Within the Sanctuary of Wings

EIGHTEEN

Catching a caeliger on foot is impossible even in the flattest terrain. In the Sanctuary of Wings, even to attempt such a thing would have been suicide, for I would have broken my neck thirty seconds into any sprint.

The only way to be certain I could greet the caeliger upon landing was to arrange for it to land in a place of my choosing. It was with this intent that I skidded back into Imsali, hard on the heels of Ruzt and Kahhe and Zam, and gasped out a desperate request for the brightest cloth or paint they could give me.

Suhail and Thu were not with us. I knew better than to charge into the village with two more humans at my back; that would only cause more alarm. And although I very much wanted the Draconeans to be suitably alarmed, the presence of my husband and our Yelangese friend was too likely to tip matters over from “suitable” to “excessive.” Eventually I must admit their presence… but not until I had explained the caeliger and what it portended.

Kuvrey’s last words to me had been that she hoped to see me again soon. Her next words were, “We did not expect you this soon. What is going on?”

I tried to let Ruzt explain, trusting her vocabulary far more than my own, but that did not work; Ruzt, of course, did not fully understand what the caeliger portended. Between the two of us, we got the point across, albeit in tangled and uneven fashion. The news that more humans were attempting to breach the Sanctuary did not go over well. The more warlike of their people—chief among them Esdarr’s sister-group, who had escorted me to the place of the elders—were in favour of meeting this incursion with knives and the short spears they used for hunting.

“You will die,” I said flatly, making no attempt to soften it. “They have objects that hurl spear points farther than any arm, so quickly that no one can hope to dodge them. If you threaten them, they will kill every last one of you, to protect themselves.”

Not long before, I had been assuring them that humans were not the murderous monsters of legend; now all that good work was undone. But I was willing to accept temporary damage to the reputation of my species in exchange for not provoking a confrontation that would guarantee even more hostility going forward. “I can keep them from hurting you,” I said, putting more confidence into the words than I felt. “But I need to be there when they arrive.”

“This was your plan all along,” Esdarr spat, wings spreading. “You led them to us!”

I cannot blame her for thinking so. In a sense, she was even correct: it was my decision to come to Tser-nga that had sent the first caeligers over the Sanctuary. The army would likely have tried that sooner or later, but they might have tried it elsewhere in the Mrtyahaima—not here. Not where it would threaten the Draconeans.

I turned to the elders. “Have you seen this before? Last spring, a little before the monsoon. Two baskets like that one. They would have come in over the river.”

“Someone in Eberi said they had,” Sejeat said. “But no one believed them.”

With the caeligers painted to blend with the sky, it was not difficult to overlook them—especially when no one expected such a thing in the air. “Those two sent for others,” I said. “Or they went astray, and this one has been sent to look for them. It hardly matters. This means more humans are coming; there can be no hope of a slow revelation now. And if I am not there to meet them, you will not be able to talk to one another, which will only make everyone more afraid, and therefore dangerous. Please—I beg you. Give me fabric or paint, something bright, so we can bring them down where we want them.”

My words were even more garbled than usual, fracturing under the strain of distress and difficult subjects, but by then Ruzt was accustomed to piecing my utterances together. “How will those help?” she asked.

I closed my eyes, trying to calculate how large an image must be for someone to reliably spot it from the sky. “I need to make a target.”

Sejeat was observant. In the short time I had been in the place of the elders, she had learned to read my moods well; now, in the kicked ant-hill that was Imsali, she took me aside and asked, “What are you not saying?”

I had known all along that I could not keep Suhail and Thu hidden forever. Had Sejeat not drawn me off, I would have done the same to her; the sisters and I had agreed that of all the people I could speak to first, she was by far the best choice. “You recall that I came to the mountains with companions,” I said, not bothering to prevaricate. “Two of them stayed the winter outside the Sanctuary. We met them in the col today, where they were looking for my body. They were with us when we saw the caeliger.”

Perhaps it was the consequence of piling shock upon shock; eventually one reaches a point where additions have little effect. Sejeat stared at me, as unblinking as a lizard. Then she turned and bellowed in a powerful voice for the scant handful of carrier mews that had not already been dispatched to the place of the elders.

These went out shortly thereafter with a postscript to the previous message. This done, Sejeat insisted that Kahhe go out and bring the two men down. I do not think she especially wanted to add them to the chaos of the village; but it would be worse if they were discovered by chance, or left to wander freely.

I will not trouble my readers with a detailed account of the furor that greeted them. You can imagine it for yourself; for the curious, it was a second menagerie come to town, and for the suspicious, it was proof positive that humans were coming to kill them all. I was grateful beyond words for two things: first, the presence of the two elders and Habarz, without whom I am sure the situation would have degenerated into violence; and second, for my husband’s fine memory. At one early point, while everyone else was shouting, he whispered into my ear, “Is there a religious leader in this crowd?”

“Two,” I whispered back. “Esmin is local, but Habarz is something like a head priest for the whole Sanctuary. Why?”

Suhail’s answering smile was more than a little tinged with nerves. “I put my time waiting to what I hope will be good use.”

Moving slowly, so as not to startle anyone, Suhail approached Habarz. The shouting abated, except in a few quarters; Esdarr very much wanted to step forward and protect the elders. But Suhail stopped a safe distance away and knelt. Then, in a voice strong and clear, he recited words I could only partially make out—words in an approximation of the Draconean language.

It was one of the texts he had been working on back in Scirland. His transliteration of the script was imperfect, his pronunciation flawed, and the language itself was even more archaic than the religious form used in the Sanctuary… but it was recognizable. The words were a prayer to the sun, that it guide the beneficiary down the right path.

If my own first speech had been akin to a yak standing up on its hind legs and saying hello, now the yak was leading a worship service. The reactions would have been comical, had the situation not been so tense; as it was, I still had to stifle a laugh. Habarz stared at Suhail with his wings drooping so their tips almost trailed in the mud. The shouting stopped utterly; the only voices I heard were villagers murmuring to one another, asking what on earth the human had just said.

Kuvrey was the first to recover her wits. “Quite remarkable,” she said dryly. “But I think we need more than the sun to help us now.”

“Then let my companions help,” I said. “I will vouch for them. And call for all the aid you like, neighbouring villages with their knives and their spears; you may need them. But please, do not hurt these men.”

The elders stepped aside to confer with the ruling sister-group of Imsali. Suhail rose and returned to my side, not even bending to brush the mud off his knees. Thu was watching all of this with an unreadable expression: wariness, perhaps, but also very rapid thought. I did not know him well enough to guess at those thoughts.

When the elders came back, I knew by Sejeat’s posture that I was not going to like what they had decided. “You may make your picture,” Kuvrey said, “and meet with the humans. But we will hold these two.” She gestured at the men. “If the others coming here are as dangerous as you say, then we must have protection against them.”

I swayed on my feet. Hostages. Suhail and Thu would be hostages after all. If I failed in my goal…

It took me an agonizingly long time to force my reply into Draconean. “I cannot—” The word “promise” had fled my mind. “The men who come in the basket, I do not control them. I will try. But my trying may not be good enough.” My companions were looking on, uncomprehending; they could see only that a sudden wave of fear had come over me.

“With these two in our keeping,” Kuvrey said, “you will try your very best.”

I scarcely slept a wink that night. A good deal of time was taken up in creating the sign I needed; there was no proper paint in the village, but the white lime ordinarily used to plaster the yak barn served well enough. I also had to discuss with the villagers the best place to lay that sign out. We needed a suitably large and flat meadow, where the snow had melted enough that my sign would be visible to a caeliger entering through the col, and the craft would have a reasonable chance of landing. And of course we had to negotiate the specifics of who would be where when that happened—my human companions included.

After that, though, there were still some hours in which I might have slept. I passed them instead in Suhail’s arms, trembling with nerves. “I am so sorry,” I murmured, knowing the words were laughably inadequate. “I should not have brought you here.”

His arms tightened around me. “To Imsali?”

“Or the Mrtyahaima.”

“Don’t be absurd,” he said lightly. “I wanted to come—well, not quite as much as you did, because that would be difficult to equal. But I certainly would not have sent you off without me. And if you had not come, none of this would have happened, good or bad.”

“But you are a hostage now, because of me. I should have sent you back across the col. Back to Vidwatha, where you could warn someone—”

This time the pressure of his arms was stronger. “Don’t even think of it. No force in the world could have persuaded me to leave you. Not when I had just found you again.”

His words silenced me for a time. It was bravado to say I would have sent him away; I could no more have parted from him than he from me.

But the choice, in the end, might not belong to either of us.

“What if I don’t succeed?” I whispered. “What if—”

Suhail kissed the top of my head. “You’ll do very well. There is no one in the world better suited to this than you.”

A bitter, frightened laugh shook my body. “True. But only because there is no other human in the world who speaks their language.”

