Page 2 of The Dragon Queen Complete Series Collection
Chapter 2
I worked out who had packed the sack of supplies for me when I returned to the hut, because, once I’d performed a more thorough audit of the bag’s contents, I found a single cake of soap. I nearly dropped it, I was so shocked by the sight of it, and then by the smell of it. I pressed that small perfumed round to my nose, fighting past the all-pervading scent of pig shit, wood smoke and mud to capture a faint waft of lavender.
“Nadia…”
Nadia had been my lady’s maid before Father died, and she’d protested when she’d been redirected to serve Arabella. She’d made her thoughts plain more than once until my stepmother was forced to have a very blunt conversation with her. Serve the daughter of the house or be dismissed without references, which was a fate reserved only for girls who couldn’t keep their legs closed around the men. She’d then have been forced into a life of prostitution if she’d tried to find a position anywhere but in Deepacre. I’d urged her to silence then, to do as Arabella or Stepmother required. It had become clear that I had lost any position of privilege I might have once enjoyed, and all of my letters to the King had come to naught. If I was to fall, as it appeared I would, I didn’t want to take her down with me.
Buoyed by the sight of such a precious thing, I opened the hut door, grabbing two wooden buckets and the heavy yoke I balanced across my shoulders to carry the buckets once they were full. The pigs all looked up in interest. But I wasn’t retrieving water for them to add to the muck of their pens. This was for me.
The cake of soap almost felt like it burned in my pocket as I walked to the river, the small piece seeming illicit somehow, given how long it had been since I’d possessed such a luxury. Once I made it to the bank and had drawn my buckets of water, I knelt and thrust my hands into the bright, cold water of one bucket. Rubbing my hands together, I tried to dislodge as much dirt as I could before I applied the soap, and when I did, a sob caught in my throat. My nut brown skin re-appeared, some stubborn dirt still collected around the nails, but still cleaner than it had been in what seemed forever. As I turned my hands over and over in the water, rinsing them, something broke.
In my former life I’d been as guilty as any of my class of looking down my nose at the dirty and the dishevelled, protected as I was by my position from the reality of the time and effort involved in keeping clean. It was so much work, to draw water, to spend the time cleaning yourself, and when I was still Lady Pippa, that work had been undertaken by others on my behalf. But for far too many, cleanliness was a luxury.
I didn’t need to be clean to look after the pigs. I didn’t need to be clean to chop firewood and set a fire. In fact, it was an advantage not to be. I could spend more time at my work, at surviving, stopping myself from starving, or freezing, or from losing the animals that had become my livelihood. But right now, all of that faded away. I had my father’s old, worn shirt up and over my head, the thick belt around my waist unbuckled, and my pants jerked down before I could think twice about it.
I plunged into the freezing river, part of me questioning the wisdom of what I was doing, sure I’d catch my death from the chill, but at the same time my hands moved without thinking. I rubbed the soap up and down my arms, across my stomach and breasts, down my legs, through my hair, in an orgy of cleansing. As the river pulled the swirling skeins of bubbles downstream, it felt like more than dirt went with them. Every jeer, every shove, every disgusted sniff, every slight… and my eyes fell closed as I tipped my head up towards the sky in relief. But then I wished it hadn’t been Nadia that had packed the bag, that the soap hadn’t been there for me to find.
Because it was little more than a tiny sliver now, left to dry out on the rock, precious and almost gone. While I was clean, my clothes on the bank were still filthy and I had no others to put on. Old Bay had told me that a fine living could be made from tending pigs, but I was yet to see it. People turned away from me when I brought my beasts to market, gave me only what coins they could bear to part with, chortling at the enforced discount they were getting. Because what was I to do? Walk the beasts to the next town? I could barely keep the blasted things in line as it was, fighting to keep them from rampaging through the village… I let out a sigh, then clambered out onto the bank, grabbed my clothes and dragged them into the buckets.
Although I really didn’t want to, I used the rest of the soap up, attacking my clothes, scrubbing them as best I could. I watched the soap wear away, becoming smaller and smaller in my hand, and then it was gone before I’d finished cleaning everything. I just stared at my hands, my clothes, feeling a pang of loss the like of which I hadn’t felt in such a long time and I didn’t welcome its return. I worked as best as I could to remove the remaining dirt through abrasion alone until I heard the seams of my clothes groaning. As I tossed them onto the grass to dry, my feet squished in the soft mud, a foreshadowing of what awaited me when I got back to the hut. Mud and shit, mud and shit, that was my lot now. Then, as if in counterpoint to that, I heard a roar.
My head jerked up, my eyes turning to the sky, as no doubt did those of all of the residents of Deepacre, because where there was one roar, there would be more. The king’s dragon riders always flew in groups of four or five. Four of them flew above me, the massive forms of their beasts casting shadows over the land as they passed. My eyes widened as I watched them go overhead, the jewel-like tones of the dragons obscured by the sun. But as I followed their path, my heart sank. The riders were early. They were heading for the estate and I had been tasked with providing the pork for the dinner table. I almost smiled then, imagining the flap my stepmother must be in at their unexpected arrival. But the moment of pleasure I had at imagining her consternation didn’t change my problem. I’d been tasked with bringing the hogs to the estate on time or else face the consequences, but at the same time I’d been told not to be seen by the riders.
