Griffen took his advice and went on a small tour of the facility. Everyone seemed to have his or her assigned tasks and was executing them confidently. With no experience, he was at a loss. He felt small and young and completely out of place walking past the partially finished floats, the knots of people talking, and the tables pushed against the walls. He had probably better leave.
He weaved his way between the committees and machine tools, smiling at everyone who met his eyes.
A voice rose above the screeching din. "It's got to be the flagon with the dragon."
Griffen spun on his heel.
"What?" he asked, not sure if he had heard correctly. "Who said that?"
"I did!" One of the younger men, Jacob, grinned at him from a card table behind the green dragon float. "Hey, Griffen, come on over."
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"We're ordering throws for the parade. You ought to be in on this, young dragon, since you're the king. Bobbie, did you say four thousand?" A tiny woman with pale skin and long black eyelashes nodded. Jacob nodded and noted tiny numbers next to an entry on the inevitable clipboard. Griffen sat down on a stool at the edge of the table. The surface was covered with hundreds of strings of beads. Shiny smooth beads, faceted beads, braided beads, twisted beads in metallic or plain white, some strings with large, ornamental beads, some with multiple strands or a pendant, such as a bottle opener or a flashlight. Griffen let the strings of beads flow through his hands like shining waterfalls. He couldn't stop playing with them. Neither could the others.
"And what about the specials?" asked a fat woman with brilliant green eyes in a tawny face surrounded by ochre hair.
"I have some numbers," said a slender man with hollow cheekbones. "The float captains want a few hanks each, but not too many. They're just too expensive."
"But they are amazing," said the second man. He held up a handful of strands for Griffen's inspection. Spaced between the gleaming metallic beads were five or seven large, shaped beads two inches across. "You'll probably want some for your float, too. We have dragon's-head necklaces, purple with green eyes, green with gold eyes, and gold with purple eyes. A few of the really fancy ones have LEDs inside, and the really, really fancy ones blink." He touched an invisible switch near the clasp of the necklace, and the dragons' eyes flashed on and off.
"I sure do," Griffen said, delighted. "I want some to keep, too."
"What do you say, then? Twenty hanks, forty?" Jacob asked. Griffen shrugged. Jacob eyed the other numbers on his page and made a notation. "Hey, you'll want to see these. We've also got doubloons, and those will have the king's head on one side, the theme on the other. Here's the proof copy." From his shirt pocket, he produced a plastic coin with a hollow-eyed man in profile. With surprise, Griffen recognized the image.
"That's me."
"Yep. We took it from a photo of you Etienne had." From the same pocket, Jacob brought out a photograph. Griffen recognized the room around him as the interior of the Irish bar. It could have been taken anytime within the last few months. "What do you think?" Griffen studied the plastic coin.
"I think . . . I look surprisingly dignified," Griffen said. Bobbie laughed. "You could really feed a guy's ego like that. But what about what I heard?" Griffen asked.
Jacob smiled. " 'The flagon with the dragon' . . ."
". . . 'Has the brew that is true,' " Griffen finished.
"Yes, indeed. You look plenty young to be a Danny Kaye fan, but we already knew you were something different. Isn't that just the perfect quote? We are the dragon krewe. We're ordering cups to throw as well as beads and doubloons. The cups'll have an imprint that goes around them, with our dragon on them, and it'll say, 'The brew that is true.' We'll tell people that to drink out of one of these is to give them health and long life." Griffen grinned. "We got you, I can just tell."
"You do," Griffen said. "Give me a bunch of those. However many you think is right for the duration of the parade."
By the time he was finished with the committee, he had put his name down for thousands of necklaces, doubloons, and cups. They would all have to be paid for by February, but Jacob agreed that since Griffen had just joined, he would be allowed to pay over time.
"The treasury can support it," Jacob said in an undertone, though it was unlikely that Callum could hear them over the noise. "Most of the people on the krewe are rich."
Griffen glanced at Etienne, whose pants hems were frayed at the heels. Jacob followed his glance.
