The Dragonbone Petticoat

Prologue

Having started in the food stalls, where they nibbled, sipped, and sampled the best of the Grand Exhibition, the fashionistas then headed for the bazaar, where the dear old bat flirted not only with the salespeople demoing this year's crop of innovation--their eyes, wide with optimism and fear, meeting hers, winking only with poorly-concealed salacious intent--but with her junior partner, who at half her age was finding it difficult to pour out such milky tones for no-names without curdling his carefully-cultured flattery and souring his long-distilled ambition.

While he leveled eyes darkened not only by eyeshadow, but by unrecognized malevolence, he yet loved her, the first to believe in him and bear his projects to the world. That said, if he deigned to leave his memoirs, he would set the record straight: sycophancy was hard work. While he mirrored her sneers as they turned their noses up at subpar creations, his scorn snarled at its edges. He smoldered as she treated every location as a setting, every person an extra, and every object her prop, all theatrical effects basking in her magnanimity. She condescended to the world, as if she thought herself not only the center, but the zenith of creation.She still thinks herself beautiful, he snorted. She is venerated only because of her great venerableness. They allow her to act precious because she is ancient, delicate china.

As if responding to his train of thought, in one curious booth, contrary puppets spun and reeled their masters, and by ventriloquism, threw their voices to embarrass the dangling puppeteers.

Another's air-sown seeds rested in the palm with their feather-weight of gravity, but when cast in the air, hung there, sprouting all directions, so that until the blossoms budded, there was no way of knowing the roots from the fruits. At this point in the demonstration, the bristling seeds bobbed mid-air like aerial caltrops. Venos took mental notes, for they had immense potential as pratical jokes, if they were only mildly interesting as an agricultural advancement. Until they could not only grow in the breeze, but root there as fixed as in soil, a garden sown in Vanoor might be blown to Klyrn.

Three tents down, an orrery represented not only Lamuna as a gleaming brass orb with continents in raised relief, and crowned by revolving circlets begemmed with its satellites and every planet known to astronomers, but circuiting in a very close orbit, a tiny copper fleck to stand for the cloud island Wysaerie, and a few fabulistic satellites, like the dragon Adomavok. The mythic monster was sculpted larger than Wysaerie from bushy silver filaments flowing into bow-tied wings. It was obviously not rendered to accurate scale, as the western hemisphere was currently eclipsed by the dragon's outline; despite that impressive visibility in miniature, no one had seen Adomavok in centuries.

While a clever sophomore project, this pipe dream had no practical application in the world it represented, other than a hopeful bid to gain the attention of investors, so that its mythical realism was a kind of makeshift religion ready-made for a single angel investor, one already aglimmer with this starry-eyed point of view.

While Lucina did not linger at the booths advertising youthening cream, they turned her head for a fraction of a second,until she angled her chin up, adamant and proud.

Flirting, sycophancy, and biting sarcasm proved to be such hard work that they allowed themselves to be tempted by another row of food vendors, having been allured by the warm, yeasty aromas of cracked bread; thick, oily soups fragrant with rosemary and sage; and the sweet, syrupy zest rising from liquored decanters, wineglasses, and snifters, tangy scents that urged a huge thirst.

"We'll eat here." Lucina promenaded to the largest available table and waited for Venos to pull back one of nine chairs. Seating herself side-saddle to prop her feet on the crossbar joining the legs of a neighboring chair, she thumbed through the menu, a handwritten publication bound by a single leathern cord at top left.