Daughter of the Serpentine

by E. E. Knight

  “Oh, may the finest of fates find you and grant your wishes, miss. You can’t know what this means. Blessings! Blessings on you!”

  Ileth’s plans for a bright new sash vanished as quickly as the coin. “I hope your—I hope your mother recovers.”

  Oddly, she felt lighter. The coin had felt like charity; maybe the old fellow had spotted her tied-together laces and decided to do her a good turn. Childhood teachings also pulled at her. She never had sacrificed to make up for her lies at the Lodge before she left or her thefts of food on the trip south. Giving all she had in charity even when she was in need would cleanse her, if Directist teachings of her childhood had it right.

  The silent wife hugged her—she needed a bath—and they departed, taking with them the promise of her new sash and the ghosts of her past sins against both the man who’d raised her and countrymen she’d robbed.

  Well, money that came easily also left easily, the Captain always told her. And she still had the pleasure she gave that old fellow with the neckerchief. Silver couldn’t purchase that gentle smile, his heartfelt words, or the brightness in his eyes thanks to the stimulating dance. That was another thing the priests harped on: your deeds counted to your credit more than coin. She thought about childhood stories of beggars’ blessings. She’d done two good turns that day; maybe she could find a third person to help.

  “You didn’t give them money, did you?” a sharp voice asked.

  A gentleman, or someone with the time to perfect his attire like a gentleman, glared at her from a bootmaker’s that occupied a little slot of building between the Kingfisher’s and a wine and oil merchant. The bootmaker had a measuring tape wrapped about his wrist so it dangled just a little; perhaps he was the proprietor. He had small eyes, and they surveyed her from hair to old boots.

  “They aren’t even from the Vales. Both wearing Galantine boots. I know Galantine bootmakers, always that extra decorative stitching at the back.”

  Ileth shrugged. People from all over the map washed up in the Vales, looking for a new name and a fresh start.

  The man’s eyes flashed angrily at that, but then he must earn significant custom from the young female Names in the Serpentine. He smiled. “You have to be more careful in Vyenn, miss. Even by day it’s good to have a companion and keep to respectable shops and streets. A girl your age shouldn’t be out alone, even on Broad.”

  “My duty in this case asks that I brave the risks of Broad Street.” The street was as free of risks as it was of shoppers, as far as she could tell.

  He put palm to breast, gave a curt bow, and returned to his leathers. She enjoyed getting away with a little insolence.

  So much for shopping for a sash.

  Still, she was no closer to finding anything wrong in Vyenn, other than that the boys who worked the fishing boats, barges, and coasters were at war with the town boys over a treaty about border lines. Would negotiating a peace treaty between the Town-Cats and the Boat-Rats satisfy Master Traskeer? She thought not. As she had the time, she turned down one of the short, narrow streets connecting Broad with Wharf. If a girl her age shouldn’t be about Broad, who knew what peril lay on the waterfront. Perhaps she could find some actual boat rats.

  She disturbed prowling cats in a badly drained alley between two warehouses, followed a splash of sun, and then she was on Wharf Way. Five paces farther east and she’d be off the edge of the wharf and into the Skylake.

  There were no rats out that afternoon, and only a few people, as it turned out.

  Scattered signs of commerce showed in the form of boxes, barrels, carts, and winch-fitted yards to handle them, but there wasn’t any activity worth observing. The fishing boats were putting in, having unloaded their catch at the Serpentine. She saw why the boatmen’s boys had time to battle it out with town children. The usual lake and river boats and barges stood tied up. Ileth, thanks to her time in the Freesand, knew idle, unloaded ships and boats when she saw them. Some captains or owners were taking time to scrape, repair, re-rig, and paint; others just sat at their moorings with that despairing look of an empty vessel.

  There was a red flag flying from the mast of one coaster. Up on the Freesand Coast, that meant the boat was for sale, and she suspected the same was true on the Skylake.