“That is not all of it—though I’ll grant that it’s a necessary precondition. But Isabella… you have thrown yourself into the thick of things before. You are fearless. Not in the sense that you feel no fear; I know better than to think you that foolish. But you do not let it hold you back, and there is power in that. You will hurl yourself in front of that caeliger and refuse to accept anything less than cooperation, and you will bend whoever has come to your will. I believe this, with all my heart.”

We lay in silence again, while I tried to ensure I could speak without my voice wavering too badly. When it was steady at last, I said, “All the same. I want you and Thu both to be prepared to do… whatever you have to.” Defend yourselves, I thought. Run away. Whatever it took. I had lost one husband in the mountains; I would not lose another.

“We will,” Suhail promised. “Now sleep.”

Perhaps I did, a little. But my memory is of an all-too-short time at his side, before Suhail rose for his dawn prayer and Kahhe came to say it was time.

The worst part was the waiting.

I laid my sign out in the meadow we had chosen, just below the point at which the greenery of spring thinned out to the barren rock of the upper slopes. It was an enormous sheet made of yak-wool blankets hastily stitched together, a square of suspiciously regular brown, with a huge white star painted in its center—a shape snow was unlikely to melt into. Below that I had written “LAND HERE” in the largest letters the space allowed, but I could not be certain anyone would be able to read them from the air.

There were so many things I could not be certain of. What if they did not enter between Gyaptse and Cheja? There were other cols, or the river gorge through which the first caeligers had passed. I had no idea when the caeliger was coming; if its base was very far away, they might not return today, or even tomorrow. We might sit out here for a week without anything happening—and then I would wonder whether I should stay, or make my dash for the outside world in the hope of preventing more flights. (How I might do that, I could not even begin to guess.) They might overlook my sign, or crash in attempting to land, or see movement nearby and rake the ground with their rifles before touching down.

I had all the time in the world to think up one disaster scenario after another, for the caeliger did not come at dawn, nor at noon. The only mercy of this was that waiting dulled the edge of my fear, which cannot remain sharp for so long without something to hone it. The whetstone finally went to work in the early afternoon, when movement at the col drew my gaze. The caeliger had returned, and this time it looked like it would succeed in clearing the pass.

My lips formed soundless prayers. Though ordinarily I devote little attention to religion, in that moment I begged for the mercy of any deity that might care to listen, from the Lord of my childhood Assembly-House visits to the sun the Draconeans worshipped.

The caeliger almost scraped the snow of the col; I think a downdraft must have pushed it unexpectedly to earth. But then it shot forward at a slant, as if it were skiing down the western slope, and attained the free air of the Sanctuary.

A pole lay on the ground at my side. I seized it and, with all the strength in my arms, began to wave its banner back and forth: a piece of yak wool, the brightest blue the limited dye palette of Draconean fabrics could offer. Surely they would have scouts looking below; they must see this movement, a spot of unusual colour against the expected hues of spring, and shapes too regular for nature. I had not intended to speak, knowing my voice would be lost before it reached so high, but holding back proved impossible; I shouted at the top of my lungs, begging them to see me.

And the caeliger flew on. It soared past me and my increasingly desperate cries, dropping altitude as it went, until it was nearly on a level with me. Then it began to turn, and I realized it was simply preparing its approach. I ran for the edge of the meadow, flagpole in hand, to get out of their way.

I did not choose my direction at random. The surrounding terrain afforded little in the way of concealment for Draconeans; even with their spring-grey scales helping them to blend in, the odds of them being spotted from above were too great. But there was a little hollow where one could crouch, and Ruzt was there. If matters here went badly, she would break cover and relay a warning to the rest of her people. I laid my flagpole down near her, exerting all my will not to look at the hollow, and waited.

The landing of the caeliger was a lengthy enough process that I had time to thank any deity who might be listening that we had developed synthetic dragonbone. Had my people landed in something obviously assembled from pieces of dead dragons… it did not bear thinking about. Someday we would explain that entire matter to the Draconeans, but not that day.

Shouts were coming from the caeliger, but at this close proximity the noise of the engine was too loud for me to make out any words. Men swarmed in the gondola—more men than our vessels had carried from Vidwatha to Tser-nga—carrying out the work necessary to bring it firmly to earth. I knew enough of such operations to be sure they were not quite done when one of the crew flung himself over the edge of the gondola, staggered on the thin spring grass, and set off toward me at a run. “Isabella!”

It was my brother Andrew, whom I had left behind in Vidwatha nearly a year before. We collided in the middle of the meadow, Andrew enveloping me in a hug so tremendous, I thought he might re-injure the ribs I had cracked crossing the Cheja Glacier. He was laughing hysterically, as well he might: it was clear that Tom and Lieutenant Chendley had made it back to the lowlands and the army there, and so Andrew had believed me dead.

Our collision swung me around so that I could not see what was going on at the caeliger. As soon as I could, I wriggled free of my brother’s embrace so I could turn to look. Under ordinary circumstances I would have been delighted to stay where I was, for each reunion did more to strengthen me than any medicine… but I could not forget the burden of expectation that lay upon me.

Behind me, the caeliger was being staked to the ground. The number of men aboard made me certain their point of most recent departure was a good deal closer than Vidwatha. Hlamtse Rong, perhaps, or some locale even more remote, where the Tser-zhag were unlikely to notice them. Close enough that all they need do was get the caeliger up and over the col, whereupon they could seek a landing on the far side.

A man in winter uniform was standing not far away, looking as though he knew he ought to order Andrew to release me at once and behave as befitted a soldier, but was reluctant to disrupt our moment of happiness. When he lifted his goggles, I recognized him as Colonel Dorson, the fellow who commanded the caeliger base in Vidwatha. “Dear God, Lady Trent,” he said when I faced him. “How can you possibly be alive?”

“Did the locals rescue you?” Andrew said. He still held my arm—as if, were he to release me, I might vanish in a puff of smoke.

I gave him a sharp glance. “What do you know about them?”

“The locals? Nothing, really.”

Dorson intervened, clearly trying to regain some kind of command over the situation. “The original scouting flight saw houses. They aren’t Tser-zhag, are they? All our reports say this is beyond the edge of the territory controlled by Tser-nga.”

“It is well beyond their control,” I said firmly. “In fact, the people here have been cut off from outside contact for a very long time. They—”

Andrew crowed in delight, throwing his arm around my shoulder. “You found a hidden mountain kingdom! Is it like the ones in the legends? Is there a palace of gold around here somewhere?”

He turned as if to look for a palace of gold, which made me very worried that he might see Ruzt instead. Fortunately for me, Dorson snapped out a sharp reprimand: “Captain Hendemore!”

My brother whipped back to face his commanding officer, startled almost to the point of saluting. “Sorry, sir. It’s just—my God. She’s alive!”

“I can see that,” Dorson said.

A sudden thought came to me, strong enough that it diverted me from my own course. I clutched at Andrew’s hand. “Tom. Where is he?”

Andrew looked about as if expecting Tom to materialize at his elbow. “That’s odd. Why hasn’t he—”

Dorson coughed. “I’m afraid Sir Thomas is still asleep.”

“Asleep?” I echoed, staring. Then I remembered our own flight from Vidwatha. “Dear God. The laudanum.”

“We had to dose him pretty strongly,” Andrew said, looking embarrassed. “But he insisted. Said your husband and that Yelangese fellow were out here looking for your body, and that on his own he’d have a better chance of scaling the pass from this side. He was awake for the flight yesterday, but two days in a row seems to have done him in.”

Sure enough, Tom was curled up beneath several blankets in one end of the gondola. He was not, as Dorson had claimed, asleep; he was merely thoroughly fuddled. “Tom,” I said, crouching in front of him. “Tom, wake up.”

Andrew leaned over the edge of the gondola. “Look who we found, Wilker! No need to search for her body; she’s been kind enough to bring it to you, alive and well.”

I knew my brother’s lighthearted tone was a mask for his feelings. Tom’s response was to shake his head. His words more than a little slurred, he said, “I may need opium to ride in this infernal thing, but I refuse to become the sort of opium-eater who converses with his delusions.”

“I am not a delusion,” I said. It did not come out quite as tartly as I wished, for the rejoinder stuck a little in my throat. I could see a gleam at the corner of Tom’s eye, threatening to fall. “A delusion would not tell you that she has solved the puzzle of that plaster cast—you know the one I mean. And if you get up, you will soon have a chance to see the solution with your own eyes.”

This roused Tom enough for him to lift his head. “Actually, she might say that. But—” His mouth wavered. “But she would not look like ragged hell when she said it. Isabella—”

“It is me,” I assured him. Then he came surging up out of his blankets to throw his arms around me; and I did not care how many soldiers were looking on, or whether this might renew any rumours about the two of us. I was coming to realize that after a winter isolated among Draconeans, it would take a very long time before I was tired of being embraced by those I loved.

Before we separated, though, I whispered quietly in his ear. “Gather your wits as fast as you can. Suhail and Thu are here, but their safety depends on our keeping the peace.”

