The Cracked Slipper

by Stephanie Alexander

  “I did. After you met with her I was elated. I suppose I felt I wasn’t an idiot, imagining she cared for me. I don’t know what good I thought it would do.”

  “Do you think she feels as strongly?”

  He paused, his heart heavy in his chest. “I know she does. I almost wish she didn’t.”

  “How far have you taken it?”

  “She stopped me, thank HighGod, when I couldn’t stop myself.”

  Anne Clara took a few thoughtful moments. “What of Gregory? Does he suspect?”

  Dorian threw down his napkin. “That’s the most damnable part of it all. I don’t think he does. Gregory is so used to everyone agreeing with him and doing his bidding I think it’s beyond his imagining. I hope he’s not so naïve when he’s king.”

  He wanted his sister to believe him. “How can I look him in the face, knowing I’m in love with his wife? I hate myself for it. I go back and forth, wanting to strangle him for how he treats her and wanting to encourage him so she hates him. It’s disgusting.”

  “Can you retreat from him?

  Dorian snorted. “You know I can’t. You don’t just retreat from the Crown Prince of Cartheigh. Besides, you know what he’s done for me. I’d still be a soldier. I might be dead. He made me into something.”

  She took his hand. “He didn’t make you into anything. He just saw what was already there.”

  “And this is how I thank him for it. Gregory has his flaws. Believe me, I know the worst of them. But he has goodness in him as well. I have hope he will be a fine ruler someday. I can’t hate him. We’ve been through too much together. And even if I did I’m too entrenched.”

  His throat constricted. He could not remember the last time he cried. He had not shed a tear at his parents’ funerals, or through the violence of his military career. He rubbed a rough fist across his eyes and hoped Anne Clara hadn’t noticed.

  “I’m not my own man, sister,” he said. “It weighs on me.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t say that. I wish you had been at the Second Sunday Ball and not here with me. It could’ve all been different.”

  “No, you needed me. I would not change it.”

  Anne Clara wrapped her arms around her swollen belly. “I would offer you a solution, Dorian, but for all my heart I can think of none,” she said.

  He stared into his whiskey as if it might provide the answer that eluded them both. He took a drink, but familiar taste and smell brought him no comfort. “I know it. I know it too well.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll enjoy my time with you and Ransom and the children. I’ll stomach a visit with our dear brother Abram. Then I’ll return to Eclatant and serve them both. I couldn’t stay away if I tried.”

  It took Eleanor and Gregory and their party three days to reach the North Country. They followed the Clarity River, skirting Maliana on the way. For a few hours Eleanor could see the silver turrets of Eclatant shining on the hillside. They met a light mist on the second morning as they left the home of a wealthy cattle farmer. It became a drizzle as they traveled north, and it didn’t let up. Chou Chou complained in her pocket. Eleanor finally snapped at him to shut his beak, at least it was dry in there. The damp crept inside her clothes and she shivered, even though the mountains trapped the fiercest weather on the Svelyan side of the border. She imagined it must be miserable in winter, and understood why the farms and towns were few and far between.

  They stopped for lunch and Gregory pointed at a low hill. “On the other side are the Great Marshes,” he said. He took a bite of dried beef and pointed east. “It’s said that Caleb Desmarais’s farm was somewhere in that valley, but it’s long since disappeared. Wild unicorns still live in the Marsh. If we’re lucky we might see them.”

  They ate quickly and mounted again. The Marshes were passable by only one road, the Path of Nine Bridges, so named for the crossing points where the land became too boggy to support travelers. Eleanor strained for a sight of the wild unicorns. Gregory asked Thunderhead, his falcon, to fly high and see what he could see. The bird took off and disappeared against the cloudy sky. Chou Chou poked his head out of Eleanor’s cloak.

  “Such speed,” he said with admiration.

  “Yes, he’s fast, but he eats rats,” said Eleanor.

  “Point taken.”

  When Thunderhead returned he reported to Gregory like any sharp lieutenant. He had seen a group of mares and a foal two miles east.

  “Thank you, Thunderhead. Good work.”

