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A Basin of Water
There are three truths I have come to learn in the year since the Dragon War. The first is that both humans and dragons have the capacity to be good or evil. The second is that even if you’re doing something you love, you can still become bored with your work. And the third truth is that my business partner, Marta, will never be finished with her wedding gown.
Either one of them.
“It’s so white,” Marta complained for the thousandth time.
I tried to put my head in my hands, and nearly poked myself in the eye with a needle. I jerked back just in time, and glared at the needle. “Marta,” I said.
“Yes?”
I had no idea what else to say, so I shook my head instead. My gaze fell on some blue fabric that lay on the cutting table in front of me. “Your gown for the Moralienin ceremony isn’t white,” I offered. Of course, we had had this conversation so many times that I knew exactly what was coming next.
“But that’s a set pattern,” she said, as she always did. “No room for us to experiment, to really make it special. ” She flapped her hands in agitation. “And I have to sew every stitch myself, it’s tradition. ”
I put my needle down and ground the heels of my palms into my eyes. “Maaarta,” I wailed.
“Oh, I’m sorry, does this bore you?” She threw a spool of thread at me. “Just because it’s my wedding, and not yours!”
That hurt, but I didn’t let it show on my face. I knew that Marta hadn’t meant it to be unkind. I had never confided my fears to her – that I would end up a lonely spinster, running the dress shop by myself after she was long wed. After all, I had had the audacity to fall in love with a prince, and princes do not marry shopkeepers.
“Don’t worry, Creel, you’ll be married soon enough. ” Alle, our assistant, came in with a bolt of cloth in her arms and a mischievous twinkle in her eye. I was sure she knew exactly what we had been talking about.
“No, I won’t,” I protested.
“You get more letters from Prince Luka than his father does,” Alle said, unintentionally causing me another pang. “And he’s supposed to be passing along information to the king about Citatie. ”
“Where is Citatie, anyway?” I asked in an attempt to change the subject.
I really did want to know about Citatie: I had never dared to tell Luka that I had no clue where he was. All I knew was that it was very hot there, and that their king was very odd. Although Luka and I were just friends – how could we be anything more than that? – I hated to look foolish in front of him. The schoolmistress in Carlieff Town, where I grew up, had been a bit vague about the geography outside Feravel’s borders.
“It’s to the south, across an ocean,” Marta said, sounding just as vague as my old teacher.
Alle shrugged. It seemed that we had all had the same level of schooling. I sighed.
“If you’ve finished fussing over Marta’s gowns, which needn’t be ready for four more months,” Alle said, “I believe that it’s time to open the shop. The invitations to the crown prince’s wedding were sent out two days ago; there should be quite a few wealthies wanting new gowns for the feasts and the ceremony. ”
“And that’s another thing,” Marta said as we took off our work aprons and straightened our hair in the mirror on the wall. “We’re making the clothes for the royal bride-to-be, we’re friends with both princes, yet where’s our invitation to the wedding?”
“Marta,” I said, even though secretly I was a little hurt by this as well as by their teasing, “we’re commoners. ”
“Be that as it may,” she said severely, “you’re still the Heroine of the Dragon –”
I whirled around. “Don’t say it,” I told her. “Don’t even think it. I own a dress shop and girls from small northern towns who own dress shops do not go to royal weddings. I’m not some mythical warrior woman. ”
That was what I told myself every day. King Caxel had once offered to have me marry Miles, as a reward for my part in the Dragon War, and I had refused. I truly had no desire to be a queen or a princess, but it still pained me that in refusing Miles I had cemented my status as a common merchant with no chance of becoming one of Marta’s wealthies, who had the right to dance with princes.
Or to marry them.
Her eyes filled with sympathy as though guessing at my roiling emotions. We opened up the shop in silence.
