Fire Without Powder

He was not entirely dead, though Kenneth insisted on looking at him the way one looks at a collapsed stone wall.

The dragon's body did not decompose the way old livestock did; it hardened like quicklime when it lacks water. Frost was already sealing his eyelids and an opaque, white saline crust climbed from his wing knuckles up to his neck. Beneath it, barely a tremor. A pulse so remote you could only notice it if you pressed your bare palm against the hollow between the third and fourth rib, where the skin smelled of spent sulfur and the banks of dried marshes.

"Fetch the copper pot," said Maren, rubbing her forearms to force her blood to circulate.

"He's got a frozen keel, girl. They'll bring the axes from the court before the week is out."

"I said the pot. And the skinning knife, the one with the notch in the deer-bone hilt. If you stand there you'll end up just as stiff as him, and you take up twice the space to drag to the pit."

A lie.

Kenneth was broad-shouldered and heavy-gaited, but he did not take up that much space. He let out a snort that formed a dense cloud in front of his four-day beard and, without talking back for the first time all afternoon, he stooped to grip the cauldron's handle. The frozen metal screeched against the courtyard flags with a sharp click that echoed all along the rampart walk.

The watchtower's kitchen offered little more heat than the trench. The chimney flue drew poorly and the green birch wood hissed in the hearth, spitting tiny sparks that jumped upon the unseasoned ashlar stones without warming the air past two spans from the fire. Maren overturned a burlap sack onto the butcher's table. Four brown onions, hard as river stones, rolled across the waxed wood until they bumped against a pewter bowl.

"Peel them," she ordered, planting the notched knife in his hand.

Kenneth looked at the worn handle, then at the petrified vegetable, and then at her.

"I am the custodian of this place."

"And right now you're the scullery boy. If you don't take their dry skin off, the broth turns bitter. Cut their roots in a cross so they release their juice even if they're woody."

"They're like granite."

"Well, press with your thumb. You've got calluses on your hands to stop a pike; don't complain to me about a little onion skin."

Kenneth muttered a curse under his breath, propped his hip against the bench, and drove the iron into the first piece with a soldier's clumsiness. The blade slipped and a flake of frost jumped off, landing on the bib of his jerkin. Maren paid him no mind; she was busy scraping the bottom of an earthenware terrine with the back of her nail where a lump of old lard remained.

She plunged the rancid fat into the deep black iron skillet. The sizzling was slow to come, lazy, accompanied by a heavy vapor that smelled of pork cured with too much saltpeter and old smoke. With a pinch of coarse hand-ground salt —the grains scratched her chapped knuckles before falling— she tossed in three sprigs of wild rosemary she had plucked from the sun-drenched wall. The aroma shifted all at once: the harsh green of the herb, toasting in the lively fat, filled the air with a sudden, almost insolent warmth amid so much freezing stone.

"You're burning the corner," said Kenneth in a dry voice.

"It's not burning. It's browning. There is a difference, even if they taught you at court to eat everything boiled in clean water."

"I'm not from the court. And my mother put the vegetables whole to the fire."

"That must be how they tasted to him."

Kenneth did not answer, but the left corner of his mouth curved just a millimeter beneath his soot-stained mustache. His fingers, numb and thick, fought with the last onion. The wedges came out irregular, some squashed and others too thick, but they fell one after another onto the cutting board with a steady rhythm.

"Your grandfather did this job better," he murmured, without lifting his gaze from the edge.

"My grandfather had six hammered copper pans and three apprentices who lit his charcoal at four in the morning. I have you and a fire that looks like it's apologizing for breathing."

"It could be worse."

"How?"

"It could be sleeting inside the kitchen."

"Don't tempt the clouds, custodian."

The lemon was small, its skin rough and stained by the journey, but when Maren sliced off a long strip with the fine-tipped paring knife, the oily, acidic perfume leaped into the air like a small slap. She tossed it into the skillet at the exact instant the onion lost its icy whiteness and turned translucent, floating in the dark depths.

