This is a holiday vignette set in the world of The Kingdom’s Disdain. It takes place between the events of Sick Butterfly and The Spokes of Decay.
Whether you are familiar with the series or not, I hope you enjoy the story. Happy holidays, whether you are a christian, an atheist, agnostic, pagan, or worship a magical dragon from space.
FESTIVAL PAST
-Sareash Farmaldas: Age 16
5 years ago
“The Saint was born of three women, for Bal’zomest, most blessed of dragons, most shimmering of scale, deemed them all worthy of his parentage. Upon the day of his birth, the mountains shone with a glorious radiance, and it was declared a day of feasting; a Feast of Lights before the Day of Darkness. Blessed be the name of Bal’zomest, and blessed be the name of his saint, Turin of Angoll.”
The crowd in front of me listened intently, like I was the prophet himself. I was calm. This was tradition. This was familiar.
There was a time when I used to get excited about the reading. As a girl, I would lose sleep over the thrill. I would practice the passage for weeks. I loved getting to wear a bright and shiny swira hand made by tailors in the Fatherland. I loved to see all the people from the village and the neighboring villages and the exotic pilgrims from Alto controlled parts of the islands, all smiling, sitting together with their families listening to me, their night-sky lit up by the dragon crystals, like solid stars mounted on metal poles. I would get nervous sometimes, but I knew this was the most important thing I had to do all year. This was the true meaning of Feasteve, the word of The Dragon. As the crown princess, it was my solemn duty to deliver the holy text. If I got too nervous during the reading, I would always look to Mom’s face. Afterwards, Mom would always congratulate me the same way.
“What a lovely speaking voice you have, my flower. You’ll make an excellent queen someday.”
But Mom wasn’t here anymore, she might never be here again. Dad wasn’t here either. He was off on another pilgrimage. I had hoped he might surprise me by showing for the holiday. That was the kind of thing he used to do. Once again I was disappointed.
“Your belt was a bit loose. You should tie it tighter.” Lady Solth, the step-queen declared, inspecting my swira. That was the first thing she said to me after the reading. She looked at the state of my swira before she looked at my eyes.
“Is that all you have to say to your crown princess?” just a hint of bite in my tone. I couldn’t help it.
“Oh, and you read it beautifully.” Solth added, as a stark adenium. It didn’t feel particularly authentic. “Your father would have loved it if he were here.” she tagged on.
“Yes, but he isn’t, is he?”
“No.” she sighed, “I suppose the ship from Caulde must have been delayed. It would have been nice to have received word. He can be so forgetful sometimes.”
“We’re all children of the gods.” I said, quoting the book of Law and Promises, “Sometimes father is a child too.”
Sometimes I wish I was raised by the gods, instead of these people.
Solth looked at me like she was trying to determine whether I was making a sharp remark or not, but she couldn’t tell. She was so dull in the head. I said my goodbyes and took my leave after that.
After that little holiday duel, I was free to wander Aldroy and explore the Eve festivities. I was excited about that, excited to stop by all the tents and try all kinds of hot food and treats from across the continent. I would not drink of course. I was still a child in the eyes of the kingdom, but I could enjoy candy and cakes and cuts of rare meat.
Sadly, nothing caught my interest. All of it felt plain to me. I kept walking, like I was looking for something. I gazed at the people wandering about under the starlit sky, all having fun, children and girls and boys and men. There were a few adventurers from out of town here, all mortal beast hunters, the least interesting types of adventurers. There weren’t even any forest elves among them this year.
It’s true what the scripture says; there’s nothing new under sun or moon. I suppose I’m too old to be excited about things anymore, sixteen is such a jaded age. What I wouldn’t give to be stolen by a bandit or an ogre like in the stories.
While I was staring at a bulbous man in a particularly brightly colored and ill fitting swira, I bumped into someone.
“Oh, Princess. I’m sorry. I should have watched where I was going.”
I looked over and saw a young man, tall but thin and spindly. He wasn’t dressed in a swira, just white robe, with travelers boots, a silver sash and plated headband.
