The Dragon's Adopted Princess

Gwendolyn Fields often thought to herself that her language had deeply failed her for not having a word beyond “exhausted” she could use to describe herself.

“Gwendolyn,” came a sharp woman’s voice at the door. On the other side, the young woman knelt in front of a smaller child, holding a small pair of shoes. The young woman sighed audibly, opening her mouth to respond and turning toward the door. Before she could respond, a sharp knock came again and a second later, “Gwendolyn, hurry up! You’re going to be late!”

“Coming,” Gwendolyn shouted in a voice full of a weary resignation.

“Hurry up!” the woman’s voice boomed again. “You’re slower than a one-winged dragon,” the woman’s voice continued, though it trailed off as she walked away from the door.

“Yes mother,” said the girl. She turned back to the child in front of her, holding out the shoes. “Bartin, please. You have to put on your shoes to go to school.”

“No,” said the child in a squeaky voice. “I don’t want to wear shoes. Bartolemiew don’t wear shoes,” he said, holding out a small toy in the shape of a rabbit.

“Bartolemiew doesn’t go to school,” Gwendolyn said in a calm tone.

“Yes, he does, he go with me!” Bartin exclaimed.

“Do you want me to make Bartolemiew shoes?”

“No, he do not need shoes! I do not need shoes!”

Gwendolyn shook her head. “Bartin, please. You’re six years old now. You have to wear shoes; you have to go to school. And if mother found out you still bring Bartolemiew wherever you go, she would be very upset. Do you want me to tell her why you won’t put on shoes?”

From far away, the same sharp voice called out, “Gwendolyn, do not make me ask again!”

Bartin took the shoes from Gwendolyn’s hands and said, “fine. I wear shoes. If you make shoes for Bartolemiew.”

Gwendolyn nodded and kissed Bartin’s forehead. “Deal, I’ll make them this week.” Then she stood up and ran downstairs.

“You don’t have time to eat now,” said Gwendolyn’s mother. Behind her and further into the kitchen, six children and Gwendolyn’s father sit at a table with bowls of porridge and various fruits in front of them. “You’ll have to just go without.”

“I can eat fast,” said Gwendolyn, hungrily eyeing the food in front of her younger siblings.

“No, your father is ready to work, aren’t you, Sardain?” her mother directed her attention to her husband.

“Aye, I’ve been ready,” he said. He pushed back from his seat and hurried toward the door, stopping to kiss Gwendolyn’s mother on the way out. “Maryan, what will be on for lunch?” he asked after kissing her, then added, “maybe that stew you made last week?”

“I was planning to keep the rest of the peas for dinner with Fridrik and Grigg, but perhaps I can make the stew today. If that’s what you want,” she added, her voice less sharp and somewhat higher pitched when she addressed her husband, coming out in a softer, slower manner.

“Please,” he said. Then he grabbed a canteen and a hat from the counter and walked out of the kitchen. A second later, Gwendolyn heard the front door shudder against the frame and knew he had left the house. She also knew she only had a minute to follow before she would be in trouble. Grabbing her own canteen, smaller and dirtier than her father’s, and her own hat, she quickly dashed out the door.

The last thing she heard as the door shut behind her was her mother telling her younger siblings she would have to take them all to school that day, because Gwendolyn had woken up late.

Of course, that wasn’t true. Gwendolyn had actually been up earlier than usual. But by the time she had gotten all the children into their clothes and had the almost daily fight about shoes with Bartin, she was out of time before she had to head to the barn to work on her family farm.

As the oldest of her parents’ children still living at home, Gwendolyn was expected to work on the farm. Indeed, she had been taken out of school at the age of eleven and put to work. Her older brothers, now married and living in the village, had been allowed to stay in school.

“Men need an education,” Gwendolyn remembered her father saying. “Women just need to look pretty and make themselves useful.” She trailed along behind her father, still thinking about the day she was told she couldn’t continue her education. It hadn’t exactly come as a surprise, but it had certainly been unwelcome news. She had prayed to the First God every night for years that her parents would not follow through and remove her from school when her eldest brother turned eighteen.

But they had. Fridrik turned eighteen and moved out, working as an apprentice to the town’s bookkeeper. His job was to help local shops keep track of the money they made each day, an important task in a town where half the population was only barely literate. Most shops paid a premium to the bookkeeper to collect their profits every day and store them safely, pay out salaries to employees, and even lend money if things got difficult. The bookkeeper Erod had moved to their village only twelve years ago, from the Capitol of Imirene.

