“Suhail is in Tser-nga now,” I said. “Your elders will be negotiating with the Tser-zhag king soon, and I should like to be there for that. It will be a good deal faster if I sail to the other side of Dajin, instead of tramping through the mountains—and a good deal safer, too.”
Ruzt’s wings fluttered. “And you do not want to go back.”
Before I could frame a response to that, she waved it away. “I understand, Zabel. Isabella. For you, it is a difficult place. But you will always be welcome in our house.”
“And you in mine,” I said reflexively. Then I laughed. “Though I will understand entirely if you decline to sail to the far side of the world to visit me.” The sea had been even more daunting a sight than the plains of Khavtlai; it would be a very long time before any Draconean ventured out upon it.
BLESSING THE EMPEROR
Thu accompanied Tom and myself to the port of Va Nurang, where a Scirling naval ship was bringing a set of proper ambassadors to establish relations with the new emperor. That same ship brought a letter, addressed to me. I went boneless with relief when I saw it was from my son—for he would not write to me unless word had reached him that I was alive.
Its contents, however, were most startling.
Dear Mother,
I am very glad to hear that you are not dead.
You may have noticed that this letter was not sent from Scirland. I fear you shall be very cross with what I have to tell you, but please understand that I did not mean it to happen this way. I had every intention of waiting until you came back from the Mrtyahaima before I made any decisions, so that I could talk to you first. (Like the good and obedient son I generally fail to be.) But then word came that you had died in the mountains, which put paid to any notion of talking to you—unless the spiritualists are to be believed, which I doubt. And it put me in the mood to do something rash besides, so I went ahead and did it. Now I’ve learnt that you aren’t dead after all, but it’s too late to take back my decision. Even if I wanted to, which I’m quite sure I don’t.
All of that is by way of preface to telling you that I am no longer at Merritford, nor do I expect to ever go back. You see, my school chum Millpole has an uncle who sails with the Four Seas Company, not as a merchant, but as a scientist, studying the oceans. Right after you left for the mountains he gave a lecture at Merritford, and he and I fell to talking afterward. Well, the long and short of it is that he offered to take me on as his assistant—I think he meant after I graduated, but I ran away from school and joined him. So I’m writing you this letter from the deck of the Osprey, in port at Wooragine. Who knows how it will get to you, or even where you are now. Somewhere in Yelang, if that revolution is going well? I doubt we’ll put in at any Yelangese ports—but, well, stranger things have happened, and quite recently, too.
I hope you aren’t too angry at me. It isn’t that I disliked university, I swear. But I don’t see that there’s anything I could learn about the ocean while sitting in a lecture hall hundreds of miles from the nearest salt water that I couldn’t learn much faster at sea. Millpole senior is a splendid fellow, really quite brilliant—reminds me of you, honestly, except with fewer wings and more water. And male, of course. I’m sure you’ll meet him eventually, whenever both of us contrive to be in the same place at once. I’d say in Sennsmouth the next time we call there, but for all I know you’ll be out in the plains of Otholé or at the North Pole or something. But I promise I will write. If nothing else, I have to meet a Draconean in person. (I can’t believe you truly found them! Or is that just wild rumour? Logic says it’s rumour, but I know what my mother is capable of.)
Please do not die again, even if it turns out not to be true.
Your loving though wayward son,
Jake
I stared at this some time before dissolving into laughter and showing it to Tom. How could I be angry with my son? It was the sort of thing I might have done, had I been born a boy. And certainly I have done many more foolish things in my life, so I was hardly in a position to throw stones.
We sailed from Va Nurang on the same ship that brought the ambassadors. Thu saw us off: a very different farewell than the one we received when we were deported from Va Hing. “Thank you,” I said to him. The phrase was wholly inadequate, but I had no better alternative; there were no words to express the true depth of my gratitude. “Had you not discovered those remains—had you not chosen to dangle them before me as very excellent bait—”
Thu bowed, in the manner of someone who knew the gesture was wholly inadequate, but had no better alternative. “It has been an honour and a pleasure, Lady Trent.”
* * *
Tom went back to Scirland; I disembarked in Vidwatha, proceeding back to Tser-nga by less covert means than we had used the first time. There Suhail and I served as interpreters for negotiations between the council of Draconean elders and the Tser-zhag king. Letters between the two of us had been infrequent, owing to the difficulty of conveying them; when we were not carrying out our official duties, we talked ourselves hoarse telling stories of the things that had happened while we were apart. I told him of the dancing dragons; he told me about how he won over Esdarr and her sisters, which I thought was by far the more impressive achievement. He also showed me the modern Draconean syllabary, which he had learned from Habarz.
“So,” I said, “we will finally be able to read all the inscriptions?”
Suhail laughed. “We will be able to pronounce them, at least. And we can certainly make a much better guess at their meaning. I intend to ship a set of the most recent edition of the inscriptions to the Sanctuary; Habarz has shown a great interest in reading them.” His smile lit up the room like a sun. “I thought it was impossible for you to find me a second Cataract Stone. Instead, you found me something far superior.”
