excuses, excuses

I've been very, very sick and on top of that I'm getting ready to join the navy so I won't be around much longer. I'm going to try to keep up with my posts, but since obviously just being sick knocked me out for a month I don't know what being in the navy is going to do to my posts. I will do my best.

Sorry

I've been sick for like three weeks so I'm going to have to promise the next chapter next week. I'm sorry. Thanks for understanding.

Dragon's Apprentice (10)

Part 10

Lynn knew that something was wrong as soon as the bidding started on the first girl and the sounds of the auction began. There were far too many voices and the few glimpses she got as the curtain parted only confirmed her worst fears. This was one of those years where half the bloody world turned out for the auction. Slavers, rich men looking for help for their impossibly large mansions, and who knew who else now stood beyond that curtain. Hundreds, possibly a thousand or more, people had gathered and most of them wouldn’t know her. She was going to sell! She was going to get taken away!
Lynn looked around franticly as reality sank in. She knew she was pretty enough to sell…to anyone who didn’t know the bite of her personality, at any rate. With so many strangers she was bound to go as soon as she stepped out on that stage, but by this point there was no longer any hope of running. There had been girls who had tried to run in the past, a few who had even made it, so careful guards of married village men were now posted all over the place, stoic and unmoved by the tears of many of the other girls lined up behind her. It was too late to get away.
Abruptly rough hands gripped her shoulders and shoved her, all dignity aside, out through the curtain. She’d been so busy panicking that she hadn’t heard her name called. She spun, fully intending to run, only to see her father standing just out of sight of the crowd behind the curtain, staring at her with intense blue-gray eyes and it occurred to her that her parents were counting on her. She didn’t know what they were counting on her for, but they were counting on her and, as there was apparently no escape, the least she could do was face her fate with pride.
Slowly she turned to face the crowd and froze again. There were more people clustered about the stage then she’d ever seen in one place in her life, almost all of them talking, one over the other. The shear noise was astounding, the volume was massive and she had to wonder how anyone heard anything. Even as she stood there the auction continued, people signaling for the next highest bid as the town magistrate called out with more voice then she’d ever heard him use so fast she couldn’t understand him.
She shivered, but still stood as straight as she could and walked over to stand center stage where she gazed coldly out over the clusters of people. She tried to gather her best ice queen stare and felt that she managed fairly well until she spotted him.
He stood at least a head above the others around him in a space that had been cleared for him. In one hand he clutched the reigns of a golden horse with white mane. The horse and man both stared at her, the man with an intensity that was almost frightening. He was silent within the throng, unmoving, an island in a sea of human bodies, just listening to several other bid on her, but just as it seemed a man dressed in leather and chains was about to win the bid he put in a bid that had caused a thick silence to descend over the crowd like a blanket of snow on a winter night. All heads turned to stare at him. Even Lynn had never heard such a sum of money come from a human mouth. A dragon’s, yes, but never a human.
She stared at him with the rest of the town until the sound of a gavel pounding broke the silence.
“Sold!” The town magistrate bellowed and almost everyone jumped.
Lynn swallowed hard and thought again of running, but even as she thought it she spotted the men coming to collect her and guide her to her new husband who was already being ushered off to sign papers. Before they could reach her, though, she turned on her own and headed for the steps that led over to the coral where those that had made purchases were taken to sign all of the correct paperwork. It had been a horse coral, one of the small ones used for training colts, but now it had several old, battered desks pushed close to the fencing, each with a man seated behind it. The steps to the stage led directly down into it and she went willingly, proudly, to stand at the coral’s center, not looking at anyone even though her mother drifted within her line of sight, tears streaming down her face.

Dragon's Apprentice

For those of you that check, I'm sorry it's late. It's been one of those weeks. Thanks for your patients.