"Yeah," he said. "Even the captain. He dresses like a lobsterman, but he inherited natural-gas contracts from his granddad. Didn't have much when he grew up, but he and his mom have a big place out on Lake Ponchartrain, as befits a proper lady dragon. Dragons tend to attract wealth. Even ones with less than a teaspoon of dragon blood."
"He's still a dragon," Griffen said, moved again to defend Etienne. "You guys wouldn't have a krewe to build floats for if not for him."
"Yeah, yeah," Jacob said hastily. "I'm not disregarding all he's done. But I can feel levels of power. I know where he falls in the pecking order, and that's way below everyone else."
"Power's not everything."
"Said the man with the biggest stash in the room," Jacob said. "You don't get it."
"Don't treat me like a kid," Griffen said.
"You are a kid. You're the youngest one here except for the children, and you're the most powerful. It's a defense mechanism. You ought to understand that."
That left a question unanswered in Griffen's mind. Mose and Jerome had always told him that dragons sought to conquer one another or sign on with one they perceived as more powerful. These all acted together, as human beings would do. It was unnatural, as he understood it. As the most powerful dragon in the room, he felt as if he needed to watch his back all the time.
"Hello, Griffen," Lucinda said, coming around the open mouth of the dragon. "Come on down and help construct or paint. It'll be a good example for these other youngsters that people still know how to work hard. Do you know how to apply papier-mache?"
"I haven't done any since I was in art class in grade school. We made Easter eggs out of balloons."
She smiled. "Then you know enough. Come and get your hands dirty."
Griffen held back. He glanced at the neatly dressed lieutenants talking to one another.
"I can't see them getting paste on their pin-striped suits," he said. Lucinda followed his eyes and smiled.
"You can't? Well, then, it'll be a revelation to you when you see them up to their elbows in buckets of flour and water," Lucinda said. "Let's you and I go and recruit some helpers."
Lucinda was more than persuasive. Very shortly, Griffen found himself squatting on the floor plastering tacky strips of newspaper around a chicken-wire armature representing an enormous snapdragon. As Lucinda had promised, the haughty executives abandoned their dignity and buckled down to help, just like the students, clerks, and homemakers all around them. It would have been normal but for the skyrockets of fire and streamers of light going on behind Griffen's eyes. The others couldn't have missed it. He all but blurted out the question.
"What is this feeling of power here? It's not just the people. It's like it's in the air."
Callum wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a streak of gray glue just under his hairline. "Have you ever made anything, young man? Anything physical?"
"Nothing except love or an inside straight," Griffen admitted. He pasted down a strip of newspaper and wiped it with his sponge."
"You ever heard how lions and tomcats go in and kill kittens that aren't theirs?"
"Yes."
"How do they know?"
"Well, I assume the male's scent is on them . . ." The others grinned at him, so Griffen thought about it harder. The males would not have had any contact with the kits since sperm met egg. "I guess not. I don't know."
Langford cleared his throat. "It's part of a dragon's power. When we make something, we transfer a touch of power to it. More. That's how we can tell it was ours. Usually, the residue is very subtle. Most dragons can't really feel it, and humans can almost never detect it. You're different. Your blood is stronger than ours. You seem to be able to sense very minor amounts of our power. If we had any doubts after your little demonstration, this would convince us you were either a sensitive human, a supernatural, or a very powerful dragon."
Griffen raised an eyebrow. "This was a phenomenon I hadn't come across yet."
"You will," Langford said.
"When we really enjoy making something, it is stronger yet," Callum told him. "When we deliberately imbue something with power, anyone can feel it, but it would knock you over. Even puny humans, nonsensitive humans, can feel it a little. It's one of the reasons that dragon-made items of power have been objects of desire by humankind for millennia. They want to possess them, whether or not they can wield them. Many can. Not as effectively as if they were dragons, of course. Whether or not they know what it does, they know there is something special about it. Objects made by dragons have been revered throughout all of human history."