The Little Dragons Read online

The Little Dragons by Rowan Starsmith

  Before the Kings came, the People of the Land had an agreement with the Dragons. It was negotiated by the Dragon Priestesses, who could communicate with those fearsome beasts through their familiars, the Little Dragons. The Kings, however, knew only the way of the sword. In their war against the Dragons, they killed their smaller cousins as well, along with the Priestesses who cared for them. The revenge of the Dragons was disastrous for both peoples, forcing everyone to live their lives at night, when the Dragons sleep in their caves in the mountains.

  Feeling her age breathing on the back of her neck, Mother Peg, a Senior Healer of the Earth People, is determined to track down the persistent rumours that some of the doomed Dragon Priestesses shared their knowledge with the Healers who sheltered them. On the other side of the Realm, powerful King Anglewart of the Westlands, as determined as Mother Peg to find the Little Dragons, sends a search expedition to the mountains.

  Others become caught up in the quest: King Anglewart’s spirited wife, Queen Melisande, and their daughter, Liandra, apparently pregnant, although she denies ever lying with a man; Mother Peg’s servant, Maida, who dreams of becoming a Healer despite her origins as the daughter of a cheesemaker; Gleve, newly confirmed as a Healer and worried about what will happen to his beloved elderly teacher, Father Mallory, when he leaves; Keiran of Hanford, who survives the dangers of the King’s expedition to the Dragon caves, only to be beaten and left for dead by his own companions; Jessa and Ev, two lowly servants in the Women’s Retreat House, where young noblewomen commit themselves to craft and prayer, and widows retire to live out their days.

  Danger surrounds each of these people—Dragons, of course, but also their antagonism towards one another. They cannot know that each bears a unique clue to the secret knowledge of the Dragon Priestesses.

  "This is an awesome book! I love the author’s boldness, writing outside the box, giving me twists and turns and unexpected plots. This is a nice long story where you get character development in the first ten or so chapters, then get the rest of the book to continue traveling along with people you now know and love (or hate)." Cynikat, Podiobooks subscriber.

  "I was thoroughly enchanted and delighted by the best book I have listened to in a very long time.
It is a well-crafted world of fantasy; man-eating dragons, little dragons, unfaithful kings, banished queens and princesses, Earth people, King’s men, witch healers, and Little Dragon Keepers all trying to survive in a very believable world.
As a well-written story should, it got under my skin. I laughed, gasped in surprise, cheered on and cried. It will be in my mind for a very long time." Arlene Radasky, author of The Fox.

  Would you rather listen to The Little Dragons? An earlier version is available as a free serialized audiobook on Podiobooks.com.

  A Warning

  This book contains mature themes and is not intended for children. Also, two of the female characters share a loving lesbian relationship and one of the male characters is attracted to his male friend. Several Podiobooks listeners have found this offensive. Others have found it delightful, especially those who rarely see themselves reflected in the pages of fantasy fiction.

  The Little Dragons

  by Rowan Starsmith

  Copyright 2011 Rowan Starsmith

  Tigh na Cailleach

  Prologue: The Dragons

  Old as the Night

  Shimmering rivers of scales

  Woven into ancient roots of our mountains

  Creatures of Water and Earth

  We sleep.

  Touched by Sun we burst forth

  Glittering creatures of Fire and Air

  We hunt.

  Hungry

  Always hungry

  Our Keepers dead by the sword

  Their herds of cattle stolen

  Now we hunt

  Hungry

  Listen

  Someone approaching

  An Old One

  One-Who-Remembers

  They, too, almost gone

  Chapter 1: Mother Peg

  Crazy old woman! Mother Peg grumbled to herself. She used her walking stick to slash at a branch that had fallen across the path. Her small travel lantern shook and rattled, turning the trees around her into wildly dancing shadow-creatures. You're too old for this. What if you fall and can't get up? It's not like the main path, where someone might come along and find you.

  While she caught her breath, she lifted her lantern to study the woods. This trail was as old as the memory of the People. How far had she come? Should she not have reached it by now? “I’m not lost,” she announced to the trees. Her voice disappeared instantly, absorbed by the creaking forest night.

