Daughter of the Serpentine

by E. E. Knight

  “I am flattered, sir.” He seemed to be counting unhatched chickens. Behind him, Vor Rapp rolled his eyes and edged away.

  Vii made the rounds, saying her good-byes. She had rearranged her hairstyle to cover the small injury to her scalp.

  “I look forward to trying your swirl,” Vor Rapp said to Vii, as he and Heem Beck each took a handle of her trunk. “I’ve only had it once in Sammerdam. The way things are going for me here, I may ask you for a job washing dishes.”

  “You’re much improved since our swearing-in,” Vii said, squeezing his hand. “Just one girl’s opinion, but there it is.”

  “Can we get this over with, Rapp?” Heem Beck asked.

  Dun Klaff, who seemed to be annoying Santeel by paying attention to Ileth, bowed. “Duty calls. Consult me with any difficulties in your apprenticeship, Ileth. I’d be happy to help.”

  Ileth bobbed mechanically in return.

  Vii had a bundle over her shoulder. A scarf slipped out as Vii turned up the passage. Ileth picked it up and caught up to return it.

  She overheard Vii talking to Dun Klaff: “You don’t have to lay it on so thick with her. No money, and you’re not her type. She has a stutter, she’s not stupid.” Ileth decided to return the scarf later. Instead, she took a tight, quick passage up to the Long Bridge and trotted to the archives.

  Gowan told her Kess was sleeping. Something about his tone told her not to ask questions about why his Master was sleeping, so she asked him if there were such things as written records of battle plans, orders, things like that.

  “Yes, hundreds; every time formal orders are written they end up here, if someone thought to preserve them, which isn’t often enough,” the apprentice said. “I must say, you look better with the pins out of your head. You’re still pretty.”

  She smiled.

  “You wouldn’t have anything about . . . about f-fighting pirates in the North . . . in the North Bay? They told me it used to happen, before I was born.”

  It turned out the archive had its own smaller archive, in a series of catalogs. It was cleverly fashioned, a sort of book held together by bolts of steel like screws. You could open the screws and place a new sheet anywhere you liked. Gowan consulted one.

  “We index things by year, subject, and location. Names of dragons and their dragoneers come up a lot, but we don’t have that properly indexed, just a rough one for the most famous ones because every now and then we get a biographer in here or a descendant who wishes to know more about a famous ancestor. Ah, here are the pages for campaigns in the north. Not much.”

  He showed Ileth the page. It had a few old pre-Republic entries about a war against the Wurm, a great empire in the north, now decrepit and somnolent. There were only three entries after the founding of the Vale Republic. A name caught her eye.

  “Annis Heem Strath!” Ileth said.

  The apprentice looked at the notation. “Yes, looks like she was up there. About nine years ago.”

  “I m-met her and her—and her dragon as a girl of seven.” Met was not a big enough word for it. Annis Heem Strath was the dragoneer who had issued an invitation to her to join the Serpentine. How sincerely the invitation had been issued she wasn’t equipped to know and now would never know.

  “Would you like to see it? There’s a notation that the report is confidential, but that just means none outside the Serpentine may view it without permission from one of the Masters.”

  Ileth felt a small thrill, knowing she could see “confidential” documents. She nodded.

  Gowan found it quickly—he was apprenticed here for a reason—and she took it over to the well-lit, chairless reading table. Gowan was talking about the difficulties in maintaining and organizing documents, saying something about dust and mold. All Ileth had eyes for was the linen envelope and the document in Annis Heem Strath’s own hand. She had lovely regular writing, and Ileth felt a new urgency in improving her own hand.

  “Looks like a reconnaissance report,” Gowan said, paging through it. “Seems she was sent up to see how feasible it would be to destroy those pirates. There’s a rough plan and some estimates.”

