“What makes you think the dragons are just going to bow their heads and let us collar them?” Luka put down the yarn he was coating with herb-infused beeswax and looked over at me.
It was a week later, and we were in the large sitting room at the back of the Mordrel country manor. It was a spacious room, beautifully decorated, but looking rather untidy at the moment. Bundles of herbs and cones of wax cluttered the small tables and skeins of yarn were draped over every available surface. A large table had been brought in to hold the duke’s maps and the scouting reports that were still pouring in.
“Feniul’s going to help us,” I said.
I continued to work my belt loom. It was fastened to the back of a chair instead of my belt, though. It made it easier to work with. When it got too long, I would just scoot my stool back to maintain tension. Marta was sitting on a stool beside me, her loom fastened to the same chair.
“Er, no offence, Creel, but Feniul doesn’t strike me as the most awe-inspiring member of his kind,” Luka replied. “I know he means well, but is that going to be enough?”
“Probably not,” I said placidly. “But there’s little else we can do now, is there? Your father is in hiding, your brother is a hostage, and the King’s Seat is besieged by mad dragons. We have to take the dragons away from Amalia so that the Roulaini are forced to fight fair. That means collaring as many as we can. But if you have any better ideas, I’d love to hear them.”
“I can’t believe you’re talking to a prince like that,” Alle, who was seated on my other side, hissed out of the corner of her mouth.
Looking up, I saw that Luka had heard her all the same. “Oh,” I said in a light, disparaging tone, “he’s just a younger son.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you are covered in freckles?” Luka picked up a small ball of beeswax and lobbed it at me.
My hands full of yarn, I hunched my shoulders and let it bounce off one of them and on to the floor. It rolled under the table, and Marta bent down to retrieve it.
“Children, these things are very precious,” the Duchess of Mordrel reprimanded us. “Please stop playing with them.” She took the wax from Marta and frowned at it, then picked off a bit of lint it had collected on its way under the table.
“How, precisely, will your friend Feniul be helping us?” The duke spoke up from where he stood on the other side of the room, consulting with Tobin and Earl Sarryck, the Commander General of Feravel’s army, about the war. They were marking positions of armies on an enormous map of Feravel and Roulain.
In the past week the situation had got more dire, if that was possible. The Roulaini army was on the march, Prince Miles was a hostage, and messengers were able to get only limited information to and from the hidden King Caxel. Most of the king’s privy council were dead or hostages; the Duke of Mordrel, the Earl Sarryck and Prince Luka were the only ones able to communicate freely with the army.
“Feniul and I have some thoughts,” I said, feeling shy under the scrutiny of the earl. “One is to gather things that the dragons hoard. You know, wave around a – a shoe or what-have-you, until we get their attention and they try to get the object.”
“And what if they simply burn you?” Luka was frowning at me, concern written large on his face.
“If they did, they’d destroy whatever it was we were offering them,” I explained. “So they wouldn’t do that. They’d have to come down and talk to us, or at least face us, and then we could get the collar on.
“Feniul also thinks that the others may want to be collared,” I continued, “so that they don’t have to feel the compulsion to fight any more. It’s demeaning for them, you know, and he thinks that if they are offered the chance of freedom, they’ll take it. We just have to get their attention first.”
“This is all hingeing on a lot of ifs,” Earl Sarryck grumbled. “Not to mention relying on the word of a monster.”
“Feniul is not a monster,” I retorted. “Your Lordship,” I added after Marta nudged me.
As the men went back to their maps and plans, the duke exhaled with a sigh. “We just don’t have enough soldiers to take back the King’s Seat unless we surrender our border to Roulain.” He grimaced. “Of course, now that Prilian is there leading the army in person, we don’t have much of a border left.”
“We need to get my father out of the caves and free Miles,” Luka said. “There’re over a hundred soldiers in the caves as well.”
“We don’t have the manpower, and the city is guarded by dragons,” Mordrel said, ticking the points off on his fingers. “We need to get rid of those dragons, and Creel’s plan is the best we have to offer.” He gave me a slight smile, which I returned, and then he directed the earl’s attention back to the map and the latest news from the border.
I concentrated on my own work. We had been weaving collars for days, and I was exhausted. After Feniul had brought us to the Mordrel estate, I had flown back to the King’s Seat with him to help convince the others that he wasn’t under Roulaini control. It had taken us five trips to pick up the duke and duchess, Ulfrid, Marta, Ulfrid’s bar girls, Derda and Alle. None of the trips was what you might consider restful. The Roulaini-manipulated dragons were patrolling the skies, and Feniul had had his tail toasted by none other than Theoradus, my old friend from the Carlieff hills.
It had been Ulfrid’s idea to fetch Derda and Alle, and it proved to be very good advice. The waxed yarn was difficult to work with, and knotting the dried herbs into the pattern was, as Alle rather crudely put it, like trying to shove an egg back into a chicken.
The herbs were brittle, and if too much of them broke off, it ruined the charm. Or so the alchemist’s notes indicated. I had finished one collar, and set it down on the table, when Alle accidentally knocked it to the floor and half of the rue crumbled to dust. I had to unravel the whole thing and start over with a new bundle of rue. I swore like a tinker until I saw that Alle was biting her lip to hold back tears. Chastened, I gave her a hug and admitted that it had not been her fault.