  She pushed on. Another thorny bush grabbed at her skirt, another stone caught at her foot. Then a sharp turn, a tiny clearing, and there it was. “Well,” she said aloud. “Well then.”

  Her lantern lit a stone surface eaten away by centuries of lichen and weather. The sharp details of the carving were gone, but still the Dragon curled around his tree, sinuous and terrible, his eyes filled with power, wisdom and pain. This was one of only three Dragonstones remaining in the Eastlands. There were others, particularly in the Northlands. Because of their isolated locations, the Kings had missed these few in their obsession to destroy the Dragon Priestesses and every mark they had ever left on the landscape, along with their precious knowledge.

  Mother Peg's narrow chest filled with longing to the point of pain. The Dragon Priestesses and their Familiars, the Little Dragons, channels between the Great Dragons and the People, had made it possible to live well in the Land, in the light of day.

  Once Mother Peg would have fallen to her knees before the Dragonstone. If she did that now, she might never get up again. She bowed her head, leaning heavily on her walking stick, and reached into a pocket of her skirt for some of the Sacred Herbs she carried there.

  “Please, Great Dragons, Little Dragons, wherever you have gone, there is so little time left. All I want is to find clues to what the Dragon Priestesses knew. I have Healed many People in my time, taught many Apprentices, but all I ever truly wanted to leave behind is a key, or even part of a key, to the secrets of the Dragon Priestesses.”

  A flake of snow danced with lazy grace through the light of Mother Peg’s travel lantern, then another. They were the fluffy, isolated snowflakes of Spring, but they shook Mother Peg out of her prayer. She was cold, and there were all those hurdles to cross again on her way back to the main path. She scattered the Sacred Herbs at the foot of the Dragonstone and, turning awkwardly, began to hobble back the way she had come.

  Chapter 2: Jessa

  Between themselves, Ev and Jessa called the scullery “The Dungeon,” not only because it was a windowless stone room, but because this was where they were sent every time they were caught breaking the rules. The kitchen, just outside the door, bustled with activity, warmed by its open hearth, brick bake-oven and the many lanterns hanging from hooks high on the walls. The scullery was cool, quiet and damp. Its single lantern cast angular shadows from cans of milk and cream standing in a shallow stone trough along one side of the room. An array of pots and buckets sat upside-down on racks along the opposite wall. Shelves held cheeses and eggs, meats and vegetables, anything that needed chilling. The cool dampness came from a small spring bubbling through a pipe in the wall at one end of the trough and draining out the other end.

  Their assignment was usually peeling potatoes, and this is exactly what they were doing, seated on low wooden stools on either side of a large wooden bucket. Their elbows rested on its rim and their small knives sent long brown curls of peel into its depths. At least, Ev made long brown curls of peel. Jessa watched her friend’s slender, brown hands working quickly a
nd carefully at the same time, the way Ev did everything. Jessa’s potatoes tended to shed their skins in ragged chunks. This was the third and final day of their latest exile. Jessa grinned.

  “What?” Ev asked her.

  “The look on Sister Mattia’s face when she caught me in that dress!” Both girls giggled quietly. It wouldn’t be a good idea to be heard by the other servants in the kitchen.

  “Oh, but Jessa,” Ev said, “It’s a beautiful dress!”

  A new Widow had arrived four days before. The Widows were high-born women whose husbands were dead and children grown. No longer useful to their families, they often chose, or were forced, to retire to the Women’s Retreat House. They had rooms on the upper floor, poor compared to the mansions and castles they came from, but comfortable by the standards of this place. They prayed with the Sisters and most of them worked in the embroidery room making robes and hangings for castles and churches. They wore the same grey dress as the Sisters, although their veils were black.

  The new Widow had brought two silk dresses for her journey to the Retreat House. Ev and Jessa were given the job of cleaning and pressing them for sale in the market. Jessa just couldn’t help herself. She had to try one on.