My hurt deepened as the day wore on and just as Alle had predicted, customers poured in to demand gowns for the royal wedding. It seemed that everyone with the least title, the least bit of wealth, had been invited. But I know Crown Prince Milun, I cried out inside. Marta and I were among perhaps a dozen people who had permission to call him Miles. And yes, Luka and I could never be more, but we were friends, after all. Page 2
I steeled myself with the thought that Marta and I wouldn’t have enough time to make ourselves new gowns, anyway. We had more than two dozen orders by the end of the day, and would have to hire temporary help to measure and cut the fabric. This was cheering, since it meant continued profit and success. If things continued in this manner, we would be able to take on a permanent apprentice or two in the next year.
By the time the shop closed I was exhausted. I didn’t want to see one more ribbon or bolt of cloth, and I certainly didn’t want to attend any feasts or ceremonies. But before I could lie down for some much-deserved sleep, I had one last thing to do.
In my bedroom above the shop I had two washbasins. One was painted with flowers and birds, and had a matching pitcher beside it. I washed my face and hands in it morning and night, and it was quite lovely. Across the room from this basin was a small table bearing another washbasin. This one was a heavy, gaudy thing, made of beaten gold and set with roughly cut crystals. There was always water in it, which I never changed.
The gold basin had come from the hoard of a dragon, and the water in it had been alchemically charged.
I pulled up a tall stool. Why stand when you can sit, as my mother used to say. I leaned my elbows on the table, one on each side of the basin, and yawned at my reflection.
“Lovely,” rumbled a voice from the water.
During my yawn, the reflection of me looking tired had been replaced with the image of a large gold dragon.
Shardas the Gold had big blue eyes and blue horns, and the scales down his nose were so new and bright that they put the golden basin to shame. His horns, I noticed, were ragged and needed trimming.
“Sorry,” I said. I yawned again; I couldn’t seem to stop. “You look well. ”
“You look tired,” Shardas said kindly.
“The invitations to Miles’s wedding have just been received,” I explained. “All the wealthies need new gowns. ” The bitterness in my voice surprised me.
“Oh. ” He sounded disappointed.
“What’s wrong?”
I wondered if he and his mate, Velika, felt snubbed. Of course, no humans but Luka, Marta and I knew that Shardas and Velika were still alive, so it made sense that they wouldn’t have been invited. They were believed to have died along with the horrid Princess Amalia of Roulain a year ago.
“I had thought that you might have time to visit us soon, but if you are busy …” He sighed, and it stirred the water. Seeing ripples form under the surface of the water was fascinating, and I thought about re-creating the image in embroidery.
Bringing my mind back to the present, I pursed my lips. “Hmmm. I would like to take a break from the shop,” I said. “If I brought some pieces to embroider with me, I could do them at the cave. And we’ll be hiring extra help, so Marta and Alle should be all right. ”
Shardas grinn
ed, showing off his impressive teeth, and his tongue, which was the length of my arm.
“You look just like Azarte,” I told him, naming the leggy hound that had once belonged to his cousin Feniul and now resided with Miles at the palace. “His tongue is almost as long. ”
Shardas pulled his tongue back in and rolled his eyes at me. “I will tell Feniul to fetch you from the usual spot at the end of the week,” he said.
“Perfect. ”
“Bring a sheep. ”
“What?” I imagined trying to tie a bleating sheep to the back of Feniul, Shardas’s dog-loving cousin. “Absolutely not. I’ll bring you peaches and apples and perhaps some sweet figs. No live animals. ”
“Smoked ham?”
“Fine. ”
“And Velika likes sausages. ”
“Since they don’t squeal and relieve themselves on my shoes, that sounds just fine as well. ”
“You were brought up on a farm,” Shardas reminded me with a laugh.
“Precisely why I now live in the city and have no livestock,” I countered, drily. “If we get enough temporary help, I can stay for a week this time,” I said.
