Daughter of the Serpentine

by E. E. Knight

  Behind her, she heard wings rustle and griff rattle. If the silver jumped, she’d never see her death coming.

  Taresscon said something in Drakine that she didn’t understand; the dragons had to pitch their voices a certain way for humans to even make out the proper sounds.

  “Falberrwrath, old hero,” Ileth repeated. She didn’t stutter when she spoke Drakine.

  The red looked down at her. His nostrils widened, tested the air about her, then opened as he took her odor, suspiciously, like a cook checking a doubtful egg.

  All the while Taresscon kept speaking, the modulations in her voice steady and even, like a chant, if dragons did such a thing as chant.

  She heard the dragon snuffle behind her as well. Could one sun-baked girl calm him as well? She tried a careful dancer’s turn to throw off more body odor, and saw the silver nudge Vii, who seemed stunned or paralyzed with fear, out of the way. Ottavia ran quick and light to retrieve her. “Falberrwrath, you never finished telling me about the Battle in the S-Snows.”

  Falberrwrath closed his lips over his teeth and glanced down at her. “What’s that?” he asked in Montangyan.*

  Both the males settled their wings. Their griff retracted.

  Ottavia had Vii to safety in a flash.

  Falberrwrath breathed deeply, listening to Taresscon. He said two more words in Drakine that Ileth recognized: I will. Then he retreated toward the dragon chambers below the Rotunda.

  The dancers retreated to a trickle of water so Vii could be cleaned up. “That was a stupid thing to do, Ileth,” Santeel Dun Troot said. She looked paler than usual. “You would have been mashed if they’d lunged at each other again.”

  “My hair caught on Fal’s scale when he charged,” Vii said, as Ottavia and the others looked at her injuries. “I can’t stop shaking.”

  Ottavia, voice dull with shock, described what had transpired. It was a typical dragon formal meeting to hear news from the just-returned dragons from the west. There was an argument, and as the dragons weren’t conversing in a manner that allowed humans to hear the words (Ottavia’s Drakine was quite good; her musical ear made her good with languages), all she knew was that Taresscon called for an intermission to let tempers settle. The dancers came out to perform. Nothing out of the ordinary, especially when male dragons were crowded together and arguing. Suddenly Falberrwrath exploded, charging forward at the silver. The dancers and musicians fled, and Ottavia didn’t even know Vii had fallen until she’d reached the passage, and then it was too late; the fight had started and Vii was caught up in it.

  Taresscon spoke to the dragons and they ended their session in the Rotunda. They avoided the place where Vii’s blood had dribbled, some making small groaning noises over the spot, others stepping around it the way you might avoid a spill on a floor. Dragons, for such famously savage hunters, could be funny about blood, their own or that of friends.

  Taresscon called Ileth and Ottavia aside. The dragon settled herself down so that she could speak to the humans at their level. Her skin was a little loose in the manner of old dragons and Ileth dully watched the bones beneath the sagging skin move in sad fascination.

  “I am sorry for that,” the great old dragon-dame said in Montangyan. “That poor girl could have been killed. You know Falberrwrath. Docile. He’s not so old that his mind—well, I will keep him away from other males. Ever since the business with the eggs he has been on edge. Falberrwrath is sensible now and will apologize to you all for shedding blood, perhaps on the morrow.”

  Ileth wondered what the fight had been about, but if anyone should ask, it should be Ottavia. Ottavia looked tired. Wearily, she asked Preen to take the dancers down to the Quarter and make them strong tea.

  The green dragon turned her slack-skinned face to Ileth. She had odd scales; there were a few white spots and blotches against the faded green. Ileth wondered if it was aging or just a coloration oddity like Mnasmanus’s purple scales or the stripes on the Lodger.

  “Ileth, you are Ileth, yes? Our gentle old Trother’s friend? I remember you from his funeral. That was a brave gesture, just now.”

  “Was the silver hurt?”

