Dragonskin Slippers

by Jessica Day George

  Which made me very afraid to look in the next cavern.

  “Oh, Shardas,” I breathed, when I stepped through the doorway. Tears welled up in my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. “Oh, my dear Shardas, I am so sorry.”

  It wasn’t one or two windows that had been broken, it was all of them. The floor was covered in literally thousands of pieces of brightly coloured glass, chunks of wooden frames and brittle segments of leading. Wires hung askew from the ceiling, the windows they had borne now lying in ruins beneath our feet. The mirrors that redirected the sunlight to shine through the windows had been smashed or knocked over so that the cavern was only dimly lit. A mercy, considering the terrible, sick waste that surrounded us.

  The sheen of something that was not glass caught my eye and I turned to look at one of the broken frames. A scrap of ribbon had caught on the jagged wood. A scarlet ribbon of the finest silk.

  “Amalia did this,” I said with conviction, plucking the scrap of ribbon free and crumpling it in my hand. “And when I get my hands on her, I. Will. Make. Her. Pay.” I pounded my fist into the opposite palm. It was worse than the way I had felt when Larkin admitted to giving my shoes to the princess. Seven hundred years of collecting beauty in the form of glass windows, and Shardas’s treasure was destroyed in a matter of what? An hour?

  “All right,” Luka said. He seemed a little alarmed at my vehemence, but I could see by the stunned expression on his face that he understood some of what had been lost here.

  Tobin reverently picked up a large piece of glass that still carried the delicately shaped face of a woman, and set it out of the way where it would not be stepped on. When he saw me watching him, he gave me a look of deep sympathy, and nodded.

  “Show me the message, Feniul,” I said, my voice coming out strangled.

  “Over here, in the pool.”

  I went and stood beside him, looking down at our reflections in the still circle of water. At Feniul’s instruction, I bent and touched my finger to the surface. The ripples that spread from my fingertip spread across the pool and then Shardas’s face appeared.

  “My dear Creel,” he said.

  “If you have received this, then some horrible fate has befallen me. I should have told you when you were here with me, or at least tried to make you leave those slippers behind. Your blue slippers are made from the hide of Velika, the last queen of the dragons. She befriended Milun the First, and he repaid her friendship by slaughtering her and using her skin to make those slippers. Through them Milun controlled my people, using them to fight his war and spreading the lie that she supported him freely – that all the dragons sided with him. My alchemist friend kept me safe from manipulation by the use of his arts. When the turmoil was over and I had returned to my senses, I helped Jerontin sneak into the palace and take the slippers.

  “I could not bear to destroy them – they were all we had left of our beauteous queen – so I gave them to Theoradus, hoping to hide them in plain sight among his many shoes. Thus they came into your possession. I do not know how you lost them, I can only hope that you were not harmed.

  “I have tried to re-create the charm Jerontin used to protect me, and have left it for Feniul. I trust that you will be able to make more, and I beg you to help free my people from this horror. May your gods protect you.”

  “Feniul,” I said, tears coursing down my cheeks. “I don’t understand. Why couldn’t he destroy the slippers, for all your sakes?”

  “Ah.” Feniul’s tail whipped through the broken glass on the floor. “He … ah … took the betrayal of our queen very hard. His … allegiance to her was great and he was … quite grief-stricken.” His agitated tail swept the shards against a wall, breaking them into smaller pieces.

  “Oh.” I swallowed, feeling guilty that Shardas thought the slippers had been taken from me by force, when really I had just been tricked by a spoiled princess and her spy. “And I don’t see why he didn’t wear the collar himself.”

  “In my message he said that he felt strong enough to resist the compulsion, that it was there but it only nagged in his head. He thought that it would be better if there were two of us free instead of just one,” Feniul explained, distressed. “The messages were only in case he couldn’t fight it off. He was going to come to my cave with the collar, but then I suppose she arrived before he could. Up close, the strength of the slippers was too much, I think.”

  “Oh.” I stared at the pool, which now showed only our two reflections once more. Dashing aside my tears, I turned away. “Show me where you found the collar,” I said.

