Her days with the Lodger grew until her time in the Cellars could be marked by a calendar. The old dragon took food, sparingly at first, mostly of meat or fish stews, then began to chew up joints and hams. He never did eat with the ravenous enthusiasm Ileth expected—she’d always imagined dragons tore up their food like wolves—but whether it was because he had no great appetite or just had whatever a dragon’s version of table manners were, she wasn’t experienced enough to say.
The retired dragoneer who served as head groom came down for a personal inspection with a team and cleaned him up properly. He apologized to the Lodger for not coming down since the new group of novices joined and promised to make amends. For two days a parade of apprentices and novices worked his skin and scale and a physiker dressed his wounds and rubbed an ointment in, leaving a large pot of the stuff for Ileth or other grooms to use.
Though it wasn’t her duty, Ileth listened as attentively as the other novices as the head groom showed them how to spot a weak scale, dress sores, and work about even a largish dragon like the Lodger safely.
“I’ve never much liked humans crawling over me and tweaking this and that,” the Lodger said to her. He accepted his scale being checked and polished and having cracked and loose scales removed, but he drew the line at filing and shaping. “A dragon should let his scale stand as nature designed. All this making patterns and painting, my own sire and dam would call it decadent.”
He showed an intelligent interest in her dancing, more because it was something he hadn’t seen much of, rather than out of some inner fascination that her smell and movements evoked. That, or he was an accomplished dissembler. She arranged a performance for him, even, bringing down Preen and Zusya with music boxes to each show off their favorite routines. They were going to dance as pairs at the Feast of Follies, and it gave them a chance to rehearse before an audience. Ileth set floorlights all about and helped them with their costumes. The new Cellars apprentices, who were more diligent about the pump that kept the sluice clean, attended as well. After it was done the Lodger rustled his wings and waved the tip of his tail about a little as the limited space would allow. He apologized to them afterward that he had no sacrificial chickens or sheep to give them, which left the pair nonplussed, but they left with copious thanks from Ileth.
“What was all that about chickens?” Zusya whispered to Preen as they went out.
“They do say he’s mazy.”
Duskirk and his novices followed, Duskirk solicitously inquiring of Zusya if she was cold in her costume. He’d feel responsible, you see, if she became chilled in the Cellars and became ill . . . Ileth snuffed out the floorlights and picked them up.
“What was that about sacrifices?” Ileth asked.
“You know, I believe your art is derived from old ceremonial dances in Hypatia. All the emphasis on being up on the balls of your feet, or your toes, as that . . . oh, I’ve forgotten her name, the darker one, as she did: that’s for invocation of air spirits and such that control the weather.”
Ileth couldn’t quite manage the toe-work yet; you needed to wrap your feet well and have special shoes with a hardened leather cup that had to be made to fit her.
“Some of the other movements,” the Lodger continued, “are meant to evoke fauna. The Hypatians had a lot of mythology about the connections between humans and swans, swans being a beautiful soul that would remain on earth for a while with the power to bring peace, I think it went. Or was that doves? Ha-harumm, my memory isn’t what it was. Oh, dragons bringing calamity, and later luck when it became more politic for the Hypatians to rechoreograph them as heroes and guardians, I believe holding the arms up above the head in a manner that is supposed to be wings or horns. Cats were always popular, snakes, oxen—but I didn’t see those females imitating any oxen so maybe those parts have been lost. If I’d known that flourish of their culture would thrive all the way over here, I’d have paid more attention. I remember the male temple dancers being proud of the height of their leaps. The number, too. Audiences would count them off. I recall one dancer who could do sixteen, turning each time in a great circle. He must have had legs like a stag.”
Ileth tried to imagine a great clumsy man dragon dancing but failed. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be really good at it. I can work up a sweat with the best of them. But it’s a good job for-for me. There’s n-no talking when you dance.”
“Talking makes you uncomfortable?”
“Yes. I’d g-give anything to be rid of this . . . this stutter. But I can’t beat it.”
“Yes, you can.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“You can do anything,” the Lodger said. “Standing before me, I see millennia of triumph.”
Ileth made a choking noise. “Ha!”
“Girl. You had a mother and father.”
Ileth fought to keep a grimace off her face. “Yes. Obviously.”
“And so did they, and so on going back each in their turn. Sires and dams, generation after generation.”
“I suppose. Don’t know much about them.” All she knew was that she looked nothing like the Captain or anyone related to him, in person or portraiture, for all the Freesand talk of him being her father.
“You don’t? I do. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. You’ve no idea, no idea at all what your line has overcome. The challenges they lived through, and didn’t just survive, slinking off grateful that breath was still in their bodies; they managed to bring the next generation into the world and keep them alive long enough for them to reproduce in turn. Triumph after triumph after triumph! If there was a failure anywhere along that line reaching into the mists of prehistory, fssssssht! Finished. You wouldn’t be here. One jaguar’s leap not escaped, and you wouldn’t be standing here, believing you can’t overcome a stutter. Your blood got through famines, droughts, earthquakes, plagues, invasions of barbarians. Strength against strength, cunning against cunning, craft against craft and they won, won against other men, beasts, storms, even dragons. They fled the fall of civilizations and built them up again out of sweat and wreckage. They escaped dragon raids and slaves’ shackles and the chariots and spears of—I don’t know what you call them in your tongue, ogres maybe. You, Ileth, are a diamond, the product of millennia of immense pressure. Your line didn’t shatter, it hardened and cleared and sharpened. Don’t tell me a bit of difficulty like a stutter is going to stop you. Ha!”
She could just stand there, a little awestruck by the epochs he described.
The Lodger sighed. “You even conquered me. I’m tired now; I think I shall rest. Isn’t it about time you went upstairs and had a good dinner? All that dancing must have given you an appetite. Join your kind.”
She went to sleep thinking on what he had said and the next morning was the first in place for morning drill, her exercise sheath as clean as her freshly washed face, hands, and feet. She went through the drills losing herself in music and motion, her standing leg a piece of supportive iron, her flying leg reaching new heights and holding with foot perfectly arched.
“Ileth, you’re on your toes this morning,” Ottavia said, smiling as Ileth’s arms fell gracefully back to the resting pose at the end of the second set. “I can’t seem to tire you out.”
“Then try harder, my Charge,” Ileth said, smiling.
As her dance slowly—or rapidly, over the next few mornings—improved, the Lodger also acted as her tutor.
It started on an ordinary morning. They were talking about the different kinds of people who came into the Serpentine. He didn’t ask about her origins, and she was grateful for that, and though the reason for it could have been that he just didn’t care, now that she knew him a little better she decided he considered such questions bad manners. But she said her education only went as far as being able to read, write, and do basic arithmetic, no arts or formal training in other languages (what Galantine she knew, she knew out of the Captain’s use in the Lodge). She told him she was a little envious of some of the girls who had private tutors visiting a few times a week. The Serpentine made allowances for the novices and apprentices to continue whatever studies their families were willing to pay for.
“I don’t know that I possess an education of much use to a human here, beyond teaching you Drakine,” the Lodger said. “You can’t dance all the time, and it’s something to keep me awake. You’d find it useful if you wish to build a life here.”
She’d been told to learn Drakine if she could, and she eagerly accepted.
Learning Drakine often led to talks about other subjects. He recited, from memory, a list of books and compilations of old scrolls he wanted her to read, and she turned it in to the Mistress of Chambers, who was in overall charge of meeting the dragons’ needs. Two or three volumes appeared almost immediately, available at the Serpentine’s small library, and a bookshop in Vyenn supplied one other, though where the funds for its purchase came from Ileth didn’t know. The rest would require some expertise in finding and the project had to be shelved (literally; the Master of Novices put her reading list on his bookshelf with a promise to write a friend of his in Asposis who knew some of the old libraries there). She had more than she had time to read in any case.
Ottavia alarmed her briefly just before the Feast of Follies by calling her in for an interview. Ileth went up, fearing that she’d be removed from duty with the Lodger now that he was on the mend. It turned out that Ottavia was equally relieved by their talk, because she had what she thought was the bad news that the Mistress of Chambers thought it would be best if the Lodger had company through the winter at least. The physiker hadn’t liked the sound he heard when he put an ear to his chest and listened to him breathe. He worried about the old dragon’s health and wanted to make sure he stayed active and engaged. Ottavia thought it was strange, the Cellars business; old or badly hurt dragons were generally sent off to one of several locations for “pensioners,” as they were called, with plenty of fresh air and mountain sunshine. For some reason the Lodger stayed hidden in the Cellars and no one spoke his name. It was a mystery.
Ileth was only too happy to agree to continue attending the dragon she increasingly thought of as hers. He was the most unusual tutor one could imagine, but she wouldn’t trade him for the most famous sage in the Vales.
Ottavia finished the interview with good news. “Oh, and a parcel arrived for you. If I read the posthouse legend it comes all the way from Sammerdam.”
Ileth thought it would be a book from the Lodger’s list, but Ottavia handed her a wooden box about the size of a loaf of bread. Someone had been in a hurry to get it to her—there were wings stamped on the labeling from the posthouse and the final destination of the Serpentine. It had gone by dragon courier.
That was most strange, and a very expensive way to send a gift, as she understood such things.
Ileth borrowed a knife from Ottavia and managed to work it open in the privacy of her own sleeping area. With mounting excitement, as it certainly didn’t look as if there were books within, she extracted the object and removed the old, lightly oily rags protecting it.
The box contained a music box. It was carved out of something that reminded her of whalebone, with a design of moon and stars on the lid.
She showed it to Ottavia, who identified both the material—ivory—and the tune it played, “Dance of the Fireflies.” Ottavia, something of an expert on music boxes, pronounced it exceptionally fine and pointed out that it had two wind-up keys, allowing the owner to play the tune at two different tempos, slow and solemn or fast and twinkling.
There was no note enclosed, no token that might give away who had sent it to her. She wanted to ask Ottavia how much she thought it was worth but sensed that crass subjects like the price of a gift were beyond discussion for Ottavia’s class of person. So she had to speculate in silence. It drove her to distraction.
She thought about the timing. The most likely candidate was Rapoto; his family had money and perhaps he felt as though he owed her some kind of restitution for being turned out of the Manor. She wondered if she could let it drop that she’d received an expensive gift next time she saw Santeel or Quith at the Great Hall and gauge their reactions.
The music box played a lovely tune at either tempo, and she danced to both for the Lodger. She used the slower tempo for drills and fatigues—the Lodger showed an equal interest in those as he did in pure dancing—and the lighter, quicker tune for a variation on a dance they’d rehearsed for the Feast of Follies. It was still missing something, though.