Part Nine

He pushed through the crowd, inserting elbows into soft midsections where necessary, with three horses in tow. Occasionally he would pause and put one foot in the stirrup of his own horse’s saddle and he would pull himself up to look out over the crowd.
His master was well visible from this vantage point, standing heads above those gathered around him, his long, almost white, blonde hair catching the sunlight and throwing it back. The man stood straight and noble, his eyes fixed on the crude stage that had been erected for the sole use of the barbaric auction his master had gone ahead of him to reach. Perched upon his master’s nose was a strange contraption of brown glass cut into neat little ovals and held before his eyes with delicate silver straps and bands. Skin so white it could have been cut marble made him stand out even worse then his fine dress, odd eye pieces, his master called them ‘glasses’, and waist length, almost white hair, braided down his back.
Estin shook his head to himself, hopped down from this latest move to gain his bearings and elbowed a particularly heavy set man in worn farmers cloths in the ribs and tugged the three reluctant horses behind him as he continued to make his way to where his master stood.
“You just had to center yourself in the crowd, didn’t you?” Estin asked as he at last made it into the five foot space the crowd had left around his master’s tall, lean form. That beautiful, male face turned slowly toward him, though with those infernal - what were they?- glasses it was impossible for Estin to tell if he was actually looking at him.
His master grinned. “I like being the center of attention,” His master said with his usual humor before he turned to look back at the stage. “Did you bring my horse?” He asked though Estin was sure that he had looked.
Estin rolled his eyes. “No. I left the ornery creature about one hundred miles down the road and traded him for a mule. Of course I have him. Do I look stupid to you? No, wait, don’t answer that,” He said and looked away as his master’s shoulder’s shook with silent laughter.
“So…why did I need to lug, not only your horse, but an extra all this way to this boon dock town stuffed in the middle of the gods only know where? Don’t tell me that you actually plan to buy one of these poor unfortunate backward women,” Estin said and preformed the same trick he had used to spot his master through the crowd to get a look at the stage. Sometimes he hated being shorter than the average woman. Other times he didn’t care.
His master turned to look at him and one pail brow arched above the glasses. “You look ridiculous,” His master said in his usual way.
Estin snorted. “I’ll chop you off at the hips and we’ll see if you fair any better for seeing over a crowd of people this big,” He said.
Again his master’s shoulders shook in silent laughter. Estin just ignored him.
“So, are you going to buy one of these poor souls?” Estin asked again.
His master kicked two sets of saddle bags at his feet. “The money’s in here,” He said, “ Now hush. I need to listen for the right name.”
“So, we’re here for someone specific? Does she know we’re coming?” Estin asked.
“Shh!” His master shushed him, the sound somehow half growl.
Estin frowned but held the rest of his comments to himself as a small, angry looking man in purple robes wandered, almost as if half lost, out onto the stage, a gavel clutched in one hand as if he planned to fight the congregation with it. For a moment he faced the crowd and shifted his weight from foot to foot in a nervous, small kind of way, and hopped up and down a couple of times, the gavel lifting higher as if he were about to begin to preach, before, just as suddenly, he turned and shuffled, his shoulders hunched so far forward it looked as if he were trying to disappear, to the podium. Slowly he climbed up the small step stool placed behind it so that he was at least level with the old, wooden podium and faced the crowd again. The look on his face was almost furious now and when he pounded the gavel down in a call for silence Estin was sure that he was going to break it.
With a grumble and a sigh, sure that everyone on the planet was trying to get in his way, Estin pushed a strand of brown hair that had escaped his warrior’s tail out of his face and looked up at his ever patient horse who looked back at him with calm, brown eyes. With another sigh Estin clambered up the animal’s back to drape himself across the saddle. After all, he didn’t want to stand out too much, but he still wanted to see.
The old man behind the podium glared at him briefly, as if Estin cared what some old grump thought of him, before he banged the gavel one last time and began to drone on about something about witches and evil and young women tempted into the arms of the devil.
Estin wished he’d just get on with it and hoped that the girl his master wanted wouldn’t be too far back in the line. He didn’t know how long he could stay comfortable draped across the saddle like so much luggage before he began to loose circulation in necessary limbs.
At long last, after a long dissertation on who knew what - Estin tuned it out less then half way through- the old man banged the gavel one last time and called the name of the first girl.

