Page 377 - The Grotesque Children's Book

Chapter 68.
The protection of dragons

Once she was in possession of a locket of poison-antidote, Bianca was happier and rosier
than she had been in many months. She was impatient for Zaccario to mix up more than nine
doses’ worth so she could stash them in more remote areas of the palaces, just in case. Little did
she know that Carola had spilled much of the antidote onto the floor when she had so
clandestinely pried open the locket that morning before returning to her Majesty’s jewel box. It
was the Realgar coloring in the antidote which had made Carola so sick; Realgar contains
arsenic. After Carola’s spill, there were no longer nine full doses in the locket, but only two or
three perhaps. Bianca would have worked herself into a frenzy again had she ever discovered
this fact.

Bianca grew impatient for her amulet, and the forty days passed like they were forty
years. However, one day Zaccario presented her with it. It was a dramatic red ruby-looking oval
stone, but a deeper red than any ruby; a rich red blood. It fairly throbbed with color. Zaccario
had gone in search of a jewelry maker who understood the intricate motions of the heavenly
bodies and who could locate a gold oval clasp-frame setting with a pedigree worthy of the
powerful stone. Zaccario said he had found an old female goldsmith who could read the various
aspects and auras emanating from stones. The woman found an oval setting which had once
been part of a Turkish queen’s ring. According to the goldsmith, the setting had quite
accidentally and coincidentally crossed the Mediterranean on the occasion of three separate full
moons, exactly one hundred years apart, in 1313, 1413 and 1513. The goldsmith explained that
the oval shape was actually something called a mandorla, like a halo which went around an
entire religious figure, rather than just the head. “The jewel fit into the mandorla as though the
two halves had found each other,” Zaccario said the old woman had remarked. Bianca thought it
looked like an eye, like a dragon’s eye, and she liked to imagine it could see as far as the
Mediterranean. With her amulet and her locket, Bianca began to feel safe again, and often
dreamt she was protected by dragons.

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