Dragonskin Slippers (6 page)

Azarte, apparently sated, laid his long body down alongside his enormous master and heaved a great sigh. In a matter of seconds he was sound asleep and snoring.

“Yes, well, that’s too bad, Feniul,” Shardas said when it became clear that the other dragon was going to be clucking and fussing over his dog for some time. “But I had better go and figure out what to do with this human maid now.”

“What? Oh, yes! Why was it you picked up that human?” Feniul’s attention was pulled away from his dogs with an effort.

“For reasons that I will explain to you at a later date,” Shardas said. “Perhaps.” And he stirred the pool with one long claw, breaking up the image of his (distant) cousin.

Shardas heaved a sigh not unlike Azarte’s and turned to me. My knees started shaking again. No matter how many hours I spent conversing pleasantly with dragons, they were still
dragons
: mighty, ferocious damsel-eaters, if the legends were to be believed, although, according to Shardas, at least, they weren’t.

I bit my lip as I looked up at Shardas. He blew smoke out of his nostrils and looked down at me.

“You want to go to the King’s Seat,” he stated finally.

“Yes, sir,” I said in a small voice.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he told me gently. “I’m trying to figure out what the best and safest way will be for you to take. What are your plans, again?”

“I want to find work embroidering,” I said. I pulled the gladiolus-decorated handkerchief from my pocket and held it up.

He lowered his head and studied it with one sapphire eye, then the other. He reared back after a moment’s scrutiny and nodded at me.

“I am not a collector of fine embroidery,” he admitted, “but it looks well made to me.”

“Thank you. My mother was very skilled, and she taught me.”

“What do you think you will need in order to find
work of this kind?” For a dragon he had a very practical mind.

“Better samples of my work than this dirty handkerchief,” I said after thinking for a moment. “I had some embroidered scarves and woven sashes, but I’ve had to trade them all in return for food or lodging. I need to have different types of embroidery to display, to prove that I know the various techniques. I don’t have the cloth to make a dress or anything, so I suppose my own gown will have to do, to show my skill with plain work.” I sighed at this: my gown was an uninspiring brown colour and not new.

“I see.” Shardas nodded thoughtfully. “What do you require in order to make more embroidery?”

“Just some time.” I shrugged. “I have some linen and a lot of yarn and embroidery floss in my pack.” Then I looked up at him in dismay. “My pack!”

“Your pack is right over there,” he reassured me, pointing with a long claw.

“Oh, thank you!”

“You are welcome. Take all the time you need. I shall not charge you for bed and board, as your people say. And when you are ready, I shall take you to the King’s Seat myself.” He nodded his great head.

“A thousand thank-yous,” I said, tears pricking my eyes. Then a thought struck me. “But why are you being so kind to me?” I tried to keep suspicion out of my voice and simply sound humble. Was he trying to catch me off guard, or fatten me up for better eating?

“Perhaps to prove to you that we dragons are not all
as bad as the bards would make us out to be,” he said with an airy wave of one foreleg. “Or perhaps because I miss my alchemist friend.” He strolled over to one of the larger windows and gazed intently at the scene it depicted: a young woman in a green gown playing the harp while a dragon wheeled overhead. “Or perhaps because something about you reminds me of a fair dragoness I knew long, long ago,” he finished in more sombre tones.

“Oh. Thank you.”

I went over to my pack and began to lay out my embroidery floss and needles. I was starting to feel hungry, but ignored it. When my stomach growled loudly, however, Shardas laughed and went into another chamber. He came back with an immense wheel of cheese and a basket of apples. Putting aside my silks, I let the dragon show me how to impale the fruit and chunks of hard cheese on to a stick. I held the stick away from me, and he used the barest trickle of flame to toast our food. We feasted until I thought I would burst. Then Shardas settled himself down in the middle of the room to contemplate his windows, and I began my sampling set.

A few hours later, we heard Feniul call from the pool, insisting that Shardas give Azarte a talking-to. Shardas and I rolled our eyes in unison, and then he began to sing to drown out the sound of barking dogs.

