A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent

SEVEN

Although it is hard to find now, I encourage any youngsters reading this—by which I mean anyone under the age of forty—to seek out a copy of my first publication, A Journey to the Mountains of Vystrana. Not for reasons of quality; it’s an insipid little thing, produced because at the time travel writing was considered a suitable genre for young ladies’ pens. But that book, which contains a much fuller account of our travel from Scirland to Vystrana, is a window into a time all but forgotten now, in this age of railways, fast ships, and caeligers.

You cannot conceive, if you are young, the slowness and difficulty of travel back then. Nor, I imagine, do you want to; this modern speed has brought many improvements for commerce, diplomacy, and learning, and more. And yet, there is a part of me that misses the old way. Call it an old woman’s nostalgia if you like, but our journey to Vystrana served as a useful transition, a separation from the young woman I had been in Scirland, and a preparation for the woman I would be on the expedition. Had it been possible for me to arrive quickly in Vystrana, I think I would not have been ready when I did so.

I believed myself to be ready then; now, with the hindsight brought by greater age, I see myself for the naive and inexperienced young woman I was. We all begin in such a manner, though. There is no quick route to experience.

From our landing in Trinque-Liranz we went upriver to Sanverio, where we attached ourselves to a trio of carters taking supplies across the nearby border into Vystrana. For a fee, they packed their wagons high with our belongings, and so we began our climb into the mountains.

It was my first real taste of hardship, though by the standards of such a word, my sufferings were mild indeed. The village we aimed for was very isolated, even for Vystrana; the carters only made the journey because it was more convenient for the local boyar to be supplied from Sanverio than anywhere else. Once or twice we managed beds in a farmhouse, but more often than not we slept in tents, on folding cots that kept us off the ground, but had nothing else to recommend them.

So determined was I not to complain that I did not let myself think of the day when this stage would end. It therefore came as a shock to me one morning when Lord Hilford said, “We should make it there today, if this weather holds.”

Blinking in the early sunlight, I said, “Make it where?”

He smiled at me. “The village of Drustanev. Our destination, Mrs. Camherst.”

After so much time on the sea and the road, I could hardly believe we would be stopping at last. We loaded ourselves onto the wagons in a hurry, and set out with more energy than usual.

I studied the landscape around me with a newly curious eye. It was uneven territory, valleys of spruce and fir alternating with gentle slopes of grass and windswept ridges of limestone and lichen. Even with the cloudless sky, the air was no more than pleasantly warm. I wondered how far we had risen from the coast. High above I saw a bird floating lazily on the winds; with no point of reference, I could not be sure how large it was, but I rather thought it must be some breed of eagle. Certainly it was not a dragon, though I kept my eyes eagerly open for one.

The weather held fine for most of the morning, but as the afternoon drew on, clouds grew on the mountaintops and rolled in our direction. One of the carters shot at a wolf that was following us too closely, scaring it off. He and his fellows held a brief conversation (in the impenetrable dialect of their native region, not the more refined Chiavoran the rest of us knew), and decided to press on; they judged this a bad area to camp in, even if it meant a wetting before we arrived in Drustanev.

As the wind picked up, I tied my bonnet more firmly to my head. The clouds seemed very low. I had a book out which I had been attempting to read, and for a time I tried to go on doing so, bracing my forearms along the edges of the pages to keep them from flapping about. From the wagon bench at my side, though, Jacob nudged me and said, “You might want to put that away. I fear it will rain soon.”

I sighed, but he was right. Closing the book, I turned in my seat and reached over the back of the wagon bench to stow it in a pack that would all too soon prove whether it was as waterproof as advertised or not.

As I did so, a gust of shockingly cold air pulled at my sleeves, and ice stung my face. Wondering if we were in danger of hail, I looked up.

I have little recollection of the next several seconds. Just a moment of frozen staring, and then—with no transition—my voice shrieking “Get down!” as I wrapped my arms around my husband and dragged him forward, off the wagon bench.

Two other screams overlaid my own. One, high-pitched and awful, came from our driver as claws snagged him off the wagon and into the air. The other, lower but even more terrible, came from above, as the dragon plummeted from the clouds and raked over our heads.

Jacob and I landed in the wagon traces, the reins and harness tangling our limbs while the horses shied and whinnied their terror. Being on the outside, I tumbled free first, and cried out to see the wagon lurching forward, my husband still caught within. He fell a moment later, directly beneath the wagon, and the wheels passed close enough to leave a track across his coat.

I crawled toward him, hearing shouts from all around us. Frantic glances skyward showed me nothing; the dragon had vanished again. From the slope ahead, though, came the agonized groans of our driver. Just as I reached Jacob, a loud noise cracked the air: a gunshot, as one of the other drivers fired off the rifle he carried against highwaymen or wild animals.

Wild animals. I had not, until that moment, put dragons in that class. I had thought them something apart.

“Stay down, Isabella,” Jacob said, shielding me with his own body. I crouched in his shadow, and realized quite irrelevantly that my bonnet had gone astray. The wind was very cold in my hair.

A great flapping, as of sails: the dragon, though we could not see it. Looking under Jacob’s arm, I saw Lord Hilford put out a hand and stop his driver, who would have fired at the sound. With nothing to see, there was no point in wasting the round.

Then suddenly there was something to see. Several shots rang out, and I swallowed the protest that tried to leap free of me. This was no vulnerable runt in a menagerie. The dragon was huge, its wingspan far larger than a wagon, with stone-grey hide and wings that kicked up dust with every beat. The guns fired, and the beast made a dreadful noise, aborting its stoop on us and climbing rapidly for the sky. Clouds enveloped it once more, and we waited.

Waited, and waited, until at last Lord Hilford sighed. “I think it’s gone.”

Jacob helped me to my feet. My bonnet was caught in a low, scrubby bush; I retrieved it and smoothed it out with shaking hands while Mr. Wilker and one of the other men went after the driver the dragon had seized. Its claws had left great gashes in his back and chest, but the worst injury was to his legs, which had broken badly when he fell. Blood seeped out where the bones had breached the skin. If I had not seen a similar injury once to a horse, I might have fainted.