In happier news, Peak and the others were due to return on the eve of the feast. They’d been much delayed by encore performances, social invitations, sketches by artists who wished to imitate Risso Heem Tyr, and the inevitable problems of travel as fall gave over to winter.
Outside the Cellars, preparations for the Feast of Follies were under way, and they chatted about the feast. It was the one feast day that did not have a regular and predictable spot on the calendar. It was reserved for a warm spell in late fall. North of the Notch in the Vales you didn’t always get a final taste of summer after the equinox, but south of it there was almost always a reliable span of balmy warmth that gave the citizens one last chance to gather outside. For summer to come after fall seemed folly, thus the name.
This year in Vyenn and the Serpentine, the date had been settled on by the Masters and a quick in-town jury of the guild heads and an innkeeper’s wife who had a sixteen-year run of predicting the weather and having it not rain on the feast day she selected.
On the Serpentine, it would take place on the Long Bridge, which would have every available lantern and candle strung between the existing lamp stations, oiled to burn all night. Tables would be spread out in the shelter of the Pillar Rocks just in case (the innkeeper’s wife’s run would have to end sooner or later) with food to be served by the Masters and dragoneers instead of the usual workhorses of the Serpentine, the novices and apprentices.
It was one of the highlights of the year, especially for novices and apprentices, who for once had nothing to do in the feasting. Ottavia put her heart into it, especially as it would be a farewell performance for two of her veteran dancers.
Ileth had her own set of worries. By tradition you appeared at the Feast of Follies in a costume representing some bit of foolishness, ideally that you wished to be rid of, but she had no money for the purchase of odds and ends. She took her problem to Ottavia, as she was expected to perform with the others in costume.
“I’d be happy to help you if you wish to create a costume. As Charge I’m handling drinks. Small beer, courtesy of the Serpentine and the fishermen’s guild.”
“I’ve never attended a costume party,” Ileth admitted.
“They’re fun. This is the only one the Serpentine holds. But the tradition is a mote confusing,” Ottavia said. “You’re from the north and I don’t think it’s much celebrated up there. No? Well, you wear a costume that’s supposed to evoke a folly. The problem is, some celebrants wear one they wish to indulge, and others wear one they’d like to be rid of. It can be confusing. Pride, for instance. Lust is always popular at both ends. Ignorance, profligacy, it seems like there’s no end to them.”
“Will there be dragons, as we’re dancing?”
“They come out and watch, many of them. I believe they enjoy the color and noise. They perch up on the rocks or coil around the bridge supports. One year Mnasmanus managed to get his horns tangled in the lantern wire. Dun Huss was so embarrassed. Then he’s easily embarrassed. I gave him my last veil once during a removal dance and he blushed about it for half a year.”
Perhaps those imaginings of hers about Ottavia and Dun Huss had some foundation. She and Ottavia talked over sources for costuming.
Ileth returned to the Cellars deep in thought. There were plenty of venalities she’d like to be rid of, but she didn’t see how wearing a costume would help. Or how to depict it. Still, it sounded like fun.
She’d just served the Lodger his dinner and started warming up to dance for him—a little ritual they enjoyed before they settled down to the lessons on Drakine imperatives—when Zusya burst in.
“Oh, hurry, by your guiding star!” she gasped. For Zusya to be too winded to talk there must be a crisis shaking the foundations of the Serpentine! “Peak is back. The trunks. The trunks, Ileth, you should see them! She says they’re full of costume. It’s like a caravan out of the Great Green Book! Hurry!”
The Lodger rumbled in what Ileth now knew was a draconic chuckle. She looked up at him. “By all means, go attend your bazaar. I would welcome an early night. Imperatives won’t disappear from Drakine in your lifetime.”
They hurried up to the dancers’ rooms. Though she’d been named, several times, and was treated in every instance as a member of the troupe, for some reason this wild upstairs dash racing Zusya—who, despite being winded from her run down to the Cellars, was still nimble as a two-year-old deer—made her feel at last that she belonged to Ottavia’s dancers. It seemed there would be no more “oh, and Ileth” when it came to rosters or rotations during the drills.
So they joined the throng. Peak was just opening the last two trunks. The outer chamber behind the curtain looked like a seamstress shop had sicked up through the curtain. There were shoes, sheaths, hose, headdresses, scarves, leg ties, hairnets, skirts, and other performance accoutrements spread across the floor, chairs, tables, and cushions as though they’d been sacked by raiding gargoyles. At the center of the floor a light rug had been put down and jewelry and stage paint was spread out before kneeling dancers, examining items. “I know you don’t much go in for stage paint, Ottavia, but it’s practically required in Zland,” Peak said.
“It can be expensive,” Ottavia said. “Far too much for day-in, day-out use. But it’s timely. You can teach the rest of us how they apply it in the fashion of a Zland performer.”
“Which gives me an opening for my real news,” Peak said. “I’m moving to Zland. I’m to be married!”
Everyone except Ottavia and Ileth squeaked some variety of “What?” Ottavia looked stricken and Ileth curbed her expostulations.
“It’s true,” Peak said. “I am to be wife to Risso Heem Tyr. Can you believe it? It still seems impossible to me.”
“It should be impossible,” Ottavia said. “Isn’t he on his third wife?”
“I’ll be fourth! You can’t blame him for the second: she died in childbed. He was only sixteen when he married the first. I was going to tell you all at the Feast of Follies. But I just can’t keep it in.”
“I have the opposite problem, once I get my hand around one,” Zusya said.
“The Feast of Follies would have been an ideal time for this announcement,” Ottavia said. “What about wife number three?”
“Dreadful woman. She wears bracing so her breasts shelf out. She’s a schemer just after his money.”
“His money,” Preen said. Ileth had heard that Preen and Peak had joined the dance troupe together. “Which you don’t care a raisin about, I’m sure.”
“Spirits, no. It’s art. I shall be art, evermore and forever! I’m his muse!”
“How amusing,” Preen said.
“I thought we were going to announce together?” one of the older dancers, Tassa, said.
“What’s this now?” Ottavia said, her hand going to her throat as though a thief were reaching for her necklace.
“I’m betrothed too. He’s Heem Tyr’s painting dealer; he sets the price and so on. He handles other artists too. It’s the place to buy art, Zland. I didn’t know so many paintings existed! He came backstage with a great mass of flowers after our debut performance. He was to deliver them to Peak, but he saw me and was overwhelmed. They went to me instead.”
“He couldn’t help but notice you,” Fyth, the other dancer from the trip, said. “You were twirling around backstage stripped to your earrings and gushing about how many bows you took.”
Ottavia collapsed onto a costume-covered cushion.
“Ottavia, are you well?” Zusya asked.
Ottavia groaned. “I feel like Mnasmanus himself has sat on me. You’re my two best dancers! Fyth, Fyth, please tell me you’re not leaving as well.”
“Fear not, my Charge,” Fyth said, posing with hands on heart and chin nobly raised. “I kept my sheath on, and my legs only went in the air when I danced, so no offers at all.”
Peak shot Fyth a dirty look. “Oh, Ottavia, I’d be heartbroken if you are unhappy about this. Press-gang a few novices, or beg one of the apprentices to join, appeal to the need of the Serpentine. You’ve done it before. The dragons don’t care about extension, they just want sweaty women.”
The Charge rolled forward and put her head in her hands, like a drunk suddenly doubtful about the last round.
“I care about the discipline. I’m trying to make something here, you know. Not just me, some of the motions and balances you all invent. You realize we’re creating a new art form. It’s universal. We could tell a story, just like actors, but it would have nothing to do with language. All the emotion comes through movement and music.”
Ileth looked around. She liked Peak, but the only constant in life is change, as Caseen had told her.
“Oh, we forgot to reveal secrets!” Vii said.
“It’s not a betrothal ceremony,” Fyth said. Some argument back and forth broke out about the definition of a betrothal.
Peak scowled. “It’s as close as I’ll get to one. Why not? Ileth, won’t it be fun? You have good secrets, I’m thinking.”
“I’m—I’m n-not sure what . . . what you mean,” Ileth said.
“Never been to a betrothal?” Shatha asked. “I went to my first when I was a little girl.”
“Oh, it’s simple,” Zusya said. “The bride’s friends take her aside and her guests each reveal a secret to her. Sometimes after you reveal the secret, you get to ask the bride a question. Well, that was the tradition around us.”
“We just did secrets in Asposis,” Shatha said.
Ottavia stood up. “I will let you girls share secrets. At my age, you don’t have many secrets, but if you reveal them you’ll end up facing a jury. I’m going to see what Joai has in the way of rotgut brandy. Perhaps I’ll be lucky and die of poisoning.”
None of the troupe let Ottavia’s acidity spoil the party atmosphere.
“Let’s start,” Peak said. “Who’s the youngest?”
“Ileth, I think,” Vii said.
“Oh, but Ileth’s never done secrets, Vii. You go first.”
Vii took a breath. “I’m in love with a wingman. I just say that, Peak and Tassa, because I hope you love your future husbands as much as I love him.”
There were a few excited gasps. Questions for her to elaborate flew from everyone but Ileth, who was still trying to work out the tradition.
“Oh, Vii, you can’t leave it at that,” Peak said. Ileth wondered if Vii was playing a spoiler and stealing some of her betrothal glamor. “As the betrothed I demand to know more!”
“I’m betrothed too,” Tassa said. “I don’t give an old sock who Vii’s mooning about.”
“More, Vii,” Peak insisted.
Vii sat back. “No, said all I’m going to say. Ileth’s turn.”
Ileth cast about, wondering what sort of secrets she had. The Lodge was a poor place for secrets, and she’d been too busy since coming to the Serpentine. She could admit that she stole food on her journey there, but that didn’t seem right for the occasion. No, it should be something about life, probably. Marriage . . . children.
Ileth looked at her hands. “I . . . I met a dragonrider when I was young. Annis Heem St-Strath. She st-stopped for water in our t-town. I gr-grew up . . . grew up in a lodge. Made up . . . made up this story in-in-in my head where Annis was actually my m-mother. Secretly. She’d-She’d had to give me up to be a dragonrider. Wanted to grow up like . . . like her. I’d imagine myself asking her things . . . just silly things like what she thought of a bracelet I braided out of twine, stuff like that. I . . . wanted to tell her that when I, when I came h-here, but I learned she’d died against the Gal-Galantines. I say that because if you have little girls and they show you a bracelet they m-made out of some old twine, make a big deal about it.”
Ileth lifted up her gaze. The last time she’d seen so many vacant eyes staring at her was the gutting table.
“Oh, Ileth . . .” Peak said. She looked sad.