  Teardrop pricked her ears. “We should call them. They will hear us.”

  “Maybe,” said Gregory. “What do you think, Vigor?”

  Vigor tossed his head up and down. “If they are mares and I call, they will come.”

  “You should cover your ears, Eleanor,” Gregory said.

  “My ears? Why?” She got her answer as Vigor let out a piercing cry, almost a screech. She clapped her hands on the sides of her head. Chou Chou twisted in her pocket and scratched her through the thick wool.

  Gregory laughed. “That’s why.”

  They waited for a few minutes, watching the horizon.

  “They are coming,” Teardrop said.

  Vigor and Thunderhead nodded. Eleanor didn’t see anything at first, until she caught flashes of white. Four mares and a foal leapt over the pools of water and landed easily on solid ground. They stopped about twenty paces away. The mares nudged the little one behind them, but it kept peeking at the visitors from behind their tails.

  Vigor called out. “We send you greetings.”

  The wild mares danced on their hind legs.

  “I am called Vigor, and this is Teardrop.” He did not bother introducing any of the humans. “We are passing through on our way to the place where the dragons sleep. We won’t disturb you, but we wanted to pay our respects.”

  One of the mares stepped in front of the others. Eleanor supposed if you could say a unicorn spoke with an accent, she did. “Our stallion is Terin.”

  “I have heard of him, even in the cities of men where we live. Please send him my regards.”

  The wild mare nodded. “We will. It is good to see a friend of man remember to show respect. You will have easy passage here.”

  Vigor thanked her. The first mare nipped at the others and got them moving. The foal bucked and capered. She snorted and pushed it in line with the others. Soon they were white dots on the horizon again.

  Gregory reached over and squeezed Eleanor’s thigh. “You don’t see that everyday.” He called to the soldiers. “Move out!”

  As Eleanor took up her rein, she noticed Teardrop looking after the wild mares. Eleanor wondered if she could still see them. “Teardrop? Are you ready?”

  Teardrop fell in behind Vigor. “Does it make you sad when you see the wild unicorns?” Eleanor asked her.

  “No,” said Teardrop. “Not sad. They have their allegiances. I have mine. It’s a different life. But no thinking being can help imagining herself in someone else’s footsteps. At some point we all ask, what if my path had been different?”

  Eleanor knew just what she meant.

  The terrain itself could not be called beautiful, but it demanded respect. There were no trees, just damp hills and sparse grass bunching up on each other as they rolled toward the mountains. They passed two shipments of newly mined Fire-iron being sent south. Gregory stopped and spoke with the transport guards, a rough mix of soldiers and martial magicians.

  The Clarity River wound down from the Scaled Mountains and through the North Country on its way toward Maliana. Once it reached the port town of Navigation Ford it widened out, but up here it was rocky and wild. Raw Fire-iron traveled south in clunky horse drawn carts until it could be loaded onto barges in the Ford. Transport guards ensured the precious cargo got there.

  “Dorian served on transport when he first came north,” said Gregory.

  Eleanor kept her reply casual. “Oh?”

  “He was promoted within a month. Unhea
rd of, really, but General Clayborne had never been so impressed with a lieutenant.” Gregory’s chest swelled with pride, as if her were talking about his own offspring instead of his friend. “You’ve seen his skill with a blade…but his men loved him, too…and he singlehandedly dispatched a Kellish magician bent on stealing a shipment of raw iron. Clayborne brought him south a few weeks later. He still had a gash on his chin when I met him.” Gregory smiled at the memory before trotting ahead.

  By the evening of the third day the journey lost its romance. Eleanor was wet through and her rear-end was sore. She longed for a cup of hot tea and a crackling fire.

  “We’ll soon reach Peaksend Village,” said Gregory.

  “Good,” Eleanor said. It had been several hours since they passed any settlements.

  “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s nothing but miners’ cabins and a dry goods merchant.”

  He did not exaggerate. She saw only a few women in the village, who seemed to be peddling themselves over any dry goods, and no children. Eleanor was on the far side of town before the last of their party passed the first cabins. They came to a fork in the road.

