A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent

TWENTY

In most cases I believe the phrase “tearing his hair out” is meant metaphorically, but I’m fairly certain I saw a few strands caught between Mr. Wilker’s fingers when he took them away from his head.

“Are you mad?” he demanded. I took the question as rhetorical, but he answered himself. “Of course you are. That much has been obvious since before we left Scirland. I knew it then; no sane woman would demand to be involved with this. But since you’ve gotten here—!”

“Once there’s been a quiet night or two, people will begin to accept it,” Jacob said. “Isabella is right; Astimir will certainly not come back. Not tonight.”

Mr. Wilker made an inarticulate noise of frustration. “He doesn’t have to. The villagers don’t want us here, and never have; now they know that all they must do to be rid of us is cause trouble tonight.”

Pleasure over my cleverness had been glowing warmly inside me; his words were like a bucket of cold water dashed over that flame. I had thought about Astimir. I had not thought about everyone else.

“Then we’ll just have to keep watch,” I said, trying to sound confident.

“We?” Mr. Wilker’s eyes were bloodshot. He had not gotten any rest the night before, I remembered; that might have some bearing on his volatility now.

I lifted my chin. “Yes, we. I am not too delicate to go a night without sleep. I will stand watch alone or with someone else; Dagmira might join me. Or Iljish. There are some people here sympathetic to us.”

From Jacob I heard a grim murmur of “Not many,” but I paid it no heed. “Science will triumph, Mr. Wilker. I will not be driven out of Drustanev by peasant superstition.”

His murmur was rather more audible than Jacob’s. “No, by peasant pitchforks and torches.” But apparently he considered the argument at an end, for he stormed out of the workroom. I wondered if I had won or lost.

Jacob sighed and dropped into a chair. After a moment, he asked, “How many bottles did you say he had?”

“Half a dozen.”

My husband shook his head. “Where in heaven did he get them?”

The bottles in question were with Lord Hilford and the mayor, but I remembered them well enough. “The writing on the labels was Chiavoran. Jacob, I’m wondering if the plan to drive us away was formed even before we came here.”

The specter of the missing Gritelkin hung over us, more ominous than ever. Jacob said, “Then why wait so long? Why not cause trouble as soon as we arrived?”

“We hadn’t been to the ruins yet. Astimir needed a justification for his haunting.”

“He could have invited you sooner, though.”

That was true. I thought back through our time in Drustanev. The invitation had come after my misadventure with the smugglers; perhaps it had something to do with them after all. They might have provided Astimir with the acid, though why they would have it on hand themselves, I could not guess. They had not killed me—but then, killing a Scirling gentlewoman would have brought a great deal of trouble down upon them. Scaring her off, on the other hand, would not. But why not threaten me then?

Too many questions. I fingered the firestone in my pocket. Acid. Smugglers. Rock-wyrm attacks. Gritelkin missing. This charade with “Zhagrit Mat.” The dragon graveyard. The ruins. I could not tell if we had too little data or too much; I was convinced at least some of the pieces belonged together, but I could not tell which ones, and they all stubbornly refused to form a clear picture.

I told myself to take one problem at a time. This is not always useful advice; one does not always have the leisure, and some problems are best tackled together. But at the moment, I could see no useful course of action except to make certain we were not driven out of Vystrana in the morning. That must come first.

And—once again, addressing the nearest problem first—it might be best if we all got a little sleep that afternoon, so as to be fresh for the night. (Mr. Wilker particularly.) I drew breath to say as much to Jacob, when a knock at the workroom door forestalled me.

Back home in Scirland, of course, we would have had servants to receive any visitors, inquire of their business, and then interrupt our conversation in as graceful a manner as possible. Here in Drustanev, we had Dagmira, Iljish, and our cook, whose name I had never learned. The first two were somewhere in the village, talking of Astimir’s treachery, and the cook came only twice a day. Jacob and I therefore found ourselves blinking at a total stranger, without the faintest clue who he was or why he had decided to walk into our house without invitation.

He was rather more finely dressed than your average Vystrani peasant. His heavy coat, hanging to the knees, was of fine wool, and the leather boots below shone beneath their dusting of dirt. It was a style of attire I had seen before, and as soon as I placed it, the words leapt from my mouth. “You’re one of the boyar’s men!”

The bow he executed looked foreign, to my inexperienced eye, and when he spoke even my ear could detect a different accent in his Vystrani. “I am Ruvin Danylovich Ledinsky, stolnik to the boyar, yes.” He glanced past me to Jacob. “You are one of the Scirling companions to the Earl of Hilford?”

Jacob gathered his wits and came forward. I did not mind a little more time to gather my own; my first, nonsensical thought was that this man—this stolnik, whatever that was—had come to evict us from Drustanev where the locals could not. “Yes, I’m Jacob Camherst, and this is my wife.”

This was not, I thought, the same man I had spied upon at the ruins, overseeing the smugglers’ work. Ledinsky was older than that fellow, with gray salted into his hair; the fur-trimmed cap the man at the ruins had worn might have concealed that, but I did not think so. Which removed, or at least weakened, one of the other possibilities for why he might be there.

“I come bearing a message from Iosif Abramovich Khirzoff,” Ledinksy said. “He regrets the unfriendly welcome he gave to your lord, which was a consequence of his surprise. Iosif Abramovich did not know Gritelkin was bringing such honored visitors to this village, and was displeased to learn his razesh had been so inconsiderate. But he wishes to make amends now. He invites all of your party to visit his hunting lodge and enjoy his hospitality.” A dubious glance cast around our workroom spoke volumes as to Ledinsky’s opinion of the low conditions in which we had lodged all this time.

Those low conditions had (mostly) ceased to bother me, but the prospect of a few nights in the boyar’s lodge did appeal. Time away from the hostility of the villagers—which I suspected would persist even after we had made our point regarding Zhagrit Mat—and a chance to put the matter of Astimir and the smugglers to Khirzoff; possibly even news of Gritelkin. When I glanced at Jacob, I saw him thinking much the same. “I will have to speak to Lord Hilford, of course,” he said, “but your master honors us with the invitation. When would he like us to come?”

“I have brought horses for you all,” Ledinsky said.

Neither of us understood right away. Jacob said, not quite believing, “You wish us to leave today?”

Ledinsky nodded. “The cook is preparing a feast in your honor.”

In our honor, perhaps—but this Vystrani boyar had some cheek, expecting Lord Hilford to leap at his command. I knew from Lord Hilford’s comments that the boyar class had many distinctions within it; where the Vystrani ones ranked, I did not precisely know, but given the client-state condition of Vystrana, I doubted it trumped the status of a Scirling earl. Jacob’s frown mirrored my own. “I will let Lord Hilford know,” he said, his tone hinting at cool disapproval.

Whether Ledinsky heard it or not, I could not tell. He said, “I will send a boy to help you pack your things,” and bowed himself out of the room.

Jacob held up a cautioning hand when I would have spoken. “You should fetch Dagmira and Iljish; we’ll want them with us, at least for the journey there. No doubt Khirzoff has servants of his own to wait on us once we’re arrived. I’ll send Wilker back in, and go tell Hilford.”

Very well; I would not say what I thought of such a peremptory invitation. If we were going to tell Ledinsky to wait, it would be better coming from the earl.

In the meantime, I was not going to let some stranger pack our things. I hurried outside and saw Dagmira in the distance, arguing with two women at their front gate. Cupping my hands around my mouth, I called her name, and beckoned for her to come. “Fetch your brother,” I said with a sigh as she drew near. “It seems we may be guests of the boyar for a few days.”

We did not refuse the invitation. Urjash Mazhustin had, it seemed, had quite enough of the trouble we were causing in his heretofore quiet village, be it supernatural or otherwise. He was not quite vexed enough to run us out of town, but when presented with such an ideal chance to be rid of us for a few days, he spoke volubly in favor.

Ledinsky seemed to think we could depart immediately, but of course it was not so easy. The lodge lay three days’ ride away, even on horseback; the beasts had little advantage over donkeys or our own feet, along such tracks as the mountains afforded. We would need to pack clothes for that journey, and then better clothes for our time at the boyar’s lodge, and of course the stolnik was unhelpful as to how long that time might be. “It will depend on his master’s pleasure,” Lord Hilford said, resigned. “Which might be anything from a day to a month.”

“We haven’t the clothes with us to look fine for a month,” I said, “even with laundry. But I will do what I can. At a minimum, I suppose we want enough to be respectable for a week; that will give enough time for someone to come back here and fetch the remainder, if it falls out such that we stay there longer.” I did not like the thought of staying there longer; the lodge was quite in the opposite direction from the cavern graveyard, which we’d had no chance to show to the other two men.

The panniers on Ledinsky’s horses were not enough to hold everything we wished to bring. But he had not brought horses for Dagmira and Iljish, either; they would have to ride donkeys, and so we might as well bring a third for the remainder of our baggage. Sorting all of this took the better part of what remained of the day, with the stolnik frowning impatiently over us. When it became apparent that we would not be able to make any distance worth mentioning, Lord Hilford insisted we stay in Drustanev one more night.

Jacob stepped aside with the earl and asked quietly, “What will that mean for our situation here?”

Lord Hilford shrugged, looking philosophical. “We may as well sleep, if we can. Mazhustin was quite adamant that we would not set even a toe beyond our door tonight; he and a few of his fellows will keep their own watch. They’ll do a better job of it than we could, anyway.”

“If none of them decide they’d rather have us gone.”

“The mayor is a fair-minded man,” Lord Hilford said, unperturbed. “He admitted, when I put it to him, that the local children dare each other to visit those ruins all the time. They may not want to consider that Astimir would fake such a thing, being that he’s one of their own—but if this is a trick, then Mazhustin is determined to pillory whoever is responsible.”

With that, we had to be content. And it seemed to suffice, at least for one night, for when we rose the next morning, there were no new disturbances to report. So it was, with a feeling of vindication, that we rode to meet Iosif Abramovich Khirzoff.

TWENTY-ONE

The term “hunting lodge” had led me to expect something small and on the rustic side: the sort of place a gentleman or peer might retire for a week or two of shooting before returning to the comforts of a less isolated residence.

Whatever else might be said of Khirzoff’s lodge, it was not small.