“Excellent. We shall look forward to seeing you. ”
I smiled at my old friend, but I almost felt like crying. Shardas, I knew, did look forward to seeing me. But his mate was another story. She was more badly injured than him, and had not been well prior to their plunge into the Boiling Sea to stop Princess Amalia and her horrible dragonskin slippers. In the times I had visited Shardas and Velika, I had rarely seen her, and never heard her speak. I would bring her bushels of sausages if it would help, but I doubted that it would.
“Until the end of the week, then,” I said warmly.
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His image rippled and was replaced by my reflection. I slithered off the stool and went to bed.
By the Lake
Two weeks later I was sitting on a rock on the shore of a blue lake, coaxing a tune out of my wooden flute, when Shardas came out of the cave to complain about the noise. Luka had given me the flute and tried to teach me to play it, but he had been sent away to Citatie before our lessons had gone very far. Still, I didn’t think I sounded all that bad.
“Creel, please stop,” Shardas rumbled. Living with dragons, I had developed a pretty good ear for their great, craggy voices, especially Shardas’s. He was amused, but also firm.
“I haven’t finished this tune,” I replied.
“Oh, that was a tune?” His voice was light with false innocence.
Picking up one of the small grey pebbles from the shore, I lobbed it at him, sticking out my tongue for good measure. He batted it out of the air and lay down by my boulder.
“It’s not that I mind,” Shardas said, “but Velika is trying to sleep. ”
“Oh. ” Feeling guilty, I slipped the flute back into its satin bag and hung it from my belt. “Sorry. ”
“Quite all right,” he said. “She said to tell you that some day you might be a passable musician, and at that time, you may play for her. ”
I smiled. “All right. ”
“Now, if you would be so kind?” He rolled so that his back was to me, showing off the patchwork of old and new scales along his spine.
“Of course. ”
I stood up on my boulder and leaned over his back. The burned scales, black and rough and brittle, were coming off in patches as smooth new scales grew underneath. It was horribly itchy, and dragons, like most humans, cannot scratch the middle of their backs. I was doing my part to help by pulling out the loose burned scales from the places Shardas couldn’t reach. He did the same for Velika, since she couldn’t bear to be touched by a human.
When Shardas dived into the Boiling Sea only seconds after Velika made the plunge with Amalia in her claws, his dive was so forceful that he touched the bottom of the Boiling Sea itself and had felt, in the searing pain of the burning, poisonous water, a touch of blessed cool.
A current of fresh water flowed into the Boiling Sea from an underground river. It soon blended with the poisonous minerals of the sea and heated to boiling point, but Shardas had come near to its source, and it gave him hope. With only a moment to act before the waters overcame him, he lashed out with his tail and found Velika. Wrapping his long, dexterous tail around her neck, he pulled her down to that cool portal and forced his way through a hole in the rock that seemed barely big enough to fit a creature half his size. Fighting the current and dragging Velika, Shardas made his way through a narrow tunnel and into an underground lake of deliciously cold, clean water.
Racked with pain, melted scales now cooling into stiff armour, he pulled Velika’s head up so that she could breathe, though there was no shore for them to rest on. They dozed in the water for hours before Shardas found the strength to lead Velika up another underground river, where at last they found a cave large enough to allow them to sleep and heal.
By working their way through the caves that riddled the Feravelan countryside, they had eventually made their way here, far to the east, to this beautiful lake and secure hollow hill. To rest. To heal. To hide.
“Over to the left,” Shardas directed me, and I snapped back to attention and moved to loosen the scales where he indicated. “Be as thorough as you can. Feniul will be here soon. ”
“I know. ”
Luka, Marta, Feniul and I were the only ones in the world who knew that Shardas and Velika had not died in the Boiling Sea. Unfortunately, we all also had obligations back home. Feniul had his collection of dogs to care for, Marta and I had the shop, and Luka was abroad. This meant that for long weeks, Shardas and Velika were on their own, living off what food Shardas could scavenge, and at the mercy of any humans who might stumble upon them. The poisonous waters of the Boiling Sea had extinguished their fires and they could not fly, for the delicate membrane of their wings had been burned away. It was growing back now, far slower than their scales, and their wings had the look of poorly made lace, but it would be a long while before they would be able to take to the air. This thought hurt me almost as much as seeing their burned, scarred bodies.