“That’s not how this works, Ileth,” Vii said.
“Oh, be quiet, Vii,” Shatha said. “She’s never done this before.”
They moved on to Fyth, who put things back on track by saying she much preferred wearing men’s clothes when going to Vyenn. Not because she thought she looked good in them, more because she could go about her business in peace and if she accidentally muddied herself in the streets no one thought twice about it. And she could have a nice big porter in one of the alehouses without anyone raising an eyebrow that a woman ordered herself a worker’s tankard of beer. She encouraged the others to try it and everyone started describing what sort of man they’d dress as.
By the end Ileth was laughing with the rest of the troupe.
Talk shifted to the Feast of Follies and costumes, and the party broke up. Ileth waited her turn to congratulate the future brides. After she embraced Peak, she tried a question she’d been mentally rehearsing. “I’ve wanted to ask about your name. Now I’m worried I won’t get another chance.”
Peak smiled. “Oh. I thought everyone knew. My family is from the Medi Islands. There’s more history than I like telling, but we had to flee, and the Vales had my grandfather’s most remote trade-hold. Girls are traditionally named for landmarks—White Blossoms on the Stairway to Urun Temple is my mother’s full name. I’m Peak of the Golden Road, which is where my father happened to be when I was born. So . . . Peak. In Montangyan.”
“You ever see your mountain?”
“No. Thought I might, being with the dragons, but it looks like I never will now, unless my husband takes it in mind to paint it.”
“What is your future husband like?”
“Not like what you’d think. I imagined he’d be quiet and artistic, but he’s big and loud and messy. Droll sense of humor. Shouts a lot. Slightest thing sets him off.”
“You don’t m-mind being shouted at?”
“Oh, the house is so big; I shan’t be able to hear him often. I will get him to heat his studio better, though, even if I must do a bit of shouting myself. Zland isn’t that high up, but it still gets cold this time of year. He works in a long coat to keep the paint off, so he doesn’t notice. It’s a miracle I didn’t catch the most dreadful cold. Chilly work, being a muse.”
Ileth decided to go to the feast dressed as greed. Greed was easy; you just needed coins, or things that looked like coins. They had a lot of scarves with little imitation coins that tinkled away and complemented certain dances, thanks to Peak’s trip where they were popular with tavern dancers, so it was just a matter of strategically wrapping herself up in a few of those. In the Serpentine, among the dancers, there was a certain relaxed sense of propriety. Her costume would never pass the Matron’s inspection, but the Matron could ride off on a bristle brush.
She didn’t think she was greedy in the traditional sense, but now she found herself constantly jealous of her fellow novices and apprentices, few of whom had ever wondered how they were to “clear the housekeeping,” as the Lodge’s cook used to put it when she counted out the coin the Captain had given her to feed them that month.
Ileth also wondered if she wasn’t greedy for things other than coins. Status. A place in the world. Praise. She’d had plenty of examples lately of life going wrong when you became greedy, for coins or for . . . other tokens that indicated that she mattered. But it wouldn’t hurt to publicly be done with greed.
There was to be a performance at the feast and she found herself anxious about it. They would be dancing for an audience of humans, not dragons. She couldn’t help but feel nervous: a gut full of darters, as they put it in the Freesand. But it was a good kind of nervous. Mostly. Dancing. She wouldn’t have to say a word. Flick out onstage, smile, make obeisance to the audience, smile, dance, smile, keep time, smile, make another obeisance to the audience, give one last smile, flick back offstage. Easy as cold roast breakfast.
She was to dance with Preen and Vii, and also do the initiate’s solo they taught her, only three times through to keep the audience from being bored. Ottavia suggested a little flourish with her arms and head that she could add on the third run-through of the compass points, since she was comfortable with the rest of the routine. Her performance backing up Preen with Vii was even more simple, more of an exhibition of basic support and floor drills than anything taxing. Ottavia would stand off to the side and give a short introduction (Ottavia was dancing herself in both the first and last performances).
Their stage was a little platform flanking the main tunnel into the Beehive. Once upon a time, she’d been told while out with the troupe, a dragon had always sat guard there, day and night, but the tradition had been abandoned because the dragon never had anything to do and they tended to just get bored and go to sleep, and a snoring dragon on the doorstep made the fortress look undisciplined. Anyway, it made a perfect stage. When she wasn’t onstage she’d be in the mouth of the tunnel, behind a temporary curtain helping with costumes and such.
The feast was already in progress when the dancers emerged from their quarters, all wearing long plain overcapes to hide their costumes until they were onstage. They danced in a short procession back and forth across the Long Bridge to the Pillar Rocks to help draw a crowd. The weather had held; the air was soft and warm, so the innkeeper’s wife could buy another bracelet or whatever she did to mark her score at seventeen perfect predictions.
They passed the food tables under Mushroom Rock. Caseen was pouring out cold party soup and making a mess of himself and his table. But he smiled, splattered with soup as he was. For once his mask did not look out of place; instead of ominous it could pass for festive. The tempting smells made her mouth run. She and the other performers wouldn’t be able to eat until after they danced.
There were town folk mixed in as well, faces of all ages. Ileth saw several groups of Vyenn girls, in fine gowns with just a mysterious hint of a folly they wanted to give up, under the eye of an elderly chaperone.
“Good hunting for the townies at the Feast of Follies,” Vii said to Ileth, quietly.
“We’re performing as soon as the musicians are ready,” Ottavia said, over and over again. “We invite your attendance.”
An artist from Vyenn hastily captured the scene on easels, sketching rough to be filled in with paint later. Ileth watched in astonishment as he made three different sketches of the bridge scene facing different directions from his carefully located stool, each in what had to have been but a minute or two.
The dance began as soon as they finished their procession and the musicians signaled that they were ready. Ileth was at the back with Vii, who kept falling out of line to greet friends. Ileth helped Preen light the footlights ringing their watchpost-stage. Dax and a few musically minded apprentices were warming up. There was another man with arms like a blacksmith, perhaps a local friend of Dax, who supported an awkwardly stringed instrument that must have been difficult to haul around. As he stood with his bow, ready to play it, he looked like he was dancing with a rich man’s coffin. His only bit of costuming was a hat tied on upside down.
Dax had outdone himself. He displayed a bizarre outfit made to look like he was upside down, walking around on his hands. A mannequin head hung down from his backside, hair dangling almost to the ground. She wasn’t sure where his head was hiding in the rigmarole (she finally decided he’d built a wire box around his head), but she saw hands tuning the impeller partly hidden by false footwear. Perhaps he could see a little through the stretched-tight fabric in front of his face.
Ottavia gathered them up and arranged them in performance order. Peak helped Vii with her costume. She’d managed to catch it on something and tear away a part during one of her embraces.
“Remember, it’s no different from the dragons,” Ottavia said. “Make eye contact. Pick someone out in the audience and look at them. If you engage with one, you engage with everyone. And smile!” She nodded at Dax and the music started.
She waited her turn, feeling she would be a bad follow-on to the other dancers.
Seemingly before she could draw breath, it was her turn. She made it through her solo, to some polite applause, nothing like what the opening number with five dancers had. She forgot to make eye contact. She wasn’t even sure she smiled, but she did keep her head up and kept in time to the music, even if Dax sped tempo up on each run-through to give her an extra challenge and keep the audience interested. By the second slide of her third repeat, she was ready to turn him upside down for real. But she finished.
The drill demo with Preen went easier. Ottavia explained the routine as a set of exercises her dancers used to train their muscles and perfect their posing and then stood off to the side. She talked about the delicate balance the troupe tried to maintain, so the performers worked with muscles hot and loose, yet not exhausting themselves, by rotating them on and off the floor for rest and water that would keep the sweat flowing. Having her present, like a protective mother hen keeping watch while her chicks pecked about, gave Ileth the confidence to examine the audience.
The drill began. She recognized Dath Amrits (who had a tapped keg of something hanging at his gut like a mother in her ninth month of expectation) and Hael Dun Huss standing next to him. Amrits in particular seemed to be enjoying himself. Or perhaps he was a cheery drunk.
Dun Huss pointed straight at her and leaned over and said something to Amrits. He chuckled and waggled his eyebrows at her. As Dun Huss shifted to hear Amrits say something, she recognized Rapoto Vor Claymass behind him, standing next to Santeel Dun Troot, who was hardly visible in the crowd, just a bit of her face white like the moon behind mountains.
The sight of Rapoto caused her to flub a leg lift. She recovered and caught up.
Vii’s hand tapped the side of Ileth’s head as they flung themselves left and right, arms rising and falling in synchronization. Ileth glanced over at her and saw that Peak’s repair on Vii’s costume had come undone. Vii’s daringly abbreviated top’s shoulder strap had fallen down her arm and only sweat was keeping the material over her left breast.
“Tit,” Ileth said to Vii out of the corner of her mouth.
“Cow,” Vii whispered back.
“Your top will fall,” Ileth managed through her smile-grimaced teeth.
Vii fixed it in a flash, showing more deftness and skill than Ileth would have believed. She seemed to make it part of the drill. She rewarded Ileth with a smile and a nod.
Rapoto must have seen the byplay, even if he didn’t understand the words over the music. He smiled at her. Santeel leaned close to whisper something in his ear. Ileth picked a different audience member to watch.
It was over just as she was getting comfortable with the idea of performing in front of a crowd. This time there was more applause. “If you are interested in a challenge and working right under the noses of the dragons, we do have vacancies in the troupe,” Ottavia said. “I hope a few of you will consider it. We don’t wear elaborate costumes all the time. And it is an excellent way to get to know some of the dragons.”
Ileth politely waited until the finale, smiling so widely she felt like her cheeks would split. The dancers in the finale took their bows; then Ottavia called the musicians and the rest of the troupe up onstage for a final bow and it was done.
Food, at last. She hurried across the Long Bridge and its festoons of lights.
Her first spot was Caseen’s cold soup. Caseen was messier still; he seemed to be getting one serving in four on himself. The cold soup was tomatoes (how he got them this late in the year she couldn’t imagine; perhaps someone in town jarred them, but they didn’t taste stewed) and spices and mint and something crunchy that was probably dry crumbs, she wasn’t sure, and most miraculously for the end of the year, ice, but the sharp acid chill was welcome to her thirst.
“I hear you’re finding your feet with the dancers, Ileth,” the Master of Novices said as he poured a bowl for Preen.
“I wish I could lose my feet again, sometimes,” Ileth said. “They get very tired.”
“How are things down with the Lodger?”
So he knew about that.
“Yes. He’s much better . . . I-I think.”