  Ileth felt a chill run through her body. “Fates fates fates fates fates,” she whispered. She remembered Agrath had a damaged wing from whatever they were doing up there. She’d met them in the early morning, which probably meant they’d been flying all night. Ileth forced her brain through some of the math of flying speeds and what she knew about the size of the bay. Yes, it was possible.

  “What was that?”

  “N-nothing.”

  There were some aerial sketches of the coast of the bay and the straits leading out to the Inland Ocean, principal harbors, fortifications. She didn’t know the Rari had fortifications.

  Ileth read through it. She tripped over some military terminology and descriptions of defenses. She knew what a highpoon was, and a bombard, and she was pretty sure she’d heard Falberrwrath speak of the dangers of “wingchain.” There was also some talk of the sorts of ships the pirates used, designed to be quick, handy, and easily filled and emptied of the men for boarding their prizes. There wasn’t much talk of the prisoners taken, but Ileth knew from growing up in the Freesand the ransoms and losses of men if they were not paid. The men were made slaves and the ship either added to their own fleet, torn apart for salvage value, or sailed off to a port where buyers weren’t too officious about a ship’s history.

  Annis Heem Strath noted that the Rari had no dragons, but they were sometimes visited by dragons affiliated with the Wurm. Gargoyles were mentioned, something Ileth had thought were mostly stories to frighten children into being home before dark. The report finished with an incident where Agrath had his wing pierced by a projectile fired from a fortress guarding the Rari harbor while on night reconnaissance.

  “I’ve heard of gargoyles but thought they were just stories. They really exist?” she asked Gowan.

  “We have an illuminated book in the natural science section with quite a few drawings of them. Torturing humans and even a dragon, if you can believe that. They were bleeding the dragon into great jeweled cups. They’re tangled up with the history of the dragons somehow. I’m no expert, but I know our dragons despise them.”

  The Captain told stories about them, but she always assumed they were tall tales like the hundred-limbed sea monsters that pulled apart ships or that island full of nothing but women who would sometimes take sailors to keep their race alive. When enough were impregnated, they’d kill the sailors. The Captain had an odd sensibility when it came to the sorts of bedtime stories to tell nine-year-old girls.

  There was a suggested plan to destroy the Rari. According to Heem Strath, it would take between nine to eighteen dragons, with the attacks coming in waves, one to smash the fortress and scatter the aerial defenses, and following waves to destroy the pirate craft and finally their boatyards and docks. The aid of the Republic’s warships would be helpful, but the Republic’s fleet, such as it was, was harbored in Sammerdam and would have to be brought all the way around to the Inland Ocean, a difficult prospect that would require a diplomatic effort and heroics of navigation and supply. Heem Strath mentioned that the Governor was difficult where dragoneers were concerned, citing the expense.

  Tight old Governor Raal. What a shining example—losing a silver to save a few figs.

  “So this plan was just filed away. Never used?” Ileth asked.

  Gowan shrugged.

  Ileth kicked herself for asking such a stupid question. It obviously hadn’t. There’d certainly been no campaign against the Rari in Ileth’s lifetime; had there been you couldn’t have stepped out of the Lodge without tripping over celebrants. She covered by asking for a definition of “darklighting,” which Heem Strath mentioned as the most vital task of the first wave.

  “Have to look that up myself,” Gowan said, moving to the reference book wall.


  This document solved Ileth’s greatest problem in her commission, the suggestion of a solution. She could simply reference the Annis Heem Strath plan to suppress the pirates found in the archives and suggest a new reconnaissance to see if alterations needed to be taken. Perhaps the Rari had reinforced their steadings. But she doubted it. If anything, the pirates had grown more insolent in the intervening years; they sometimes brought their overrigged vessels into sight of the shore of the Freesand, sending the fishermen hurrying back into port. They seemed very sure of themselves.

  Gowan returned, saying he needed more time with the index to find out about darklighting.

  “May I ask you a, well, a strange question, Ileth?”

  Ileth thought it would be nice to go an hour entire with one of her fellow apprentices without odd requests. She looked up at him and nodded. He was at least a decade her senior. Having a friend in the archives had proved helpful already.