“Make room for him in one of the wagons,” Lord Hilford said in Chiavoran, then turned to me. “Mrs. Camherst, if you would—in my green chest there should be some laudanum. Black bottle, in the top rack.”

I crammed my bonnet back onto my head and did as he asked. There were bits of grit and rock in my palms, which I picked out as I went, and I had torn my skirt, but seeing the driver, I was acutely aware of how lucky Jacob and I had been. Had I not seen the dragon coming…

Rain began to fall. Mr. Wilker bound up our driver’s wounds as best he could. We needed to get him to shelter, but first there was his cart to deal with; the horses had quite understandably bolted at the approach of the dragon. They had both gone lame, and the wagon had overturned, spilling our trunks onto the ground and knocking one of them open. Working together, the men retrieved everything while I created a makeshift canopy to keep the rain off the injured man. The laudanum, fortunately, put him into a shallow sleep, and he did no more than moan in protest when we moved onward and the road jolted him where he lay.

In this manner, bedraggled and scarred, we arrived in the village of Drustanev.

I did not see much at first of the building that was to be our home for the next several months. I accompanied the injured driver as some locals carried him inside, and tried to explain in my very bad Vystrani what had happened. I expect that little of what I said even registered on them, between my limited vocabulary, appalling accent, and atrocious grammar, but one thing I did notice: the villagers did not seem surprised to see his wounds. No one could have mistaken them for anything other than dragon-inflicted, even without me repeating that one word over and over again—balaur, balaur—and they did not seem surprised.

Relatively approachable Lord Hilford had called the Vystrani dragons, that first evening at Renwick’s when I heard of his expedition. It was not the phrase I would have chosen.

A young woman appeared out of nowhere at my elbow, tugging me away from the men now swarming through the downstairs of the building. Using a flood of incomprehensible Vystrani, she seemed to be trying to convince me to sit down in a quiet place and have vapors over my misfortune. I’m afraid I gravely disappointed her by haring off into the rain, my already-ruined bonnet listing to one side on my head, to make certain our things were being brought inside. It seemed a minor thing to worry about, with howls emanating from a back room where they were trying to set the driver’s broken legs, but I was no use there, and could not abide sitting around and doing nothing.

My efforts averted a buildup of trunks in the front hall that would have made passage impossible. By repeating those few parts of my Vystrani vocabulary that were relevant to the situation, accompanied by much gesticulation, I managed to get some of the local servants to shunt our luggage upstairs, to the rooms we would sleep in. Jacob found me in the midst of this, and insisted on examining me for injuries. He exclaimed over my skinned palms and had Mr. Wilker bind them up, although by then they were hardly bleeding at all. For my own part, I conducted a similar examination of Jacob, and was relieved to find that his coat might have been badly torn along the back, but his skin was nothing more than scratched. An inch less into our fall, and the dragon would have caught him like the driver.

The noise in the back room subsided at last, and Lord Hilford appeared, weary and bloodstained. “He’s asleep again,” the earl said. “Whether he’ll survive… well, we shall see. Come.” We followed him obediently, Jacob, Mr. Wilker, and myself, like very lost and unnerved ducklings, into a room off the front hall.

Someone had made an effort to transform this dark-paneled, low-ceilinged chamber into a sitting room, though whoever had done so appeared to have been operating from a thirdhand description of Scirling customs. There were couches at least, even if they were more like wooden benches with cushions placed along the seat and back, but we sank onto them gratefully. From somewhere Lord Hilford produced a bottle, and there were clay tumblers on a nearby table; he poured a small amount of brandy into four of these and passed them around, even to me. I had not tasted brandy since the physician sewed me up after the wolf-drake, and had to force myself to take a sip, momentarily overwhelmed by the memory.

As the warmth traveled through me, dispelling the chill of the rain, Lord Hilford said heavily, “I am so very sorry, Mrs. Camherst.”

I looked up at him. “Sorry? Why to me, more than another?”

“I know I spoke to you of the dangers of this expedition, but I did not anticipate anything like this.”

“What the devil got into that thing?” Mr. Wilker demanded, and got a reproving look from Jacob for his language.

“My question exactly,” I said, “if in rather more vivid terms than I am permitted to use. I was not under the impression that rock-wyrms tended to attack people.”

Lord Hilford scowled and knocked back the remainder of his brandy. “They don’t.”

“Then I don’t blame you for failing to warn me of a danger you could not have expected,” I told him. My fingers curled around the clay mug. “By all means, let us be sorry for the poor driver, and pray for his recovery. But I am not the one injured, Lord Hilford; I do not need your apology.”

It sounded well, and I meant it as much as I could. Under no circumstances was I going to begin by letting anyone think I would wilt at the first hint of peril. Such wilting could be done later, when there was no one present to see.

I was rewarded with a rueful smile from the earl. “You will tarnish my reputation as a gentleman, Mrs. Camherst, with such gallant courage as that.”

“We still have Mr. Wilker’s question to answer,” I said. It was easier to think of the dragon’s attack as a puzzle in need of solving; that gave me something to focus on. “What could provoke such behaviour? It can’t have been rabid.”

Jacob laid one hand on my forearm. “Isabella, we might leave such questions until morning. Now is not a suitable time.”

“If by ‘not suitable’ you mean that we don’t have any answers,” Lord Hilford said. He put his empty tumbler down on the scarred surface of the side table. “Or at least I don’t. Perhaps the excitement rattled my brains loose, but that was quite unlike anything I have seen from a rock-wyrm before, and I’ve been close to them many a time. I shall have to ponder it. At any rate, this is the house where we are to be staying; our luggage should be around here somewhere…” He stared about the ill-lit room as if the trunks might be lost in the shadows.

“Upstairs,” I said. When I rose to my feet, I was pleased to find my knees steady. I had feared the moment of sitting and relative relaxation would have persuaded them to give out. “Though where precisely I sent them, we must discover.”

We ascended the stairs in a damp herd, all bumbling against one another in the dark and cramped stairwell. The boards creaked alarmingly beneath my feet, let alone Lord Hilford’s, but held. Once in the corridor above we found that our luggage had gotten all mixed up, despite the tags with our names. By now, however, the hour was grown late enough that we did not care. We pulled out the valises that contained our traveling gear, allocated rooms, and fell into bed with hardly a pause to change out of our wet clothes.