  “Oh! You’re so beautiful! It matches your eyes!” Ev had exclaimed, raising her work-worn hands to her mouth while her friend danced around the room, swirling the brilliant blue skirt around her ankles. Jessa had pulled off the grey scarf that covered her hair and tossed away the pins that imprisoned it in a tight bun. It billowed in a thick golden curtain around her happy face. Sister Mattia had chosen that moment to walk in.

  Ev went back to peeling potatoes while Jessa sighed and looked down at her rough grey dress, the standard uniform of a servant in the Women’s Retreat House. “I wonder what jewels she wore with that dress. Do you think she had sapphires that same shade of blue? Set in worked silver? Around her neck and hanging from her ears?” she asked.

  “Oh Jessa …,” Ev began, but stopped and turned toward the door. There was music somewhere, just faintly audible, not the singing they did in the Women’s Retreat House, but pipes and horns and drums. The kitchen was quiet. Jessa leaped from her stool and ran to the door. She peeked out carefully. Lanterns shone on rows of pots hanging on hooks, dishes stacked on shelves, long worktables strewn with cutting boards and tools. The fire crackled in the hearth, but no one was there. It must be midnight prayer time, when all the servants joined the Sisters and Widows in the chapel. The kitchen servants had forgotten the two disgraced young women in the scullery.

  Delighted, Jessa ran across the kitchen to a window looking out across the Cathedral Square. The music was much louder now. The Square was lit with many lanterns, and bobbing torches entered from a street to the right of the Women’s Retreat House. “It’s a procession!” Jessa said to Ev, who had joined her. “Come!” She grabbed Ev’s sleeve and pulled her across the kitchen. Ev resisted for a second, a frown crossing her face, then broke into a grin and ran after her friend.

  A stone passageway on the far side of the kitchen led past wooden storeroom doors to an arch framing the bottom step of a circular stair. Jessa in the lead, the two young women gathered their skirts and ran up the dark steps, their dirty bare feet slapping on the stones.

  Although they wore identical grey dresses and scarves, and were both medium-tall, they could have been from opposing sides of a set of playing-pieces. Jessa’s pale colouring contrasted with Ev’s dark complexion, her shining black hair and eyes. Ev was slender and wiry, while Jessa was built, as Sister Fidelity, the Cook, loved to say, like a brick house.

  The Women’s Retreat House leaned against the long side of the Cathedral and the tower stood at its outside corner. When they arrived, gasping, at the top, they ran across an open stone floor to a parapet. From here they could look down over the Square, across the wide front steps of the Cathedral to the Men’s Retreat House, built against its other side. A tower matching their own marked its farthest corner. Over there a lantern faintly outlined a large group of men watching from their parapet. The Brothers in the Men’s Retreat House were allowed out in public much more than the residents of the Women’s House. In fact, many of their assigned tasks took them out for days at a time. Jessa cast a little spark of envy in their direction, but in a moment her attention was drawn to the scene unfolding below.

  The procession passed in front of the Women’s Retreat House and stopped in front of the Cathedral. Well-dressed men with torches and musical instruments, soldiers on horseback and glittering carriages stood in a line beneath them. The largest carriage, pulled by four horses, stood right in front of the Cathedral steps.

  As they watched, four men stepped down from the carriage behind the large one and walked forward. Their colourful cloaks swirled around their feet and feathers swayed on their broad-brimmed hats.

  “Look,” Jessa whispered. “Princes. Or Noblemen of the Realm.”

  As she spoke the men placed themselves in a line between the large carriage and the Cathedral steps. In dramatic unison, they swept off their hats and held them at their sides. Jessa leaned forward to study them, tall and short, fair and brown, all with neatly trimmed hair and beards.

  “Look at the tall one with the curly brown hair," Jessa squealed. "Isn’t he handsome?” Ev nodded vaguely, but looked instead at the dreamy, delighted expression on Jessa’s face.

  A servant opened the door of the large carriage, and one of the men stepped forward and offered his hand. A woman stepped out and Jessa held her breath. Torchlight reflected softly from yards of brilliant while silk. Jewels glittered from neckline, bodice and hem. More shone from the woman’s wrists, hands and ears. Her skirt was so large, a maid had to help her free it from the carriage and then walked behind her, holding it up so it wouldn’t drag on the dirty cobblestones.