Dragon's Apprentice (8)

Part Eight

Lynn stood slightly apart from the other girls who had clustered together behind the curtain of the stage that had been erected in the town square for the sole purpose of the bridal auction. With her hands clasped tight behind her back she leaned against one support beam and watched them as they milled about nervously like cattle ushered into too tight an enclosure. As of yet she hadn’t peeked beyond the curtain as each of the other girls seemed to do in shifts, but she didn’t really care to see all of the village boys, decked out in what amounted to their finest garb, milling about as their fathers glared. Even Lynn’s sisters didn’t seem immune to the nervous peeking of the others and normally Lynn would have made at least a token effort to cluster with them, but since none of them had said a word to her since she’d glided down off the stairs in the dress their mother had horded for her she didn’t want to push her luck by trying to hang on them like the an annoying kid sister.
Lynn rolled her eyes and dared to hope that all of her sisters were purchased that day or life at home would soon be a greater hell then it ever had been. If nothing else, Lynn thought, her mother knew how to insure that all of her daughters felt ostracized from one another. Oh, the glares Lynn had gotten from Gypsum as she’d left the house. If their father hadn’t been there Lynn was positive that her oldest sister would have beaten the crap out of her and ripped the dress from her body. As it was she might still loose the dress if she had to walk home if the looks she was receiving from the other girls, all of them older then her, none of them as well dressed.
She shook her head and looked away from the others at last since their nervous fidgeting was making her nervous. She just hoped that she was right to not worry.
She flexed her hand again and felt for her rings by touch, counting each one slowly. She hadn’t bothered to remove them after she’d gotten home the night before, but had simply cast a light don’t-notice-me spell across them to keep anyone from asking questions. She didn’t need anyone noticing anything else odd about her…like spontaneously appearing rings.
She clinched her hands into fists and looked longingly in the direction of the forest even though she couldn’t see anything other then tree tops over the buildings. She couldn’t help but long for Vaden’s singular company, for the peace of the forest. By contrast the voices around her sounded discordant and loud. It was disturbing to ears no longer accustomed to it.
At long last the town magistrate began to speak beyond the curtain and one of the older married women of the town, a matronly woman that Lynn didn’t know personally, bustled back and began to form all of the young women into some form of a line. Lynn somehow ended up fourth in line, crammed behind Milsy Longsdaughter who was a husky, tall girl who looked the part of the farmers daughter, and Jamsis Millsdaughter, a very slight, fragile girl who’s health had always kept her out of the fields.
Lynn hugged herself and wished desperately that she could get a deep breath around the girdle crushing her ribs. The people were suffocating enough without help.
Somewhere beyond the curtain a gavel banged and the world fell to silence before the name of the first girl in line was called and she disappeared through the curtain in a swirl of blue fabric.

Dragon's Apprentice (7)