When he had moved to Bartet, their village, everyone had thought Erod was crazy. But he had received a commission from King Arelon to find a relatively prosperous agrarian village and establish a new concept. In the city, it was apparently a concept called a “bank”, but this was confusing to the village. Bartet was a village built on the banks of the Valley River, and the villagers could not understand calling an institution for holding and collecting money a “bank” too. Erod tried to push the term, but eventually gave up and began calling himself a bookkeeper. The sign that hung above the modest shop Erod had paid the local bricklayer to build read “Bartet Royal Bank”, but that was the only reference to the word in town.

Gwendolyn was pulled out of her thoughts when she arrived at the barn just behind her father. With a grunt, he swung open the doors to the barn and stood aside. Neither Gwendolyn nor Sardain spoke a word as they went about letting the animals out of their pens to graze in the fields behind the barn. Riela, one of the family dogs, barked joyfully at them from her bed in a corner. Riela was heavily pregnant, due to give birth any time. Her sister, Welka, and their male dog Tonbi, were out in the fields protecting and driving the sheep.

“Hey girl,” said Gwendolyn in a quiet tone to Riela. Riela’s whole body wiggled with joy as Gwendolyn approached. She leaned down over Riela and petted her head for a moment. “Almost that time, huh?”

“Gwendolyn, get to work!” came her father’s harsh voice, just behind her.

“I’ll be back,” Gwendolyn whispered quietly to Riela.

“Hello there, Riela,” her father muttered, leaning down himself to take Gwendolyn’s place petting the dog. Though he had no use for his kids beyond working them and marrying them off, Sardain loved the dogs. He reached into a bag nearby and pulled out a salted beef treat, which he made himself for the animals.

Maryan or Gwendolyn salted or smoked the meat that got the family through the winter. Sardain had no interest in that task.

Gwendolyn pulled a pitchfork from the tools hanging on the wall by the barn doors and got to work mucking the cow stalls. Behind her, her father puttered about, mucking one or two of the pens and moving a few hay bales from the hay storage into the horses’ pens on the other side of the barn. Their barn was larger than any other Gwendolyn knew of, a unique design by her great-grandfather. It was the size of two large barns set side by side but connected by narrow alleyways on both ends. On one side were the cow pens, the hay storage, the manure pile, and a calving pen. On the other side were horse stalls, sheep’s pens, foaling quarters, and a door that led to the chicken coop. One end of the barns opened up to the farmland, where the Fields family had grown apples and barley for generations, and the other end opened up to large fields for the animals, which were fenced in and connected to another fenced area used as a pigsty.

Once her father had busied himself about for long enough that he felt he had put on a good show, he turned to her.

“I’ll be leaving for a bit. Going into town to see about selling the eggs,” he said. The excuse was paper thin. He never took any eggs with him. When he went to town in the middle of the workday, he was always either inquiring about a husband for Gwendolyn or sneaking off to the pub. More often than not, on pub days, he would come back drunk and, according to Maryan, reeking of other women.

“Sure,” said Gwendolyn. She no longer bothered to question her father when he lied.

“Gastaf will be coming in to work the fields soon, and Ardene is already out there,” her father said, “if I’m not home for lunch, make sure your mother feeds him and that she saves me some o’ that stew.” She nodded. So today it would be the pub, then.

“And you take care of these here animals,” he added over his shoulder, already on his way out the door.

Gwendolyn nodded, taking care to appear busy for at least a few minutes after her father left. More than once he had circled back to spy on her and discovered her “lazing about”. That usually meant going without supper, and she was hungry enough as it was. When a few minutes had passed, she moved toward the open barn doors under the pretense of sweeping some old, dirty hay away from the clean hay. She saw her father’s back receding on the horizon and breathed an audible sigh of relief. She leaned against the frame of the large barn door, breathing in the fresh morning air.

In the fields, a hazy moving dot was moving through the barley crops. Ardene, she was pretty sure. Gastaf normally arrived at the farm around nine in the morning and glancing up at the sun Gwendolyn noted he still had about twenty minutes.

Ardene came in earlier, and often stayed later. He was saving money to propose to his sweetheart, the baker’s second daughter, Setella. The baker, Temothe, was a prosperous man, and didn’t think Ardene was suited to marry his daughter. But they were in love, and eventually Temothe had agreed that Ardene could marry her if he funded and built a two-story home without a bookkeeper loan before anyone else asked for Setella’s hand.

Setella was a beautiful girl. Ardene was lucky he was well liked in the village, and the other men respected him enough to leave her alone. But he worked hard, because he didn’t want to take any chances that some other man would decide she was fair game.