  Taresscon glanced back at the silver, who was being examined by the green dragon. “I do not believe so. He’s young and interested in Nephalia, the dragonelle you see checking him for broken scale. He rarely gets to see her as they’re posted out, she to the west and he to the south. When Nephalia became heated with Falberrwrath, he interposed, and before I could even blink griff were being rattled and the fight was on.

  “I must now try to reconcile them. I hope one day to see you dance myself, I so rarely get a chance to enjoy your art. Perhaps in the winter we could visit, when the flying is bad and there’s less to do.”

  Ileth promised she would. It never hurt to be agreeable to the dragons in the Serpentine. They were as much citizens of the Republic as their humans. Ileth remembered the Lodger going on about the uniqueness of that. He’d been a part of establishing that tradition, or law. Status. Whatever it was.

  Back in the Dancers’ Quarter, with Vii’s torn scalp tended by a physiker and hot tea in their cups, Ottavia asked after Ileth’s wound and if she felt well enough to return to her dancing. She left off her usual laments about being short of dancers but mentioned that she expected a batch of novices to join them soon. She’d heard that these girls had applied to the Serpentine Academy with the purpose of becoming dragon-dancers, having seen performances or paintings. She asked Ileth to help them with the first drills as they passed a silver bowl of nuts back and forth.

  This was a bad time to have this conversation, but Ileth knew that the longer she put it off, the worse she would feel. “I had hoped, Charge . . . I had hoped t-to be able to do . . . to do more apprentice work.”

  Ottavia’s lips disappeared for a moment as she set her mouth. “You are an apprentice, Ileth. An apprentice dancer. It’s your specialty.”

  “I joined the Serpentine to become a dragoneer, sira.”

  “So did I, but I found my own calling,” Ottavia said. “This is much better for you. As an ordinary apprentice, if your six years go by and you’re not a wingman, well, out you go. You’ve told me you have no family to go back to, no expectations of marriage. Your apprenticeship ends with the dancers; you’re hired on as a specialist to the Serpentine company, which means a quarterly income and pension. You may dance as long as you’re healthy enough; the dragons don’t care a fig if your hair goes gray or your teeth yellow. Shatha’s going on twenty years with the troupe. She’ll have money to travel, purchase a property, do whatever she likes when she retires.”

  “S-S-Santeel Dun Tr-Troot is dancing and apprenticing both.”

  Ottavia reached for her bowl of nuts, offered Ileth a handful, then chewed a few in thought. “She has a famous Name and is expected to rise. She’ll succeed her way upward, or fail her way upward, or marry her way upward. She’ll leave the Serpentine and go back to the security of that Name or take on a better one. People like you and I don’t have the luxury of wasting our youth indulging our fancies.”

  Ileth bristled at the word fancies but guarded her tongue. Her Charge had never been anything but fair, even generous, in her acts. A quarrel about a word would not be worth jeopardizing that.

  Ileth felt tears on the way. She’d only just made apprentice, and everyone was telling her she’d stop there? “I’ve wanted nothing but that since . . . since I was little.” She blinked the tears back.

  “Ileth, I’m sorry. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. The troupe had a bad scare today. We’ll talk later.”

  “Tomorrow sh-shall I—”

  “Let’s see how things look in the morning. I appreciate what you did with Falberrwrath. I know Vii does. Go to bed proud of yourself.”

  Ileth passed through to the sort of alley with their bed partitions where the dancers, other than Ottavia, of course, slep
t in a long row. Preen and two others were still up, having tea.

  She accepted a cup and sat on one of the rugs that added some warmth and color to the Quarter. Shatha told the story of a dancer from her apprentice age who’d lost a leg in an altercation very like the one they’d just witnessed when she was knocked over and stepped on by a charging dragon, and another girl named Aylee who’d vanished—she’d been up late entertaining a dragon, the last thing the dragon remembered was nodding off into sleep as she danced, and no one ever saw her again. Some said suicide, some said murder, but she was still marked on the rolls as missing.

  Shatha suggested that everyone get some sleep, and Preen picked up the tea things. Ileth looked in on the sleeping Vii, took a glass from beside her bed, and sniffed the contents—Ottavia’s brandy. She helped Preen wash up the cups and infuser, neither of them saying a word, and she turned in.

