Meghan's Dragon

by E. M. Foner

  “What’s she doing?”

  “The cloth fixer? Surely you have cloth fixers where you came from, uh, outside of Castle Trollsdatter.”

  “She’s sitting there holding up that guy’s trousers and staring at them while he stands there in his underwear looking foolish. How is that fixing anything?”

  “Your clothes haven’t been fixed?” Meghan asked. “Hmm, I guess that explains the smell. She’s fixing his pants so they can’t get dirty or wear out, though the fixing fails if the cloth is torn with something sharp enough to cut all the way through the fibers.”

  “That isn’t poss—” he let his objection trail off at her sharp warning look. “But how do the clothes makers stay in business if everything lasts forever?”

  “Oh, you really are a bumpkin,” Meghan said with a genuine smile. “People will pay much more for something that suits them if they know they can get it fixed so it will last as long as they want. And it’s expensive to fix clothes because the fixer has to trace every individual fiber through the weave.”

  “Can you do it?” Bryan whispered.

  Her sudden look of irritation tinged with worry reminded him that he wasn’t supposed to ask potentially dangerous questions while they were outside.

  “If I wasn’t magicless, like you, I could fix cloth,” she told him pointedly. “But they say that even powerful mages need to follow every thread, so it takes time and patience. Fixer Sandra has less magical aptitude than most people, but she practices the one thing all day, every day, so she can do it faster than anybody else in the castle.”

  They passed by several other small tradesmen whose stock of goods was limited to what they could haul in a handcart. The whole setup reminded Bryan of the background scenes from a swords-and-sorcery-style video game he used to play, but the sounds and smells were something else altogether. He followed his guide through a small passage to an inner courtyard, where a group of boys was watching a number of young men practice with quarter staffs and wooden swords. The boys had chosen favorites and shouted encouragement to them like fans at baseball game.

  “Get after him, Stavy. Come on, now!”

  “He’s a bum, Dorman. Wipe the floor with him.”

  An older man with a severe limp moved between the sparring pairs, correcting the young men when they failed to execute the proper forms. Bryan winced when one of the would-be warriors whose padded head protection had slid down over his eyes mistakenly slashed at the instructor’s neck with the wooden broadsword, but the old man stopped the strike with the back of his hand without even looking. It was the sword that shivered into splinters on contact.

  Bryan couldn’t stop himself from uttering “How?” before he remembered his instructions and clamped his mouth shut.

  “Phinneas is the castle’s war master,” Meghan said. Something in her voice hinted that she had a soft spot for the aging warrior. “His magic for fighting is very strong, and he’s been to war so many times that he doesn’t even count them anymore. That limp is the result of a battlefield healer doing a rush job to get him on his feet again. By the time he got back to the castle, it was all Hadrixia could do to save his leg.”

  “Who are you fighting against?” Bryan asked.

  “We of Castle Refuge are always at war over something or another,” she replied sadly. “The last one was because Cynthia, our baron’s daughter, tricked a dressmaker at King’s Castle into believing that she was the daughter of Baron Thundercrack and stole a dress the Thundercracks had special ordered months before the Harvest Ball. Cynthia is very good at glamour and impersonation.”

  “You fought a war over a ball gown?” Bryan asked in astonishment.

  Meghan shrugged. “Warriors have to fight over something, don’t they?”

  “Why?” A sharp elbow in the ribs informed him that it was a stupid question. “I mean, we don’t have so many wars around Castle Trollsdatter.”

  “Then what does everybody do?” a gravelly voice demanded.

  “Phinneas,” Meghan squealed, and flung her arms around the war master’s neck. Up close, Bryan saw that he was at least in his early sixties, maybe even older if magic could slow the aging process. “How is your leg feeling these days? We worried when you weren’t back after the second week.”

  “The War of the Dress did grind on longer than we expected,” Phinneas replied sardonically. “The Thundercracks asked for a temporary truce in order to attack the Castle Edgestorm in support of the Firehearts, with whom they have some treaty obligation. Our baron didn’t see the point of packing up and coming all the way home just to set out again, so we went along to observe. It was good training for the young men, seeing a siege set up.”