  She surveyed the establishments near Wharf Way and its extension out onto the lake atop thick pilings. There were even what looked like houses built on one cheerfully painted pier, some with rooftop gardens or rigging for drying laundry. There were children about, mostly poking around the water from the edge of the wooden docks. Ileth indulged in a brief fantasy of having one of those narrow, upright homes, right out over the lake, a boat in its own little shelter beneath and a sunny space on top with flower boxes and a superb view of Vyenn and the Serpentine.

  Perhaps, if vouchsafed a career with the dragoneers, she’d take her pension in one.

  The rest of the establishments were traders, small and large, warehousing, shipping names, a ship chandler, a courier and guide service for travel about the Skylake or down beyond the falls. There were a few taverns, a cheap eating house with long tables, and a little tea and tobacco shop with smiling husband-and-wife proprietors, she guessed, amusing themselves inside with a game of cards. None looked as though they were thriving. Ileth didn’t see a single customer anywhere save the taverns, where men had pulled chairs outside to nurse their ale in the summer air.

  Ileth knew her way around boats and struck up conversation with those at work, asked a few questions, and did her best to make herself agreeable. Despite her hopes, nobody offered to sell her smuggled Galantine cottons or wines from the Hypatian coast.

  There was discontent born of idleness among the boat-folk. River trade had dropped thanks to the Galantine control of the southern stretches of the river and the Scab. Boats and barges that would normally be bringing cargo back and forth from the Blue Ocean in the south were idle, or fewer trips were being made thanks to Galantine duties. Everywhere men were being put off, or paid only with promises, and it made for hardship.

  Most blamed the Galantines.

  “They’ll impound your ship and cargo at any bad excuse,” a mate on a coaster told her. He was supervising a work gang fixing a coaster’s bottom; they had it up out of the water like a beached whale. “Captain Vatkin had his whole ship taken because they found a Directist prayerbook on board, said he was smuggling in materials of a banned faith. The sailor who owned the book’s sitting in the gaol. Sounds like they’re chopping his head off or not, depending on if Vatkin pays a ransom.”

  “That’s—that’s piracy!” Ileth agreed, even if she couldn’t come up with the proper name for the outrage.

  Ileth had heard many such stories in the Freesand that brought the word to mind. The Rari pirates on the narrow channel where Pine Bay let out onto the Inland Ocean gobbled up entire ships and held the crew hostage for ransom. Shipping traffic out of the Freesand withered and died, save for a few fast, well-armed (and expensive) vessels that challenged the pirates and their cursed fast and handy two-masters.

  “More ships will flag themselves Galantine and spare the trouble, you know,” another old sailor said. His captain, it seemed, had sold his boat entire to the Galantines and he was looking for work. Today he had to settle for watching this mate’s crew work the coaster’s bottom. “I’m strong for the Republic, always have been. I’ll starve before I bow every time some Galantine Baron rides by. But gods, those fools in the Assembly make it tough for a man.”

  The mate took off his flat sailor’s cap and wiped his brow. The sun was hot now. “You dragoneers ought to put a good force together, get that whole lot of dragons together, and take back the Scab, that’s what I’m thinking. Last time you fought ’em all wrong, little two- and three-dragon attacks. I saw ’em flying off. It’s like slapping when the other guy’s throwing punches and kicks. No wonder we lost.”

  Ileth had neither
reason nor experience to argue with him. She let him get back to his repair work.

  She couldn’t find much at fault around the wharf, other than the general idleness from the decline in river trade—

  Ileth stopped in her tracks, realizing her own blindness. The “problem” in Vyenn was all around. She’d practically waded through example after example. Cargos that should be headed downriver to the Blue Ocean and from there to the Inland Ocean weren’t flowing. Entire livelihoods were being lost. She would have danced at the epiphany, if not for the knowledge that the hard times endemic to the Freesand were about to spread here: poverty, foreclosure, people scraping out the barest of livings or selling everything at a loss to relocate and start over.

  She turned toward the Serpentine, deep in thought. She left town hardly knowing she’d done so.

  The husband and wife she’d given her silver guildmark to were at the little travelers’ shrine on the edge of town. They broke her out of her reverie. She gave them their space to go through their devotions, though they both turned to her and made obeisance again. They lit and left a candle and moved off on the road to the Serpentine after thanking her again.

