A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent

by Marie Brennan

  PART TWO

  In which the expedition arrives in Vystrana, but faces difficulties in commencing its work

  SEVEN

  The journey to Vystrana — My first wild dragon — Arrival in Drustanev — A chance to depart

  Although it is hard to find now, I encourage any youngsters reading this—by which I mean anyone under the age of forty—to seek out a copy of my first publication, A Journey to the Mountains of Vystrana. Not for reasons of quality; it’s an insipid little thing, produced because at the time travel writing was considered a suitable genre for young ladies’ pens. But that book, which contains a much fuller account of our travel from Scirland to Vystrana, is a window into a time all but forgotten now, in this age of railways, fast ships, and caeligers.

  You cannot conceive, if you are young, the slowness and difficulty of travel back then. Nor, I imagine, do you want to; this modern speed has brought many improvements for commerce, diplomacy, and learning, and more. And yet, there is a part of me that misses the old way. Call it an old woman’s nostalgia if you like, but our journey to Vystrana served as a useful transition, a separation from the young woman I had been in Scirland, and a preparation for the woman I would be on the expedition. Had it been possible for me to arrive quickly in Vystrana, I think I would not have been ready when I did so.

  I believed myself to be ready then; now, with the hindsight brought by greater age, I see myself for the naive and inexperienced young woman I was. We all begin in such a manner, though. There is no quick route to experience.

  From our landing in Trinque-Liranz we went upriver to Sanverio, where we attached ourselves to a trio of carters taking supplies across the nearby border into Vystrana. For a fee, they packed their wagons high with our belongings, and so we began our climb into the mountains.

  It was my first real taste of hardship, though by the standards of such a word, my sufferings were mild indeed. The village we aimed for was very isolated, even for Vystrana; the carters only made the journey because it was more convenient for the local boyar to be supplied from Sanverio than anywhere else. Once or twice we managed beds in a farmhouse, but more often than not we slept in tents, on folding cots that kept us off the ground, but had nothing else to recommend them.

  So determined was I not to complain that I did not let myself think of the day when this stage would end. It therefore came as a shock to me one morning when Lord Hilford said, “We should make it there today, if this weather holds.”

  Blinking in the early sunlight, I said, “Make it where?”

  He smiled at me. “The village of Drustanev. Our destination, Mrs. Camherst.”

  After so much time on the sea and the road, I could hardly believe we would be stopping at last. We loaded ourselves onto the wagons in a hurry, and set out with more energy than usual.

  I studied the landscape around me with a newly curious eye. It was uneven territory, valleys of spruce and fir alternating with gentle slopes of grass and windswept ridges of limestone and lichen. Even with the cloudless sky, the air was no more than pleasantly warm. I wondered how far we had risen from the coast. High above I saw a bird floating lazily on the winds; with no point of reference, I could not be sure how large it was, but I rather thought it must be some breed of eagle. Certainly it was not a dragon, though I kept my eyes eagerly open for one.

  The weather held fine for most of the morning, but as the afternoon drew on, clouds grew on the mountaintops and rolled in our direction. One of the carters shot at a wolf that was following us too closely, scaring it off. He and his fellows held a brief conversation (in the impenetrable dialect of their native region, not the more refined Chiavoran the rest of us knew), and decided to press on; they judged this a bad area to camp in, even if it meant a wetting before we arrived in Drustanev.

  As the wind picked up, I tied my bonnet more firmly to my head. The clouds seemed very low. I had a book out which I had been attempting to read, and for a time I tried to go on doing so, bracing my forearms along the edges of the pages to keep them from flapping about. From the wagon bench at my side, though, Jacob nudged me and said, “You might want to put that away. I fear it will rain soon.”

  I sighed, but he was right. Closing the book, I turned in my seat and reached over the back of the wagon bench to stow it in a pack that would all too soon prove whether it was as waterproof as advertised or not.

  As I did so, a gust of shockingly cold air pulled at my sleeves, and ice stung my face. Wondering if we were in danger of hail, I looked up.

