Elizabeth Moon - Fool's Gold.pdf - Elizabeth Moon - margozap

Fool's Gold

Elizabeth Moon

"It's been done to death," Mirabel Stonefist said.

"It's traditional." Her sister Monica sat primly upright, embroidering tiny poppies on a

pillowcase. All Monica's pillow-cases had poppies on them, just as all the curtains on the

morning side of the house had morning glories.

"Traditional is another word for 'done to death,' " Mirabel said. Her own pillow-cases had

a stamped sigil and the words PROPERTY OF THE ROYAL BARRACKS DO NOT

REMOVE.

"It's unlucky to break with tradition."

"It's unlucky to have anything to do with dragons," Mirabel said, rubbing the burn scar on

her left leg.

* * *

Cavernous Dire had never intended to be a dragon. He had intended to be a miser, living

a long and peaceful life of solitary selfishness near the Tanglefoot Mountains, but he had,

all unwitting, consumed a seed of dragonsfoot which had been—entirely by accident—

baked into a gooseberry tart. That wouldn't have changed him, if his neighbor hadn't

made an innocent mistake and handed him dragonstongue, instead of dragonsbane, to

ease a sore tongue. The two plants do look much alike, and usually it makes no difference

whether you nibble a leaf of D. abscondus or D. lingula , since both will ease a cold-

blister, but in those rare instances when someone has an undigested seed of dragonsfoot

in his gut, and then adds to it the potent essence of D. lingula . . . well.

Of course it was all a mistake, and an accident, and the fact that when Cavernous went

back to the village to dig his miser's hoard out from under the hearthstone it was already

gone meant nothing. Probably. And most likely the jar of smelly ointment that broke on

his scaly head—fixing him in his draconic form until an exceedingly unlikely conjunction

of events—was an accident too, though Goody Chernoff's cackle wasn't.

So Cavernous Dire sloped off to the Tanglefoots in a draconish temper, scorching

fenceposts along the way. He found a proper cave, and would have amassed a hoard from

the passing travelers, if there'd been any. But his cave was a long way from any pass over

the mountains, and he was far too prudent to tangle with the rich and powerful dragons

whose caves lay on more lucrative trade routes.

He was forced to prey on the locals.

At first, sad to say, this gave him wicked satisfaction. They'd robbed him. They'd turned

him into a dragon and robbed him, and—like a true miser—he minded the latter much

more than the former. He ate their sheep, and then their cattle (having grown large

enough), and once inhaled an entire flock of geese—a mistake, he discovered, as burning

feathers stank abominably. He could not quite bring himself to eat their children, though

his draconish nature found them appetizing, because he knew too well how dirty they

really were, and how disgusting the amulets their mothers tied round their filthy necks.

But he did kill a few of the adults, when they marched out with torches to test the

strength of his fire. He couldn't stomach their stringy, bitter flesh.

Finally they moved away, cursing each other for fools, and Cavernous reigned over a

ruined district. He pried up every hearthstone, and rooted in every well, but few were the

coins or baubles which the villagers left behind.

Although the ignorant assert that the man-drake has powers greater than the dragonborn,

this is but wishful thinking. Dragons born from the egg inherit all the ancient wisdom and

power of dragonkind. Man-drakes are but feeble imitations, capable of matching true

dragons only in their lust for gold. So poor Cavernous Dire, though fearsome to men, had

not a chance of surviving in any contest with real dragons—and real dragons find few

things so amusing as tormenting man-drakes.

'Tis said that every man has some woman who loves him—at least until she dies of his

misuse—and so it was with Cavernous. Though most of the children born into his very

dysfunctional birth-family had died of abuse or neglect, he had a sister, Bilious Dire, who

had not died, but lived—and lived, moreover, with the twisted memory that Cavernous

had once saved her life. (In fact, he had merely pushed her out of his way on one of the

many occasions when his mother Savage came after him with a hot ladle.) But Bilious

built her life, as do we all, on the foundation of her beliefs about reality, and in her reality

Cavernous was a noble being.

She had been long away, Bilious, enriching the man who owned her, but at last she grew

too wrinkled and stiff, and he cast her out. So she returned to the foothills village of her

childhood, to find it ruined and empty, with dragon tracks in the street.

"That horrible dragon," she wailed at the weeping sky. "It's stolen my poor innocent

brother. I must find help—"

* * *

"So you see, it's the traditional quest to rescue the innocent victim of a dragon," Mirabel's

sister said. "Our sewing circle has taken on the rehabilitation of the faded blossoms of

vice—" Mirabel mimed gagging, and her sister glared at her. "Don't laugh! It's not

funny—the poor things—"

"Isn't there Madam Aspersia's Residence for them?"

