Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(6)

Tern considered it. “It’s an impressive gift, but not quite right.” She envisioned her subjects warring with each other.

“These, then,” the dragon said, knotting and unknotting itself.

A cold current rushed through the room, and the boats scattered, vanishing into dark corners.

When the chill abated, twenty-seven fine coats were arrayed before them. Some were sewn with baroque pearls and star sapphires, others embroidered with gold and silver thread. Some had ruffs lined with lace finer than foam, others sleeves decorated with fantastic flowers of wire and stiff dyed silk. One was white and pale blue and silver, like the moon on a snowy night; another was deep orange and decorated with amber in which trapped insects spelled out liturgies in brittle characters; yet another was black fading into smoke-gray at the hems, with several translucent capes fluttering down from the collar like moth wings, each hung with tiny, clapperless glass bells.

“They’re marvelous indeed,” Tern said. She peered more closely: each coat, however different, had a glittering crest at its breast. “Are those dragons’ scales?”

“Indeed they are,” the dragon said. “There are dragons of every kind of storm imaginable: ion storms, solar flares, the quantum froth of the emptiest vacuum . . . in any case, have you never wondered what it’s like to view the world from a dragon’s perspective?”

? 25 ?

? The Coin of Heart’s Desire ?

“Not especially,” Tern said. In her daydreams she had roved the imperial gardens, pretending she could understand the language of carp and cat, or could sleep among the mothering branches of the willow; that she could run away. But dutiful child that she was, she had never done so in truth.

“Each year at the Festival of Dragons,” the dragon said, “those who wear the coats will have the opportunity to take on a dragon’s shape.

It’s not terribly useful for insurrection, if that’s what the expression in your eyes means. But dragons love to dance, and sometimes people so transformed choose never to abandon that dance. At festival’s end, whoever stands in a dragon’s skin remains in that dragon’s skin.”

Tern walked among the coats, careful not to touch them even with the hem of her gown. The dragon rippled as it watched her, but forbore comment.

“Yes,” she said at last. “This will do.” The coats were wondrous, but they offered their wearers an honest choice, or so she hoped.

“What of something for yourself?” the dragon asked.

Some undercurrent in the dragon’s tone made her look at it sharply. “It’s one thing to use the treasury for a matter of state,” she said, “and another to pillage it for my own pleasure.”

“You’re the empress, aren’t you?”

“Which makes it all the more important that I behave responsibly.”

Tern tilted her chin up to meet the dragon’s dispassionate gaze. “The treasury isn’t the only reason you’re here, is it.”

“Ah, so you’ve figured it out.” The dragon’s smile showed no teeth.

It extended a hand with eight clawed fingers. Dangling from the smallest claw, which was still longer than Tern’s hand, was a disc rather like a coin, except it was made of dull green stone with specks in it like blood clots, and the hole drilled through the center was circular rather than a square. The most interesting thing was the snake carved into the surface, with every scale polished and distinct.

“Is it watching me?” Tern asked, disconcerted by the way the snake’s eyes were a brighter red than the flecks in the rest of the stone. “What is it called?”

? 26 ?

? Yoon Ha Lee ?

“That is the Coin of Heart’s Desire,” the dragon said with no particular inflection.

“Nothing with such a name can possibly bring good fortune,” she said.

“It never harmed your mother.”

Then why had she never heard of it? “In all the transactions I have ever witnessed,” Tern said, “a coin must be spent to be used.”

The dragon’s smile displayed the full length of its jagged teeth.

“You’re not wrong.”

Tern inspected the coin again. She was certain that the snake had changed position. “How many of my ancestors have spent the coin?”

“I lost count,” the dragon said. “This business of reign-names and funeral-names makes it difficult to keep track. But some never spent it at all.”