He stared at me as I drew back, but I dared not say any more. Colonel Dorson was waiting with thinly concealed impatience as I climbed out of the gondola once more, leaving Tom to pull himself together. “I imagine you have a hell of a story to tell, Lady Trent.”

“I do indeed, Colonel. But before I do, I must ask: what are your intentions here?”

Clearly this was not the direction Dorson had expected our conversation to take. “That is a military matter, Lady Trent. I am very glad to see you alive, but I must remind you that your status as a scientist, or even as a peer of the realm, does not give you the authority to inquire after such things.”

My mouth was very dry. “Ah, but I am not asking as a peer of Scirland, nor even as a scientist. I am asking as the appointed emissary of—of a foreign nation.”

Andrew’s arm dropped from my shoulder. He and Dorson were not the only ones staring at me; by now the caeliger was fully secured, and the men from it were watching this exchange with interest. To my surprise, a number of them were Yelangese. Khiam Siu? They must be; only our rebel allies would be here, walking free in the midst of a military expedition.

Their presence only furthered my suspicions. “Let me guess: you are looking for an aerial route by which to invade Yelang. No—something more than that. Our caeligers cannot traverse these mountains so easily that overleaping the whole mass in one step would be feasible, not by anything other than the most lightly manned craft.” The Sanctuary stretched out before us, the peak of Anshakkar shining in its center. My mouth kept working, taking input but no caution from my brain. “You want to use this as a base. It lies beyond Tser-zhag authority, and is unknown to the outside world; if you could establish yourselves here, then you could mount patrols or military excursions at will. It would allow you to control this entire region.”

“Well, yes,” Andrew said, as if he saw no point in denial.

“Captain Hendemore.” This time Andrew did salute, but Dorson was no longer paying attention to him. “I see the keenness of your intellect is not exaggerated, Lady Trent. But what in God’s name do you mean, calling yourself the emissary of a foreign nation? Are you talking about whatever yak-herders live here? I hardly think they can call themselves a nation, and I fail to see why they would need to appoint anybody to speak on their behalf. Or are you working for the Tser-zhag king?”

I wondered how much he knew about my actions in Bayembe, when I had, not entirely on purpose, undermined our colony there. At the time it had been a great scandal (I was even accused of treason), but I had won enough acclaim in subsequent years that not everyone remembered that incident. I said, “This has nothing to do with Tser-nga, except insofar as they have a neighbour they are not aware of. My purpose here today is to prevent a conflict which would be detrimental in the extreme to both this land and our own. I have done more than survive, Colonel; I have made a discovery of such magnitude as to cast all my previous work into insignificance by comparison. Scirland has the opportunity to share that discovery with the world—to establish our pre-eminence in ways other than military, which can only be to our benefit.”

My declaration aroused a great deal of curiosity, which was as I had hoped. Dorson, however, remained skeptical. “Do you mean that carcass Sir Thomas claimed to have found in the mountains? If it is as he described, then I suppose it is of interest to scientific types—a new sort of dragon, one we didn’t think really existed. But I fail to see what relevance that has for our situation here.”

A glance over my shoulder revealed that Tom was on his feet, though holding on to the edge of the gondola as if it might be necessary to his continued verticality. I should have liked for him to be more steady, but I did not think I could delay any further.

I made myself smile, as if I had no fear in the world, only excitement for the news I bore. “It is far more than that, Colonel. May I have your word that your men will hold their fire?” Each of them bore a rifle, and while they had not unslung them and readied them for use, I was certain they could do so with great speed.

Dorson tensed at my words. “Lady Trent, asking a military man to hold his fire only confirms for him that there may be a reason to shoot.”

“The people of the Sanctuary have no weapons to match yours,” I assured him. “I only wish to forestall any misunderstanding that might result in needless bloodshed. If you please?”

A tense silence ensued. I dared not look away from Dorson, though I knew Andrew was staring at me, and I was desperately curious whether Tom had guessed my meaning. Finally Dorson said, “Very well, Lady Trent. Men, hold your fire—for now.”

It was the best I could hope for. Now I spared another glance at Tom, and my grin, though still nervous, was also sincere. “This,” I promised my colleague, “is also not a delusion.”

Then I addressed them all, in ringing tones. “What we found in the col was more than merely another kind of dragon. It was the sad remains of one of the people of this valley.” Turning, I called out in Draconean, “Ruzt, please stand up.”

NINETEEN

Ruzt had volunteered herself for this duty because she was more comfortable around humans than any other Draconean save possibly Kahhe, and I had accepted her offer because I trusted her more than any other Draconean, Kahhe included. But we both knew that if anything went wrong in that first moment, she would be the one who took the brunt of it, and I could not breathe as she stood up.

Dorson’s men did not fire. Andrew swore as imaginatively as any sailor, and the colonel did not reprimand him. Ruzt, to my undying astonishment, made her very best mimicry of the curtsey I had given to the elders when I departed from their council, which I had explained to her was a gesture of politeness. I do not think anyone else realized what her movement was supposed to be.

I said, “This Draconean and her sisters saved my life after the avalanche. It is on their behalf, and that of all the Draconeans in the Sanctuary of Wings, that I signaled for you to land here today. If you are willing, Colonel Dorson, I will take you, Sir Thomas, and a small number of your men to meet with representatives from their council of elders.”

Enough time had passed without violence that I felt safe in tearing my eyes away from Ruzt and the soldiers and looking at Tom. Judging by his expression, it was entirely possible he had not taken a single breath since Ruzt stood up. I could not help smiling: despite the tension, it was a pure joy to share this discovery with the man who had been my friend and colleague for so many years. Once the last of the laudanum had left his body, we would have a tremendous amount to discuss.

Dorson was staring too, but with a good deal more shock than revelatory understanding. In a limp and wandering voice, he said, “How is this possible?”

At least my encounter with Suhail and Thu the previous day had given me some practice in explaining. I delivered the most concise version I could, blessing the fact that military discipline meant no one interrupted me with a single question. The biological origins of the Draconeans I glossed over with a brief reference to developmental lability; Tom would have guessed a fair bit of it on his own by now, and the phrase would mean nothing to Dorson, which meant I could elide anything that might require me to utter the ominous word “blood.” But I told him of the Downfall—a brief rendition of what I could piece together between the Draconean version of that tale and our own—and how, over the millennia, the survivors had taken refuge here. “And now, Colonel, you see why I call them a nation, for they are certainly not Tser-zhag.”

“I should bloody well think not,” Dorson said faintly. Then he shook himself. “You’re able to speak to these… things?”

“I am indebted to my husband’s work in reconstructing elements of the Draconean language,” I said. “Beyond that, a winter with no one else to talk to is a wonderful motivator for acquiring vocabulary. I shall serve as your interpreter, Colonel, if you are ready to meet the elders…?”

This sparked quite a brangle, for Dorson wanted to bring a full complement of armed men, and I wanted nothing of the sort. “Colonel,” I said at last, “you should be aware that my husband and Thu Phim-lat reached the Sanctuary yesterday, not long before you made your first attempt at the col. They are currently the guests of the Draconeans—”

“You mean hostages,” Dorson said, his entire posture hardening. “Say the word, Lady Trent, and we will retrieve them from these beasts.”

“Dear God,” I said impatiently. “How clear must I make it that I wish no bloodshed here at all? All you have to do is speak civilly to the elders—who, may I remind you, are no more beasts than we are—without looking as if you are here to finish what the Downfall started, and all will be very well. That means no more than two men with you, plus Tom.” All would be very well… unless Esdarr or someone of her mind chose to start trouble. But I had to trust the elders to keep order on their end, for I had enough to occupy me on my own.

It was all well and good to insist on only two other men, but who would accompany Dorson? I was astonished to see the changes the army had wrought in my brother; he argued less than I would have expected when Dorson ordered him to remain behind and guard the caeliger. But matters became more than a little tense when the colonel refused to allow any of the Khiam Siu to join him. “If this comes to blows, I don’t want to catch your lot up in it,” he said to their leader, a familiar-looking fellow I thought I must have met at one of those diplomatic suppers in Scirland, what felt like a lifetime ago. That man looked very unconvinced, but ultimately ceded the point.

Tom, in the meanwhile, had approached Ruzt. They could not converse at all, and I could not spare any time to interpret or even to really watch them, but he told me later that he had, through much pointing and other elements of mime, made clear to her his gratitude for my preservation. When I was finally able to rejoin him, he shook his head in disbelief.

“I had a whole winter in Vidwatha to think about this,” he said. His restless gaze roamed the mountainside, never settling on any one thing. “You and I had wondered, after all, whether there might not be living specimens out here. I thought, what if there are? And what if—” His jaw worked silently for a moment before he could voice the rest of it. “What if they somehow saved you?”

I put one hand on his arm. He turned his head aside, so that I could not see his expression, and could barely hear his voice. “I wanted to believe anything that meant you weren’t dead. No matter how impossible.”