  Her body felt heavy in the rope bed.

  The long day, begun in hope and ended in disappointment, weighed on her. What had started as a bit of necessary formality, signing herself in to the Serpentine, had turned into a labyrinth of difficulties. Except it was a labyrinth where she had to negotiate it by somehow taking both the right turn and the left turn or she’d fail. And no matter which passage she chose, there was failure. She knew what was coming, like the first faint tendrils of pain that promised a thundering headache. Her mind would pick through every horror she’d witnessed and carried about ever since, like the terrified eyes of the boy she’d lost in the rescue from the mining plateau in the Baronies when her grip failed, or the dead escaped slave she’d seen as a child, white and bloated after being pulled off the Dragonback.

  Her life had turned into one of those stories where every time the hero strikes down one enemy, the body breaks and forms into two new ones.

  She felt like crying.

  Ileth didn’t fight crying. She’d been told as a child to have her cry and then “get on.” Getting on might be returning to the streets in the Freesand where the boys mocked her stutter as she tried to sell little bits of sewing the girls in the Lodge had created (aromatic herb sachets with bits of prayerbook wisdom embroidered in were popular with fishermen’s wives). Getting on might be apologizing to the Captain for whatever you’d done that had irritated him into cuffing you in the ear. Getting on might be going back to the laundry pot after you accidentally scalded yourself taking a boiled shirtdress out. But if the crying was relief, it didn’t much help with the getting on. It just made her too tired. She’d found it more effective to fight the impulse to cry and use the emotional energy to get on, with maybe a little striking back thrown in. Like the time she put a generous dose of mineral oil in the Captain’s bread dip.

  On the other hand, it was bedtime. She was tired. A good cry would help her go to sleep all the quicker. But such was the state of her overwrought emotions that the moment she gave in to the impulse, the tears wouldn’t come. Instead she rolled over, again and again, in the bed she’d once considered the most comfortable she’d ever enjoyed.

  If this was the life of an apprentice of the Serpentine, she wondered what she’d look like after six years of it. Gray-haired and gaunt, she imagined, a crone by her twenty-second year. Her tongue probed her teeth, checking for soundness.

  She quit summoning sleep and got up. She decided to have a swim.

  The Captain, for all his nastiness and flashes of cruelty, was right about a few things. He used to tell a story about how when he feared for the future—he was surprisingly open about some matters, one of which was being scared pale before every long voyage—he’d swim about in the chilly waters of the bay until he felt better.

  He believed cold seawater built up the constitution and the blood and cured everything from skin blemishes to gout. Twice a week, winter and summer, his girls dutifully trooped down to a secluded sandbar and splashed themselves or swam, teeth chattering, while the Captain napped on the other side of a dune. Ileth, who’d been told she shared blood with the Captain, was expected to set an example and always swam, and while she never grew to exactly like it, she believed he was more right than wrong about its effects on health and mood.

  She passed down through the kitchens, where a lone, tired-looking apprentice cleaned and watched the embers in the bottom of the great grill where they cooked fish and joints for the dragons. The cooks were used to dancers showing up at odd hours in various states of dress and just nodded as she passed, grabbing a clean cloth from the rack above the sink. The dragons kept unpredictable schedules, staying awake for a day or two and then sleeping for up to a week, so the dancers who entertained them had to take meals when they could.

  She walked from the kitchens to the now-empty and nearly lightless Catch Basin, where only a bored sentry on night watch stood guard. She knew he’d be joined now and then by the Guard officer and his escort, who tromped about through the Beehive checking on the sentry posts. Ileth looked at the scrubbed, empty gutting tables where she had done her first labor as a novice without the least regret. She even recognized her balky old gutting knife with the broken handle she’d repaired, shining in its hanging-place on the wall. Life was much better in the dancers.

  Why shouldn’t she be happy with them? It was a more interesting job than anything she’d been thought capable of growing up in the Lodge. You worked with the dragons, heard their stories and philosophies and confessions, which was more than the apprentices who labored in the up end of the Serpentine could say.

