Chapter 4
Rosie
My story is a common one.
You may find any number of women of approximately my age who could tell the same basic tale with a few small tweaks to the details.
If you stood on the main street of any country village in the Unified Kingdoms and threw a stone, chances are you’d hit another poor orphan girl who lost her family in a dracori raid, fled inland, and scraped out a life for herself surrounded by strangers.
Granted, not every orphan girl was lucky enough to land headfirst in the gruff graces of a woman like Mistress Iliyani.
Half-elf and composed entirely out of hard edges, she was a grim but fair woman who had no use for a gangly millstone of an orphan child hanging around her neck.
After her initial attempts to foist me off on some unwilling peasant family or another, she sighed and declared: “Well, at the very least, you can make yourself useful.”
So I was put to work. First as a grunt: chopping, stirring, scraping, plucking, hauling, mucking…
the unending list of tasks required to keep a thriving apothecary in business.
Later, I graduated to fetch-and-carry girl, running errands across the country for my mistress to “spare her old bones,” as she put it.
Bearing in mind, I’ve seen her carry a fully grown billy goat on her back for five miles without breaking a sweat. There’s nothing wrong with her bones.
When I turned sixteen, Iliyani informed me that I could either sign on as her official apprentice and train to take over the business from her one day—though how this was to be managed, I never could quite discern; half elf that she is, she will likely outlive me by a good century—or I could marry Farmer Giles of Horlim, the next town over, and be stepmother to his seven children.
It wasn’t a difficult choice.
All that to say, life was fairly ordinary.
For the last many years, I’ve learned the intricate ins and outs of the apothecary’s trade, traveled up and down the quiet green kingdom of Anfalen, foraged for the herbs and roots and minerals needed for my mistress’s various medicines, and treated any number of fascinating patients.
Oh, there were the usual butcher, baker, and candlestick maker and all their sundry friends and relatives, of course.
But living so near Inamaer Forest as we did, a well-known border between this world and the Utherlynd, we found ourselves more often than not serving Utherkynd.
A vampyr suffering from bloodfever, or a kobold with a case of sulfur rot.
I’ve treated beautiful korrigans for head lice, tommy-knockers for lung blight, harpies with early-onset molt, and once a chimera with an ingrown fang.
And every solstice night, a party of ethereal elves would appear under moonlight to drink with Mistress Iliyani and dance on her lawn until sunrise.
When the first rays of dawn touched their faces, they would transform back into gnarled, wrinkled, bent little crones, with cracked voices and quick eyes, utterly unlike the beings I’d glimpsed through the shutters the night before.
One by one, they slipped back into the forest, not to be seen again until the next solstice.
It was a simple life, but an interesting one.
An apothecary is always treated with respect wherever she goes, and as the apothecary’s apprentice, I enjoyed my standing in the village of Gartsworth.
Occasionally, Mistress Iliyani would take on a second apprentice—such as Tim, bless his heart—and there would be more company for a little while.
They never stayed long. The strangeness of Inamaer Forest drove them to seek placements elsewhere.
But I loved it. I felt at home, walking under the spreading branches of the younger trees that grew along the fringes.
I never ventured deep; I had more sense than that.
But I breathed in the air of Utherlynd, tasted the indescribable hint of magic on the tip of my tongue, and knew to the very depths of my bones that this was where I belonged.
Until one night—about a month ago now—when the king’s men, led by the formidable Captain Norlan, thundered into the cottage yard, declaring the time had come for me to leave my place of refuge.
The High King had summoned the Dragon Princess, Roselle Pandracor, to present herself at Stromin Palace. The Hour of Destiny was at hand.
To which I answered: “What in the hell-blazes are you going on about?”
No one spoke. Fifteen armed men mounted on brutal battle chargers, moonlight glittering on their armor, and they all just sat there, dead silent. Watching me. I got the unsettling and utterly inexplicable feeling that they were…afraid.
I turned to Mistress Iliyani, who stood beside me in the cottage doorway.