He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. When he finally lowered it again, straightening his shoulders, I said lightly, “That goes to show just how astute you are, Tom. Now come: I think you will be fascinated to see what the ruff of a male Draconean looks like.”

To my inexpressible relief, the meeting with the elders went off without violence.

Tom contributed substantially to that, for after a winter in Vidwatha, he knew Dorson far better than I did. The colonel had enough of an ego to enjoy the thought of being remembered as the man who established the first treaty with the Draconeans—and of course he thought of it in those terms, that he would be the one who achieved that triumph. (I, after all, was just the interpreter.) I let Tom exploit that angle for the time being, knowing that it gave Dorson a greater feeling of control, which in turn made violence less likely.

Suhail and Thu were both present, looking passably like guests instead of hostages. My husband’s nod reassured me that they had not been mistreated; Kahhe and Zam were watching over them, much to my relief. But after that I could spare very little attention for them, as my efforts were entirely taken up by the role of interpreter, which I was sadly ill suited to.

I will not attempt to replicate all the points of conversation that day and the following ones. They would make for tedious reading, and would distract from the true turning points that sealed the fate of the Sanctuary and its Draconeans. The first of these involved Andrew, and the second involved Thu.

Dorson had every intention of sending the caeliger back across the mountains as soon as that first meeting concluded. He and the bulk of his men would remain in the Sanctuary, but there were others outside—as I suspected, they had established a temporary base nearby in Tser-nga—and he wished to notify them immediately of what he had discovered. When he returned to the landing meadow, however, Andrew informed him with a doleful expression that the caeliger’s engine was malfunctioning. “I think fighting the headwind yesterday strained it something awful, sir,” he said. “We’re working to repair it, but the ship isn’t going anywhere yet.”

I prudently waited until Dorson was done castigating everyone for their failures, then snatched a brief moment of conversation with Andrew where no one else could hear. “A malfunctioning engine?”

Andrew shrugged. “It was pretty clear you wanted to keep this under wraps for now. But if I get caught and court-martialled, you should know that I expect you to come riding in on a dragon to save me.”

(He was not court-martialled. I did, however, later take the precaution of securing him a pardon.)

My brother’s act of benevolent sabotage bought me vital breathing space. At the time I thought it would only give me more opportunity to work on Dorson, persuading him to see the Draconeans as people instead of beasts, and perhaps even convincing him that Scirland must work to protect the Sanctuary from being overrun. Unfortunately, I suspected I would need a good deal more time than Andrew could give me. Dorson seemed willing enough not to kill the Draconeans… but I had very little faith that the Sanctuary would not wind up a possession of the Scirling Crown, its inhabitants treated as little more than exotic animals—possibly even put into a menagerie. And I could not see how to prevent that from happening.

“If I’d had a chance to prepare the ground outside,” I said to Tom in frustration. I had explained to him the plan the elders and I had formulated—a plan that was now shredded beyond all recognition. “But without public sentiment prepared, what is there to stop the army and the Crown from doing exactly as they please?”

Tom shook his head. “I don’t know. Dorson… he isn’t a bad sort in his own way, but he’ll put this whole place under military control, and be convinced he’s doing what’s best for everyone involved.”

“Which will only persuade Urrte and Esdarr and their ilk that the humans must be fought,” I said. “God help us all.”

“You need leverage,” Tom said. “But damned if I can see any.”

My one comfort was that I was permitted to go freely between the caeliger camp and Imsali. The remainder of the council would not be there for days yet, and nothing could be decided until they arrived; in the meanwhile, I could see my husband and Thu.

Though both men were still considered hostages, they were not being kept in close straits. Suhail spent every waking moment studying the Draconean language, pausing only for his five daily prayers—an activity he pursued with more diligence than usual, on account of his tremendous gratitude for my survival. Thu was at somewhat looser ends, and frustrated that he could not speak directly with his Khiam Siu brethren. Two days after the landing, I had a question for him.

“Your countrymen seem very eager to meet the Draconeans,” I said. The three of us were in the house of Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam, which no longer seemed half so stifling to me, now that Suhail was there. “It could be simple curiosity, of course—but it doesn’t seem to be. I don’t suppose you have any idea why?”

He’d had no opportunity to speak with them yet, but it was clear he had been thinking about the matter. “If they are like me, they are thinking this is a very good…” He paused and looked at Suhail, who supplied him with the word he had forgotten. “Omen, yes. A good omen for the Khiam cause.”

My knowledge of Dajin dragons was still woefully patchy, and I knew even less of how the Yelangese interacted with the creatures, owing to my premature deportation from that country a decade before. I did recall one point, though, which might be salient. “Because dragons are an imperial symbol?” Then I made several connections, quite rapidly. “Good Lord. Dragons are an imperial symbol… and the Taisên have been slaughtering theirs for their bones.”

Thu nodded. “We say the first emperor of Yelang was able to unify the country because he had the blessing of the dragons. This is why they have always kept dragons, and given them so much respect. For the Taisên to kill them is very shocking.”

“And for the Khiam Siu to encounter them en route to planning an invasion is fortuitous. Half dragons, anyway.”

At my addendum, Thu’s eyes widened. “You have thought of something,” I said. “Is it useful?”

He did not answer me directly. Instead, choosing each word very carefully, he said, “In some versions of the tale, it is said that the dragons could take human form.”

We all fell silent. It was the type of silence that seems almost clairvoyant, where no one speaks because it is apparent that everyone else is already following the same path of thought, and a mere cock of the head or lift of the hand is enough to communicate the next point. Finally Thu said, “If Giat Jip-hau—”

“We’d have to get him here, first,” I said morosely. “And that would take months.”

Thu looked startled. “Is he not with the soldiers? I would not expect him to sit back and let others lead the way.”

“He—” I stopped, blinking. I had met Giat Jip-hau in Scirland, during those interminable diplomatic events, though I had not spoken to him above twice. He looked very different in the rough garb of a Mrtyahaiman expedition, with his facial hair grown to a thin scruff.

The would-be emperor of Yelang was in the caeliger camp that very moment.

And now I had a very good idea of why Dorson was so reluctant to allow any of the Khiam Siu to speak with the Draconeans. Suhail said, “Do you think you could arrange a meeting?”

“From the Draconean side, yes,” I said. “I’m sure Kuvrey and Sejeat and Habarz would be willing. But from the Scirling side? Dorson will see it as an attempt to usurp his role.” Which, in all fairness, it would be.

“Then don’t tell him,” Suhail said.

Even after a winter among the Draconeans, I could not always read their expressions and body language reliably. The three sisters, yes; their mannerisms were deeply familiar to me. The elders, however, were another matter. I therefore did not realize, until I suggested the meeting with Giat Jip-hau, that Kuvrey, Sejeat, and Habarz had taken a strong dislike to Colonel Dorson.

“We would like to speak to someone else,” Kuvrey said, when she heard my proposal. I did not think it was my imagination that I read her words as understatement. All of Dorson’s words went through me, and I did what I could to polish them, but by now the Draconeans had enough sense of human body language that they might well be able to detect his perpetual air of condescension. Even while negotiating a treaty, Dorson seemed as if he were speaking to a group of particularly clever animals, which could not possibly go over well.

Back I went to the caeliger landing meadow, for a hushed conversation with Tom and Andrew. “I think I can resolve this situation in a way that will work out to everyone’s benefit—but it requires me to get at least Giat Jip-hau out of the camp without Dorson noticing. Better if it is him and some of his countrymen, but him at a minimum.”

Andrew chewed on his lower lip. “I could make some kind of diversion—light something on fire, perhaps—”

“No!” I reared back in alarm, then made myself relax. If anyone saw us, we must not look like we were plotting conspiracy. (Even if we were. Especially because we were.) “You’ve already put your neck out far enough, Andrew. I don’t want to see you in front of a firing squad.”

“Dorson wouldn’t do that,” my brother scoffed, but all the confidence in the world would not have persuaded me to risk him in that fashion.

Tom said, “What about the Draconeans? If some of them wanted to meet with Dorson—”

“I would be needed as their interpreter. Which means I would not then be there to interpret for the Khiam Siu.” Given time we did not have, Suhail might have been able to share that duty with me—but there were limits even to my husband’s capacity for learning.

Tom had seen the flaw as quickly as I had. He nodded. “Nighttime, then. When most of the camp is asleep.” He hesitated, then said, “We could make certain they sleep. All of them, except the Khiam Siu. I still have quite a lot of laudanum.”

The prospect made me blanch. “That is nearly as bad as Andrew’s suggestion. They would know it was you, Tom—or they would blame the Khiam Siu for drugging them. No, we simply need the sentries to look the other way for a brief time.”

“Then we’re back to a diversion,” Andrew said. “But one quiet enough that it won’t wake up the whole camp. I’m on watch tonight, if you can arrange the meeting for the right hour, but there will be another fellow with me. And I don’t think it will work for me to simply point behind him and say, ‘What in the world can that be?’”