All through the night, I dreamt of the dragon, and fell again and again to the hard Vystrani soil, just out of the range of its claws.

When I awoke the next morning, Jacob was already gone. Morning sunlight showed me the room in better detail than I had seen the previous night, disclosing a bleak and cheerless place. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all of that same dark wood; I stretched out one hand from where I lay and found it was painted with a kind of resin that presumably sealed it against weathering. The ceiling beams were low and heavy, giving the room a claustrophobic feel. Our furniture consisted of a bed without posters or canopy, a wardrobe, a dressing table with a mirror, and nothing else.

The air outside my coverlet was quite chill, as I discovered when I left the bed. Shivering, I made a quick search and pulled on my dressing robe and slippers. These warmed me enough that I could search more thoroughly for a trunk with suitable clothing in it. The previous day’s dress was piled on the floor, stained, torn, and utterly beyond repair.

I was lucky enough to find one of the plain, sturdy dresses I had commissioned before leaving Scirland, with buttons I could reach on my own. Just as I finished with the last of them, the door creaked open, and the young woman from the night before poked her head tentatively in.

She was tall and of that build we so politely call “strapping” and applaud when found in peasant folk, with strong features and a wealth of dark hair. She also, at that moment, had an alarmed expression, apparently provoked by the sight of me dressing myself without aid.

From the words that poured out of her mouth, I gathered that she was supposed to be my lady’s maid. I had been afraid of that. She would need to be educated in her duties, starting with the purchase of a bell I could use to summon her when I awoke. I laid that aside for the moment, however, and held up my hand to silence her.

When she subsided, I asked, “Tcha prodvyr e straiz?” What is your name?—or at least, that is what I hoped I had said.

“Dagmira,” she replied.

“Dagmira,” I said. “Isabella Camherst eiy. Zhe Mrs. Camherst tchi vek ahlych.” This was a line I had rehearsed many times, until I was certain I pronounced it at least as well as our Chiavoran drivers did. I am Isabella Camherst. You will call me Mrs. Camherst. If I was to train this young woman to be my lady’s maid, then we would have to start by establishing boundaries. I was her employer, not a child to be chivvied around. Proper respect was essential.

I did not want to reflect that a Vystrani child would know more of the area and local customs than I did, let alone the language.

For my next display of linguistic accomplishment, I asked Dagmira where my husband had gone, and received in return a second flood of words too quick to comprehend. Another attempt, this time prefaced by setkasti, setkasti—slower, slower—rewarded me with a more suitable pace, but still far too many words I did not understand. Jacob had gone out; no more could I discern.

Frustrated by this, I gave Dagmira broken instructions to bring to that room all the trunks with mine or Jacob’s name on them, and to remove all those with Lord Hilford’s or Mr. Wilker’s, then went downstairs. The kitchen was cold and empty, the only smell a lingering one of blood from the doctoring of the driver. It drove out any thought I had for breakfast.

Compared with the dank interior of the house, the street outside (if I could dignify the hard-packed dirt path with such a grand name) was painfully bright. I squinted and shielded my eyes until they adjusted. In the distance, I could hear voices chattering in fluent Vystrani, but none were familiar to me.

The exterior of the house was not much more promising. Weather had faded the dark resin to more of a golden color, but it was bereft of decoration, showing just bare planks, broken here and there by narrow windows, and capped by a steeply sloping thatched roof. The bedroom had not exhibited such an angle; there must have been attic space above us. A glance around showed me there were few houses nearby, and those downslope; they appeared to be single story, apart from the presumed attics. Our lodging appeared to be the best Drustanev had to offer.

The path led downward to the rest of the village. Descending, I saw that most of the houses, unlike our own, had low fences enclosing geese-filled yards. Women stood at the gates, spinning thread and chatting with one another, not bothering to disguise the way they watched me. I smiled pleasantly at them as I passed, but my attention was mostly on the familiar wagons drawn up around the village well, with one of our Chiavoran drivers fixing a horse into harness. “Are you leaving so soon?” I asked him, a little surprised.

He glanced over his shoulder at one of the houses. “Soon as they bring Mingelo out. We have to go on to the boyar’s lodge.”

I knew they still needed to deliver their cargo, but Mingelo was the injured man. “Oh, surely it would be kinder to leave him here to heal, rather than subject him to such a journey.”

The driver spat into the dirt, unconcerned with propriety. “They say there’s a doctor at the boyar’s house. Chiavoran. Better than some Vystrani peasant any day.”

Even allowing for partisan national pride, I had to admit his assessment was probably fair; surely the boyar’s man would be better educated than the village bonesetter. I pitied Mingelo, though, having to endure the trip.

Jacob found me shortly after that. He, too, had apparently dug clothing out of a chest in random haste; his suit was rather finer than the situation called for. “Isabella, there you are,” he said, as if I had been the one to vanish so early this morning. “The drivers have to continue on to the boyar’s lodge, but after that, they’re going back to Chiavora. You—”

I stopped him with a hand on his wrist, very aware of Vystrani eyes on us. “Please don’t,” I said in a soft voice, so no one could eavesdrop, even if they spoke Scirling. “Don’t ask it of me. You know I will not go, and I don’t want to argue in front of these strangers.”

His hazel eyes searched mine. The mountain wind disarranged his hair, adding a touch of distress I would have found charming under other circumstances. Only then did it occur to me that I had left without so much as brushing my own, let alone pinning it up. What sort of image was I presenting now, argument or no argument?

Perhaps my own distress charmed him. Jacob sighed, though the worry did not leave his eyes. “Can I at least ask you to keep close to home for now? Hilford is asking questions of the village leader—what’s going on with the dragons, and where Gritelkin is. Until we have that settled, please, behave yourself.”

I resented the implication that I was misbehaving already, but that faded next to other concerns. I had assumed that Jindrik Gritelkin, Lord Hilford’s local contact, was one of the men rushing about last night. “He’s not here?”

“No, he isn’t. Will you go back to the house?”

The house, where I would have to face the incomprehensible Dagmira. “Yes, dear. Please let me know what’s going on, when you can. And what we are supposed to do for food.”