In a great deep voice the gold dragon sang “The Ballad of Jylla and the Fair Youth of Trin”, a song my father
had often sung in the evening. Tears pricking my eyes, I bent over my sewing. The piece I was working on was meant to be a curling vine, but in my mind it was the sinuous curve of a dragon’s tail.

I slept that night on a fresh pile of leaves and branches in the main chamber of Shardas’s lair. The next morning, I awoke stiff and groggy, with hair like a bottlebrush and my gown sadly creased.

“You look awful,” Shardas said.

“Thank you,” I muttered.

There was a roast pig and a bowl of strawberries the size of a washtub sitting on the floor in the middle of the chamber. Still half asleep, I ate berries and pork and tried to get my bearings. Shardas attempted to make conversation, but when I replied only with grunts, he gave up.

After breakfast, during which he ate most of the pork and all but a handful of the strawberries (stems and all), he took me down the passageway and into another cave.

“This will refresh you, I hope,” he said.

The floor of the chamber sloped away from the entrance to a pool of turquoise-blue water that steamed in
the dim light. Shardas’s bulk would fill the pool with only just enough room to turn around, but it was still bigger than the pond I had learned to swim in at home.

“The water is quite hot for humans, though I enjoy it,” Shardas said. “If you do not get too close to the middle, I think you will find it comfortable enough.”

“Is it a natural hot spring?”

“Oh, yes, there are many such in this land.”

“Not around Carlieff Town.”

“You didn’t spend enough time in caves, then. That is why we dragons came to Feravel in the beginning: so many deep caves, with air vents and hidden pools.” He gave a great sigh, rippling the water. “Even Milun the First couldn’t get rid of us entirely.” And with that he left me to bathe.

I ran back down the passage and fetched my pack. There was a little nub of soap tied up in a spare handkerchief and a clean set of underthings in the bottom of my pack. Keeping to the edges of the pool as suggested, I scrubbed myself clean. My straight hair was horribly tangled, and I broke two teeth off my comb working through it. Then I took the rest of the soap and scrubbed the dirt and sweat out of my gown and laid it over a rocky outcropping to dry.

Having nothing else to wear, I crept back down the passageway with a shawl draped over my underthings. I sat and sewed with the shawl around me until the heat of the pool had dried my gown enough to make it wearable again.

After a lunch of peaches and mutton, Shardas asked if I would like to have a proper sleeping chamber, and I gave a heartfelt nod. He took me down the passage that led to Jerontin’s old workroom. On the far side of the laboratory was a curtained opening too small to admit Shardas. Shifting the curtain aside, I found a small sleeping chamber, thick with dust.

“I have not been able to clean it,” Shardas said, his great voice heavy with regret. “I tried reaching in with a cloth to dust from time to time, but it was too awkward.”

“I see.”

Stepping inside the room, I walked around slowly. There was a bed of heavy carved wood, and a red-lacquered chest. The bedcoverings looked to be not only dusty but also disintegrating from age, and the rug that covered the rough stone floor was more holes than cloth. Shelves had been carved into the wall, and on them were books with spines faded from age and use.

“More of Jerontin’s alchemical books,” Shardas explained.

“I will clean them up and put them in the laboratory,” I said.

“Thank you.”

Shardas provided me with some of the cloths he used to shine his windows, and I set to work. I carried out the rotten bedding and rugs, and Shardas gathered them up and took them away. When he came back a few hours later, he had a collection of blankets held carefully in his claws.

“I’ll find you a new rug tomorrow perhaps,” he told me.

“Where did you get these?” I held up the blankets: they smelled freshly laundered and two of them were still damp.

Shardas scraped at the stone wall beside his head with the tip of a blue horn. “Oh, I found them.” He looked like a little boy who had stolen a pie.

“Where did you find them?”

“Hanging.”

“Hanging?”

“Hanging on clotheslines near some farms,” he confessed in a rush.

“Shardas!” I was shocked. “You stole these?”

“I only took one from each clothesline,” he argued.

There were four blankets. That meant there were four farmer’s wives wondering just what had happened to the blankets they had washed and left to dry in the spring sunshine.