For the Khiam Siu to sneak out of camp, they would need a longer distraction than that. The three of us sat in silence for a time, broken only by the occasional aborted suggestion: “What if—no, never mind” and the like.

Finally a thought came to me, and a grin spread across my face. “I think I have the answer. But I will need something from Imsali first.”

It was a mad rush, arranging everything in time. Tom spoke to Giat Jip-hau, as he could do so without attracting as much attention as I would; but I had to settle the place and time of meeting with the elders, and then I had to talk to Ruzt. She doubted my ability to carry out the plan on my own—rightly, I suspect—and so when night fell at last, I crept out of Imsali and toward the caeliger meadow with Zam at my side, and two squirming bundles under my coat.

When we were still far enough from the meadow not to risk being overheard, she muttered, “One group of humans; another group of humans. How much difference will it really make?”

All the difference in the world, I hoped. But what I said was, “How much difference would it have made had I been found by Esdarr and her sisters, instead of you three?”

Zam spat something I expect was very uncomplimentary, and we left it at that.

At the edge of camp, beyond the light of their lamps and fire, we crouched down behind the same cover that had previously sheltered Ruzt. Zam released her own bundles first, with a quiet whistle to command them. My coat began squirming even more energetically; I opened it and let two more mews slip free. They lifted their heads and sampled the air; then one scurried away. They would have easy pickings in the camp’s supplies: Dorson and his men had not learned from the Nying to set traps.

Andrew had been listening for the whistle, but he waited several minutes to give the scouting mew time to call in the rest of its flight. Once they had settled in for a thorough raid, he cursed softly, as if he had just noticed the invaders, and dragged his fellow watchman over to drive the mews away.

The trained kind are more difficult to scare off than their wild brethren, especially when Andrew was deliberately ineffective. The mews were still hissing and flapping about the watchman’s head when I slipped away from camp, circling around to meet up with the aspiring emperor of Yelang and lead him to the Draconeans.

Once again I played interpreter, but this time for a very different sort of conversation.

Giat Jip-hau spoke very good Scirling, better than Thu’s, but I wished my companion could have been there. It was, after all, his discovery of the first Draconean body that had put us all on this path; and without him, I would not have known to engineer this meeting. Unfortunately, the elders insisted Thu remain with Suhail, under guard in Imsali, as insurance against any deception. I had complete faith that the Khiam Siu intended nothing untoward; my sole concern was that we get the prospective emperor back to camp as soon as possible. Neither of us had much hope that he could return as discreetly as he had left, of course. But if we could keep negotiations from dragging on for so long that his absence was discovered, I believed all would be well.

When we arrived at the copse of dwarfish trees where the elders and their guards waited, he showed respect to the elders as I had advised him, crossing his arms over his body in imitation of wings. Then he bowed in his own manner—a tiny inclination of the body; as much as could be expected from a man of his station—and held out a small object. “Lady Trent, if you would give this to them. It is my gift, in gratitude for their hospitality.”

A few torches lit the area, enough for me to see what he held. It was an intricate carving of a dragon, not very large, but all the more impressive for being executed so small—especially as it appeared to be made of jade, which is quite a hard stone. My naturalist’s instinct made me want to study it more closely, to see if I could identify the breed, but I carried it to one of the guards, who passed it to Habarz.

With that to pave the way, I told the story of the first emperor of Yelang, as Thu had told it to me: how the dragons had taken human form and blessed the man, and how this blessing was believed to legitimate each subsequent dynasty in turn. And I told how the Taisên had slaughtered dragons for their bones—but honesty would not allow me to leave the matter there. “My own people have done the same,” I said, “although now we have a way of creating the substance of dragonbone from other materials, as one creates butter from milk.” I bowed my head. “Indeed… I myself have been party to the killing of dragons. It is necessary for my study of them. But I confess that after coming here, to the Sanctuary, my feelings on the matter are rather different from what they were before.”

How could they not be? We still do not know which draconic species first gave rise to the Draconeans themselves; it may be a breed long since gone extinct. But I could not look at dragons any longer without seeing them as the cousins of the Draconean people. I believe this would have been true even had Ruzt not told me their myth, the one in which humans were born from the fronts of the four sisters, and dragons from their backs. I do not credit that story as factually accurate, but that does not prevent it from carrying a more symbolic truth. There are times when the death of dragons is unavoidable—they are, after all, still large predators who occasionally take it into their heads to threaten the lives of others—but ever since my time in the Sanctuary, it has been my habit to avoid killing whenever I can.

My revelation occasioned some muttering among the Draconeans, and a conference between Kuvrey, Sejeat, and Habarz, for which I stood well back and forced myself not to eavesdrop. At last Kuvrey turned back and said, “That is not the matter for which you brought us here tonight.”

“No, it is not.” I took a deep breath and brushed my hair from my face. The elders were correct; my own past behaviour was not the most important issue at hand. We were concerned now with nations, not individuals. “The alliance Giat Jip-hau proposes to you is this: if the council bestows its blessings upon his reign—publicly, with one or more Draconeans accompanying him into Yelang for the purpose—then when he claims the throne, Yelang will in turn acknowledge and protect the sovereignty of this place.” Figuring out a way to say “sovereignty” had occupied far too much of my time and Ruzt’s. If the Draconeans ever had such a word, it had been lost during the ages in which they hid from all foreign relations.

Before the elders could respond, I added, “This also protects you against my own people. Scirland will gain more from a friendly dynasty in Yelang than it will from taking over the Sanctuary of Wings. If they fail to respect your borders, they will lose their alliance with the Khiam Siu. If the Khiam Siu fail to honour their agreement with you, then you can withdraw your blessing of them, which will endanger their standing in Yelang. Because both groups benefit from your continued independence, they will be your shield against anyone else who thinks to threaten it.”

I knew full well that what I proposed was a house of cards. Others have built such things before, and seen them collapse, sometimes in catastrophic ways. It was, however, the only solution any of us could see: myself or any of my companions, human or Draconean. But the entire proposal hinged on one question: would the Draconeans bestow their support on a group of humans? It would cost them very little, and they stood to gain much… but part of the cost would be the willingness to look past the disputed history of the Downfall, their ancient fear of our species, and extend the hand of friendship in view of all the world.

Kuvrey looked at Giat Jip-hau. He did not cast his eyes downward, but met and held her gaze. According to the customs of the Draconeans—and in some ways, the customs of humans—his boldness constituted a challenge. I understood, however, his unwillingness to appear meek in front of potential allies. This man aspired to be the emperor of one of the most powerful nations in the world. He could not begin by showing submission to anyone. Even his bow at the beginning had been a noteworthy concession.

Finally Kuvrey said, “He will have no answer tonight. No decisions at all will happen until the remainder of the council arrives. But we will consider this proposal, Zabel, and weigh it against what the other human has said.”

Dorson’s offer was not nearly so attractive as this one, and the elders disliked him besides. I could not imagine them accepting his overtures, in preference to those of the Khiam Siu.

But those were not the only two options on the table. The Draconeans might decide to follow some third course entirely—one I could not begin to predict.

Sejeat asked, “Our people you wish to send with him. Would they be safe?”

I translated her question for Giat Jip-hau. He said, “I would do everything in my power to protect them. But I cannot guarantee their safety—any more than I can guarantee my own.”

It was a fair answer. I gave it to the elders, who simply nodded; and then the meeting was at an end.

TWENTY

To say that Dorson was displeased by what we had wrought in the night is a profound understatement, but a more accurate description would entail words I prefer not to use in print.

He was displeased when Giat Jip-hau returned to camp—Andrew having dutifully woken him up when the other sentry spotted the prospective emperor returning. He was displeased when he heard that the leader of the Khiam Siu had met with the Draconeans, and I had engineered it. He was displeased when he realized that he could not punish me by shutting me out of his own negotiations, for without me, there could be no negotiations at all; he even went so far as to question my probity in translating their exchanges, and only desisted when Tom threatened to duel him then and there.

I thought of placating the colonel by offering a different kind of glory: allowing him to claim the credit for engineering the three-way alliance between the Sanctuary, Scirland, and the future Yelangese dynasty. But when I opened my mouth to speak the words, they would not come out. I had finished with such concessions. When others have contributed to my achievements, I am more than willing to give them credit. I would not have come to the Mrtyahaima had Thu not first located the dead Draconean’s remains and identified them as something unusual; I would not have been driven into the Sanctuary, and the hands of Ruzt and her sisters, had Tom not spotted the second body in the col; I would not have been able to communicate half so well with the Draconeans had my husband not unlocked the first doors of their language. There are countless others to whom I owe thanks, ranging from my father to my first husband Jacob to Lord Hilford, from Yeyuama in the Green Hell to Shuwa in Hlamtse Rong. I even owe a debt to that unknown desert drake who laid her eggs atop the buried entrance to the Watchers’ Heart.

Dorson had provided me with transportation into the Mrtyahaima, and had played a catalyzing role in sparking our negotiations that spring, not least of all because he brought Giat Jip-hau with him. But he had no part in the alliance, except to obstruct it—and I would not hand him those laurels simply to win his goodwill. As I said to Tom, “He can either join in and do his bit, for which I will thank him… or he can get out of the way.”