“There should be a cook; that’s another thing Hilford’s asking about. I think.” Jacob tried to smooth his hair back down, only to have it blown astray again by the wind. “I will arrange for something.”

I climbed the stony path back toward our borrowed house, resolutely not looking back toward the Chiavoran wagons, and my chance to depart.

EIGHT

I have written before about Drustanev, in A Journey to the Mountains of Vystrana. If you should happen to own a copy, though, or are intending to buy one (as I encouraged before), I beg you not to pay any attention to what I said there concerning the village, or indeed the Vystrani people as a whole.

The words I wrote then heartily embarrass me now. I was attempting, against my inclination, to conform to the expectations of travel writing, as practiced by young ladies at the time. It is a worse piece of drivel than Mr. Condale’s Wanderings in Central Anthiope, inspired more by the theatrical convention of colorful, semiprophetic Vystrani characters than by the people I knew in Drustanev. To hear that book tell of it, Vystrana is a land of wailing fiddles, flashing-eyed women, and sweet, strong wines.

Which is to say, a land of the most tedious cliches. I drank more tea in Vystrana than wine, heard fiddles rarely, and never once saw Dagmira’s eyes emit anything resembling a flash. You would be better served to read a history book, which will explain to you the many threads woven into the fabric of that nation. The position of their mountains, nearly straddling the neck of Anthiope, has brought most of the peoples on this continent trampling past at one time or another: Chiavorans, Eiversch, Akhians, Bulskoi, and more—those last ruling Vystrana as a client-state for sixty years before our arrival. But those influences have remained largely in the valleys and lowlands, trickling up only piecemeal to the shepherds and hunters in the mountains, where an intense Vystrani identity holds strong.

Young ladies are also expected to wax rhapsodic about the charms of the places they visit. Men, when they write about their travels, are permitted to complain, and to assert the natural superiority of their homelands. While I am relieved that my sex forestalled me from committing to print any sins of the latter sort, I must take this opportunity to say what I could not admit then:

I hated Drustanev.

Not the people; though I rarely understood and often resented them, in the end I am grateful for all of their aid, and their forbearance in permitting us to come among them. And there were points at which the mountains touched my heart with their beauty. But I often detested my physical circumstances, and have never felt the slightest urge to return.

Some of it was a simple matter of climate. The astute among you will have noticed that almost all of my expeditions have been to the warmer regions of the world: Akhia, the Broken Sea, and so forth. (The one notable exception apart from Vystrana—my flight into the Mrtyahaimas—was regrettably unavoidable.) My native companions in those places often expressed amazement at my willingness to endure the heat; in their experience, we Scirlings are a cold-adapted lot, who wither and die without regular applications of chilly fog. But I have always preferred warmth to cold, however excessive it may be, and so the mountains of Vystrana in springtime were hardly to my taste. The wondrous prospect of dragons had convinced me to overlook this impending misery, but now that I was subjected to it, I became very grumpy indeed.

For one thing, “springtime” to the Vystrani means something rather different than it does to us Scirlings. (Or to nearly anyone who may be reading this, be they Erigan or so on—unless I have acquired devotees in Vystrana, which I suppose is possible.) Spring, to the inhabitants of Drustanev, is the time when their lowland cousins drive the flocks of sheep up to the so-called middle pastures, near to the village. This usually happens in early Floris—not long before our arrival—and you may deduce the average local temperature from the fact that the villagers do not shear their sheep until later in the season.

At that time of year, snow still lingers in the steep valleys, especially where spruce and fir grow too thick for the sun to easily penetrate. Fresh falls may occur through the end of Floris or beginning of Graminis; our expedition saw flurries almost into Messis. I have had gentlemen—I use the term loosely—mock me for complaining of having been cold my entire time in Vystrana; to them I say, join me next summer in the deserts of Akhia, and we will see who fares better then. I may be elderly, and I certainly detest the cold, but that does not make me delicate.

Drustanev was a scattered place, houses planted in whatever spot offered enough level ground, with nothing one could particularly call a street running among them. Most appeared absurdly small beneath the tall peaks of their thatched roofs—tall because of the need to shed that abundant snow. The people were, and are, shepherds in the warmer months, and hunters in the winter; they trade fleeces, woven blankets, and hides to the lowlands.

The slopes around their villages have been shaped over time by the centuries of human habitation. Some have been cut into small terraces, suitable for local crops, but the primary alteration is that every ten years or so the men go out and set fire to the forests. I was not privileged to see this event—though I would have enjoyed it, I think, for the heat if nothing else—but I’m told the ashes enrich the soil, creating good pastureland for some time, and afterwards the kind of young forest that attracts deer. Sheep eat the grass, wolves eat the deer, and dragons eat everything that doesn’t run away fast enough.

I detested the cold and the isolation, the repetitive food reeking of garlic—but the true root of my suffering was that I was in a foreign land, far from everything familiar, and I adapted very badly. You may think it would be romantic to run away there, like young Thomas in Mrs. Watree’s insufferable three-volume novel, and for some of you it might be so; for me, it was not. Looking back on it now, my feelings have faded into a kind of gentle dislike that might almost be called fond, and so I will not harp too much on the misery I felt when I sat down to yet another sour-flavored soup, or looked out the (unglazed) window to see snow falling yet again. But it may help to understand a few of my subsequent actions if you bear in mind that I was going half mad in Drustanev, and dragons were the one thing that could distract me from it.

The house we were staying in belonged to Jindrik Gritelkin, who was of the class they call “razesh” in Vystrana—a sort of local agent to the boyar, as Lord Hilford had said. That was the definition of the term; its true meaning, particularly in this locale, took longer for us to discern. Much would have been clearer had Gritelkin been there, but he was not; and that absence was of primary concern on that first full day in Drustanev.

By the time Lord Hilford arrived at the house, with Jacob bearing a hamper of food for our lunch, I had given up on Vystrani and was repeating myself to Dagmira in Scirling, over and over again, louder with every repetition, as if volume would succeed where vocabulary did not. Our trunks were sorted, but the furniture in which to store their contents was lacking, and Dagmira did not seem to understand this. Moreover, Lord Hilford’s beloved chair, that he hauled with him wherever he went, had been damaged when the wagon overturned, and in my frustration I was about ready to scrap the thing for kindling.