  I have little recollection of the next several seconds. Just a moment of frozen staring, and then—with no transition—my voice shrieking “Get down!” as I wrapped my arms around my husband and dragged him forward, off the wagon bench.

  Two other screams overlaid my own. One, high-pitched and awful, came from our driver as claws snagged him off the wagon and into the air. The other, lower but even more terrible, came from above, as the dragon plummeted from the clouds and raked over our heads.

  Jacob and I landed in the wagon traces, the reins and harness tangling our limbs while the horses shied and whinnied their terror. Being on the outside, I tumbled free first, and cried out to see the wagon lurching forward, my husband still caught within. He fell a moment later, directly beneath the wagon, and the wheels passed close enough to leave a track across his coat.

  I crawled toward him, hearing shouts from all around us. Frantic glances skyward showed me nothing; the dragon had vanished again. From the slope ahead, though, came the agonized groans of our driver. Just as I reached Jacob, a loud noise cracked the air: a gunshot, as one of the other drivers fired off the rifle he carried against highwaymen or wild animals.

  Wild animals. I had not, until that moment, put dragons in that class. I had thought them something apart.

  “Stay down, Isabella,” Jacob said, shielding me with his own body. I crouched in his shadow, and realized quite irrelevantly that my bonnet had gone astray. The wind was very cold in my hair.

  A great flapping, as of sails: the dragon, though we could not see it. Looking under Jacob’s arm, I saw Lord Hilford put out a hand and stop his driver, who would have fired at the sound. With nothing to see, there was no point in wasting the round.

  Then suddenly there was something to see. Several shots rang out, and I swallowed the protest that tried to leap free of me. This was no vulnerable runt in a menagerie. The dragon was huge, its wingspan far larger than a wagon, with stone-grey hide and wings that kicked up dust with every beat. The guns fired, and the beast made a dreadful noise, aborting its stoop on us and climbing rapidly for the sky. Clouds enveloped it once more, and we waited.

  Waited, and waited, until at last Lord Hilford sighed. “I think it’s gone.”

  Jacob helped me to my feet. My bonnet was caught in a low, scrubby bush; I retrieved it and smoothed it out with shaking hands while Mr. Wilker and one of the other men went after the driver the dragon had seized. Its claws had left great gashes in his back and chest, but the worst injury was to his legs, which had broken badly when he fell. Blood seeped out where the bones had breached the skin. If I had not seen a similar injury once to a horse, I might have fainted.

  “Make room for him in one of the wagons,” Lord Hilford said in Chiavoran, then turned to me. “Mrs. Camherst, if you would—in my green chest there should be some laudanum. Black bottle, in the top rack.”

  I crammed my bonnet back onto my head and did as he asked. There were bits of grit and rock in my palms, which I picked out as I went, and I had torn my skirt, but seeing the driver, I was acutely aware of how lucky Jacob and I had been. Had I not seen the dragon coming …

  Rain began to fall. Mr. Wilker bound up our driver’s wounds as best he could. We needed to get him to shelter, but first there was his cart to deal with; the horses had quite understandably bolted at the approach of the dragon. They had both gone lame, and the wagon had overturned, spilling our trunks onto the ground and knocking one of them open. Working together, t
he men retrieved everything while I created a makeshift canopy to keep the rain off the injured man. The laudanum, fortunately, put him into a shallow sleep, and he did no more than moan in protest when we moved onward and the road jolted him where he lay.

  In this manner, bedraggled and scarred, we arrived in the village of Drustanev.

  I did not see much at first of the building that was to be our home for the next several months. I accompanied the injured driver as some locals carried him inside, and tried to explain in my very bad Vystrani what had happened. I expect that little of what I said even registered on them, between my limited vocabulary, appalling accent, and atrocious grammar, but one thing I did notice: the villagers did not seem surprised to see his wounds. No one could have mistaken them for anything other than dragon-inflicted, even without me repeating that one word over and over again—balaur, balaur—and they did not seem surprised.