  Feniul led us into the alchemist’s cave. The shelves had been rifled, jars broken or left unstoppered on the long work table. But it didn’t look like the work of the intruders. It looked more like something done in haste, as though jars had been dropped and there was no time to clean up their contents. I thought of Shardas trying to handle the delicate glass jars with his huge, slick claws, and understood.

  “It was up above the shelves,” Feniul explained, “in a crack in the rock. Dragons have very sharp eyes; Shardas had written my name with the faintest bit of charcoal. I saw it at once.”

  There was a square of parchment on which Shardas had listed several herbs and scented waxes that were to be smeared on the yarn or knotted into the weave of the collars. A few hanks of wool spilled out of a box on one of the shelves, but it looked like barely enough to make one more collar.

  “Oh.” I looked helplessly at the alchemist’s formula, my eyes still blurry. “There’re instructions here for more collars,” I said to Luka and Tobin.

  “What needs to be done?” Luka touched my elbow gently.

  “We need to gather the things on this list, pack them up, and take them somewhere safe.” I looked at the box of yarn. “We’ll also need a lot more of this,” I said, holding up a tangled skein.

  Laying the list down on the table where we could all see it, I began sorting through the jars. Tobin found a box and Luka offered his tunic to cushion the jars so that they wouldn’t break during transport. I gathered up the yarn that was left and tucked it around the jars as well, then we covered the box and started back through the caves to the main entrance.

  “Feniul.” I laid one hand on the dragon’s foreclaw. “I know this is a very great favour, but it’s very important that we get back to the King’s Seat as fast as we can. Could you please fly us there? I need to start making more collars like yours, so that we can stop this war. Or at least help the dragons who are being forced to fight in it. Like Shardas.”

  Feniul hesitated, rocking from side to side for a moment, then he swung his head up and down. “All right. I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you, Feniul.”

  “I have a family obligation to Shardas, you know,” Feniul said.

  “I know. And I know that he would do the same for you,” I told him gently.

  “If he could take us to the Duke of Mordrel’s country estate, instead,” Luka said, after conferring with Tobin. “I think we would be safe there. Then, if it looks clear, could Feniul go to the King’s Seat and bring back the duke and duchess?”

  “Yes, I think that would be all right. Feniul?”

  He nodded his great head, and we walked out of Shardas’s cave with our box of alchemical oddments and a faint glimmer of hope.

  Hope Strung on a Loom

  “What makes you think the dragons are just going to bow their heads and let us collar them?” Luka put down the yarn he was coating with herb-infused beeswax and looked over at me.

  It was a week later, and we were in the large sitting room at the back of the Mordrel country manor. It was a spacious room, beautifully decorated, but looking rather untidy at the moment. Bundles of herbs and cones of wax cluttered the small tables and skeins of yarn were draped over every available surface. A large table had been brought in to hold the duke’s maps and the scouting reports that were still pouring in.

  “Feniul’s going to help us,” I said.

  I contin
ued to work my belt loom. It was fastened to the back of a chair instead of my belt, though. It made it easier to work with. When it got too long, I would just scoot my stool back to maintain tension. Marta was sitting on a stool beside me, her loom fastened to the same chair.

  “Er, no offence, Creel, but Feniul doesn’t strike me as the most awe-inspiring member of his kind,” Luka replied. “I know he means well, but is that going to be enough?”

  “Probably not,” I said placidly. “But there’s little else we can do now, is there? Your father is in hiding, your brother is a hostage, and the King’s Seat is besieged by mad dragons. We have to take the dragons away from Amalia so that the Roulaini are forced to fight fair. That means collaring as many as we can. But if you have any better ideas, I’d love to hear them.”

  “I can’t believe you’re talking to a prince like that,” Alle, who was seated on my other side, hissed out of the corner of her mouth.

  Looking up, I saw that Luka had heard her all the same. “Oh,” I said in a light, disparaging tone, “he’s just a younger son.”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you are covered in freckles?” Luka picked up a small ball of beeswax and lobbed it at me.