The way in question was, of course, alliance. It did not happen overnight: the remainder of the council arrived on the same day that Dorson finally sent the caeliger back across the Sanctuary wall to inform the rest of his expedition of what he had found, and after that things got very, very complicated. But in the end, the council voted to proceed as we had discussed, blessing the reign of the first Khiam emperor.

Some delusionally optimistic part of me had thought that once this was arranged, I would be able to go home. I have rarely been prone to homesickness, but by then my longing for Scirland was so powerful I could taste it. Although I had been reunited with Suhail and Tom, my son still believed me to be dead, along with Natalie and all my family save Andrew, and all the good friends and colleagues I had acquired along the way. It would sadden me to leave behind Ruzt and Kahhe and yes, even Zam, but the Sanctuary was not and could never be my home.

My rationality soon reasserted itself, though. Suhail was devoting himself to the task of learning Draconean with a single-mindedness that astounded even me, and a rate of success that put me utterly to shame. Giat Jip-hau and several others were also bending their efforts to this task, albeit more slowly; and in turn we were teaching small amounts of some human languages to the Draconeans. Scirling and one or more of the Yelangese tongues were the most useful diplomatically, but the Draconeans made the greatest strides with Akhian, because of its relationship to their own language. As strenuously as we all worked, however, I remained the only person who could converse with both species in anything like a fluent manner (and even then, my limitations remained great). No one else, after all, had endured months in which there was nothing to do but herd yaks and acquire vocabulary.

This meant that any alliance expedition must necessarily have me along—and so it was that, ten years after my deportation from Yelang, I returned to that land in a convoy of Scirlings, Khiam Siu, and Draconeans.

Counting both those who came into the Sanctuary on that initial flight and those who had remained outside, the Khiam Siu accompanying Dorson’s forces numbered just under a score, plus Thu Phim-lat. A pair of these remained behind in the Sanctuary, but the rest formed the core of our laughably small invasion force.

To these we added a round dozen Scirlings, including myself, Tom, and Colonel Dorson, and four Draconeans. The elders had decided upon a suitable punishment for the transgressions of Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam: they would be the ones to accompany our group, risking themselves in a world full of humans. But in the end they numbered four, not three, because their clutch-brother Atlim insisted on accompanying them.

This occasioned yet another argument—I thought they would never end. To the Draconeans, four is an auspicious number, echoing the four sisters from whom their species is said to descend. But to the Yelangese, four is decidedly inauspicious; in most Yelangese languages, that word is a homophone for “death.” But Atlim would not remain behind. In the end we resorted to numerical sleight-of-hand; there were not four Draconeans, but three plus one. Only the sisters would publicly bless the new emperor, with Atlim standing aloof.

So altogether we numbered thirty-three. This was, of course, not nearly enough to mount a revolution off our own bat. Should it come to that, however, we were already lost; for it would mean the bulk of the Khiam Siu movement, those revolutionaries who had remained in Yelang, had failed to rise to Giat Jip-hau’s banner. Without them, we had no hope of success; more soldiers in our party would not change that.

And waiting for more soldiers would only put us at risk of losing the element of surprise. Dorson’s message to the outside world had of course been sent with strict orders for military security—but none of us (including Dorson, once his bluster faded) believed that would last for long. And once the Taisên learned about the Sanctuary, their own soldiers would be here as fast as their caeligers could fly. To avoid a pitched battle in this hidden valley, and to preserve the impact of the Draconeans’ first appearance in Yelang, we had to move as soon as we could.

The remainder of the Scirling contingent, and a pair of Khiam men, stayed behind in the Sanctuary. Andrew argued vociferously to come with us to Yelang, but I took him aside and pled with him to accept command of the Sanctuary forces. “You are the only one among Dorson’s men I trust to safeguard the alliance we have made,” I said.

“Suhail will be here,” he said, his jaw set in its most stubborn line.

It was not an argument calibrated to sway me. Leaving my husband behind was one of the most wrenching decisions I have ever had to make; after our winter-long separation, neither of us was yet ready to be parted once more. But it was the only feasible choice: with me gone from the Sanctuary, Suhail was the closest thing to an interpreter anyone there would have. His command of Draconean was still weak, but he would be competent with it long before anyone else could hope to be.

“Suhail’s authority does not apply to the military,” I said. “I need you both here. And—” My throat closed up unexpectedly. “I need you to watch over him. Whatever the council has voted, there are Draconeans who do not like this alliance at all. If something were to happen to him while I am gone—”

Andrew gripped my shoulders. “Say no more. I’ll keep him safe.”

I have never asked who it was that arranged for Suhail and I to be alone on my final night in the Sanctuary, with Ruzt, Kahhe, Zam, and Thu all quartering elsewhere. I think it must have been my husband; but it may have been one of the sisters. Not Zam, as she had little understanding of human notions of privacy and pair-bonding, but Ruzt or Kahhe might have done it. Regardless of the cause, we had one night in which we need not attend to anyone else’s troubles but our own.

Suhail had made no secret of his reluctance to let me go, but he understood the need, and he was smiling as we cleaned out the bowls that had held our supper. I should not have had any appetite, but after a long winter of limited rations, my body had little concern for the distress of my mind. (In particular, the tins of lime juice from Dorson’s supplies were exceedingly welcome. I had nearly forgotten what it felt like to have my teeth sit secure instead of loose.)

“How can you be so cheerful?” I demanded of him. Despite my words, a little smile of my own kept tugging at the corners of my mouth.

“I am just thinking,” he said, “that most people will not have heard yet that you are alive. What a grand entrance you will make!”

This was so at odds with my own mood that could only stare at him. Then he came and enfolded me in his arms; and to my surprise, I found myself laughing. “Indeed,” I said at last. If the shoulder of his shirt was damp by the time I drew back, neither of us commented on it.

And that is all I shall say of that night.

So it was that in early Gelis, just days before my fortieth birthday, we crossed the wall of the Sanctuary—the far wall, on the western side. The mountains there were even more deserted than the western edge of Tser-nga, but soon shrank into foothills, which gave out onto the high plains of Khavtlai. The people there had been subject to Yelang for over a century, but the Taisên presence was minimal: the imperial soldiers were content to hunker down in forts, leaving the trackless grasslands to the nomadic herdsmen of the region.

We could avoid the Taisên, but not the Khavtlek, who are as adept as Akhian nomads at knowing who passes through the vast empty spaces of their home. Fortunately for us, they had no particular fondness for their overlords, and could be persuaded to turn a blind eye to our passage. We had only to keep our Draconean companions hidden—for as much as we wanted their presence to make a stir, we did not want it to do so yet.

I should have foreseen our first difficulty. But after so many months cooped up in the frigid heights of the Mrtyahaima, the prospect of leaving them was, to me, an unmitigated joy. It did not occur to me, until our first night in Khavtlek territory, that not everyone in our party would view it the same way.

That the Draconeans had been silent during that day’s travels, I attributed to the necessity of bundling them under cloaks for concealment. But they dove into their tent with such alacrity, I knew something was amiss. “May I come in?” I called from outside the flap, and entered when I heard Kahhe’s reply.

They sat in a ring, facing inward with their wings partly spread to cup one another’s backs. For them it is a comforting gesture, akin to an arm around a human’s shoulders. “Is everything all right?” I asked. Then I waved the question away as foolish. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Make the sky smaller,” Zam muttered, hunching her back.

What felt to me like gloriously open terrain was, to them, a daunting void. With each day we travelled, their beloved mountains receded farther into the distance, replaced by arid grassland and empty sky, as alien to them as a subterranean city would be to me. At home they were accustomed to gliding down the valleys from higher precipices; here they could scarcely fly at all, even if we dared risk such a display. The cloaks were both a blessing and a curse, helping them close out the sight of so much open space, but causing them to feel even more penned in than I had felt in their house.

It pained me that there was nothing I could do for them. The only solution would be to send them home again—and that was no solution at all. We needed them with us, and their elders had decreed this was their punishment. The council had chosen well indeed. Only Atlim could return before this affair was done; and he refused, as he had refused to stay behind in the first place. The sisters had no choice but to endure.

Matters would become both better and worse once we reached a more settled area. Our destination was the city of Tiongau, in the lower-lying hills that marked the far boundary of the Khavtlai plain. This was a hotbed of Khiam Siu, though they had been left quite leaderless since the failed insurrection at Diéziò; and it was here, Giat Jip-hau said, that he intended to proclaim himself the first Khiam emperor.

I did not participate in the initial infiltration of the city. Not only had I no desire to do so, I would have been worse than useless: a Scirling woman in the middle of a Yelangese city would have been extremely noticeable. Along with my fellow countrymen and the Draconeans, I lay in wait outside the city—which you need not think meant we were all huddling under bushes. One of the local magnates with an estate in the nearby countryside was a secret Khiam sympathizer, and he gave us shelter while Giat Jip-hau and his chosen companions went disguised into Tiongau, in search of the rest of their coterie.

