountains. It was dauntingly spiky, but with my hands protected by gauntlets, I could take hold of it. Now to pull the dragon off the road—but where? I couldn’t pull downhill, toward the river, but how far uphill could I drag that load? With no better alternative, I braced myself and gave it a mighty heave.

  The spiky tail jerked out of my hands and whacked my armored middle. If I hadn’t been knocked flat—which I was—I’d have hit the ground willingly to avoid another such blow. As it was, I rolled behind the rocks for cover and peered out uneasily at the dragon. But the massive body lay motionless, and it certainly smelled dead. I got to my feet and tried again. This time, when the tail again twitched out of my hands, I scuttled away to where Isabeau stood, ready to defend her if the dragon rose again and attacked. But once I let the tail go, the dragon stayed as lifeless as a heap of old clothes. Nothing moved upon it but the occasional late-blooming maggot. You’d think I’d dreamed those two tail-smacks, except that I could feel the bruises forming all up and down my body.

  “Bees can still sting after they die,” Isabeau said, as if she knew what I was thinking.

  “I can’t haul it off the road if I can’t hold it,” I said. “I can’t cut it apart and float it downstream, lest it poison the water. And at this rate, flies—even giant ones—will take all year to eat it.”

  “Maybe flies were the wrong carrion-eaters,” Isabeau mused.

  “Don’t even think of calling bears,” I said. “I don’t know what drunken bears would do, but...”

  “Naturally not bears,” she said. “but if these great dragons live and die, the earth must reclaim their bodies somehow.”

  “For a dead thing, it has enviable defenses,” I said. “Why are some creatures made like that? Why do dead bees sting?”

  “Good questions, Ursula. For an unlettered knight, you have an uncommonly inquiring mind.”

  “Huh. I don’t need Latin and letters to see the world with my own eyes.”

  “You may have put your finger on it, Ursula: the solution to our problem. Even in death there must be something of life. And if there is something alive, there may be something I can work with.” She approached the dead dragon, armed with no more than the pouch she wore on her belt for collecting herbs and the little silver knife she used to cut through the stems.

  “What are you doing, Isabeau?”

  “I need to understand this dragon to work with it. When its bile, or lymph, or perhaps blood splashed into your eyes, you saw as the dragon saw.”

  “Yes, and I could have killed myself,” I said. “This has gone beyond a nasty chore, Isabeau. It’s dangerous. It’s not as though anyone’s life depends on moving the dragon. Let the merchants find a different path. It’s not worth it.”

  “Just walk away? Without finding out anything about this—this extraordinary creature?”

  “We’ve found out enough,” I said. “Even dead, it knocks you flat at one end, steals your senses at the other, and bleeds madness in the middle. It’s dangerous to carve, impossible to move—it didn’t budge when I hauled with all my strength—” I glanced at the dragon’s head and what I saw stopped my tirade. “Oh, for all that’s holy! It did budge. The WRONG WAY.” The dragon’s head, once pillowed on its wing, now sagged toward the river, its forked tongue trailing into the water. “Isabeau, do you think there’s any chance the dragon’s tongue isn’t poisonous?”

  Isabeau followed my gaze. “Maybe. But I wouldn’t drink that water.”

  “We can’t leave it like that.”

  “Then you admit I’m right,” she said. “I have to try the dragon’s blood and see what I can learn from it.”

  “NO, Isabeau. I need you to think clearly. If anyone’s to try it, I’ll have another go.”

  “You’re stronger,” Isabeau pointed out. “I can’t restrain you if you run mad, but you could restrain me.”

  “And then what? Pushing you in the water may no longer help, now the water’s fouled.”

  “I’ll only put a drop in one eye, so the other eye sees the real world around me.”

  “Well, God guard fools and lunatics,” I said. “I have no better plan.”

  She dipped a rag in the dragon bile, touched it to one eye, then lay down on the ground before the madness took her. I hung close, ready to restrain her at need, while the right side of her body convulsed and the left lay still. In time her eye watered and cleared. “I see now,” she said.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “So much I can scarcely say. The dragon didn’t die of that little crossbow wound. It was dying already. Something blocked the passageway.”

  “The whole dragon is blocking the passageway.”

  Isabeau shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I need you to cut very carefully, exactly where I show you, a handspan deep and no more.”

  I drew my hunting-knife. “Show me where.”

  “Put on your helmet first,” she said, “visor and all.”

  “To defend myself from a dead thing?”

  “There’s life even in death. You found that out already,” Isabeau said. “Make a cut across the belly, two yards long but not deep, right about here.” She pointed above her head.