  “A wedding,” Ev whispered. “I wonder who she is.”

  “A princess!” Jessa breathed the words. “Or at least a noblewoman, probably marrying a prince or a powerful Man of the Realm.” They watched as the woman and her retinue disappeared inside the Cathedral. “Oh Ev! Why wasn’t I born to that?”

  “Maybe you were.”

  Some orphans raised in the Women’s Retreat House knew where they came from. Ev was one of these. Her mother, a servant in a wealthy household, died when she was eight years old. Her mother’s employers had given her to the Retreat House, but she had occasional visits from her mother’s relatives. Other’s came as babies, many simply abandoned on the front steps, with no idea of their origin. Jessa was one of these. Whether their past was known or not, however, once adopted by the Women’s Retreat House their future was all the same. They would live and die as servants, taking care of Sisters and Widows under the rule of the Head Mother.

  “Jessa,” Ev turned to her friend, her brow creased in concern. “I started to say this downstairs. Please don’t torment yourself with what you can’t have. It makes you unhappy …”

  Jessa did not hear. She wrapped her arms around herself. “What would it be like?” she said, “To dance in the arms of your husband? Your own Prince?” She began to move back and forth, humming a tune she imagined would be played on the glittering dance floor of a Royal reception. Suddenly she unwrapped her arms from herself and threw them around Ev, pulling her into a swaying imitation of a couple sliding across the polished wood of a ballroom floor. Ev tensed, then surrendered herself to the motion, giggling.

  Just then a voice came from the stairs. “Is someone up here?” Sister Tibelda emerged, lantern in hand. They were caught again. Another three days in The Dungeon.

  Chapter 3: Mother Peg

  Mother Peg stood at the edge of the woods. She leaned heavily on her walking stick and frowned at the sky. Dawn was approaching, painting faint peach streaks across the eastern horizon. The path at her feet was clearly visible now, winding out across the Barrens. Peg abruptly lifted the chimney of her small travelling lantern, useless now, and blew out the flame. No one could make
it across the Barrens in daylight, let alone an old woman with a walking stick. As if to remind her of the danger, an ominous shadow appeared, outlined by the brightening sky. A sinuous, reptilian body beat huge translucent wings in effortless flight. The hairs stood up on the back of Peg’s neck, although the Dragon was miles away. Using her stick for support, she turned and hobbled slowly back into the sheltering trees.

  A few hundred feet back, a wooden cabin stood beside the path. The Order of Healers kept it for eastward travellers caught by daylight at the Barren’s edge. Peg stepped inside. It was tiny, holding just a bed, table and bench, a cupboard and a small woodstove. Peg slid her light pack awkwardly from her shoulders to the bench, setting her lantern beside it. She hobbled to the cupboard and looked inside. As she knew it would be, it was stocked with a few fresh provisions. She had probably just missed the Healers who brought them. In the days leading up to Spring Equinox, Healers patrolled the roads welcoming members of the Order travelling from every corner of the Realm to the most important Gathering of the year.

  Peg turned to face the east, where the sun would now be rising above the horizon, and said the shortest form of the Morning Prayer. Then she unwrapped bread and cheese from a square of oiled linen cloth, cut herself a few pieces and ate sitting on the side of the bed. She wrestled with the ties on her laced bodice, growling at her stiff old fingers. With the ties finally loosened, she gathered the neatly folded comforter to her shoulders and lowered herself clumsily to the soft mattress. Despite her exhaustion and the clean straw beneath her, however, the wooden frame of the bed ground against her old bones and kept her awake well into the day.

  Peg started awake. She had heard a voice. Then she remembered where she was, the Healers’ cabin on the west side of the Barrens. These were surely Healers, coming to see if a traveller had been stranded here at dawn. It was dark, so she must have slept after all. The voice came again and Peg recognized it. In a few minutes, her memory produced a name, Sister Martha.