  “The cut on your eye—looks much better with the pins out, hope that didn’t hurt too much—I heard a curious story from that girl Quith saying someone is after you.”

  “Quith?”

  “Well, she told it to me in confidence, but I think she meant confidence as in other people. As you were the subject of the discourse, I don’t feel a need for secrecy. She has this idea that the Galantines want to eliminate you. She thinks there’s a Galantine agent among the apprentices and one of them was supposed to cut your throat and make it look like an accident.”

  “Quith said this?”

  “I know. Supposedly you uncovered something there and they have to eliminate you now.”

  Ileth laughed at that. “The-the only thing I learned in Galantine lands was cooking farina and nannying and how to attach a beer barrel to a dragon. Women there don’t do much other than—other than have babies and sew clothing for them.”

  Quith read too many novels. Had Ileth inadvertently learned some great secret, they could have murdered her easily enough at the Baron’s estate and made up a story about a pox. Though she wondered if the kindly, animal-fancying Baron would actually do it. It would have taken a direct order from the Galantine king himself, probably.

  “Quith and her . . . dramatics. I’ve been back and forth across the Long Bridge by myself in the dark any number of times this week. Now I’ll be looking at the shadows, making sure there’s no one lurking there to chuck me off.”

  “Oh, didn’t mean to frighten you.” Gowan gulped. “I was just . . . concerned for you. Forget it.”

  He started to make noises about needing to get back to his sorting and cataloging or Kess would be angry.

  “One more thing, Ileth. Don’t think I credit what Quith says, but what my Master said about a will is important. I don’t mean to give the game away, but it’s one of the little checks they have on apprentices here. It’s a sign that you take your role seriously, that you are organized about those who will come after you.”

  “Like a test?”

  “Well, it’s not a survival or a physical exam or a jury defense or anything like that, more something that gives the Masters a sense of you.”

  She blew on her fingers again, and Gowan smiled. “No money for law.”

  “You don’t need it. Just write down who you leave your property to, seal it, and mail it to yourself here at the Serpentine with IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH written big and bold on the envelope near your name somewhere. It’ll hold up as a will in any court you can name, our mails being under Republic law. There’s a whole stack of them at the post-cage. Give it to the Post Commissioner, he’s here twice a week or more.”

  Another silent, unannounced test of some unwritten rule. She wondered how many she’d passed, how many she’d failed, and what they counted for. Oh, to be a bird at the windowsill when the Masters met to discuss the apprentices!

  Still, the mail idea would not be difficult. She had tax-paid letters, envelope, and paper all in one, from Falth; it would be easy to re-address one to herself and add the legend. Sealing it was easy; stubs of wax could even be found in the Dancers’ Quarter, and her knuckles did for a family design. Ileth knew Vyenn’s mail commissioner, from writing letters updating Santeel Dun Troot’s family about her progress. Which was a thought: perhaps good old Falth, Santeel’s tutor or whatever he was, would allow her to draw enough coin from Santeel’s account to pay for a sash. So far the “friendship of the Dun Troots” hadn’t amounted to much; perhaps she could get a sash out of it.

  She resolved to write a letter that day. “Who should I leave my music box to?” Ileth asked, as it was her only valuable possession, unless you counted the dragon’s old books on mining and forestry and so on cataloged in the archives.

  “If you don’t have a relative, the Serpentine is the usual place. Your possessions will go to whoever needs it, income to the legacy account. The legacy account is vital. They use it to make up for shortfalls from the Republic. I know, I archive the counting-house records four times a year; they come like clockwork.”

  “I don’t have an income.”

  “Oh, of course, well, maybe someday. Generous pension, huh?” He smiled at her, a little unsurely. Something about the Serpentine made all the boys awkward. Maybe it was the smell of dragons. Or the punishments Sifler told her about.

  Gowan gathered up the report. “I need to put this back in the archive.”

