Dragonfield by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online

soft coo-coo-co-roos from the rafters, I remembered where the family had gone.
    Rising from my sickbed, I slipped a silvery party dress on over my shift. The dress was well patched with spider webbing, but the stitches scarcely showed, especially in in moonlight.
    I looked in the glass. My hair seemed startled into place and I combed it down with my fingers, not feeling up to searching for my brush. Then I pinched my cheeks to bring a blush to them.
    The doves coo-coo-co-rooed again, nannylike in their warnings. Their message was clear.
    “A gift!” I reminded myself out loud, beginning to shiver, not from fever but from fear. What if I had arrived without a gift? The king, a fat slug who was so obese he had to ride his charger sidesaddle, would have had my father exorcised by his priests if I forgot to gift his child. Exorcism on a male fey is very painful for the essence is slowly drawn out and then captured in a bottle. Imagine my dear, gentle father corked up for as long as the king or his kin liked. It was too horrible to contemplate. One of Father’s brothers had been exorcised by a Kilkenny abbot and was still locked up in a dusty carafe on the back shelf of the monastery wine cellar and labeled Bordeaux, 79. As that was a terrible year for wines, Father does not expect anyone will ever uncork him. Father visits once a year and they shout at one another through the glass. Then father returns whey-faced and desperate-looking. But only a human can free Uncle Finn. Father, alas, cannot.
    Is it any wonder that I turned right around and ran back into the pavilion to the storeroom in which the trunk stood?
    The oaken trunk was locked with a fine-grained pinewood key but the key was only for show. The trunk was bolted with a family spell. I spoke it quickly:
    Come thou, cap and lid,
    Lift above what has been hid,
    All Out!
    The last two words were done in the shouting voice and the whole, as with all magic, made my head hurt. But as the final note ended, the top of the trunk snapped open.
    I peered in and at first thought the trunk was empty for the tatty Cloth was working again. Then, as I looked more closely, the Cloth suddenly failed around the edges and I saw the tip of the spindle.
    “Blessed Loireg,” I said with a sigh, praising my great-great-aunt, a patroness of Hebrides spinners. I reached down and the spindle leaped to my hand.
    Clutching the spindle to my breast, I ran out the door and along the winding forest paths toward the castle. Since it was morning, and I being still weak with fever, I could not fly. So of course I was very late. The christening, begun promptly at cock’s crow—how humans love the daylight hours—was almost done.
    I had wrapped the Cloth about my shoulders for warmth and so, on and off, I had been invisible throughout the trip. A cacophony of crows had noticed me; a family of squirrels had not. A grazing deer, warned by my scent, had seemed puzzled when I did not appear; a bear, pawing honey from a tree, was startled when I popped into view. But by the time I reached the castle the Cloth was working again and so the guards did not question my late entrance for they did not know I had come in.
    I stopped for a moment at the throne room door and peered around. The king and queen were sitting upon their high gilded chairs. He was—as I have noted before—fat, but Father said he had not always been so. Self-indulgence had thickened his neck and waist and the strong chin that had marked generations of his family repeated itself twice more, the third chin resting on his chest. On the other hand his wife, unsoftened by child-birth, had grown leaner over the years, vulpine, the skin stretched tightly over her cheekbones and marked with lines like a plotter’s map.
    Before them was a canopied cradle, its silken draperies drawn back to reveal the child who was, at present, screaming in a high-pitched voice that demonstrated considerable staying power. My father and brothers and sisters were