The Dragons' Chosen (10 page)

“I have it already. And don’t call me ‘My Lady.’ I’m not your lady.” In the heat of their discussion, the bucket dropped and the water poured upon the ground. I was grateful it wasn’t the axe that fell.

Douglas picked up the bucket, still trying to redeem himself in her eyes. “My Lady, er, Chris. Let me do this for you. Allow it as a favor to me.”

Chris glared at him. “I don’t need some muscled male to carry firewood or water, thank you very much! Now, since you’ve been so helpful, I have to go all the way back to the stream again.” Chris angrily yanked the bucket away from him.

At that point I interceded, and Douglas retreated with his gentle feelings hurt. Douglas and Lawrence both were sweet on Chris. All of us noticed but Chris. She was friendly with the men, winking and grinning with everyone except the captain, though she could go from joking to combative with the blink of her eye. The men were fascinated by her. Her cinnamon hair was often loose, pushed casually behind her ears, her face bare of embellishment apart from those strange eyepieces. There was a power to her, a sureness that came not from rank but from within. She backed down from none, holding her own in ways that I had never imagined. She took their teasing and teased back. Once she even sparred with Charles, flipping him to the ground right before she herself was felled by a quick move that sent her buttocks over teakettle. She got up and shook his hand, saying, “Good job.” And that was that.

It was all beyond me. I sat quietly with my embroidery, but drawn to that easy way she had with them. Even though the men accepted me, I was still a princess. They and I knew it. It kept a certain formality in our relationship.

Later that night in my tent, I withdrew the “dragon book,” as I had started to think of it. It fell open to five pages that were stuck together. Chris and I worked through the water-stained writing.

“What do you think this means?” Chris fingered one of the paragraphs. “It looks like the journal of one of the first princesses.”

I fear this meeting above all things. What if I am not to his taste?

I frowned. This didn’t make sense. One thing I hadn’t worried about was that a dragon might not find me flavorful.

Chris verbalized my thoughts. “What if the dragons want you for some other purpose?”

“Perhaps, but what possible use could I be for a dragon?”

The rest of the text was so faded and blurry we couldn’t make it out. I put it aside, planning on dedicating time to try to glean hints from it. Chris said she hoped reading the book would convince me to go home. But I knew that I couldn’t. Perhaps within this book was some aid, some secret that would help me survive. I remembered my father’s last words: “Even a pawn can topple a king.” And I was no one’s pawn.

On the following morning, Lucinda had healed sufficiently to limp around with a stick for support. Chris ate her breakfast in silence, standing. After two long days of riding, she had little wish to sit. I wondered at her quiet mood, so unlike her normal self. She stirred the morning fire, not looking in my direction.

“I have a paper due and I haven’t started writing it.” She pulled out the golden card. “I need to go back. I still don’t know if all this,” she waved her hand around, “is real or a dream. I truly can’t tell.”

I held my breath; I couldn’t bear for her to leave me. Not now, not when we were so close to the dragons.

“I’ll be quick. It’s just for a few days, no longer.”

“Of course,” I finally said. “This isn’t
your
world, it’s merely a
dream
anyway.” I bit my tongue. I couldn’t believe I had said something so cutting. My only excuse was that we would reach the dragons in under a fortnight so my hold on my emotions was slipping.

Chris looked at me then. “No, I’m not deserting you. I won’t. I’ll be back, and soon. Make no mistake about it. We’re in this together.”

I dared not speak. I would say the wrong thing. The last time she left, it was over a fortnight before she returned.

“I have to go back. My mother gets all wiggy if I don’t phone her each weekend. Midterms are next week and I have a B plus going in. I can’t screw this up.” She sounded like she was pleading with me to understand. I didn’t.

She sighed then, a small shrug indicating her confusion and discomfort. “My consciousness-raising group says that you’re a metaphor for change, for the struggle women are going through. That this kingdom is only a dream representing the patriarchal social structure. The dragons illustrate my fears of being absorbed in a male relationship and I’m trying to put it in perspective, sort of like
Alice in Wonderland
or Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
.” She scuffed her foot against the trunk of a huge oak. “They say that I’m reaching through to my subconscious and they applaud my imagery.” She looked over her eyepieces at me. “I don’t think so. I think this is real. Besides,” she nodded toward Michael arm-wrestling with Lucinda over who should carry the saddlebags, “this is not how I view the battle for sexual equality.

“I don’t care if you’re a dream or a figment of my imagination. Whatever. All I know for sure is that you’re not going to be eaten by dragons on my watch. You are not going to face this without me. I will be back soon.”

I struggled not to sound like I was pleading. “We’re to arrive at the cave in twelve days.”

Chris nodded. “I’ll return before you know it, long before you get there.”

I nodded, and a weight lifted from my shoulders as I looked into her eyes, earnest and compelling.

“Okay, now that this is settled, I do need to leave. The paper won’t take me any time to write. Midterms will be over in nothing flat after that.”