Part Seven

The day of the bridal auction dawned hot and clear even though the past few mornings had been slightly foggy. It was a little unusual for that time of year, but those that saw it read little into it and Lynn wasn’t awake to take note of it or she might have thought better about participating in the day’s events.
“Get up!” Lynn’s mother shrilled up the stairs to the loft where, in a rare moment of bravery, Lynn had gone to her own bed in her sisters’ room the night before. It had been a brave move because her sisters were prone to loud arguments, which often degenerated into throwing things at one anothers heads with Lynn’s bed smack in the middle of the line of fire as hers was the center, and smallest, bed. It was why she so often slept in the coal cellar with the mice.
The night, however, had been remarkably uneventful. There had been one short squabble over who knew what, right after the lights had been doused, but one uncharacteristic shout from their father had squashed it in its tracks.
“I said up, all of you! Everyone up or there won’t be time to get ready before the auction starts and how would that look?! I’ll tell you how it would look! Like I can’t mind my own girls, that’s how it would look so UP!!” Their mother yelled again up the stairs and Lynn’s sister’s began to groan slowly into wakefulness. Lynn herself, who had been awake for the better part of an hour and just waiting for someone else in the household to stir that so that she wouldn’t get accused of sneaking off, sat up and swung from bed before any of them could start shouting at one another. She made a dash for the door, her bare feet as silent as cat’s paws across the hardwood.
With the ease of someone used to dashing through a wild forest she hitched her night gown up around her hips and slid, all dignity forgotten, down the stair railing and swung off before hitting the ornate ball at it’s end. Her feet firmly on the ground floor and away from her sisters, who were already starting to argue, she paused at last to stretch the kinks out of a back not used to sleeping on so soft or lumpy a surface as the mattress on her old bed. Of course the condition of the mattress probably had not been helped by the fact that it had first been the mattress of all of her sisters before her. Only her sister, Nan, had a new mattress, being the oldest and all. Her bed frame was also new and would be part of her dowry as a wedding bed assuming one of their other sisters didn’t do something spiteful to it beforehand.
Lynn cracked her neck first one way, then the other, then it cracked again as she returned it to her natural position and she put her hand on the back of her neck as a crick threatened to form, putting pressure on the knot before it could take shape. The cramped muscle released readily enough and, at last, she moved on through the sitting room to the kitchen where her mother was busy fixing a feast that would barely be large enough to feed the hoard that would descend upon it before long.
Lynn’s mother turned with a pan large enough to fry a baby in, which she’d been using to cook scrambled eggs, and jumped just enough to send a plate full’s worth of food into her hair when she spotted her youngest daughter who seemed to have just materialized at her back.
It was because she moved so blasted quietly, Molly decided to herself. Not like her sisters who all stomped and yelled about. She’d fetch a good price at auction, especially since she’d lost the ghastly tan which she’d developed who knew where. Molly also had it on good authority that this would be one of the biggest turn outs for an auction in Gold Spring’s modest history with men coming from as far away as the capital. She hoped that most of her daughters would go. Eight mouths were somehow a great deal easier to feed then eleven. A house with one daughter would also be a hell of a lot quieter, that was for sure and certain.
She smiled. “What were you doing up stairs, dear? I just sent your father down into the coal cellar to wake you.”
Molly didn’t think of herself as a neglectful mother where Lynn was concerned. After all, the girl had lived long enough to be old enough to participate in the auction. That was more then some families could say and if Lynn got less attention then her sisters it was because she demanded less, though perhaps she wouldn’t have if Molly hadn’t let the girl run wild. For just a moment Molly experienced a painful desire to have gotten to know her youngest child before it was too late, but then it was gone again, replaced by the pragmatism of a woman who had lived almost her entire life by the rules of a small town that didn’t encourage free thinking. She continued her trip to the kitchen table with the pan of eggs. Once she had placed them down she stepped outside the open kitchen door to shake the egg off of her hair and clothing before she returned to cooking.
“Any of your sister’s stirring yet?” She asked as Lynn slipped into her chair and began to heap food across her plate. Toast, eggs, bacon, ham, beef tips, fried red potatoes, hash browns, two hot cakes, fried green tomatoes, piping hot bread, cold apple pie and a carrot somehow found space on the plate before she smothered it all in butter, salt and pepper and began to shovel it down with a fork that seemed way too small for the job.
“ ’ibble,” Lynn managed around a mouthful so big that her cheeks bulged.
