Dragon Spear
DRAGON SPEAR
Jessica Day George
NEW YORK BERLIN LONDON
For Amy Finnegan:
friend and writer
Table of Contents
Praise for the Dragon Slippers Series
I
t’s a bucket of sand,” I said.
“Yes, yes, it is!” Luka was still grinning at me with delight. “
Black
sand. And we got six bucketfuls!”
“How nice,” I told him. I looked over at Tobin. “Did he hit his head while you were out exploring?”
The mute warrior grinned and flicked his fingers at me slowly. I had never been as adept at interpreting Tobin’s hand signs as Luka or Tobin’s wife, Marta, but I caught this message easily enough.
“It’s a present for Shardas? Why on earth would a dragon want buckets of black sand?”
I stepped back from the incoming tide and rolled down the legs of my trousers, then picked up my bucket of crabs. We had been catching crabs to cook for supper when Luka had disappeared with Tobin, to return an hour later with the buckets of coarse, dark sand.
“Creel,” Luka said, the pleased expression on his face telling me my prince was about to unspool a grand plan, “do you know how glass is made?”
“Of course,” I said, somewhat stung even though I knew that he wasn’t trying to make me look foolish. I was very sensitive about my poor schooling: I had grown up on a drought- stricken farm far to the north, and lately large gaps in my education had been brought to my attention by Luka’s father, King Caxel. The king was not pleased that his son was marrying a commoner.
A commoner—that is to say, me.
“You, er, make glass by . . .” I trailed off, blushing. “All right: where
does
glass come from?”
Luka put the bucket down beside the others and gave my sandy hand a squeeze. His was equally dirty. “I’d be surprised if you knew; I doubt most people do,” he said gently. “Glass-makers are notoriously secretive. Glass is made from sand that has been melted.” Now his grin was even wider.
I blinked at him. “How hot does sand have to get before it melts?”
“Very hot. Dragonfire hot, you might say. Shardas has been talking about making his own glass, and the best way to get different colors and textures is to use different types of sand. Black sand is very rare, but it’s the only way to make a true red glass.”
The buckets of sand now seemed precious rather than strange. I knelt beside one and ran my fingers through the coarse grains. “How wonderful!”
The dragons had been exiled from all but a few civilized lands, forced from their caves and hoards. They had found a new home in the south, on the Far Isles, many days’ flight from my home in Feravel, but the last year had not been easy for them.
They had had to excavate new caves, learn to forage for foods, and set up their own gardens and herds of animals. A large number of the dragons had been born into slavery to the army of the desert nation of Citatie, and consequently lacked even the most basic survival skills.
Shardas, the king of the dragons, was a dear friend of mine. He loved stained glass, and had once had a magnificent hoard of stained glass windows. His mate, Velika, also loved glass, though she preferred finely blown glassware. Both of their hoards had been destroyed some time ago, and the Far Isles were not a place where they could come by either type of glass easily. Which brought us back to Luka’s buckets.
I shook the sand off my fingers. “So,” I said casually, trying not to reveal further ignorance, “when they say
blown
glass . . .”
“When the sand gets hot enough, it melts together until it’s like taffy,” Luka explained. “They make vases and goblets by blowing through a pipe with a blob of melted sand on the end, shaping it into whatever you want.”
My brow furrowed. “It sounds difficult.”
“I’m sure it is,” he said, undaunted. “But I think that Shardas is up to the challenge.”
“Of course he is,” I agreed, feeling a thrill of excitement. In a few weeks we would be going to visit Shardas and Velika and the rest of the dragons on the Far Isles, and I couldn’t wait.
“All right, I think I have enough crabs,” I said, straightening. “We’d better get them back to Marta before she runs out of firewood.”
Marta, my business partner, was waiting farther down the beach. We were in Moralien, Tobin’s birthplace, for Marta and Tobin’s One Year Celebration. According to Tobin’s brother Skarpin, Moralienin men were so impossible to live with that if their brides didn’t kill them by the end of a year there was a month of dancing and feasting. The newlyweds give gifts to their relations as thanks for putting up with them for an entire year. Last year at their wedding Luka had proposed to me, and now at their One Year Celebration he was trying to convince me to get married in Moralien—right then—rather than being married in Feravel later in the spring.