  “Tricky,” I said. “ I’ll have to stand on it.” I made my way along the vast corpse, looking for a toehold to climb on. Toward the tail it was thin enough, but I’d learned to fear the tail. The hind leg seemed my best bet; I pulled myself up, and for a wonder, it stayed still while I clambered up the knee onto the belly. The dragon’s flesh felt strange underfoot, the way the inside of the whale must have felt to Jonah.

  At last I reached the spot where Isabeau was pointing. She keened a wordless chant as I pierced the dragon’s skin. Green fluid flowed down its side, but fortunately, not onto Isabeau. I sawed against resisting scales to widen the cut. The flow became a waterfall, first green, then clear. Then I hurtled to the ground and drew my sword, because I felt movement in the flesh below my feet.

  A tangled mess of claws and tails appeared at the cut edges of dragon skin and wriggled clumsily out onto the scorched turf. Finally it disentangled itself into two dragons no bigger than sheepdogs—that is, if sheepdogs’ tails grew longer than their bodies. One dragon, as green as the big one, tumbled passively, inert and dead. From beneath it, a reddish dragonlet struggled free of its dead twin, bit away a shimmering membrane that tethered it to the corpse, and flopped weakly about, trying to lick its wings clean with its immense purple tongue.

  Well. I’d wanted to fight a live dragon. Now that I had one, the battle scarcely seemed knightly.

  “Don’t!” Isabeau cried the moment the muscle on my sword-arm twitched.

  “I don’t like to harm a newborn creature, “ I said, “but should we let it grow up to kill the travelers we guard?”

  “She won’t,” Isabeau said. “I can tame her.” She reached toward it, humming a low tone.

  I stood there hesitating while the dragonlet fluttered damp wings and puffed wisps of smoke. Its three eyes glittered like amethysts. Remembering what the dead one’s eye had done to Isabeau, I half-averted my face, keeping watch without locking gazes. The dragonlet also turned aside, gemlike eyes half lidded, and chirruped rather pathetically.

  I lowered my sword. The dragon made sweet whickering noises like a foal. Its face was ruby-red, but the scales shaded to rose and pink in the middle, then toward lilac in the tail. Isabeau drew something from her herb satchel and held it out to the dragon. It flopped weakly toward her. I held my breath when that hot snout approached her hand, but I trusted Isabeau—mostly—to know her own strength. The dragon delicately took the proffered herb with a flick of the tongue, then tucked its head under Isabeau’s hand and made peaceful whirring noises deep in its throat. “Good girl, Laetitia,” Isabeau crooned.

  She’d named the creature. Like it or not, I’d be traveling with that scaly nightmare. “But Isabeau,” I said, “how would you feed it? If it grows as big as the old one, it could eat an ox a day.”

  “No, no, no,” Isabeau said. “I got a good look at the teeth. They’re grazers and browsers, like most very large animals. Leaves, shoots, maybe grubs.”

  “If they mostly eat greens, why do they have weapons at both ends?”

  “Cows have horns. Bees have stings. Horses have murderous hooves, like your Fury, and wicked teeth, like that nasty stallion you sold after he bit Cloudmane. If I trust you to manage your war horses, you can trust me to manage Laetitia.”

  “You’re not planning to ride her. Are you?”

  “Not now,” she said. “She’s still a baby. But the magic in her! I can learn so much from her. I must have her.”

  “Right,” I said weakly. “What about the job we came to do? The pass is as badly blocked as ever.”

  “Oh!” said Isabeau. She’d forgotten that little problem already. “That can be remedied. Here, Laetitia!” She gave the dragon a handful of leaves to eat, then fed her one of the swollen grubs. Laetitia licked it all up and looked adoringly at Isabeau, who drew a long strip of rag out of her herb pouch, the type she kept for bandages. She held it in front of the dragon’s nose and jerked it around tantalizingly. When Laetitia’s flame lit the rag, Isabeau told me, “Get ready to jump in the river.”

  She hurled the burning rag onto the old dragon; white-hot flames engulfed the whole corpse. Isabeau plunged into the water, and I went with her. The dragonlet fluttered her rose-colored wings and followed us into the shallows, sputtering steam.

  “You gave me the clue when you asked why dead bees sting,” Isabeau told me. “A bee is never alone; even dead, it has to protect the others. This dead dragon was so well defended, she had to have others to protect. In the normal course of things, I think, she’d have had other dragons about to help her give birth, or to burn her corpse when she died. But she’d flown a long way from home—maybe disoriented by pain when her young got stuck wrong way round—and so she was all alone till we came to play midwife.”