  “I can refer to it again, if I need to?”

  “Of course.” He took a thin slip of paper and wrote down a number, then handed it to her. “This is a reference number, saves looking it up. Even Kess will fetch it for you if you’ve saved him looking up a reference. Just in case that grave opens for me that requires my own testament being read.”

  Ileth laughed with him at that. Judging from the thickness of the roof and the narrow, turned entrance, even if the Galantine dragons attacked and laid down fire, Gowan and the archive would survive.

  Back outside, the height of the sun shocked her. Time was running out on her. She’d used up all of her morning.

  She hurried to the gate and found Sifler coming on duty for one of his four-hour shifts. He asked her how her commission was proceeding, which was decent of him.

  “Well, I’ve made excellent progress, so I thought I’d engage in a bit of spycraft for you. You say it’s a stationery store and bookshop, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’d like to go in and buy a book. I’m sure they’d talk a good deal to me, if I were a paying customer.”

  “That’s a sound strategy.”

  “There’s a weakness to the . . . to the strategy. I’ve no m-money.”

  “Master Caribet doesn’t know that,” Sifler said.

  “Master?”

  “Oh, he ran a school in town for a while. It failed.”

  “What is the young lady’s n-name?”

  “Eswit Caribet.”

  Ileth committed the details to memory. “Any advice f-from your military academy on running a . . . running a reconnaissance?”

  “It has to be carried out by such elements that can move quickly and easily, and escape at need, because what they learn about isn’t much good if it never makes it back. Unless you’re carrying out a reconnaissance in force, then you need to—”

  “I’m more the escape-quickly type,” Ileth said, which was true enough. She’d crawled out of the attic vent at the Lodge, quitting the only home she’d ever known in the time it took to draw ten breaths.

  Sifler gave her directions to the shop, in his usual precise style. Ileth was eager to meet this Eswit, just to see what sort of girl this odd little monkey fancied.

  * * *

  —

  She jogged down to Vyenn. She needed the exercise as there hadn’t been any dancing lately, and after the morning in the archives, time was running short. Using his directions, she found the shop on one of the side streets. It had a sign mo
unted above its big white-painted doors, though they had heavy ironwork, making the white paint look like someone’s attempt to brighten up a prison.

  Caribet’s didn’t look any more like a shop than a school. It was next to an impressive-looking house and seemed like the sort of place a family might store a carriage or stable their horses. Some rooms above, with a flower box just over the bolted-on sign, probably served as the family residence.

  Ileth peeked inside. There was a nice arrangement of writing paraphernalia up front, and a long counter with paper and so on displayed atop it. Books lined the wall. In the back there were a few desks piled with more books, save one that was cleared off that had an unhappy-looking boy clinking his heels together as they swung from his chair. The boy was reading aloud.

  A man of considerable girth listened to the boy. He wore the black plainclothes of a schoolmaster, not as shabby as some of the teachers desperate enough to accept the Captain’s wages and meals up in the Lodge, but his neckcloth was stained and yellowed.

  He muttered to the boy and beckoned her in with a welcoming smile.

  “May I be of service, young lady?”

  “P-p-perhaps. Your shop was . . . was recommended to me.”

  He smiled, pleased at the news. She suspected the pleasure would last until he sniffed out that she was penniless.

  Ileth realized one of the bookshelves in back by the student was an upended horse trough. It was actually a clever reuse of the thing; they’d installed wooden shelves. She heard a creeak-thump! and a girl rose from behind the counter like an apparition. She had a delicate chin and expressive eyes, and was a little on the small side, like Ileth.

  “Father, do you need me?” The girl looked at Ileth closely.

  Ileth leaned and saw that she’d come up from the cellar through a trapdoor.

  “Listen to Ger recite, please, Eswit.” He turned back to Ileth and started asking questions about what sort of book she was looking for. Ileth cleared her throat and stammered out that she was trying to learn about strategy and tactics.