I turned to Mistress Iliyani, who stood beside me in the cottage doorway. Her nightcap framed her walnut-wrinkled face with pink ribbons. “Mistress,” I said, flinging an arm out to indicate the captain, who’d urged his mount a little in front of the other beasts. “Tell him. Tell him he’s mistaken. There’s no Roselle Pandracor anywhere in these parts. No princess. Certainly no dragon!”
Mistress Iliyani merely drew a long breath through her nostrils. Then she stepped out onto the doorstep and beckoned the captain with one imperious hand. Rather to my surprise—and possibly to his, judging by the look on his face—he dismounted at once and approached her. He hesitated for a moment, and his knees bobbed, as though he half wanted to kneel at her feet.
“Have you the High King’s signet?” Iliyani demanded, her thin voice sending shivers down my spine.
At once Captain Norlan produced a gold ring. It bore a red jewel carved with the symbol of the Gorduin Royal House: a phoenix, rising from flames. When Iliyani put out her hand, he promptly dropped it in her palm. My mistress held it up to the moonlight, turning it this way and the other. She blinked once, and when her eyelids rose, the eyes they revealed were no longer faded periwinkle blue. They were moon-wide lanterns, glowing with inner fire, no trace of either iris or pupil to be discerned.
Another blink, and they were human eyes once more. She pursed her thin lips, held out the ring, and deposited it back in the commander’s care. “Very well,” she said, then turned to me. “Best get your shawl, girl. And your good boots. You’ve a long journey ahead of you.”
It wasn’t until after the fact that I wondered what would have happened had my mistress not been satisfied with the ring presented. The idea that she might have stopped such a proudcompany of armed men on her own is laughable and yet…I’m not certain anyone would actually dare laugh at it. Not to Iliyani’s face anyway.
At the time, however, I was rather taken up with the absolute madness of the situation. Before I could get my head on straight, I found myself wrapped in a shawl, with boots on my feet, and mounted on that big black horse just behind the captain, my arms around his middle, my cheek pressed against the cold metal of his chain mail. I only looked back once. Just in time to see Mistress Iliyani’s hunched shoulders disappearing into the cottage right before the door slammed behind her. As though I was nothing. As though the sixteen years I’d spent as her companion, fetch-and-carry girl, and apprentice didn’t matter at all.
Tears streamed down my cheeks throughout that night. By the time the company stopped for rest, I was too exhausted by a throbbing, tear-induced headache to care about the fancy pavilion they erected for me. Or the silk gown with the elaborate beadwork at the neck and cuffs, which was left for me to discover when I woke. The long weeks which followed as we journeyed to Stromin Palace were something of a nightmare, and the only thing I remember clearly was saying over and over again: “It’s not me. You’ve got the wrong girl. I’m not a dragon.”
I can’t be a dragon. It’s simply impossible.
Dragons don’t…burn.
“Dragons don’t burn.”I whisper the words under my breath so that Philippa won’t hear me, even as I study my reflection in the mirror glass.
After stripping me of my rumpled bodice and overskirts, my lady-in-waiting plunked me, shivering in my underthings, beforethe enormous gilt-edged mirror which dominates one wall of this stone-carved chamber, making it seem twice its real size. Before coming here, I’d never seen a mirror larger than the small handheld glass Mistress Iliyani sometimes covertly used to check for vampyric auras in certain suspicious clients. That was a small, murky thing, with nothing like the startling clarity of this great oval. It’s unnerving to sit before such an exact replica of myself.
Even now, a full week following my arrival at Stromin Palace, I still don’t fully believe the girl in that glass isme. I already knew that my dark olive skin and flaxen hair were an odd combination. But seeing myself displayed so plainly, along with the citrine clarity of my pale eyes, is…unsettling. In this palescintillight, my skin takes on a faintly greenish undertone.
But a dragon’s daughter? Surely not. The burn scars stretching from my neck down my shoulder and licking along my rib cage on my right side are far too pronounced.