  Refreshed by the thought that at least she wasn’t gutting fish as much as by the air of the lake, clean of dragon-smell, she trotted to the far end of the wharf beyond the cave’s mouth where it descended to the chain of rocks that led out to the old ruins of the lighthouse and guard tower that had once stood there. A wooden walkway still existed but wasn’t much in use; it was a chilly, windy spot and she’d been told all the stonework and platforms were treacherous.

  One of the dragons was out night fishing, gliding over the lake about a wing length above the water, eye cocked to the side, but the creature was too far away for Ileth to identify it. A quick dragon could get a few fish by just diving into the water with as large a splash as possible over them. The force of his impact would stun a fish, which could then be taken by mouth easily enough.

  She double-checked to be sure she was out of sight of the sentry before stripping off her shirt—she took the precaution of weighting it with a rock, as sudden gusts of wind could come rolling in off the Skylake—and slipped into the glacier-fed lake.

  The shock of the cold water woke her from toes to hair ends and she paddled vigorously, breathing deeply as she’d been taught to cope with cold water since childhood. It was a bit of a game to her, testing herself against the cold water, holding out as long as she could and then holding out a bit longer. She swam on her front, her back, her side, always keeping within the light thrown out by the Catch Basin.

  When she emerged, she felt deliciously alive, glowing and tight-skinned. She wiped herself off with the kitchen rag. The air chilled and dried her and it was good to get back into her clothing.

  She’d had an audience after all, as it turned out. The officer of the Beehive watch and the sentry lined the ramp up to the kitchens. She recognized the ensign; it was that wingman who’d been at the tailer ragging at the Long Bridge, Dun Klaff. Odd that he was just an ensign. Sifler, still only an apprentice and younger by a good few years, sported the same junior officer’s cockade in his hat. Dun Klaff held his hands behind his back, looking stern, and she suspected he was concealing a spyglass, not that it would have done them much good, dark as it was outside. Heem Beck was with him on guard duty, and a younger apprentice from Ileth’s draft.

  She’d heard that the overnight guard shifts were either a punishment or a way to prove your desire to do the difficult and uncomfortable in your service to the Serpentine and, by extension, the Republic. She wondered which form his service took.
/>   Ileth dripped her way up to them, wet hair wrapped in the cloth she’d snatched from the kitchen.

  “Lots of hot water in the kitchen,” Dun Klaff’s friend, that Heem Beck, asked. “Why freeze your jigs off out there?”

  “Good evening, Ileth,” Dun Klaff said. They’d often passed each other in the dark when she was first a dancer, before her trip to the Baronies. He’d just been a sentry of the watch then. “Hard night dancing?” His tone and smile suggested much more familiarity with her than he really had.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Ileth replied, too tired now to come up with anything witty. She did smile at Dun Klaff; the friendship of a wingman-at-large in the Guards might help her learn how to get into the Guards.

  The lonely watchman who had charge of the quiet Catch Basin overnight joined the conversation. “By the Dragon Horn, I heard you finally made apprentice. Congratulations, Ileth. What happened to your eye, you brush against a dragon?”

  She mumbled something about an accident, suddenly exhausted. Her body was finally tired enough to overcome her mind.

  “Rum luck, Ileth, a botch at every new moon,” the boy from her draft said, sounding as if he was quoting Serpentine gossip. She ignored him and moved off toward the kitchens and the Dancers’ Quarter.

  Ileth heard a clatter and looked over her shoulder to see the youngest Guard sentry’s hat on the floor, and the youth protecting the back of his head with his hand, looking at Dun Klaff in shock. Dun Klaff’s hat looked about to fall off too, and he was shaking his hand out as though it pained him.

  “Are you mad, Klaff?” the sentry asked. “We’re on duty.”

  “You’ve bent on her now?” Heem Beck asked. “You changed your tune about her right quick. Giving up on that Dun—”

  “Straighten up, the both of you. You’re in uniform, on duty, and I won’t have contempt for any of the Serpentine in my hearing. Next post, march.”

  4