Some of my irritation, though, came from hunger, and so I was relieved to find the earl unpacking sausages and bread rolls onto the kitchen table. “If you could acquire chairs, Mrs. Camherst,” he said, “we can sit down and talk.”

Three chairs and one stool were scrounged from other parts of the house, and we fell like ravening wolves upon our meal, Mr. Wilker nobly taking the stool.

“Gritelkin,” Lord Hilford said after the first round of food had vanished, “is not here. He sent a message warning me that now was not an opportune time for research. But knowing how the international post can be, he also took the precaution of traveling to Sanverio in the hopes of intercepting us. It seems that both the message and Gritelkin went astray.”

“Do you think he is all right?” I asked. In light of what had happened to our driver, my imagination was creating a variety of unfortunate scenarios for the absent Gritelkin.

“Likely so,” the earl said. “The villagers don’t see much cause for worry, at any rate. Odds are we missed him on our way into the highlands; it’s easy enough to do.” The optimism in his tone was only a little forced, but I wondered what he would have said, had a lady not been present.

“What of the dragon?” Mr. Wilker asked. “It’s clear this isn’t the first time such a thing has happened, but no one will talk to me about it.”

Lord Hilford shook his head and reached for another roll. “Nor to me, but you are correct. There have been other attacks. I was able to winkle that much out of the village mayor, Urjash Mazhustin. Not so many that we must fear for our lives every time we step out the front door, but enough that he did not wish to speak of them to a foreigner.”

This produced a quiet moment at the table. I wondered, but did not ask, whether anyone else was questioning whether we could even do what we had come for.

Jacob broke the silence. “Do we have any idea what might cause such a thing? Is there a disease akin to rabies that afflicts dragons? Or do they, like wolves, prey on human settlements when times become harsh?”

Lord Hilford’s eyes gleamed. “That, Camherst, is an excellent set of questions to answer. I haven’t the faintest clue, but we shall address ourselves to the matter forthwith.”

I kept silent as our luncheon continued, attending to every word, but striving not to draw attention to myself. This, I remembered firmly, was to be my role here: facilitating their research from this home base in Drustanev. Since no one had yet tried to forbid us our work, the gentlemen were making plans to ask for maps and scout the surrounding area. Gritelkin should have had that information for us—for them, I reminded myself—but in his absence, the gentlemen were prepared to fend for themselves.

If you doubt the restraint of my intentions, please remember: I was only nineteen, and not yet Lady Trent, with all the associations that name conjures up. I did not yet even know that dragons were to be my lifelong career. I thought this Vystrani expedition was all I would ever have, and I was determined to do my best in the role allotted to me, as an efficient and effective helpmeet.

Which is a lofty way of saying that I spent the following week butting heads incessantly with Dagmira. My command of Vystrani improved rapidly, through sheer necessity and use, and while I will not claim my grammar was good, at least I acquired the words I needed. It did not help that Dagmira had a way of seizing my hands and kissing them both whenever I produced a new piece of vocabulary. In Vystrana this is a courtesy shown to those of higher rank, but the sardonic manner in which she did it was more like a Chiavoran woman throwing her hands into the air to praise the Lord for a miracle.

Some of the words I searched for, even Dagmira did not seem to know. It soon became apparent that what I considered to be a minimal amount of furniture, just barely enough for us to scrape by, was extravagant by the standards of rural Drustanev, and some of the pieces I wanted (such as a wardrobe, for hanging my dresses) existed nowhere in the village, or even in Dagmira’s understanding. To obtain them would require that we have them brought up from Sanverio, which was not worth the time and expense. We would, I supposed with the long-suffering martyrdom of a gentlewoman in rough circumstances, have to make do.

We were equally short of servants, though that, at least, I had expected. A shockingly pale boy named Iljish served the gentlemen, or rather Jacob and Mr. Wilker (with Mr. Wilker himself playing servant to the earl), and after the first day we had a placid cook whom nothing seemed to disturb, but Dagmira was the one I dealt with most, and I began to suspect that no facility with her language would aid me in breaking through the barrier of her manner. She was not imperturbable—far from it, with her hand-kissing and frequent diatribes too rapid for me to understand—but whether calm or distraught, she seemed utterly unaffected by anything I said to her. It is fortunate that I had not expected or hoped for my maid to be a source of companionship while in Vystrana; I would have been gravely disappointed.

I did not tell Jacob or the others how much of the work around our house I took on personally. The tedious work of cleaning and other such domestic tasks I left to Dagmira, of course, but anything relating to dragons I kept jealously to myself. In the absence of proper shelving, I acquired a number of crates which sufficed for the purpose, and arranged those volumes we had brought with as much care as if I were organizing a grand library. Mr. Wilker had brought a large map of Vystrana and a smaller one of the mountains around Drustanev, which I tacked up onto the walls, bringing a spot of relative brightness into the otherwise grim house.

The sitting room became our working room, as we lacked any place more suitable. I confess I did not mind this, as it meant any conversations we had as a group were liable to be held in there, giving me more time in the one place I felt anything like at home.

As the days passed without sign of the absent Mr. Gritelkin, Jacob and Mr. Wilker began the task of mapping the surrounding countryside. They had not brought surveyor’s tools, so their work was imprecise, but Mr. Wilker’s childhood collecting fossils on Niddey meant he was more than accustomed to tramping about the countryside (albeit a flatter one) and mapping the area in his mind. A third sheet went up onto the walls, and was taken down each evening for me to add their findings to it, in my best draftswoman’s hand. During the day, Lord Hilford paced in front of it, muttering often to himself.

The reason for his muttering was that without Gritelkin’s guidance, they had very little notion of where to go looking for dragons. Oh, it was often possible to see them winging through the air; during my morning constitutional around the village, which I undertook so as to have some escape from the grim darkness of our house, I glimpsed the beasts gliding about the distant mountain peaks, long-winged shapes instantly distinguishable from those of raptors. But to see them more closely was a much greater challenge.