We left Tser-nga as soon as the negotiations were done, despite pressures to stay. Neither of us could endure the thought of living through another Mrtyahaiman winter, and by then there were others who could communicate to an acceptable degree—humans and Draconeans both. Moreover, my desire to be home had passed “overpowering” and reached a level for which no adjective could suffice.
Besides, I had business to attend to there. With the bright tone of one looking forward to a moment of perfect, undiluted triumph, I reminded Suhail, “I have something to report to the Philosophers’ Colloquium.”
AFTERWORD
I would say that the rest is history, but as the entirety of my memoirs have been concerned with matters historical, it seems a bit redundant.
I returned home to honours and accolades, a thousand requests for public lectures and nearly as many dinner invitations. At a time when I wanted nothing more than to ensconce myself in my study once more, the world demanded my presence, and I fear I ran myself ragged trying to satisfy their insatiable hunger.
But one invitation I would have accepted were I on my deathbed from overwork.
On a beautiful Athemer evening in early Graminis, at a ceremony in their premises off Heron Court, I was inducted as the first woman Fellow of the Philosophers’ Colloquium.
Compared with my elevation to the peerage, the ceremony was not particularly elaborate. The induction of new Fellows takes place in the Great Hall, around a little table with a book. This volume is the Charter Book of the Colloquium; its opening pages contain the royal charter that first created the institution, and the rest of it holds the signatures of the Fellows, inscribed in columns on each page beneath the Obligation that binds all members. That Obligation reads as follows:
We who have hereunto subscribed, do hereby vow, that we will endeavour to promote the good of the Colloquium of Philosophers, and to pursue the end for which the same was founded, which is the Increase of Knowledge; that we will carry out, so far as we are able, those actions requested of us in the name of the Council; and that we will observe the Statutes and Standing Orders of the said Colloquium. Provided that, whensoever any of us shall signify to the President under
our hands, that we desire to withdraw from the Colloquium, we shall be free thereafter from this Obligation.
The room that day was filled to the walls with the current Fellows of the Colloquium; the street outside was filled with journalists, well-wishers, and hecklers. I did not like to keep all those people waiting, and so it was not until a later occasion that I had the opportunity to turn the thick vellum pages and peruse the signatures of the luminaries who had gone before me: Philippe Dénis, who proposed our taxonomic classification of organisms; Yevgeny Ivanov, the great astronomer and discoverer of planetary moons; Randolph Cremley, who created the periodic table we use to organize the elements; Albert Wedgwood, the theorist who gave us the concept of evolution; Sir Richard Edgeworth, whose book had been such a formative influence on my youth and my field.
Perhaps it is just as well that I did not have the time to survey the ranks of those I was joining. My hand might otherwise have shaken quite badly as I added my name to their company. But I did take a moment to look back a smaller distance, to the page that bore the name of Maxwell Oscott. He was not the Earl of Hilford when he signed; but he was, of course, the man whose patronage had launched me on my career, without whom I would not have been in the Great Hall that day.
I could not look for long. It would not have done my reputation any good for me to sniffle, or for a tear to fall upon the pages of that precious book. But I looked up and sought out Tom Wilker’s eye, for he had benefited as much as I had from that patronage. We shared a smile; then I bent and signed my name to the book. If you have a chance to see it there, know that the slight gap in the column is intentional, for I felt it was only proper to place my signature to the right of Tom’s.
After that there was a banquet, in which the President of the Colloquium stood up and said a great many flattering things about me, and many toasts were drunk in my honour. Much was made of the fact that the vote to award me a Fellowship was unanimous. Tom had told me in private that the President had taken a few recalcitrant gentlemen aside and informed them that if they did not vote in favour, they would not be welcome on the premises thereafter; for it would be to the eternal shame of the Colloquium if they failed to recognize the achievements of the woman who had found the last surviving population of the Draconean species. Those gentlemen had attended the signing, but absented themselves from the banquet, and I did not miss them. I did not need their dour faces marring that day. I said earlier in this volume that if the Colloquium had not admitted me to their company, I would have washed my hands of them without further ado; but it was much finer to achieve my girlhood dream at last.
For although the Colloquium is often a hidebound place, it is still a fine institution, and one that fosters scientific understanding in countless fields. My son Jacob is now a Fellow himself, having earned recognition through his work as an oceanographer—a field for which we did not even have a name when I was born. Natalie Oscott and her friends turned their attentions from the sky for a time in order to build him superior devices for exploring the world beneath the waves, and he has put these to excellent use. Suhail served as President of the Society of Linguists for a number of years, though he retired from that position a while ago; in his words, “If I never have to sit through another meeting again, it will be as good as attaining Paradise.” (A part of me is relieved that no one has yet been able to stomach the notion of a female Colloquium President. I have no doubt that it will happen someday, and I will applaud the lady who takes that laurel—but I had rather it not be me.)
