“I know something.” Phoebe had a smug look on her face.
“Spill it, little fireball.”
“Orion’s mother is in the pigsty, cleaning,” Phoebe said cheerfully. “And so’s uncle Nikolai and Alcott. They’re mad.”
“Oh, crud. Daisy, there’s family mama drama happening. Gotta go.” She quickly hung up the phone.
Damn Orion. He was really not going to make any friends like this. Then again, she got the impression that he didn’t care about whether he made friends.
As she stood up, she saw Maude and Aurelia approaching her.
“Ready for training?” Maude called out.
“I hate to put it off, but I’ll have to do it this afternoon,” she said. “Orion punished his family for not telling me that you were trying to visit; he sent them out to clean the pigsty. I’m going to go help them.”
“Why on earth would you do that?” Maude asked in astonishment.
“Because I don’t want to be the cause of a fight between Orion and his family.”
“Well, you have fun with that,” Maude said, making a face. “I guess we’ll go into town to shop or something. We’ll see you in the south meadow at two this afternoon for training.”
Cadence went out to the pigsty, where Cynthia was waving a pitchfork around, looking furious.
“These pants are ruined,” she wailed to Alcott.
“Who wears silk pants to clean out a pigsty?” Alcott grumbled at his sister-in-law.
“Well, excuse me for not having any casual clothes! Oh, hello, Cadence,” she said, her expression deeply wounded. “I assume you came to laugh at us.”
“Nope,” Cadence said, and grabbed a shovel. “I came to help.”
“Not necessary. There’s no reason for you to even be here. At all,” Orion’s mother said huffily.
Cadence ignored her and set to work, ignoring the loathsome odors that perfumed the air and the squeal of the pigs that wandered in and out as she labored. Cynthia, Nikolai and Alcott worked silently, not acknowledging her presence. About half an hour later, her aunt and cousin came in.
“Wow, he’s making you clean out the pigsty? What a jerk,” Maude said.
“Right?” Cynthia agreed resentfully. “And he made Phoebe’s mother clean out the latrines this week.”
“And I thought our Dominus was a tyrant,” Maude said, grabbing a pitchfork.
“That is your father you’re speaking of, dear,” Aurelia said. She pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “But it’s true, he can be a bit of an ice-hole.”
“Ice-hole,” Maude snickered, and Cynthia started laughing too. Cadence kept her head down and shoveled. For the moment, nobody was trying to set anybody on fire, and she’d like to keep that going for as long as possible.
* * * * *
“I will never be able to dragon,” Cadence moaned after she’d tried for the fifth time to come up with a full-size snowball.
Her little puffs of frozen water were becoming smaller, not larger.
They were standing by a cluster of pine trees. Aurelia had created a snowfall that blanketed the surrounding area in wintry white, and Maude had coated the trees with ice. Meanwhile, Cadence was conjuring up snow marbles, not snowballs.
“I’ll be down to a single snowflake soon,” she groaned. “Why am I so lame?”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. It just takes time. You’re getting much better at going scaly,” Maude said to her.
“You’re being too nice to her,” Cynthia announced, strolling through the trees, her boots crunching in the snow. She’d changed out of her pigsty clothes and was again elegant and regal in appearance.
“What do you mean?” Maude demanded.
Cynthia turned to face her. “I hear that she actually managed to summon a halfway decent ice blast when Viola attacked her the other day. Well, halfway is probably too generous.”
“Hey.” Maude scowled at her. “Watch it.”
“Please,” Cynthia snorted. “Obviously her powers come out under duress. If she wants to access her inner dragon, assuming she even has one, she’s got to actually work for it. When our dragonlings are young, we push them off the top of a steep hill. We blast fire at them. We make them actually work at it. Maybe she’s just weak, Maude. Maybe you Cheat-hams just don’t produce strong dragons.”
“Watch what you say!”
“Or what?” Cynthia took a deep breath and blew out a stream of fire at Maude, who quickly countered it with an icy blast of air.
But Cynthia kept advancing towards her, and her flame got hotter and hotter. Sweat poured down Maude’s face.