The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart

by Stephanie Burgis

  And then the smell from the kettles and the metal pot and – !

  So many scents washed over me at once that I staggered, my vision blurring.

  ‘Watch out!’ Marina said sharply.

  I yanked myself upright just before I could stumble into the table beside me. It was covered by more than a dozen glasses with long, thin stems leading up to curving, shallow bowls, each of them filled with a dark, creamy-looking substance that smelt amazing.

  If she hadn’t stopped me, I would have knocked at least half of them off the table.

  I gritted my teeth and refused to apologise.

  ‘Where shall I start?’ I asked, jerking my chin up and walking further into the room.

  She didn’t follow me. ‘When was the last time you ate?’

  ‘Who, me?’ I blinked at her. ‘This morning.’ I frowned, thinking back. ‘Early morning.’

  ‘I might have known.’ She let out a hiss through her teeth. ‘Of all the absurd –’

  ‘I don’t need food,’ I told her. ‘I need work.’

  ‘And how are you going to do any work for me if you’re swooning all over the place, ninny?’

  I only understood about half of what she’d just said to me, but it was more than enough to make my face-fur draw together into a frown. ‘My name’s not “ninny”.’

  ‘I don’t care what your name is. You’re not setting to work in my kitchen without food in your belly. Hunger leads to distraction, which leads to carelessness – and you’d better learn right now that I don’t tolerate carelessness in my chocolate house, not now, not ever. So …’ She scooped up one of the glasses full of sweet-smelling darkness and handed it to me along with a long silver spoon. ‘Here. The people who ordered these ran away like frightened bunnies five minutes ago. You might as well eat one instead of letting them all go to waste.’

  Dragons could go for days without food when they needed to, and I didn’t like being treated as if I was weak. Still, as the scent drifted up from the glass in my hands, I lost the will to argue. ‘Fine,’ I muttered, and dug in.

  The first taste made my head spin all over again. The second taste made pleasure shoot up and down my body in a shower of gold.

  A moment later I stared down at the empty glass in my hands, almost moaning when I realised I was finished. ‘What was that?’

  Marina looked at me with her face-fur raised and her arms crossed. ‘You tell me,’ she said. ‘What did it taste like?’

  I closed my eyes, running my tongue along the top of my mouth and trying to soak in any last tendrils of taste. ‘Well, obviously there was chocolate –’ so rich, so silky, so intense, my stomach felt warm at the thought of it – ‘and then there must have been milk of some sort – no, thick cream …’ I’d tasted them both on that cart ride, so I knew the difference.

  ‘And then … oh, there was definitely cinnamon.’ Nothing could make me forget that flavour! ‘And something else to make it taste so sweet. But there were at least two other spices in it for flavour, and I don’t know either of their names.’ I opened my eyes and met her gaze, refusing to lower my own or look ashamed. ‘I don’t know the names of a lot of things here, yet.’

  She studied me for a long moment. Then she nodded. ‘Fair enough. The other two spices were nutmeg and vanilla. You’ll learn the taste of them fast enough if you work in this kitchen, I can promise you that.’

  Nutmeg and vanilla. I memorised the names, filing them away.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I want you to taste this.’ She strode to the charcoal brazier on my right and unhooked one of the copper kettles from the closest grate. ‘Pass me one of those chocolate pots, will you?’

  Following her pointing finger, I stood up on my toes and lifted down one of the lovely silver pots from the shelf nearby. It looked almost like a kettle, but it had two lids instead of one and it was far too dainty to survive a fiery stovetop. If I hadn’t been so curious about what was coming next, I would have taken a moment to play with the different lids and work it out like a puzzle. Instead I handed it to Marina before she could ask a second time.

  ‘Good.’ She opened the lower lid and poured in the contents of the kettle. Dark, rich brown liquid streamed through the air, sending up a cloud of steam that made me close my eyes for a moment as I breathed it in.

  Hot chocolate. Oh, this was definitely hot chocolate – but not like the food mage had made it. Not at all.

  Incredibly, it smelt even better. Richer. More intense. And there was something else about it, something …

  I’d moved closer without even realising it.