His tortured face relaxed and he stared off at something only he could see. “He’s a great old dragon. I’m not sure we’d have our Republic if it wasn’t for him. The first Alliance of Kings about did us in. My grandfather and all three of his brothers died then.”
“Caseen, save some soup for the bowls, would you,” Dath Amrits said, pushing through. He turned to Ileth, and she had to pull back to avoid being knocked flat by his barrel of a belly. “Hear you brought Old Stripes back to life. He talk your ear off about the Imperial Rock? Or has he only worked his way through ten thousand years of ancient dragon history up to now?”
“He’s teaching me some Drakine.”
“Costume’s a daring one, Ileth,” Dun Huss said. He gracefully drew another soup-eating apprentice out of the way before Amrits could bowl him over.
Ileth shrugged and tried to guess what Dun Huss had done as an example of folly. He looked much as he did other times she’d seen him. She realized he had the middle buttons undone on his tunic and his sword-frog was only hooked in two places on his belt, not all three. The madman! What if the Master of Dragoneers saw him like that?
“You two never change,” Caseen said. “Where’s the Borderlander?”
Amrits slapped the keg on his waist. It gave a sloshy, half-empty wet sound, making Ileth think he was sampling his own costuming. “He and Catherix are on watch in the flight cave. You know that worn hunk of old boot leather: only way to get him to attend a party would be to chain him in a box like the Great Efreent and haul him to it in a cart. He’d probably escape even quicker.”
Dun Huss ignored him, especially once he started filling a cup on a chain from his obscenely placed keg tap. “Did Galia tell you, Ileth? She passed her survival, brilliantly. I’ve made her my wingman.”
Ileth had heard something called a “survival” mentioned a few times, some sort of test with a dragon in the wilderness for senior apprentices, but the exact nature of it was still a mystery to her.
Caseen raised a drippy bowl of his soup in salute to Dun Huss. “I hadn’t heard. Always was the best of her year, Galia. Is the eve of the Feast of Follies the best time to announce that?”
“Unofficial. I talked to her this morning and she accepted. Thought she deserved to have a bit of a spree tonight without anyone thinking the worse of her on the news. I’ll officially present it to the Master in Charge in a day or two.”
“I think it’s wonderful,” Ileth said.
“The way she flew in in that duel.” Dun Huss smiled. “If I’m ever up against it, I want her coming in the same style.”
“Legally it wasn’t a duel anymore, Hael-me-lad,” Amrits said. “I’d blown it over. She could have run him through, claimed she was defending our future Speaker of the Assembly here.”
“As you mentioned flying in, sir, d-do you know anything about-about a music box?” Ileth haltingly relayed the mystery of her ivory music box from Sammerdam.
Dun Huss glanced at Dath Amrits.
“Don’t look at me, I gave her my silver whistle, and she sniffed about it being just nickel, the ungrateful whelk. Well, must be off. See if there are any thirsty townies from Vyenn about trying to give up on lust. Convince her to reconsider.”
“I am sorry, I don’t know anything about a music box, novice,” Dun Huss said.
Caseen shook his head at her as well.
“I see Galia,” Ileth squeaked. “I must con-congratulate her. Master, dragoneer.” She handed the soup cup to a man at the washtub.
“Just your humble servant tonight, Ileth,” Caseen said.
Galia stood against the thick decorative railing of the Long Bridge, looking out at the lake and the lights of Vyenn. They were feasting down there as well; what she guessed to be the high street was all lit up.
Her costume was mostly made of feathers and lace. Like most of the things she did, it seemed expertly sewn, and if she was trying to look ridiculous, she had failed. She looked almost elegant. If a young woman wearing a bunch of chicken feathers couldn’t actually look elegant, Galia came about as close as possible.
“I give up. It can’t be cowardice,” Ileth said. Galia turned.
“Ileth! I saw you dance. You can’t have just been doing it since summer! You looked like you’d been practicing for years!” Galia squeezed her hand, then looked her up and down. “You’re doing . . . poverty?”
“Greed,” Ileth said.
“Oh, courses, I’m sorry. Greed! Don’t know why I thought poverty. Good for you. It’s—um, very daring, but you dragon dancers can get away with anything. You asked about mine, didn’t you? I caught some of the novices clucking a little while after I told them off and put them on extra mending. They called me an old mother goose. I didn’t have money for goose feathers so I made this with chicken feathers and a few stained doilies of the Matron’s. But I’ve resolved not to peck at them all the time. If geese peck. Do they? I’m from the city.”
“Will you be around to peck?”
“I saw Dragoneer Dun Huss speaking to you. Did he tell you?”
She nodded.
“I still think I’m dreaming. Me, a wingman, to Hael Dun Huss. Or wingwoman. I’ll have to ask Kithiminee what she was called if she ever gets back. The language of the Serpentine isn’t designed for us, is it?”
“I’d settle for toilets designed for us,” Ileth said. “I get tired of-of-of squatting in cold pee.”
Galia laughed. “You’re so bad, Ileth. Or do northerners joke about such matters all the time?”
“As a wingman do you have a . . . have a dragon?”
“Sort of. Has no one told you how it works? Wingmen are always associated with a dragoneer. They are available to help him accomplish whatever commission has been handed to him. Sometimes they fly with one of the roster dragons, dragons who haven’t paired up with a dragoneer; other times they care for their dragoneer’s dragon. They might take his place if he’s injured. Please let that never be the case with me!”
Ileth thought there was an unusual amount of emotion in the last for cheery, confident Galia. They talked a little, and Ileth learned that wingmen can be given commissions, take on an apprentice, and do practically all of what a dragoneer does.
“May I ask you something, Galia?”
“Oh, I’ve been running on. Yes, please do!”
“Is there some tradition about dancers? Not becoming dragoneers?”
Galia worked her lips in thought. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard of it happening, but I’ve only been here a few years. They’re in their own world, like the physikers and tinkers. An important world: they keep the dragons happy. I know our men like them just as much as the dragons, for the most part. Ottavia’s always losing them to marriage or—well, you know. The mothers’ lodge in Vyenn,” she finished in almost a whisper.
Galia brightened. “But you know, I’ve never heard of a woman fighting a man in a duel, and you did that, didn’t you? So why not? That’s what you joined for, right? You’re not the marriage-market type, or a sage looking to write the definitive new dragon tome. I thought you might be a moonraker, but then that affair with Rapoto—speaking of whom, here he comes.”
Ileth turned, and there was Rapoto with Santeel at his side, tight on the bride’s arm. Rapoto had on a sleeping-jacket and a silk night-hat with such a long drape to it that it could also serve as a scarf while you wore it.
“Sloth!” Galia guessed.
“I’m not very original, I’m afraid,” Rapoto said. “Right the first guess.”
“Didn’t you do that last year?”
“It didn’t take.” Rapoto smiled. “Ileth, your dancing was lovely. No sloth, you.”
“Not onstage, sir. Thank you.” Rapoto didn’t seem to appreciate the honorific tacked on. He edged closer to her and she stepped over to replace a wayward feather on Galia to keep from being trapped between Rapoto and the bridge rail.
“Is no one going to guess mine?” Santeel Dun Troot said.
The assembly turned to Santeel. She wore something like a jester’s outfit, well-fitted, with diamond-shaped cutouts showing off parts of the body a woman of her name could only reveal on a feast night like this. The weighted-tassel skirt she wore was stylish and expensive-looking and opened up in strips when she walked. Part of her face was obscured by black greasepaint.
“Oblivious!” Galia said.
“Ignorance?” Ileth asked.
Santeel glared. “I had it made especially for me. I’m incomplete!”
“I should think so,” Galia said. “They left out half the material.”
“You know, Galia, for someone from Sammerdam you’re a bit of a prude. I’m serious. I wish to finish my journey to adulthood here, ready for a citizen’s responsibilities to the Republic.”
“Uh-huh. I thought your family came from old aristocracy,” Galia said. “And your father was part of the Royalist gang in the Assembly.”
“Their convictions are not mine. Don’t we mix as equals here? Didn’t I stand as second to Ileth, a nobody from north nowhere?”
Galia nodded. “And I had to jump in to keep her from being stabbed through the belly.”
Santeel glared at Galia and turned to Ileth. “Is it true, what your Charge said about the dancers? You, uh, perspire all the time.”
Ileth nodded.
“That’s the idea,” Rapoto said. “The dragons enjoy the sweaty smell. It’s their job to stink. I don’t mean stink. You know what I mean, Ileth.”
“Stink is the word for it,” Ileth said.
“Doesn’t it make you feel uncomfortable?” Santeel asked. “Clammy? I would think you would faint. I have an aunt who faints just getting out of a carriage and walking across the courtyard on a hot day.”
“We wrap up whenever we aren’t dancing,” Ileth said. “She m-makes us drink. She has this salty vinegar concoction she gets from the kitchens that they use for the pickled eggs. We drink it between drills.”
“That girl with the thick black hair, Peak, can certainly spin,” Rapoto said, shrugging off Santeel and stepping up to Ileth. “If I ever get a free morning, I’d like to watch you rehearse. Is that allowed? I mean, you’re in the middle of the Wall of Mirrors and the dragons hang over you.”
“We get the grooms up all the time. Cooks. Or dragoneers, even. We’re used to it. Wh-Which reminds me. That roasting pig smells d-delicious. I must—”
“Allow me to get you a plate,” Rapoto said. Santeel glared at Ileth.
“Thank you,” Ileth said. “But—”
Rapoto hurried off before she could stammer out anything after but.
“I thought you dancers never ate,” Santeel said.
“Not at all. They put us practically n-n-next to the kitchens because we’re always eating.”
“The dragon kitchens? I saw them on my first tour. You must have strong stomachs.” Santeel looked up and down. “What are you, anyway, Ileth? Resolving not to accept charity anymore? It can’t be putting a price on your virtue, that’s too obvious. That would be like selling a swayback horse that’s already been—”
“She’s greed, Dun Troot,” Galia said.
“Doing away with greed.”
“Greed? What do you have to be greedy about? You haven’t anything to your name but a secondhand silver whistle, if you haven’t sold it, that is.”
“Someone sent me a nice music box. Ivory. It p-p-plays at two tempos.”
Santeel looked thoughtful. “It certainly wasn’t me. No card with it?”
“No.”
Santeel started to turn her head toward Rapoto but instead smiled at Ileth. “Well, tra-la-la, a music box. How nice. Your costume looks well sewn, anyway. Clever about using those coins, draw the eyes when you move. It’s simple but well done, Ileth.”
“This is my first Feast of Follies, so I thought I’d s-start with an easy one. Oh, still have the-the-the whistle.” She pulled it out of her costume. “I promise to blow it if your Rapoto tries to kiss me again.”