The fence that surrounded it was no wattle-and-daub affair, but sturdy planks of wood, with a shingled roof over the gateway, which had doors sized to admit both carts and people on foot. For our distinguished party, the larger was unbarred and swung open, admitting us to the spacious courtyard beyond.

Above us reared a three-story dwelling of roughly dressed stone walls that, as Mr. Wilker muttered under his breath, might have been dropped there by a dragon migrating from Bulskevo. I had little eye for such things, but the crude scallops of decorative woodwork along the edges of the roof and the octagonal bay at one end certainly resembled nothing I had seen in Drustanev. The place would have been charmingly rustic, were it not for an unpleasant smell in the air. I hoped the odor did not originate in the kitchens, or the promised feast would be difficult to choke down.

Someone must have been keeping watch for our arrival, as a man stood on the steps of the lodge, ready to greet us. It took no great deductive mind to guess that this was Khirzoff himself. His knee-length coat was of imported silk, and held more embroidery than all of his followers’ clothing combined. The man beneath all that splendor I judged to be about fifty or fifty-five, with a beard gone mostly grey springing magnificently from his jaw.

He remained at his post while we dismounted from our horses, but spread his arms wide and said in a voice that boomed across the courtyard, “Welcome, honored guests, welcome!”

To my surprise, he spoke in Chiavoran. That country’s favorable trade position in Anthiope has made its language known to many, of course, and all within our party spoke it more fluently than we did Vystrani. (Also, as I later learned, few of the boyars of Vystrana actually speak the language of their own subjects; they hold instead to Bulskoi, the language of the tsar, relying on underlings to communicate with the locals, and in this Khirzoff was no exception.) But I suspected the reason for that choice stood at his right hand: a man whose olive complexion and manner of dress marked him as Chiavoran himself. This must be his scholar friend.

Taking his cue from this, the earl returned the greeting in kind. “We are honored to be welcomed in your home, Iosif Abramovich,” Lord Hilford said, climbing the stairs. He could not suppress a wince as he went; even with the fine tent Ledinsky supplied, the journey had taken its toll on the man’s aching joints. “I am Maxwell Oscott, Earl of Hilford.” He introduced each of us in turn. I suffered Khirzoff to kiss both of my cheeks in the Bulskoi manner, wishing he had forgone the friendly gesture of greeting us as we arrived in favor of the more civilized Scirling practice of allowing guests to freshen themselves briefly first. There was sap in my hair where a tree branch had knocked my bonnet askew.

Our host then introduced us to his friend. Gaetano Rossi bowed over my hand with perfunctory courtesy, for which I was grateful; my mind had chosen the most inopportune moment to remind me of my facetious comments to Jacob back home, about Chiavoran dancing girls.

“But come, it is late,” Khirzoff said, when the introductions were done. “I have servants waiting for you inside; you may send your peasants on their way.”

It was, I think, the dismissive manner in which he delivered those words that raised my hackles. Dagmira might have been a terrible excuse for a lady’s maid, but I was suddenly determined not to be parted from her. Had anyone demanded a rationale from me, I would have said I saw no sign there were any other women at this hunting lodge. Khirzoff was a widower, according to Ledinsky, with two sons both grown and trying to curry favor in the tsar’s court, and of course he could not possibly have fetched anyone in time for our arrival. If I was going to have a ham-handed Vystrani woman doing up my buttons, at least it would be the ham-handed woman I knew, rather than a stranger.

But my response was not rational. I simply did not like the fact that he was attempting to separate us from Dagmira and Iljish. I only barely managed to avoid saying so outright, which would have been unpardonably rude. I resorted instead to a silly caricature of some women I had known at home. “Oh, I could not possibly be without Dagmara,” I said, deliberately erring on her name. “She’s been my only companion all this time; we’ve come to know each other quite well. I would feel quite lost without her. And of course her brother must stay, too…” I let that trail off, gesturing vaguely in Iljish’s direction in a manner calculated to suggest that I had forgotten his name entirely.

(Oddly, although I have grown more liberal-minded with time, as my travels brought me into contact with many strangenesses to which I had no choice but to adapt, on this one point I have instead grown more inflexible. As a young woman I was willing to be thought quite brainless when it suited my purposes, for that was, all too often, the assumption of those around me. The more I encountered such assumptions, though, the less patience I had for them, and the more assertive—some would say “unpleasantly opinionated”—I became. At that tender age, however, I had no compunctions about behaving in a manner my current self would smack silly.)

Jacob gave me a peculiar look, which I hoped the boyar did not see. What reports the man had of me I did not know, but any quick summary of my activities in Vystrana could well make me look fluff-brained. (The harmless sort of fluff-brained, I mean; not the sort I actually was.) I thought I saw Khirzoff’s lip curl in disdain as he looked over our two companions, but the concealing mass of his beard and mustache made it hard to be sure. “Very well,” he said at last, not quite as graciously. “Rusha will find a place for them.”

Lord Hilford had tried to coach us on the journey regarding the subtleties of Bulskoi names, but it still took me a moment to realize that “Rusha” must be our guide, Ledinsky—a diminutive of “Ruvin.” He gestured for Dagmira and Iljish to follow him. In the meanwhile, two of Khirzoff’s men hurried to open the doors of the lodge, and those of our party who were not servants went inside.

We were shown to our rooms—one apiece for the earl and Mr. Wilker, and a shared room for myself and Jacob. The chief extravagance of this place seemed to be the abundance of chambers, and the willingness to squander wood in heating them; our bed was certainly an improvement over our accomodation in Gritelkin’s house, but nothing on the comforts of a Scirling mattress, and the decorations were scanty. The serving boy who brought up a basin of water spoke no Chiavoran, and either lacked equally in Vystrani or was afraid of me; he just shrugged at my question about Dagmira and hurried out of the room.

“Why do you want her?” Jacob asked, once we were alone. “I thought you detested the girl.”

“Less than I used to, and besides, it’s a friendly sort of detestation,” I said. “It’s just—” I lowered my voice. Inside, the lodge was less charmingly rustic, more grim and dark. I had, at Manda Lewis’s insistence, once read The Terrible Thirst of Var Kolak. The terribleness of that novel lies more in the overwrought prose than the monster Var Kolak, but standing in this place, I understood at last what had inspired Mr. Wallace’s pen. “We have few enough friends in this place, and I don’t think Khirzoff is one of them.”

I expected Jacob to chide me out of that view; it was easy to imagine my uneasiness a simple fancy, brought on by the isolation. But Jacob nodded, and answered in the same low tone. “We may be his guests, but I don’t think we’re welcome. The question is, why did he invite us here?”

I had no answer. We washed our faces in the cold water and went down for supper with the boyar. Gaetano Rossi was not present, and after the first course had been laid—a style of service which, I reflected, we had acquired from the Bulskoi in the first place—Lord Hilford asked after the man.

“He is occupied with his work,” Khirzoff said, attacking his soup as if he, not we, had been riding for three days.

“Work?” Lord Hilford repeated, with an inquiring tone. “He is not here for leisure, then?”

Was it my imagination, or did Khirzoff hesitate? It might only have been that the slice of beet in his spoon was too large and overbalanced back into the bowl. He cut it with the edge of the spoon and said, “Leisure, yes, but we have been hunting. The preservation of our trophies is his task.”

The conversation went on to bear, wolf, and other game, while I listened in silence. A young lady, of course, could not be expected to take much interest in such talk, but in truth I was glad for the chance to observe. Khirzoff’s friendliness and good cheer was distinctly forced, I thought. It might be explained away by saying his razesh had not warned him sufficiently about us; now the boyar felt obligated to play host, against his own wishes. But my uneasiness grew.

Khirzoff did pause long enough to assure us that this was not the promised feast; that would come the following night. I wondered if it would be an improvement over what we faced now. Our dishes were odd, as if the cook were trying too hard, or unsure of his work. He did not stint on expensive spices—I could not even recognize some of them—but the application was peculiar and sometimes less than successful, as with the venison dyed a most off-putting shade by aggressive use of turmeric. I left most of it on my plate, politeness be damned.

Lord Hilford did tell the boyar of our “supernatural” difficulties in Drustanev, and their source. “You say the lad ran?” Khirzoff said, and frowned through his beard. “My men will hunt him down. Or he will go back to his village; either way, we will find him.”

I was hardly well-disposed toward Astimir after everything he had done to disrupt our work, but I found myself hoping the young man was not taken up by Khirzoff’s followers. It sounded as if his punishment might be harsher than I would wish.

From his seat across the table from me, Jacob said, “I suppose there hasn’t been time yet to find traces of Jindrik Gritelkin.”

He could count the days as well as I could; the boyar’s men could scarcely have returned yet, even if they found the man almost immediately. Ledinsky must have been sent to Drustanev practically on Lord Hilford’s heels. No, I thought—my husband had spoken simply to watch Khirzoff’s reaction.

The man’s lips thinned inside his beard. “No, there has not.”

Gritelkin was supposed to be this man’s agent. Even if his primary duty was to collect the village taxes twice a year—which was the description Lord Hilford had given of a razesh—surely his title meant something. “I’m astonished the villagers did not send to you when Gritelkin went missing.”

The boyar snorted, picking up his glass of wine. “Likely they got drunk in celebration. They hate Gritelkin there, you know. The razeshi are rarely liked, but every time he came to me with the taxes, more complaints.”

By the expressions around the table, my companions’ thoughts were the same as mine. We had heard nothing of such conflict, and yet, it explained a great deal—including the general miasma of hostility that had surrounded us since our first moments in Drustanev. Living in the house of the hated razesh, expecting him to be our local guide, must have tarred us with his brush.

I wondered how much of that had been due to Gritelkin himself. As I had told the men, village gossip had made it clear that Khirzoff himself was not much liked, either. Few of the Vystrani boyars were; they were Bulskoi interlopers, reminders of Vystrana’s subject status. But Khirzoff made no attempt to hide his own disdain for the villagers of Drustanev. Everything about his establishment, even here at this summer hunting lodge, was Bulskoi, with no concessions to local habits.

Gritelkin, though… his was a Vystrani name. How did that figure into this web of tension?