  ‘Watch out!’ She nudged me back with one strong arm as she reached towards the closest table. ‘Now it’s time for the molinet.’ She picked up a long wooden tool with a wide, ridged bottom, and flipped open the top lid of the chocolate pot, exposing a hole in the lower lid that was just big enough for the skinny end of the molinet to slip through. A moment later, the lower lid was closed, the bumpy part of the molinet was hidden inside the pot, and she was rolling the slim, long wooden end of the tool vigorously between her hands. ‘Never stint on this step,’ she told me. ‘Otherwise you’ll lose all the froth.’

  Oh, I wouldn’t be stinting on any steps, not ever! I could tell that even before I’d taken a single sip.

  ‘And now …’ She opened the lower lid, pulled out the molinet and closed the whole pot. ‘If you’ll pass me a cup …’

  I didn’t even take a second to choose between all the different colourful patterns. I just grabbed the closest porcelain cup and handed it over.

  Dark, frothy liquid filled it to the brim. It took all my willpower not to lunge as Marina finished pouring.

  ‘One sip,’ she told me. ‘Only one, and I don’t want you to swallow it all at once. Roll it around and take your time with it. Then tell me what you taste.’

  My hands trembled with anticipation as I lifted the cup to my lips and closed my eyes. Slowly, reverently, I took my first taste and held it in my mouth, swirling it back and forth to savour every last drop. There was another, more subtle taste behind the deep, dark chocolate, something faint and warm that wasn’t cinnamon, and it was growing … growing …

  Ohhh! I almost dropped the cup as the hidden flavour exploded in my mouth like a fireball. It burned through my senses in a roar of flame until I swallowed it down without even meaning to and my eyes flew wide open. I was panting hard as I stared at Marina, my chest rising rapidly up and down. Flames licked through my body, almost like … like …

  ‘There,’ said Marina, in a tone of deep satisfaction. ‘You haven’t had that at any other chocolate houses, have you?’

  ‘What was it?’ I whispered. I couldn’t find my voice.

  She smiled smugly. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is chilli chocolate. Our house speciality. What do you think?’

  I didn’t answer. But a sudden, startling wetness pricked at the back of my eyes.

  I’d thought I would never feel that heat in my throat again. I’d thought that I had lost my flame forever.

  Marina waited a moment and then nodded, as if satisfied by my response. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Drink the rest of it up, but don’t take too long. That lazy lout Erik hadn’t even finished grinding all the cocoa nibs for the day! It’s a good thing you’ve eaten now, because there’s plenty of work to be done, and believe me: you’ll need all your strength to do it.’

  The smile that stretched across my face when I heard that was completely uncontrollable.

  I could hardly wait.

  CHAPTER 10

  By the time I’d been Marina’s apprentice for a week, my puny human arms were stronger than I’d imagined possible. Every night, as I curled up by the fireplace to sleep on the warm kitchen floor, my muscles ached with effort, making me shift restlessly back and forth against my blankets and my scale-cloth to ease the burn.

  But every single night, as smoke from the endlessly roasting cocoa beans circled around me, I closed my eyes and imagined that it was my famil
y’s smoky breath drifting over me, keeping me warm and safe in my new chocolate-filled home. Sometimes my eyes leaked again, as I thought of how it used to feel to fall asleep with Mother and Jasper’s scaly bodies curled up next to mine. But sometimes just imagining their steady, hot breath against my skin was enough.

  Chocolate followed me into my dreams, even when my family was there, too. Sometimes I was diving for jewels in our hoard with Jasper, racing to see who could find the most first, but mixed in with the gold and precious gems, I always found mountains and mountains of rough brown cocoa nibs, thirty times the size of the piles that I crushed and rolled into a liquid paste in the kitchen of the Chocolate Heart every day.

  Sometimes I fell asleep to find myself curled up against the heat of my mother’s great blue-and-gold back, her strong scales rising and falling under my snout as she spoke to me. Instead of Mother’s voice, though, I heard Marina’s, repeating the instructions that I’d memorised days ago: ‘You roll the nibs until they form a paste, and then you just keep on rolling with all your might, until not a single fraction of a bump, not a fragment of a shard of roughness, can even be remembered by it. In this chocolate house, you never stop until you’ve achieved perfection.’

