The Dragon’s Throne 1

“Too bad I can’t sleep through winter,” she said out loud, her voice echoing in the empty, two-bedroom home.

She was still shaking when she went into the bathroom and got ready for bed.  She opted to go to sleep fully clothed, even though she didn’t normally.  She was sure that Gabe had gotten the message loud and clear, but just in case he came pounding on her door, she wanted to be ready.

Still worried that she had forgotten to lock something, she took a single candle, going around the house again and checking every door and window.  As she was walking by the fireplace, she stopped, grabbing a sharp poker and taking it with her to her bedroom. 

She took the chair from her sewing table and tilted it, shoving it under the door handle and making sure it was secure.

“It’s only paranoia if you’re not right,” she thought, getting into bed with the poker at her side.

It wasn’t sharp enough to hurt her if she rolled over on it, but she laughed at the thought of being found impaled by it and the absurdity of it all.

She closed her eyes, mentally going over everything she had to do in the morning to prepare for Festival.  It was going to take Eleanor and Anna a while to carry the trunk between the two of them, but they would make it in one trip.  She smiled, thinking about the day ahead spent with her best friend, mingling with people from the next village and talking to people that she rarely saw outside Festival.  It was her favorite time of year and she couldn’t wait to wake up and get going.

She was starting to drift off to sleep when a thought occurred to her.  Should she take one of the dresses her mother had sewn in the months leading up to Anna’s birth in late December?  Isabel had no idea she would die in childbirth and had been sewing furiously all fall and winter.  She’d been hoping to sell more dresses that year than any other year, and in two months had sewn what normally took her five months. 

Anna still had five of the dresses, each a work of art unmatched by any seamstress, living or dead.  Maybe she could sell just one dress, making enough to close the gap without sacrificing everything she had of her mother’s work.  Then, she could spend every waking moment getting enough work done to make a killing at Spring Festival, and she wouldn’t have to worry about selling anything else out of her mother’s closet.

As much as she hated to do it, she realized that it was the only way.  She mentally cataloged what she had, deciding to go with the dress that was the darkest shade of purple she had ever seen.  The Dragon Queen was known to favor purple over all other colors, and this dress had been created with the queen in mind.  Anna could charge triple what the other dresses were worth and she was sure one of the servants would buy it on the queen’s behalf.

A single tear slid down her cheek, but her mind was made up.  She was going to sell one of her mother’s creations.  Just one.  She knew that her mother would care more about Anna being able to live through the winter than any emotional attachment she had to thread and fabric.  There were four other dresses. 

She would want to provide for you, Anna told herself as she let the darkness of sleep overtake her.  But she knew that nothing she could tell herself would take away the sting of letting go of something her mother had made with her own hands, and she knew that she couldn’t sell it unless it went to the Queen. 

A dress that beautiful would be wasted on anyone else.