The Vystrani rock-wyrm, you see, prefers to lair in caves. (This, along with its stony grey hide, gives rise to the name.) Once such a lair is found, the natural historian may track the inhabitant’s movements to see where it goes to feed, to water, to attract the attention of other dragons. He may, if he is bold, enter the lair during the dragon’s absence to examine its castings and ordure. The lair is a nearly indispensible starting point for such work.

But first it must be found. And one of the reasons Vystrani rock-wyrms love to lair in caves is because they abound in the region, which is largely a karst landform. The primary function of the map my husband was making with Mr. Wilker was to mark the locations of caves. They discovered easily half a dozen each day, though many were too small for dragons; some they discovered on their way home, passing through an area they thought already mapped in its entirety. Jacob found one by the unfortunate expedient of falling down a loose, steep slope, fetching up on a ledge beneath an overhang of brambles that had previously obscured the cave’s entrance from their eyes. Intrepid man that he was, he had Mr. Wilker lower down an unbroken lantern so that he could search the interior before finding a route back up. Deep gouges in the stone of the floor said a rock-wyrm had indeed once laired there, but the drift of dead leaves above those gouges betrayed how long ago that had been.

In the dark of night, when I lay on our lumpy, uncomfortable bed and tried to go to sleep, my mind entertained itself with ever wilder visions of how I might solve this puzzle on their behalf. It began with half-reasonable notions: I could sit with a sketch pad at a good vantage point and draw the movements of the dragons, to see if there was a pattern. (And pray none of the dragons spotted me and swooped in for an easy meal: this is why the notion was only half reasonable.) I could make my own search of the mountains, concentrating in areas Jacob and Mr. Wilker had not yet covered. (And pray I didn’t fall as my husband had, break my leg, and lie helplessly until a dragon came looking for an easy meal.) I could walk empty-handed into the Vystrani wilderness, trusting to my childhood dream of dragons to guide my steps, as Panachai had been guided by the Lord in the desert, until fate led me to the perfect lair. (Where I would become an easy meal. The deranged side of my mind invented these ideas, but the practical side knew where they would end.)

Then again, I should not speak too readily of practicality. Although I did at last find a solution to our problems, the means by which I arrived at it was nearly as foolhardy as the worst of my dreams.

NINE

There is a peculiarity that comes with living in a rural village, with which my readers—most of who, I imagine, enjoy the benefits of the electric lights that are nowadays everywhere—may be unfamiliar.

In the absence of artificial illumination, one’s sleep divides into two distinct periods, with a gap of wakefulness during the dark hours of the night. Experiencing this in Drustanev, I initially attributed it to the lumpiness of the bed, the cold of the room, the general alienness of my surroundings, and so on; it took me some time to discover this was the usual way of things for the villagers. (Jacob’s own habits took longer to shift, I think because of the strenuous exercise he received, climbing about the mountains.)

On the night I will now relate to you, I had not yet learned the reason for my wakefulness. All I knew was that I awoke, as I had for several nights running, and could not immediately go back to sleep. Rather than trouble Jacob with my tossing and turning, I rose from the bed, wrapped myself in a thick robe, and tiptoed out to occupy myself elsewhere until drowsiness returned.

It’s an odd time, that period of midnight wakefulness, if you are not accustomed to it. The world seems dreamlike at that hour, and the mind subsides into a meditative state; my own thoughts seemed distant to me, like specimens upon the table of my shed back home. I considered reading, as I had the previous two nights, but felt guilty at using yet more candles—especially as I was beginning to suspect that striking a light only postponed my return to sleep.

I went into our workroom, it being the place I was least likely to disturb anyone, but instead of reading I unbarred the shutters and swung them open. Chill air struck my face, simultaneously bringing me further awake and yet strengthening the dreamlike nature of my thoughts. I felt pleasantly detached from myself and, sitting in the dark room, gave myself over to contemplation of the cloudless night sky.

I pray you forgive me if I temporarily postpone the true purpose of this narration to speak about that sky. In Falchester at that time, and in many places these days, the light from human habitation blots out a portion of the stars. And? you may ask, wondering why this matters. There are still plenty of stars to be seen. But I remember my childhood home in Tamshire, far enough from the nearest city to be spared this change, and I remember the sky above the mountains of Vystrana. You may think you see plenty of stars, friend reader, but you are wrong. Night is both blacker and more brilliant than you can imagine, and the sky a glory that puts to shame the most splendid jewels at Renwick’s. Up in the mountains, where the air is crisper than the humid atmosphere of Scirland, I beheld a beauty I had never before seen.

I am not often a sentimental woman. But whether it was the splendor above me or my odd state of mind—likely both—I found myself nearly overwhelmed. At first I was entranced; then, feeling it was too much, I tore my eyes away and contemplated the far more mundane scene of sleeping Drustanev.

Mundane—except for the light that flared some distance away.

This was not the diamond wink of a star, but the warm, spilling glow of firelight. A door had opened in one of the houses, and two figures appeared in the gap. One, smaller, had the rounded silhouette of a woman, with a shawl thrown over her shoulders. The other was noticeably taller, with clothing in an unfamiliar style, and in the light from inside I saw something even more out of place: yellow hair, pulled back into a very un-Vystrani plait.

The fascination of the stars fled as I sat up, peering through the darkness toward those two. My first, absurd thought was that Mr. Wilker had taken a Drustanev woman for his lover—for lovers those two certainly were, by the way they embraced in the doorway, the man appearing as reluctant to depart as the woman was to let him go. But Mr. Wilker’s hair was not so light, nor nearly long enough to braid. The man was no one I had seen in the village; and there were not so many people in Drustanev that I could have overlooked that blond head among them.

I became aware that I was now hanging halfway out the window, its sill pressing uncomfortably across my pelvis, as if closing the distance by two feet would allow me to make out more detail. My interest was not prurient; in fact, I wished the two would stop kissing and move apart so I could see the man’s face. But the face was not what mattered, was it? His features would not tell me who he was. I hauled myself back inside, stuffed my feet into the muddy shoes I had left by the door, and slipped outside without a sound.