  And I never did stop until she told me it was time, not even when I had been rolling the paste for hours on the hot stone over the oven, the muscles in my hands seizing up and cramping as I pushed the heavy iron roller back and forth, back and forth, putting everything I had into the movements until the long muscles of my back would have screamed if they had had a voice.

  Let them scream. All I cared about was the hot paste before me, growing smoother and smoother with every relentless pass of my roller.

  Every time that Marina finally said, ‘All right, stop,’ her words resonated inside me, filling me with as sweet a victory as if I’d finally launched into the air for my first flight.

  I wasn’t allowed to do the next stage of the work, not yet. Marina herself set the paste into round moulds, forming cakes of cooking chocolate that would have to wait a full month before they were used in the chocolate house. But every day when I passed the cupboard where the cakes were set, I sent silent, fierce whispers to the ones that had been made from my paste. Be strong. Be right.

  I was counting down the days until the first of them could be used. I only hoped that Marina would let me taste what was made from that one, to see for myself how I’d done.

  But I had more than enough work to keep me busy in the meantime.

  There were always cocoa beans roasting over the open fire, and it was my job to deal with them. They started out as plain, unimpressive beans that would never have caught my eye for an instant as a dragon, but they were carried into the chocolate house in sacks that we treated just as reverently as if they had been filled with gold. It was like magic, how those plain, ordinary-looking beans could hold the rich secret of chocolate inside them.

  I was the one who took them out of the hot roaster when they were finally ready to reveal that secret, like dragon eggs getting ready to hatch. Marina stood over me, watching every move, the first three times I pierced their thin, crackly outer shells to pull out the cocoa nibs we needed. A single slip of my hands, and the precious nib would be ruined, the chocolate essence lost as if it had never existed. Even the thought of it was enough to fill me with panic. It would be like smashing a diamond tiara through sheer carelessness. I was only too glad to have Marina there to save me from making any mistakes.

  But the fourth time I prepared the roasted beans for shelling, Marina only raised her face-fur – no, eyebrows – at me from across the kitchen, where she was preparing an assortment of chocolate creams for our morning customers. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘What are you waiting for? Get on with it.’

  So – after a startled moment – I did.

  And that felt an awful lot like flying, too.

  On the seventh day of my apprenticeship, Horst walked into the kitchen and clapped one hand to his head with a groan of horror. ‘Marina!’

  ‘What now?’ Marina didn’t even bother to look up from the kettle where she was combining ingredients for her special chilli chocolate. ‘Have the customers complained? Has the king himself decided to visit? Or are you just here to make my life difficult again?’

  ‘Not you,’ Horst said, through gritted teeth. ‘Her!’ He pointed at me.

  I blinked, but I didn’t stop grinding the big white sugar loaf I was working on. It needed to be crushed into fine powder to dissolve into Marina’s concoctions, and it was still a nearly eight-inch-long solid lump.

  ‘What about her?’ Marina said. ‘Unlike the last one, she’s not a disaster. So far.’

  ‘So far?’ He let out a hiss of exasperation. ‘Have you even noticed that this is her seventh day of work in a row? And I haven’t noticed her leave for any afternoons off.’

  Afternoons off? What was he talking about? I frowned at him even as my hands and arms continued in their grinding.

  Horst looked from one to the other of us and groaned again, shaking his head. ‘Every apprentice,’ he said, holding up one forefinger, ‘receives one afternoon off a week, by law, along with two full days a month. Remember?’

  Marina tapped a sliver of dark red powder into the kettle. ‘I’m not stopping her. If she wants to find something more interesting to do …’

  More interesting than chocolate? I don’t think so. I turned over the sugar loaf, starting a new angle of attack.

  ‘Look –’ Horst began, through his teeth. Then he stopped. ‘What’s your apprentice’s name, Marina?’

  Marina shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It hasn’t come up.’

  ‘It hasn’t – ?!’

  ‘What’s your name, girl?’ Marina called out.

  For a moment my hands stilled in their work as I remembered Silke’s words: ‘How about we call you Eva? That’s a nice ordinary name, with no mysteries.’

