Dragonskin Slippers (7 page)

If I hadn’t been so scared at the prospect of flying – and worse, falling – I think I would have been embarrassingly weepy as we climbed to the top of the hill. We had decided to take off four hours before dawn from the
top of the wooded hill that housed Shardas’s lair. The hill never looked as big from the outside as it felt on the inside, and I mused aloud about how long it would take to excavate a hill, burrowing deep enough to provide such large chambers within.

“An hour, perhaps two,” Shardas said in an offhand way as he scanned the skies. He was looking for the telltale smoke of tinker and bandit fires, in order to plot a course that would take us over the less-travelled areas of the forest.

“What?” I said.

“You don’t think I spent months digging it out with my claws, do you?” He turned his attention to me with amusement. “And your eyes aren’t playing tricks: it really
is
bigger on the inside than on the outside.” Humming to himself in a satisfied way, he picked up my bundle and hunched a shoulder so that I could clamber up.

“Oof! Sorry!” Scrambling up the side of a dragon was not as easy as I had thought. For one thing, Shardas’s gleaming scales were very slick, and some of the edges were sharp. For another, my gown and slippers had not been made for dragon riding. By the time I settled myself between two of his neck ridges, my cheeks were hot, my hair was coming unbraided, and my gown was uncomfortably twisted around. I settled it as best I could.

“Are you all right?” Shardas asked. “My alchemist friend was much more graceful at mounting.”

“Well, la for him,” I replied testily. I clutched the neck ridge in front of me and gritted my teeth. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Almost before I had finished speaking, Shardas leaped into the air. His enormous wings unfolded with a snap like wet silk being shaken out and we soared upward. My stomach rose into my throat and I squeezed my eyes shut. I invoked all three gods, and promised that I would enter a hermitage for life if they would just let me live through this.

I’d thought it would be easy to ride a dragon, but found that I had to concentrate on holding tight to the spiny ridge in front of me, clamping the sides of Shardas’s neck with my legs, and not being sick all over the both of us. He carried my bundle for me so I wouldn’t have to worry about losing it mid-flight. I thanked the Triunity that no one would be able to see me with my skirts hiked up and my teeth chattering from fright.

Wind rushed past my face as my stomach settled back where it belonged. Surprisingly, there was little movement and no sound other than the wind. I cracked open one eye. Then the other.

Shardas’s wingspan was so great that he glided through the air as smoothly as an eagle. I had imagined a more unwieldy, frantic motion, but I should have realised that after centuries of practice, the gold dragon would be an expert flier.

I stared upward in amazement. The stars didn’t appear to be moving at all. Yet when I looked down, the moon-silvered forest was rushing past at a dizzying rate. It was disconcerting, but not unpleasant.

We soared higher so suddenly that my sweaty hands slipped off the ridge in front of me. Fortunately, Shardas’s
neck was wide enough that I didn’t fall. Instead, I threw my arms wide and closed my eyes again, pretending that
I
was the dragon, and that it was I alone who flew over the forest. I opened my eyes and let out an exhilarated whoop of joy.

A vibration shook my legs: Shardas was laughing at me. I whooped again, my arms still flung wide, and he swooped left and then right in a leisurely fashion, glided down to rattle the tops of the trees with his claws, and then flew higher until I felt that I could reach up with either hand and grab hold of a moon.

And then it was over, and we were standing on the wide, paved highway a half mile or so from the gates of the mighty King’s Seat. Even in the wee hours before dawn there were so many lanterns and candles alight in the city that I could no longer see the stars, and the moons seemed sickly and dim.

I had known that the King’s Seat was the largest city in Feravel, but I had not been prepared for what that truly meant. The construction of stone and wood before me was vaster than I ever could have imagined, and in the darkness I could hardly see all of it. My legs quaked from nervousness and the after-effects of keeping my seat on Shardas’s back.

“I had better go; the guards might see me,” Shardas said, but his reluctance was clear in his voice. “Please be careful.”

“I will.” I hefted my bundle into my arms, scuffing the road awkwardly with one blue slipper. “And you be careful with the migration and everything,” I said.