I would like to tell you I did this because of the dreamlike state brought on by waking in the middle of the night. It is a fine excuse, and there might be some truth in it. The bulk of the blame, however, must fall first upon my impatience, which chafed under the slowness of our research, and second upon my curiosity, which knew even fewer bounds than usual that night.

By the time I made it outside, the door had closed. I halted, clutching up my robe so it would not trail in the half-frozen mud, and soon spotted movement: the man, walking uphill out of the village. Very definitely not a local, and my curiosity grew stronger. I set off after him, darting from house to house so as to have some cover if he looked back.

How far did I intend to follow him? I cannot tell you. Eventually I would have had to ask myself that question, but before I reached that point of awareness, something took the decision entirely out of my hands.

The village was surrounded by a rocky, cleared area, and downhill there were fields, but the woods began not far up the slope. I had gone far enough into their depths to realize that a nightgown and robe do not make good attire for creeping after a man who obviously knows his way through such terrain, and to feel the chill biting at my stockingless ankles. Drustanev was obscured from sight by a screen of trees, and so was most of the light from the sky. I therefore had not the slightest bit of warning before an arm pinned me tight and a hand clamped down over my mouth.

I let out an immediate scream—insofar as I could, muffled as I was. It wasn’t yet a cry for help; my thoughts had stopped dead with shock, leaving nothing but pure animal reflex. The man jerked me closer and hissed something unintelligible in my ear. I could not tell if it was Vystrani or some other language; it could have been Scirling, for all my brain was capable of comprehending it. I twisted, trying to get free, and now I did try to shout for help, with no particular success. The man snarled wordlessly, a sound of clear threat, and I stopped.

We had managed enough noise between the two of us, though, that my quarry heard and turned back. For the moment or two it took him to reach us, I thought he might prove my savior. As he drew near, unfortunately, my hopes were dashed. He spoke, not to me, but to my captor, and my captor answered him, in a language that was neither Scirling nor Vystrani. They clearly knew each other, and if they were not happy with each other, that still did not mean either one was on my side.

The dreamlike feeling vanished as if it never had been there at all. I stood rigid in my captor’s grip, mind racing in useless little circles, like a mouse trapped under a basket. What would they do to me? Kidnapping, murder, an outrage upon my honor—all of those and worse seemed possible. I had faced a wolf-drake and a stooping dragon, but never a human who wished to do me harm, and the one part of my brain that remained detached enough to observe this scene was disgusted at how badly I was handling it.

I am grateful to that little corner of my brain, for it shamed me into better effort. I weighed my options, and found them sadly wanting. I had nothing of value with which to bribe the men into letting me go. We were far enough from the village that I couldn’t be certain anyone would hear me scream, if my captor uncovered my mouth long enough for me to try. His grip was strong as a dragon’s, and even if I somehow broke free of it, I wouldn’t get very far, stumbling through the woods in my nightgown and robe. I found myself wishing, quite irrationally, that I had read more of Manda Lewis’s sensational novels—as if those would provide anything like useful guidance in a situation like this.

Perhaps I would have been better off not weighing my options. They both dismayed and distracted me, such that I was taken by surprise when the hand over my mouth vanished, and the man I’d been pursuing stuffed some kind of rag between my teeth. I shouted as loudly as I could—which was not very—and squirmed more, but they soon had me bound, gagged, and blindfolded. Before the kerchief went over my eyes, I caught a glimpse of my captor, who proved to be another light-haired man, taller and more heavily built than the first. Once I was sufficiently trussed up, he threw me over his shoulder, and off we went.

So it was to be kidnapping, then. At least to begin with, and my blood ran cold at the possible sequel.

We soon achieved sufficient distance from the village (or rather they did, and I was carried along willy-nilly) that the men felt it was safe to talk at greater length. From the tones, it was clear that my captor, now my bearer, was seriously displeased with the man who had gone to visit his lover, and was reading him quite a lecture. And then, to my surprise, I realized that I was gathering this sense from more than just their tones: I could understand them.

Not well, mind you. If my Scirling readers have ever encountered a farmer from the more distant and rural parts of the country, they will have some sense of what I heard that night: familiar words, turned on their heads and decorated with oddly bent vowels. They were not speaking Scirling, of course. But their language, once recognized, was easier for me to grasp than Vystrani: it was an obscure dialect of Eiversch, which I had studied as a girl.

There is, of course, a world of difference between learning to sing a song or read a poem in Eiversch—or any other language—and translating the angry conversation of two strangers while you are slung over the shoulder of one, being carried through the midnight forests of mountainous Vystrana. Now that I recognized the language, though, I was able to follow the general thrust of the argument, which I shall take the liberty of re-creating.

“You’re an idiot,” my bearer said in disgust—except he used some word I did not know, whose meaning, I suspect, was rather more opprobrious. “I told you not to go back there.”

“I didn’t think it would do any harm!” the young lover protested. (I had seen his face while they were trussing me, and he could not have been much more than a year or two above my age, if that.)

My bearer snorted and hitched me higher on his shoulder. “You mean you didn’t think I would notice. You’re lucky I did, or this little chit would have followed you all the way back to our camp.”

“What does that matter?” the lover asked sullenly. “You’re bringing her there yourself.”

So he was, and I did not like to think why that might be. But knowledge was my one tool, and so I kept listening.

“I’m not about to let her go running back and raise a cry,” my bearer said. “Maybe the locals ignore you going for a tickle with your pretty widow, but this one isn’t from around here. I want to know who she is, and what she’s doing here. Then we’ll decide what to do with her.”

For all that “we,” he spoke like a leader—of this pair at least, and likely of more. And they hadn’t been in the area for long, or they would know of Drustanev’s Scirling visitors.

I grunted as the pieces fell into place. Yellow hair, and a dialect recognizable, if only barely, as Eiversch: these fellows must be Staulerens. I could not, in that moment, remember the details of their history, but an army from Eiverheim had marched through these mountains some two hundred years previously, and some, being cut off at war’s end with no pay and no way home, had settled in the region. Their descendents, known as Staulerens, lived for the most part on the northern side of the Vystrani mountains, but their young men occasionally crossed south toward Chiavora, for one clandestine (and lucrative) purpose:

Smuggling.

