In the west, the sunrise touched the distant mountains with rose, and their snowy peaks seemed to glow in the fresh morning air. The streets were still in shadow, though, as Lisa and her little sister picked up the basket of clothes after carefully closing the door behind them.
Annette danced around Lisa as the older girl faced the big basket and finally nodded.
“Okay, ‘Net”, she said. “Help me get this up.” The last word ended in a squeak as Lisa hiccuped.
Annette giggled. “I’m not going to help you,” she said saucily, pausing in her dance just a moment.
“Annette!” Lisa’s frustrated complaint ended, again, in a squeak.
“I’m just teasing you,” Annette said, sticking out her tongue. “You need someone to scare you to get rid of your hiccups.”
Lisa sighed and hiccuped, gripping the sides of the basket and bending her knees. Annette grabbed the far side, and together they lifted the basket up to Lisa’s head where she struggled for a moment to get the balance, frustrated by the little shudders that shook her body as the hiccups came again and again.
She had hardly gotten the basket balanced when Annette released any hold she had on the basket and began dancing around her again.
“Lisa and Jakob, sitting in a tree…” the little girl began to sing.
Lisa sighed, but smiled at her sister’s energy. Annette never seemed able to sit still for more than a moment. She was more like a butterfly than a girl in some ways, flitting here and there, never resting long. A shudder passed through her with another hiccup and her hand flew up to make sure the basket was still balanced, but she needn’t have worried. This was a task she had practiced for many years, and even with the involuntary shaking, the basket would stay where it belonged. She started to walk down the street east, towards the river.
As the girls made their way through town, doors and windows began to open to one side or another of them as people opened shops or came out on their own chores. Mrs. Biltmore came hobbling down her little alley, as bent and crooked as the stick she leaned on, or the alley itself.
“Good morning, Mrs. Biltmore,” Lisa hicced, bending ever so slightly at the knees in courtesy.
“Good morning, young thing,” Mrs. Biltmore replied, peering at the girls to make sure they were who they sounded like. “Goodness, but I can’t see the one that’s flitting around so much,” she remarked. “That must be Annette!”
Annette giggled, and gave the old woman a hug that might have knocked her off her feet. “Now, you stop that,” the old lady scolded, and then looked up at the basket looming on Lisa’s head.
“It can’t be wash day already!” she remarked, her cloudy eyes fixed on the large dark shape hovering over Lisa.
Hic. “The baby’s been sick,” Lisa informed her, “and papa’s wound opened up again, so the sheets are (hic) nasty.” Her neck ached each time her body jerked and the basket shifted, just a little.
“Well, don’t let me keep you,” Mrs. Biltmore said, pressing a half-copper at Annette, who didn’t see because she was just dashing across the road to try to catch a cat.
“Good day to you,” Lisa said, and she continued down the road towards the river gate.
With the delay, she wasn’t surprised that the entire steeple of the temple of Beory was lit with the sunshine before they got near the docks. When they could finally see the Realstream, he had already risen above the edge of the Dim Forest, escaping the mists that always seemed to gather there, and was shining brightly on the two sisters.
Annette rolled her eyes when Lisa didn’t turn right, to the nearer part of the shore, but went left. Past the fishing docks, past the ferry landing, Lisa finally found the part of the bank she wanted. She had explained to Annette a hundred times that if you washed the clothes downstream of the fishing docks it took much longer, as you were always cleaning fish scales out of the clothes, but the little girl thought it was a lot of pointless walking.
Pulling the sheets out of the basket that now sat on the ground, Lisa gulped to try to suppress a hiccup, and glanced across the smooth dark water of the Realstream.
There was a sort of unofficial camp over there, where people waited for the ferry to start in the morning. As it wasn’t market day, Lisa didn’t expect there to be many people, but was surprised to see some large tents spread around a smoky fire. The tents were low — probably half-folk — but there was a man walking around the fire, poking it.