  My hands full of yarn, I hunched my shoulders and let it bounce off one of them and on to the floor. It rolled under the table, and Marta bent down to retrieve it.

  “Children, these things are very precious,” the Duchess of Mordrel reprimanded us. “Please stop playing with them.” She took the wax from Marta and frowned at it, then picked off a bit of lint it had collected on its way under the table.

  “How, precisely, will your friend Feniul be helping us?” The duke spoke up from where he stood on the other side of the room, consulting with Tobin and Earl Sarryck, the Commander General of Feravel’s army, about the war. They were marking positions of armies on an enormous map of Feravel and Roulain.

  In the past week the situation had got more dire, if that was possible. The Roulaini army was on the march, Prince Miles was a hostage, and messengers were able to get only limited information to and from the hidden King Caxel. Most of the king’s privy council were dead or hostages; the Duke of Mordrel, the Earl Sarryck and Prince Luka were the only ones able to communicate freely with the army.

  “Feniul and I have some thoughts,” I said, feeling shy under the scrutiny of the earl. “One is to gather things that the dragons hoard. You know, wave around a – a shoe or what-have-you, until we get their attention and they try to get the object.”

  “And what if they simply burn you?” Luka was frowning at me, concern written large on his face.

  “If they did, they’d destroy whatever it was we were offering them,” I explained. “So they wouldn’t do that. They’d have to come down and talk to us, or at least face us, and then we could get the collar on.

  “Feniul also thinks that the others may want to be collared,” I continued, “so that they don’t have to feel the compulsion to fight any more. It’s demeaning for them, you know, and he thinks that if they are offered the chance of freedom, they’ll take it. We just have to get their attention first.”

  “This is all hingeing on a lot of ifs,” Earl Sarryck grumbled. “Not to mention relying on the word of a monster.”

  “Feniul is not a monster,” I retorted. “Your Lordship,” I added after Marta nudged me.

  As the men went back to their maps and plans, the duke exhaled with a sigh. “We just don’t have enough soldiers to take back the King’s Seat unless we surrender our border to Roulain.” He grimaced. “Of course, now that Prilian is there leading the army in person, we don’t have much of a border left.”

  “We need to get my father out of the caves and free Miles,” Luka said. “There’re over a hundred soldiers in the caves as well.”

  “We don’t have the manpower, and the city is guarded by dragons,” Mordrel said, ticking the points off on his fingers. “We need to get rid of those dragons, and Creel’s plan is the best we have to offer.” He gave me a slight smile, which I returned, and then he directed the earl’s attention back to the map and the latest news from the border.

  I concentrated on my own work. We had been weaving collars for days, and I was exhausted. After Feniul had brought us to the Mordrel estate, I had flown back to the King’s Seat with him to help convince the others that he wasn’t under Roulaini control. It had taken us five trips to pick up the duke and duchess, Ulfrid, Marta, Ulfrid’s bar girls, Derda and Alle. None of the trips was what you might consider restful. The Roulaini-manipulated dragons were patrolling the skies, and Feniul had had his tail toasted by none other than Theoradus, my old friend from the Carlieff hills.

  It had been Ulfrid’s idea to fetch Derda and Alle, and it proved to be very good advice. The waxed yarn was difficult to work with, and knotting the dried herbs into the pattern was, as Alle rather crudely put it, like trying to shove an egg back into a chicken.

  The herbs were brittle, and if too much of them broke off, it ruined the charm. Or so the alchemist’s notes indicated. I had finished one collar, and set it down on the table, when Alle accidentally knocked it to the floor and half of the rue crumbled to dust. I had to unravel the whole thing and start over with a new bundle of rue. I swore like a tinker until I saw that Alle was biting her lip to hold back tears. Chastened, I gave her a hug and admitted that it had not been her fault.

  Despite this, tempers were short and all of us were vowing that we would never wear – let alone weave – another sash as long as we lived.

  “There!” Marta smiled with triumph as she finished the collar she had been working on. With great delicacy she cut the collar free of the loom and laid it, loosely coiled, on a large sideboard. There were half a dozen other collars already there, all waiting to be wrapped around the necks of dragons and fastened with a knot of scarlet silk.