  Ileth bobbed an obeisance. “N-no, thank you. Sincerely. I mean it.”

  The couple were puzzled by that but left the mad Serpentine girl alone at the shrine.

  Ileth, having considered it at length, knew exactly what she owed them. If she hadn’t given over her coin, she would have spent the afternoon bickering about the cost of white cloth in the Kingfisher’s and possibly being talked into having them sew her sash, as they no doubt could do a better job. She might never have made it to Wharf Way and filed away the hundreds of little impressions of dying river trade that led her to a decision about her commission. She might have gone back to the Serpentine with nothing more to show for her time than a report on some attention being needed at the slow-flowing decorative fountain before the Commonist temple.

  Such a stroke of fate should be recognized.

  * * *

  —

  After collecting her thoughts and reviewing the rituals she’d practiced as a child what felt like two Ileths ago, she did her own obeisance at the shrine. The candle was still burning, and as the Captain used to say, any light would do, even one at a Commonist shrine. Using the Directist phrasing she’d been taught as a child—the one thing her mother had given her beyond a name of an old Galantine queen was the request that she be taught Directist prayers, where you interacted with the gods without benefit of priests and sacred spaces—she asked that her crimes and offenses be forgotten, and that she be allowed to grow into a dragoneer at the Serpentine. She asked that she be given strength and wisdom to do her duty, care for a dragon and wear its colors, be known for brave deeds, one day have a name and reputation that was a credit to those who went ahead of her, and be an example to those who came behind.

  She dreamed of doing something that would be written about in a book someday, be talked about after she was dead, even if her part in it was forgotten with her name. Should she one day have wealth, she’d use it to help people like the beggar couple. No, she was at a shrine with a candle burning, she had to be fully honest. She also wanted wealth so she could walk into any shop in the land and have the proprietor drop everything to attend her. She wasn’t proud of those thoughts, but they had to be acknowledged because unless she admitted the bad parts of herself to herself, identified, numbered, ranked, and examined them, they could sneak around the edges of her motives and lead her astray. She asked for her stutter to be lifted, and if she was paying for some misdeed of her mother’s with it, that soon her mother’s fault would be forgiven through her daughter’s good works.

  Oh, silly girlish wishes, they were, but at sixteen she was still part girl, wasn’t she? She was like a snake shedding its skin; the younger part remained inside while the older husk was shrugged off and replaced with something bigger and newer.

  * * *

  —

  Feeling bright and cleansed—perhaps giving away the silver coin had carried off old guilt with it—she used her password and stepped back through the gate, exchanging courtesies with the new officer of the watch, a youth a few years older than Sifler bearing the green sash of an apprentice who’d completed all his rotations.

  Inside the Serpentine, the late-afternoon heat hit its peak. Usually this sort of day ended with a quick, refreshing rain shower, but the unusually still air must have changed the pattern. A team of young men and boys were working; an ad hoc draft of apprentices and novices sweated shirtless outside the stables. She’d heard that part of it was to be converted and expanded into a dairy, and there was a dusty piling of gravel and excavated dirt.

  Curious, she circumnavigated the works. They still looked to be working on the foundation. The horses were out in the Serpentine’s small paddock. Ileth walked over to one to make friends, but it didn’t like the smell of her and it trotted off.

  From the unaccustomed angle behind the stables she had a good view of the long, low, rectangular building that was the Dragoneers’ Hall with its bright metal roof. It was one of the older pieces of the Serpentine, with a colonnade walk out front and gardens behind. The garden was built around a sheltered stone gazebo with an exotic sort of overly bulbous dome, unoccupied as far as she could see except for a pair of green boots propped up on the decorative wall of the thing. She walked into the garden—there wasn’t a wall to keep anyone out, just a row of bushes—because she suspected she knew the owner of the green boots.

  Before she reached the gazebo, and with a view of the garden entire leading down to the wall, she spotted the dragoneer she perhaps knew best in all the Serpentine, Hael Dun Huss, hanging laundry of all things. His face was shining with sweat. He was mostly out of uniform, but he’d kept his loose work shirt, not that different from the one she wore under her overdress.