“We will speak more of it tomorrow,” Khirzoff said, rising from the table. “And also of what you have been doing here, this research of yours. The servants will show you to your rooms.”

He did not even offer brandy as an after-meal courtesy. Lord Hilford murmured to Jacob and Mr. Wilker, “I have some in my pack,” and the men went off to cleanse their palates.

I found Dagmira in my room, turning down the covers, scowling fit to light the bed on fire. I had meant to ask her for sooner, but everything from the mob onward had distracted me. I wondered how badly I would regret that delay. “Tell me about Gritelkin. Your people don’t like him, I’m told.”

I received a glare of the sort that told me I was prying into village business, where I did not belong; but Dagmira answered me nonetheless. “Why should we?” she muttered, keeping her voice low, as if she, too, felt the oppressive weight of this place. “He made himself the boyar’s creature. Too much reading put ideas in his head; he said it would be better for Drustanev if he was razesh. But he was just as bad as the one before him.”

I worked through this with lamentable slowness, hearing what she did not say. “Was Gritelkin born in Drustanev?”

“Of course,” she said, once again filled with scorn for my ignorance.

Had Lord Hilford ever mentioned that? He’d called Drustanev Gritelkin’s village, but I had assumed the association a political one. A Vystrani man, somehow positioning himself as the boyar’s administrator, with grand dreams of benefiting his village. It made sense; a local man would be more sensitive to local issues, more willing to advocate on their behalf to the foreign overlord. But it had done no good—no wonder, with Khirzoff as he was—and worse, it had rebounded to ill; the people of Drustanev felt betrayed by his failure. It was truly unfortunate that Lord Hilford had chosen this of all places to conduct our research.

It raised an unpleasant specter in my mind. “Dagmira—would anyone kill Gritelkin? Anyone in Drustanev, I mean.”

For once, her fury came as a relief. “What do you think we are? Just because Astimir is an idiot, playing those tricks—but you’re outsiders; half the village would say you deserved it. If he hadn’t been scaring us, too.”

Again, I had to listen to what she did not say. “Gritelkin was not an outsider, then. Even though he worked for the boyar.” I paced around the small room, the spring of my mind wound too tightly for me to rest, even though my body was tired. “We’re fair certain he’s dead, Dagmira. He’s been missing for too long, and—there’s just too much going on here. What about the smugglers? They’re outsiders, Stauleren; have they been known to kill people?”

“No,” she said, but the word came out uneasily. Enough strange things had been happening that I could understand why.

Lord Hilford had told me that a scientist must never reason ahead of his data. He thought the dragons had done it, and maybe they had; I knew well that it was my own partisan inclinations that made me not want to believe it. But there was another prospect in my mind, growing stronger each time another possibility was eliminated or reduced. “Would the boyar have any reason to kill him?”

Dagmira’s response was incredulous. “Why would he?”

“Gritelkin claimed he’d made arrangements for us to visit, but it doesn’t seem to have been true. Khirzoff isn’t happy we’re here.” That was hardly motivation for murder, though. My thoughts progressed further. “And Gritelkin sent a message saying it was a bad time to come. What if he meant more than the dragon attacks?”

“If the boyar didn’t want you here,” she said, “he could just order you to leave.”

That was true. However, its being true did not rule out other factors that might make Khirzoff reluctant to send us away. I just could not imagine what those might be.

I must have paced for some time without speaking, because Dagmira gave me a pointed attempt at a curtsey. “Do you need anything else?”

“Oh, don’t be like that, Dagmira,” I said, distracted. “I wanted you here because something about this place sets me on edge, and I trust you. But no, I don’t need anything else; rest well, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

She kissed my hands and went out. I lay down in bed, but it was a long time before I managed to sleep.

TWENTY-TWO

The next morning, as I went in search of breakfast, I encountered Rossi on the ground floor, emerging from some kind of cellar. He gave me an unfriendly look, though I nodded a polite good morning to him. “Will you be joining us on our ride today?” I asked, for Khirzoff had made mention of an excursion the night before.

“No,” Rossi said curtly. “I have work to do.”

“Yes, so the boyar said. Taxidermy.” It no doubt accounted for the unpleasant smell that wafted along with Rossi. “Would you be so kind as to show me where breakfast is laid?”

I asked mostly to annoy him; breakfast, given the layout of this lodge, would be in the same room where we had taken our supper the night before, but I wished to make him behave like a gentleman. As the words left my mouth, though—the Chiavoran words—a thought came to mind that jolted me where I stood.

The bottles of acid had been labeled in Chiavoran.

Under most circumstances, I would call it meaningless coincidence. Drustanev lay on the southern side of the mountains, facing into Chiavora; much of their trade went across that border. Naturally any such exotic thing would be brought into Vystrana from the south. And Rossi’s nationality could hardly be considered proof of guilt.

Except that the man was also, by reports, a scholar of some kind. He might be doing taxidermy for the boyar—but that required a knowledge of chemicals.

Had Astimir’s sulfuric acid ridden with us in the carts from Sanverio, destined for the boyar’s lodge?

I ate very little breakfast, sorting rapidly through the details of this possibility. Khirzoff discovered the Scirling visitors to Drustanev were natural historians—from the villagers? Or from the smugglers? Chatzkel’s men were working with at least one minion of the boyar; they, wishing not to rouse curiosity by ordering us away, arranged the charade with Astimir, intending that it should cause us to be driven out. Or Rossi might have done that, but he was not a known figure in the village. When it failed—no, he sent Ledinsky before we discovered Astimir’s perfidy. When Lord Hilford came inquiring into Gritelkin’s disappearance, then. At that point, Iosif Abramovich Khirzoff resolved to deal with us more directly.

I had no proof, but I had more than enough suspicion to make me very worried indeed. The only thing preventing worry from becoming outright panic was the unlikelihood of Khirzoff wishing us dead. If that were the case, I reasoned, Ledinsky could have done away with us any time those three days from Drustanev, or upon our arrival here.

It was not much to comfort myself with as we rode out on the boyar’s horses, around mid-morning. Khirzoff’s own mount was a stallion that he controlled with a hard grip, but the rest of the horseflesh was uninspiring; my own gelding made heavy weather of some of the slopes, lurching up or down them such that a lesser rider might have lost her seat. As it was, I found myself glad my divided skirts permitted me to sit astride.

I feigned difficulty, though, so as to draw Jacob to my side. In brief snatches as he steadied me or chivvied my horse on, I related my fears. I had no sooner finished than Mr. Wilker reined in at our side. He nodded toward Lord Hilford and Khirzoff, who were then turning their horses to continue on through a stand of fir, and spoke to Jacob in quiet Scirling. “I don’t like it.”

“Like what?” Jacob asked. He and I had kept toward the back, followed at a discreet distance by one of the boyar’s men, but my shoulders tensed, fearing we made a suspicious group.

“He’s been asking endless questions about our research. But I don’t think he’s interested in it,” Mr. Wilker said. “The earl is being his usual self—you know, holding back most of it because he hasn’t yet presented to the Colloquium, but hinting all over the place that we’ve discovered incredible things. And yet, Khirzoff doesn’t show the slightest bit of intellectual curiosity.”

I knew what Mr. Wilker meant about holding back. Lord Hilford had told us a lengthy story once about von Grabsteil, the fellow who had developed the theory of geologic uniformitarianism; he unwisely shared it with a like-minded colleague before he was ready to make public his conclusions, and that colleague, someone-or-another Boevers, had published a book on the topic first. It was a terrible feud at the time, though considered old history by the time I was a young woman, and of course it’s all but forgotten now; its effect, however, lingered in the paranoia of many scientists, who feared others would steal a march on them.

Frowning, Jacob said, “I thought you said he’s been asking ‘endless questions.’”

“He has,” Mr. Wilker replied, frustrated. “But—oh, Khirzoff isn’t a scholar; surely you’ve gathered that. I don’t think he cares in the least about the science. He only wants to know what we’ve been doing.”

Jacob and I exchanged worried looks. “I thought it had to do with the smugglers,” I said, even more quietly than before. “But could it somehow be related to our research?”

Mr. Wilker’s gaze sharpened. “What do you mean?”

I did not want to draw attention. Nodding to Jacob, I prodded my horse forward, and let him give Mr. Wilker a précis of our suspicions—even more abbreviated than the one I had given Jacob, by the rapidity with which it concluded. Mr. Wilker’s horse, choosing its path, detoured to the side of me, and the gentleman and I met each other’s gazes.

That wordless moment ended the minor war between us that had waged since I was added to the expedition back in Scirland. If I was right—if the boyar had killed his own razesh for uncovering something he should not, and it had anything to do with our own work—then the points of friction between us were trivialities, not worth so much as another second of our time. Mr. Wilker was not certain I was right, and neither was I; but the possibility was too grave to dismiss for lack of certainty.

The three of us were in accord, then. It only remained to inform Lord Hilford, and to devise some response. I left the former to the gentlemen, while all three of us considered the latter. Soon, however, Khirzoff and the others began hunting, bringing down several pheasants for our feast that night, and the crack of the rifles only added to my tension. How easy would it be for someone to suffer an “accident” out here? I flinched when Lord Hilford fired without success at a fleeing bird, and found myself wishing the pheasant success in escaping.

Behind the pheasant’s line of flight, a little distance above us, a stony promontory stirred.

With menacing and predatory slowness, it expanded to either side; and because I had been thinking of the pheasant and its madly flapping wings, my first reaction was—hard though it may be to believe—to think anatomically, watching how the outer “fingers” of the wing spread first, before the upper structure stretched out to catch the air.

Then, belatedly, the rest of my mind pointed out that a dragon was about to stoop upon us.

I cried out a warning, all the more frantic for being delayed. Two of Khirzoff’s men brought their guns to bear on the looming figure, but held their shots until it came into closer range. My gelding shied: he might not have been born to the mountains, but he recognized the approach of this predator just the same. I swiftly weighed the likely outcome if I were on his back, and flung myself from the saddle, diving for cover in a thick stand of trees.

Because of that action, I failed to see what ensued; I could only hear and feel. Several shots rang out. By the cursing that followed, they had done no good. A shriek from above then heralded the dragon’s attack; branches snapped like kindling as it tried to seize its prey, but I heard no cries to suggest that it had met with any better luck. Khirzoff bellowed orders in Bulskoi, probably for his men to keep shooting—and then a gust of wind raked through my pitiful cover, bringing with it a shower of needle-sharp ice fragments.