Gwendolyn’s thoughts drifted across Ardene and Setella, to her own older siblings. Fridrik and Grigg had both married and started their own families. She barely spoke to them anymore, since they rarely visited the farm. They’d be coming for dinner later that week, to celebrate their father’s birthday. Fridrik and Grigg had never been particularly kind to her, encouraged by her parents to think of her as the family scapegoat. It had been that way for as long as she could remember, since about three weeks after she was born, she reckoned.

“Winnie!” a sudden voice exclaimed. She started, having completely missed Gastaf approaching the barn from the path leading into town. She could see the path, which her father had just departed on, out of the right corner of her eye, but she had been looking off so intensely into the distance that she hadn’t seen his approach.

She laughed, “you scared me!” she shouted in mock anger. She swatted gently at his arm.

“I thought my frantic waving would be enough to catch your attention, but you were somewhere else entirely weren’t you?” He asked.

“Just thinking,” she mused, “about Ardene, and Setella, and about my family.”

“Why, are you thinking of getting yourself a fella?” he asked.

“No,” she replied, truthfully. She had no interest in marriage, certainly not to anyone living in Bartet.

“Smart,” he said with a nod. “Wait ‘til you find someone you treasure.” He walked over to the wall of tools with a sad look in his eye, and Gwendolyn knew he was thinking of his late wife, Abbia, who had died of some sort of fever a few years prior. They had three children he was now caring for on his own.

“She was a wonderful woman,” said Gwendolyn softly, “and I know you miss her.”

He nodded, but he didn’t look back, and when he spoke he sounded as though he held back a tear, “better than I deserved. Never understood why she loved a farmhand.”

Abbia had run away from another village in The Floating Valley, settling in Bartet on the opposite end of the valley. Her father had planned to marry her to a man almost thirty years her senior. She took a job in town sweeping and cleaning in the apothecary, and she met Gastaf when he went in to buy a poultice after he took a bad horse kick to the leg.

By the time Abbia’s father found her, they had already had their eldest, Sebien.

After a moment to compose himself, Gastaf grasped a hoe and turned to Gwendolyn.

“When I passed by the house on my way up here, your mother was taking your siblings to school. She asked me to tell you that she forgot to mention, you’re having dinner with her in town tonight. She said to be back at the house before sundown.”

“Did she say it that nicely?” she asked in a voice of faux-naivete.

“No,” said Gastaf with a small smile, “she asked me to tell her ‘burden of a daughter’ that she was ‘expected at the house before sundown’ to get ready for a dinner she should ‘count herself lucky to be invited to at all’.”

Gwendolyn nodded. “That sounds like her. I will pray to the Third Goddess that it isn’t another awful dinner for ‘eligible bachelors’ and village virgins.”

Gastaf snickered as he brushed past her on his way to the orchard. “Don’t call it that at the dinner, or you’ll cause the other ladies to faint with the scandal of it all.”

“Good, that’ll be the most exciting thing to ever come of those dinners,” she shouted at his retreating back.

Hours later, Maryan fluttered around in a huff while Gwendolyn stood in front of the mirror in her parent’s bedroom. She had been dressed in a clean, new dress Maryan had sewn. Gwendolyn usually had the last pick of the clothing in her family, but on special occasions like fancy dinners with potential suitors, she was usually given a nice hand-me-down from Maryan or even a new dress. Maryan was still angry that her husband had not come home for lunch and had muttered about “lazy drunk” and “ungrateful men” under her voice for an hour while Gwendolyn tried to eat her lunch in peace. She was no longer muttering, but her brow was still furrowed in anger, hours later.

“Ayalla, darling, come here please,” Maryan called out the bedroom door in the pleasant, honeyed tones she used to address any of her children that weren’t Gwendolyn. Then she turned to Gwendolyn, and her voice changed to a harsh tone, as she nearly hissed, “can you not stand up straighter?”

Ayalla walked through the bedroom door at that moment, mercifully sparing Gwendolyn any need to answer.

“Oh, Gwendolyn, you look beautiful,” she said as she approached them.

“She’s certainly a beauty,” said their mother, begrudgingly.

Gwendolyn didn’t reply, instead examining herself in the mirror. She had long, waist-length blonde hair the color of barley in sunset. It was true that she was pretty, with a small, upturned nose and dimples. She had only a small smattering of freckles right across the bridge of her nose. Ayalla had freckles across her whole face, and often bemoaned them, but Gwendolyn envied them.

“I simply love that color on you,” Ayalla continued, lavishing her with an unusual amount of praise. It was also true that the bright pink nicely offset Gwendolyn’s large blue eyes, though it had a neckline that made Gwendolyn blush slightly, as she was used to high collars and long sleeves. “You look like a porcelain doll.”

