by E. E. Knight
“Paperwork keeping you . . . busy?”
Sifler followed her gaze. “Oh, that? No, I had a session with Choppers this morning. Had to write an essay about honor while he timed me. Made a mess of the inkwell.”
“I’d like to read that.” The corner of his mouth turned up and he straightened.
“Would you? Well, I’d like your opinion.” He scuttled off before she could say she didn’t have time to look at it right this morning and returned with two closely written pages. “Here’s the fair copy. I was inspired by the essays of—”
He had a very good hand. She liked it better than Santeel’s or Ottavia’s even. “I wish I had time to read it now. But I’m out the gate today and pressed. I have the password: honeycomb.” She passed the pages back.
“That’s not the password,” Sifler said.
“But . . . Master Traskeer . . .”
“I’m just ragging you up, Ileth. You should have told me you were in a hurry. Of course it’s the password. But you only need it to come back in. That’s the Serpentine in brief: easy to leave, hard to get in. Follow me.”
He took her over to the gate, lifted a heavy hook out of the fitting, and slid part of the decorative, interlaced metal gridwork of the gate open. Though she was by no reckoning tall, she would still have to dip, and step over the gate bottom, to get in.
As she passed through the gate-within-a-gate, beneath the great metal dragon wings arcing like two great fans above the gate, shading those beneath (or perhaps sheltering those firing crossbows and meteors down at attackers), he reminded her to be back by sunset. “I could be your brother and still wouldn’t let you in, not after dark. If your business takes you late, find lodgings in town. Shall I log you out on orders?”
Lodgings. She didn’t have a fig to flip.
“It’s sort of a . . . a commission from Ma-Master Traskeer.”
He smiled a shy smile, which made him look even more like a boy playing in his father’s uniform. “I shouldn’t keep you then. Carry on, Ileth.”
As Ileth walked down the very good road from the Serpentine to Vyenn, she examined it with fresh eyes. Vyenn was the northernmost large town on a line of river traffic that extended south all the way down to the river delta on the Blue Ocean. It clung close to the lake and then grew out over it on wide piers, people above, boats below. A stone wharf extended farther than the farthest buildings south of town, with barges and what in the Freesand would be called “coasters” tied up along it, though at the moment there didn’t seem to be water traffic coming or going.
The town itself was colorful, the roofs in good repair, paint and whitewash everywhere. Splashes of green filled every gap between buildings, where there were gaps, sometimes just big enough to hold a single tree. Almost every building had window boxes bursting with flowers or what were probably herbs and vegetables. On the side away from the lake, an old wall stood, or the remains of one, anyway, as the town had outgrown it in long years of peace, though there was still a substantial hedge and a roadside ditch at the end of town that served as a polite warning that you were about to fall under the jurisdiction of Vyenn’s watch.
She knew Vyenn had a watch because they sometimes returned drunken dragoneers and wingmen to the Serpentine, but whether they had uniform hats or coats or were just an assembly of the more vigorous citizens whistled up when there was trouble (as was the practice in the Freesand) she didn’t know.
Halfway down the road she turned around and looked back at the Serpentine. The low, thick walls girding it appeared much more imposing from below the steep sides of the peninsula. She could just see the tops of the Pillar Rocks and the Long Bridge where it joined the Beehive. All but a few decorative spires of the jumble of buildings at the up end were invisible. The Beehive with its lighthouse atop looked a little more angular from this side, where it sloped down to the lake, and less like a half-buried melon the way it appeared from up by the gate (she’d heard it called a “flame-topped teat” by less reverential apprentices).
All around the Skylake were picturesquely steep mountains with bits of snow clinging year-round in the more sheltered areas. You could get lost in the detail of just one, examining the slides of fallen rocks and the treeline and where bits of greenery had established themselves in improbable-looking crevices. She congratulated herself again at the extraordinary old view from a new vantage point. She was lucky to have found a place in the fortress. If she were an artist, she could set an easel down just about anywhere in this inspiring valley and get a picture out of it.