As little as I wished to participate in another battle, waiting there was excruciating. Dorson spent the entire time pacing; he greatly disliked sitting idle while the Yelangese went about their work. But of course the presence of Scirling soldiers in Tiongau, even out of uniform, would only increase the chance of discovery. I did not pace, but I fretted all the same, spinning a hundred different scenarios in which we had to flee east on sudden notice, back to the shelter of the Sanctuary.

But disaster did not come. As is so often the case with such things, the waiting was lengthy, but the event itself brief. I shall not attempt to relate what I was not there to see; I will only say that once the fighting began, it lasted for scarcely two days. Pockets of resistance remained, but the Khiam Siu had overthrown the governor and taken possession of key locations around the city. Once those were secure, Thu reappeared with a bandage around one arm, and announced that Giat Jip-hau required our presence in the city.

I was not at my best when Tom and I arrived at the governor’s palace. Although the arrival of the caeliger and the subsequent juggling of forces in the Sanctuary had done a little to acclimate me to human company once more, I was wildly unprepared for a city full of my own species. The last time I had faced them in such quantities was in Kotranagar a year before, on my way through Vidwatha to Tser-nga. I wondered how the Draconeans would fare, surrounded by humans. I was very glad that, for reasons of security, they would not enter Tiongau until they could do so under cover of darkness.

The prospective emperor had laid claim to the governor’s own chambers. Austere for reasons of both personal inclination and political image, Giat Jip-hau had ordered the rooms stripped of much of their finery; what remained, however, was still more than elegant, with laquered screens and windows framing views of the gardens outside. I felt terribly out of place, even after my first proper bath in more than a year.

He wasted no time in making it clear why he had summoned us. “The governor of this place, like many of his rank, kept a menagerie, and in it there are dragons. I know the Draconeans trained those creatures in the Sanctuary for their own use—the mews. I want them to train the dragons here.”

Tom and I exchanged glances. His minute shrug said he deferred to my knowledge on the matter. I almost wished he hadn’t; none of my instinctive responses were at all polite. I managed to replace them with a question: “Train them to what end?”

“You rode a sea-serpent into battle in the Keongan islands,” Giat Jip-hau said. “The dragons here are large enough to bear a rider.”

I fear I gaped like a landed fish. Too many words wanted to come out of my mouth at once; they clogged my mind instead, leaving me with nothing. Tom stepped into the breach. “My lord, that is more like riding a wild mustang than a war-horse. The Keongans use the serpents in part because they have neither the firearms nor the artillery of a modern army; you do not suffer any such lack. Dragons would not be of much use to you as a weapon.”

Giat Jip-hau dismissed this with a small cut of his hand. “Their use as weapons is secondary at best. But if my enemies see my generals riding into battle upon dragons, the effect on their morale will be enormous.”

Insofar as it went, he was probably correct. That did not make the idea a good one, though. I found my tongue, and used it. “My lord, the Draconeans have spent centuries breeding the mews for their use, in much the same way that humans bred wolves into dogs. The fact that we can command hounds for our own benefit does not mean we can do the same with tigers; and I think it is fair to assume that the gap between mews and whatever dragons you have here is at least that large. If you had a decade to spend on this endeavour, it might be possible; but I presume your schedule is rather swifter than that.”

I should have stopped there. My mouth went on, though, without leave from my brain. “And even if it could be done, I think it should not.”

He fixed me with a steady gaze. “Explain.”

I thought of the rock-wyrms that had attacked the boyar’s men in the Vystrani Mountains, the fangfish that had savaged the Ikwunde, little Ascelin killing the Taisên agent in Qurrat and the sea-serpents thrashing in the waters around Keonga. But Giat Jip-hau would not be swayed by my qualms over my own past actions, nor by my newfound reluctance to see dragons killed for any reason other than sheer necessity. His care was for the future of his nation, not the well-being of a few beasts.

Instead I gave him a practical answer. “Battles are perilous things, my lord; you know that as well as I do. What omen would it be for your reign if these dragons were shot down in the field?”

“It would be the Taisên who shot them, and the Taisên upon whom the blame would fall.”

“Perhaps. But they have not used dragons in battle; their own ministers would argue that you are the one who brought them to that fate. Some would agree with you, and others with the Taisên. It is a great deal of effort for dubious benefit—especially when you might more profitably attempt to train them for another purpose.”

I spoke that last as if I had some plan in mind, held in reserve until that moment. In truth, it only took shape as I spoke; and even then, I hesitated to dignify it with the name of “plan.” But Giat Jip-hau listened with interest as I shared the beginnings of it, and he and Tom contributed elaborations and improvements, and before long, I was committed.

To my part, at least. “I must consult with the Draconeans before I can say anything for certain,” I reminded him.

“Then act swiftly,” he said. “One way or another, we do not have much time.”

TWENTY-ONE

The entire plan depended on the assistance of the Draconeans. They entered Tiongau in the small hours of the night, when only Khiam Siu patrolled the streets, and were smuggled into the palace through a servant entrance.

Even traversing the city at night was a shock to them. “I owe you an apology, Zabel,” Ruzt said when Tom and I met them, shortly after dawn. “You told us there were many humans in the world, but I never believed they could exist in such numbers. How many places like this are there?”

“More than I can count,” I said. “And some are far larger than this. But you need not concern yourselves with that just now; I have something to show you.”

The governor’s menagerie was no miserable zoo, with animals kept in iron cages. Instead it was a series of beautiful gardens, with their bars, where necessary, concealed behind trees and flowering bushes. The most splendid of these gardens housed a pair of ci lêng, a species known in Scirling as the azure or eastern dragon; the latter name derives from their natural range, which lies in the eastern part of Yelang, and the former derives from their lovely blue scales.

Our Draconean companions reacted to these with astonished delight. Just as I had told them of the vast number of humans in the world, I had told them of other dragon breeds; and just as my words had failed to convey the true reality of humankind, so too had it fallen short of describing dragonkind. Despite my cautions, the sisters hurried through the gate and into the garden, where they sat utterly still until the ci lêng lost their wariness and came to investigate. There is no sight quite like a trio of previously mythical Draconeans sitting in a Yelangese garden with two azure dragons wending between them like curious cats; and in that moment, I felt as if all my suffering the previous winter had been more than worth it.

But of course we had a great deal to do, and not much time in which to do it. Nor, for that matter, did we have many resources to work with. The governor’s dragon-men were of course no help, as they were all loyal to the Taisên; and Tom and I knew perishingly little about the breeds of western Dajin, on account of having been thrown out of Yelang before we could study more than a few. But the dragon-men had kept books detailing their arrangements, which Thu translated for us, and from this we were able to learn the means by which they fed, cared for, and worked with their charges. Kahhe, who was the best of the sisters at training mews, shook her head over the latter parts. “Is that how humans do it? No wonder you can’t manage much.”

I grinned impudently at her, buoyed by my excitement. “Very well—let us see you do better.”

They set to it with a will, despite certain obstacles. True to Tom’s predictions regarding the mews, our friends from the Sanctuary were too well adapted to high elevations and cold temperatures; the warmth of eastern Yelang in Gelis was as punishing to them as the Akhian desert in Caloris was to me. Fortunately the governor, being a wealthy man, had storehouses of ice brought down from the mountains. The four Draconeans took refuge there during the hottest parts of the day, working with the azure dragons in the morning and evening.

But they pushed themselves to their limits, for Giat Jip-hau insisted on swift action, and with good cause. The Khiam Siu rebellion needed momentum; their victory in Tiongau could not be allowed to grow stale, or the Taisên to gather themselves to resist. The moment of truth was upon us before we knew it.

It came on a brilliantly sunny day. The last of the resistance within Tiongau had been defeated; in celebration, the Khiam Siu and the people of the city were staging a great festival. Despite the destruction wrought by fighting, the burned houses and the grieving survivors, a raucous procession wound its way to the plaza in front of the governor’s palace. There were drums and fireworks, dancers and priests, and an enormous puppet of a hong lêng, the dragon associated with the Yelangese emperor himself. This was carried by a whole crowd of puppeteers, and when I saw the puppet later, it reminded me a great deal of the legambwa bomu the Moulish had used to chasten me into shedding the burden of witchcraft, so many years before—albeit much larger and more brilliantly decorated.

I did not see the puppet until later because I was not standing with the soldiers on the steps of the palace, awaiting the emergence of Giat Jip-hau. I was with Tom, very gingerly leading a pair of leashed azure dragons through the corridors like enormous greyhounds, and hoping very sincerely that they would not decide to turn against us without warning. The ci lêng were relatively tame, as dragons went, but just as a cat or a horse may snap at its owner, so too may such creatures—with very injurious consequences.