“Thank you, Ayalla,” said Gwendolyn demurely. She tried not to look suspicious as she made eye contact with her younger sister. Ayalla didn’t treat her with the utter disdain and indifference of her parents and older siblings, but neither did she treat her with the adoration of the five youngest, who Gwendolyn had practically raised. There were three distinct attitudes toward Gwendolyn in her family. Those already there when she was born— her parents and two older brothers— treated her with unkindness. The two who came right after Gwendolyn— Ayalla and their younger brother Arden— treated her with a neutral sort of indifference laced with occasional, irregular kindness. The youngest five— Traya, Dieon, twins Bartin and Baseal, and three-year-old Tannia— showered her in love. Without the youngins, she was fairly certain she wouldn’t get up most mornings.

“Ayalla, since Gwendolyn and I won’t be here this evening, and your father has probably passed out somewhere with a woman or two in bed, you’ll need to see your siblings fed and put to bed, please.”

“Of course, mother.” Ayalla nodded, but her expression gave nothing away, and Gwendolyn didn’t think she looked as if it was new information. She had a sinking suspicion that wherever she was going this evening, Ayalla already knew.

Gwendolyn swallowed her fury over her suspicions that her evening was a mystery only to her. Her mother had bid her sister get out the makeup that Maryan kept in a closet for special occasions.

“Stand up straight,” Maryan hissed at Gwendolyn once again, the sound of Ayalla rummaging in the closet almost drowning out her voice.

“I can’t stand any straighter,” said Gwendolyn, “sorry.” She tried to stand straighter but succeeded only in getting a twinge in her back. She felt a separate sting in the small of her back and looking around she saw that her mother had swatted at her.

“Don’t talk back,” said Maryan. “And remember to smile.”

At that moment, Ayalla emerged from the closet with a basket full of minerals that Maryan used to beautify herself. Maryan immediately began rummaging in it, pulling out powders and potions that Gwendolyn couldn’t identify no matter how many times Maryan tried to force her to learn.

Maryan dipped her fingers into an earthenware pot of some light pink powder, then used her hands to dabble the powder across Gwendolyn’s cheeks. Using her other hand, she rubbed the powder in.

She stood back, and in doing so, she cleared Gwendolyn’s view into the mirror. Looking at herself, she used the back of her hands to rub the powder into her skin, because she wasn’t fond of the vibrancy of the bright pink color against her pale skin.

“Stop that!” ordered Maryan, as she cleaned her hands with a cloth. “These are expensive, luxury items. Don’t waste them undoing my work. We need you looking your best,” and with that Maryan grabbed Gwendolyn’s hand and rubbed the back of it with the cloth until the pink powder displaced there was gone. “And First God forbid you stain your new dress.”

“Sorry, mother,” muttered Gwendolyn. Maryan began rubbing Gwendolyn’s cheeks again, muttering, “made it uneven,” under her breath.

Suddenly, mother and both daughters turned toward the bedroom door and the rest of the house just beyond, as the front door hinges creaked and a second later, it slammed closed.

“Maryan,” came Gwendolyn’s father’s voice. “Maryan!”

“What?” her mother shouted, in a voice even angrier than the one she usually reserved for Gwendolyn.

“Where is m’ stew?” Gwendolyn noticed her father slurring.

“You lazy drunk, who says I saved you any?” Maryan shouted, rushing out of the room and to the left, where the small hallway hiding her parent’s bedroom opened into the kitchen.

Gwendolyn sighed and glanced out the window. The sun was just beginning to set, so she assumed it was somewhere around 6:30 in the evening. She assumed that the dinner she was attending was another dinner with a group of suitors and other young women, and such dinners usually started around 7:30. She sat on the edge of the bed as her parents began arguing twenty feet away, trying not to listen.

“You do look beautiful,” said Ayalla, who crossed the room to shut the door.

“Thanks, Ayalla,” said Gwendolyn, staring into her lap at her folded hands.

“They’ll be at this for a while,” said Ayalla, with a vague nod toward the door. “Let me help with the makeup.”

Unlike Gwendolyn, Ayalla had studied her mother’s makeup techniques with vigor. Ayalla was beautiful in a very different way from Gwendolyn. Though they both had blonde hair, Ayalla’s was almost silver, and her blue eyes were rimmed with a dark brown, giving her stare an intense and almost inescapable quality. Ayalla’s face was covered in a sprinkling of freckles, in greater quantity and over a greater area than Gwendolyn’s, and Ayalla had lips that curved slightly downward, giving her a permanently serious expression. Also, unlike Gwendolyn, Ayalla was deeply self-conscious. Though makeup was a luxury for a family of farmers with ten children, they were one of the wealthier farms in The Floating Valley, owing mostly to their extensive barley crop. After all, her father often boasted, “pubs are never empty, but they would be without barley to make the beer!” And, after all, he would know.

