Sasha was reading in bed when he came to her, his ruddy, bearded face alight, but she laid her book on her bosom and listened raptly to his story as he told it, his hands moving. Near the end, he drew back to show her how he had drawn back the bow and had let Foe-Hammer, his father’s great arrow, fly across the little glen. When he did this, she laughed and clapped and won his heart.

The King’s Preserves had almost been hunted out. In these modern days it was rare to find so much as a good-sized deer in them, and no one had seen a dragon since time out of mind. Most men would have laughed if you had suggested there might still be such a mythy creature left in that tame forest. But an hour before sundown on that day, as Roland and his party were about to turn back, that was just what they found… or what found them.

The dragon came crashing and blundering out of the under-brush, its scales glowing a greenish copper color, its soot-caked nostrils venting smoke. It had not been a small dragon, either, but a male just before its first molting. Most of the party were thunderstruck, unable to draw an arrow or even to move.

It stared at the hunting party, its normally green eyes went yellow, and it fluttered its wings. There was no danger that it could fly away from them-its wings would not be well developed enough to support it in the air for at least another fifty years and two more moltings-but the baby-webbing which holds the wings against a dragon’s body until its tenth or twelfth year had fallen away, and a single flutter stirred enough wind to topple the head huntsman backward out of his saddle, his horn flying from his hand.

Roland was the only one not stunned to utter movelessness, and although he was too modest to say so to Sasha, there was real heroism in his next few actions, as well as a sportsman’s zest for the kill.