your honour as a Firedrake,
to listen quietly?"

"On my sacred word of honour," said the beast, casually scorching an
eagle that flew by into ashes. The cinders fell, jingling and crackling,
round the prince in a little shower.

Then the Firedrake dived back, with an awful splash of flame, and the
mountain roared round him.

The prince now flew high above him, and cried:

"A message from the Remora. He says you are afraid to fight him."

"Don't know him," grunted the Firedrake.

"He sends you his glove," said Prince Prigio, "as a challenge to mortal
combat, till death do you part."

Then he dropped his own glove into the fiery lake.

"Does he?" yelled the Firedrake. "Just let me get at him!" and he
scrambled out, all red-hot as he was.

"I'll go and tell him you're coming," said the prince; and with two
strides he was over the frozen mountain of the Remora.

[Illustration: Chapter Ten]

CHAPTER X.--_The Prince and the Remora_

If he had been too warm before, the prince was too cold now. The hill of
the Remora was one solid mass of frozen steel, and the cold rushed out
of it like the breath of some icy beast, which indeed it _was_. All
around were things like marble statues of men in armour: they were the
dead bodies of the knights, horses and all, who had gone out of old to
fight the Remora, and who had been frosted up by him. The prince felt
his blood stand still, and he grew faint; but he took heart, for there
was no time to waste. Yet he could nowhere see the Remora. "Hi!" shouted
the prince. Then, from a narrow chink at the bottom of the smooth, black
hill,--a chink no deeper than that under a door, but a mile wide,--stole
out a hideous head!

It was as fiat as the head of a skate-fish, it was deathly pale, and two
chill-blue eyes, dead-coloured like stones, looked out of it.

Then there came a whisper, like the breath of the bitter east wind on a
wintry day:

"Where are you, and how can I come to you?"

"Here I am!" said the prince from the top of the hill.

Then the flat, white head set itself against the edge of the chink from
which it had peeped, and slowly, like the movement of a sheet of ice, it
slipped upwards and curled upwards, and up, and up! There seemed no end
to it at all; and it moved horribly, without feet, holding on by its own
frost to the slippery side of the frozen hill. Now all the lower part of
the black hill was covered with the horrid white thing coiled about
it in