“I’ll get these off before Feniul and I have to leave, don’t worry,” I grunted, placing a knee against some of the sturdier new scales on his back so that I had leverage to pull off more of the dead ones.
When I had pulled the last of the loose scales from his back I picked up a metal file. The tall spines that ran along Shardas’s backbone would not fall off and be replaced like his scales; they grew slowly, like fingernails, but I was gradually reshaping them and trimming off the damage with the file. It was like giving a manicure to a giant. I scraped the file across a spine in an upwards motion, gritting my teeth at the sound it made.
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“Shall I leave the file, so that you can attend to Velika’s spines?”
“Yes, do,” Shardas said, shaking his head as the grating sound irritated his nerves as well. He stretched out the wing on the side opposite me, gingerly, and I averted my eyes from the sight. “I wish she would come out during the daytime. The sunlight would do her good,” he said, his fretful tone making him sound like Feniul.
“I can understand being afraid of being seen,” I said. I also wondered if her eyes couldn’t stand the light. She had lived in the caves beneath the royal palace for over a century prior to her dive into the Boiling Sea, so it would have surprised me had Velika not been sensitive to sunlight.
“I hoped that the window would cheer her,” Shardas went on, scratching now at the scales under one forearm. “But she is still so apathetic. ”
The window had alerted Luka and me to the possibility of Shardas’s being alive. He collected stained glass windows, and one had been stolen from a chapel not far from here a few months ago. The priest reported the theft to the king, in hopes of receiving money to replace the window, and Luka and I had set off in joyous pursuit of the thief.
“Does Velika like windows?” I asked. “Did she collect them as well?”
“Well, no,” he admitted. “She liked – likes – glassware. Vases, goblets, and the like. But I didn’t know how to find any of that for her. ”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I promised. I gave the spine I was filing an extra-hard rasp. “You should have told me sooner,” I scolded.
He shuddered. “Yes, yes, I’m sorry. Don’t –”
We were interrupted by yapping.
A tiny white dog came running down the pebbled beach, barking in excitement. She fearlessly ran right up Shardas’s foreleg, her little claws clicking and scrabbling, skittered over his shoulder, and into my arms.
“Hello, Pippin,” I said, and let her lick my chin before putting her down on Shardas’s back.
Pippin half-ran, half-slithered down his haunches and on to the beach again, going to the mouth of the cave to peep inside at Velika before running along the shore in the direction she had just come from. We could now see Feniul, a green dragon, making his way along the pebbles with great care.
Dragon expressions are not easy to read because their faces are not as mobile as a human’s. I had found (and I could say without boasting that I had more experience in this than any other human living) that to gauge their mood, you had to rely more on body language and voice than facial expression. So it was easy, even from a distance, to see that Feniul was displeased with the pebbly state of the beach. He had been here before, of course, and had made his displeasure known then as well. When he had brought me here a week ago, he had proposed that I make use of my time by sweeping up the pebbles, to which I had made polite, noncommittal noises.
“The footing here is so treacherous,” he complained as he reached us. “I thought you were going to sweep the shore. ” He levelled an accusing glare at me.
“I haven’t had time,” I said innocently. “It’s good of you to make the journey, Feniul. ”
He sniffed. “Well, I did promise to take you back to the King’s Seat. ”
“Feniul,” Shardas rumbled. “Creel could not possibly sweep the shore of a lake clear of pebbles. In a week or a month. What would be left if she did?”
“Dirt that wouldn’t turn and skid under my claws,” Feniul retorted.
Shardas made a sort of hooting, snorting sound, and I covered my laugh by ducking my head to continue scraping at his spines.