“Damned if I do and damned if I don’t,” I muttered furiously. It was not the first time since my exile that I had been on the horns of a dilemma. I shook my head and then pulled my clothes on as best I could, shouldering my buckets before walking back to the hut.
Sometime later, I realised that I was going to catch hell for my tardiness. I hadn’t leapt into motion as soon as I had got back to my dwelling. I hadn’t separated two of the pigs away from the others and directed them towards the estate as I should’ve. Instead, I’d let my clothes dry before the fire and dug around in the chests Old Bay had left, finding what I needed in the bottom of one. The flat cap was old and moth eaten, but as I tried it on my head, I saw it would serve my purpose. I plaited my hair as best I could and then wound it on top of my head, putting the cap on and pulling it over my eyes.
Arabella and my stepmother, Lady Cecily, would be beside themselves at the early arrival of the dragon riders, so I hoped they would be sufficiently distracted not to notice me slinking in with the pigs they wanted. With the cap and my old pants and shirt dried, I could pass myself off as a pig boy. I was tall and slender like a lad, Arabella had told me often enough. Let’s just hope others shared her opinion, I thought furiously.
If my stepmother and Arabella had known how much it hurt coming back to the estate, perhaps they would’ve forced me to return more often, because it was always an exercise in the most pitiful longing. I walked the pigs through the oak trees on the outskirts of the estate farm and my eyes followed the irregular shift of the stone fences, studying them like the familiar lines on a lover’s face. Because I adored this place: my father’s estate, my home. It was the land on which I was born, where I’d grown up and got into a dozen silly scrapes, climbing trees or trampling through my mother’s rose bushes. I paused for a second, staring at the cows standing placidly in their field. For the vast majority of my life, the estate had been a haven full of books and Cook’s sweet biscuits and my father’s cuddles. A treasure I had taken for granted, right up until it was all ripped away from me. But as the pigs grunted, rooting around in the undergrowth and looking for acorns, my present reality reasserted itself with a harsh slap.
A low roar had my head jerking up as did the pigs’.
I’d intended to go straight to the stockyards, hand the pigs over to the overseer there and then be gone before anyone even realised who I was. A skinny boy in drab clothes with a couple of pigs in tow? There was nothing remarkable about that. But as I looked ahead, there was plenty remarkable about what was in front of me.
As I walked further out of the treeline, my heart felt like it fell straight to my boots and my pace slowed. The dragons, all four of them, had been left to rest in the only area big enough to accommodate them on the estate. Not the gardens. The beasts would’ve crushed the rose bushes flat with their immense weight. And they couldn’t go anywhere near the stables. Our horses weren’t dragon-hardened. So that had left the farmland in front of me.
One of the fields had been emptied of cattle, creating a space for the beasts to settle, but they weren’t alone. Men, so many men, milled around everywhere, come to look at the wondrous beasts that had just landed. But even the great number of onlookers could not mask the sight of the massive dragons. My pace slowed to a stop, the pigs rooting around my feet, seemingly unaware of the giant predators, as I just stood and stared.
If coming to the estate hurt, then looking up at the four dragons was, strangely, a far worse pain. They were beautiful in a way that made my eyes hungry to see more, my head weaving back and forth as I tried to catch glimpses through the crowds. The dragons gleamed like dark jewels in the sunlight: one a bright red and sparkling like a ruby, another cool and crisp as blue topaz, while the next I could see was deep purple and glowing sullenly, like good quality amethyst. But it was the last one that had me stepping forward for a clearer view. Black as obsidian and shining with all of the brittle beauty of that rock, he was a massive beast. Men cried out, then chuckled at their own responses when the big bastard ruffled his wings, then turned his head.
It was then that I realised how inadequate the tales of dragons were. As I met the pair of golden yellow eyes, I felt an alien presence there, pressing against my mind. Its understanding, its intelligence, was immense, far dwarfing my own. I was little more than a tiny bug by comparison. Yet, somehow, I didn’t feel small or insignificant in his presence, even though I so patently was. And it was then I understood how these beasts had come to represent the power of the throne in our land.
It’d been so long since anyone had looked at me with anything other than disgust, fear or irritation, that it was as if part of my body had gone numb as a result. And now, under this great saurian’s gaze, I felt as if all the blood rushed back in. It had hurt to be ignored, ridiculed, to have all that was mine stolen from me, but it hurt far worse to be seen. My soul prickled and ached, just as my limbs did when circulation returned, and that had me stepping backwards. I shook my head over and over, but it would not dislodge the presence of the dragon, and tears pricked my eyes, my breath catching in my chest.
“Milady!” That broke the spell, the sound of my hissed title enough to stop me in my tracks as I turned toward the speaker. “Gods above, milady,” Raymond, one of the grooms, hissed. “You can’t be seen!”