If you must be the victim of a dragon’s extraordinary breath, I recommend the rock-wyrm. Its ice shards are capable of cutting the skin, but not deeply; the chief danger lies in the body’s instinct to curl up tight against the sudden, bone-aching cold. This renders one more vulnerable to the dragon’s subsequent dive.

Further gunshots told me that at least some of the men were still in a position to defend us. I forced my reluctant body to uncurl and peered out above a fallen branch. Jacob was alive—I sucked in a great gasp of relief—and there were Mr. Wilker and Lord Hilford; after them I spotted Khirzoff and his two men. All seemed intact, and one final volley of shots brought a cry from above that might have been either frustration or pain. Whichever it was, it seemed to persuade the dragon to seek easier prey, for after a few tense moments, we emerged from cover.

All our horses had scattered, with the exception of the boyar’s stallion; for a wonder, none had broken their legs or necks, though Jacob’s mount had gone lame. My idiot gelding surprised me by being perfectly fine, and I patted his neck soothingly. He might not have been pleasant to ride, but I was glad he had not been killed.

Khirzoff was spitting words in Bulskoi that I doubted were fit for a lady’s ears. Lord Hilford asked him a question in the same tongue, and got a curt answer. Translating for us, the earl said, “This isn’t the first attack they’ve seen, of course. He’s quite vexed they failed to bring the beast down, though for my own part, I feel it’s just as well. We haven’t any of our equipment with us; such observations as we could make would hardly be worth the effort.”

One of the Bulskoi men gave Jacob his horse, and led the lamed one on foot; it seemed we were going back to the lodge. Though I dreaded the place, I would be glad to have a roof over my head, concealing me from a dragon’s gaze.

The beast had done me the service, though, of breaking my thoughts away from fears of conspiracy, toward other matters of equal—or perhaps greater—importance. Sotto voce to my husband, and in Scirling so the foreigners would not understand, I said, “Could it be the gunshots roused the dragon to such fury? It did not stir until after Lord Hilford had fired.”

“As an immediate cause, perhaps,” Jacob mused, glancing back at the place where the rock-wyrm had been napping. “But if you mean an ultimate cause for the attacks, I doubt it. The locals shoot game all the time. If that upset the dragons, these incidents would be a constant thing, all over Vystrana.”

True—and yet, one of our drivers had shot at a wolf not long before the attack on the road. Iljish had been shooting rabbits. Even the boy who brought me the sample of skin had said he and his father were hunting deer. It was not enough to constitute proof; as Jacob said, there were many other shots fired in this region, and not all of them brought down draconic wrath. It was, however, the closest thing to a common factor we had observed, and might be significant.

Back at the lodge, we had little opportunity to speak privately. Mr. Wilker must have managed to say something to Lord Hilford, though, because shortly before supper, Jacob conveyed a message to me. “We’ll look for an excuse to leave. If there is a danger, though, that may provoke him. For now, we stay.”

My first instinct was to protest. I had spent the entire afternoon dwelling more and more obsessively on my desire to escape this place; to have that prospect drawn back felt cruelly unfair. And if there were danger, should we not leave sooner? Yet I immediately saw Jacob’s point about provocation. So far, Khirzoff had offered no violence to us. The violence I suspected him of, moreover, was purely theoretical.

I am—and was, even then—a scientist. When I find myself with an uncertain theory, my impulse is to gather evidence that will prove or disprove it.

Jacob is capable of sleeping under any circumstances; I am not. I lay awake quite late that night, and finally could endure the uncertainty no longer. Moving quietly, I rose and stuffed myself into the most easily donned of my dresses, tucking my notebook into my pocket. Working by touch alone, I located the candle and matches at the bedside, which I would light once I was safely away. Then I lifted the latch on the bedroom door and stepped out into the corridor.

Where I promptly fell over something on the floor. It was a soft-but-bony something, and it swore as I kneed it in the stomach; the voice was Dagmira’s. Extricating myself from the girl and her blankets, and wondering if my heart was going to pound its way right out of my rib cage, I hissed, “What in Heaven are you doing there?”

“Sleeping—or trying to,” Dagmira hissed back. I scrambled to my feet and dragged the bedroom door shut before we could wake Jacob. By the time that was done, I understood. For all my airs about needing “Dagmara,” I had not asked where she and Iljish were being housed. It seemed that Khirzoff had no room for them, or else was fond of the old ways, where a servant slept outside his master’s door, or at the foot of his bed. This gave me entirely new reasons to detest the man.

Dagmira, for her own part, quite rightly demanded to know what I was doing. “Snooping,” I said. “Will you help me?”

She knew me well enough by then to take my bluntness and audacity in stride. We collected the fallen candle and matches and went downstairs, where we discovered that despite the late hour—I judged it to be midnight, or nearly so—someone else was also awake. We heard noises from the vicinity of the kitchen, and stole quietly in the other direction, toward the cellar door from which Rossi had emerged that morning.

It proved to be locked. I lit the candle and examined the latch, unwilling to be thwarted so easily. From what I could see, the lock was of a simple sort; the key acted to pivot a narrow bar on the other side. The gap was just large enough to admit the cover of my faithful notebook. With nary a tinge of remorse, I tore the cover off, and with its length was able to reach through and lift the bar, allowing the door to swing open.

Stairs led downward, into a veritable sink of Rossi’s distinctive and unpleasant odor. Dagmira followed me with the candle, its light bobbing and dancing with each step. And then, when we reached the bottom, the flame reflected off a hundred glassy surfaces.

The cellar was no taxidermist’s workshop. It was a chemical laboratory, the likes of which I had never before seen, and have only seen since on the premises of a university. I lacked the proper names for most of the things I saw: bottles and beakers and retorts, rubber tubing and large, shallow tubs. Poor judge of such things though I was, the entire array must have cost a fortune, in transport costs alone.

Dagmira touched the candle flames to a pair of lamps, brightening the room so I could see further. The light played over a well-used notebook on the table, crates of chemicals underneath. I knew their labels would be familiar before I even looked: Chiavoran make, most of the names unknown to me, but the sulfuric acid immediately recognizable. So Astimir had indeed gotten it from here. But why?

The answer, or at least part of it, lay at the far end of the room.

There was no question of mistaking the bones for ursine or lupine. I had drawn their like in the open air, hurrying for fear that they would disintegrate before I could record all the details. I had seen mineral-encrusted samples preserved by some trick of chemistry in the great cavern near Drustanev. Here they lay in an enormous pile: uncounted numbers, far too many to come from a single beast, not with that stack of femurs against the wall.

Dragon bones. Processed in this laboratory so that they would not break down—my breath stopped at the thought. With what Rossi had developed, we could study them with vastly greater accuracy; we could answer mysteries of anatomy and osteology that had puzzled dragon naturalists since the founding of the field.

But he did not want them for study; of that, I was sure. Had he intended to sell them to collectors, he would have kept each individual’s skeleton separate, and he would have preserved all the bones. I saw none of the smaller, more irregular components, and only one skull, placed atop a table in the manner of a trophy. The rest were roughly sorted, and they were long bones all: femurs and humeri and great, curving ribs.

My hand trembled as I reached out and picked up a rib. Even in those days, with my limited experience of animal physiology, I marked the extraordinary lightness of the thing. It was necessary; the weight of ordinary bone would never have allowed something so large as a dragon to fly. And where the bones of birds were delicate, these were tremendously robust for their thickness, or they would have collapsed under the burden of muscles and organs. Acting on sudden suspicion, I gripped the rib and tried to snap it across my knee. It did not give.

Dragon bones, perfectly preserved, as if they were still within the body of their dragon.

How many had Rossi and Khirzoff killed, to achieve this success?

Behind me, I heard Dagmira gasp. It broke me from my stunned contemplation of the bones. I turned and found her standing, candle holder almost slipping from her nerveless fingers, staring into the palm of her other hand, where something small gleamed.

I went quickly to her side. “What is it?”

Wordlessly, she extended her hand to me. The object was a ring: a small, cheaply made signet. The emblem, when I examined it, bore words abbreviated in a manner I recognized as Chiavoran. In a voice made tight with fury, Dagmira said, “That is Jindrik’s ring.”

Gritelkin. “You are sure?”

“That is the school he went to, in Chiavora, after he ran away from Drustanev.”

It did look like a university ring. And when I turned it over in my fingers, I found letters engraved on the underside of the face: J.G. Not Rossi’s own ring, then. It was proof enough.

We had to leave the lodge as soon as possible. All of us.

But when I slipped the ring over my thumb and turned with Dagmira to go, we found a new light descending the stairs. A moment later, it emerged into the cellar, and it was borne in Gaetano Rossi’s hand.

His surprise, I think, was for finding two women in his laboratory. Our lights would have long since given away that someone was prying about in his things. I wondered, briefly, whom he had expected. Jacob? Lord Hilford?

In his other hand he carried a plate of sausage, cheese, and bread. A midnight snack, I supposed, to fortify him in his work. He laid it down atop his notebook, not taking his eyes off us, and then said, “Well. What do I do with you two?”

He spoke Chiavoran, of course, which Dagmira would not understand. I imagined she could make out his tone well enough, though: speculative and threatening. Licking my lips, I answered in his own tongue, hoping to flatter our way out of this cellar. “Your work is remarkable. Men have tried to preserve dragon bone before, but so far as I know, you’re the first to succeed. It’s a tremendous discovery for science.”

Rossi dismissed that last word with a sneer. “Science is for withered-up old men in dusty rooms. We have better plans for those bones. Stronger than wood, and lighter than steel; what could we not do with that?”

It was not at all what I had expected him to say. “You—you are talking about industry?”

“I’m talking about wealth,” he said. “And power. The nations of the world already squabble over iron; that will only grow worse with time. The man who can offer them an alternative will be able to name his price.”

Despite the circumstances—which should have held my attention very firmly indeed—I could not stop my mind from leaping to consider Rossi’s point. Stronger than wood and lighter than steel, yes; as braces or struts, dragonbone would be worth—well, far more than its weight in gold. But you could not build an engine out of it, not by riveting ribs or ilia together. Unless he had some notion of how to—

That was as far as my thoughts got before Rossi put down his light, and picked up a knife.

