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is fortunate for all who walk the earth that the Great Ones bred but rarely;
    and that mankind has borne Plough heroes to vanquish the most of them. But it is
    this writer’s most fervid belief that at least one more hero must stand forth from
    his people to face the last of the Great Ones.

    “Of this last—I have said one or two; perhaps there are three or four; I know
    not. But of one I will make specific remark: Gorthold, who slew Crendenor and
    Razimtheth, went also against Maur, the Black Dragon, and it he did not slay.
    Gorthold, who was himself wounded unto death, said with his last strength that
    the dragon would die of its wounds as he would die of his; but this was never
    known for a certainty. The only certainty is that Maur disappeared; and has been
    seen by no man—or none that has brought back the tale to tell—from that day to
    this.”
    In the back of the book Aerin found an even older manuscript: just a few pages,
    nearly illegible with age, sewn painstakingly into the binding. Those final ancient
    pages were a recipe, for an ointment called kenet. An ointment that was proof
    against dragonfire—it said.
    It had a number of very peculiar ingredients; herbs, she thought, by the sound
    of them. She knew just enough of the Old Tongue to recognize a few syllables;
    there was one that translated as “red-root.” She frowned; there was a thing called
    redroot that showed up in boring pastoral poems, but she’d always thought it
    belonged to that classic category known as imaginary, like nymphs and elephants.
    Teka might know about redroot; she brewed a uniquely ghastly tea or tisane for
    every ailment, and when Aerin asked what was in the awful stuff, Teka invariably
    rattled off a list of things that Aerin had never heard of. She had been inclined to
    assume that Teka was simply putting her off with nonsense, but maybe not.
    An ointment against dragonfire. If it worked—one person, alone, could tackle a
    dragon safely; not a Great One, of course, but the Black Dragon probably did die
    of its wounds ... but the little ones that were such a nuisance. At present the
    system was that you attacked with arrows and things from a distance, with
    enough of you to make a ring around it, or them, so if they bolted at someone he
    could run like mad while the other side of the ring was filling them full of arrows.
    They couldn’t run far, and usually a family all bolted in the same direction. It was
    when they didn’t that horses died.
    Aerin had been sitting under the convenient tree by Talat’s pond most
    afternoons for several weeks when she found the recipe for dragon salve. It made
    her thoughtful, and she was accustomed to pacing while she thought. The surka
    was slowly losing its grip on her, and while she couldn’t exactly pace, she could
    amble slowly without her cane. She ambled around Talat’s pool.
    Talat followed her. When she stopped, or grabbed a tree limb for balance, he
    moved a step or two away and dropped his nose to the ground and lipped at

    whatever he found there. When she moved on, he picked up his head and drifted
    after her. On the third afternoon since finding the recipe she was still pacing, not
    only because she was a slow thinker, but because her four-legged shadow with
    the dragging hind foot intrigued her. It was on the third day that when she put her
    hand out to steady herself against the air, a horse’s neck insinuated itself under
    her outstretched fingers. She let her hand lie delicately on his crest, her eyes
    straight ahead, ignoring him; but when she took another step forward, so did he.
    Two days later she brought a currycomb and some brushes to Talat’s meadow;
    they belonged to Kisha, her pony, but Kisha wouldn’t miss them. Kisha was the
    ideal young sol’s mount: fine-boned and delicate and prettier than a kitten. She
    was also as vain as Galanna, and loved nothing better than a royal procession,
    when the horses of the first circle would be all decked out in gilt