“But you stole them!” Then a thought struck me. “The food that we’ve been eating – the fruit and the meat … you stole them, didn’t you?” I thought of my father, working so hard to make our farm a success. Imagining a dragon swooping down and denuding our fields made me feel sick.

“No, no, it’s not like that,” Shardas assured me. He reached through the doorway into the little bedchamber as though thinking to pat my head or back with his claws, and then withdrew without touching me, still looking guilty.

“Then what
is
it like?” I was torn. I really liked Shardas, and I was deeply flattered that a dragon would
want to please me this way. But, having been raised on an impoverished farm, the idea of stealing was more than I could bear.

“I only go to very prosperous farms: lots of buildings in good repair, farmhands bustling around. Then I take very, very little. A single blanket, which I haven’t done since Jerontin died. A clawful of peaches. The pig was wild: I caught it here in the forest, and the sheep was a stray.”

That soothed me to a certain extent. “Oh. Well, I suppose the food is all right, then. But maybe you should take some of these blankets back.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know which farm I had got which blanket from,” he admitted. “And it does get cold in these caves at night, for humans.”

He was certainly right about that. Last night, after pulling my shawl around me and then putting on my winter stockings, I had still shivered. No wonder I had woken up so out of sorts. Aside from waking up in the lair of a dragon, I mean.

At last I accepted the blankets, though I politely refused a rug for the floor. Most of my days would be spent in the window room, I argued, where it was warm and there was better light to sew by. After that I stopped asking where Shardas got our food, and he never told me. But soon I learned to trust and respect him, and I was comforted by the fact that his gentle soul would not allow him to ruin a family’s livelihood.

And so, as stitch after stitch found its place on the
handkerchiefs and swatches I embroidered, our days fell into a routine. Shardas with his windows and I with my embroidery sat together companionably for hours while light fell through the jewel-like glass panes and made patterns on the floor of the cave.

Though I missed Hagen, and sometimes found myself choking back tears as I thought of my parents, I didn’t miss life on our farm. It was delightful to sit and embroider all day without having to worry about wasting candles, or getting my chores done. There was no scrawny cow to milk, no chickens to peck at me as I tried to gather their eggs. My aunt’s shrill voice was nowhere to be heard, and the depressing sight of wilting potato vines did not greet me when I went outside to relieve myself. After only two weeks, I had to admit it: I had never been so happy.

When a month had passed in pleasant harmony with Shardas, however, I felt that I should leave. I had woven four sashes and had a respectable sampling of my work exhibited on a number of handkerchiefs and linen squares. Since I had more thread than cloth, I had even decorated the hem, neckline and sleeves of my own gown with stylised floral patterns I copied from Shardas’s windows. I kept nervously asking him if he thought it would be enough of a reference for a future employer, and he replied quite honestly every time that he had no idea. I soon stopped asking.

“Are you certain you want to do this?” Now Shardas was the one asking repetitive questions as we prepared for the short journey to the King’s Seat.

“I have to,” was my automatic reply as I packed my things and made ready to leave.

I would be arriving at the King’s Seat in grand style aboard the back of a mighty golden-scaled dragon. Not
that anyone would know: Shardas would leave me outside the city gates just before dawn to avoid being seen. When the guards opened the gates for the day, they would find me waiting there, pretending to have walked in from the country.

Packing my things made me sad. I would miss Shardas and it had been wonderful to have a room all to myself. I had revelled in the freedom of rising late, lingering in the steaming bathing pool, and eating as much as I liked. Making my sampling set had been a thrill as well, because for once I was doing things I liked, not the patterns that my mother assigned me, copied from the dull, squarish designs the ladies of Carlieff favoured.

I liked to think that Shardas appreciated my company as well. We would talk for long hours as I embroidered. Sometimes he would sing strange dragon songs or human ballads and hymns. I would return the favour by reciting the epic poems popular in Carlieff. He had once asked me to join him in a duet, and with a blush I confessed that I had no singing voice to speak of. He complimented the sewing I was working on, and chose another song.

And then there were the times when we both sat silent, watching the light shift through the gorgeous panes of Shardas’s windows and thinking our own thoughts. We also liked eating peaches and watching the moons rise from atop the hill that housed his lair.