Lisa turned her attention to the clothes, coaxing Annette into digging out the bar of soap that had been her burden on the way from the house. After she had wet most of the clothes, she made the little girl scrub with the soap while she rinsed the sheets in the river water. Her hiccups were louder, as she worked less at suppressing them, but focused on her work.
It wasn’t long before she heard the voices of the men who manned the ferry as they settled the oars in place. One of them grumbled loudly about the party on the far bank – why couldn’t they have waited until later in the day – but the other men mocked his laziness, and the ferry pulled away from the shore, hanging on the cable as it pushed across the main current of the Realstream.
Lisa had just spread one of the sheets out on top of some bushes near the bank when she glanced up to look at the people across the river. The ferry had arrived there, and there were several people walking around, including two half-folk. They had what looked like a boat that was being pulled by some horses, and the ferrymen were all standing back, on the near side of the ferry instead of helping to make sure they loaded the thing correctly. While Lisa was trying to figure out why the people didn’t just cross in their own boat (although it did look small) and why they hadn’t taken down all of their tents, one of the tents moved.
It was long, low, and black, and it might have been just a row of bundles, but now it stretched and flexed, and a big, black wing reached up shakily into the air before sorting itself onto to the creature’s back.
Two men-folk followed the boat onto the ferry, and the half-folk went with them, but the other man had stripped down and was standing passively on the shore while the ferrymen leaned to their oars and began to row.
Once the ferry was well away, the last man on the shore walked to the water, and followed by not one but two large, black, sinuous shapes, slid into the water.
Lisa’s laundry was forgotten, and somewhere along the line she had lost her hiccups, too. Annette was under the bushes, under the sheets, having a sing-song conversation with one of her imaginary friends, but Lisa stood transfixed, staring at the ferry laboring across the river, and the man swimming easily through the strong current with the two black, scaly creatures.
When the man climbed, dripping from the water, his finely-etched muscles gleaming in the morning light, the first of the black creatures surged out after him. It had an ugly, scaly snout, and as she stared it opened a long mouth full of sharp teeth and yawned. The man slapped it on the neck, just behind the head, and it jerked away from him, hauling itself completely out of the river water and stretching out, two huge wings spread to catch the sun. The other creature followed, and a hideous stink like the aftermath of vomit wafted down the bank to where Lisa stood, transfixed.
The ferry tied up at the landing, and the ferrymen busied themselves with untying the restrains that had been put on the boat. Lisa could see (when she looked away from the huge, black creatures) that the boat had bat-like wings, and also, inexplicably, wheels. The horses willingly pulled it onto the bank, ignoring the huge black creatures, and one of the half-folk, a woman, climbed up to a seat at the front of the boat.
The other half-folk, a man, rose casually into the air, pivoting slowly as he looked around. Lisa wasn’t sure, but she thought he might have winked at her as he turned past her, but she thought she couldn’t be sure of anything right now.
The other two folk on the ferry were regular people, a man and a woman. The man headed over to the swimmer to give him his clothes back, while the woman paid the ferrymen. Lisa couldn’t hear what she was saying, but could tell by the tones she used that she was calming and soothing them. Lisa was so interested, trying to catch the woman’s words, that she didn’t realize one of the black creatures had silently crept closer to her.
There was a sudden whiff of the acid stench as it opened its mouth and a long, black, slimy tongue stretched out towards the drying sheet. The swimmer had just finished putting his tunic back on, and saw what the creature was doing as his head cleared the neckline.
“Hey, cut that out!” he yelled, seeming to cross the distance between them without moving. Cuffing the creature behind the head, he turned to Lisa with a slight bow.
“My apologies, miss,” he said. “He knows better – usually.” Cuffing the creature again, so that it swung its head insolently away, he grabbed it by a horn and began tugging it towards the rest of the party.
Lisa found her voice. “Sir,” she said hesitantly. “Sir –” The man turned to look at her. “What is it?”
The man smiled broadly. “Fang?” he said. “Fang’s a black dragon.”