“We’ll be fine, despite Feniul’s annual histrionics,” Shardas assured me, and we both chuckled. Feniul had bespoken Shardas through the enchanted pool nearly every day that I had been in the gold dragon’s lair. Between his frustration with his dogs (I managed to count roughly twenty, but Azarte seemed to be the most trouble) and his fears that this year something would go horribly wrong with the migration, he was grating on Shardas’s nerves and mine.

“You may call on me if you need help,” Shardas said. “Please promise me that you will.”

“Thank you, I shall certainly do so,” I said with polite puzzlement. “But how?” I wondered if he would give me some sort of enchanted water pot or something, and worried that it might attract too much attention.

“Simply call out my name, and I will hear you and come,” Shardas said. His large muzzle opened as though he were about to say something else, but then closed again with a snap of his jaws. “I will hear you.”

And with that he leaped into the air and glided away, leaving me blinking dust from my eyes and waving sadly. I shouldered my burden and trudged up the road to the gate, then sat on the neatly tended grass beside the road to wait for dawn and the opening of the gates.

Just before dawn a cart carrying wicker cages of geese came along the highway. I slipped into the city in its wake, letting the honking and flapping and flying feathers distract the guards. Anyone might enter the King’s Seat, but the guards took down the number of people in the party, their business, and ultimate destination. Not
wanting to admit that I had no idea where I was going, I stood near an exhausted young gooseherd and let them put me down as one of that group. The driver of the cart looked at me curiously, but I just shrugged. It wasn’t my fault if the guards were lax.

It was then that things got complicated. I didn’t know how to find work as a seamstress or fancyworker. The tired gooseherd only knew where the poultry market was, and the cart driver shrugged and spat when I asked if he could give me a ride to the cloth-workers’ district.

“Never seen it, never cared to,” he grunted, and slapped the reins for his mule team to walk on.

The broad central street of the King’s Seat stretched away before me. If I kept walking along it, I would eventually come to the Jyllite Square, where the two palaces were, or so I had been taught in school. But the walk from the gates to the Jyllite Square would take several hours, as I had also been taught. I started up the street anyway, hoping that the cloth-workers’ district branched off the main thoroughfare.

The King’s Seat sloped gently uphill towards the palaces, but after an hour of walking it felt more like a mountain. I had passed a number of inns, but didn’t have any money to buy food or drink or a bed. I passed cattle markets and horse auctions and the glassblowers’ district. But no seamstresses. No weavers or dyers or cloth workers of any kind.

At the next inn I passed, the innkeeper’s wife was
industriously sweeping the front steps, and I stopped to ask the way to the cloth markets.

“Just in from the country, are you?” She paused and leaned her beefy forearms on the broom.

“Yes, good mistress, I’m looking for a place as a fancy-worker.” I held out my sleeves to show off the decorations I had sewn there.

“Well, then, be off with you and your country fancy-work,” she sneered, and swept a cloud of dust straight at me.

I ran, trying to keep away from the worst of it, my cheeks burning with embarrassment and my eyes smarting with tears at the sound of her raucous laughter. What was I, little Creel of Carlieff Town, doing in the King’s Seat? Did I really think that my crude provincial skills were wanted here in the city?

I kept on going because I had nowhere else to go, but I didn’t ask for directions again. After three hours, when I hadn’t seen anything that looked like the cloth-workers’ district, and yet still was nowhere near the palaces, I turned down one of the side streets, my fingers crossed that it would lead where I wanted to go.

I passed through a market that sold all sorts of exotic fruits and vegetables, and even more exotic animals for fine ladies to keep as pets. There were fantastically plumed birds and brown bears no higher than my knee, and little black monkeys, with wild manes of white hair, that could fit in a pocket.

When I stopped to gape at these last creatures, the
trader displaying them smiled at me kindly. He had a very brown face with very white teeth, and wore a strange, conical blue hat. I dared to ask him if he knew the way I wanted to go, but he merely smiled and shook his head.

“Please?” My voice wavered a little from tiredness and frustration.

“Gaal matto,” the man replied, shaking his head again.

Across the way, the man selling bright-feathered birds called out, “He don’t speak the language, maidy.”