Her nightcap framed her walnut-wrinkled face with pink ribbons.
“Mistress,” I said, flinging an arm out to indicate the captain, who’d urged his mount a little in front of the other beasts.
“Tell him. Tell him he’s mistaken. There’s no Roselle Pandracor anywhere in these parts. No princess. Certainly no dragon!”
Mistress Iliyani merely drew a long breath through her nostrils.
Then she stepped out onto the doorstep and beckoned the captain with one imperious hand.
Rather to my surprise—and possibly to his, judging by the look on his face—he dismounted at once and approached her.
He hesitated for a moment, and his knees bobbed, as though he half wanted to kneel at her feet.
“Have you the High King’s signet?” Iliyani demanded, her thin voice sending shivers down my spine.
At once Captain Norlan produced a gold ring.
It bore a red jewel carved with the symbol of the Gorduin Royal House: a phoenix, rising from flames.
When Iliyani put out her hand, he promptly dropped it in her palm.
My mistress held it up to the moonlight, turning it this way and the other.
She blinked once, and when her eyelids rose, the eyes they revealed were no longer faded periwinkle blue.
They were moon-wide lanterns, glowing with inner fire, no trace of either iris or pupil to be discerned.
Another blink, and they were human eyes once more. She pursed her thin lips, held out the ring, and deposited it back in the commander’s care. “Very well,” she said, then turned to me. “Best get your shawl, girl. And your good boots. You’ve a long journey ahead of you.”
It wasn’t until after the fact that I wondered what would have happened had my mistress not been satisfied with the ring presented.
The idea that she might have stopped such a proud company of armed men on her own is laughable and yet…
I’m not certain anyone would actually dare laugh at it. Not to Iliyani’s face anyway.
At the time, however, I was rather taken up with the absolute madness of the situation.
Before I could get my head on straight, I found myself wrapped in a shawl, with boots on my feet, and mounted on that big black horse just behind the captain, my arms around his middle, my cheek pressed against the cold metal of his chain mail.
I only looked back once. Just in time to see Mistress Iliyani’s hunched shoulders disappearing into the cottage right before the door slammed behind her.
As though I was nothing. As though the sixteen years I’d spent as her companion, fetch-and-carry girl, and apprentice didn’t matter at all.
Tears streamed down my cheeks throughout that night.
By the time the company stopped for rest, I was too exhausted by a throbbing, tear-induced headache to care about the fancy pavilion they erected for me.
Or the silk gown with the elaborate beadwork at the neck and cuffs, which was left for me to discover when I woke.
The long weeks which followed as we journeyed to Stromin Palace were something of a nightmare, and the only thing I remember clearly was saying over and over again: “It’s not me.
You’ve got the wrong girl. I’m not a dragon. ”
I can’t be a dragon. It’s simply impossible.
Dragons don’t…burn.
“Dragons don’t burn.” I whisper the words under my breath so that Philippa won’t hear me, even as I study my reflection in the mirror glass.
After stripping me of my rumpled bodice and overskirts, my lady-in-waiting plunked me, shivering in my underthings, before the enormous gilt-edged mirror which dominates one wall of this stone-carved chamber, making it seem twice its real size.
Before coming here, I’d never seen a mirror larger than the small handheld glass Mistress Iliyani sometimes covertly used to check for vampyric auras in certain suspicious clients.
That was a small, murky thing, with nothing like the startling clarity of this great oval.
It’s unnerving to sit before such an exact replica of myself.
Even now, a full week following my arrival at Stromin Palace, I still don’t fully believe the girl in that glass is me.
I already knew that my dark olive skin and flaxen hair were an odd combination.
But seeing myself displayed so plainly, along with the citrine clarity of my pale eyes, is…
unsettling. In this pale scintil light, my skin takes on a faintly greenish undertone.
But a dragon’s daughter? Surely not. The burn scars stretching from my neck down my shoulder and licking along my rib cage on my right side are far too pronounced.