  “Don’t sieges usually go on for months?” Bryan couldn’t help asking.

  “I see your young friend isn’t a complete military ignoramus after all,” Phinneas said to Meghan. He turned his attention to Bryan. “Normally, waiting out a siege on the sidelines wouldn’t be high on my to-do list, but our baron received news by carrier pigeon that his cousins, the Barleyhops, planned to move against Fireheart Castle. After two weeks of siege, the Firehearts got word of the Barleyhop attack and had to rush home to raise the siege on their own castle, so the Thundercracks finally made the time to pick up our battle where we left off. Good thing, too, since we were running out of supplies.”

  “I didn’t hear any mourning cries when you returned last night so it must have gone well,” Meghan said.

  “Bit of a letdown,” the old war master replied. “The Edgestorms hadn’t been happy about the Thundercracks joining the siege against them in the first place, so when the Thundercracks finally broke it off to fight us, the castle’s defenders sallied out and attacked them from the rear. Turned into something of a rout.” He paused to draw a dagger from his belt and flipped it at Bryan. The surprised dishwasher blinked, but he still managed to get a hand up and catch it by the butt.

  “Knew you’d be quick just by looking at you,” Phinneas continued, speaking directly to Bryan. “I haven’t trained soldiers for five decades without learning how to spot the likely candidates. Will you be participating in the tower climb?”

  “He doesn’t have any magic,” the girl said quickly. “He’s starting with me in the kitchen tomorrow.”

  “Ah, that’s a shame,” Phinneas said, turning to the girl. “Well, I have to get back to these young idiots before somebody gets a splinter in the eye. Tell Hadrixia I’ll come to see her later.”

  “Bye,” Meghan replied, dragging Bryan back through the passage to the main courtyard.

  “I thought you were supposed to be a friendless orphan,” Bryan said. He was annoyed that she had answered for him about the tower climb, whatever that was. If Phinneas was willing to accept him for training, fighting with wooden swords couldn’t be any worse than washing dishes without a machine.

  “When Phinneas returned home five years ago with his leg all black and rotting, Hadrixia stayed with him day and night for a week. I was the only one she let in to bring them food, and I watched him while she slept. After that, he was confined to bed for nearly a month, and I stayed with him when Hadrixia started doing rounds again. I think she used me on purpose, so that Phinneas would look kindly upon me.”

  “Trying to match make you with that old man?” Bryan asked half-seriously.

  “He’s the second most important man in the castle after the baron, and he could have left to become the king’s war master if he wasn’t loyal to our baron’s family,” Meghan replied with dignity. “And he has granddaughters older than I am.”

  A swarm of children engaged in some sort of game suddenly enveloped the pair, danced around them for a moment, and then streamed away like receding floodwaters. That’s when it hit Bryan that there were more children than adults in the courtyard, and that even the toddlers seemed to be teetering about without supervision.

  “Where did all the kids come from?” he asked.

  “I thought we covered that earlier,” Meghan replied
, glancing up at him in amusement.

  “No, I’m serious. I’ve never seen so many little kids in one place, other than a schoolyard, and nobody seems to be paying attention to them.”

  “Do they send children that young to school at Castle Trollsdatter?” Meghan asked with an edge in her tone, adding a reproachful look. “Around here, the small children are too busy looking after their younger brothers and sisters, and they usually start working with their parents as soon as they can do something useful. The smarter boys might be apprenticed to a better trade if their parents can afford it, but only the rich and highborn kids go to school at King’s castle, and that doesn’t start until they’re older.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Bryan said. He was about to tell her that families where he came from usually had just one or two children, but he didn’t want to get stuck explaining what made that possible and decided to let it pass. “Where’s the kitchen you keep complaining about?”

