Dragon Rose(2)

One might think we should appeal to the king, so he could send his knights and warriors against the Dragon. This happened once, even longer ago than the storms and the quakes. The ruins still stood to the north of Lirinsholme, where the original town square stood before the wall was built. The scorched bricks and scattered stones were left as a warning, I think, and in any case, no other king dared raise his hand against the beast that dwelled just within the farthest northern borders of his kingdom. The sacrifice of one young woman every once in a while did not seem too great a price in order to avoid any further destruction. And besides, the Dragon always compensated the families of his Brides well. One thousand gold crowns in exchange for a daughter. Some might say it was a fair price.

Because of all this, Lirinsholme was left to manage its own peculiar curse.





My father was a potter, and quite a successful one, as such things are measured. On his own, he probably would not have done so well, but my mother managed him just as capably as she managed her daughters, and if he had had a son to carry on the family business, all would have been well.

Of late, however, his eyes had begun to fail, and for the last few years I’d taken over the fine painting on the most expensive pieces, those items destined for the houses of rich merchants such as Liat Marenson and his ilk. I had drawn since I could remember, using up the precious lead pencils intended for my sums and penmanship studies to instead draw the mountains surrounding the town, the faces of my sisters, the horses tied in front of the shops and taverns—anything save the occupations for which those pencils had actually been intended.

Because of my skills in this area, it seemed logical for me to perform the one task I could do to help keep the household going. And although I would rather have been sketching landscapes, at the very least painting flowers on a pitcher or tracing out the intricate Sirlendian twistwork that had lately come into vogue on a platter or serving tray seemed vastly preferable to helping my mother in the kitchen.

We told no one what I was doing, of course. People paid for Barne Menyon’s work, not his daughter’s. Luckily, my father’s workshop was at the back of the house, in an area where no one could spy on what I was doing, and so it was easy to conceal the deception. It seemed harmless enough, after all, and I suppose I hoped in the back of my mind that my utility with a paintbrush might serve as a means to keep me at home longer, and out of a marriage I definitely did not want.

The meeting with Master Marenson had perhaps not dashed those hopes, but it certainly made them seem rather na?ve and foolish. And when he sent a fine necklace of garnets the following day, I realized he was not one to be dissuaded quite so easily. I wished I could send the jewels back. My mother would have none of it, though, and instead had me pen a stilted little note of thanks, which she dispatched by means of our one servant, Janney, who was glad to escape the kitchen for a little while to deliver it.

“Perhaps I should run off with the next caravan of Keshiaari merchants,” I remarked to my friend Lilianth, who had accompanied me to market the next morning.

“As if you would!” she laughed, but her expression sobered. “At any rate, you know that sort of thing never turns out well.”

I paused at the stand of one of the vegetable vendors, pretending to measure the relative merits of one bunch of carrots over the other, but really, I was considering her words. Whether it was a quirk of the curse or just spectacular bad luck, whenever a young woman tried to leave Lirinsholme, she either ended up right back in the town after a series of misadventures, or suffered some ill fate on the road. We learned it was not wise to leave—at least not until we reached the magical age of twenty.

“I suppose not,” I replied, and nodded toward Alina, who managed the vegetable stall my mother preferred. Alina handed me the indicated bunch of carrots, and I gave her a copper piece before tucking the vegetables into my basket, already heavy with my other purchases.

“It is rather dreadful,” Lilianth said, after we stepped away from Alina’s stall and wandered a few paces, going in the direction of Mertyn Pike’s cheese shop. “If only you could meet someone like Adain!”

Adain Sweeton had been besotted with Lilianth since she had taken her hair out of braids, and she loved him just as fiercely. He’d had a domineering mother who wished for no rival at her hearth, but since she had obligingly passed away from a sudden heart spasm, the way seemed to have been cleared for Lilianth and her beau to marry, and soon. And since she was six months younger than I, Lilianth had more of a reason to marry as soon as seemed proper.

There was no one in town who caught my eye, and I was not one of those girls who would snatch up someone—anyone—just to avoid the Dragon’s curse. Those marriages, more often than not, seemed to result in years of misery, a poor trade for the small chance that one’s name might be drawn by the city elders as the Bride. After all, there were at least a hundred young women of the correct age at any given time. Those odds didn’t seem to be that poor.

“Have you chosen a date yet?” I asked, not bothering to reply to Lilianth’s remark. I guessed it would be easy enough to distract her from a conversation about my own conspicuous lack of appealing suitors.

As I had thought, she did not seem to notice the redirection. “Yes, just yesterday evening. We did not want it to seem to be too soon, because of Mistress Sweeton. But we thought the fifteenth of Sevendre should be far enough off.”