Molly watched in amazement as the girl somehow got it down and repeated the process with a second bite of what looked like butter, apple pie, hash browns and hot cake liberally sprinkled with pepper.
Out of all her children Lynn was definitely the most expensive to feed, especially in the morning. The girl was always the first to the table when she joined them at first meal at all and ate as if she hadn’t seen food for at least a year or more.
How could a girl so slight possibly eat so much?
Molly shook her head and patted her daughter’s unusual black hair, currently a tangled mass around her head, and added sausage to the girl’s plate. Out of all of her children Lynn was the only one that Molly didn’t have to nag into not dawdling through the morning even when she was eating for an army.
“Once you’ve finished eating, and after your sisters get up, I need you to come with me so that I can fit you to a dress,” Molly said just as Lynn’s father stomped into the house. With a smile at Lynn and a grunt to the world in general he threw himself down into the chair across from Lynn and began to shovel food onto his plate without a further sound.
Lynn grunted in response to her mother’s statement and went on eating. Her father watched her over his own food, wondering if she ever came up for air. Not for the first time he regretted that she hadn’t been one of his sons. Only people who worked hard ate like Lynn did and he had the feeling that she would have taken to the farm craft far better then any of his other children ever had.
He held his plate out for a few fresh strips of bacon as Molly walked by and they both stared in amazement as a whole hot cake disappeared into Lynn’s mouth with the accompaniment of three sausages and a slice of toast. In one gulp it was gone and she chased it with half a jug of orange juice.
“Leave some for the others, dear,” Molly said and eased the fresh bacon onto a plate in the center of the table with a fork.
“ ‘na ‘ooze ‘na wooze,” Lynn managed to say somehow around cheeks full of bacon, eggs and toast slathered in butter.
Her father grunted a laugh as Molly frowned at her.
“Now dear, please leave some for the others. I don’t want to have to cook twice,” Her mother said and Lynn shrugged, but didn’t add any more food to her plate even as her hand kept twitching toward the serving platters as if she wanted to.
“GET UP, YOU LAZY CRETENS, OR I’LL LET LYNN EAT YOUR SHARES, TOO!!!” Molly bellowed up the stairs one last time before she also took a seat at the table and began to fill her own plate with far less then either her daughter or husband.
Within moments there was a stampede of noise as not only her sisters but all five of her brothers came tripping over themselves down the stairs in a rush to reach the table. Lynn, her cheeks stuffed full of a little of this and a lot of that, stared as her siblings made a mad rush for the table faster then she’d ever seen any of them move in her life. She hadn’t realized that she was such a motivation to get her brothers and sisters moving.
With a growl she snatched her pitcher of orange juice away from her oldest brother, Jacky’s, reaching hand and took a huge gulp straight from the clay spout, insuring that no one else would try to take it. She plunked it down solidly in the place where everyone else kept their glasses and glared around at everyone before resuming her meal. Only her oldest sister, Gypsum, glared back, her eyes narrowed, but since this was normal Lynn ignored her completely.
Having inhaled her breakfast faster then anyone else, Lynn took herself outside the kitchen door and sat down on the low step just outside the door. With her chin in her hands she stared out at the forest. Ancient pines reached massive branches out past the boarder that her father so meticulously maintained to keep the forest from encroaching on the back door. The long needles spread upon the branches like fingers reaching desperately, it almost seemed, toward her as if calling her home. A high wind stirred the top most branches and a sound almost like a low, lonely moan passed through the boughs.
Lynn shivered and looked away even as she wished she could go comfort her forest, but that was silly. Why would anything in those old trees, besides Vaden, miss her?
“Ready, my dear?” Molly asked from her back and Lynn turned her head to look up at her mother.
Molly was not, by most standards, an attractive woman. Short and dumpy with limp, muddy brown hair that always seemed to escape from the bun at the nape of her neck she was the type of woman someone might look at and say “There goes a sturdy woman.” She wasn’t the kind of woman who would have ever fit in amongst nobility, but as a farmers wife she was the perfect choice. Once, before the boys had been old enough to work, she had held her own at her husbands side working in the fields. Now she was perfectly happy to be a house wife and do nothing but cook, clean, mend and accomplish other motherly tasks.
By contrast her youngest daughter looked more as if she belonged on the arm of a king then working in a field somewhere. With long, rich, thick black hair that seemed to shine almost purple, of all the colors, in the light and eyes the exact shade of amethyst crystals she was a sight to behold, even when her hair was a tangled mess. Tall and slender with a sinuous, quiet strength, the girl often seemed more predator then farmer’s daughter. She was beautiful and Molly knew that if any of her girls sold that day it would be Lynn, though she doubted that Lynn knew that. The girl had the oddest misconceptions about herself.
