Read Online Dragonskin Slippers by Jessica Day George - Free Book Online Page A

eyes smarting with tears at the sound of her raucous laughter. What was I, little Creel of Carlieff Town, doing in the King’s Seat? Did I really think that my crude provincial skills were wanted here in the city?
    I kept on going because I had nowhere else to go, but I didn’t ask for directions again. After three hours, when I hadn’t seen anything that looked like the cloth-workers’ district, and yet still was nowhere near the palaces, I turned down one of the side streets, my fingers crossed that it would lead where I wanted to go.
    I passed through a market that sold all sorts of exotic fruits and vegetables, and even more exotic animals for fine ladies to keep as pets. There were fantastically plumed birds and brown bears no higher than my knee, and little black monkeys, with wild manes of white hair, that could fit in a pocket.
    When I stopped to gape at these last creatures, thetrader displaying them smiled at me kindly. He had a very brown face with very white teeth, and wore a strange, conical blue hat. I dared to ask him if he knew the way I wanted to go, but he merely smiled and shook his head.
    “Please?” My voice wavered a little from tiredness and frustration.
    “Gaal matto,” the man replied, shaking his head again.
    Across the way, the man selling bright-feathered birds called out, “He don’t speak the language, maidy.”
    I turned around, hope rising in my breast, to address the friendly-sounding bird seller. “Sir? Do you know the way to the cloth-workers’ district?”
    “Aye, that I do. But come here so I don’t have to shout, you’re a fair way off.”
    But as I took an eager step towards him, I tripped over what had to be the world’s smallest dog.

The Princess’s Pippin
    “Watch where you are going, you horrible cow!” The voice snapped at me over the sound of a small dog yipping with pain.
    “Oh, I’m so sorry!” I looked at the young woman standing behind me and then down at the little animal I had stepped on.
    The girl had a cascade of brown curls falling from a coronet of stiffened silk and ribbons, and her brown eyes were narrowed in anger. The dog was white, and barely larger than a bedroom slipper. Its long hair was tied up with a lavender bow on top of its head, revealing two round black eyes and a small brown nose. In contrast to its mistress, the dog wagged a long plumed tail at me in greeting, apparently already recovered from being trod upon.
    “Pippin! Pippin darling! Come here,” the owner shrilled, holding out her manicured hands to the dog. “Let Mummy see if the nasty big peasant hurt my darling!”
    But Pippin didn’t want to be comforted. She wanted to smell my shoes. That done, she trotted over to the monkey seller and stood on her hind legs to get a better look at the little black-and-white creatures.
    “Pippin!” The girl’s voice was sharp now. “Come here to Mummy right now!”
    Pippin seemed to sigh and slowly wandered back over to her mistress, giving a casual stretch rather like a cat before condescending to being picked up. Her “mummy” fussed over her for several seconds, looking for any sign of injury, while I stood red-faced and stammering over and over again how sorry I was.
    “You’re very lucky, country cow, that you didn’t break one of my Pippin’s little paws.” The other girl sniffed at me. “She cost more than your family’s entire farm, I’m sure.”
    “I am so very sorry,” I said for the thousandth time, bristling at being called a country cow. “I truly didn’t see her.”
    “Well, how could you? In that great dragging old-fashioned gown and with those huge boats for feet,” the girl sneered.
    As I got a better look at what she was wearing my heart sank. She was right: my gown
was
old-fashioned, or at the least, dreadfully countrified. While I wore a single long gown with a fitted bodice and flaring skirt all of a piece, she was elegantly dressed in layers of skirts that had been pinned up in the front to