I slept that night on a fresh pile of leaves and branches in the main chamber of Shardas’s lair. The next morning, I awoke stiff and groggy, with hair like a bottlebrush and my gown sadly creased.
“You look awful,” Shardas said.
“Thank you,” I muttered.
There was a roast pig and a bowl of strawberries the size of a washtub sitting on the floor in the middle of the chamber. Still half asleep, I ate berries and pork and tried to get my bearings. Shardas attempted to make conversation, but when I replied only with grunts, he gave up.
After breakfast, during which he ate most of the pork and all but a handful of the strawberries (stems and all), he took me down the passageway and into another cave.
“This will refresh you, I hope,” he said.
The floor of the chamber sloped away from the entrance to a pool of turquoise-blue water that steamed in the dim light. Shardas’s bulk would fill the pool with only just enough room to turn around, but it was still bigger than the pond I had learned to swim in at home.
“The water is quite hot for humans, though I enjoy it,” Shardas said. “If you do not get too close to the middle, I think you will find it comfortable enough.”
“Is it a natural hot spring?”
“Oh, yes, there are many such in this land.”
“Not around Carlieff Town.”
“You didn’t spend enough time in caves, then. That is why we dragons came to Feravel in the beginning: so many deep caves, with air vents and hidden pools.” He gave a great sigh, rippling the water. “Even Milun the First couldn’t get rid of us entirely.” And with that he left me to bathe.
I ran back down the passage and fetched my pack. There was a little nub of soap tied up in a spare handkerchief and a clean set of underthings in the bottom of my pack. Keeping to the edges of the pool as suggested, I scrubbed myself clean. My straight hair was horribly tangled, and I broke two teeth off my comb working through it. Then I took the rest of the soap and scrubbed the dirt and sweat out of my gown and laid it over a rocky outcropping to dry.
Having nothing else to wear, I crept back down the passageway with a shawl draped over my underthings. I sat and sewed with the shawl around me until the heat of the pool had dried my gown enough to make it wearable again.
After a lunch of peaches and mutton, Shardas asked if I would like to have a proper sleeping chamber, and I gave a heartfelt nod. He took me down the passage that led to Jerontin’s old workroom. On the far side of the laboratory was a curtained opening too small to admit Shardas. Shifting the curtain aside, I found a small sleeping chamber, thick with dust.
“I have not been able to clean it,” Shardas said, his great voice heavy with regret. “I tried reaching in with a cloth to dust from time to time, but it was too awkward.”
“I see.”
Stepping inside the room, I walked around slowly. There was a bed of heavy carved wood, and a red-lacquered chest. The bedcoverings looked to be not only dusty but also disintegrating from age, and the rug that covered the rough stone floor was more holes than cloth. Shelves had been carved into the wall, and on them were books with spines faded from age and use.
“More of Jerontin’s alchemical books,” Shardas explained.
“I will clean them up and put them in the laboratory,” I said.
“Thank you.”
Shardas provided me with some of the cloths he used to shine his windows, and I set to work. I carried out the rotten bedding and rugs, and Shardas gathered them up and took them away. When he came back a few hours later, he had a collection of blankets held carefully in his claws.
“I’ll find you a new rug tomorrow perhaps,” he told me.
“Where did you get these?” I held up the blankets: they smelled freshly laundered and two of them were still damp.
Shardas scraped at the stone wall beside his head with the tip of a blue horn. “Oh, I found them.” He looked like a little boy who had stolen a pie.
“Where did you find them?”
“Hanging.”
“Hanging?”
“Hanging on clotheslines near some farms,” he confessed in a rush.
“Shardas!” I was shocked. “You stole these?”
“I only took one from each clothesline,” he argued.
There were four blankets. That meant there were four farmer’s wives wondering just what had happened to the blankets they had washed and left to dry in the spring sunshine.
“But you stole them!” Then a thought struck me. “The food that we’ve been eating – the fruit and the meat … you stole them, didn’t you?” I thought of my father, working so hard to make our farm a success. Imagining a dragon swooping down and denuding our fields made me feel sick.
“No, no, it’s not like that,” Shardas assured me. He reached through the doorway into the little bedchamber as though thinking to pat my head or back with his claws, and then withdrew without touching me, still looking guilty.
“Then what is it like?” I was torn. I really liked Shardas, and I was deeply flattered that a dragon would want to please me this way. But, having been raised on an impoverished farm, the idea of stealing was more than I could bear.
“I only go to very prosperous farms: lots of buildings in good repair, farmhands bustling around. Then I take very, very little. A single blanket, which I haven’t done since Jerontin died. A clawful of peaches. The pig was wild: I caught it here in the forest, and the sheep was a stray.”
That soothed me to a certain extent. “Oh. Well, I suppose the food is all right, then. But maybe you should take some of these blankets back.”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know which farm I had got which blanket from,” he admitted. “And it does get cold in these caves at night, for humans.”
He was certainly right about that. Last night, after pulling my shawl around me and then putting on my winter stockings, I had still shivered. No wonder I had woken up so out of sorts. Aside from waking up in the lair of a dragon, I mean.
At last I accepted the blankets, though I politely refused a rug for the floor. Most of my days would be spent in the window room, I argued, where it was warm and there was better light to sew by. After that I stopped asking where Shardas got our food, and he never told me. But soon I learned to trust and respect him, and I was comforted by the fact that his gentle soul would not allow him to ruin a family’s livelihood.
And so, as stitch after stitch found its place on the handkerchiefs and swatches I embroidered, our days fell into a routine. Shardas with his windows and I with my embroidery sat together companionably for hours while light fell through the jewel-like glass panes and made patterns on the floor of the cave.
Though I missed Hagen, and sometimes found myself choking back tears as I thought of my parents, I didn’t miss life on our farm. It was delightful to sit and embroider all day without having to worry about wasting candles, or getting my chores done. There was no scrawny cow to milk, no chickens to peck at me as I tried to gather their eggs. My aunt’s shrill voice was nowhere to be heard, and the depressing sight of wilting potato vines did not greet me when I went outside to relieve myself. After only two weeks, I had to admit it: I had never been so happy.