I had always loved sewing. Really, it didn’t matter what kind: hemming sheets, tailoring my brother’s tunics, or doing fancy embroidery. The idea of opening my own shop had glowed like a jewel in my mind. And yet, after just a day of working for Derda, I was starting to rethink my chosen career. Perhaps it was because I didn’t really want to wear a pink gown. Or perhaps it was because whenever I worked on the grey gown for the duchess, Derda hovered over my shoulder inspecting every blessed stitch to make certain that it was up to her standard.
I had wondered how Derda and her girls could possibly wait on customers and get their work done, but that question was answered by the end of my first (very long) day. Fashionable ladies did their shopping at certain times: never before noon, because the morning was taken up with sleeping late and dressing languidly, and never after dusk, because that was when they had their social engagements. So Derda’s shop, like any that catered to the wealthies (as Marta called them), was only open for four or five hours a day. Before and after closing, Derda supervised her employees as we sat around the large table in the back room and sewed and gossiped and sewed some more. Derda had a small table of her own, where she worked on very special commissions, like the skirt with the scarlet ribbons for Princess Amalia.
So it was that within moments of nearly losing my employment for agreeing to sew for the duchess, I was cutting out the grey silk to make her skirt. Beside me lay a neatly folded pile of pink wool that would be used for my own shopgown. Marta told me that it seemed to go faster if you did things “all at once”.
“Do all the cutting you have to do for both projects,” she instructed me, sitting down to a large froth of pale golden silk that would soon be a ten-layered skirt for a countess. “Then do all the pinning, all the hemming, and so on. Trust me, if you only work on one gown at a time, you’ll scream from boredom.”
“If you find it so boring, you can find yourself another job, my girl,” Derda said as she leaned over my shoulder and glared at the seam I was pinning. “Re-pin that,” she barked.
With a sigh I removed the pins, straightened the two slippery pieces of fabric, and pinned them again. The ripples of grey silk reminded me of the pool in Shardas’s cave that he used to talk to Feniul, and I felt a pang of longing for my quiet life there. I hoped that the migration would go well this year, and that Feniul was not bothering Shardas too much. It seemed like three weeks rather than three days since I had left him.
“Thinking of your swain?” Larkin raised her eyebrows at me.
I laughed aloud. “Oh, no,” I told her, sobering at her startled expression. “I was just thinking of an old friend.” A sudden vision of Shardas crouching in the street outside Derda’s shop, knocking on the door with a claw, nearly made me laugh again, but I stifled it.
“Is your ‘old friend’ a prince?” Alle looked at me slyly as she embroidered a narrow sash.
I gave her a bewildered look. “No, why?”
“One of the kitchen maids told me that Ulfrid brought you here as a favour to Prince Luka,” Alle answered, her expression eager.
“The prince was kind enough to direct me to Mistress Ulfrid’s inn,” was all I would say, no matter how Alle pried.
And she did continue to pry. There was nothing else to do while we sewed, hour after hour, than gossip. I, as the new girl, found myself being prodded for any gossip of interest from Carlieff Town (which wasn’t much) or any variations on the same old stories they’d already told each other (which weren’t many). A few days after I arrived, they were going around the table telling stories about sightings of goblins or dragons or trolls where they were from.
“Er,” I said, when it was my turn. “There aren’t any goblins or trolls in Carlieff.”
“Then make something up,” Marta urged me. “We’ve nothing better to do.”
“You could sew,” Derda said sharply from her table.
“Well, ah.” I looked around the table, and they all looked back, expectant. “There is a dragon.”
Larkin looked up at me sharply, and Alle giggled a little. Derda pursed her lips, but didn’t interrupt again.
“The hills around Carlieff have lots of caves,” I went on. “And it’s rumoured that there’s a dragon living in one of them. Years ago he used to carry off children, sheep, goats, but no one’s seen him now for generations and everyone thinks he’s dead.” I bit my lip. “Um, that’s really all.”
Disappointed, my audience looked back to their sewing, and I concentrated for a few minutes on the sleeve I was setting in my pink gown. Another day or two and it would be finished, and I would have the mixed blessing of being able to wait on customers.
“Our dragon is named Ama-something,” Alle announced. “Amaracin, or Amacarin. Anyway, in my great-grandfather’s time, the local laird challenged him to a duel, and Amacarin ate him.”