Out over the lake another pair of dragons, or perhaps the same pair from earlier, were flying, one just below and behind the other. The one beneath was making some effort to match the one above. Ileth thought for a moment and then remembered hearing that was how messages were passed between aerial dragons: one dragoneer dropped a weighted line, and then the message was sent down on a little tube attached to a ring. The one below had to not get struck about the head by the end of the line, catch it, and then release the message-case. Tricky work.
The dragons separated. She hoped for the trainee’s sake that the message-case hadn’t been dropped into the Skylake.
Renewed in her pride at living as a dragoneer in one of the most famous landmarks in all the known world, she entered Vyenn for the first time with head high and a confident smile.
The first house she came to at the edge of Vyenn belonged to a tobacconist. A sign hung over the door, well-painted (the Vales were full of aspiring artists; the most famous painters in Zland and Tyrenna commanded fabulous, or infamous, sums—depending on who was doing the creating and who was doing the paying) and depicting a relaxed, reclining dragon with soothing smoke coming out of its nostrils. The proportions were all wrong; it had a snakeish body and tiny wings, but real dragons were mostly wing jutting out of mountains of muscle at the wing joints and rear limbs and had tapering necks and tails. Odd for a shop with dragons in daily view, but perhaps the owner wanted something fanciful.
She supposed she could submit a report critiquing the art and pointing out all the anatomical errors and try to pass it off as a joke. She doubted Traskeer would be amused.
Ileth only knew two roads in Vyenn from conversations about town. One was called Broad Street and the other Wharf Way running the length of the town north–south. She knew that the Serpentine’s moneyed and respectable females visited Broad Street when in town; the wharf was considered disreputable, having little to offer unless you were looking for a grog shop. It was obvious which was which. They divided at a small triangular travelers’ shrine where those entering or leaving town could leave an offering, in either hope or gratitude. The road to Broad Street was the better of the two; heavy loads had rutted the road up from the wharf.
She’d seen enough ships in her young life, growing up in the Freesand, but very little of towns with more than a shop or two and a few necessary artisans, so she tried Broad Street. Other streets and alleys branching off it led up the slope to the old city walls, some small and crowded, others wide and inviting.
The town smelled like horses, to her nose long used to the dragon-air in the Beehive. Horses and cooking smells and summer sunshine on wet soil full of growing things.
There weren’t many people about on Broad Street, but then it wasn’t a market day in town so the street was practically deserted along its long, gently bending length. She heard the faint sound of children shouting and playing from the streets and alleys of the one she walked upon. Broad Street ended in the south at what looked to be a temple or meeting rotunda.* She expected to see more boatmen, but maybe there was some unspoken social order that kept them to the wharf. She did mark a pair of Serpentine Dragoneers, out of uniform save for their bright sashes, riding leggings, and black boots, idling at a table sitting at the edge of what looked to be a beer garden where they could watch what little was going on in the street. They were shaded by trellises grown sum
mer-thick with flowering creeper. The dragoneers nibbled on something crusty and dripping with cheese, each with a potbellied mug of what she guessed to be the local ale. One was dark and youthful; the other had white hair and a deep tan that made it difficult to guess his age, but certainly older than the other.
The younger she knew by face but not name, though she knew his dragon; the other she’d never seen before. Of course, dragoneers were constantly posted in different parts of the Vales, and about half the dragons could be expected to be out at any one time. Made them easier to feed. If all thirty were crammed into the Beehive overlong they’d soon run out of fish and mutton. And tempers would erupt with the crowded-together males, no matter how hard the dancers worked.
She shifted over to the boardwalk on their side of the street to pass close. It wouldn’t do for an apprentice to ignore a pair of dragoneers. But she didn’t want to press herself on them either; Ileth was unsure of how their connection was handled outside the walls of the Serpentine.
The dark-haired dragoneer she just knew by face had been listening to the other talk. Ileth couldn’t make out his words as she approached, as he had a low voice and his back was to her.