"Madam Aspersia only has room for twenty, and besides she gives preference to women

of a Certain Kind." Mirabel rolled her eyes; her sister combined the desire to talk about

Such Things with the inability to name the Things she wanted to talk about.

"Well, but surely there are other resources—"

"In this city perhaps, but in the provinces—" Before Mirabel could ask why the provinces

should concern the goodwives of Weeping Willow Street, her sister took a deep breath

and plunged on. "So when poor Bilious—obviously past any chance of earning a living

That Way—begged us to find help for her poor virgin brother taken by a dragon, of

course I thought of you."

"Of course."

"Surely your organization does something to help women—that is its name, after all,

Ladies' Aid and Armor Society. . . ."

Mirabel had tried to explain, on previous occasions, what the LAAS had been founded

for, and why it would not help with a campaign to provide each orphaned girl with hand-

embroidered underclothes for her trousseau, or stand shoulder to shoulder with the

Weeping Willow Sewing Society's members when they marched on taverns that sold

liquor to single women. (Didn't her sister realize that all the women in the King's Guard

hung out in taverns? Or was that the point?)

Now, through clenched teeth, Mirabel tried once more. "Monica—we do help women—

each other. We were founded as a mutual-aid society for all women soldiers, though we

do what we can—" The LAAS charity ball, for instance, supported the education of the

orphaned daughters of soldiers.

"Helping each other is just like helping yourself, and helping yourself is selfish. Here's

this poor woman, with no hope of getting her brother free if you don't do something—"

Mirabel felt her resistance crumbling, as it usually did if her sister talked long enough.

"I don't see how he can be a virgin, if he's older than his sister," she said. A weak

argument, and she knew it. So did Monica.

"You can at least investigate, can't you? It can't hurt . . ."

It could get her killed, but that was a remote danger. Her sister was right here and now.

"No promises," Mirabel said.

"I knew you'd come through," said Monica.

* * *

As Mirabel Stonefist trudged glumly across a lumpy wet moor, she thought she should

have chosen "stonehead" for her fighting surname instead of "stonefist." She'd broken

fingers often enough to disprove the truth of her chosen epithet, and over a moderately

long career more than one person had commented on her personality in granitic terms.

Stonehead, bonehead, too stubborn to quit and too dumb to figure a way out . . .

She had passed three abandoned, ruined villages already, the thatched roofs long since

rotted, a few tumbled stone walls blacked by fire. She'd found hearthstones standing on

end like grave markers, and not one coin of any metal.

And she'd found dragon tracks. Not, to someone who had been in the unfortunate

expedition to kill the Grand Dragon Karshnak of Kreshnivok, very big dragon tracks, but

big enough to trip over and fall splat in. It had been raining for days, as usual in autumn,

and the dragon tracks were all full of very cold water.

Her biggest mistake, she thought, had been birth order. If she'd been born after Gervais,

she'd have been the cute little baby sister, and no one would ever have called on her to

solve problems for the family. But as the oldest—the big sister to them all—she'd been

cast as family protector and family servant from the beginning.

And her next biggest mistake, at least in the present instance, had been telling the Ladies'

Aid and Armor Society that she was just going to check on things. With that excuse, no

one else could find the time to come with her, so here she was, trudging across a cold,

wet slope by herself, in dragon country.

They must really hate her. They must be slapping each other on the back, back home, and

bragging on how they'd gotten rid of her. They must—

"Dammit, 'Bel, wait up!" The wind had dropped from its usual mournful moan, and she

heard the thin scream from behind. She whirled. There—a long way back and below—an

arm waved vigorously. She blinked. As if a dragon-laid spell of misery had been lifted,

her mood rose. Heads bobbed among the wet heather. Two—three? She wasn't sure, but

she wasn't alone anymore, and she felt almost as warm as if she were leaning on a wall in

the palace courtyard in the sun.

They were, of course, grumbling when they came within earshot. "Should've called

yourself Mirabel Longlegs—" Siobhan Bladehawk said. "Don't you ever sleep at night?

We were beginning to think we'd never catch up."

"And why'd you go off in that snit?" asked Krystal, flipping the beaded fringe on her vest.

"See this? I lost three strings, two of them with real lapis beads, trying to track you

through that white-thorn thicket. You could just as easily have gone around it, rather than

making me get my knees all scratched—"

Elizabeth Moon - Fool's Gold.pdf

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