“But never mind what I’m doing with the bones,” he said. “The real question is what to do with a pair of spies.”

I had thought myself frightened when that rock-wyrm attacked us on our way to Drustanev, or when I believed us stalked by an ancient demon. It was nothing, I discovered, to facing a man who might be about to murder me in cold blood.

Threats from natural sources I can handle calmly; threats from humans bring out the most foolish impulses in me. The next words from my mouth were very ill considered indeed, from the standpoint of wanting to survive, but I could not stop them. “You killed Gritelkin. Why? Because he learned about this?” I gestured toward the dragon bones.

Rossi’s mouth twisted. “No. Because he was sniffing around the smugglers too much.” Knife reflecting gold in the light, he advanced a step toward me.

“Wait!” I flung my hand up to stop him—the hand bearing Gritelkin’s ring; not a very wise choice. But there was the faintest chance that my scientific conclusions might do some good. “Please, you must listen. You saw the bones in the cave, didn’t you? Or Khirzoff did. That’s how you knew it was possible to preserve dragonbone after death. You must know they use that cave for a graveyard—the dragons do—they mourn their dead, don’t you see?”

“And what if they do?” he said impatiently.

I doubted a moral argument would sway him, but a pragmatic one might. “That’s why they’re attacking people! I’m sure of it. Because you’ve killed so many of them, and likely because you haven’t let them carry off their dead; it has made them angry. If you continue on like this, more people will die.”

His lip curled, and he answered with disdain. “Peasants.”

His next words were cut off by footsteps, coming in a staccato rush down the stairs. I had never before heard that sound in such a panic, but even so, I recognized my husband’s step.

I opened my mouth to call out—with what words, I will never know—but Rossi had no more patience with intruders. As Jacob came off the stairs, the Chiavoran turned and plunged the knife into his gut.

The horror of that sight paralyzed me, from my hands to my voice. I could not even shriek. But Dagmira was not thus frozen; she had been waiting for Rossi’s distraction, and when it came she moved without hesitation, snatching up a jar and smashing it over the man’s head.

Rossi went down like a felled tree. The chemical that spilled over his head and shoulders was soon joined by more, as he collapsed sideways into the table and then to the floor, taking glassware and the lamps with him.

His fall broke my paralysis at last. Jacob had staggered backward against the wall; I rushed to his side, one hand hovering over the crimson stain that flowered across his shirt. I knew how to draw the body. I did not know how to fix it.

Jacob fumbled in his pocket, came up empty-handed. The motion roused me to my own search; I found a handkerchief and, after brief hesitation, pressed it to the wound. Jacob covered my hand with his own and met my gaze. What he saw there must have alarmed him, for he put on something like a smile and said, “I will be all right, Isabella.”

I would have liked to believe him. But the blood seeping through the handkerchief was hot against my fingers.

From behind me, Dagmira spoke in an unsteady voice. “He is the one who killed Jindrik?”

Rossi. We’d spoken in Chiavoran; she would have understood nothing but the name. I turned enough to put the fallen man in my field of vision, but he showed no sign of rousing. “Yes.” Him, or someone else involved with this scheme. He was the one who had stabbed Jacob, though, and that was more than enough guilt for me.

I had spoken of there being a dragon inside me. For the first time, I felt it not just in the yearning for freedom, but in the predator’s desire for the kill.

Could I have done it? Could I have slipped my hand from beneath Jacob’s, picked up the knife or a shard of glass, and murdered Rossi where he lay?

I do not know. I would like to think not; there is something dreadful about believing one’s nineteen-year-old self could cut the throat of a fallen man, whatever his crimes might be. But I never made the choice: Jacob spoke before I could, and the moment slipped past. I wonder, sometimes, whether he sensed my thoughts in the rigidity of my hand, and intervened before I could resolve myself one way or the other. “Dagmira. Go rouse the others; we must be out of here tonight, before Khirzoff can discover that we have learned his secrets. We’ll meet them at the stables. Isabella, is there anything with which to bind Rossi?”

Dagmira went. Moving like a Hingese automaton, I found a length of rubber tubing, and used Rossi’s fallen knife to cut it into lengths suitable for binding his feet and hands. A few sheets of paper and a third bit of tubing sufficed for a gag. Jacob remained against the wall, not moving to help, and I tried not to think of what that meant. Would he be able to ride?

He must. My task done, I moved to help him up the stairs, but stopped as we reached the bottom step. “Wait—”

Jacob steadied himself as I turned back. Jumping over Rossi’s prone body, I snatched up the Chiavoran’s notebook, and then fetched the first portable bone that came to hand: a wishbone. Proof of what he had done. “Now we can go.”

TWENTY-THREE

I almost turned back at the beginning of our flight, when we had saddled some of Khirzoff’s horses and ruined the tack of the rest, and were set to put that place behind us forever—because a glimmer of light caught my eye.

Steadying my husband in the saddle, I said, very quietly, “Jacob? There is a fire.”

The others heard. Dagmira growled something that might have been “let them burn.” For my own part, I did not realize I’d begun to move until Jacob clutched desperately at my arm. “Isabella—you cannot—”

“There are innocents in there!” I said, too loudly. Softer, but with no less intensity, I went on. “Khirzoff and Rossi may be monsters, but what of their servants?”

Guilt prodded me as much as altruism. I saw my husband’s white, drained face in the night, and knew our hope of survival depended on fleeing straightaway; and yet I could not sacrifice all those men on the altar of our own preservation.

Mr. Wilker growled and flung himself from the saddle, running for the stable, where he had left a watchman—a boy, really—tied up while we stole the horses. A moment later he was back out, setting his gelding into motion even as he spoke. “He’ll rouse the household. You realize this means they’ll be on our trail faster.”

He realized it, too; and yet he had gone. None of us wanted that atrocity on our heads.

It made the nightmare of our flight even worse, though. We could not ride at speed through the mountain night, even with the half-moon to light our way, and although we had done what we could to hamper pursuit, we knew Khirzoff’s men would be following us. No, not even following; they knew where we would go.

Or so they would think. Dagmira and Iljish consulted in quiet whispers too rapid to follow, and then proposed that we go where Khirzoff would not expect: to the ruins. There was the huntsmen’s hut, where Astimir, Lord Hilford, and I had spent the night after our visit, or we could attempt shelter in the ruins themselves. Iljish volunteered to slip into the village on his own, to gather up what he could of our more valuable possessions. Then, I supposed, we would go south. Back to Chiavora, back to Scirland, leaving behind our notes and equipment and Lord Hilford’s beloved armchair—and the people of Drustanev.

It would mean breaking my vow. Dagmira and her brother could spread word of my theory, explaining to their neighbors why the dragons were attacking humans—but what good would it do them? They had no capacity to stop Khirzoff and Rossi, no recourse to any higher authority. Nor did we, not from where we stood. We could perhaps write to the tsar, once we had returned home, but it was a poor excuse for aid. And as little as that would do for their village, it would do even less for Dagmira and Iljish, unless I could persuade them to go with us. Surely Rossi, if he survived, would remember the peasant who broke a jar over his head. They would not be safe anymore.

All of that was a distant hypothetical, though, soon lost behind the immediate necessity of our flight. The world narrowed to the simplest, most primitive of tasks: find water. Find food, what little could be got while making forward progress. Cover our tracks. Keep watch for dragons. Stay in the saddle, or put one foot in front of the other when the terrain made riding all but impossible.

Pray for Jacob.

Mr. Wilker was the closest thing among us to a doctor, and he could do nothing except bind the wound. It would have been dreadful enough, were Jacob lying in a bed; three days of grueling, cross-country flight made his condition dire. All the blood leached from his lips, and his eyes acquired a staring, blank quality, as every ounce of effort he could spare went into clinging to his saddle, and to life. I writhed with helplessness, my mind racing in futile, exhausted circles, trying and failing to find some way to help him. If I had entertained the slightest shred of hope that Khirzoff would take pity on us, I would have sent the others onward and waited with my husband for our pursuers to come. But I did not, and so the only thing to do was to press on, praying that we would make it to the ruins, and that rest there would restore my husband’s strength.

My prayer was doomed to failure, and I knew it.

We struggled at last up the back slope of the ruins, with the shattered wall rising before us. There, with shelter in sight, Jacob slid bonelessly from his saddle and crashed into the ground.

I cried out even before his sleeve had slipped from my grasp. Jerking my mount to a halt, I lurched down without grace and fell to my knees at my husband’s side. So sure was I that Jacob had died, I could not even speak his name.

But the touch of my hand on his cheek roused him. For one instant, I felt hope; he was not dead, and we had reached the ruins, and surely all would be well. The delusion, however, could not survive for long. He would not move from this place: Jacob knew it, and so did I.

I caught up one of his hands, clutched it in my own. He responded with the merest twitch of his cold fingers. The only words I could find were pitifully inadequate. “I’m so sorry.”

His white lips shaped the word “no.” Jacob closed his eyes, then opened them again, and mustered enough strength to speak in a bloodless whisper that went no further than my ears. “No regrets. Be strong, Isabella. Stop them.”

I had spared enough energy during our flight to tell the others what Khirzoff and Rossi were doing to the dragons, what I had found in that charnel house of a cellar. But how could I stop them? All I could do was flee.

The others had dismounted, forming a silent ring around me. The sun baked the silent ruins, a gentle blessing of warmth. I bent and kissed my husband’s lips, pressing my mouth to his until I felt the faintest trace of pressure in return, tears slipping down my face to wet his. When I drew back at last, Jacob’s eyes had closed for the last time, and a moment later his breath stopped.

You will think me inhuman for saying this. But even in the face of the worst grief I had ever experienced, grief piled atop mortal exhaustion and shock, my mind would not grant me the mercy of ceasing to work. It persisted in ticking along, like a soulless collection of gears, and so when—after how long, I do not know—I lifted my head to regard the others, the words that came from my mouth were nothing to do with my dead husband, stretched before me on the ground. I said, “I’m going to search the cave.”

