I stood staring at her as she lifted a discreet curtain and disappeared into some unknown quarter of the store. Alle gave me a scandalised look and began to clear up the mess that the princess had left. My hands clenched in my skirts, I started to stomp towards the back room, when a hand on my elbow stopped me.
“She wanted to claim that the designs were her own,” Marta whispered. “She always does. Says it’s her right as our employer. Sewing embroidered ribbons around the
necklines of gowns was my idea. And the kilted layers of skirts that are all the rage now? A local fashion where Alle is from.”
Alle shot a terrified glance at Marta and moved farther away, as though not wanting to be tainted by association if Derda came back.
“Why don’t you open your own shop, then?” I asked, also keeping my voice low. My body was turning hot and cold and I wished with all my heart I was back in Shardas’s cave.
“A shop? With what money?” Marta snorted at the idea. “I couldn’t afford the rent on the shop and it would take years to build up a clientele.” She shook her head. “The only hope for country girls like us is to keep our heads down and work for someone like Derda, and hope that we can save up enough money to go into business on our own before we’re too old to care.”
“You could attend the Merchants’ Ball,” Alle put in shyly, and then scurried into the backroom with an armload of cloth.
“Is it true that even an apprentice can go to the Merchants’ Ball?” I picked up the spool of scarlet ribbon and another of grey, and Marta filled her arms with balls of embroidery yarn. My mother had told me that she had once thought of attending, before she married.
“The Merchants’ Ball is a fool’s dream,” Larkin said as I stepped into the back room. “I hope you have not been filling her head with such ideas, Marta,” she said in a severe voice.
“Not me. Alle brought it up,” Marta said with a toss of her head. “It’s not like any of us would have a chance there. But who are you to decide what we can and can’t dream about?”
I dropped the spools on the table with a clatter. “Will Derda attend?”
“Oh, no! Why would she?” Marta shook her head. “The Merchants’ Ball is where people like you and me go to try and court a wealthy investor. Derda doesn’t need an investor, and she would never gamble her money away on some unknown artisan. Anyone can attend, to try their luck.” Marta wrinkled her nose. “The only catch is: you have to look presentable and have some really wonderful samples to prove yourself with. So what would I do? Go in this awful pink shopgirl’s gown and show them some decorated ribbons?”
“We should be grateful to Derda for giving us this fine shop to work in and a good place to live,” Larkin scolded.
I was starting to rethink my first impressions of these girls. Marta, though perhaps a bit of a flirt, seemed genuinely kind, while Larkin was striking me more and more as a wet dishrag, as Hagen would have put it.
“Grateful!” Marta rolled her eyes. “We do all the work, we invent the new fashions, and she takes all the credit and the money! If I had a fine enough gown, I’d be at the Merchants’ Ball begging for a wealthy patron!” Her eyes roved over the shelves of brightly coloured fabric. “There are times when I think about
stealing some silk and making myself a ballgown,” she confided to me.
“Derda and I both know the contents of this shop forward and back, miss,” Larkin warned. “If enough silk went missing to make you a gown, we’d know before you had time to baste the seams!”
“Then why couldn’t you find the scarlet ribbons?” she retorted. Marta stuck out her tongue and went back to the front of the store. As she went, I thought I heard her mutter something about a “two-faced little snake”.
“What was it about your slippers?” Larkin gave me a mild look. “I could hear some of the conversation. The princess sounded quite taken with them.”
“If by ‘taken’ you mean that she tried to force me to give them to her, then yes,” I said with a snort.
“Why?”
I hesitated. I disliked calling attention to my shoes because of their odd origin.
“They’re lovely,” Alle said, coming around one of the rows of shelves, her chore finished. “Beautiful blue slippers, they are. A very strange style.” She ducked her head at me in a shy gesture. “If they were mine, I would cut my skirts a little shorter, to show them off.”
“She’ll be cutting her skirts the same length as the rest of you,” Derda said, smashing through the swinging doors. “I’m closing the shop. It’s nearly time, and I doubt that we’re fit to serve another customer.
“So!” She put her hands on her hips and looked me
up and down. “Take a bolt of the lightweight pink wool and start working on your dress. I don’t want to see you in the front of the shop again until you have it finished.” And with that she smashed back out.