  “Where does it go?” she asked.

  “To Peaksend Castle.” Gregory pointed east. “And the soldier’s encampment.”

  Several hundred squat cabins cowered in Peaksend’s gloomy shadow. Granite turrets loomed over the camp like a stern father wagging disciplinary fingers at his errant children. Peaksend had none of Eclatant’s graceful angles. There were no grounds, just a steep path up the craggy mountainside. Castle or not, the whole scene depressed her. She could not believe Dorian had spent years up here.

  They pressed on. Eleanor was about to break her resolve against complaining when Gregory stopped Vigor.

  “Here we are,” he said. She eased Teardrop beside Vigor and looked down over a narrow valley. It was as if they had stumbled upon an oversized anthill. Men hauled carts loaded with digging tools and huge hunks of meat. Chunks of raw Fire-iron, wrapped in the thick hides of various animals, were loaded onto rough horse-drawn carts and dragged out of the valley. Merchants gathered in noisy clusters around piles of used hides; an earthy rainbow of browns, tans, reds and blacks. The hides, known as dragon robes, absorbed the Fire-iron’s heat and held it forever. Magicians believed the robes held warmth because they had once held life, a fact Eleanor had always found fascinating. Her own great-grandfather had made his fortune in dragon robes. An unlucky herd of sheep grazed in rickety paddocks outside the Gate, blissfully unaware they would all end up as a combination of dragon feed and cooling skins.

  There were at least fifty unicorns at work, some mounted, some wandering free. A few stood watch at the Gate but more came and went from the twelve cavernous openings in the mountainside leading into the mines themselves.

  “We move the dragons from cave to cave.” Gregory pointed at the six caves that glowed orange and spewed thick black smoke at regular intervals. “Those caves are active; there are dragons living in them. Those over there—” He turned to two caves that had lost their hot glow but still leaked smoke. “—are inactive, but the Fire-iron is still too hot for extraction. And those four quiet ones are being mined right now.”

  Only the unicorns entered the active caves. Most had bushels of raw meat strung over their backs. It must be too hot for humans, Eleanor thought.

  The men did come and go from the smoking inactive mines. They carried animal skins down into the caverns to cool the iron.

  “The smoke must be horrible for them,” she said.

  Gregory nodded. “It is, but there’s no other way and the pay is good. Men come up here from all over Cartheigh to do this work. It doesn’t kill them, if they don’t stay too long, and we have magicians who cast spells to clear the air. The cooling is the worst. The extracting is dark but not very dangerous.”

  Eleanor’s brow furrowed.

  “And yes, I have been down there myself,” Gregory said. “Don’t give me that look.”

  “What look?”

  “The one you always give me when you think I’m being a pampered dandy.”

  “I never—I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  He laughed. “Peace, sweetheart, here are our quarters.”

  With two rooms down and a large bedroom upstairs, their cabin was larger than the others, but still rustic. Simple wood furniture sat on a floor with no rugs. Dragon robes made of different animal skins covered the bed; fox, bear, wolf, rabbit. A line of rusty hooks on the bedroom wall served as a wardrobe. They would take their meals with the miners in the eating hall.

  “So this is the Desmarais version of the great outdoors,” Eleanor said. She opened the shutters to let out the musty air. She took her mother’s music box from her saddle bad and set it on the rough table beside the bed.

  “Do you plan on playing a tune for the miners? Dancing a jig in that broken slipper?”

  Eleanor didn’t know what possessed her to drag the music box and the cracked slipper from Maliana to Solsea to the Dragon Mines. “I couldn’t wear it even if the miners planned a ball at Peaksend. It’s too fragile. I’ve had dreams of it falling to pieces on my foot.”

  In truth the dream had become an ever more frequent nightmare. The slipper always shattered as soon as it touched the floor. Glass sprayed across marble in glittering needles. Eleanor fell on her knees, desperately sweeping crystals into her bleeding hands, but she could never catch all the shards.