It doesn’t hurt. Not anymore. It did when Mistress Iliyani first found me, a small, half-feral creature staggering out of the forest, weeping for pain and fear. Years of the old healer’s ministrations have long since reduced that pain to an ignorable numbness. But the scars remain. And the memory of flesh burning. The stink filling my nose. The wild frenzy, the need to escape, to somehow separate my soul from my body, to no longer inhabit this existence of agony. It’s always there, lurking just in the background of my mind.
“Dragons don’t burn,” I whisper again, staring at the spread of that raw, wrinkled flesh. “But I do.”
Philippa pauses, nail file in hand. She looks up from her work, catching my eye in the glass. “Pardon, Princess?” she asks. “Did you say something?”
“Nothing.” I hastily drop my gaze to my lap. Philippacontinues to study me for a count of five breaths before shrugging prettily and returning to her work.Scrape-scrape-scrapegoes the file. My nails tend to grow very long, very fast, with sharp points. Ordinarily, I chop them short rather than risk inadvertently tearing my own flesh when I go to scratch my bum. But Philippa tells me that a lady’s nails must be shaped into delicate half-moons and polished to a shine. She is nothing if not determined to make a princess out of me.
“I really must emphasize,” she says now, continuing a conversation I entirely lost track of sometime in the last few minutes, “how utterly inappropriate it was for you to interact with a strange man. Especially under the circumstances.”
Oh gods! Are we still harping on that theme? I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “He was hardly astrangeman, Philippa. He was one of my guards.” I won’t bother to mention that I’d never seen this particular guard before. Most people around here seem to treat the guardsmen as a single entity made up of various armor-clinking parts anyway.
“Do you think that makes a difference?” Philippa finishes my left-hand pinkie with a flourish before immediately taking hold of my right and starting in on the thumb. She is so swift and efficient in every movement, one might suspect she was raised to be a lady’s maid and not a lady of high birth herself. The High King appointed her personally to be both my companion and caretaker, a role into which she has thrown herself with all the fervor of a warrior marching into battle. Barring the king himself, I’ve never met such an intimidating person; the fact that she is near my own age makes her all the more terrifying.
“Have you so little idea, Princess,” she persists, her expression rather grim, “just how important you are? Have none of the precautions taken over your care, none of the secrecy and securitysurrounding your arrival and stay here in Stromin Palace, impressed upon you the absolute necessity of your protection?”
“I hardly think an isolated conversation with a single guardsman is going to interfere with me fulfilling some great destiny or doom.”
Philippa sniffs. She does it most elegantly, as she does all things, communicating her disapproval with searing grace. “When it comes to soliciting the aid of the gods, one cannot be too careful.” She tilts her head, inspecting her work on my thumb. Satisfied, she moves to the index finger. “I shall have to report that to Captain Norlan,” she mutters.
I glance up at her face in the glass once more. “What do you mean?”
“When you did not meet me at the library as planned, I could find none of your guards anywhere!” Her lip curls faintly, not enough to mar the smoothness of her countenance, but just enough to make her feelings plain. “When I finally found them, they were all crowding the lower hall where the—you know—theprivatechambers are located. Clutching their stomachs and complaining of the flux. Every last one of them, the captain included!”
My brow puckers. “Those poor men. Did they say what brought it on? Was it something they ate? Or do you think they caught the bowelerous flu? It’s the time of year for it, at least back home.”
“I don’t care if they’re dying,” Philippa replies with the coldness of one who has never known a day’s sickness in her life. “It is their responsibility to oversee your safety. There’s simply no excuse for abandoning their posts.”
While I’d never dare contradict Philippa, under the circumstances, I would prefer the men make a mad dash for the privies than remain in place, doubled over in malodorous agonies. It’snot as though I was ever in any danger. While the corridors were certainly bereft of my usual bevy of valiant guards, one man, at least, was still on the job.
A small smile tilts the corner of my mouth. Memory of a poorly fitted cuirass stretched across a massive chest appears unbidden but not unwelcome in my mind’s eye. I should make a point to commend my solitary protector to his commanding officer. What was his name though? I don’t think he ever mentioned it. I suppose I’ll see him again soon enough, trading watches with the other fellows. Would Philippa be completely scandalized if I sidled up to him and asked his name directly?