  As far as she knew, there was no prohibition against apprentices being on the grounds of the Dragoneers’ Hall. It seemed so odd that so important a man would do his own washing that she felt compelled to aid him. He was the sort of man who was very easy to talk to, and even if you didn’t throw your troubles at his feet and spoke of nothing but the weather, you usually felt better after.

  “C-can I help, sir?” she asked her sun-pinked living shrine.

  “Oh, hullo, Ileth,” Dun Huss said, examining a seam with a frown. “No need. Just about done as is.”

  “You do . . . you do your own l-laundering?”

  “I’ve done my own laundry since coming here. Keeps certain reprobates from stealing my best shirts. Leave the bedding to the novices, though.”

  She heard a snort from the gazebo. “A blind man wouldn’t steal one of those shirts. Your tailor should go back to his true calling of sewing flour sacks.”

  She would recognize Dath Amrits’s accent and quick style of speaking anywhere. He was usually hanging about Dun Huss; when you saw one of them about the Serpentine, the other usually wasn’t far away. Amrits sat up, rubbed his unshaven chin on his sallow face, and blinked the sleep out of his fishlike eyes. His teeth were wine-stained.

  “Oh, this heat. Ileth, come over here and let me look at you. I’ve had enough of the stink of summer heat on men, I need a clean girl like you about.”

  “I warned you against roast pork and all those fried potatoes,” Dun Huss said, examining a shirt with a missing button. He moved it to the end of the laundry line. “Change your diet with the seasons, man.”

  Dath Amrits vented gas with the indifference to company of a dragon. “Nonsense. Am I a cow to stuff greens in my face all day? Do me charity and bring me some cool water, would you, Ileth?”

  Amrits had been pillowing his head on his rolled-up tunic, resting on one of the stone benches ringing the interior of the gazebo. It would be a nice spot for musicians, and there was an open paved area where people could dance. Or hang their laundry to dry. Ileth followe
d the walkway to a cistern, but it was empty thanks to a poorly patched crack, and there was no cup.

  “You’ll have to go to the Visitors’ House pump, sorry to trouble you,” Amrits called.

  “Let him get his own water if he wants it, Ileth,” Dun Huss said. “It’ll do him good to move. He’s been lying in the shade since breakfast.”

  “Your cis-cistern is cracked,” Ileth said.

  “I know,” Dun Huss said. “There are dozens of repairs that need doing, but the Republic’s in arrears. Again. We can’t even get the roof fixed. We’re shaving expenses down and being more self-reliant about supply.” He twitched his chin toward the future dairy barn.

  “Ileth,” Amrits groaned from the bench, his arm across his face to shut out the light. “Do be quick! I’m perishing here.”

  Dun Huss sighed over a stain that didn’t come out in his underclothes. “Set an example for our new apprentice and perish quietly, then, with the quiet acceptance of fate that marks a true dragoneer. Why aren’t you wearing your sash, Ileth, was there a problem in your promotion?”

  A gaunt dragoneer in a patched-up set of scarecrow clothes with a quill stuck in his teeth strode out the back entrance of the Dragoneers’ Hall carrying a washbasin. His bare feet made no noise as he approached the gazebo; he had a great deal of stealth for such a big man. Dath Amrits had no idea what was coming until the basin was poured on his head.

  “Shaving water!” Amrits sputtered at the man Ileth had only ever heard called “the Borderlander.”

  “The piss-pot was empty,” the Borderlander said through the quill clenched in his teeth.

  Ileth knew these three to be old friends. They often flew out together on commissions; when one was absent on his dragon, the other two tended to be as well. They’d always been kind to her. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but thinking about it in her rope bed at night, she often thought that Dun Huss did it because his personal code required him to be kind to everyone; the Borderlander saw her as a fellow northerner, a moneyless, nameless odd-one-out much like himself; and as for Dath Amrits, well, he was easily bored and she always seemed to be getting into difficulty in ways that amused him.