I turned around, hope rising in my breast, to address the friendly-sounding bird seller. “Sir? Do you know the way to the cloth-workers’ district?”

“Aye, that I do. But come here so I don’t have to shout, you’re a fair way off.”

But as I took an eager step towards him, I tripped over what had to be the world’s smallest dog.

“Watch where you are going, you horrible cow!” The voice snapped at me over the sound of a small dog yipping with pain.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I looked at the young woman standing behind me and then down at the little animal I had stepped on.

The girl had a cascade of brown curls falling from a coronet of stiffened silk and ribbons, and her brown eyes were narrowed in anger. The dog was white, and barely larger than a bedroom slipper. Its long hair was tied up with a lavender bow on top of its head, revealing two round black eyes and a small brown nose. In contrast to its mistress, the dog wagged a long plumed tail at me in greeting, apparently already recovered from being trod upon.

“Pippin! Pippin darling! Come here,” the owner shrilled, holding out her manicured hands to the dog. “Let Mummy see if the nasty big peasant hurt my darling!”

But Pippin didn’t want to be comforted. She wanted to smell my shoes. That done, she trotted over to the monkey seller and stood on her hind legs to get a better look at the little black-and-white creatures.

“Pippin!” The girl’s voice was sharp now. “Come here to Mummy right now!”

Pippin seemed to sigh and slowly wandered back over to her mistress, giving a casual stretch rather like a cat before condescending to being picked up. Her “mummy” fussed over her for several seconds, looking for any sign of injury, while I stood red-faced and stammering over and over again how sorry I was.

“You’re very lucky, country cow, that you didn’t break one of my Pippin’s little paws.” The other girl sniffed at me. “She cost more than your family’s entire farm, I’m sure.”

“I am so very sorry,” I said for the thousandth time, bristling at being called a country cow. “I truly didn’t see her.”

“Well, how could you? In that great dragging old-fashioned gown and with those huge boats for feet,” the girl sneered.

As I got a better look at what she was wearing my heart sank. She was right: my gown
was
old-fashioned, or at the least, dreadfully countrified. While I wore a single long gown with a fitted bodice and flaring skirt all of a piece, she was elegantly dressed in layers of skirts that had been pinned up in the front to reveal each successive garment. Her bodice had the look of a tightly fitted jacket over a foamy white shift.

There was embroidery along the neckline and in long panels down her skirts, though. I gave it a quick scan and saw that it was nothing I couldn’t do.

“How dare you stare at me in that way!” The rich girl stomped one pink-slippered foot. “Who is your mistress? I will have you fired at once! First you try to kill my precious Pippin, then you ogle me with your horrible country eyes!”

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, looking down at my dragging country skirts. What more did she want from me?

“Do you know who I am?” she demanded.

“No,” I muttered.

“No? No what?”

“What?” I looked up at her and blinked again. Did she want me to call her “mistress”? We were the same age, as near as I could guess.

She looked over one shoulder and screeched something in a strange tongue. Four hulking brutes in scarlet tunics with heavy swords belted at their hips stepped forward. I hadn’t even noticed them before, since all my attention had been focused on the dog and its excitable mistress.

She pointed her finger at me and babbled some more in that foreign language, and one of the brutes pulled a length of cord from a large belt pouch while the other made as if to grab my arm. I dodged out of his reach and for a wild moment I considered knocking over a cage of monkeys to create a diversion.

“Hey!” I yelled. “What’s going on?”

“You need to be taught a lesson,” the girl said.

“I say, what’s all this?”

A tall and fairly good-looking young man in a rich green velvet doublet and leather riding breeches stepped forward. He frowned at me and then at the girl. “What’s the to-do, Amalia?”

“This great peasant tried to kill my poor Pippin,” the girl said in a voice that suddenly sounded on the verge of tears. She pulled out a dainty handkerchief and sniffed into it. As it wafted past the dog’s face, “poor Pippin” tried to bite it. “I thought she had crushed my sweet doggie! And then she said rude things to me!”

“I did not!” I was astonished at this turn of events. She had gone from being shrill and demanding to weepy and victimised in a matter of seconds. And I
liked
dogs, even small fussy ones, and felt quite bad about stepping on Pippin.