"A choo! Calm down? When I'm having an allergy attack? Achoo, oh, bother, achoo!" said the gray-green dragon. "Somebody give me a handkerchief. A choo!"
"Here," said Cimorene, holding out one of the ones she had brought with her. "Use this." She was beginning to feel much less frightened, for the gray-green dragon reminded her of her great-uncle, who was old and rather hard of hearing and of whom she was rather fond.
"What's that?" said Roxim. "Achoo! Oh, hurry up and give it here."
Kazul took the handkerchief from Cimorene, using two claws very delicately, and passed it to Roxim. The gray-green dragon mopped his streaming eyes and blew his nose. "That's better, I think. Achoo! Oh, drat!"
The ball of fire that accompanied the dragon's sneeze had reduced the handkerchief to a charred scrap. Cimorene hastily dug out another one and handed it to Kazul, feeling very glad that she had brought several spares.
Roxim went through two more handkerchiefs before his sneezing spasms finally stopped. "Much better," he said. "Now then, who's this that lent me the handkerchiefs? Somebody's new princess, eh?"
"We were just discussing that when you came in," Kazul said, and turned back to Cimorene. "You were saying? About cooking and so on."
"Couldn't I do that for one of you for a while?" Cimorene said.
The dragon smiled again, and Cimorene swallowed hard. "Possibly.
Why would you want to do that?"
"Because then I wouldn't have to go home and marry Therandil," Cimorene said. "Being a dragon's princess is a perfectly respectable thing to do, so my parents couldn't complain. And it would be much more interesting than embroidery and dancing lessons."
Several of the dragons made snorting or choking noises. Cimorene jumped, then decided that they were laughing.
"This is ridiculous," said a large, bright green dragon on Cimorene's left.
"Why?" asked Kazul.
"A princess volunteering? Out of the question!"
"That's easy for you to say," one of the other dragons grumbled. "You already have a princess. What about the rest of us?"
"Yes, don't be stuffy, Woraug," said another. "Besides, what else can we do with her?"
"Eat her," suggested the yellowish green dragon in a bored tone.
"No proper princess would come out looking for dragons," Woraug objected.
"Well, I'm not a proper princess, then," Cimorene snapped. "I make cherries jubilee, and I volunteer for dragons, and I conjugate Latin verbs-or at least I would if anyone would let me. So there!"
"Hear, hear," said the gray-green dragon.
"You see?" Woraug said. "Who would want an improper princess?"
"I would," said Kazul.
"You can't be serious, Kazul," Woraug said irritably. "Why?"
"I like cherries jubilee," Kazul replied, still watching Cimorene.
"And I like the look of her. Besides, the Latin scrolls in my library need cataloguing, and if I can't find someone who knows a little of the language, I'll have to do it myself."
"Give her a trial run first," a purplish green dragon advised.
Woraug snorted. "Latin and cherries jubilee! And for that you'd take on a black-haired, snippy little-" "I'll thank you to be polite when you're discussing my princess," Kazul said, and smiled fiercely.
"Nice little gal," Roxim said, nodding approvingly and waving Cimorene's next-to-last handkerchief. "Got sense. Be good for you, Kazul."
"If that's settled, I'm going to go find a snack," said the yellowish green dragon.
Woraug looked around, but the other dragons seemed to agree with Roxim.
"Oh, very well," Woraug said grumpily. "It's your choice, after all, "It certainly is. Now, Princess, if you'll come this way, I'll get you settled in."
Cimorene followed Kazul across the cave and down a tunnel. To her relief, the ball of light came with her. She had the uncomfortable feeling that if she had tried to walk behind Kazul in the dark, she would have stepped on her tail, which would not have been a good beginning.
Kazul led Cimorene through a long maze of tunnels and finally stopped in another cave. "Here we are," the dragon said. "You can use the small room over on the right. I believe my last princess left most of the furnishings behind when she ran off with the knight."
"Thank you," Cimorene said. "When do I start my duties? And what are they, please?"
"You start right away," said Kazul. "I'll want dinner at seven. In the meantime, you can begin sorting the treasure." The dragon nodded toward a dark opening on the left. "I'm sure some of it needs repairing. There's at least one suit of armor with the leg off, and some of the cheaper marc swords are probably getting rusty. The rest of it really ought to be rearranged sensibly. I can never find anything when I want it."
"What about the library you mentioned?" Cimorene asked.
"We'll see how well you do on the treasure room first," Kazul said.
"The rest of your job I'll explain as we go along. You don't object to learning a little magic, do you?"
"Not at all," said Cimorene.
"Good. It'll make things much easier. Go and wash up, and I'll let you into the treasure room so you can get started."
Cimorene nodded and went to the room Kazul had told her to use. As she washed her face and hands, she felt happier than she had in a long time.
She was not going to have to marry Therandil, and sorting a dragon's treasure sounded far more interesting than dancing or embroidery. She was even going to learn some magic! And her parents wouldn't worry about her, once they found out where she was. For the first time in her life, Cimorene was glad she was a princess. She dried her hands and turned to go back into the main cave, wondering how best to persuade Kazul to help her brush up on her Latin. She didn't want the dragon to be disappointed in her skill.
"Draco, draconem, dracone," she muttered, and her lips curved into a smile. She had always been rather good at declining nouns. Still smiling, she started forward to begin her new duties.
Cimorene settled in very quickly. She got along well with Kazul and learned her way around the caves with a minimum of mishaps. Actually, the caves were more like an intricate web of tunnels, connecting caverns of various shapes and sizes that belonged to individual dragons. It reminded Cimorene of an underground city with tunnels instead of streets. She had no idea how far the tunnels extended, though she rather suspected that some of them had been magicked, so that when you walked down them you went a lot farther than you thought you were going.
Kazul's section of the caves was fairly large. In addition to the kitchen-which was in a large cave near the exit, so that there wouldn't be a problem with the smoke from the fire-she had a sleeping cavern, three enormous treasure rooms at the far end of an intricate maze of twisty little passages, two even more enormous storage rooms for less valuable items, a library, a large, bare cave for eating and visiting with other dragons, and the set of rooms assigned to Cimorene. All the caves smelled of dragon, a somewhat musty, smoky, cinnamony smell.
Cimorene's first job was to air them out.
Cimorene's rooms consisted of three small connecting caves, just off Kazul's living cavern. They were furnished very comfortably in a mixture of styles and periods, and looked just like the guest rooms in most of the castles Cimorene had visited, only without windows. They were much too small for a dragon to get inside. When asked, Kazul said that the dwarves had made them in return for a favor, and the dragon's tone prevented Cimorene from inquiring too closely into just what sort of favor it had been.
By the end of the first week, Cimorene was sure enough of her position to give Kazul a list of things that she needed in the kitchen. The previous princess-of whom Cimorene was beginning to have a very poor opinion-had apparently made do with a large skillet with three dents and a wobbly handle, a wooden mixing bowl with a crack in it, a badly tarnished copper teakettle, and an assortment of mismatched plates, cups, and silverware, most of them chipped or bent.