Next to the beer garden there was a rag room. She peered hopefully through the poor glass of the windows, hoping that she’d see a length of white fabric somewhere that she could trade her sheath for. It was good material with little wear and no holes. She could replace a sheath easily enough; there were always a few spare stained castoffs lying around the Dancers’ Quarter. Someone inside was going through children’s smocks, but whether it was the proprietor or a customer she couldn’t tell.
She overheard the one she knew by face. “Still, it doesn’t sound like any great difficulty, though the Troth preserve us if they ever get meteors. Routes west are secure.”
“Trade routes out to the Azures and the Indigos don’t matter a fig if we’ve no markets. Tea already won’t pay for carriage. That’s all gone, at least in a profitable sense, thanks to the Galantine Impounds. No Scab, no river. No river, no route to the Blue. No Blue, no Inland Ocean.”
Ileth, who liked studying maps, sidestepped closer to the men and mentally traced the route south and east he described. Though she’d never seen it, she knew that the Scab was a great red-walled fortress that sat on the river the Skylake fed at the south end of another big lake, with the navigable river that led up to the Antonine Falls at one end and the Scab at the other. She’d often heard it described as a “cork in the bottle” of the Tonne River. Vyenn rested at the northernmost easily navigable point, being a great artery to both the Blue Ocean to the south and the Inland Ocean far to the east. The Scab had been a point of contention in the long peace negotiations that ended the Galantine War, where the Vales lost both control of the fortress and access to the Blue Ocean. Now a Galantine Baron sat in the Scab and charged a fat premium on any trade along the river and impounded any cargo that couldn’t pay his ransom.
“So you see it doesn’t matter how easily things flow into the pipe if the exit is corked,” the elder finished.
The younger jerked his chin at Ileth, and the two looked up at her. The white-haired man was very tan and fit, with shoulders like a blacksmith. Ileth thought his eyes shrewd. He looked more like a thick-skinned mountain shepherd than a dragoneer.
“Ha, girl! Felt like an escape from dragon-air, I mark,” the younger said, noticing her. “Join us, cousin.”
He took out his handkerchief and wiped a chair for her.
She couldn’t help but smile at him. He was one of those sunny young men who went into the Serpentine as sort of a youthful lark. He possessed the trimmed, watered, and raked good looks she’d seen among young Galantine nobles. “You picked a fine day for an excursion. You should wear your sash in town, though, you’ll get a more respectful tone from the locals.”
“G-good m-morning, sirs,” she managed. She was too far away to bob, so she paced forward and performed one.
The men rose to their feet. The white-haired one’s face stayed hard, like he’d just had bad news. She didn’t trust men who stayed intense, despite a beer and leisurely breakfast. The younger spoke: “You’re the stuttering one: Fish-something?”
Ileth kept up the smile. “They . . . they used to call me Fish-Fishbreath when I—when I w-worked in the Catch Basin. Ileth, of the . . . of the Freesand.”
“We’ve not formally met,” the dragoneer who spoke to her said. He was very young, he must have risen fast. “I’m Velleker, Taresscon’s dragoneer, though she flies but little these days, so I feel something of a dragoneer-at-large. This is Garamoff. He flies Nephalia. She’s Taresscon’s niece, and Garamoff had me as his wingman before I moved up in the late war.”
Ileth knew Taresscon. She was one of the senior dragons of the Serpentine, analogous to Charge Deklamp. The two consulted frequently.
“Cousin, actually. Taresscon’s cousin,” Garamoff corrected. He had a clipped manner of speaking, like his words were having the door slammed shut behind as they left. He wore a green sash with silver lines set in it.
“Join us, Freesander?” Velleker asked. “Now that he’s relieved himself of the burden of his stock market losses, Garamoff can tell you stories of the Channel Isles and the Indigos. He’s blue-watered his dragon, which is more than most of us can say.” Ileth wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but she knew from her upbringing among sea folk that blue water meant ocean out of sight of land. Garamoff didn’t look pleased at the idea.
“I’m on . . . on an err-errand, you might s-say.”