  If there was one thing Silke understood, it was people, and how to manage them. ‘I’m –’

  Then I slammed my lips shut, my skin suddenly hot and pricklingly aware of my scale-cloth, lying folded in the storage cupboard across the room. Hidden … but not abandoned. Never abandoned.

  Some things were more important than fitting in.

  ‘I’m Aventurine,’ I told them firmly.

  ‘Aven– sorry, what?’ Horst frowned.

  ‘Aventurine,’ Marina said firmly. ‘You heard her. Now, do you have something to say to us, or are you just bored with mollycoddling rich people and want to see some real work for once?’

  Horst sighed heavily. ‘I am here,’ he said, ‘to make certain that the lord mayor’s men can’t find any violations to report to the merchants’ guild, which is exactly what they’re itching to do. Apparently, someone managed to make our esteemed local leader furious by firing his nephew.’ He gave Marina a meaningful look. ‘Two of his assistants have been sniffing around outside since eight o’clock this morning, looking for something to complain about. I wouldn’t be surprised if they send someone in here for an out-of-the-blue kitchen inspection, too.’

  ‘Just let them try,’ Marina said darkly. She’d stopped adding ingredients to her mix, though. Her lips pursed for a moment, and then she nodded decisively. ‘Fine. Aventurine?’ She jerked her head in the direction of the door. ‘Out!’

  ‘What?’ I stared at her, still grinding the sugar loaf. ‘But I’m not done. I still need to –’

  ‘Go and have some fun that isn’t chocolate flavoured,’ Marina told me. ‘Lord mayor’s orders.’ She snorted. ‘Enjoy. Don’t come back after dark, though, or you’ll find the shop locked and you’ll have to throw pebbles at my window to get my attention. And I’m not staying in all night to wait for you, I’ll tell you that right now.’

  I gave her a flat stare. ‘I don’t want to leave in the first place. This is ridiculous! I don’t even want an afternoon off.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to be hauled up in front of the town council for an ear-hammeri
ng, just because my apprentice happens to be as stubborn as a donkey!’ said Marina.

  ‘She’s not the only one,’ Horst muttered.

  Marina pointed one finger at the door and gave me a narrow look. ‘Well?’

  Growling, I pulled off my apron. ‘Can’t I just finish the sugar and – ?’

  ‘Don’t worry about any of that.’ Horst’s shoulders relaxed and he tossed me a coin. ‘Here, your first week’s wages. Now go and enjoy yourself. Marina can take care of everything here that needs doing. Believe me, she’s had more than enough practice at managing it all herself, every time she terrifies away another one of her apprentices.’

  ‘I am not terrified,’ I snarled. ‘Just very, very irritated at the waste of my time when I could be getting some work done!’ Slapping down my apron, I stalked towards the doors.

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ Horst mumbled. ‘Now we have two of them.’

  I slammed the kitchen doors shut behind me.

  There were four customers sitting in the front room, along with a small, thin man who was walking restlessly around, frowning as he ran his fingers over the painted walls, and a brown-haired woman loitering outside, peering in through the windows. I would have assumed she was just dithering about whether or not to come in, but as I stepped through the front door she coughed meaningfully and crooked one beringed finger at me.

  It took me a moment of bafflement – and then outrage – to realise that she was actually trying to summon me with that gesture.

  It was lucky for her, considering my mood, that I didn’t have the power of flame any more. As it was, I gave her a look that should have singed her eyebrows off.

  ‘I’m a chocolatier, not a waitress,’ I informed her. ‘And anyway, it’s my afternoon off.’ Seething, I turned on one heel and started in the opposite direction.

  ‘Wait!’ Long fingers closed around my arm and dragged me back, past the front window, until no one inside the chocolate house could see us. Sharp nails bit through the cloth of my dress when I tried to yank myself away. ‘There’s no need to take offence, my little chocolatier. I only want to get to know you.’ The woman’s pale pink lips curved in a smile, but her green eyes flicked up and down my face with the cold intelligence of a predator sizing up its next meal. ‘You’re the new apprentice, aren’t you? That must be a difficult job, especially for a young girl on her own.’