  “We’re still using the summer kitchen, which is the area over there by the wall of the keep,” Meghan told him. “The winter kitchen is in the keep itself, with the bakery. When you aren’t washing pots and pans in the scullery, the cooks may have you running pie fillings to the bakers. The full pots were too big for me to carry by myself, so for the last week the baker’s assistant has come for them.”

  “What’s a scullery?” Bryan asked. He felt like he should know what the word meant, but somehow he couldn’t make the connection.

  “It’s the room built onto the kitchen for the dishwashers,” Meghan replied. “Didn’t you have a scullery at Castle Trollsdatter?”

  “I guess we did,” Bryan replied, thinking about the steam filled room and the oval-tracked dishwashing machine. “How do we get paid around here?”

  “Coppers, or if you tell them not to pay you every week, you may get a silver.”

  “No gold?” Bryan asked in disappointment, unsure what had even prompted the question.

  “There’s my dragon,” Meghan replied happily. “You could work in the scullery for a year and not earn enough for even a small gold ring.”

  “You use rings rather than coins?”

  “We have both, but people prefer the rings because you can put a cord through them and wear them around your neck. Don’t worry. Stick with me and I’ll get you a whole pile of gold and jewels for your dragon’s hoard.”

  Chapter 8

  “I’ve got a surprise for you today,” Bryan announced. He took a break from scouring the giant copper pot and looked over at Meghan for her reaction. Compared to what he had imagined medieval cookery might entail, this castle’s kitchen was surprisingly clean. The soap wasn’t the best, but they used boiling water to keep the grease off of the counter surfaces and the stone floor, and strong lye produced locally from ashes kept the drain channels clean. The food was simple and hearty, though Meghan explained that he had arrived at the start of the harvest, which was the best season for eating.

  “So, what is it?” the girl asked, not taking her eyes off of the carving knife she was whetting on a well-worn stone. She never imagined when she had pulled Bryan over from Dark Earth a week earlier that she would be welcoming his help in the scullery. It turned out that working in the kitchen was the easiest way to keep him fed, not to mention earning some money so he could save for his own room. She was getting tired of sleeping on Hadrixia’s examination table.

  “It’s a surprise,” he replied smugly. “You’ll have to wait and see.”

  Meghan stopped sharpening the knife and looked around the scullery to make sure they were alone.

  “Don’t get cocky,” she warned him. “Thanks to Hadrixia you can speak the language like a native, but everything you say and do makes it clear to anybody who’s paying attention that you aren’t from around here. Just keep your head down and give me time to figure out why you aren’t transforming.”

  “First of all, I’m at least two years older than you, so I don’t see why you keep trying to tell me what to do,” Bryan replied calmly. “Second of all, I don’t understand why you think I would want to turn into a giant winged lizard.”

  “Dragons are not winged lizards. You just take on that form when you fight or fly, I think. According to the scrolls you’ll become a powerful mage, and wise too, though I wouldn’t know it from talking to you,” she concluded.

  “Just wait until the morning shift is over,” he told her with an infuriating smile.

  “Pot call,” Peter said, sticking his head into the scullery. “Going to give me a hand with the fillings?”

  “I’m there,” Bryan responded, happy to take a break from scrubbing. “But how come the bakers don’t just cut up the ingredients in the bakery?”

  Meghan shot him a look.

  “The cooks here would never allow it,” the baker’s assistant explained. “Meat and vegetables have to come from the kitchen. We get to buy our own fruits, flour, eggs, even lard. But my first week as an assistant, the bakers sent me to buy chicken and carrots for pies, just as a joke. The kitchen assistants found out and they hung me upside down in the stables over a mound of manure.”

  “Why?” Bryan asked.

  Meghan rolled her eyes and groaned.

  “Why do the cooks and the bakers protect their privileges?” Peter asked in surprise. “How could we all get along living in the same walls if bakers started cooking and boot makers started baking? You wouldn’t want anybody else coming in here and scrubbing pots, would you?”

