Scrapplings Children of the Dragons

Chapter 1: Darna’s Discovery-2

“But the prince does not.”

The priestess’s statement hung in the air. To be the daughter of the pale, sickly prince. What would they say in the kitchen? The prince’s daughter could make the cook cower, not the other way around. She would be able to get revenge on all the servants who had slighted her or thrown dung at her. She would be beholden to the prince for everything, trapped at Tiadun keep. She would still have to bow to him and do whatever he and his mistress planned for her. Still, she would have fine clothes, do no work, and probably have a Cerean tutor of her own, teaching her to read and reason in the way of the rulers, without regard for the dragons.

If she were stuck in the keep and surrounded by people all the time, she would never see the dragon again. She knew it in her bones. If she took another parent, Tiada would leave her. She wanted to see Tiada again and to see Anara if she could. She didn’t want to be one of the dragon-blind, even if it meant a life of comfort. Besides, the whole idea was absurd.

“Well?” the priestess said. “Shall we go to him now?”

“I don’t see what he’d want with a daughter, even if he had one,” Darna said. The prince had red hair, too. Not as bright as her own, but on him everyone admired it instead of teasing him. People would admire a wart on a prince.

“He could make you head priestess in another province,” the priestess said, “or a keep mistress.”

“I don’t want that,” Darna said.

One thing he would not do would be to let her run free. Anamat waited for her, she was more sure of it than she’d ever been. It was home to the dragons’ children – that’s what the minstrels said. She wanted to see the beauty of its streets and of the many graces of Anara. The keep had none of that. She hated the place. She would not be chained to it.

“You’re a fool. You will never be a priestess without his influence,” the priestess said, pursing her lips. She was probably as dragon-blind as the prince himself.

“Why would I want to be?” Darna threw a dirty parsnip in with the peeled ones.

“You are obviously unsuited to this work, in any case.” The priestess sniffed at her mutilated pile of parsnips. “I will go tell him.”

“Don’t,” Darna said.

“I promised your mother that I would,” the priestess said.

“Why should she care?” Darna complained, so loudly that some of the other servants turned to look. “Why would he?” she added more quietly.

“She was your mother,” the priestess said. “She suckled you through your infancy, and she always waited for word of you.”

Darna doubted that. She’d certainly never heard anything about it.

“As for the prince,” the priestess whispered, “if it is known that he has sired a child, he will be better able to fend off his brother’s ambitions. I saw him as a youth. I am older than he is. You look very like he did before he became a man.”

Darna shook her head. Now, of course, despite the red hair, he looked nothing like her. People admired him, or at least flattered him.

“And there’s this,” the priestess said. “The princes have begun to pay some heed to this new Cerean philosophy. In it, the father’s seed has all the making of the child, the mother is just the passive vessel.”

“The Cereans also say that the dragons aren’t real, or that they are demons. Who could believe that?” Darna asked, exasperated, wondering how the priestess could favor Cerean philosophy over the dragons’ ways, even if she was dragon-blind.

Darna stood to walk away. Her father was less than nothing to her, even if he was the prince. She didn’t care that the keep mistress hadn’t borne him an heir. The child of a village priestess could mean nothing to him, even if he had visited her once. All sorts of men came to the priestesses. If they did bear babies, it was a shame and an accident, a sign that they were not performing the rite in earnest. How could her existence mean anything at all to them?

“He would value you,” the priestess said.

Darna shook her head. If by some chance she did mean something to him, it could only trap her forever.

The priestess stood, brushed a few parsnip peelings off her formerly immaculate robes, and swept out of the kitchen, taking the scent of incense with her. Darna was left with the garlic and muddy peelings and less than a handful of beads in her pocket. She considered the prospect of being the princess of this provincial keep for the rest of her born days.

“To Na’s fire with him!” Darna cursed. She felt faint, queasy. She had to get outside. She dropped her work, scrambled to get her stick, and ran. The cook shouted after her but it didn’t matter. She had to escape. She wanted as little to do with the prince as possible. He fed the servants meager rations even at harvest time. The keep cramped them all together, grating against each other, one complaint fast on the heels of the last, from the prince right down to her, the least of the servants.

Once outside, Darna slowed down. Tiada was nowhere to be seen. Near the privies, a few guardsmen were gossiping over dice, but they didn’t look up as she hurried past.