“Don’t let the Gar’s manner put you off,” Velleker said. “He’s always this way, even in the summer shade with good beer.”
“Do join us,” Garamoff said. He didn’t exactly smile, but he pulled out the chair Velleker had wiped for her. “I’ve been away too long. Don’t know any of the new drafts. I should remedy that.”
As a freshly enrolled apprentice, she’d have to be mad to publicly refuse an invitation from a pair of dragoneers, one of whom was evidently senior enough to be away in some sort of far-off command. Someday one might be looking for a new wingman.
“Thank you, sirs,” she said. “Pl-please don’t think me rude if I—if I don’t stay long.”
She sat.
At the creak of the somewhat weather-warped chair, an attendant left off chalking a price change next to the open serving window. She made little effort to smile or move briskly. They were the only customers outside, after all. Ileth couldn’t tell through the smoked glass of the establishment who might be within.
“Anything for you, miss?” she asked.
“No. No, thank you,” Ileth said.
The server gave a nod whose brevity indicated what she thought of someone who’d sit in a beer garden without ordering anything and returned to her chalkboard.
“Ileth,” Garamoff said, not addressing her, but speaking the name as though it jogged something. “You helped recover Vithleen’s eggs. They promoted you to apprentice after that. Dun Huss mentioned you.”
“One of the Serpentine’s best, Fates keep him,” Velleker said, toasting them both and taking a generous swallow of his beer. Garamoff joined the toast so mechanically Ileth wondered if he even took a sip. Velleker clanged his pot on the table and pointed to it. “Terrible on his wingmen, though. They all sicken, die, or quit. He expects too much. We’re all just flesh and blood. Flesh and blood that gets used up fast as it is, when the bolts start flying.”
Velleker didn’t look at all used up; he looked as though he’d enjoyed a good breakfast and Vyenn’s best ale.
When the beer was refilled and a tally scratched on the table with the chalk, Garamoff spoke again. “What happened to the apprentice fellow that helped with the theft? Hanged, or did the dragons burn him?”
“The jury of inquiry decided the dragon gave orders to him. They were never able to establish a direct connecti
on between the boy and the Galantines, and of course the dragon’s not around to testify what was ordered or promised. As, in the end, the eggs were saved and Vithleen returned to full health, they packed him off on a labor sentence.”
Ileth had been friends with the boy, a lad named Yael Duskirk. They’d both worked in the Beehive and came from ordinary folk. She’d pleaded to the jury for mercy for him.
“So it’s an egg year after all. You wouldn’t know it,” Garamoff said, looking up and down the empty street. A year where that rarest of events occurred—a clutch of dragon eggs were produced—was supposed to be an unusually prosperous one, good-omened.
Velleker nodded. “Good news for you, Ileth. They say it’s lucky to novice on an egg year.”
“I need it. I was the tailer.”
Garamoff kept glancing at the line of pinch-pins going up her now-divided eyebrow. Velleker shrugged. “Let me stand you a beer. Tailer or no, you deserve a drink to celebrate your apprenticeship.”
“I should be about my duties.”
The dragoneers exchanged looks. Velleker shrugged and opened his mouth to say something, but Garamoff shook his head. “Then we mustn’t keep you, errr, Ileth. Galantine name, isn’t that?”
“That’s what I’m told, sir. I grew up in a lodge.”
She bobbed and left them to their beer and discussion. She popped into the rag room and learned that there was nothing white about, though a gray jacket with dark blue piping tempted her. She could do a lot with such a jacket. “White goes out as soon as it comes in, flower,” the woman told her. “Try the Kingfisher’s.”
Ileth had heard of the Kingfisher’s and thanked the woman and moved down the street.
A painted belted kingfisher marked the store. Ileth was a little in awe of the glass; the panels were almost as tall as she was, long thin ones that formed a sort of blister-gallery sticking out the front of the store. They had gold leaf painted in the corners. A fine gown stood on a sewing model. The material was so thin she wondered if it was silk. She fingered the thick channeled cording of her overdress.
