Free Dragon Flight by Jessica Day George

put one hand on her foreleg. My heart swelled with affection as Luka did the same. His face was grave.
    “Madam,” he said softly. “Thank you for sharing this with us. We will do everything in our power to make certain that the dragons of Citatie are freed even as you were.”
    I reached out and put my other hand in Luka’s and gave it a squeeze.

Making a Scene
    Good day to you, Captain,” I said to the man barring our way. “We’re here to see the king.”
    Dressed in the white tunic and breeches of the Citatian army, and topped with the requisite spiked helmet, the guardsman gleamed in the sun. He squinted down at us in disbelief, visibly turning over my words in his head, searching for a translation that would make sense.
    Marta and I, clad in our finest Citatian trousers and tunics, thin beaded slippers and brilliant sashes, stood on the scorching pavement and smiled. I had dyed two of my braids blue, and Marta had rubbed beeswax on hers so that they wouldn’t appear so frayed.
    At our feet rested a basket containing our handiwork: a suit of clothes made of embroidered Feravelan satin and trimmed with mirrored silk. Luka had given us the king’s dimensions as best he could, judging the man to be slightly less than his own height, narrower in the shoulder but thicker in the middle, and we had worked with that.
    “You want … to see … King Nason?” The soldier’squestion was laboured, both from an uneasy command of Feravelan and from apparent disbelief at our request. He studied our clothes and the basket. “What … business?”
    From what we’d heard of Nason, if you weren’t invited to the palace, you could spend months waiting for an audience. Luka, who had been an expected royal ambassador, had still waited on the king’s pleasure for six days. He had met a man wandering the corridors who said he had been living in an empty antechamber for nine months, trying to gain an audience to settle a land dispute. The man was haggard and his finery in tatters, but he knew that if he stayed nearby, Nason would eventually summon him.
    I wondered if he was still here.
    “We are the finest tailors in the world,” I said, opening my arms wide. “We are here to present his Effulgence with a new suit of clothes.” I threw open the lid of the basket and showed the guard captain the scarlet and gold coat folded on top. He reached out to touch it with one dirty finger, and Marta slapped his hand away.
    “No, no,” she scolded. “This is for the king.”
    Growing red, the man glared at her. “I must look for … danger. Weapons.”
    “Good man,” I said. I leaned down and, as delicately as if I were lifting a baby, drew the coat from the basket. Marta picked up the tunic and trousers with equal care, and we wafted them up and down to show that therewere no concealed weapons or tiny assassins waiting to leap out at the king. The guard looked into the empty basket suspiciously and then at the shining fabric we held.
    “Very well.” An ugly grin split his face. “The king will … maybe … see you. This year.”
    While we refolded the clothing he stepped back and gave the order for the gates to be opened. Marta and I went past him with our heads high, the basket carried between us. I gave the man a courteous nod, as though he had been gracious.
    “Well, we made it past the first obstacle,” Marta said out of the corner of her mouth as we went across the courtyard.
    Then we had no more breath to spare. The front doors of the Crown Palace were at the top of a mountain of stairs made from gleaming white stone. It was nearly noon, and the heat beat down on us as we trudged up the stairs, holding the basket between us and feeling the baking-hot marble burn our feet through the soles of our light slippers.
    “I still think that Nason wants Feravel because Citatie is too hot,” Marta panted.
    “And full of monkeys,” I added.
    She shot me a dark look. “He’s still learning.”
    “He’d better learn fast,