“Gah,” I said.
“You have no idea,” Alle muttered under her breath. Then, seeing Larkin’s dark look, she trotted out.
I had always loved sewing. Really, it didn’t matter what kind: hemming sheets, tailoring my brother’s tunics, or doing fancy embroidery. The idea of opening my own shop had glowed like a jewel in my mind. And yet, after just a day of working for Derda, I was starting to rethink my chosen career. Perhaps it was because I didn’t really want to wear a pink gown. Or perhaps it was because whenever I worked on the grey gown for the duchess, Derda hovered over my shoulder inspecting every blessed stitch to make certain that it was up to her standard.
I had wondered how Derda and her girls could possibly wait on customers and get their work done, but that question was answered by the end of my first (very long) day. Fashionable ladies did their shopping at certain times: never before noon, because the morning was taken up with sleeping late and dressing languidly, and never after dusk, because that was when they had their social
engagements. So Derda’s shop, like any that catered to the wealthies (as Marta called them), was only open for four or five hours a day. Before and after closing, Derda supervised her employees as we sat around the large table in the back room and sewed and gossiped and sewed some more. Derda had a small table of her own, where she worked on very special commissions, like the skirt with the scarlet ribbons for Princess Amalia.
So it was that within moments of nearly losing my employment for agreeing to sew for the duchess, I was cutting out the grey silk to make her skirt. Beside me lay a neatly folded pile of pink wool that would be used for my own shopgown. Marta told me that it seemed to go faster if you did things “all at once”.
“Do all the cutting you have to do for both projects,” she instructed me, sitting down to a large froth of pale golden silk that would soon be a ten-layered skirt for a countess. “Then do all the pinning, all the hemming, and so on. Trust me, if you only work on one gown at a time, you’ll scream from boredom.”
“If you find it so boring, you can find yourself another job, my girl,” Derda said as she leaned over my shoulder and glared at the seam I was pinning. “Re-pin that,” she barked.
With a sigh I removed the pins, straightened the two slippery pieces of fabric, and pinned them again. The ripples of grey silk reminded me of the pool in Shardas’s cave that he used to talk to Feniul, and I felt a pang of longing for my quiet life there. I hoped that the migration
would go well this year, and that Feniul was not bothering Shardas too much. It seemed like three weeks rather than three days since I had left him.
“Thinking of your swain?” Larkin raised her eyebrows at me.
I laughed aloud. “Oh, no,” I told her, sobering at her startled expression. “I was just thinking of an old friend.” A sudden vision of Shardas crouching in the street outside Derda’s shop, knocking on the door with a claw, nearly made me laugh again, but I stifled it.
“Is your ‘old friend’ a prince?” Alle looked at me slyly as she embroidered a narrow sash.
I gave her a bewildered look. “No, why?”
“One of the kitchen maids told me that Ulfrid brought you here as a favour to Prince Luka,” Alle answered, her expression eager.
“The prince was kind enough to direct me to Mistress Ulfrid’s inn,” was all I would say, no matter how Alle pried.
And she did continue to pry. There was nothing else to do while we sewed, hour after hour, than gossip. I, as the new girl, found myself being prodded for any gossip of interest from Carlieff Town (which wasn’t much) or any variations on the same old stories they’d already told each other (which weren’t many). A few days after I arrived, they were going around the table telling stories about sightings of goblins or dragons or trolls where they were from.
“Er,” I said, when it was my turn. “There aren’t any goblins or trolls in Carlieff.”
“Then make something up,” Marta urged me. “We’ve nothing better to do.”
“You could sew,” Derda said sharply from her table.
“Well, ah.” I looked around the table, and they all looked back, expectant. “There is a dragon.”
Larkin looked up at me sharply, and Alle giggled a little. Derda pursed her lips, but didn’t interrupt again.
“The hills around Carlieff have lots of caves,” I went on. “And it’s rumoured that there’s a dragon living in one of them. Years ago he used to carry off children, sheep, goats, but no one’s seen him now for generations and everyone thinks he’s dead.” I bit my lip. “Um, that’s really all.”
Disappointed, my audience looked back to their sewing, and I concentrated for a few minutes on the sleeve I was setting in my pink gown. Another day or two and it would be finished, and I would have the mixed blessing of being able to wait on customers.
