7 Laundry Day

  When the light came in through the windows, Sara sat up, ready to head to her private bathing area, but the look around the room reminded her that it was no longer a possibility.

  A few minutes later, she was staring at the last of the bread and decided that it would be better to eat it than let it go to waste. She might have been a princess, but she knew that food went bad if she left out too long. There were ways to preserve food, but that was something she didn’t know anything about. She added that to her list of skills that would be good to learn.

  She ate the bread and washed it down with the water that she had. Remembering David’s words about needing to fill the water trough before her chores she began to head out to fill it before she was called on to do something. However, it was at that moment that she heard the giant moving in the direction of the house.

  She was disappointed that she might not have a chance to fill the trough when she remembered that David had filled it. Relief filled Sara as she realized that she wouldn’t have to do that today.

  “Sari, it is laundry day. The good news is Draco does not wear clothes; the bad news is that mine make up for it.”

  Sara sighed and went outside to face the giant. As she suspected, he was carrying a load of clothes in his arms. One armload of laundry wouldn’t have been too bad except that the armload was a giant’s.

  Sara looked around, and David guessed.

  “Don’t know how to do this either?”

  Sara shook her head and said, “No.”

  David sighed. Then, a noise in the dragon’s strange language came from the cave.

  “Do not complain to me, you overgrown lizard, you are the person who decided that having a princess as a servant would be a great idea, not me.” David answered back.

  After the outburst from the day before, Sara was shocked when it sounded like laughter coming out of the cave and not the roar of an enraged dragon.

  “Before we get started on laundry, I think that breakfast is in order. If you get the eggs started, I will go get some more goat.”

  Sara had been told that gathering eggs and making breakfast would be required every day she worked, so she walked into the house and got the fire started. Once that was done, she got the basket she had used the day before and went out to get the eggs. Now that she knew what to expect, it didn’t take her long to get the eggs they needed, leaving some to hatch. On her way out, a rooster chased her away from the henhouse.

  Once the rooster went back to the hens, Sara studied what it looked like. “Watch it there,” She said to the offending rooster, “unless you want to be Draco’s next meal.”

  The rooster seemed to shake out its feathers as if challenging her. Sara didn’t know if it was, but unless another rooster decided to come after her, that one was going to be the dragon’s next meal.

  Sara had more eggs than she needed for their breakfast, and David told her that she could either keep them for the next day or put them in a jar and set them in the bottom of the spring to keep it cold or from going bad. He also warned her that if she wasn’t sure if the eggs were fresh, to crack them in a bowl by themselves and not to put them in with other eggs or on the fire. When she asked why, he said that if they were bad, she wouldn’t want to ruin the food she was working on.

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  Then he told her, “If you break a rotten egg into a cooking pan, they smell even worse than they do uncooked, and the smell will get everywhere in the house.”

  Sara believed him but wondered if a rotten egg could really be that bad. She would soon find out exactly how bad it was, and that David had understated it.

  After breakfast was cleaned up, David spent all morning showing Sara how to do the laundry. Sara was glad that David cleaned most of his own clothes. The only downside was the smell of the bleaching agent almost made her sick, not to mention the idea of how they made it.

  Once the laundry was done, she wanted nothing more than to get the smell off of her. However, her day was far from over.

  David took her to the far side of the valley to show her where the fruit trees grew. The trees were in bloom, but they got some of the wild vegetables and herbs that grew in the area. He also told her that there was mint near the house which could be used to make tea.

  David warned her about plants that would be poisonous or dangerous in some other way. Sara was sure that she couldn’t remember everything, but David told her that he would take her out again to test what she remembered.

  When they got back to the house, David showed her the side of the house she hadn’t looked at before and saw a door leading into a cellar under the house. David told her to open it and go down there and get dinner. Once Sara opened the door and went down it was easy for her to find the potatoes hanging in a bag. She grabbed them and took them out.

  As she prepared to go back out Sara examined the door she had come through and realized it was barely big enough for a normal-sized man. Since one look was enough to convince her that the giant could never get down in the cellar, and since Draco was bigger still, Sara wondered how the potatoes got down there in the first place.

  Did Draco and David have someone here before me, Sara asked herself. Sara would find out but that is another story.

  Before she could consider that further, David began instructing her on how to cook the tubers. He showed her what ones could be cooked and the ones that were only good for planting. Under the supervision of the giant who looked in through the door, Sara placed the good one next to the fire to bake and also explained how potatoes could be boiled for mashing or added to a soup.

  To Sara’s surprise, she found learning about cooking interesting and asked a lot of questions.

  When David had called an end to the day, Sara was glad. She was tired but also pleased with all she had learned.

  Sara grabbed a couple of buckets to fill with water and walked out of the house. David walked with her to the back of the house. As she walked past the trough, Sara reached down and found that David was correct; the water was warm enough to bathe in.

  As they reached the spring, David broke the silence, “Do you want to take this week’s day off tomorrow or wait another day?”

  Sara stopped and looked at the giant after filling the first bucket. She wanted to take the day off to look around the valley alone, but she also knew that she wanted to take the two days off together, no matter what the giant suggested.

  “I’ll wait for a couple of days, I think. What day of the week is it?” Sara thought it was the fourth day of the week but didn’t want to assume that David and Draco were on the same calendar.

  “Fourth Day,” David answered. “So, are you thinking of taking Sixth Day and Creators Day off together?"

  Sara nodded and reached down to grab her other bucket when Draco dropped in behind the house with a crash.

  Goats and chickens ran, but Draco ignored them and, in what Sara assumed was the dragon’s language, growled out something.

  David ran towards the dragon and said, “We have to go, we’ll probably be back in a day or two.”

  David jumped on Draco’s back, and then the dragon turned, and to Sara’s horror, his tail smacked into her bathing trough, spilling at least half the water.

  The dragon stared at the trough as if it had attacked him rather than him hitting it. Draco growled, then kicked it over, spilling the rest of the water onto the ground. The Dragon nodded his head, looking at Sara the whole time, then turned and launched into the air.

  Sara dropped her bucket and stomped out into the open and yelled after the dragon, “You did that on purpose.”

  There was no response but the flapping of the dragon’s wings.

  Sara did her best to clean herself without a bath, but when she went to bed that night, she could still smell the ammonia that she had used to clean the laundry. Every time she got a strong whiff, she remembered the look Draco gave her when he knocked over the water, she was planning to bathe in. She could see something in that look that was more than just him being petty but couldn’t figure it out.

  Thankfully, when she lay down on her bed, she fell asleep almost immediately. She slept all night, and it was unusually peaceful, undisturbed by dreams.