Masteress Meenore breathed flame on the hearth logs. I took a skewer and held it out to the fire. The scent of bread and cheese improved the air.
When the skewer was toasted, I blew on it to cool it, although I could hardly wait. A human-sized bench and a tall three-legged stool were drawn close to the fire. I sank onto the bench. The bread tasted as sweet as a scone, and the oozing cheese was sharper than any I’d ever sampled.
Masteress Meenore—my masteress!—took two skewers between ITs right-claw talons. IT lowered ITself until IT reclined facing the fire, leaned on ITs left elbow, and thrust the skewers up to ITs wrist into the heart of the fire.
I gasped, although a dragon wouldn’t burn. After a minute or two, IT pulled the skewers out and devoured them entirely, bread, cheese, and wood.
“The skewers are pine. I enjoy the resin.”
What else did IT like the flavor of?
In ITs uncanny way, IT answered my thought, “I prefer cypress wood, but the boatwrights take it all. I will not eat oak under any circumstance. I dine also on what humans eat and pebbles when I feel too light. On occasion I swallow knives, but they do not sit well.” IT cooked and ate two more claws-full of skewers, then belched. ITs smoke shaded blue again. “Pardon me.”
I nodded and tucked away three more skewers myself.
IT rose. “I shall return shortly.” When IT moved, I saw that ITs belly had covered a huge trapdoor. “Do not take a single coin from the basket while I’m gone. I will know.”
“I’m not a thief!”
“And do not open the trapdoor.” IT clumped outside.
Without ITs presence and despite the fire, the air chilled. I drew my cloak around me again and approached the trapdoor. The wood was heat-blackened but firm when I touched it. The handle was a ring of iron.
I was not a mistress of deduction or induction, but I needed neither to guess what lay below: ITs hoard. Every dragon was reputed to have one. I might be standing on wealth enough to buy the ogre’s castle.
ITs wealth, not mine. I returned to the fireplace bench, sat with my back to the fire, and surveyed the lair.
Light came from the fire and the dozen torches that were spaced around the edge of the room. With IT gone, I could smell the greasy torch rags.
The walls were hung with painted cloth so faded I couldn’t make out what had once been depicted. Masteress Meenore’s heat had baked the dirt floor as hard as pottery.
If the fireplace was twelve o’clock, eight to ten o’clock was occupied by a high table pushed against the wall. A long bench hid under it. Mother said you could learn a household’s character from its table. I rose and went to this one. The wooden tabletop, which sagged in the middle and was worn and scratched, came up to my chin.
I saw a jug, half a wheel of yellow cheese, two loaves of bread, an orange squash, a small salt bowl, and a big double-handled bowl that held a spoon and a knife. The bowl was common green pottery, the spoon wood, the knife handle wood, too—a poor folks’ bowl, poor folks’ cutlery.
At eleven o’clock along the wall was a heap of large tasseled pillows. The tassels lay in my hand as smoothly as silk. The pillows might have been worth a silver or two if their linen hadn’t been so worn. But though worn, they were unstained. I lifted one to my nose and smelled rosemary.
Across the lair, at three o’clock, stood a double-doored cupboard. I hadn’t been forbidden to open it, so I concluded I was supposed to. The contents were a stack of folded lengths of linen, clean but threadbare; sundry bowls of the same quality as the one on the table; a row of four pottery tumblers; a small pile of cutlery; four sheaves of unused skewers tied with thread; and a little box, which proved to contain knucklebones.
Nothing more. IT might have warned me away from ITs hoard to make me think IT rich, while in truth the hoard was home to a few starving mice. Or IT might be fooling me twice.
Unbidden—unwelcome—a mansioners’ tale came to mind, the tale of Bluebeard. What if the hoard contained the bones of dozens of Masteress Meenore’s assistants?
I stood over the trapdoor. Open it? Run?
I knelt and grasped the iron ring. And there I stayed, uncertain. I wanted to be a dragon’s assistant if I couldn’t be a mansioner for now, and I needed food and a place to sleep.
And IT interested me. And no one feared IT. I stood up.
The trapdoor opened. I jumped back.
IT heaved ITself up onto the floor. “Lodie of Lahnt, if I had found you below, I would have tossed you out. If I had found you napping at the fireplace, I would have tossed you out, too. I want neither a thief nor an assistant who lacks curiosity.”
I returned my cloak to the hook at the door.
“So, what have you learned about your masteress?”
Imitating ITs way of speaking, I said, “I used my powers of induction and deduction to conclude there is an outdoor entrance to the hoard.”
“What else?”
“I cannot tell whether or not you are rich. All depends on what lies under the trapdoor.”
“Well done, Elodie.”