It lay not twenty feet from where I knelt, covered once more by branches. I nodded toward it, and saw the others realize what I meant. In a tone half bewilderment, half groan, Mr. Wilker said, “The smugglers. Mrs. Camherst, with all due respect—do they truly matter?”

“Yes,” I said sharply. “They are part of this, Mr. Wilker—part of the same damnable conspiracy that has just killed my husband. Rossi said as much. I do not think it is opium they are smuggling; it is something else, and I am determined to find out what. Jacob told me to stop them, and I intend to honor his last words.”

The entire picture had almost come together in my head. Only a few pieces were missing. Khirzoff was an ambitious man, cultivating connections to the south, seeking to make a fortune for himself with Rossi’s work on the dragon bones. He feared our research on account of that. But Gritelkin did not die because of the dragons; he died because of the smugglers. And Khirzoff already had a fortune, at least a small one, with which to buy Rossi’s chemical laboratory, not to mention rich clothing and spices for himself. But he had come to it recently, or the rest of his surroundings would be better.

The keystone that would hold it all together lay here. I was sure of it.

Mr. Wilker accompanied me, because we had no rope, and he could lift himself from the cave where I could not. He could have gone alone, but I was determined to see with my own eyes. We struck a light on a fallen pine branch, which would do for a short-lived torch, and Mr. Wilker lowered me down, following a moment later.

The crates I had seen before were gone. It was possible the smugglers had emptied the entire place out the day I’d come here with Dagmira, leaving no evidence behind; but the only way to be certain was to look. Torch raised against the darkness, I went farther into the cave.

The way was cramped in places, but not enough to force us to crawl. And it did not go nearly as far back as I had feared: no more than two hundred feet, I judged. At that point, the cave ended in a wall of solid earth and stone.

Mr. Wilker brushed his hair from his face with one filthy hand and sighed. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Camherst. Whatever they were storing here, it’s gone.”

My gaze swept over the dirt, trying, in a most unscientific fashion, to deny its blank uselessness. There must be something. I would not allow there to be nothing. “Assuming what they did here was store,” I murmured, going forward another few steps.

The signs were there, in the uneven shape of the earthen wall, the spots that might have been sharp gouges before the edges crumbled into softer slopes. Someone had been digging there, and not many days ago, either.

I dropped to my knees, jamming the narrow end of the torch into the ground, and began to scrabble at the dirt. The rigors of rock climbing and cave exploration had already roughened my hands beyond what befitted a lady; now I sacrificed the last bit of delicacy, tearing my nails as I clawed lumps of earth and stone away. And, as Mr. Wilker reached out to stop me, my persistence was rewarded.

It glimmered even before I wiped it clean on my sleeve and held it up to the light: a fragment of firestone, larger even than the one I had found in the grass above.

“This isn’t a cache,” I whispered. “It’s a mine. Khirzoff has found a source of firestone.”

Mr. Wilker took the stone from me, lips pursed in a soundless whistle. His Niddey accent came through strongly as he said, “If Bulskevo’s laws are anything like Scirland’s, by all rights this belongs to the tsar.”

For such a glorious find, Khirzoff might well receive a reward from his master. But how much more wealth could be gained by smuggling the stones across the border and selling them in Chiavora? He would have to do it slowly; a sudden glut of firestones would be noticed, even if they were sold in secret. But it would not take many at all to fund Rossi’s efforts, and pay for some new luxuries in the bargain. Given enough time, the stones and the innovation of dragonbone—lightweight, all but indestructible; better even than steel—could make Khirzoff one of the wealthiest men in the world.

“You know more of politics and law than I do,” I said, my voice tight. “What might the tsar do, if he discovered his vassal was stealing from him in this fashion?”

It was a rhetorical question; we could both guess perfectly well. Mr. Wilker nodded. “It will be enough to bring him down, yes. Let’s go tell the others.”

The discovery put new life into our limbs, hurrying us back toward the ragged spill of light that was the cave’s entrance. But Mr. Wilker, without warning, dragged me to a halt, one hand going over my lips to muffle my startled question.

A rope dangled down from above. We had brought nothing of the sort with us from the boyar’s lodge.

With his mouth by my ear, Mr. Wilker whispered, “You didn’t see another way out of here, did you?”

I shook my head, hand tightening on the dying torch. The passage might continue beyond the dirt wall—my guess was that the ground above had collapsed at some point in the distant past, as this whole place lay very near the surface—but that was of no use to us. The only exit was that opening, into the arms of whoever waited above.

It was a mark of our dire situation that I found myself hoping it was the Stauleren smugglers.

Mr. Wilker drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Stay hidden,” he murmured near-soundlessly, “and snuff out that light. I will go. With any luck, they’ll think I came down alone.”

It was the gentlemanly thing to do. It was also the one thing that might win us the slightest advantage, if only I could think how to use it. Iljish had left us already, diverging toward Drustanev in the hopes of snatching up our money; only Lord Hilford and Dagmira waited above. What use I could be, separate from them, I did not know, but it was worth a try. My jaw tight, I nodded to Mr. Wilker and doused the torch in the dirt.

The drop was not a large one; with jumping, he could have caught hold of the edge and dragged himself out. With the rope’s aid, he was gone from my sight in mere seconds.

From above, I heard muffled voices.

Then a voice, speaking Bulskoi-accented Chiavoran, that I recognized all too well. “We know you are down there. Come out now.”

I kicked myself inwardly as I remembered the horses. If Khirzoff had snared my companions—as I had to assume he had—then he would have seen an extra riderless mount; even the best liar would have been hard-pressed to make him believe I had lain down somewhere for a nap, or fallen over a cliff, or any such thing.

Gritting my teeth, I went forward, and took hold of the rope.

They dragged me up without ceremony and dumped me to the ground. When I climbed to my feet, I saw it was quite as bad as I had feared. Khirzoff had brought with him half a dozen men: the sort of odds that may be entirely manageable in a drunk man’s boast, but which are rather more difficult in real life, especially when the half dozen have guns, and the two gentlemen and two women those guns are pointed at do not. In addition, there was Khirzoff himself—and with him, Gaetano Rossi.

When the man had lain helpless at my feet, I had felt compunctions about the desire to see him dead; now that he stood before me, and my husband was the one lifeless on the ground, I wished with foul, poisonous rage that I had cut his throat while I could. It was scant satisfaction to notice the bruising from Dagmira’s jar, and the discoloration where the chemicals had spilled over his skin.

Our captors looked tired—they must have ridden hard to catch us—but nothing like so exhausted as we were. Khirzoff mostly looked angry. “When I invited you to my lodge, I was considering whether it might suffice to order you out of my lands,” he said. “Had you not been so determined to pry, it might have done. If you had been content to remain ignorant.”

“We would have been suspicious,” I said, too foolish to keep my mouth shut. “That’s why you tried the ridiculous charade with Astimir.”

The boyar shrugged. “Yes—but what could you do? Complain to the tsar? He would not care. Not if all you had were suspicions.”

But now we had proof. Or rather, enough specifics to give the tsar reason to investigate. Theft, smuggling, murder—even if no one cared that the boyar’s scheme was causing the dragons to attack people, the rest would be enough to cause him trouble.

I retained enough sense not to point that out, if only barely. The most likely case was that he had followed with the intention of killing us, but if not, there was no sense in encouraging him.

Lord Hilford said, “You forget, sir, that I am a Scirling peer. And your man there has murdered a Scirling gentleman.” The way he pronounced the word “sir,” it might have been the vilest insult he knew.

Khirzoff seemed entirely unconcerned. “With the feuds between Bulskevo and Scirland? That only gives the tsar more reason to ignore you.”

“Perhaps,” Lord Hilford said, drawing himself up, “but it gives others more reason to pay attention. If anything should happen to me, or to my companions, it will go very hard for you.”

Rossi laughed outright, a harsh, ugly sound. “What if you met with an accident? Chasing around the mountains, trying to pet the dragons—there have been so many attacks lately, after all. Who could be surprised if it ended badly?”

As covers for murder went, that one was unfortunately plausible. And even if the villagers or our families back home could raise suspicion regarding our deaths, it would not do us much good.

I had little hope that it would be any use, but I had to try. “Didn’t your tame chemist there tell you, Iosif Abramovich? All these attacks—you’re causing them yourself. The more you pursue this course, the worse it will get.”

As I feared, Khirzoff only shrugged again. “Dead dragons will attack no one. And we can protect ourselves better than the peasants can.”

He would not keep talking forever; sooner or later, and likely sooner, he would decide to end at least one of his problems by ending us. I glanced toward Mr. Wilker, hoping he might see some way to make use of our firestone discovery to persuade Khirzoff to spare us—but he seemed entirely distracted, squinting into the late afternoon sun.

Late afternoon.

I squinted, too, wrinkling up my face so that our captors might think me about to cry. With my lashes filtering the light, I could make out what Mr. Wilker had seen: a large shape in the air, winging its way home for the night, but too distant to be any threat.

Unless we happened to provoke it.

There are proverbs about frying pans and fires that I might have quoted to myself, but I preferred to adapt a different one to my purposes: better the devil that would attack everyone impartially than the devil specifically looking to kill us. At the very least, it would create chaos, and we might be able to take advantage of that.

Or rather, the others might. What I had in mind to do might leave me in no state to take advantage of anything at all.

I could not let myself think about it; if I did, my nerve might fail me. I simply looked at Rossi and said the first offensive thing that came into my head: “By the way, I burned your notebook.”

Then I hiked up my skirts and took off for the ruins.

For the first few steps, I thought it would do no good. One of the soldiers would just chase me and drag me back, with nothing gained. But then I heard Rossi’s enraged sputtering, which resolved at last into words: “Shoot her!”

Even when you are exhausted beyond any previous experience of the word, adrenaline has the marvelous ability to bring life to your limbs. I ducked and wove through the thin trees, praying desperately that I might make it to the wall where I had found my firestone; the first shot came close enough that splinters rained across my face. It was soon followed by more, and then I flung myself to the ground behind the stone, gasping for air.

How many shots was that? Eight? Ten? Would they carry clearly enough in the mountain air to draw the rock-wyrm’s attention to this place?