  With much less fanfare, Derda also rose to her feet, cut loose the collar she had been working on, and put it on the sideboard. She picked up some skeins of yarn from the table, and a bundle of herbs. The yarn was silk, from her own back room. The stout dressmaker appeared aged by the shock of the dragon attack. She was no longer brusque and blustering, but quiet and prone to starting at any noise. Her plump cheeks sagged, and she barely ate. Ulfrid sat up with her at night, offering tea and her particular type of comforting silence.

  “Creel, are you ever going to be done with that one?” Marta plopped down on the stool next to mine with an armload of yarn and began stringing her loom for another collar.

  Feeling guilty, I looked down at my work. Marta had caught me unravelling the last hand’s span I had woven. There had been a flaw in it, and I wanted to correct it.

  “We don’t have time to make them perfect,” the duchess pointed out. Alle and Marta were teaching her to weave so that she could help us, and the one collar she had finished so far was what we politely called “a good effort”.

  “Look at Feniul’s,” Marta agreed.

  “I know,” I mumbled. “But I was thinking of using this one for Shardas.”

  “Oh.” Marta let the matter drop, and so did the others.

  I had been trying to capture the colour-block style of stained glass on the narrow collar, and it wasn’t going very well. But even if it was for his own good, the thought of collaring Shardas like a dog made the bile rise in my throat. I was salving my conscience by trying to make his collar as beautiful as possible. I hoped that it would work. For both of us.

  “How many dragons have been reported?” It was the earl again, pulling at his lower lip while they studied the map.

  “At least a dozen,” the duke said.

  Tobin made some signs with his hands at me, but I still couldn’t get the hang of the gesture-language that he used.

  “He says that there’s only one gold dragon, and that it is your friend,” Marta whispered in my ear.

  “How do you know what’s he’s saying?” I looked over at her, surprised.

  She flushed deeply. “I … have a cousin
who is deaf. Tobin uses similar signs.” She blushed even darker and went back to work.

  “It’s all very well for you to make a special collar for your friend, dear,” the duchess said. “But we shall need five more collars as soon as possible, and you are the best weaver here.” She gave me a kind smile. “Perhaps you could hurry just a little?”

  “You’ll need to hurry a lot,” Earl Sarryck said, coming away from the table to frown at us. “We’ve been gathering things from that list the dragon provided. We want to try collaring the dragons around the King’s Seat right away. If it doesn’t work, we need to know so that we can mount a better defence.” He shook his head. “We had no idea that their army was so large, and I’m getting reports that dragons are raiding cities as far north as Carlieff.”

  I went pale at this, thinking of Hagen and my relatives. “Carlieff?”

  The earl nodded, grim. “And it’s still not certain if the Roulaini are holding Prince Milun for negotiation, or if they’re going to execute him.”

  “They won’t hurt the crown prince,” the duke argued.

  The earl snorted. “Even if they’re trying to eliminate the royal family so that they can annex Feravel?”

  “That seems a bit extreme, don’t you think?” The duchess gave the earl a severe look.

  “Half of the King’s Seat and nearly all of the court are in line for the throne, one way or another,” Luka put in. “There are dozens upon dozens of us. They’d have to –”

  “Burn the King’s Seat to the ground?” Earl Sarryck’s voice dripped acid. “I believe they’ve already got a good start on that, Your Highness.”

  Silence greeted this remark. The earl, no matter how unpleasant, was right. The King’s Seat lay in ruins, the king was in hiding, and the roads were flooded with soot-covered people fleeing the city. Things were desperate, and this plan of ours was risky in the extreme.

  Bending my head over my work, I began to weave for all I was worth, carefully working the herbs into the silk and telling myself sternly that the pattern didn’t matter. It was hard to keep myself from continuing the pattern I had already begun; my fingers had fallen into a rhythm. So rather than turning my energy to breaking the pattern, I forced myself to ignore it if my fingers fumbled and I knotted a thread three times instead of twice, or slipped a stitch. Shardas would understand if his collar was not perfect, I told myself.