“You don’t have to apologize to me. I’m the one who was clumsy. Can’t keep my head out of the clouds, that’s what they’re always telling me.” I said, looking up at Lageiriun Cypul (or Lage as I called him sometimes, against his will). He was an apprentice seer, a hermit priest. He used to be the apprentice to my father’s favorite seer, Filsa of the Stone Hills, but then she was eaten by a large dragonfly. Lageririun was seven years my senior, but he was still the closest thing I had to a friend my own age. Friend? Well, he often escorted me around the holiday grounds. He was a traveler, but always came back to Aldroy for the holidays. He had an ovular face, dark hair going just to his ears.
“No, I . . . I’m taller so I should have . . . and I’m . . . a man.”
His foolish, nervous chatter ranged between annoying and endearing. Tonight it fell somewhere in the middle, since I was lonely and starved for company, but I was also cranky because of Lady Solth.
“No, I insist. I deserve to be stepped on.” I said, speaking the first nonsense thought that came into my head, “I’d love to be trampled and lost forever under the feet of my people.”
“Princess . . . please don’t say things like that.”
“Please, you don’t need to take me so seriously, no one else does.”
He frowned, a small wrinkle of thought forming between his eyes, “No. I mean, you shouldn’t say things like that because they’re weird, and I don’t like hearing them.”
“Well, I am only here to please you, so your wish is my command, Lage.”
“I asked you not to call me that, um, your majesty.” (Here I must act as a translator. The nickname ‘Lage’ sounds a lot like the tradespeak word Laigy, which is a sort of local slang term used to refer to a man who is single and unloved) “I was just um . . . going to the beef tent. Would you like to go that way?”
It was bold of him to offer to lead. I was royalty of course, so my word was above his, but in his mind I was also a girl. I followed along, hoping his interest in rare cow flesh might trigger some sympathetic pleasure in me.
What was I looking for? What am I looking for?
I looked up at Lageiriun. His face was handsome and there was a bright eyed, boyish innocence to it.
Was I looking for a boy? For love?
That didn’t feel right. I had often wondered if I might be in love with Lageiriun. At age sixteen I was supposed to be in love with somebody by now. True, a marriage between a hermit priest and a crown princess wasn’t traditional, but if my adventure stories were to be trusted, forbidden love was the best kind of love.
I loved to tease him and make him nervous. Maybe I was in love with him.
“Beef tent.” I repeated, and tried to surreptitiously take his hand.
We got our beef, mine the savory variety, his the sweet. We looked at the light crystals and marveled at them. I asked him if he had a lover or a courter a number of times and made him blush.
It was fun, but my mind was wandering. I was still thinking about adventure stories and kidnapping. Then the dragon bursts started. Big bursts of color and flame exploded into the sky. This should have been thrilling. It was thrilling, but I was not thrilled. As I watched red and blue flames explode in the night air, all I could think about was the fact that these were the same dragon bursts I’d seen every year of my life, and I’d probably see them every year until I died.
Chapter 1
-Sareash
The mountain winds howled through my ears.
I came back to the present. We were standing by the body of a newly slain Daralak-Muus, a Terror Beetle. Cardinal was considering having a suit of terror beetle armor made. That would be quite costly and take quite a bit of gold, and I myself could not imagine my little magic dando fighting in a suit of heavy armor. Even I avoided that sort of thing, preferring freedom of motion over protection, and, while I could see that Cardinal might think more of protection than I would, he didn’t have the strength that I had. He would be dreadfully slow in such a getup. But I didn’t say anything. Our little thing had been working because we both did our utmost to respect each other’s choices and freedoms. If Cardinal wanted to be a slow beetle man, I would learn to appreciate and accept a slow beetle man.
It should have been a hard fight, but we were quite the pair. We cornered it at the edge of a precipice, and I hurled javelins at it while he pounded it with gravity bombs, eventually pushing it over the edge and dashing it on sharp rocks. It might have survived, given its metallic exterior shell, but as luck or doom would have it a particularly sharp rock found the soft spot on its neck. Now we were at the bottom of the precipice, standing over it. Cardinal was crouched down inspecting the wound, and I had just finished hueing off its head. Needless to say, it did not feel like Feasteve.