I had certainly occasioned a great deal of shouting. I wanted very badly to look whether the others were all right, but my respite lasted only a few seconds; then I scrambled once more to my feet and looked for a hiding spot, knowing someone would be after me, if they weren’t already.

Gunfire broke out again, this time more sporadically. My heart was torn; every shot, I hoped, increased the odds that a dragon would take offense, but it also meant my companions were in danger. Already I was cursing the impulse that had made me run: it seemed such a hopeless gamble. And yet, what better chance did we have? Run and be shot, or stay and do the same.

I plunged through a concealing screen of brush—and found myself mere feet from a terrified and very dirty Astimir.

More precisely, from the barrel of his rifle. But I had passed through fear to a region on the far side, where I could without hesitation do things that would have seemed unthinkable risks in the light of saner contemplation. I seized the gun’s muzzle and wrenched it aside, and either my conviction that he would not shoot me was powerful enough to convince him, too, or Astimir was paralyzed with his own fear, for he did not resist.

“The boyar is going to kill us,” I snarled, and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. “He has already killed my husband. You helped create this disaster; you will damn well do something to fix it. Get out there and help.” Upon that last word, I hurled him bodily toward the fight.

I honestly cannot tell you whether I remembered to speak in Vystrani or not. It may be that my tone sufficed all on its own. Astimir stumbled through the brush, and then I sallied after him, driven by grief and rage past the bounds of rationality, into a soaring state wherein I had lost all capacity for fear. My husband lay dead on the ground. I must do something more than run.

As if to give voice to my rage, from above came a furious, inhuman scream.

I had indeed managed to attract a dragon—and a very angry one at that.

The ruined wall blocked my view of what happened on the ground. I saw only the penultimate stage of the dragon’s stoop, and heard shots ring out from below. The wyrm screamed again, this time in pain.

Either none of the boyar’s men had made it this far in pursuit of me, or they had already gone past in their search. I swarmed up the wall, thinking the unexpected vantage point would give me a degree of protection from any guns, and looked down to the ground beyond.

The dragon was thrashing about, too wounded to regain the air. Its blood seemed to be everywhere, and the frantic beating of its wings, the quick whipping of its head and tail, made it almost impossible to parse the scene. I saw one of the soldiers, half behind a tree, taking aim for the dragon once more; then I spotted Mr. Wilker across the way, crouching for cover. A sudden twist of the dragon’s body revealed Khirzoff lying motionless, and my heart gave a savage leap; but it turned to pain a moment later as the soldier shot and the beast suddenly collapsed into the dirt, dead.

A banshee howl from just below me dragged my gaze downward. Heaven only knows what had gone through Astimir’s head during those days hiding in the ruins; I think it had rather unhinged him. I doubt it was any sort of vengeance for the fallen dragon, or even for us, that made him aim for the soldier and shoot. Whatever motivated him, the bullet struck true; the boyar’s man cried out and toppled backward down the slope. But there were still others now emerging from cover; and then I heard a snarl from behind me.

I twisted to see Rossi halfway up the wall, his discolored face contorted into an expression of animal fury. He was close enough to snatch at my foot, braced against the stone; I drew it up just in time. But he caught a handful of my skirt, and only a desperate clutch at the wall kept me from falling.

I kicked out, twice, three times, and struck his hand hard enough against the rock to make him swear and let go. Then I scrambled higher, drawing myself fully onto the top of the wall, less afraid in that instant of the men with the rifles than of the one pursuing me with single-minded madness. But there was nowhere to go; if I leapt off the wall, I should certainly break something, and be left easy prey.

The stone crumbled beneath Rossi, giving me a fleeting moment of hope. He caught himself, though, and clawed for a new handhold, after which it was the work of mere seconds for him to attain the top of the wall. I retreated as far as I could, but it put me barely out of arm’s reach, and there was nothing more behind me except a steep angle of broken rock and air.

Rossi paused, securing his balance. The mountain wind tried to make a sail of my skirt; soon it would carry me off my own precarious footing, and he would not get the satisfaction of killing me after all.

My attention was so fixed on him that I did not realize those tearing gusts of air were not solely from the wind until a shadow fell across us both.

TWENTY-FOUR

You may say it is pure fancy to think that the second dragon took Rossi and spared me because it somehow knew which of us was the enemy, and which a friend. I will agree with you. Vystrani rock-wyrms are intelligent enough to carry their dead to rest in that great cavern, but they have not the slightest shred of affection for humans, nor any care to distinguish friend from foe. But fancy or not, I have no other explanation for how, when that shadow beat flapping off from the wall, Rossi was screaming in its claws, and I was left untouched.

(Even fancy cannot explain how I managed to avoid falling, either. That, I must attribute to divine providence.)

The chaos left Khirzoff and Rossi both dead, along with two of their men; the others had fled. We were, in the end, saved by the dragons: a fitting revenge for their fallen brethren. And the boyar and his chemist were stopped. But the price of that victory had been so very high.

I sometimes think it has taken me this long to write my memoirs because I knew I could not avoid speaking of Jacob’s death.

The grief, of course, has faded. The Vystrani expedition was decades ago; I no longer weep into my pillow every night for his loss. But coming to terms with one’s sorrow is one thing; sharing it with strangers is quite another. And given how many of the events that led to his death can be laid at my feet, I was deeply reluctant to invite the sort of criticism that would—and still perhaps will—inevitably follow.

I will not attempt to lay before you the pain I suffered then. I have said what I can; it is insufficient, but then I am a scientist, and not a poet. My feelings are as strong as any woman’s, but I lack the words to express them. It is not true, what some said of me, that I never loved him: I have already refuted that argument. If it lacks the grand passion some demand, I will not apologize; I am who I am, and the sincerity of my affection, the worthiness of my marriage, are not things I care to debate.

Let us speak instead of what followed.

We would not leave the bodies for the scavengers, not even those of our enemies. The horses bore those to the hut, where we passed the night. The next day we returned to the village, and there Lord Hilford, Mr. Wilker, and Dagmira took on the unenviable task of explaining matters to everyone.

The reactions ranged from doubt to anger. The boyar was not loved, but we Scirlings were even more strangers to the people of Drustanev than he was; no one was in a hurry to believe us, and furthermore the explanation for the dragon attacks was not one that could be easily proven. Many people were also worried—very understandably—for what consequences might fall upon them as a result of Khirzoff’s death.

I attended to none of it. The rock-wyrms of Vystrana bear their dead to the great cavern; we humans have our own rites, and those began upon our return. The old women of Drustanev left their sons and daughters to argue over worldly matters, and quietly went about the business of washing and shrouding the bodies of my husband and my enemies. We buried them all the next day, with ceremonies that would have offended a Magisterial purist; but those ceremonies were all the comfort I had, and I was grateful for them.

For all the differences of religion that lay between us and the Vystrani, I will say this for them: when it came to mourning, we were not treated as outsiders. I think everyone in the village came to visit while we sat shiva, even if only from a sense of obligation. Nor did we hold ourselves apart: when the Sabbath interrupted our mourning, we attended Menkem’s service in the tabernacle, with nary a murmur of protest, even from Lord Hilford.

It’s possible we offended them by our behavior after our shiva ended. We felt we owed certain obligations to the village, though, and in discussion amongst ourselves, Lord Hilford, Mr. Wilker, and I agreed that it would be no insult to Jacob’s spirit if we brought our work to a proper conclusion, rather than leaving at the first opportunity. It was different than it had been, of course; there was no tramping around the mountains, collecting samples from dragon lairs. But while Lord Hilford rode off to handle the matter of Khirzoff’s death, Mr. Wilker and I confirmed that the dragon carcass had been taken from the ruins to the graveyard, and we documented the latter as thoroughly as we could. We could not apologize to the rock-wyrms for what had been done to their kin, but Mr. Wilker held a sober conference with Mazhustin and the village elders, and we hoped that would lay a foundation to prevent such difficulties in the future.

We also studied Rossi’s notebook, as fervently as if it had been Scripture. (I had, of course, lied to the man about its fate; I would never destroy knowledge so recklessly.) Mr. Wilker had enough chemistry to grasp the general outline, but I was entirely baffled by his attempts to explain why adding a solution of sulfuric acid to dragonbone, however slowly, whatever it was mixed with, could preserve anything. Upon one point, though, we were in perfect agreement.

“This knowledge is dangerous,” I said to him one night as we sat by the light of a few candles in our workroom.

Mr. Wilker’s face was drawn and weary in the dimness. “The things that could be built with dragonbone… Rossi was not wrong. There have already been minor wars over iron, and there will be more; we have too much technology that needs it, and a hunger for more. Anything that could replace iron, much less improve upon it, is priceless. But harvesting the bone, if you will pardon the phrase, makes the dragons angry, which makes them attack people.”

“To which the only solution is to hunt them more,” I said. “Between that and the demand for their bones… they will be driven to extinction.” Khirzoff and Rossi had already made progress toward that, in this region. No wonder so many lairs had been empty.

Mr. Wilker paged slowly through Rossi’s notebook, as if brighter thoughts might leap from it. “It may only work on rock-wyrms. We know too little of dragon biology to be sure.”

Even if the process, or the mourning behavior, was specific to only the one breed, the effect would be catastrophic. People would pursue all dragons, in the hope of getting something useful from their bones. Big-game hunters would want trophies; engineers would want bones for their inventions. It was bad enough when animals were wanted only for their pelts or ivory. This had the potential to be vastly worse.

I hated the thought of destroying knowledge—but what if the alternative was even more unbearable?

Mr. Wilker caught me looking at the book, and must have read my thoughts in my expression. “It wouldn’t do any good,” he said warningly. “Men have been trying to find a way to preserve the bones for some time. Rossi figured it out; someone else will, too.”

“What are you saying?” I asked sharply. “That I should accept this as inevitable? Allow you to publish the contents of that notebook in the Proceedings of the Colloquium of Philosophers, and get it over sooner rather than later?” A discovery of this sort could do what he so clearly craved, and lift him above the the limitations of his birth.

“No, no, of course not,” he said, his own anger and helplessness so evident that they calmed my own. “Concealing it at least defers the problem, and perhaps…”

“Perhaps?” I prompted when he trailed off.

Mr. Wilker sighed and laid his hand atop the notebook, staring as if sheer force of determination could make its contents more clear to him. “Perhaps, in the interim, an alternative could be found.”

