Page 40 of Deven and the Dragon
The stables neededmucking out badly, after the spate of traveling merchants who’d enjoyed the inn’s hospitality for the week since Deven had been home. Deven would’ve welcomed the repetitive, exhausting labor of it, except that mucking out stables made him think of Fiora and his adorable confusion over what the work entailed.
Flowers made him think of Fiora. Wine made him think of Fiora; ditto ale. Also books, sandwiches, beds, cloaks, the river, the hills, and waking up in the morning — not to mention breathing. He tossed pitchfork after pitchfork of straw and manure, trying to wear himself out. He ran with sweat in the early-afternoon heat, and he hadn’t stopped for hours.
All he could see was Fiora’s eyes, though when he dreamed he sometimes saw Peter’s body, cold and still, just for variety. He had failed on all counts. Peter would die. Fiora would never see him again. All he could hear was the last word Fiora would probably ever speak to him:Please.
“Deven, hey Deven,” Harry called to him. “Deven!”
“What?” Deven snarled, not pausing in his work. “What the fuck do you want?”
Harry stomped around him and stepped right into Deven’s line of sight. He was only fifteen, but George had hired him in Deven’s absence to take the place of the previous stable hand, who’d been Deven’s occasional lover, and who’d run off with a traveling spice merchant. Deven was relieved, more than anything; he couldn’t have borne spending so much time with someone he’d used to fuck. But Harry was a persistent, bossy little bastard, and he wasn’t intimidated by Deven’s size or by the rage and grief he carried everywhere with him now, like a burden he couldn’t and didn’t want to set down. Harry planted his fists on his hips and glared.
“I want to tell you that that odd bald fellow from the castle’s out in the yard lookin’ for you,” Harry said. “That’s what the fuck I want.”
Deven dropped the pitchfork from suddenly nerveless hands. “Andrei? Andrei’s here?”
Harry shrugged. “Don’t know what his name is, only he’s here and he ain’t going anywhere ’til he’s seen you, so. Go out and see what he wants, already.”
Deven went, snatching up his shirt from where it hung over a stall divider and pulling it over his head. Andrei was indeed standing in the yard, off to the side where a lone tree by the wall cast a puddle of dappled shade. Deven was suddenly conscious of how filthy and sweat-soaked and disgusting he was — but it hardly mattered. Andrei couldn’t despise him more than he already did. And Fiora — well, Fiora wouldn’t be asking how Deven looked.
“Andrei,” Deven said, and Andrei looked up from contemplating a small box he held in his hands. “What are you doing here? How is he? Is he recovered?”
Andrei sneered at him, showing his teeth. “Lord Fiora is no concern of yours. He wishes you to have this,” he said, holding out the box, though he gripped it so tightly Deven would have had to rip it from his hands to take it.
He didn’t try. “What is that?” The box was small, made from plain polished wood that gleamed as it caught a sunbeam falling through the tree’s foliage. It was perhaps the right size to hold a piece of jewelry.
“Take it, before I change my mind about agreeing to give it to you,” Andrei growled. Deven finally took hold of it, but it took a moment for Andrei to let it go. “You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve anything, you worthless son of a bitch. With no disrespect intended to your mother, because I’m sure you didn’t deserve her, either. Use it well, or I’ll hunt you down and kill you if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
With that, Andrei mounted his horse with surprising agility and kicked his horse into a trot. It kicked up a cloud of dust into Deven’s face as Andrei rode out of the stable yard. The dust settled on the box, dimming its polished sheen, and Deven wiped the top of it clean with the hem of his shirt.
He had a horrible suspicion what was in that box, and he was afraid to open it. He certainly couldn’t do it while standing out in the yard.
The stable chores forgotten, Deven cradled the box to his chest and slipped in the back door of the inn, going straight to his room. He set the box on his trunk of books and looked at it for a long time before he could bring himself to open it.
Inside was a single glistening blue-black scale, a little smaller than Deven’s thumb, more beautiful and more precious than any gemstone. Beside it was a tiny scrap of paper that read, ‘For Peter.’
Deven knockedon the door of the cottage he had been told belonged to Peter’s parents, and waited. Councilman Holling would have been the logical person to receive the scale, maybe, since he’d asked for it, but Deven couldn’t bear to hand something so dearly won, and so dearly given, to a man he disliked so much. To Peter’s parents, then, he had decided to go.
At last he heard footsteps, and then a young woman with very red cheeks and a dusty apron wrapped around her dress flung the door open.
“Yes? Are you looking for James?”
Her husband, Deven presumed. “No, ma’am, you, I believe. Or your husband, actually, or both of you. Either of you. Are you Peter’s mother?”
She frowned at him suspiciously. “I’m Mrs. Holling, yes. Who are you?”
“Deven Clifton, Mrs. Holling. Your — father-in-law, he must be? Councilman Holling. He’d asked me to procure something to make a medicine for Peter. My aunt and uncle own the Jolly Tankard, if you know it?” She nodded. “Peter was always about the stables, petting the horses, so I’ve seen him a bit. I’m sure Councilman Holling must have told you about asking me to help, though he may not have mentioned me by name. I’m here to give it to you. The cure.”
Mrs. Holling’s frown had cleared up as Deven explained his relationship to Peter, but it appeared again at that. “Mr. Clifton, I haven’t the foggiest what you’re on about. Peter’s visiting my parents in Tatwillow, has been for months. My dad broke his leg and needed someone to fetch and carry for him a bit, and Peter’s a helpful lad. I mean, Peter had the scarlet fever a while back, but that new doctor in town cured him with having him eat moldy bread, of all things. I mean, I suppose it’s no more odd than a roast mouse for the whooping cough, but it seemed so unlikely, but once Peter ate it, it was like night and day…”
She kept talking about mold and mice and who knew what, but Deven didn’t listen. It washed over him, a hum of noise.
Peter had recovered from his bout with scarlet fever long before Deven’s meeting with the council; Peter had been absent from the stables because he was in the village of Tatwillow, a few miles south along the river.
Peter wasn’t dying, and Holling had lied.
Crimson rage washed over Deven’s vision, obliterating the image that had come to him all at once: Holling, sitting in Mrs. Drucker’s parlor, his skin yellowed and ashy and his body frail.
“Is your father-in-law ill himself?” he demanded, and Mrs. Holling stuttered to a stop, her mouth still hanging open. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt you. Just — is he? Gravely ill?”