“I don’t know the name of the dragon my uncle claimed he saw,” Marta said. “He just saw … something … go across the sky, and then later one of the older villagers said it must have been the dragon.”
“The Carlieff dragon’s name is Theoradus,” I said, winking at Alle so that she would think I was spinning a yarn. “He’s brown, with golden eyes and horns. He lives in a cave at the top of one of the highest hills. They say he has a pool of still water through which he can see and speak with other dragons.”
“I wouldn’t know our dragon’s name,” Marta said, laughing at my tale. “But he eats dogs, or something. If you have a really good dog anywhere near our village, it always disappears. My uncle, on my mother’s side, claims to have seen something large and green carrying off our neighbour’s new sheepdog once.”
“Green, and likes dogs?” I laughed.
“Ridiculous, I know,” Marta said with a shrug. “That’s why I came to the King’s Seat.”
I laughed again, thinking of Feniul. “I came to get away from the dragons, myself,” I told her with a grin.
She rolled her eyes at me and we both snickered. Derda cleared her throat, and we concentrated on our work.
It was the next day that my feet started to itch again. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about, sewing for myself and a duchess, my feet had to bother me, too. But there I was, sitting between Marta and Alle, stitching away at the hem of my pink skirt, when I felt a sensation not unlike a feather being run across the bottoms of my feet.
“Hey!” I had pricked myself with my needle and a drop of blood fell on the pink cloth before I could catch it. I felt foolish for having pricked myself so many times in the last week. I had never been this clumsy at home; the fine fabrics I was working with now were making me nervous.
“What’s wrong?” Marta stared at me, and then thoughtfully pressed her own handkerchief over the droplet of blood to absorb it.
“It felt like someone tickled my feet,” I said, looking under the table even though I knew it was senseless. Who would be under the table tickling our feet? Besides which, the tickling had now settled into a constant itch that covered every bit of my soles. I paddled my feet against the floor and rubbed them back and forth, but nothing helped.
Larkin also ducked her head down to look at my feet. “I see that you are still wearing your blue slippers,” she said in her soft voice when she straightened up.
“I have only one other pair of shoes, and they’re just old sandals,” I admitted. Then I threw an anxious look at Derda. “These blue slippers will be all right, to wait on customers, won’t they?”
“I don’t care what you wear on your feet,” Derda informed me in a more good-natured tone than she had used with me since I was hired, “as long as you wear something. And they should be clean.”
“Our skirts cover our shoes anyway,” Marta said, after she spat a few pins into her palm. “So it hardly matters. Although the southern fashion for shorter skirts is catching on …” She had raised her voice at this last comment, casting a hopeful look at Derda.
“My girls dress decently,” was all Derda would say.
“Aaaah!” I dropped my work and ducked under the table, yanking off my shoes and frantically scratching the soles of my feet.
“Are you all right?” Marta’s voice bubbled with laughter.
“I hope you don’t have fleas,” Larkin said with a concern that seemed feigned to my ears.
“Fleas!” Alle shrieked and jumped to her feet. “Fleas?! I’m itching all over, she’s given us fleas!”
“I have not!” I yelled from under the table. Once I had got my shoes off, the itching subsided. “I think my feet are too hot. Or perhaps I’m not used to sitting so long. I did walk all the way here from Carlieff Town,” I lied.
“I’m sure it’s just your calluses or blisters healing,” Marta said, helping me out from under the table.
“She looks clean enough,” Derda said with a grunt. She frowned at Alle. “Now everyone get back to work.”
Red-faced, I pulled my shoes back on, biting my lower lip as my feet began itching all over again. With an effort I returned to my work, speaking only when spoken to and giving all my attention to the seam I was stitching. I hoped that my diligence would be rewarded, either by taking my mind off the itching or by it going away entirely, but it was not to be. When I mounted the narrow stairs with the other girls, heading to our cramped rooms on the second floor, my feet were nearly as numb as my fingers.
Before I fell into an exhausted sleep, I noticed that the itching stopped when I took my slippers off.
“Shardas,” I murmured into my pillow. “Why do my feet itch?”
“What?” Alle, on one side of me, raised herself up on her elbows. “Do you have fleas?” she hissed.
Marta, on the other side, reached across me and swatted Alle. “She doesn’t have fleas, go to sleep.”
“Shardas,” I said into my pillow again. “I miss you.” And I fell sound asleep.