  Relatively approachable Lord Hilford had called the Vystrani dragons, that first evening at Renwick’s when I heard of his expedition. It was not the phrase I would have chosen.

  A young woman appeared out of nowhere at my elbow, tugging me away from the men now swarming through the downstairs of the building. Using a flood of incomprehensible Vystrani, she seemed to be trying to convince me to sit down in a quiet place and have vapors over my misfortune. I’m afraid I gravely disappointed her by haring off into the rain, my already-ruined bonnet listing to one side on my head, to make certain our things were being brought inside. It seemed a minor thing to worry about, with howls emanating from a back room where they were trying to set the driver’s broken legs, but I was no use there, and could not abide sitting around and doing nothing.

  My efforts averted a buildup of trunks in the front hall that would have made passage impossible. By repeating those few parts of my Vystrani vocabulary that were relevant to the situation, accompanied by much gesticulation, I managed to get some of the local servants to shunt our luggage upstairs, to the rooms we would sleep in. Jacob found me in the midst of this, and insisted on examining me for injuries. He exclaimed over my skinned palms and had Mr. Wilker bind them up, although by then they were hardly bleeding at all. For my own part, I conducted a similar examination of Jacob, and was relieved to find that his coat might have been badly torn along the back, but his skin was nothing more than scratched. An inch less into our fall, and the dragon would have caught him like the driver.

  The noise in the back room subsided at last, and Lord Hilford appeared, weary and bloodstained. “He’s asleep again,” the earl said. “Whether he’ll survive … well, we shall see. Come.” We followed him obediently, Jacob, Mr. Wilker, and myself, like very lost and unnerved ducklings, into a room off the front hall.

  Someone had made an effort to transform this dark-paneled, low-ceilinged chamber into a sitting room, though whoever had done so appeared to have been operating from a thirdhand description of Scirling customs. There were couches at least, even if they were more like wooden benches with cushions placed along the seat and back, but we sank onto them gratefully. From somewhere Lord Hilford produced a bottle, and there were clay tumblers on a nearby table; he poured a small amount of brandy into four of these and passed them around, even to me. I had not tasted brandy since the physician sewed me up after the wolf-drake, and had to force myself to take a sip, momentarily overwhelmed by the memory.

  As the warmth traveled through me, dispelling the chill of the rain, Lord Hilford said heavily, “I am so very sorry, Mrs. Camherst.”

  I looked up at him. “Sorry? Why to me, more than another?”

  “I know I spoke to you of the dangers of this expedition, but I did not anticipate anything like this.”

  “What the devil got into that thing?” Mr. Wilker demanded, and got a reproving look from Jacob for his language.

  “My question exactly,” I said, “if in rather more vivid terms than I am permitted to use. I was not under the impression that rock-wyrms tended to attack people.”

  Lord Hilford scowled and knocked back the remainder of his brandy. “They don’t.”

  “Then I don’t blame you for failing to warn me of a danger you could not have expected,” I told him. My fingers curled around the clay mug. “By all means, let us be sorry for the poor driver, and pray for his recovery. But I am not the one injured, Lord Hilford; I do not need your apology.”

  It sounded well, and I meant it as much as I could. Under no circumstances was I going to begin by letting anyone think I would wilt at the first hint of peril. Such wilting could be done later, when there was no one present to see.

  I was rewarded with a rueful smile from the earl. “You will tarnish my reputation as a gentleman, Mrs. Camherst, with such gallant courage as that.”

  “We still have Mr. Wilker’s question to answer,” I said. It was easier to think of the dragon’s attack as a puzzle in need of solving; that gave me something to focus on. “What could provoke such behaviour? It can’t have been rabid.”

  Jacob laid one hand on my forearm. “Isabella, we might leave such questions until morning. Now is not a suitable time.”