As we cooked the crabs over the driftwood fire that Marta had prepared, Luka tried again. “My father isn’t here to glare at you,” he wheedled. “It’ll be much more enjoyable this way.”
This actually gave me pause. Not being glared at by my future father-in-law during my wedding was tempting.
“I don’t have my dress with me,” I said, firming my resolve. I was a dressmaker, and for a dressmaker to get married in anything less than splendor was probably both a sin and against the law.
He appealed to Marta. “Talk to her, Marta. We’ve waited a year already, and now we’re going to be in the Far Isles for months.”
“Oh, no!” I rounded on her, shaking my finger. “I helped you sew
two
wedding gowns, don’t you dare try to convince me that one of my traveling gowns will be fine.”
Marta sighed. “She has a point.” She sat down on a log bench beside Tobin and pulled a fur rug up over her legs. “And Shardas would be crushed if he wasn’t there to stand for her family.”
“Aha! See!” I poked Luka’s nose. “You can wait until the spring.” Secretly, I wasn’t too keen on the long betrothal either, but if I was going to be married in front of every titled wealthy in Feravel, plus ambassadors from Roulain, Citatie, Moralien, and who knew where else, not to mention the glaring King Caxel, I wanted to make certain that everything was perfect. Getting my dragon friends there was another complication that I still hadn’t worked out, and I wished that Marta hadn’t said anything about Shardas being there. King Caxel had banned all dragons from Feravel, no exceptions, and I would rather have Shardas at my side than most of my blood relatives.
“I might be dead by then.” Luka groaned. He pulled a fur rug over us both as we waited for the crabs to be ready. Even with a roaring fire, Moralien in early autumn was cold.
“You’ll be fine,” I told him, leaning against his shoulder and tucking my side of the rug around my legs.
“How do you know?” He made his voice sound faint and long-suffering. “It’s months away. Anything could happen. Anything!”
T
here really was no way around it: my aunt was dumber than two turnips in a rain barrel.
I’d told Luka and Marta this when I related the story of how three years ago she had decided to leave me for the Carlieff dragon to eat. Which is how I ended up walking to the King’s Seat to get work as a dressmaker, befriending several dragons, and wearing a pair of dragonskin slippers that started a war.
But I don’t think either of them really believed me.
That is, they didn’t believe me until we returned to the King’s Seat, fattened on Moralienin crab and spiced honey bread, to find my aunt ensconced in the New Palace, with my uncle and all of my cousins in tow, of course.
Luka was just helping me off my horse when the double doors to the palace swung open and my brother, Hagen, came hurrying out, followed by two of my cousins. I shouted with delight and ran to embrace my little brother, who was now more than a head taller than I.
Hugging my cousins next, whom I now had only benevolent feelings toward since we no longer shared a bed, I exclaimed over how well they looked. Then it hit me that if my cousins had come all the way to the King’s Seat, my aunt couldn’t be far behind.
“Oh, no!” I let go of my cousin Leesel with dismay. “Hagen, please tell me—”
“Dear,
dear
Creelisel!”
My stomach dropped to my shoes as my dear,
dear
aunt Reena appeared at the top of the broad steps. She was wearing a long, purple gown that even from this distance I could tell was the work of Mistress Lelane, my mother’s former dressmaking rival in Carlieff Town. Aunt Reena came fluttering down the steps, her arms spread wide, but stopped with a little shriek just a few paces away.
“What are you wearing?”
Her ruddy cheeks went even redder and she yanked the shawl off my cousin Pella’s shoulders and tried to wrap it around my waist. Then she looked anxiously around the courtyard to see who else might have seen me wearing trousers.
“Aunt Reena,
Aunt Reena!
” I fended her off as best I could. “My trousers are fine; I’ve been riding, after all.” I straightened my tunic. I had enjoyed wearing trousers in Citatie the year before, and continued to wear them when I went riding, although I’d gotten some shocked looks at first. Marta and our apprentice, Alle, had started wearing them as well, though, and the trend was beginning to spread.
“Well, I can see it’s a good thing I’ve come.” She began to drag me toward the palace. “Not just because of your appalling costume, but the steward is being very curt with us. You will need to speak to him firmly. As the only family of a princess, we deserve much finer rooms. Don’t worry: I will coach you in what to say. You will be his mistress someday, and he must learn to respect you. Now, about our chambers—”