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its great furnace jaws, the spikes of teeth as large as tree trunks, as sharp as swords.
    Lancot remembered his boyhood and the games of sticks and balls. He snatched up the fireweed with his ungloved hand and, ignoring the sting of it, flung the lot into the dragon’s maw.
    Surprised, the dragon swallowed, then straightened up and began to roar.
    Lancot was no fool. He put the mitt over his eyes, held his nose with his burned hand, and jumped.
    On shore, Tansy had long since stopped screaming to watch the precarious climb. Each time Lancot slipped she felt her heart stutter. She prayed he might drop off before the dragon noticed, until she remembered he could not swim.
    When he reached the dragon’s foot, Tansy was wading into the water, screaming once again. Her aloe-smeared hands had left marks on her skirts, on her face.
    And when the tree and kite fell, she felt her hopes rise until she saw that Lancot was not with them. She prayed then, the only prayer she could conjure up, the one her mother had spoken:
    Fire and water on thy wing,
    The curse of god in beak and flight.
    It seemed to her much too small a prayer to challenge so great and horrible a beast.
    And then the dragon turned on itself, curling round to look at Lancot, and they began to tumble towards the sea.
    At that point Tansy no longer knew what prayers might work. “Fly,” she screamed. “Drop,” she screamed.
    No sooner had she called out the last then the dragon straightened out and roared so loudly she had to put her hands over her ears, heedless of the aloe smears in her hair. Then as she watched, the great dragon began to burn. Its body seemed touched by a red aureole and flames flickered the length of its body, from mouth to tail. Quite suddenly, it seemed to go out, guttering like a candle, from the back forward. Black scabs fell from its tail, its legs, its back, its head. It turned slowly around in the air, as if each movement brought pain, and Tansy could see its great head. Only its eyes held life till the very end when, with a blink, the life was gone. The dragon drifted, floated down onto a sandbar, and lay like a mountain of ash. It was not a fierce ending but rather a gigantic sigh, and Tansy could not believe how unbearably sad it made her feel, as if she and the dragon and Lancot, too, had been cheated of some reward for their courage. She thought, quite suddenly, of a child’s balloon at a fair pricked by a needle, and she wept.
    A hand on her shoulder recalled her to the place. It was the fisherman’s son.
    “Gone then?” he asked. He meant the dragon.
    But knowing Lancot was gone as well, Tansy began sobbing anew. Neither her mother nor her sisters nor the priest nor all the celebrations that night in the town could salve her. She walked down to the water’s edge at dusk by herself and looked out over the sea to the spit of land where the ash mound that had been the dragon was black against the darkening sky.
    The gulls were still. From behind her a solitary owl called its place from tree to tree. A small breeze teased into the willows, setting them to rustling. Tansy heard a noise near her and shrugged further into herself. She would let no one pull her out of her misery, not her mother nor her sisters nor all the children of the town.
    “I could use a bit of hallow on my throwing hand,” came a voice.
    “Aloe,” she said automatically before she turned.
    “It’s awfully hard to kill a hero,” said Lancot with a smile.
    “But you can’t swim.”
    “It’s low tide,” he said. “And I can wade.”
    Tansy laughed.
    “It’s awfully hard to kill a hero,” so said Lancot. “But we ordinary fellows, we do get hurt. So I could use a bit of hallow on my hand.”
    She didn’t mind the smear of aloe on her hair and cheek. But that came later on, much later that night. And it seemed to the two of them that what they did then was very heroic indeed.
    There is a spit of land near the farthest shores of the farthest islands.