An alternative. A different process would not eliminate the base threat to the dragons. He must therefore mean— “Some method of, oh, what is the word—”

“Synthesis,” Mr. Wilker said. “Artificially producing a substance that would have the properties of preserved dragonbone, without any need to kill a dragon at all.” He grew more animated as he spoke, sitting up in his chair and gesturing energetically enough that he almost knocked over a candle. “Whatever it is that gets precipitated by the acid titration—it must be the major component of dragonbone, but we could never analyze it because it breaks down so quickly in air. With a preserved specimen to work from, we can determine what elements the molecule consists of, and attempt to re-create them in a laboratory—”

“Do you think it’s genuinely possible?” I asked, partly to stop him before he sank into a babble of chemical jargon I could not follow in the slightest.

He sank back in his chair with a sigh. “I’m sure of it—someday. Whether we can do so now, with the knowledge and tools we have… you would have to ask someone more qualified than I.”

It was reason enough to preserve the notebook. Without that, our hypothetical chemist would be set back by months, if not more. This way, we at least had a head start on anyone else re-discovering Rossi’s process.

Neither of us knew, that night in Drustanev, how vital the issue would eventually become. The Aerial War and similar matters lay years in our future. But I do not claim undeserved foresight when I say that we saw trouble coming, and did what little we could to prevent it.

“We speak of this to no one,” I said, “except Lord Hilford and whatever chemist you recommend.”

Mr. Wilker nodded. “Agreed.”

The tsar of Bulskevo was distracted enough by the deposit of firestones in Vystrana—of those mined so far, there were nineteen of sufficient quality to be set in jewelry, and dozens of smaller chips—that he forgave Lord Hilford for the tragic loss of a boyar in a dragon attack.

I thought nineteen more enough for any one man to acquire at a single stroke. He did not need a twentieth, or a twenty-first. The stone I dug out of the ground beneath the ruins was sold discreetly later on, and the money sent by even more discreet means back to Drustanev, sometimes as coin, sometimes in the form of items useful for the village. It was one part apology, one part compensation for the temporary suspension of hunting (lest it attract angry dragons), and one part incentive for them to say nothing about Rossi’s research.

Also, if my husband must be buried in a foreign land, I wanted some form of tie to bind me to his resting place.

The stone I found during my first visit to the ruins remained in my pocket, a reminder of too many things to count.

We made our farewells in late Messis, packing up our belongings and loading them onto the cart of a trader we had paid to come to Drustanev just for us. Not everyone was sorry to see the backs of us, of course; the villagers were more than ready to return to normalcy. Urjash Mazhustin bid us a stiffly formal farewell, with Menkem at his side. Astimir apologized for the hundredth time; he had initially thought the boyar’s suggestion a great joke, scaring the foreigners with the specter of Zhagrit Mat, but he had not reckoned with the fear it would evoke from his neighbors. I repeated the same forgiveness I had given him a hundred times before. The rote words became less heartfelt every time I spoke them, but there was nothing to be gained by railing at him for his stupidity.

Dagmira… I will not say she was reluctant to see me go. But she and I had achieved a kind of equilibrium, and I realized, to my surprise, that I would miss it. “Thank you,” I told her, and if I could not quite put into words what exactly I was thanking her for, she understood me regardless.

“I hope you at least got us a better boyar,” she said with the straightforwardness I had come to expect. “He’ll probably be just as bad, though—another damned Bulskoi stranger. And Iljish, the idiot, wants to go to school.”

There was a stone for Jindrik Gritelkin, in the same field where Jacob and the others were buried, even though his body had never been found. By now it would be anonymous bones, I supposed, stripped of the one item—his ring—that might have identified it. Although I had never met the man, I found myself in sympathy with him. “It isn’t necessarily a bad idea,” I said. “Having someone educated to speak on behalf of Drustanev, whether as razesh or not—there could be a great benefit in that.” What I did not say was that she and Iljish were already on the fringes of village life; schooling would not mark him out much more, and it could give him something of value to bargain with.

Dagmira only shrugged, kissed both my hands with perfunctory Vystrani courtesy, and walked off.

And then, by slow stages, we made our journey back to Scirland.

I did not suspect a certain change until we were on the ship, and was not sure of it until after we arrived back at home. The symptoms might, after all, have been a simple consequence of the stress of mourning and travel.

But they were not. I gave birth to a son in late Ventis of the next year, and named him Jacob, after his father.

Of him, I will say much more in future volumes. For now, I will limit myself to this unlovely admission: that there were times, both during my pregnancy and after his birth, when he was less a source of joy and more a painful reminder of what I had lost. I risked falling once more into the depression that had gripped me after my miscarriage, and took comfort in intellectual work. I corresponded often with Mr. Wilker, making arrangements to find someone to study our samples of dragonbone, and I spent long hours transcribing our notes, finishing my sketches, and otherwise preparing the results of our expedition for public consumption. My marriage contract provided for me generously enough to live on, but not enough to pay for the book’s publication; Lord Hilford kindly undertook a subscription on its behalf. One afternoon, some four or five months after my son was born, the earl paid me a visit in Pasterway and presented me with a finished copy.

My fingers trembled as I brushed them over the green leather cover, then opened it to the title page. Concerning the Rock-Wyrms of Vystrana, it read, and in smaller letters, Their Anatomy, Biology, and Activity, with Particular Attention to Their Relation with Humans, and the Revelation of Mourning Behavior. And then, a short distance below the title, by Jacob Camherst and others.

“It ought to have your name on it,” Lord Hilford said bluntly. “Alongside his, at the very least.”

I shook my head. I had not taken much care in dressing that morning; my hair was only hastily pinned up, and a hank of it fell forward at the motion, half obscuring Jacob’s name. “This is all the scholarship that will ever be credited to him; I have no desire to claim it as my own.”

“Claim it or not, it’s still yours, at least in part.” Lord Hilford dropped into a chair without first asking permission, but I did not begrudge it. If I was going to receive him in a shabby old gown with my hair falling down everywhere, I could hardly stand on formality. He said, “If we’re ever going to get those old sticks at the Colloquium to let you present to them, we must start laying the groundwork now.”

“Me? Present?” I stared at the earl. “Whyever would I do that?”

He snorted through his mustache. “Come now, Mrs. Camherst. Books are all well and good, but if you intend to be a scholar, you must have the acquaintance of your peers.”

With careful hands, I closed the book and laid it aside, then tucked my hair behind my ear. “Who said I intend to be a scholar?”

“I did,” he said bluntly. “You aren’t going to give this up. Right now you’re grieving; I understand that. I’m not here to chide you out of it. But you have a shed full of sparklings out back, and a book you wrote even if your name isn’t on it; any woman who puts in that kind of effort is not a woman who could simply turn her back on intellectual inquiry. You’re dragon-mad, Mrs. Camherst, and sooner or later you’ll be keen to have another chance at it. When that day comes, let me know.”

Having pronounced those odd words, he levered himself up out of the chair, nodded a polite farewell, and headed for the sitting room door.

It was swinging shut behind him when I found my tongue. “What do you mean? What ‘other chance’?”

Lord Hilford caught the edge of the door and peered around it, his whiskered face all studied innocence. “Oh, didn’t I mention? It so happens that— But no, if you intend to give all this up, then it’s of no interest to you.”

I had risen from my chair without realizing it. “Lord Hilford. I will thank you not to play games with me. If you have something to say—as you so obviously do—then stop hanging about in the doorway, come back in here, and tell me.”

He complied, a smile beginning to break his casual facade. “A little matter concerning the Scirling colony in Nsebu. His Majesty’s government is sufficiently pleased with the progress there that, as of next year, they will grant visas for citizens to travel there.”

Nsebu. I knew of it only from the papers, and not much even then; something about establishing a colony to protect Scirling interests in Erigan iron, and to oppose Ikwunde aggression. “Are there dragons there?”

“Are there dragons! Mrs. Camherst, I must remedy your lack of cartographical knowledge at once. Nsebu lies scarcely across the border from Mouleen.”

Moulish swamp-wyrms. Ugly beasts, with an extraordinary breath of foul gas—but two hundred years before, the great traveler Yves de Maucheret had written of peoples in the swamp who worshipped dragons as the ancient Draconeans had. His claims had never been verified, or even investigated.

“Some identify three major breeds of dragon within the region,” Lord Hilford added. “Others say there are no fewer than seven. It wants a proper study, truly.”

For one glorious moment, the bleakness of grief lifted from my spirit. To go to Eriga, and to see the dragons there… but then practicality reasserted itself. Mr. Wilker could not pay for chemical experimentation himself; between that and my son, I had scarcely enough money left to run my household. An expedition was out of the question, even if I had the first notion how to organize one.

I said as much to Lord Hilford, then added politely, “But I would be grateful to hear of what your expedition learns.”

“My expedition! My dear Mrs. Camherst, I cannot go to Nsebu. The heat, the humid air—my health would never permit it. Let me phrase this in a way you cannot misinterpret: I intend to fund an expedition, and if you wish to join it, all you need do is say so.”

Fortunately, my blindly groping hand found my chair again before I attempted to sit where it was not. Once I was securely planted, with no risk of falling, I said, “But—”

Lord Hilford put up one hand. “You needn’t say anything now, one way or another. The expedition won’t happen tomorrow. But I wanted you to be aware of it. You can make your decision later.”

“Thank you,” I said faintly, and so he departed.

After what seemed an eternity of staring blankly at the wall, I picked up the green-bound volume of Jacob’s and my work and went to set it on my desk. There I paused, staring at the slim spine of Sir Richard Edgeworth’s A Natural History of Dragons—the volume I had read so many times as a child, the one my father had given to me upon my marriage to Jacob.

Life without dragons was grey and empty. Sparklings had led me out of the grief that followed the loss of my first, unborn child; might not their larger cousins do the same for the loss of my husband?

The mere prospect of it was already lifting my spirits. To define myself first and foremost not as a widow, but as a scholar…

The dragon within my heart stirred, shifting her wings, as if remembering they could be used to fly.

Tucking errant strands of hair behind my ears, I took A Natural History of Dragons off the shelf and curled up in the window seat to read.