Ileth regretted the speech at once. Santeel looked authentically hurt. She’d been trying to be nice with the compliment on her costume. Unlike Galia, Ileth was inclined to believe her talk about duty to the Republic. There was no reason a rich girl couldn’t be as patriotic as a poor one.
“We have a lot of people from town this time,” Galia said.
Talk turned to the music and the size of the crowd. They looked up at the dragons—there were four up on the rocks and little natural ledges in the Beehive, watching the festivities—and tested themselves on their names; Ileth used her improving Drakine to help Santeel on the pronunciation by way of making amends. Santeel only got one right, Telemiron, Charge Deklamp’s dragon, whom the applicants had met while Ileth was waiting out on the doorstep.
A mass of barbecued pig with Rapoto somewhere behind appeared.
“Left some for the rest of us, I trust,” Galia said.
“You bid good-bye to the folly once your costume comes off, I hope?” Ileth said, setting down the platter on the wide railing of the Long Bridge.
“Rapoto, have you heard about Ileth’s music box?” Santeel asked quickly. “I wonder who could have sent her such a wonderful gift.”
He denied any knowledge but seemed impressed that someone had sent for it all the way from Sammerdam.
“Maybe it was the grateful staff of the Catch Basin,” Galia said.
They sampled the roast.
This led to a short argument over whether greed covered food as well, or if that was solely gluttony’s territory. Ileth said no, Galia yes. Santeel supported Ileth, as if to rub her republican convictions in Galia’s face.
Ileth understood little about politics, but it evidently caused some sort of enmity between Santeel and Galia. She’d been out of the Manor for weeks and weeks now. They might have argued about the use of a hairbrush for all she knew. In the Freesand nobody talked politics; they mostly talked about fish, lobsters, and oyster beds, and the depredations of the Rari on the north side of the bay. Politics belonged to the rarefied air of the Governors and the Assembly, and no one Ileth had ever known spent any time talking about them.
Santeel moved Rapoto off to another group, this one containing a few apprentice friends of his.
“She’s like a dragon on a bullock,” Galia said, watching Santeel point out details of her costume to the other apprentices, still tight on Rapoto’s arm.
“Santeel doesn’t like losing,” Ileth said. “Toenail clippers, boys . . .”
Which reminded Galia, who told the story of Santeel’s nail clippers being found hidden in the bedding of the novice from her room who snored loudly. Santeel accused her of being a thief, the girl denied it, and Quith pointed out that it was odd that the snorer would steal toenail clippers and then not clip her nails with them, as both her hands and feet needed attention. The affair ended with the return of the small scissors and the snoring girl being removed to a corner of the attic where she wouldn’t bother anyone.
“I can’t believe she’d t-try to get someone dismissed.”
Galia shook her head. “I can. I know her kind. She’ll take a ride or two on a dragon, get a pretty sash she can trot out on the patriotic holidays, maybe ride dragonback down the Sammerdam Archway in the Declaration Day Review, and ride off on a pensioner dragon on her wedding day while people toss flowers. The Masters will run her through here like a twig washed down a drain spout. Entered, apprenticed, a few fun rides, and passed on to a husband. Her dragonriding stories will be the highlight of the high priestess’s teas.”
Ileth danced once more, an informal encore with the musicians, who’d continued playing all through the feast. She didn’t drink anything but water. Not even the punches or ciders; she wasn’t sure she could trust them. Many of the feasters were already feeling their drink.
A few of the girls from the Manor embraced her and congratulated her on the dancing. The Manor seemed so long ago. Increasingly, her life felt like it was divided between getting to know the Lodger and everything else. She’d come to the Serpentine with a girl’s fantasies about riding dragons, swooping around temple towers and scattering herds of sheep or peering straight down onto a whale’s back as it blew at the surface. What she found was something like a master who could tell her about ages no living human eyes had seen. About higher ideals. The ancient troth between dragon and dragoneer. The sorts of things that were the reason men like Hael Dun Huss served his people and land.
She couldn’t wait to tell the Lodger about the evening, so she hurried down to the Cellars as soon as she was able. He’d be asleep, probably. Perhaps she’d curl up just outside his room so they could talk as soon as he woke.
For some reason the darkness of the Cellars bothered her. There was always a certain amount of mess and disarray, though it had improved a great deal since the new apprentices took over. She knew they’d been rolling out extra lamp oil for the party and breaking out spare torches and lanterns, and it showed. She couldn’t put a finger on it, but she lingered under the lamp before setting off toward the Lodger’s chamber.
When Ileth was about twelve, one of the old women of the Freesand, a bay widow who sold tobacco and nuts and oiled tie-pouches to put them in, told her that women especially needed to listen to their gut more than their head or their heart. The heart flew to all points of the compass, and the head was ready to rationalize away anything with Oh, it’s nothing to worry about, silly. But the gut you could trust. The gut never steered you wrong.
Ileth’s gut bothered her. Something was wrong up ahead. She had a horrible premonition of the Lodger, choked on a joint of meat, dying with no one there to run for help. She quickened her pace, afraid of what she would find at the end of the tunnel. It seemed a terrible distance to the light of the Lodger’s chamber and things were still. But not quite still enough.
With increasing unease, she’d covered about a third of the distance when she struck something. Her first thought was that she’d walked into something in the dark.
But the beam she’d thought she’d blundered into turned out to be a thick arm reaching from the darkness. It held her hard. Something huge and strong and reeking of beer yanked her off her feet and pulled her among the jumble of crating and shelving and barrels lined up in the passageway.
Gorgantern couldn’t resist a cackle of triumph. He slammed her against the wall and the world turned into fireworks and gongs.
“Got you, little piglet. You’ll oink now.”
He was wet, slippery. He’d greased his skin for a swim in the lake. She scrabbled for purchase with her feet and felt that he too was barefoot.
If his hands on her shoulders had closed around her throat, she would have died with a quiet crackle of cartilage and escaping breath. But he reached for her breasts. She’d been pawed there before. Her reflexes knew how to get away from that without much troubling her terrified brain. She slipped beneath his reach so fast it could have been mistaken for a magician’s trick. He grabbed her cobbled-together costume as she went, and she brought her heel, every bit of her dancer’s strength in leg and buttock behind it, down on his toes. She heard and—even better—felt an unmistakable crunch. The hand let go and she heard a howl through the blood roaring in her ears. Muscles strengthened and quickened by hours of exacting exploded and she was free of his reach.
She vaulted over a crate, caught her foot, rolled back to her feet in stride, and fled toward the Lodger’s chamber, yelling for all she was worth. She heard Gorgantern shove a crate aside as he limped after her. Later she reprimanded herself for forgetting her whistle; it would have echoed in the Rotunda; but the strength and terror in those hands reduced her to bare instinct.
Gorgantern staggered after her, swinging a bent iron crate-cracker he’d found somewhere. “Wrong way, piglet. No exit back there.”
“Murder!” she screamed as she ran. “I’m being murdered!”
She made it to the Lodger’s cavern, shrieking as she ran, only to trip on the gutter. She heard Gorgantern hard behind, flipped onto her back as she scrambled away—
Then a yellow shaft of light, heat, and noise filled the passageway. It pulled air away from her face. It was as though a tendril of the living sun came down and ran a fiery finger up the tunnel. And Gorgantern simply vanished.
One second he was there, bathed in the approaching light, and the next vaporized clean out of existence. There wasn’t even a body to fall or break into pieces. He was consumed.
She threw up her arm against the heat and the light. The next thing she knew, the Lodger had swept her up in his wing (she didn’t even know dragons could carry things in their wings until later it was explained to her that they were sort of a long-fingered arm) and, relatively safe from the fire in the leathery cocoon, survived the flames as the Lodger dashed through them in the odd rocking stride of a dragon’s leaping sprint.
Bounced around in the dark with an odd sensation of once again being a babe in arms, she felt dizzy and sick. When her head cleared, she was gasping, disoriented, out of a strange dream of the Captain knocking her down and standing wide-legged over her, roaring drunk. The dream dissolved and she was back in the Serpentine, drawing breath after gasping breath.
Sensible again, finding herself at the tunnel opening to the lift, she found herself looking into the alarmed eyes of the Lodger. His breath smelled like a hot lamp burning old grease.
“Ileth, can you talk?” the Lodger asked.
“That’s a . . . f-foolish question,” she coughed. Her lungs tingled. She broke into another series of racking coughs.
Figures dropped down from the ladders flanking the lift and she heard it clatter down to her level.
“There seems to be a fire in the—” The Lodger winced. “In the . . . passageway. I panicked. I must have some air.”
He lurched onto the platform, tucking his neck and tail. “Up. I must go up,” he growled tightly.
Ileth got to her feet, still coughing, and followed. She grabbed on to a trailing edge of wing and was pulled along as she used to be pulled when she’d grab sheep or dogs as a little girl. Yells of fire and a ringing alarm sounded from the junction. Others had discovered the fire. Finally she thought of her dragon whistle and blew it for all she was worth as she stumbled, clinging to the Lodger.
She smelled her own burned hair. There was some pain, especially on the arm she’d flung up to protect her face and on the exposed skin. The skin didn’t look like it was otherwise damaged. She’d heard bad burns didn’t hurt—at first.
The Lodger decided not to wait for the lift and climbed to the next level. Ileth hung on, listening to the dragon’s labored panting in increasing alarm. Oh no oh no oh no . . .
“Need. Fresh. Air,” the dragon said. He added something in Drakine she didn’t understand.
After an eternity they reached the Upper Ring. The Lodger, who clearly knew his way about, made for the exit. He held his front leg tight against his breast, resulting in an awkward, three-legged limp aided by a wing. The image of the dragging wing, particularly, alarmed Ileth. Something was dreadfully wrong.
She blew on the dragon whistle. “Make way! Make way!”
They must have made some pair moving across the Long Bridge, both sooty, Ileth with her hair singed and costume awry, the dragon staggering across the bridge. Someone called for people to fight the fire in the Cellars. The party dissolved.
At the other end of the Long Bridge the Lodger’s dragging wing knocked over the food tables. White-eyed and wheezing loudly, he didn’t notice, but he made it through the tunnel-like loom of Mushroom Rock and, skirting the little house where Joai served up soup and bandages, stumbled for the wall. Ileth thought she spotted the physiker’s white hair and ran to him, but it was just a portly man of Vyenn unknown to her. Ileth turned and watched in horror as the Lodger reared up, climbed over the battlements, and fell more than leaped over, his tail whipping up and over as loose as a cut line as he rolled down the precipitous slope to the bay.