“Yes, I understand.” I shook my head. “I don’t actually, but I’m trying.” I raised my head. “How are you going to go back to your world?”

She drew herself up onto her toes and clicked her heels together. “Click my ruby red slippers together and say: ‘There’s no place like home.’”

I glanced at her feet. She still had on her brown lace-up boots.

“Oh, not really. I’m just going to ‘want’ to return.” She closed her eyes. I could see her eyelids flutter. “Hmm. Before, I have returned whenever I was startled. Would you pinch me? Maybe that would help.”

I reached over and squeezed her wrist. “Harder.” I thought about her leaving me and I pinched her, hard. Chris yelped in pain. And she was gone.

Chapter 13

We traveled without much respite the next day and the day after that. Douglas asked when Chris would return. I didn’t know. At the top of each hill, at each turn in the road and each night during supper I looked for her, as we edged ever closer to the mountains. From here I could see the jagged silhouette of the great Crystal Mountain, a mountain so high that clouds obscured its snow covered peaks. Nothing good ever came from there. Chilled, I averted my glance, trying to focus elsewhere.

In the evenings I read the dragon book, deciphering lines of faded archaic script. The fragile yellowed pages of vellum cracked beneath my fingers. Nothing seemed helpful to my situation.

I didn’t know if it was significant that they only showed up during a ten-year period in each century. Or that the first time the message came from the dragons, there were three princesses chosen, not one. I puzzled over this for a while, not making any sense of it.

Other details didn’t seem to apply to me. A family named Mastin was tasked with guiding the princesses through the mountains. It was a job handed down from father to son to grandson. That was not happening in my case: Captain Markus’s last name was Clarson, and his mother was a Branneau from the north, not Mastin. There were guidelines for the sacrifices: which of the royal families the princesses could come from, how old the princess was to be and, interestingly, her marital status—uncompromised was the word used. But the book was old and written in many different hands. I wondered what, if anything, was accurate about it, or if it was mostly lore.

I thought of Frederick’s comments about deflowered princesses, and wondered if the whole kingdom had somehow gotten wind of this, if it were even true. It did resonate with his tasteless remarks about my…purity.

I worried that I might be a delicacy, something like milk-fed veal or foie gras. I could almost hear the barker calling out: tender female, virginal, royal birthed, gently raised.

I fit the description. I was fast approaching seventeen and unmarried. Sitting as I was in the middle of a forest, cloistered in my tent, I regretted every refused offer of marriage. Now I recalled the fleeting look of fear in my mother’s eyes with each refusal. I had wondered why she had wished me to marry early.

I thought about other girls of my age from the nine kingdoms of Gaulen. Why had I been chosen? There were five other princesses near my age. Josephine was sixteen, Marleen was seventeen but long betrothed. Adriana was also sixteen as were Stephanie and Catherine. All were unwed, but, as Mother delicately whispered to me once at a ball, Stephanie had a proclivity for men. Adriana, who looked like the “goddess incarnate”, was intellectually challenged, poor dear. Catherine had a face and figure that were stalwart, but fortunately a charming personality. And there I was, the acclaimed catch of nine kingdoms, a matrimonial prize, proud as any noble, dutiful and sure of my place in my world.

It sounded like a macabre country pageant. One that I hadn’t entered and didn’t wish to win. I didn’t even understand the criteria.

This couldn’t have been random. Someone must have chosen me. It was not merely bad luck that the token-bearing dove landed in my kingdom. The token bore my name. It meant someone had seen me, selected me. Picked me out from all the princesses of the realms.

Why was I selected? Who watched? Someone who decided to be both judge and executioner. Someone had chosen me, fingered me as the one to sacrifice, the pick of the litter. I wanted to know who. And if by some miracle I lived, I would have their head.

Chapter 14

I thought on this long and hard as we rode through the countryside. Dusk approached and we entered a small town by the name of Last Chance. And, yes, I did note the symbolism.

It was a sad attempt at a town. A three-sided blacksmith shop and an ill-formed inn sided with daub and wattle gripped a squishy toe-hold at the edge of the water-soaked fens. Three badly kept horses were tied out front. A single wagon pulled by two fly-bitten mules lumbered by, laden with slabs of freshly cut peat. At the village inn, Captain Markus was joined by a large burly man of dubious character. There was no doubt of his cleanliness, or rather the lack thereof. He must have weighed sixteen stone. He smelled of animal grease and sweat; and more than dirt, of anger and bile. I shuddered each time he looked my way.

He bowed to me upon leaving. His eyes assessed me as if I were a sweet he was considering. I stared back with as much dignity as I could muster.

I hailed my captain. “Captain Markus, might I speak with you?”

He joined me outside. “About that man,” I said, pointing to the rapidly disappearing brown shape. I wasn’t sure how to approach this subject. “You’re not considering bringing him with us, are you?”

“Tom Mastin? Yes, I am. His family is the bridge between us and the dragons. He’s a savvy mountaineer, an excellent woodsman. His family has guided princesses to the dragons’ lair for hundreds of years.”