Kenneth had stepped back a pace. He wiped his hands, stained with milky juice, on the thigh of his trousers, observing the saucepan with a gravity that did not fit a stew made of scraps.

"The emissary will return on Friday," he said, lowering his tone while the wind howled furiously through the tall tower slits. "He'll bring six carts and ten men with butcher axes. They don't care about the animal's hide; they only want the fossil coal from the gizzard for the capital's forges. They think it yields better if it's butchered before the blood congeals entirely."

Maren stirred the broth with an ash spoon worn down by the years. The golden fat and lemon peel spun in a thick whirlpool that gave off a stubborn, dense heat, laden with rosemary and crushed pepper.

"Let them come," she replied, watching the surface break into a tiny boil. "Joy is not a miracle that falls from a leaden sky; it is a thick broth that stubbornly defends itself against the wind."

Kenneth looked at her fixedly. There was a shadow of fatigue in his eyes, but the rigid line of his shoulders seemed to have given way by a couple of fingers.

"You're crazy, Maren."

"And you're hungry. Help me take this outside before the fat cools."

They stepped out into the courtyard, wrapping themselves in their travel blankets. The dragon was barely more than a white promontory over the pebbles; snow accumulated in the hollows of his dorsal crests, forming rigid icicles that hung toward the ground. He didn't even blink when Maren planted her boots in the frost half a span from his muzzle.

"Basile," she called softly, tapping the rim of the pot with the spoon handle. "Basile, you stubborn old thing. Open up."

Nothing.

The air stopped for a moment between the curtain walls.

Kenneth stepped forward. He didn't use the commanding voice he spent on the guards; he leaned over, placed both hands stained with onion and soot upon the beast's nasal plates, and pushed upward with a low grunt, forcing the lower jaw against the weight of the frost welding it to the stone.

"Come on," the custodian roared through his teeth. "Don't die now, you cursed beast. Don't leave me alone with this woman."

The crack of breaking ice sounded like shattered glass.

Maren did not hesitate: she tipped the entire iron cauldron into the grayish, barren cavity of the throat. The hot broth slid toward the depths with a prolonged hiss, like water poured onto a blacksmith's griddle.

For three heartbeats only the blizzard whipping the palisade timber could be heard.

Then, a dry spasm shook the base of the animal's neck.

Basile's stomach rumbled, not with the hollow crunch of dead stone, but with a clean snap, akin to a dry branch catching fire in the middle of an autumn night. The iron cauldron vanished deep inside his maw, swallowed in a single spasmodic gulp. Two needles of blue fire, thin and pure as the flame of a virgin wax candle, burst suddenly from his nostrils, blowing a gust of hot vapor that smelled of fried rosemary and sweet lemon.

The central icicle imprisoning his spine split in two with a crisp roar and slid off in thick drops of lukewarm water that smoked over the saltpeter on the ground.

Kenneth fell to his knees upon the melted snow, soaking his hose, but when he raised his head his mouth was not pressed into his usual bitter scowl. His cheeks were stained with grease, his forehead black with charcoal, and he let out a hoarse, clumsy laugh, broken by disuse, that rumbled in his chest like an enclosed thunder.

"He's still alive," he said, almost unable to believe it, watching the dragon's membranous eyelid slowly peel back, revealing a living, golden pupil.

"I told you he was just sad."

Kenneth slipped his hand beneath the lining of his tanned leather jacket. With fingers still clumsy from the mix of snow and grease, he pulled out a parchment folded in two, thick, sealed at the edges with a medallion of scarlet sealing wax bearing neither the marquis's signature nor any expiration date.

He handed the parchment to Maren without getting up from the ground, with a look in which the distance of the past few days had evaporated like ice beneath the beast's breath.

"The lease on the tower," he said, still with the echo of that unusual laughter vibrating in his throat. "No expiry date, cook. Let's see how you manage to make me dinner tomorrow."