  She unwittingly rubbed her palms on her tunic, but Gregory had already moved on. “I told you it wouldn’t be much.”

  She flopped down on the warm robes. “I love it. I’m so tired I wouldn’t care if we slept on a pile of new Fire-iron.”

  “Wife, you’re soaking my bed. As your prince and your husband I command you to remove those wet clothes immediately.”

  She threw a pillow at him. “You first.”

  “You know you won’t have to ask twice.” He was not nearly as tired as she was.

  When their other belongings arrived two days later Eleanor unpacked her extra riding leggings. Her dresses were too valuable for the rough terrain. While it never poured rain, some form of precipitation fell every day, be it mist or drizzle or lazy plunking drops. She imagined the curses of the laundresses at Eclatant should she return with a trunk full of mud-stained hemlines. Eleanor doubted she would see a petticoat for the next six weeks, not such a bad thought. She relished the idea of free movement from dawn until dusk.

  Chou Chou, on the other hand, relished nothing. After a few half-hearted attempts at keeping up with Thunderhead on his exploratory flights Chou gave up and rarely left the cabin.

  “I stick out like a tulip among ragweed out there,” he complained. “Everything is gray and brown. A Giant Buzzard will likely eat me. I’ve heard they live around here.”

  “They only eat carrion,” said Gregory.

  “Regardless, I should never have come. I need sun.”

  “Oh, Chou, hush,” Eleanor said. “Speaking of eating, why don’t you try one of those tasty moles Thunderhead brought home for you?”

  He retreated in a pique and sat muttering by the fire. “Parrot abuse, I tell you.”

  King Casper had sent Gregory to the mines to ensure the smooth leadership transitions of a new general and a new mine boss. Casper had not planned on the latter, but the former boss met an early end when a horse bolted and overturned its heavily laden cart. A cascade of warm Fire-iron crushed him. The king thought Gregory’s presence would keep things in order while everyone adjusted to the new regime.

  Gregory’s understanding of the mines and his rapport with the men who worked them impressed Eleanor. Each morning he kissed her and disappeared into the morning haze as she huddled under the dragon robes. He visited the soldiers in their camp. He helped fix broken equipment. He consulted with the magicians over air quality. After several hours of searching she finally found him one afternoon as he emerged from the shaft of one of the inactive mines. Shiny gray dust cove
red him from head to toe.

  He spent hours with the working unicorns, listening to their reports from the active caves and asking after the well being of the dragons. Were they eating well? Were any breeding? Had there been any illness? The unicorns themselves also needed constant tending. They came to the mines in six-month stints before returning to the Paladine for rest and a change of scenery. Gregory kept a lookout for those who might need to return early.

  One morning he called a young stallion from the entrance to one of the active mines. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Chalice, sire,” the stallion said.

  “You look weary. Is this your first posting here?”

  “Yes.” Like most unicorns, he did not elaborate unless asked specifics.

  “Go have a rest. I’ll see you cycle south when the relief arrives.” Gregory ran a hand over Chalice’s smooth foreleg. Chalice nodded and walked to the barn.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Eleanor asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Gregory, “but he didn’t seem right. Being up here takes a lot out of the young ones. I think the dragons drain something from them. I’ll keep him on gate patrol for the next few days.”

  “Will he get better?”

  A gruff voice answered her. “Aye, Your Highness, he’ll be better in no time. He’ll be go south and be happy to return in the spring.” The new mine boss, Matt Thromba, was a fierce-looking bald fellow, with a stringy gray beard he braided into three long twists.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “They don’t mind it up here in the badlands,” he said. “It would be their natural habitat, anyway. They just need to learn to control their energy, like.”

  “What do you mean?” said Eleanor.

  “For my life, sire, I never knew a woman to ask so many questions.” Thromba winked at Eleanor. “Don’t know if I could stand it, even from such a pretty thing.”

  Gregory clapped him on the shoulder. “Aah, Thromba, you haven’t had a conversation with a woman you weren’t paying to be there in years.”

  Thromba laughed in a series of snorts. “Ain’t it the truth, Highness, ain’t it the truth.”