Molly shook her head to herself and motioned for her child to follow her back into the house. As the rest of the family continued their breakfast, Lynn stared longingly at the remaining food as they walked past, Molly lead her up stairs to the room she and her husband shared. Leaving Lynn standing in the center of the room, staring at a room that all of the children had always been forbidden access to, Molly went to the wardrobe and, from the dust on top, took a single, flattish box wrapped in a dusty brown paper.
She blew the dust off and carried it back to the bed.
“I bought this for you on your second birthday when it had become painfully obvious to us all that you would surpass all of your sisters in both height and beauty,” Molly said as Lynn stared. “We knew when the day came, since you weren’t the oldest, that we would be unable to send you off with anything except a dress so your father and I decided to have this made for you.”
With that she cut the paper away with one of her husbands knife. Carefully she pealed the paper away from the cloth within and, slowly, exposed a swath of what appeared to be white crushed velvet. With reverent hands Molly lifted the gown from its wrapping by the shoulders. It unfolded in a graceful line into the most beautiful dress Lynn had ever seen. It must have cost her parents a small fortune.
Molly shook it out and laid it carefully across the bed before she lifted the hem of the skirt for Lynn to see. There, and in a couple of other places Lynn could see, the heavy cloth had been folded over more times then was necessary to make a seam.
“There are gold, silver, and copper coins hidden about the dress. The copper coins are hidden here, in the hem of the skirt, the gold ones are hidden in the cuffs of the sleeves and the silver are in the seams along the back. There are four gold coins, six silver and twelve copper. Even if you’re bought by a slaver it’s illegal for them to take your bridal dress from you so it is the safest place to hide anything you may wish to keep,” Molly explained as Lynn stared. A small fortune had been squirreled away for her within the seams of that dress and they both knew it.
She looked back up at her mother in surprised puzzlement.
“But, why?” Lynn asked at last and Molly met her daughter’s gaze evenly.
“Because, my dear, you are both beautiful and smart. While smarts may serve you well in this world as a poor country girl, as a younger daughter beauty will not. If you don’t learn how to take care of yourself, protect yourself, no one is going to do it for you. This dress is the best your father and I can do for you to help you on your way to learning the skills you are going to need when you leave Gold Springs behind,” Molly explained and reached for her daughter to pull her night shirt off over her head where she dropped it on the floor for disposal later.
With her naked daughter standing in the middle of her room Molly began to scrub her down with cold water from the pitcher she’d brought into the room earlier. Lynn screamed as the cold water hit her, but Molly ignored her completely, scrubbing away like a mad woman unleashed.
Once the girl was scrubbed from head to foot and the knots had been yanked from her hair with a bone comb and that same hair had been braded behind her into a single thick band, Molly dried her gruffly with a rough towel and yanked a girdle down over her head. Positioning it just right she had Lynn grab hold of the bed post before she jerked the strings in as tight as they would go. Lynn gasped even as her lungs were constricted and clung for dear life as her mother continued to pull the strings tight.
“Mother,” Lynn gasped, “Mother, I can’t breath.”
Molly ignored her and, with one final tug, secured the garment tight around her. Lynn moaned as Molly pried her hands free and spun her to face her once more. Next she helped Lynn into the appropriate three petty coats before, at last, she pulled the dress down over the girl’s head. While Lynn was definitely thin enough that she didn’t need the girdle, and the dress would fit her just fine without it and she would, undoubtedly, leave both the girdle and petty coats far behind her the first chance she got, Molly wanted to insure that she was dressed in all propriety that day.
Last, but not least, Molly helped her daughter slip into soft slippers that matched the dress. They were completely impractical for walking or riding a horse, but for the occasion they were just right.
“Alright,” Molly said when she was at last satisfied with her daughter’s appearance. “Go pack. Just remember, if it’s not a part of the dress anyone who buys you can take it from you.”
With that she chased Lynn out the door and toward her own room. Still a little in shock, she went without question as Molly turned to the task of getting the rest of her daughters ready for the day.

Note

Part seven is turning out to be longer then expected and while I could break it into a couple of parts I won't for the sake of keeping "chapter" breaks smooth. Another words, for those of you that may read my posts, I will have the next part up next Friday and apologize to anyone out there who reads my humble posts.