That was the worst thing about coming back to the estate. I fell into old habits; acted like nothing had changed, when everything so patently had. I needed new instincts now, those of a rat determined to survive. Lady Pippa might gaze upon a dragon, but Pig? She needed to hand over the pigs and get the hell away from here before she was discovered.
“We’ve been instructed to keep an eye out for you, milady,” Raymond said, his face stricken. “If we catch sight of you…”
His eyes shone, his distress so palpable it was infectious, but I just nodded and smiled.
“I know, Raymond, I know. It’s just I was told they wanted pigs for the dinner table.”
“Some of the boys have been told to go around to collect them,” he said and my eyes narrowed in frustration as my jaw locked tight.
“That wasn’t the order I was given this morning.”
“Change of plan, since the riders got here early,” he said. “I’m not sure if the boys have even left yet. Everyone’s been focussed on yon dragons.”
“As they might. Well, no harm done,” I said, forcing a cheerful tone. “The pigs are here and I won’t be for much longer. You can tell her ladyship that the boys did as they were told and she will be none the wiser, yes?”
Raymond nodded sharply, glad for the direction, and a small part of me, one that rarely surfaced, was amused by that. But that wasn’t something I could afford to focus on. We started to discuss the ways he and some of the others could get the pigs past the dragons and to the slaughterhouse, our plan seeming quite plausible, when I heard something that turned my blood to ice.
“Boy!”
The voice was deep, masculine and resonant, carrying across the field and beyond, freezing both Raymond and myself to the spot. We looked at each other, no doubt thinking the same thing. There were plenty of boys and men milling around the field, so surely this strange voice meant someone else. Someone other than either of us.
“Pig boy!”
I blinked, watching Raymond’s face fall at me being given that title again, but my own embarrassment was far more muted now. I got called the same thing any time anyone spoke to me now, so it hurt me a lot less than it did him. But Raymond was the head groom, the man who’d taught me how to ride, to — Any reminiscence was abruptly cut off as an unfamiliar man appeared.
The crowds parted instinctively for him, seeming to know this wasn’t just any man in their midst, but a rider. He towered over almost everyone around him, as these men often did. He wore the tight-fitting leather armour of a dragon rider, complete with the gleaming silver emblems of his office. A stylised dragon at his breast and burnished pauldrons at his shoulders, embossed with the shape of his beast. He strode forward, raking his hands through his long dark hair, the afternoon sun bringing out reddish highlights in his long locks as he came to a stop in front of us. Both Raymond and I dropped our heads; though my companion pulled his cap off hastily I didn’t dare remove mine. The rider seemed to note this with an amused snort.
“You’ve brought the hogs for the dragons already. That was quick work,” the rider said. Raymond and I shot each other desperate looks before I nodded sharply. “Well, you have the king’s thanks.” I heard the chink of coin in a leather pouch, my eyes widening as it was held out to me. Raymond shot me a meaningful look, forcing me to put my hand out and accept the payment.
“Thank you, Wing Commander, sir,” I said in my lowest, gruffest voice.
He led this unit, that’s what those silver pauldrons signified. All of the other riders in this group and their dragons looked to him for direction. And here he was, just standing there, watching the two of us. My heart felt like it would beat its way free of my ribcage if the moment was to stretch on for much longer, but the wing commander finally took pity on me.
“It’s just Brom, lad. No need for titles. We’ll need more pigs. I know that’s an imposition, but pickings have been thin in the towns we’ve been to prior to this. You can supply us with more?”
I’d do whatever the hell the rider wanted, if he’d just leave me be. Raymond began to fidget, unable to just stand there as the silence stretched on, so I was forced to speak.
“Some, sir, though my herd is dwindling,” I replied, even if that wasn’t true. Pigs seemed to be very good at several things: eating, shitting and making more of themselves. “But can I suggest asking the ladies of the house for venison? The estate forests are well stocked with deer and I’ve heard dragons prefer the leaner meat.”
“Have you, indeed?” I listened to the rapid staccato of my heartbeat and the hiss of his breath. “We might just do that. But another five pigs, full size and fat like these. Can you spare them?”
I nodded. I had to. No one said no to the king’s riders and to do so now would draw attention.
“Good lad.”
The rider’s hand felt like it weighed a ton as it came to land on my shoulder, the kind of rough and casual kind of contact that a man might give his inferior. But I was guessing Raymond wouldn’t feel like the palms of noblemen burned their way through the thin cotton of his shirt when he was commended for a good job, not the way I did at the wing commander’s touch. My fingers twitched as the rider drew his hand away, wanting to move, to smooth away the hot ache left on my skin, even to… I sucked in a breath at an unbidden thought so taboo, I could scarce believe I’d thought it.
Of grabbing the royal dragon rider’s hand and pulling it back towards me, renewing that hot moment of contact.
Instead, I nodded sharply and then pulled away to the sound of Raymond calling over some men to help him direct the pigs where he wanted the animals to go. I walked and kept on walking, not daring to look back until I was deep into the trees. When I turned and peered back past the leaves and the trunks, feeling like some kind of feral dog clinging to the outskirts of the estates, ready to beg for crumbs, I saw that Brom, the wing commander, was still standing there, staring into the forest depths after me.