“Watch where you are going, you horrible cow!” The voice snapped at me over the sound of a small dog yipping with pain.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I looked at the young woman standing behind me and then down at the little animal I had stepped on.
The girl had a cascade of brown curls falling from a coronet of stiffened silk and ribbons, and her brown eyes were narrowed in anger. The dog was white, and barely larger than a bedroom slipper. Its long hair was tied up with a lavender bow on top of its head, revealing two round black eyes and a small brown nose. In contrast to its mistress, the dog wagged a long plumed tail at me in greeting, apparently already recovered from being trod upon.
“Pippin! Pippin darling! Come here,” the owner shrilled, holding out her manicured hands to the dog. “Let Mummy see if the nasty big peasant hurt my darling!”
But Pippin didn’t want to be comforted. She wanted to smell my shoes. That done, she trotted over to the monkey seller and stood on her hind legs to get a better look at the little black-and-white creatures.
“Pippin!” The girl’s voice was sharp now. “Come here to Mummy right now!”
Pippin seemed to sigh and slowly wandered back over to her mistress, giving a casual stretch rather like a cat before condescending to being picked up. Her “mummy” fussed over her for several seconds, looking for any sign of injury, while I stood red-faced and stammering over and over again how sorry I was.
“You’re very lucky, country cow, that you didn’t break one of my Pippin’s little paws.” The other girl sniffed at me. “She cost more than your family’s entire farm, I’m sure.”
“I am so very sorry,” I said for the thousandth time, bristling at being called a country cow. “I truly didn’t see her.”
“Well, how could you? In that great dragging old-fashioned gown and with those huge boats for feet,” the girl sneered.
As I got a better look at what she was wearing my heart sank. She was right: my gown was old-fashioned, or at the least, dreadfully countrified. While I wore a single long gown with a fitted bodice and flaring skirt all of a piece, she was elegantly dressed in layers of skirts that had been pinned up in the front to reveal each successive garment. Her bodice had the look of a tightly fitted jacket over a foamy white shift.
There was embroidery along the neckline and in long panels down her skirts, though. I gave it a quick scan and saw that it was nothing I couldn’t do.
“How dare you stare at me in that way!” The rich girl stomped one pink-slippered foot. “Who is your mistress? I will have you fired at once! First you try to kill my precious Pippin, then you ogle me with your horrible country eyes!”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, looking down at my dragging country skirts. What more did she want from me?
“Do you know who I am?” she demanded.
“No,” I muttered.
“No? No what?”
“What?” I looked up at her and blinked again. Did she want me to call her “mistress”? We were the same age, as near as I could guess.
She looked over one shoulder and screeched something in a strange tongue. Four hulking brutes in scarlet tunics with heavy swords belted at their hips stepped forward. I hadn’t even noticed them before, since all my attention had been focused on the dog and its excitable mistress.
She pointed her finger at me and babbled some more in that foreign language, and one of the brutes pulled a length of cord from a large belt pouch while the other made as if to grab my arm. I dodged out of his reach and for a wild moment I considered knocking over a cage of monkeys to create a diversion.
“Hey!” I yelled. “What’s going on?”
“You need to be taught a lesson,” the girl said.
A tall and fairly good-looking young man in a rich green velvet doublet and leather riding breeches stepped forward. He frowned at me and then at the girl. “What’s the to-do, Amalia?”
“This great peasant tried to kill my poor Pippin,” the girl said in a voice that suddenly sounded on the verge of tears. She pulled out a dainty handkerchief and sniffed into it. As it wafted past the dog’s face, “poor Pippin” tried to bite it. “I thought she had crushed my sweet doggie! And then she said rude things to me!”
“I did not!” I was astonished at this turn of events. She had gone from being shrill and demanding to weepy and victimised in a matter of seconds. And I liked dogs, even small fussy ones, and felt quite bad about stepping on Pippin.
“I say!” The wealthy young man turned grey eyes on me, looking stern. “What is the meaning of this? Is it true that you accosted Princess Amalia and attempted to kill her dog?”
I didn’t even know how to answer. “P-Princess Amalia?” I stammered finally. “She’s a princess?” I shook my head to clear it, and remembered some Carlieff Town gossip about the crown prince being engaged to marry a foreign princess. Oh, dear.
“Yes, she’s a princess.” The young man drew himself up stiffly and stared at me. “The Princess Amalia of Roulain.” Then he looked at my clothes. “Ah, just in from the country?” He relaxed a little.
I blushed. Was it so obvious that I was a total bumpkin? But not so backward that I didn’t realise who this wealthy young man was. If the shrill girl was Princess Amalia, than this richly dressed youth must be the Crown Prince Milun.
“Yes, Your Highness,” I murmured politely, making a small curtsy as my mother had taught me. “Forgive me. This is my first day in the King’s Seat, and I did not recognise the princess. I didn’t mean to step on her dog, truly I didn’t.”
“There!” The prince gave me a patronising smile. “Very prettily said. You see, Amalia?” He turned to his betrothed. “She didn’t mean any harm.” He waved his hands at the brutes guarding the princess. “Pippin looks quite all right, as well.”
It seemed a bit much to me that the princess needed four enormous men to guard her on a simple shopping trip, but I didn’t remark on it. Who was I to know the ways of royalty? Particularly foreign royalty.
The little dog was watching all this with bright black eyes, and didn’t seem to even remember having been stepped on. She looked very much like she would prefer being on the ground, investigating the black-and-white monkeys, to being squeezed by her royal mistress.
“Well, I think she did it on purpose,” the princess said, refusing to be mollified. “If you ever come near me again, I’ll set my guards on you!” She shook her fist at me.
“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” I forced myself to say. What I really wanted to do was slap the silly wench, royal or no, but I was sure I would be spending the rest of my life in a dungeon if I did.
The princess whirled around and stormed off, her guards and the crown prince in tow, and I breathed a sigh of relief. After I had calmed myself, I turned to ask the bird seller the way to the cloth district.
“Please go away,” he said uneasily, refusing to meet my eyes.
“What? But you said –”
“I don’t want no trouble, maidy,” the man said, and made a shooing gesture at me, still not meeting my gaze.
“But can’t someone please just point me towards the cloth-workers’ district?” I looked around at the other exotic pet sellers, who busied themselves with cleaning cages or untangling leashes. The brown man with the black-and-white monkeys smiled back, though, and gabbled something I couldn’t understand. “Please?” I tugged at my clothes and raised my eyebrows at the monkey seller, trying to mime what I wanted.
“Dorfath,” he said merrily, and pointed down the street in the direction I had come from. “Dorfath!”
“Thank you!” And I marched off in that direction, hoping he knew what he was talking about.