PodCastle 770: The Dragon Killer’s Daughter

* Author : MacKenzie R. Snead

* Narrator : Heather Thomas

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

PodCastle 770: The Dragon Killer’s Daughter is a PodCastle original.

Content warning for the death of a parent.

Rated PG

The Dragon Killer’s Daughter

by MacKenzie R. Snead

Gayamiza was no stranger to pilgrims, but these two were not welcome — an old man and his daughter, foreignness sewn into their clothes, engraved in the blades they carried. The city let them in, as it did all acolytes, but as if swallowing food it was not accustomed to and ’didn’t particularly like. It coughed and gagged, people on the streets looking the other way, mothers ushering their young indoors. There was something about this pair the city didn’t trust, something more than the peculiarity of the father’s beard and the daughter’s burning hair. Any village fool could tell that they carried misdeeds in their pockets, that their pilgrimage was dishonest.

The journey had taken months, and now the father was too tired to walk. His daughter pulled him down the narrow streets in a wooden cart, bumping across unfriendly cobblestones without so much as a stumble. The locals found her strength disquieting, staring from their windows as she pulled her father along like some aged product nobody would buy. Strength like that was not natural in a girl, and shouldn’t be encouraged.

The old man squinted through heavy eyelids at the shining buildings, stiffly adjusting himself atop the armor and longsword that served as his bedfellows in the cart. “Where are we?” he asked hoarsely.

“Gayamiza, Father,” his daughter panted, not turning around to look at him. “Don’’t you recognize it?”

“No,” he croaked after a moment. “I’ve never been here.”

She knew that wasn’t true. The countless times he’d ventured to this place when she was a child, only to return with bowed head to a home sunk deeper and deeper in disgrace and poverty. She tightened her grip on the handles of the cart and leaned forward with determination. Her father would know something other than shame before he died.

“Better to come by ship,” he said absentmindedly, glimpsing the shimmering sea at the bottom of a side street.

“They don’’t let ships come to Gayamiza, Father. You know that.”

But he didn’t. Not anymore. Their journey through the mountains had been punctuated by his senility. Despite her patient reminders, he never knew what or where Gayamiza was.

Tomorrow, she thought as she gave the cart a great heave, her eyes skirting up the mountain in the distance. It loomed over the city, a precarious rise of rusty boulders on the edge of the sea, threatening to roll one rock at a time into the frothing waters below. After hearing so many stories about the place, she’d imagined the demon’s abode would be larger. It could hardly be called a mountain.

When we go up there tomorrow, he’ll remember everything.

A strange clairvoyance sometimes visits the elderly. It is rare, able to only manifest in a slipping mind. It just so happened that one of these fickle visitations came to the old man in the back of the cart. Guided by his daughter’s thoughts, he turned his gaze up to the mountain on the northern edge of the city, seeing it for the first time that day. Something stirred within him.

“The cave!” he thundered, clumsily attempting to draw his longsword from beneath him. A group of nearby children snickered, the old man appearing to merely grope at his own behind.