Her injuries forgotten, Ileth ran after him. Heart pounding as though it sought exit from her chest, she found some stairs and made it to the wall. Disturbed rocks and dust were still heading down the precipitous slope to the bay where the Lodger was thrashing—no, swimming, snakelike, with limbs tight against his sides, for the shoreline.
She jumped down the two-man-high wall and bumped down the slope after him, at cruel cost to the skin on her legs and her feet. She hit the ankle-deep water at the lakeside and hurried along the shoreline just as the Lodger dragged himself up onto the beach, taking deep, strained breaths.
“For all the gods’ sake, what is wrong?” she said.
“Air,” he said around his tongue, which stuck stiffly from his mouth. He didn’t seem to be speaking to her. He used the Drakine word. She sensed a dragon circling overhead and glanced up. There were several, turning tight circles. She could see part of the Long Bridge from here, with its festive lights, and the lighthouse atop the Beehive.
He panted for what felt like an eternity, ignoring her pleas to come to his aid. Where were the physikers?
Finally he blinked a few times. “Ileth?” he said in her own language, dry and breathy.
“Sir?” she said. “It’s Ileth, I’m here.”
“Did I make it?”
“You’re on the beach. Your back legs are in the bay. Don’t you feel the water?”
He gulped air around that horrid outthrust tongue, then managed to retract it. “I had the horrors of—being chopped up—and dragged out in hunks. Better here. Better now.”
“No!”
“I’m dying, Ileth. Something broke inside. Heart, I believe, or a blood—oh, what’s the word. Blood pipe.”
He raised his head a little so he could gaze at her with both eyes. “So you are the last thing this life gave me to love. Fate could hardly have done better. A daughter of sorts.”
Ileth tried to speak but choked on her words. “Love?” she finally managed.
“Read Lermonton’s On Planes of Love. The only flaw is he does not speak of how . . . they sometimes blend.”
“See! You’re doing w-well. You wouldn’t be quoting—”
“That’s better. Warm,” he said. “Warm,” he repeated, this time in Drakine.
He gave a shudder. “See that I’m properly burned, Ileth. See to it! Vhanesh luss.”
The last was in Drakine.
“Don’t talk. Breathe. The physikers are here. They say you need to rest and keep breathing. Keep breathing!”
They weren’t. He didn’t.
He took a deep breath and laid his head down at a more comfortable angle, as though settling in for a nap. One of his wings rattled and his griff relaxed.
“Sir,” she prodded.
“SIR.” She struck him, hard, where she thought the neck-heart was.
“Vhanesh luss! You’re not going to t-tell me what that means, are you? You old fox! I’ll have to—to figure it out for myself, won’t I?”
He stirred, nuzzled her with his snout. She caressed the pebbled skin with her hand. His eye opened, twinkling merrily, as if he were looking forward to seeing what came next. Then the lid opened wide. The eye emptied.
His griff rattled and went limp.
“Gods!” Ileth threw herself down on his neck and cried. Sobbed as she had never sobbed before. Not for herself, not for anyone. Vhanesh luss, vhanesh luss. She repeated it over and over, committing it to memory.
Orphaned. Orphaned again, and she didn’t even know his real name.
A presence loomed up behind, large, much bigger than a horse, but quiet.
“I am Aurue,” the dragon said.
She couldn’t answer him. The sobs wouldn’t stop.
“This noble one is dead.” His Montangyan was terrible, thick and utterly flat, but he could get his point across.
The gray nudged her with his snout.
“Be back on your way, Ileth,” he said. “You are wet. You are cold. Go, take our gratitude. We will finish.”
“I’ll stay.”
“Jizara and I, we are of his connected line, through my sire and sire-sire. Jizara is away. The vigil starts.”
“Don’t cut-cut him up,” she managed. “He made me promise.” She cast about at the boats and broke off an old tiller handle. It had an evil-looking pair of nails like fangs. “I’m not moving.”
“When stop the vigil, we burn him. Until then, none will touch at him.”
“Then,” she said, feeling half-dead herself, “I sh-shall wait until he is bu-burned.”
“Have your will,” Aurue said.
So she sat by the body, with her improvised club across her lap. She dragged over one of the smaller overturned flat-bottomed boats that had once been the border of the dueling ground and set it by the Lodger’s head and sat. The sun came up. She vaguely sensed that some dragoneers came down to the beach, milled about, spoke with Aurue or one of the other dragons, and left. Eventually, the sun went down. Galia came out with a blanket and some soup in a crock. She accepted the blanket and thanked her for the soup but didn’t eat any. After two futile attempts at conversation, Galia gave up and returned to the Serpentine.
Three days she sat, not eating, taking a mouthful of lake water when the thirst became too awful, hurling rocks at scavenging birds who came to worry at the tender flesh reachable to their hooked beaks. Were the dragons not bothered by birds trying to eat their kin?
Two dragons were always with her, but they changed at dawn and dusk. They neither ate nor drank nor spoke when they were on duty. Now and then a few of the humans of the Serpentine visited. They threw braided brambles or green lake plants in place of flowers since it was not the season for them. Ottavia came, said she was sorry.
“You’re only flesh, you know,” Dath Amrits said, when he and his dragon visited. Dath left an old scroll-tube filled with some blank paper and a full ink bottle by the corpse. “Come up and have a meal and a night in a bed. They won’t send him on until tomorrow night anyway. We have to fly out by sundown. Use my bed. Had the bedding washed for you. I know that drafty ruin that passes for the dragoneers’ hall is like getting the warmest room in an icehouse, but it has to be better than the shoreline.”
“No, sir. Thank you, sir,” she said.
The third night turned cold, dreadfully cold, and she shivered under her blanket. She would fall asleep for a few minutes, but discomfort would soon wake her.
As the night wore on and snow began to fall, a dozen or more dragons gathered. Their scales seemed dull and colorless. She touched one of the larger dragons as it passed. Ash came off on her hand. They’d rolled in ashes. She wondered with torpid curiosity where one found a clearing full of ashes deep enough to roll in, but then realized they were dragons and could make one out of any pile or stand of timber.
An old dragon shoved Ileth’s overturned skiff aside as the dragons stood in the center of a horseshoe shape around the corpse.
“Would it be . . . ap-appropriate for me to-to-to put on ash as well?”
“Normally, I’d say no,” the dragon said. Emotion gave his dragon-tongued Montangyan an extra layer of difficulty. “But I—forgive me—I heard of his last words. In your case I believe it entirely appropriate. He called you his daughter. Feel free to take some off one of my saa for your own.”
She did so.
It didn’t last long. Several of the dragons spoke. It was all in Drakine. She picked up a few words; they seemed to be talking about wars and a dragon king and humans. She had come in at the end of a famous life, it seemed. They sang in their own tongue, some cawing out words, others sort of droning in a chorus, and the rest thumping their tails and cracking their wings and using their long throats as organic trumpets.
There were a few humans attending, discreetly, from a distance.
“Say something if you like, girl,” the dragon at the center said, startling her.
She shook her head. “Good-bye, Lodger,” she whispered. “I wish we’d had more . . . time.”
One of the dragons must have given a signal she didn’t perceive. In turns, running around the arc, they each spat fire on the corpse of the Lodger. Soon his flesh was alight. Horribly, the smell made her hungry.
He took a long time to burn. It seemed like hours. As soon as the flames began to go out, a couple of the dragons departed. Finally the rest nudged the blackened remains into the lake, sweeping fallen scale in with their tails.
“He is with his line now,” the elder dragon said to her. “It is over.”
“Is this how you always do it?”
“Sadly we can’t always be this formal. Leave it to [3] to die at the joining of water, earth, and sky, good and proper traditionalist that he was. I imagine he planned it all out. There’s always a proper wind off the mountains here.”
Ileth’s teeth chattered in agreement. Oddly, the knowledge that he died in a place of his choosing made her feel better. Almost happy. No, actually happy. Happy? Maybe she was going mad.
“Do you want to fly back to the caves with us, or walk?” the elder dragon said.
“I can’t, I’ve never flown.”
“As you like. But you came here to fly.”
“Would it be appropriate?”
“I knew him. He had a generous soul. He’d like nothing better.”
“Ausperex, you’ve no saddle. She’ll be impaled on one of your horns,” a female dragon said. She was mostly green but had white flecks blended into her scale. “Even after all these years, you land like a catapulted elephant.” Ausperex did have a somewhat overgrown ridge of spikes running down his back, save where they were trimmed down somewhat for a saddle, though evidently one hadn’t been on him in some time, so they’d grown back.
The dragonelle settled down next to Ileth. “My name is Taresscon. I don’t fly as much as I once did. I’d be glad to carry you back.”
She knew the female by sight, as she’d often seen her pace through the passages of the Beehive, speaking to all and sundry, but wasn’t familiar with her role. She usually had a staff of humans with her, but she’d never seen Taresscon with a dragoneer.
Females had a webbed fringe running down their backs, much softer than that of the males, and Taresscon’s fringe was neatly snipped off where a saddle would rest and much cut down elsewhere.
“I should carry you anyway,” Taresscon added. “I have been meaning to thank you personally for what you did for some time now, but I’ve been so busy polishing diplomats and sealing assents. Your friend and I go back to, well, let me just be modest and say I don’t go quite so far back as he did. I am happy he didn’t die in a cave. There’s a natural little well where my neck meets my shoulders, see, girl? Sit tight there. Helps if you tip yourself a bit forward. If you want to set your teeth in my fringe, go right ahead; I can’t feel a thing there.”
She didn’t see and even if she did she was busy summoning her courage. The Beehive suddenly seemed high up and far off. Now that she had a chance to fly, she was afraid to do it.
“I find if I sit around thinking about a fear it gets even worse,” Taresscon said. “Climb up and let me worry about keeping you on. Not that different from a horse.”
Somehow knowing that dragons had their own fears helped. Ileth hadn’t had much more experience with horses than she did with dragons. There was just that time when she was six. She’d sat on farm horses a couple of times as a child. She’d never done anything that could be called riding on any kind of beast.
“I’ll stick out my front leg so. This is my on side, you know on side and off, right? Good. Use the top of my front arm as a step. My, you’re limber for being new, and up you go.”
Ileth surveyed the world from atop a dragon’s back for the second time. She was going up and taking whatever fears she had about it with her. With the energy that three days of hunger often brings, she shifted about until her hips felt comfortable.
“Just grab on to my fringe in front of you and lean way forward. Pull all you want, you can rip it out and it won’t hurt. Go forward and grip with your legs like you’re jumping a wall on your horse. Don’t be afraid to dig your heels in. I hardly feel it these days. Hoo, I used to be tender about my throat.”