She made for a lookout point just beyond the keep wall. The foreign ship had drawn closer. She could see its hull now and almost discern the movements of the men on the decks. The prince had a Cerean tutor in the court, but the Cerean rarely appeared outside the prince’s private quarters and never spoke to servants, so the ones who came at trading season were still a novelty. Their ship looked far larger than the one that had come the year before on its way to trade in Anamat.

Darna looked up and glimpsed a tip of Tiada’s wing through the clouds. Then the dragon flew back up and out of sight. No one else in Tiadun ever saw the dragon, except possibly some temple-bound priestess. She would probably never meet another person who could see the dragons as she did unless she went to Anamat. There, maybe someone might understand why she stared at the sky and not condemn or pity her for it, even if they did pity her for other reasons.

The foreigners’ ship swung toward the shore. Incense spiraled up from the priestesses’ shrine to appease the dragon as her enemies sailed closer. In the town around the keep, people climbed up onto their rooftops to watch the foreigners approach. With all the people running up and down through the keep and the town, it would be a good time to slip away, but Darna was hungry. She resolved to go to the kitchens to steal some bread, even if the cook walloped her and she had to dodge that village priestess with all her unlikely and pointless tales.

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When Darna returned to the kitchen, the cook scowled and ordered her back to work. Messengers ran back and forth to the lookouts, carrying news of the ship. Darna cut and washed and carried and fetched and looked over her shoulder for the visiting priestess until she was ready to collapse. As soon as she could slip away, she slunk into her sleeping place in the corner of the kitchen. She curled up but sleep was impossible. The cook and her minions worked on into the night, arguing about the foreigners. Darna closed her eyes. Fragments of dreams danced behind her eyelids, dreams of some distant land, barren and empty. The clatter of pots broke her out of her reverie again and again, but still she pretended to sleep. She needed to think.

At around midnight, a horn sounded from the keep’s front gates. Darna woke to discover that the servants had deserted the kitchen, leaving only one old woman nodding on her stool by the cooling hearth. Darna limped out the door. She skirted around the keep the long way to avoid the other servants and so she could slip into the receiving yard unnoticed, through a gap in the wall behind a storage shed.

The half-moon was rising by the time the Cereans marched up through the town. The priestesses had prepared their shrine, laying out the cloth on their soft altar. They had bathed and lit lanterns to imitate dragonfire. Townspeople and servants left their beds to gawp at the procession of foreign sailors.

Darna scrambled onto a wall between two of the other young servants. The boy next to her was covered with soot and ash from cleaning the guest-chamber hearths. Across the courtyard, the prince stood on the temple porch. It raised him above the heads of the gathered throng, flanked by his brother on one side and his Cerean tutor on the other. The game warden was nowhere to be seen – probably making pressing his unwelcome attentions on one of the older maids. The prince was old but not ancient. If Darna did have a father, he could be about that age. The visiting priestess in the kitchen claimed to be older than the prince, but her hair was still dark, not yet streaked with white. Maybe she dyed it. The prince wore a permanent sneer. Darna looked away as his eyes turned in her general direction – not that he was looking at her, of course. Servants grouped around the keep’s gate. Out in the streets, a baby howled. Darna craned forward, as curious as everyone else to see the approaching foreigners.

The Cerean sailors entered the gates dressed in tunics dyed varying shades of brown, except for the two men in the lead who wore blue. They all stood taller than the Tiadians.

“They’re tall,” said the boy beside Darna as the first rank entered the castle gates.

“No, they’re just wearing tall boots,” Darna observed. They also wore slouchy caps and tunics with the arms cut away to reveal broad, muscular shoulders. The procession halted as its leaders bowed to the prince. Torchlight flared along the shrine wall and its curtain rippled, but the priestess – if she was there – waited to reveal herself.

The Cerean in the lead turned to the man behind him and whispered something. The prince whispered something to his tutor, who spoke to the ship’s captain. Murmurs ran back through their ranks as the shrine’s curtain swung aside. Clouds of incense wafted out, but still the priestess did not appear.

“What are they doing?” asked a girl below Darna. She hopped up as far as she could, but she was too short and the top of the wall was already full.

“They’re supposed to go make the offering,” Darna said. “The prince is inviting him forward, but he’s not moving. There’s another Cerean stepping up. I wonder why the captain won’t make the offering.”

“They’re strange, even that tutor. I always thought,” said the boy. He pushed a little to get a better look, almost making Darna fall.

“Stop that,” complained the girl on Darna’s other side.