  “Be my guest,” Bryan said, stepping back from the copper tub on a wooden stand that served as the soaking sink.

  “Stop it,” Meghan commanded, and gave him a push towards the exit. “I don’t know how you did things at Castle Trollsdatter but it must have been a disaster. Go with Peter, and then hurry back and help me with the wooden plates for the lower table. I wish they’d go back to using bread trenchers, but the bakers claimed they took too much time.”

  As Bryan followed Peter out of the scullery, she heard him ask the other young man, “What’s a trencher, dude?”

  Chapter 9

  “You better not be doing anything stupid,” Meghan muttered under her breath after Bryan lost her. She couldn’t figure out how he had even known she was following him, much less how he’d turned the corner between the practice yard and the courtyard and suddenly disappeared. She looked around again, shaking her head in disbelief and causing one of the cooks who had left work right after them to stop and address her gruffly.

  “Lose something, girl?”

  “No, Cook,” she replied meekly, looking at the ground. She had been playing the role of the magicless waif for so long that all the bowing and scraping came by instinct.

  “That new boy working with you seems a likely sort,” the cook continued. “I’m going to try him out as my assistant next week, so you better start looking for another scullery maid if you don’t want to do the work alone.”

  “Your assistant?” Meghan spluttered, forgetting her carefully constructed image. “I’ve been slaving in the kitchen since I was ten years old and he just started a few days ago!”

  “Exactly,” the cook replied. “If you had the slightest bit of potential, somebody would have noticed by now.” He paused and peered at her suspiciously. “Are you feeling alright?”

  “Yes, Cook.”

  Meghan kept her head down as she hurried back to her room, hoping that Bryan would be there waiting with her surprise. She was going to have her dragon’s hide for making her forget the character she was playing in front of the cook, even if it was just for a few seconds. Meghan groaned inwardly at the thought of all the magical savings she had squandered on a dishwasher who had never wielded a weapon in combat. It didn’t help that he boasted about being an unbeatable warrior in multi-player Internet games, whatever they were.

  Her room was empty, but she decided to wait and spend the time recharging her pendant rather than chasing around the castle and potentially missing his return. She dropped the bar into
its slots so nobody could burst in on her and began concentrating on storing up magical energy. Just when she was starting to make progress, somebody began pounding on her door and calling her name. Meghan leapt up to unbar the door.

  Miri, the chandler’s daughter, burst into her room. “Meghan!” she shouted, her orange-flecked eyes as wide as cantaloupes. “You have to come right now. Your cousin is climbing the tower.”

  “That idiot,” Meghan hissed from between clenched teeth. She chased after Miri, down the stairs in the hollow wall, and through the twisting passages back towards the courtyard of the castle keep. “It takes years of practice to climb the tower. He wanted to surprise me by breaking his neck?”

  “He’s already halfway up,” Miri informed her. “My brother was trying today also, but he slipped back down before he got very high. That’s when he sent me to get you.”

  “Peter?” Meghan asked. Of course it was Peter, she told herself. Miri’s other brothers didn’t work in the kitchen, and in just three days, Bryan and Peter had become thick as thieves. Her dragon even had the other young man calling everybody in the castle “dude.”

  The two girls burst into the courtyard of the inner keep, and sure enough, Meghan could see Bryan more than halfway to the top of the tower. There were exactly three hundred stairs winding around the interior of the round structure, which soared above the castle’s walls and the tallest trees that had been spared in the clearing of the surrounding fields. Seeing him rapidly ascending the curved wall high above their heads made Meghan sick to her stomach. Even worse, Bryan was taking the path that was only used by the young men who had the magical strength to freeze the guardian gryphon.

  “Dude!” Peter yelled, his hands cupped around his mouth. “Dude! You’re going the wrong way. You have to get to the other side of the arrow slits.”

  “What?” Bryan’s faint reply reached the growing crowd.

  “Dude! You have to go to the other side,” Peter yelled, pointing frantically. “There’s a magical gryphon above you. Dude! You’re going to die!”