Gwendolyn sighed heavily and turned her head to better face Ayalla, who pulled out a small cow's hairbrush and pot of black charcoal.

“Look at the ceiling?” said Ayalla. Gwendolyn complied. “You know,” she continued, “I don’t know why you’re not more excited about this. Getting out of here.”

“And into the arms of a stranger?” Gwendolyn scoffed. She tried to keep her eyes open as Ayalla brushed the charcoal under her eyes. “No, thanks, regardless of what it's like here.”

“At least maybe you wouldn’t be such a bad luck charm in some other household,” Ayalla said, the cold edge returning to her voice.

“Ayalla, I had nothing to do with that. I was an infant,” said Gwendolyn, still peering upward.

“Yeah, and he was our brother,” said Ayalla, colder still. “All right, shut your eyes now.”

Gwendolyn didn’t respond, other than to shut her eyes and bite her lip.

After a few seconds of Ayalla brushing the charcoal onto her eyelids, she instructed, “okay, open up,” and Gwendolyn found herself staring into Ayalla’s eyes.

They sat in silence, staring at each other, for a long moment. Then Ayalla broke eye contact to look aside and set down the charcoal and brush.

Suddenly, words seem to tumble out of her mouth, “you may not have intended… but he’d still be here without you.”

“He was sick!”

“Yeah, because you were born first.”

Gwendolyn closed her eyes and sat that way, silent, for several long minutes. Her twin brother, Garryan, was the wanted child. She was unexpected. The midwife had told her mother she was carrying a single, male child. When Gwendolyn popped out instead, the midwife assumed the labor was over and that she’d simply been mistaken about the sex of the child. While Gwendolyn’s mother still labored, the midwife explained that it was particularly intense afterbirth.

She was on her way out the door when Maryan screamed in agony and the midwife saw Garryan’s head coming out at a strange angle. She wasn’t fast enough back to the bedside, so Garryan was born oddly tangled in birth cords and badly discolored. He only lived three weeks.

“I couldn’t control that, Alla, you know that,” she finally whispered.

“Don’t call me that!” snapped Ayalla, recoiling at the nickname that Gwendolyn hadn’t used since they were small. “Just, don’t. You were the mistake. Garryan should be here, not you. The midwife said so.”

This, Gwendolyn knew, was the crux of her family’s issues with her. That she had lived. That she wasn’t the boy they wanted. That the boy they had wanted had died, and the mistake they hadn’t expected lived.

“Okay, Ayalla.” Gwendolyn had stopped fighting it a long time ago, when she was barely ten. She had finally realized that her family didn’t care, at all, about the logic. They didn’t care at all about Gwendolyn.

“Look,” said Ayalla, and her gaze pulled Gwendolyn in again, “all I am saying is, maybe being married off wouldn’t be so bad. For you or for us.”

“Maybe,” said Gwendolyn without any conviction.

“Hold still,” said Ayalla, “I’ll finish your lips and you’ll be ready to go.”

From the kitchen, they heard the sound of something heavy crashing into a wall, or maybe the kitchen table. Gwendolyn nodded and said, “probably best to get mother out of here,”

Ayalla snickered, and Gwendolyn smiled a bit herself. It was the first such moment they had shared in many years.

Ayalla’s movements became gentler as she rubbed a pink-ish red paste across Gwendolyn’s lips.

“Okay,” she said after a moment, “what do you think?”

Gwendolyn opened her eyes and stood, approaching the mirror. As little as she wanted to attend another dinner where the young people sat around a table, alternating boy-girl-boy-girl and making painful small talk with the randomly selected single individuals around them while their adult chaperones sat at a table nearby and cast furtive glances at their charges, she had to admit she looked incredible.

Her lips perfectly matched her dress, and her eyes seemed to glow, a brighter and lighter blue than usual. Her skin looked flawless.

“I look… well, I look lovely,” she murmured.

“I’m glad you like it,” Ayalla said, coming up behind her and pulling her hair back a little bit to show more of her face, “come on, let’s go stop them from killing each other.” As she spoke, another loud thump resonated from the room to their left.

“Yes, before they destroy all the furniture.” Gwendolyn said, turning away from the mirror and walking out the bedroom door to extract her mother from another pointless argument with her father.