The corridors, though grand, had not been sized for dragons. From behind us came a delicate crash. Tom and I both stopped, wincing. I cast a glance behind me, and saw that the tail of Tom’s dragon had brushed against a vase in an alcove, knocking it to the floor.

“Do I even want to know what that was?” Tom asked.

“As there is nothing we can do for it now,” I said, “perhaps it is best if we just continue on.”

We made it to the great entry hall without further incident, and stood to one side, where we could not be glimpsed through the towering double doors. We had not been there long when I heard the footsteps of a great many people approaching, and then someone saying something in Yelangese. I turned just in time to see a Khiam Siu captain wipe the floor with a silk drapery, clearing away a souvenir left behind by one of the dragons before his emperor could step in it.

“Oh dear,” I said involuntarily. “I, ah—my apologies.”

If the incident troubled Giat Jip-hau, he did not show it. Perhaps his mind was so occupied by the impending ceremony that it simply could not accommodate any new sources of agitation; certainly mine would have been. He merely said, “Will it work?”

“I believe so,” I said. Then, because that was clearly insufficient: “Yes.” I prayed it was true.

He answered with a brief nod, and his entourage swept past us to the doors.

The roar from outside was tremendous when Giat Jip-hau appeared. I peered around a pillar long enough to see him raise his hands for silence, and obtain the closest approximation to it one can hope for from such a large crowd. But even had I been able to understand more than a dozen words of any Yelangese tongue, I would not have been able to listen to his oration; my leashed dragon was very determined to chew upon the gilded carvings of another pillar, and it was all I could do to keep her from swallowing a mouthful of wood and gold.

In a way, I was grateful for her mischief. It kept me from dwelling overmuch on what came next.

Thu seemed to appear out of nowhere, almost vibrating with excitement. “It is time.”

Tom and I emerged from the great entry hall into dazzling sunlight and the renewed roar of the crowd. It seemed all of Tiongau was arrayed in the plaza below us, and every last one of them was shouting at the sight of the two ci lêng—for I have no illusions that a pair of Scirling strangers occasioned any notice, when there were azure dragons to see. The common people of Tiongau would never have seen the beasts except in paintings, and their presence next to the self-proclaimed emperor of Yelang was as wondrous to them as the sight of a Draconean had been to me.

But we had only begun to astonish them.

Three shadows passed overhead, and the crowd fell to dead silence.

Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam had leapt from the roof above. Wings spread to their fullest extent, the sisters glided over the assembled dignitaries and down the palace stairs to a point equidistant between the emperor and the crowd. They stood there long enough for people to see them clearly, and to know that these were no humans dressed in masks and silk wings; they were draconic humanoids, creatures out of legend. Then they turned, wings and ruffs spread a little in display, and ascended the stairs once more to where Giat Jip-hau waited.

In this manner did the Draconeans make their public entrance to the world of humans.

All our pains to keep them secret came to fruition in that instant, and it was worth every ounce of effort. What might have been a moment of terror transmuted to wonder instead, as the Draconeans raised their hands to the sun and spoke a blessing in the local tongue that invoked an admixture of beliefs: a ceremony of Atlim’s design, one part Draconean, one part Yelangese, and one part pure invention. Giat Jip-hau stepped forward, and Thu laid a golden robe over his shoulders; and in a powerful voice that carried to the far side of the plaza, he proclaimed himself the first Khiam emperor.

And the azure dragons danced.

Tom and I had unclipped their leashes while the sisters spoke their blessing. Following Kahhe’s whistled signals, the two ci lêng flowed forward, executing a circle around Giat Jip-hau, down the steps a short distance, and back up again to where Tom and I waited.

For the dragons to be present at his proclamation would have been a boost to the new emperor’s legitimacy—but they were only ci lêng, the dragons permitted to high officials, not the hong lêng that symbolized the emperor himself. But for the Draconeans to appear, as if conjured from nowhere, and for the ci lêng to dance at their command… could there be any clearer proof of his blessed state?

The Khiam Revolution did not achieve victory that day, of course. Although a great many people rose to their banner after Tiongau, quite a few did not; and the Taisên fought tooth and nail to retain their power, including many pitched battles that I was glad to sit out. By the time I left Yelang, almost a year later, the success of the Khiam Dynasty was a foregone conclusion, but the fighting still continued; by then we had repeated the grand display half a dozen times, to prove that the events in Tiongau were not simply a tall tale. Not all breeds were amenable to even that minor degree of training, but it did not matter: the story spread, and influenced public opinion wherever it went. Whatever the Taisên thought, the war was won on the day that a hong lêng circled Giat Jip-hau in front of the captured Imperial Palace.

The challenges for my Draconean friends were tremendous. They remained miserable in the heat, especially when we visited lowland regions; and Zam even expressed grudging sympathy to me at one point, saying, “Now I think I understand how you felt when we were chasing the yaks.” Taisên agents made eight separate attempts to assassinate them, none successful. Thu told me it was a sign of desperation, that they would risk being blamed for such an act; but this of course is small comfort when one cannot sleep with both eyes closed. (They also tried to assassinate me, I think out of spite. I was far less of a threat to them than either the Draconeans or the new emperor.) It was a relief when I could finally install myself in a room in the Imperial Palace, safe behind a cordon of both Scirling and Khiam Siu guards.

By then my thoughts and Tom’s were increasingly bending toward Scirland, despite the grand events occuring around us. “Will you come with us back to the Sanctuary?” Ruzt asked one day. Their exile had ended; the elders, well pleased with what they had done, were permitting them to go home.

A part of me wanted to say yes. We had been through so much together; it was strange to imagine being parted from my Draconean friends. But not only was the Sanctuary not my home, I had little desire to return there—at least, not so soon. I wanted the company of my own countrymen, the ease of speaking my native tongue, the comforts of my home in Falchester. I could not have any of these yet; but I could have my husband.

“Suhail is in Tser-nga now,” I said. “Your elders will be negotiating with the Tser-zhag king soon, and I should like to be there for that. It will be a good deal faster if I sail to the other side of Dajin, instead of tramping through the mountains—and a good deal safer, too.”

Ruzt’s wings fluttered. “And you do not want to go back.”

Before I could frame a response to that, she waved it away. “I understand, Zabel. Isabella. For you, it is a difficult place. But you will always be welcome in our house.”

“And you in mine,” I said reflexively. Then I laughed. “Though I will understand entirely if you decline to sail to the far side of the world to visit me.” The sea had been even more daunting a sight than the plains of Khavtlai; it would be a very long time before any Draconean ventured out upon it.

Thu accompanied Tom and myself to the port of Va Nurang, where a Scirling naval ship was bringing a set of proper ambassadors to establish relations with the new emperor. That same ship brought a letter, addressed to me. I went boneless with relief when I saw it was from my son—for he would not write to me unless word had reached him that I was alive.

Its contents, however, were most startling.

I stared at this some time before dissolving into laughter and showing it to Tom. How could I be angry with my son? It was the sort of thing I might have done, had I been born a boy. And certainly I have done many more foolish things in my life, so I was hardly in a position to throw stones.

We sailed from Va Nurang on the same ship that brought the ambassadors. Thu saw us off: a very different farewell than the one we received when we were deported from Va Hing. “Thank you,” I said to him. The phrase was wholly inadequate, but I had no better alternative; there were no words to express the true depth of my gratitude. “Had you not discovered those remains—had you not chosen to dangle them before me as very excellent bait—”

Thu bowed, in the manner of someone who knew the gesture was wholly inadequate, but had no better alternative. “It has been an honour and a pleasure, Lady Trent.”

Tom went back to Scirland; I disembarked in Vidwatha, proceeding back to Tser-nga by less covert means than we had used the first time. There Suhail and I served as interpreters for negotiations between the council of Draconean elders and the Tser-zhag king. Letters between the two of us had been infrequent, owing to the difficulty of conveying them; when we were not carrying out our official duties, we talked ourselves hoarse telling stories of the things that had happened while we were apart. I told him of the dancing dragons; he told me about how he won over Esdarr and her sisters, which I thought was by far the more impressive achievement. He also showed me the modern Draconean syllabary, which he had learned from Habarz.

“So,” I said, “we will finally be able to read all the inscriptions?”

Suhail laughed. “We will be able to pronounce them, at least. And we can certainly make a much better guess at their meaning. I intend to ship a set of the most recent edition of the inscriptions to the Sanctuary; Habarz has shown a great interest in reading them.” His smile lit up the room like a sun. “I thought it was impossible for you to find me a second Cataract Stone. Instead, you found me something far superior.”

We left Tser-nga as soon as the negotiations were done, despite pressures to stay. Neither of us could endure the thought of living through another Mrtyahaiman winter, and by then there were others who could communicate to an acceptable degree—humans and Draconeans both. Moreover, my desire to be home had passed “overpowering” and reached a level for which no adjective could suffice.

Besides, I had business to attend to there. With the bright tone of one looking forward to a moment of perfect, undiluted triumph, I reminded Suhail, “I have something to report to the Philosophers’ Colloquium.”