Despite this, tempers were short and all of us were vowing that we would never wear – let alone weave – another sash as long as we lived.
“There!” Marta smiled with triumph as she finished the collar she had been working on. With great delicacy she cut the collar free of the loom and laid it, loosely coiled, on a large sideboard. There were half a dozen other collars already there, all waiting to be wrapped around the necks of dragons and fastened with a knot of scarlet silk.
With much less fanfare, Derda also rose to her feet, cut loose the collar she had been working on, and put it on the sideboard. She picked up some skeins of yarn from the table, and a bundle of herbs. The yarn was silk, from her own back room. The stout dressmaker appeared aged by the shock of the dragon attack. She was no longer brusque and blustering, but quiet and prone to starting at any noise. Her plump cheeks sagged, and she barely ate. Ulfrid sat up with her at night, offering tea and her particular type of comforting silence.
“Creel, are you ever going to be done with that one?” Marta plopped down on the stool next to mine with an armload of yarn and began stringing her loom for another collar.
Feeling guilty, I looked down at my work. Marta had caught me unravelling the last hand’s span I had woven. There had been a flaw in it, and I wanted to correct it.
“We don’t have time to make them perfect,” the duchess pointed out. Alle and Marta were teaching her to weave so that she could help us, and the one collar she had finished so far was what we politely called “a good effort”.
“Look at Feniul’s,” Marta agreed.
“I know,” I mumbled. “But I was thinking of using this one for Shardas.”
“Oh.” Marta let the matter drop, and so did the others.
I had been trying to capture the colour-block style of stained glass on the narrow collar, and it wasn’t going very well. But even if it was for his own good, the thought of collaring Shardas like a dog made the bile rise in my throat. I was salving my conscience by trying to make his collar as beautiful as possible. I hoped that it would work. For both of us.
“How many dragons have been reported?” It was the earl again, pulling at his lower lip while they studied the map.
“At least a dozen,” the duke said.
Tobin made some signs with his hands at me, but I still couldn’t get the hang of the gesture-language that he used.
“He says that there’s only one gold dragon, and that it is your friend,” Marta whispered in my ear.
“How do you know what’s he’s saying?” I looked over at her, surprised.
She flushed deeply. “I … have a cousin who is deaf. Tobin uses similar signs.” She blushed even darker and went back to work.
“It’s all very well for you to make a special collar for your friend, dear,” the duchess said. “But we shall need five more collars as soon as possible, and you are the best weaver here.” She gave me a kind smile. “Perhaps you could hurry just a little?”
“You’ll need to hurry a lot,” Earl Sarryck said, coming away from the table to frown at us. “We’ve been gathering things from that list the dragon provided. We want to try collaring the dragons around the King’s Seat right away. If it doesn’t work, we need to know so that we can mount a better defence.” He shook his head. “We had no idea that their army was so large, and I’m getting reports that dragons are raiding cities as far north as Carlieff.”
I went pale at this, thinking of Hagen and my relatives. “Carlieff?”
The earl nodded, grim. “And it’s still not certain if the Roulaini are holding Prince Milun for negotiation, or if they’re going to execute him.”
“They won’t hurt the crown prince,” the duke argued.
The earl snorted. “Even if they’re trying to eliminate the royal family so that they can annex Feravel?”
“That seems a bit extreme, don’t you think?” The duchess gave the earl a severe look.
“Half of the King’s Seat and nearly all of the court are in line for the throne, one way or another,” Luka put in. “There are dozens upon dozens of us. They’d have to –”
“Burn the King’s Seat to the ground?” Earl Sarryck’s voice dripped acid. “I believe they’ve already got a good start on that, Your Highness.”
Silence greeted this remark. The earl, no matter how unpleasant, was right. The King’s Seat lay in ruins, the king was in hiding, and the roads were flooded with soot-covered people fleeing the city. Things were desperate, and this plan of ours was risky in the extreme.
Bending my head over my work, I began to weave for all I was worth, carefully working the herbs into the silk and telling myself sternly that the pattern didn’t matter. It was hard to keep myself from continuing the pattern I had already begun; my fingers had fallen into a rhythm. So rather than turning my energy to breaking the pattern, I forced myself to ignore it if my fingers fumbled and I knotted a thread three times instead of twice, or slipped a stitch. Shardas would understand if his collar was not perfect, I told myself.
At least, he would understand once I had the collar on him. Assuming I could get the collar on him, and that it had been made correctly. Sweat slid down my back as I thought of what would happen to Shardas if it didn’t work.
And what would happen to me, if I were standing nose to nose with a dragon controlled by Amalia.
As though reading my thoughts, which both he and Marta had the disconcerting habit of doing, Luka came to my side and crouched down. “Creel, don’t worry. It will work. And you will help Shardas put his cave back in order. I promise.” He laid one hand on top of both of mine, stilling my frantic movements.
“But if it doesn’t?” Tears pricked my eyes and my nose started to run, much to my embarrassment.
“It will,” Marta said firmly, and passed me her handkerchief. It was snowy white and embroidered with roses.
As lovely as it was, I used it to blow my nose, then gave them both tremulous smiles. I would make it work. For Shardas’s sake.