“You know, if you had told me last year that I would spend Feasteve murdering a terror beetle and throwing it off a cliff, I would have called you the Prince of Lies.”
“Feetsies?” There was a shadow over his eyes, but then he rose, and I could see the sparkling, childlike green of his wonder. “What’s feetsies?”
“No, Feast-Eve. The . . . day before the Feast of Lights?” I knew that Cardinal was from another world, a faraway plane of reality called “Yue-Esay” or “America” but this still caught me off guard. The feast was such an important piece of my yearly calendar that the idea of it not being a cosmic constant seemed incomprehensible. Did they have no joy in Esay? No light in the cold darkness?
Well, the cold was not so cold here in Laskmeer. The climate was different from that of the islands. A lot of themes in feast literature and ritual were based around the fact that it occurred during the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. Although winter was colder than spring and summer in Laskmeer, the difference was hardly huge. In general, everything was a musty kind of humid temperate.
“The Feast of Lights, Ahnae Ath Ivae. We celebrate it as the birth of Saint Turin Clearmind, one of the greatest scholars and heroes of the Bal’zomest faith. It happens on the twenty-third day of Centaur each year.”
“Oh, so it’s like, a big important holiday?”
“The biggest, most important holiday in the whole year. We feast, we give gifts, sometimes we have feats of strength, and in Aldroy, they light up the sky with light bursts in all different shapes and colors.”
“Light bursts?”
“They’re like . . .” I played with my sword, drawing lines in the dirt as I searched for words, “flame, large explosions made from dragon dust.”
“Oh, like fireworks. We call those fireworks. We have those on the 4th of July, but we have a winter holiday that sounds sort of like what you’re describing.”
I perked up. Maybe there was some kind of universal holiday connection after all. “For us it’s called Christmas. We celebrate a man named Christ, and I guess it’s kind of a mass… which is what Catholic people call church.”
“Christ. Is he a religious figure in your world? You never talk about your world’s spiritual sensibilities.”
He looked down at the terror beetles corpse and then back at me. “I’ll explain it on the way back to the barrak. I think we need to hire a scavenger for this one.”
“Sounds good.” It was starting to get slightly chilly. Too cold to be wearing naught but a tunic, a leathervine skirt and shamhide stockings. Snow was unlikely. As a young girl, I’d always prayed for snow, just like in all the feast songs, but the fringes of humid Laskmeer never saw snow, and neither did I.
“So, the first thing to know is that we call God ‘God’ like he’s the only one. During the time of the Roman Empire, he supposedly had a son-“
-Cardinal
My body ran hot. I was drenched with sweat, and the cool breeze chilled my skin.
It would be an understatement to say I hadn’t thought about the holidays since I’d “moved” to Laskmeer. The concept of holidays hadn’t even occurred to me. I mean, what did people here have to celebrate? Flesh-eating fungus migrations? Giant bee mating season? Amputation day?
Christmas was supposed to be about peace on Earth. My life here had been anything but peaceful. In that sense, the thoughts were maybe a little bit painful. Whatever I once had was cut off. Cardinal, or whatever my real name was, would not be home for Christmas. Someone was out there missing me, thinking I was dead, or maybe they were better off without me, who knows?
Sareash seemed interested when I told her about Christmas. Like. Really interested. Her eyes lit up and she nodded along, like a kid. And it occurred to me that I was about to spend the holidays with her, with my new princess girlfriend. What a time to be alive.
We crossed the bogs and wastes slowly. It was a two hour walk back to the barrak, and there was an unusual chill to the weather. There was something different in the air now that we were talking about the holidays. Maybe Christmas spirit? Nah.
My life had been a horror story since I woke up in that cold mountain spider cave. I wondered if things would ever get better.
My memories of Home were all hazy, warm, but strange in their lack of character. There was no family to remember, no faces, nothing in particular, just trees and lights, bells and eggnog. I wondered if they had eggnog here.
They had coffee here, why not eggnog. I was sure I’d find eggnog, but it would probably have a weird name and be made out of scorpions or something.
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