  “If by ‘not suitable’ you mean that we don’t have any answers,” Lord Hilford said. He put his empty tumbler down on the scarred surface of the side table. “Or at least I don’t. Perhaps the excitement rattled my brains loose, but that was quite unlike anything I have seen from a rock-wyrm before, and I’ve been close to them many a time. I shall have to ponder it. At any rate, this is the house where we are to be staying; our luggage should be around here somewhere…” He stared about the ill-lit room as if the trunks might be lost in the shadows.

  “Upstairs,” I said. When I rose to my feet, I was pleased to find my knees steady. I had feared the moment of sitting and relative relaxation would have persuaded them to give out. “Though where precisely I sent them, we must discover.”

  We ascended the stairs in a damp herd, all bumbling against one another in the dark and cramped stairwell. The boards creaked alarmingly beneath my feet, let alone Lord Hilford’s, but held. Once in the corridor above we found that our luggage had gotten all mixed up, despite the tags with our names. By now, however, the hour was grown late enough that we did not care. We pulled out the valises that contained our traveling gear, allocated rooms, and fell into bed with hardly a pause to change out of our wet clothes.

  DRUSTANEV

  All through the night, I dreamt of the dragon, and fell again and again to the hard Vystrani soil, just out of the range of its claws.

  When I awoke the next morning, Jacob was already gone. Morning sunlight showed me the room in better detail than I had seen the previous night, disclosing a bleak and cheerless place. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all of that same dark wood; I stretched out one hand from where I lay and found it was painted with a kind of resin that presumably sealed it against weathering. The ceiling beams were low and heavy, giving the room a claustrophobic feel. Our furniture consisted of a bed without posters or canopy, a wardrobe, a dressing table with a mirror, and nothing else.

  The air outside my coverlet was quite chill, as I discovered when I left the bed. Shivering, I made a quick search and pulled on my dressing robe and slippers. These warmed me enough that I could search more thoroughly for a trunk with suitable clothing in it. The previous day’s dress was piled on the floor, stained, torn, and utterly beyond repair.

  I was lucky enough to find one of the plain, sturdy dresses I had commissioned before leaving Scirland, with buttons I could reach on my own. Just as I finished with the last of them, the door creaked open, and the young woman from the night before poked her head tentatively in.

  She was tall and of that build we so politely call “strapping” and applaud when found in peasant folk, with strong features and a wealth of dark hair. She also, at that moment, had an alarmed expression, apparently provoked by the sight of me dressing myself without aid.

  From the words that poured out of her mouth, I gathered that she was supposed to be my lady’s
maid. I had been afraid of that. She would need to be educated in her duties, starting with the purchase of a bell I could use to summon her when I awoke. I laid that aside for the moment, however, and held up my hand to silence her.

  When she subsided, I asked, “Tcha prodvyr e straiz?” What is your name?—or at least, that is what I hoped I had said.

  “Dagmira,” she replied.

  “Dagmira,” I said. “Isabella Camherst eiy. Zhe Mrs. Camherst tchi vek ahlych.” This was a line I had rehearsed many times, until I was certain I pronounced it at least as well as our Chiavoran drivers did. I am Isabella Camherst. You will call me Mrs. Camherst. If I was to train this young woman to be my lady’s maid, then we would have to start by establishing boundaries. I was her employer, not a child to be chivvied around. Proper respect was essential.

  I did not want to reflect that a Vystrani child would know more of the area and local customs than I did, let alone the language.

  For my next display of linguistic accomplishment, I asked Dagmira where my husband had gone, and received in return a second flood of words too quick to comprehend. Another attempt, this time prefaced by setkasti, setkasti—slower, slower—rewarded me with a more suitable pace, but still far too many words I did not understand. Jacob had gone out; no more could I discern.

  Frustrated by this, I gave Dagmira broken instructions to bring to that room all the trunks with mine or Jacob’s name on them, and to remove all those with Lord Hilford’s or Mr. Wilker’s, then went downstairs. The kitchen was cold and empty, the only smell a lingering one of blood from the doctoring of the driver. It drove out any thought I had for breakfast.