What little she knew of flying on a dragon mostly suggested cold. The dragoneers wore layers of material and shields over their faces to keep the worst of it out. “We’re not going up high, are w-we?”
“Stars, no. Just to the Long Bridge. I don’t think either of us is ready for an attempt at a flight cave landing.” The dragon jumped up and down in a quick hop, warming her wings. “Hold tight, we’ll be there in a moment.” Ileth gasped and tightened her grip. She felt the dragon jump in the air, but something bumped. When she opened her eyes again she found they were still on the ground.
“See, if you can hang on through that, you can make it to the bridge. I’ll set down as soft as if I were carrying my own eggs.”
Ileth nodded.
“Once we take off, I have to circle where we buried our relative. I won’t do it like the others. You’ll hardly know I’m turning.”
Ileth, now that it had been pointed out to her, did see that the dragons above were swooping around the funeral site.
The dragon began to beat her wings, warming the muscles in earnest. “Once for your grip, twice for your legs, three times and we’re off,” Taresscon sang out, coiling her body along the spine and then springing into the air like a cat jumping for a ledge.
She felt the dragon’s mighty blood vessels working through her skin and heard the wings behind her beating furiously. But she was in the air! Ileth, of the Captain’s Lodge, with her stutter and her patched dresses, sat astride a dragon in flight!
She was so excited watching the tilt of her mount’s head and the way the female’s fringe rippled in the wind that she missed circling the funeral site entirely—guilt hammered her when she thought back on that fact in bed that night—they were approaching the Pillar Rocks before she knew it. It looked strange, and she realized the feast lights had been taken down and put away. Only the ordinary lamps glowed, with the reflected beams of the lighthouse above.
Taresscon was practically the last dragon to leave the funeral site. Only Aurue, the youngest, still remained at the water’s edge, she noticed, looking back.
Ileth looked at the burned remains, and the joy of the moment turned to ash, ash as cold and wet as the philosophical old dragon’s remains. Leave it to life to squeeze the triumph she should feel at this moment out of her spirit. She was a dirty dishrag passed from fate to fate, wrung out and tossed.
The line of dragons came in one after another, tails waving about as they balanced at the last moment for the landing, slapping them down to absorb the shock of alighting. Most stalked straight through the wide tunnel to the Rotunda but two males stepped off onto the wide plaza before the tunnel entrance to scratch at their scale like giant dogs and shake off the ash before going inside.
As promised, Taresscon set down so gently Ileth hardly knew they were on the ground until the leathery rustle of her wings folding in on themselves tipped her to the fact. She felt dazed.
“Just slip off, girl. No, other way. Off side, remember? That’s it. Start your habits well, dear, and you’ll save yourself trouble.”
“Th-Thank you for your advice,” Ileth said, back on the ground again, her legs a little wobbly from the unaccustomed work of gripping a dragon’s neck. Now she was physically wrung out as well as emotionally.
“I’ve had enough practice,” the senior dragon said. “I served six years sort of attached to the Assembly. Speaking for the dragons. Humph. I’m for my shelf. It’s been one of those days where the joy and sorrow keep changing places, no? Anytime you want more practice, girl, look me up. I get tired of all the meetings.”
She brought her head in close. “Just between rider and dragonelle, so to speak, you did well. I’ve had riders in saddles who almost tipped off, and there you were hugging tight as a scale nit even without a saddle. Be proud of that, and thank Ottavia and the cooks for the strength in your legs.”
Ileth realized she’d left the blanket Galia had brought her back on the beach. She couldn’t face the long walk down to retrieve it. She just couldn’t.
Too tired to even take the extra hundred paces to the kitchens, she went straight to bed.
You look terrible, Ileth,” Ottavia said as the other dancers rose the next morning. “I’m excusing you from drill today, to spare myself from facing a jury on a charge of witchcraft for reanimating the dead. There’s ash everywhere. You smell like the sampling lounge of a tobacco house. Get rid of the shambles you’re wearing, then wash your body, hair, and linen. Report to me this afternoon when you’re fit to be seen in public as one of the Serpentine’s dancers.”
Ileth decided to eat at Joai’s house. Joai wasn’t the best of company; the sudden onset of winter, as if to pay back the warmest Feast of Follies in recent memory, had brought with it a cold. Her face was red and her nose even redder as if her nose considered the coloration of her face a challenge it had to answer by doubling.
“Word is you rode old Taresscon. Bare-skin,” Joai snuffled.
“You make it sound like a circus attraction,” Ileth said.
“Ooo, I don’t. Are-choo! It’s just overturned half the apple carts in Jotun, you might say. There’s rules and traditions about when to ride dragons, as you’re no doubt about to learn.”
Joai limited the rest of her communication to sniffles and sneezes. Ileth walked back to the Beehive and her interview with Ottavia feeling that she’d planted both feet in the muck. Again.
“Am I in jeopardy?” she asked, as soon as she passed through the curtain and entered the Dancers’ Quarter.
Ottavia smiled from her little desk, where she folded and laid down a note.
“I wouldn’t call it jeopardy, Ileth. I wish you’d spoken to me before doing your death vigil down on the lake; I would have happily excused you and made sure you had warm clothing for winter’s arrival. As it is I can’t find fault with your instructions, other than missing drill. You were assigned to the Lodger, after all, and you carried out your assignment. But remember, we dancers are a team. You can’t just go off on your own hook like that, despite your grief. But I’m ready to let the matter be forgotten. It was a mad night, with the feast and the fire and the Lodger’s death. Just communicate your needs to me in the future.”
“And Gorgantern.”
Ottavia’s dark brows came together. “Gorgantern? What does he have to do with it?”
“He’s the reason the fire started. He was in the Cellars. He meant murder.”
“You mean arson, no—oh, I see. Well, rough justice, then. The fool.” She shuddered. “I’ve a horror of being burned. Strange for someone who works around dragons, I know, but that’s the Wheel of Fate.
“Oh, more sad news. You missed Peak’s farewell. We had our winter rice pudding with brandy-raisins early. Santeel ate your portion. She claims the drills are famishing her. Peak told me to tell you good-bye. She said she’d never forget your memorable entry to full womanhood with your skirt over your head in a horse stable. She meant it as a compliment, I believe. I shall miss her brass more than her skill at dancing.”
The wheels in Ileth’s brain stopped turning. “Santeel was at . . . the drills?”
“Yes, she joined us. I made it strictly probationary. We’ve never had a society girl, much less a Name like Dun Troot. What is her family going to say, I wonder? You and I know what goes on here, but that’s not how they see it in Sammerdam or Asposis. Not yet, anyway. But the good news is the next time Preen eats too many of those cat’s-catch-of-the-day disguised as sausages from the dragon kitchens, you don’t have to clean up. You had a quick spell as scour. Assuming our new scour Santeel doesn’t fall out, then you’re back to scrubbing out the sluice.”
Ottavia ended the interview by informing her that she needed to visit Caseen, the Master of Novices, in his office after dinner. If she wished, she could take her dinner privately in the Notch or anywhere else she might find convenient.
“A final word: sorry about the Lodger, young lady. I heard you two were a fine match. Taresscon herself spoke to me. She was quite moved by the way you stood by him, in bad times and good.”
Ileth polished herself in the washroom to the best of her ability. She noticed a new bed partition, Santeel’s, obviously, and a special lacquered sort of carry-all that she’d seen carpenters and such use filled with brushes and soaps and balms in the washroom. One of the cases in it was beautifully inscribed silver.
Clean with her singed hair clipped even closer to the scalp—she took care to remove any of her own hairs and rinse off Santeel’s brush before she returned it—and with a scalp glowing from the gentle caresses of the quality bristles, she dressed in the better of the two shirts she owned (they were always swapping places as they wore down) and her mended overdress. She steeled herself for another encounter with the Master of Novices.
She had to wait; he was dealing with two boys who looked as though they’d been in a fistfight. The cat that prowled the hallway took the opportunity of her waiting to leap into her lap. She idly scratched it.
The boys left and she made her presence known.
“Nothing unpleasant today, Ileth,” Caseen said. “Please sit down.”
Ileth took her little seat opposite the desk. The room smelled like boys and blood. They’d dripped a little on the floor.
“I’m sorry for this loss. I understand you quite liked working with the old dragon,” Caseen said.
“He enjoyed my dancing. I enjoyed learning from him. I wish . . . I wish we’d had more time.”
“Remember what I told you about time at the door? About nothing on earth being able to retrieve a lost hour?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry you had to learn the lesson this way.”
They looked at each other in silence for a moment before he spoke again.
“You’ve also had your first flight, earlier than most. How did you like it?”
“Joai said there would be some trouble about me riding Taresscon?”
“Ah. Well, no harm you knowing that’s the sticking point before you walked in here. Yes, some trouble, but not—don’t look at me with those eyes. No need for tears, girl. I’m not going to reprimand you. If the dragons ask you to do something, and you can do it, you can’t ever go far wrong here following their instructions. Awful as that night was, I know the Lodger had a horror of just going to sleep in his room and never waking up. We weren’t going to cut him up no matter what, though. To tell you the truth, the plan was to just seal off that room of the Cellars and turn it into his tomb. This whole place wouldn’t have been built if it weren’t for him, so his bones might as well lie in it. Still, he went the way he wanted. Few enough of us have that privilege. Do I have to tell you that little of this would have existed if it wasn’t for him?”
“He didn’t talk about himself much. I know he took pride in the Beehive. Why did he live in secret?”
“I’m not sure anyone, even Taresscon or Ausperex, knows the full story. He made some powerful enemies in life. I suppose some of them, or their descendants, might be after him still.”
“So how, so how do I have to fix matters with flying on Taresscon? Or are you opening your Blue Book?”
“Ach, no. Riding a dragon, well, it signifies that you’ve reached a certain level of achievement. You broke with tradition, Ileth. That’s not always a bad thing. Doesn’t hurt to test a tradition now and then to see if it’s worth keeping. Usually we wait until spring before making any of the previous summer’s mob apprentices, so the first rides can be carried out in pleasant weather. But you’ve forced us to move up the schedule a bit.”
“I didn’t know . . .”
“I told you, a dragon invites you to do something, do it—as long as they aren’t telling you to murder a clumsy groom or something like that. That’s the difficulty, though. I can’t make you an apprentice. There’s a lot of talk associated with your name here. The duel. There’s that unfortunate party. The fire. Not that you are being blamed for the fire. If I made you an apprentice, every girl who keeps her sheets clean would be at my door asking why I couldn’t make her an apprentice if I did it for you. Do you understand?”