At this point I find myself wanting to make some comparison between the world as I knew it when I preserved my first sparkling and the world I live in today. But the latter is so familiar to my readers that any extensive description of it would be tiresome, and as for the former, if I have not conveyed the general sense of it with the previous volumes of my memoirs, I could not hope to do so now. The changes are pervasive: everything from the pragmatic facts of daily life (travel by caeliger, and the widespread use of dragonbone machines for countless tasks), to the fabric of Scirling society (vastly increased educational opportunities for my sex, and the right of women to vote), to the state of all scientific fields, my own not excepted. Those with a far greater understanding of anatomy and chemistry have begun to establish the various mechanisms by which extraordinary breath is produced: a thing I could not have hoped to puzzle out for myself, as my own education was so informal. And, of course, we know far more about developmental lability, and how it produced the Draconean species in the ancient past.
I will not pretend this knowledge is an unmitigated good. As one might expect, it has unavoidably led to a great deal of unethical experimentation, with disreputable types who hardly deserve the name of “scientist” attempting to create their own breeds for a variety of purposes. Some of them have even tried to make new Draconeans—or rather, new hybrids of dragon and human. Their efforts have succeeded in establishing that the theory I formulated while living in the Sanctuary (dragon eggs anointed with human blood) is likely correct; but the rate of viability for the resulting organisms is low enough that it must have taken ages of primitive dragon worship among humans before a breeding population was established. I personally suspect that the Draconean species arose from a single pair, the happy accident of two successes in close enough temporal and geographic proximity that they were able to produce offspring. From there, developmental lability ensured enough variation to avoid inbreeding.
We will likely never know for certain, though. These days we can read the ancient Draconean language quite well, but even the scribes of that civilization did not have records of how their species began, apart from myth. Records of the Downfall are also few and far between, as the event itself so disrupted the fabric of their society that it produced a great silence, a gap between that age and the rise of great human kings afterward. But translations and archaeology together produce a clear enough image, of a civilization fallen into decadence and cruelty, and of a great and merciless slaughter when some nameless human created a potion that could kill unborn Draconeans in the egg.
Of course someone immediately set forth to rediscover that, too. The value of firestone has fallen tremendously from what it was in my youth, as both its greater availability and the moral repellence of its origin have caused many wealthy individuals to cease wearing it.
But against these ills I may set the position of Draconean society today, which is unquestionably improved from the time during which they hid in the Sanctuary of Wings, with nowhere left to run. I will not pretend their re-emergence in the outside world has been without its difficulties; many humans are indeed hostile to them, and a counter-movement among the Draconeans has continually agitated for renewed isolation. But the more outward-looking members of their society have taken advantage of their new freedom, with the result that their population has nearly doubled since the creation of the Sanctuary Alliance. Many of these new generation were nurtured and hatched in less harsh conditions, which in turn makes it easier for them to travel outside the Mrtyahaima. In time they hope to re-establish a settlement in Akhia, where their civilization began—though opposition to them among certain Segulist and Amaneen factions is strong. For reasons both biological and political, I do not expect to see that happen in my lifetime.
One change, however, may happen quite soon. The final terms of the Sanctuary Alliance included the construction of a Scirling caeliger base there, for the protection of Draconean sovereignty. Although the garrison proved useful once or twice in the early years, it has not faced any significant threat in quite some time. The duration set for the base’s operation will expire next year, and I am certain the Synedrion would not even think of failing to honour the promises they made then, that they would dismantle the base and return the Sanctuary fully to Draconean control.
I still correspond with Ruzt, who now sits on the council of elders in the Sanctuary. It is a wonder brought about by the use of caeligers; when we first met, to send a letter from Scirland to
the depths of the Mrtyahaima would have taken half a year, and the other half for the reply to come back. These days I may converse regularly with friends all over the earth, from the Sanctuary to Yelang to Bayembe, and read the findings of scientific colleagues from countless other lands. As my enthusiasm for strenuous field expeditions wanes with age, I find this is a great convenience.
If there is any conclusion to my tale (apart from my death, which I hope is yet a good way off), it is that the heart of it will never truly end. Although my memoirs are of course the story of my life and career, they are also a story of discovery: of curiosity, and investigation, and learning, not only regarding dragons but many other topics. I take comfort in knowing that others will carry this tale forward, continually unfolding new secrets of the world in which we live, and hopefully using that understanding more often for good than for ill.
And so I leave it in your hands, gentle reader. Mind you carry it well.
Isabella, Lady Trent
F.P.C.
THE MEMOIRIST, PAST AND PRESENT
BY MARIE BRENNAN
A Natural History of Dragons
The Tropic of Serpents
Voyage of the Basilisk
In the Labyrinth of Drakes
Within the Sanctuary of Wings
Midnight Never Come
In Ashes Lie
A Star Shall Fall
With Fate Conspire
Warrior
Witch
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARIE BRENNAN habitually pillages her background in anthropology, archaeology, and folklore for fictional purposes. She is the author of the Onyx Court series, the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, and the urban fantasy Lies and Prophecy, as well as more than thirty short stories. The first book in the Lady Trent Memoirs series, A Natural History of Dragons, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.
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