“Our dragon is named Ama-something,” Alle announced. “Amaracin, or Amacarin. Anyway, in my great-grandfather’s time, the local laird challenged him to a duel, and Amacarin
ate
him.”
“I don’t know the name of the dragon my uncle claimed he saw,” Marta said. “He just saw … something … go across the sky, and then later one of the older villagers said it must have been the dragon.”
“The Carlieff dragon’s name is Theoradus,” I said, winking at Alle so that she would think I was spinning a yarn. “He’s brown, with golden eyes and horns. He lives
in a cave at the top of one of the highest hills. They say he has a pool of still water through which he can see and speak with other dragons.”
“I wouldn’t know our dragon’s name,” Marta said, laughing at my tale. “But he eats dogs, or something. If you have a really good dog anywhere near our village, it always disappears. My uncle, on my mother’s side, claims to have seen something large and green carrying off our neighbour’s new sheepdog once.”
“Green, and likes dogs?” I laughed.
“Ridiculous, I know,” Marta said with a shrug. “That’s why I came to the King’s Seat.”
I laughed again, thinking of Feniul. “I came to get away from the dragons, myself,” I told her with a grin.
She rolled her eyes at me and we both snickered. Derda cleared her throat, and we concentrated on our work.
It was the next day that my feet started to itch again. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about, sewing for myself
and
a duchess, my feet had to bother me, too. But there I was, sitting between Marta and Alle, stitching away at the hem of my pink skirt, when I felt a sensation not unlike a feather being run across the bottoms of my feet.
“Hey!” I had pricked myself with my needle and a drop of blood fell on the pink cloth before I could catch it. I felt foolish for having pricked myself so many times in the last week. I had never been this clumsy at home; the fine fabrics I was working with now were making me nervous.
“What’s wrong?” Marta stared at me, and then thoughtfully pressed her own handkerchief over the droplet of blood to absorb it.
“It felt like someone tickled my feet,” I said, looking under the table even though I knew it was senseless. Who would be under the table tickling our feet? Besides which, the tickling had now settled into a constant itch that covered every bit of my soles. I paddled my feet against the floor and rubbed them back and forth, but nothing helped.
Larkin also ducked her head down to look at my feet. “I see that you are still wearing your blue slippers,” she said in her soft voice when she straightened up.
“I have only one other pair of shoes, and they’re just old sandals,” I admitted. Then I threw an anxious look at Derda. “These blue slippers will be all right, to wait on customers, won’t they?”
“I don’t care what you wear on your feet,” Derda informed me in a more good-natured tone than she had used with me since I was hired, “as long as you wear
something
. And they should be clean.”
“Our skirts cover our shoes anyway,” Marta said, after she spat a few pins into her palm. “So it hardly matters. Although the southern fashion for shorter skirts
is
catching on …” She had raised her voice at this last comment, casting a hopeful look at Derda.
“My girls dress decently,” was all Derda would say.
“Aaaah!” I dropped my work and ducked under the table, yanking off my shoes and frantically scratching the soles of my feet.
“Are you all right?” Marta’s voice bubbled with laughter.
“I hope you don’t have fleas,” Larkin said with a concern that seemed feigned to my ears.
“Fleas!” Alle shrieked and jumped to her feet. “Fleas?! I’m itching all over, she’s given us fleas!”
“I have not!” I yelled from under the table. Once I had got my shoes off, the itching subsided. “I think my feet are too hot. Or perhaps I’m not used to sitting so long. I did walk all the way here from Carlieff Town,” I lied.
“I’m sure it’s just your calluses or blisters healing,” Marta said, helping me out from under the table.
“She looks clean enough,” Derda said with a grunt. She frowned at Alle. “Now everyone get back to work.”
Red-faced, I pulled my shoes back on, biting my lower lip as my feet began itching all over again. With an effort I returned to my work, speaking only when spoken to and giving all my attention to the seam I was stitching. I hoped that my diligence would be rewarded, either by taking my mind off the itching or by it going away entirely, but it was not to be. When I mounted the narrow stairs with the other girls, heading to our cramped rooms on the second floor, my feet were nearly as numb as my fingers.