Ileth nodded.
“Now. My other difficulty, just to show I don’t just have to think about you novices, has to do with satisfying our partners on the other side of the bridge. Taresscon and her two fellow seniors who act as sort of a three-dragon jury in running the Beehive have made it known to me that the Lodger spoke to them about you shortly before the night of the Feast of Follies. It seems he persuaded her—and if there’s one thing the Lodger could do it was persuade you so you thought his ideas were yours—that you were to be put into flight training at once as a thank-you for what you did for him and also for your bit in sniffing out those thieving scale-rats in the Cellars.”
Ileth rode a surge of emotion as best as she could, keeping it off her face. The crest of the wave being that she would fly again, certainly and soon, and the trough being that nothing, not even flying, could fill the hole in her life left by the Lodger.
“It would take a braver man than me to tell Taresscon that the last request of a dragon like the Lodger would be ignored. Honestly, I’d sooner face a hooded jury. So I’m stuck between the traditions of the Serpentine, a request that might as well be an order from the dragons, and my own efforts to make sure my novices are all justly treated.
“After speaking with all concerned and the Master of Apprentices—I was a busy man while you were standing vigil over the corpse of the Lodger—here is what I have decided to do. I am promoting five novices to apprentice. You are not one of them. I am giving flight training to six of the Serpentine. You are one of them. Your second in the duel, Santeel Dun Troot, is one of the names I am promoting, I’m sure you will be happy to hear. I am explaining, should any of you lot have the temerity to question me, that we need a dancer for special duty with a dragon, and since you had experience with the Lodger you are up for the job, assuming you can handle the training. I’m not going to ask you if you think it’s fair one way or the other. This is the only way I can make all those currently bothering me about one Ileth of the Freesand quiet down and give me peace. So I hope you are looking forward to marking some time on dragonback among your other duties. I’ve already dropped a hint about what’s in the offing to Ottavia; the rest is going in this note.”
He sealed the paper with a dribble of wax and handed it to her. The Captain could probably run the Lodge for an entire year on what the Serpentine spent on paper alone, never mind ink. She laughed at herself as she thought this—northerners had a reputation for keeping their purse close and the drawstring tight, and here she was, totaling up the price of paper in her head.
“Oh, speaking of training, guess who is at the top of the roster. You won’t guess, so I’ll tell you. It’s that little curtain of a boy with the impossibly long name—Sifler. He learns fast and he’s already tutoring some of the slower apprentices in navigation. Master Saiph told me he worked out the Coverix Method on his own. He’d never heard of Coverix and still worked out how to figure latitude. Amazing. Anyway, he’s the first from your group to formally go on dragonback. Be sure to congratulate him. I think there’s some tradition about shining his boots.”
For once, she had heard of this tradition. The first novice to fly would get a brand-new pair of boots paid for by everyone in his swearing-in group and have said boots shined by all the other novices in turn. Various traditions had grown up about what he won as a bonus when getting them from the girls at the Manor. Ileth thought of his embarrassment when he walked in on her that day at Joai’s house and decided to arrange something especially embarrassing at the Dancers’ Quarter when he went there to pick his boots up from her. She could probably rely on Zusya to come up with something obscenely embarrassing to do to him.
“One more thing, Ileth. Kess, at the archives in the old temple, needs you to see him. The Lodger had some old books and scrolls there. He won’t be there now. He rises early, but he’s out like a shot when the dinner bell rings.”
That gave her another mystery to think about after she delivered Caseen’s note to Ottavia. The dancers were busy, with their numbers reduced by the brides’ departures. Ileth was scheduled to dance with the troupe the next day for some kind of debate that was to be held between two teams of males, and the dragons had requested a show.
Ottavia didn’t see any difficulty. “But since Kess is an early riser, you can rise even earlier and see him in the morning.”
In the morning, in name only, Ileth knocked on the door of the archives.
The archives were in the jumble of buildings at the up end of the Serpentine. For a temple it was a distinctly uninspiring building, squat and dug into the earth. The new Great Hall had probably been sited to obstruct it from being viewed from the gate. It was a tiny, almost lightless temple that she’d been told was of the Old Hypatian style, seeking their gods down in the cool, unchanging earth.
It took so long for the heavy-timbered, iron-reinforced door to be answered that Ileth feared she’d be in for another wait on the doorstep.
A face like a rain-worn statue, all pocks and fissures, looked down at her.
“You are that Ileth,” Kess said gravely. His Montangyan had an odd cadence to it. She vaguely remembered him from her oath ceremony. He’d been watching the novices sign on to the roster of the company.
“Yes.”
“I have a statement for you and some letters. They require your attention.”
She followed him down a short, narrow few stairs into the archives. It had a domed ceiling painted with symbols, scattered across the surface like stars. The paint was scored and badly flaked, faded mystic secrets from long ago.
Kess’s archives held shelves of papers, scrolls, and books on one side and a collection of war trophies ready for parades and such on the other: some in cases, some hanging from the ceiling, and some simply piled against the walls. She marked a wide set of stairs leading down to another level.
The archivist had a small table with a folded piece of paper the size of a medium painting canvas unrolled on it. He brought over a lamp from a far more cluttered table. Ileth realized there was not so much as a stool to sit on.
“May . . . may I have a chair?” she asked.
“Sitting too much is bad for the health,” Kess said, setting the lamp down so it illuminated the paper.
He took her through the statement. It noted that the Lodger had named her as his heir in the Vales (he had left other heirs elsewhere, it seemed, and Kess was at his wits’ end over how they would even be notified of his death) and that she was in charge of the practically nonexistent personal effects he’d left in the Cellars, in the form of his bedding and an old tool he used to ream out his ears and nose. There was also a dragon-mounting hook of the kind that riders did not use anymore (if you weren’t careful with it you could catch it under the scale and wound the dragon).
Kess’s apprentice, an unfortunate-looking young man with ears that stuck out, put a piece of paper down next to Kess. “I copied that list of titles. It’s Hypatian.”
“This dragon—he liked to write and read,” Kess said, waving off his apprentice. “His collection wasn’t stored in the Cellars. A good thing, as it turned out, or the fire or water—fwoosh. I have some of his books here; the rest of his titles are registered in the old King’s Library in Asposis. This letter listing the titles will get you in if you ever need to retrieve the documents he stored there. The list my apprentice, Gowan, just brought is a copy of the works from his collection preserved there.”
“I see.” Actually she didn’t. She understood only a few of the titles; the rest were in some sort of Hypatian shorthand, as far as she could tell. Her education had many gaps.
“Sorry about the Hypatian,” Gowan said. “Lawyers. They use it to keep the rank and ordinary puzzled.”
“Excuse my apprentice’s impertinence,” Kess said. “He was forced on me. His father is a former dragoneer who wanted him here, but somewhere safe, not floating dead in the river next to the Scab, as his letter put it. Not in the best Serpentine Dragoneer tradition but practical. He’s very well off, if you’re looking for a husband, girl.”
Ileth wasn’t sure if Kess meant the father or the boy. Gowan had a face suited for a long-course voyage, as the Captain used to put it, tolerable enough if you didn’t have to look at him every day.
“My Charge just lost two dancers to marriage. I’m afraid she’d put a curse on the betrothal if I left too,” Ileth said.
“You need to sign where I’ve laid that red ribbon, right below the physiker and the Master in Charge. Put your name or mark right before where it says heir and assignee. All three copies, please.”
Ileth nodded and took up the pen, carefully writing her name in her best script. Kess knew his quills; it wrote magnificently.
“Some of them fake it to get in here. You’d be surprised how many we catch out the first few months. That’s done. Would you like me to store the library letters and such here, or does your family have an archive?”
She thought of the cabinet full of mismatched volumes in four languages at the Captain’s Lodge. “Here would be best, sir.”
“It is safer here. I close for dusting and sorting and travel to distribute and collect for a month every spring and fall. Other than that, I’m here or in the Masters’ Hall.”
“Could you help me with s-something, sir? I need to use a Drakine translation. Vhanesh luss. I . . . I think.”
“Vhanesh luss. That’s not current Drakine, at least as they speak it here. It’s an imperative. Sh is always an imperative ending. Dead Drakine, I expect. Something to do with fire or light. I have no volume that will help you; you would have to go to Hypatia—or places even less accessible.”
Well, that was the end of that, for now.
“Oh, one other thing. A piece of correspondence that they brought here, by mistake I suppose. It is a receipt having to do with a music box, showing the price paid in full by proxy in Sammerdam. It was supposed to be delivered some time ago. I hope it wasn’t destroyed in the fire. Ivory. Expensive stuff. You wouldn’t—why, whatever is the matter, girl?”
The announcement that the first of their group of novices would become apprentices, with all the privileges, duties, and honors encompassed by the title, caused a stir. “Just five,” was the general lament.
Speculation flew around at the news like birds greeting the dawn. Negotiations weren’t going well with the Galantines; they’d soon be fighting over the Scab again and they needed trained dragoneers to feed into a renewed war.
Others figured it to be Names putting pressure on Charge Deklamp. Quith was one of them.
“If it’s five a year I’ll have gray hair before I’m apprenticed,” Quith complained to her at one of her rare meals in the dining hall.
Ileth put a comforting hand on Quith. “I don’t think the rest of us are delayed. They’re just early.”
Ileth thought of telling her that she was heir to a dragon, inheritor of a couple of old grooming and dragonriding tools and some books in an archive in Asposis. She’d been carrying around the old mounting hook after giving it a good cleaning whenever she had to walk about at night, just in case Griff decided to follow Gorgantern’s example and sneak into the Serpentine. Rumor had it he’d departed downriver. Instead she spoke of the wingman with the sideburns Quith was so keen on. She’d seen him in the Beehive in a striking new uniform, talking to Santeel.
“Wouldn’t you know,” Quith said. “Santeel would be first up for apprenticeship. I’m sure letters arrive weekly: We’re counting on our beloved daughter making progress and getting the recognition she deserves. Like the Serpentine is the Queen’s Own Graces and Arts Academy for Dignified Females in Their Second Decade instead of a factory for dragon mlumm.”[4]
In the wake of the posted apprenticeship announcement, the first flight roster made no splash at all. For one, it was posted in the flight cave at the clerk’s desk and not the Great Hall. So the fact that Ileth was tacked on to the list of those due for their first dragonback training escaped notice save for whoever drew up the list and presumably the Master of Apprentices, who signed it, and the clerk in the flight cave, who stamped it—when dragons were found willing to take new fliers up and risk having to have vomit scrubbed off their scales.
Ileth couldn’t resist making excuses to go look at it anyway. More than once, in fact.