Darna regained her balance, muttering an apology to her neighbor and pushing back to reclaim her spot.

After many murmured speculations, the priestess emerged clothed in flowing scarves, moving with the grace of the dragons. Instead of admiring her, the Cerean sailors looked down at their boots. Some of them clutched their amulets. A few at the back of the group made warding signs.

The keep guardsmen stiffened, spears ready. The Cerean captain took an offering box from one of the men behind him. There were two boxes, and they argued, pointing at one then the other. In the end, he took the smaller one. The crowd grumbled.

“They don’t have dragons in Cerea,” said the girl next Darna. “That’s what I heard.”

“Everyone knows that,” Darna said. Legend held that the Cereans had killed their dragons a long time ago. Since then, the land of Cerea had been nearly barren, while Theranis was still lush with the dragons’ blessings. In any case, the Cereans didn’t have priestesses. The captain looked like he didn’t even know how to make a proper offering, something all adult men in Theranis knew and looked forward to. A few of the sailors looked up from the toes of their tall-heeled boots and from their clutched amulets to stare at the priestess as if she were as strange and miraculous to them as a living dragon would be.

The priestess chanted while her two attendants played on a flute and a small drum. Their music mimicked the sound of the dragon’s breath, the force of creation. The priestess started moving, inviting that force into her body. Her robes fluttered around her like wings, like the wind.

One Cerean sailor grabbed his crotch. The man beside him jabbed him with an elbow. The priestess beckoned to the captain, and the prince urged him up the steps to the shrine doorway, while the tutor stood back, frowning. The prince’s brother smirked. The curtain closed behind the priestess and the Cerean captain.

The people of Tiadun keep whispered to one another as they waited.

After a little while, a different priestess appeared from behind the temple. She wasn’t one of the ones who lived at the keep; it was the one who had come to the kitchen earlier to talk to Darna. Why hadn’t she waited to speak to the prince at his regular audiences? She could hardly have picked a worse time to approach him. Darna cursed under her breath.

The priestess slipped through the ranks of guardsmen to the prince’s side. The prince ignored her while his brother shifted uncomfortably and the Cerean tutor clenched his jaw. She raised her eyebrows, in that way priestesses do, and the prince grudgingly nodded for her to say her piece. The murmur of gossip swelled.

“Priestesses don’t like foreigners,” said one of the townspeople below Darna.

“Can’t say I do, either,” another responded.

“… should know better.”

The priestess whispered in the prince’s ear, turned, and pointed straight at Darna.

“Wha’d ya do this time?” the boy beside her asked.

“I was born,” Darna grumbled. “Go away.”

The prince shook his head and Darna let out her breath.

The priestess spoke again, more insistently but not loudly enough to be overheard over the subdued sound of the crowd, but the Cerean tutor did hear, and whatever she’d said made his eyes grow wide. He sprang to the prince’s side, pressing his palms together and fixing Darna in his gaze. The prince’s brother hissed something at the guard beside him. Darna felt the breath stolen from her lungs. The prince looked at her. He looked with a kind of desire, as if this kitchen girl had suddenly turned into some piece of iron with magical powers. Darna could not breathe.

She looked up. Even here on the wall, uncomfortable as it was, she had clear view of the skies, of the stars, or the dragons. That was what she wanted, all she wanted, only to see the dragons fly, even if it meant a dangerous journey to a distant city. She wanted to prove herself and to be free, free of the keep, its kitchens, and its unseeing towers. She wanted to be in that place she’d heard of in the minstrels’ songs, where she could become whatever it was that she was meant to be and where she would still be the dragons’ daughter.

“I have to go,” she said to herself. Then she turned to the boy beside her. “Help me over the wall.”

“Where you going?” he asked.

“If I stay here, I’ll hit you!” Darna shook her stick as if the prince and his court weren’t all staring at her.

A few of the guardsmen had turned to look in Darna’s general direction, too. Just then, the head priestess of the shrine emerged alone. She raised her eyebrows. The prince hurried to her side. He bowed to the priestess then followed her into the temple, looking back over his shoulder toward Darna, scowling as always.

“Now!” Darna hissed. The boy gave her a boost and she scrambled up, over the tiled roof of the stables. On the far side, she dropped her stick onto the ground, falling after it with a thud. Her leg hurt from the landing, but she could walk and that was all that mattered now. A horse whinnied. She dragged herself to the pasture gate, hoping against all odds to reach the hills unseen and, before too long, Anamat.

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