Well, two clandestine purposes, if one counted midnight tickles with pretty widows. But smuggling was of primary importance. Brandy or opium, I wondered—not that it much mattered, except insofar as it might tell me whether my captors were more likely to be drunk or drugged when they decided what to do with me. Did smugglers sample their own cargo? I had no idea. Nor any idea what to do with my understanding, except cling tight to it and wait for a chance.

Upside down and blindfolded as I was, I cannot say how long I was carried through the woods. All my blood had rushed to my head, and my bearer’s shoulder digging into my lower abdomen became more painful with each step. Furthermore, my clothing was far from sufficient for the nighttime chill; I have known winter days in Scirland that are warmer than a Floris night in Vystrana. Consequently, it came as a complete surprise when my bearer stopped and dumped me without ceremony to the ground.

My first reaction was pure relief, that I could relax my abused stomach muscles and breathe freely. All around me was half-intelligible speech in Eiversch, which I hadn’t the wit to attend to. Then a hand snatched the kerchief from my head, and I could see.

Even the small fire burning nearby was too much light at first. I blinked and curled my legs under me, less to hide my bare ankles than to warm them. There were half a dozen men, I saw, all Staulerens, each one more villainous-looking than the last, if only from lack of bathing. My bearer knelt in front of me, kerchief in hand, and addressed me in Vystrani. “Who are you?”

I thought of my shouting matches with Dagmira, my deplorable grammar, and judged it better to take my chances with standard Eiversch. In that tongue, I said, “I’m sorry—I don’t speak Vystrani very well. Can you understand me?”

His eyebrows went up, and the others muttered in surprise. “You’re from Eiverheim?” my bearer asked.

Judging by the way the others were standing back, letting him question me, he was indeed their leader. I quickly reviewed the formal pronouns in my mind—it is never bad policy to be polite to one’s captor—and said, “No, I am from Scirland. But you and your companions are Staulerens, are you not? I thought we might converse more easily in your language.”

From what I could gather out of the laughter and muttered jokes between the other men, they thought it grand comedy that I was using formal pronouns for their leader. The man himself grinned. “Scirling, eh? And what are you doing here, in Vystrana?”

During the men’s interruption, I had taken swift inventory of my present assets. They consisted of one inadequately warm robe, one even more inadequate nightgown, a pair of shoes. I had other belongings back in Drustanev—but we’d brought equipment more than money, and these men would not want to show their faces to negotiate for my ransom. The pine needles, small stones, and dirt within my reach. Myself.

As I have said before, I am an old woman now, and don’t much care whom I shock or offend. I will tell you honestly that I thought of the pretty widow in Drustanev, and I thought of myself: not particularly pretty, but young and healthy (which goes quite far, among men isolated in the mountains), and far from completely attired; and I wondered if I might be able to bargain my charms in exchange for release.

Did you not believe me when I wrote earlier of my deranged practicality? Perhaps this will convince you, then. We are not supposed to speak of such things, of course, but on that cold night, my mind performed an even colder arithmetic: it would be better to comply than to be forced, and compliance might preserve my life in the bargain. If I could bring myself to it, which was by no means certain.

Whether I could or not, such tactics would not be my first resort. I answered the leader’s question honestly. “I’m here to study dragons.”

By the perplexity in his expression, he thought at first that the differences of language were causing him to misunderstand. I watched him mouth the words, as if tasting them for consonants I might have pronounced wrong, the way Hingese will sometimes say “bear” when they mean “pear.” “Balaur,” I added helpfully, trusting that he would recognize the Vystrani word.

His eyes widened. “Dra— You mean you are here to hunt them.”

There were at the time big-game hunters who pursued dragons for sport, despite the impossibility of keeping trophies beyond the odd tooth or claw. I shook my head. “No, I mean study. For science.”

“You?” he said in disbelief, gesturing at my disheveled and female self. (He did not use the formal pronoun.)

“Not alone, no,” I said, feeling a twinge of guilt for overstating my role. “I am here with companions. A Scirling earl and his assistant, and my—my husband.” I stumbled over those last words, remembering my bleak calculations of a moment before.

The leader scratched his beard. “Your husband, eh?”

I wondered frantically whether to issue the usual melodramatic threats—If you hurt me, he will hunt you to the ends of the earth!—or to attempt to flirt my way free. Or to claim it was my unclean time; Staulerens, I thought, followed the Temple, even though their brethren back in Eiverheim had since become largely Magisterial. In the end, my conflicting impulses produced a smile.

I cannot describe that smile for you. I have no idea what it looked like to the smuggler; to me it felt like an incoherent blend of hopefulness and desperation. Whatever its appearance, its effect was to make him burst out laughing.

“Good God, woman,” he said, proving by his blasphemy that if he did follow the Temple, he did not do so very well. “You bat your eyelashes at me and expect me to believe you’re here for science?”

“I am!” I said, the confusion of a moment before resolving quite neatly into indignance. “Vystrani rock-wyrms. I came along to do sketches—I’m an artist of sorts—at least, I would do sketches if we knew where the dragons were lairing and could get close. But so far—” That last word stretched out comically as inspiration ambushed me. “You must know! Rock-wyrms don’t normally attack people, or so Lord Hilford says—despite what happened to us on the way here—but they are territorial, and don’t like people coming near their lairs. You’re smugglers, aren’t you? So you must know the mountains very well. Surely you know where the dragons are. Oh, if you tell us how to find them, I’m certain Lord Hilford would pay you handsomely. We’ve wasted so much time already.”

By the time I ran out of breath and words, everyone was staring. In my excitement, I had risen up onto my knees, gesticulating with my bound hands like a Chiavoran street-seller. There was no chance of my captor doubting me now; I would have to have been a stage actress to feign that kind of demented enthusiasm. What sort of woman, upon being kidnapped by smugglers in the middle of the night, would jump for joy at the thought of questioning them about dragons?

He didn’t doubt me, but he didn’t entirely believe my words, either, simply because they made no sense. “Why do you care about dragons?”

I’m afraid I stammered in trying to answer; too many replies attempted to come out of my mouth at once. The scrimmage was won by a simple truth, with me from the moment I held little vinegar-soaked Greenie in my palm. “Because they’re beautiful. And, and—for science, because we know so very little about them. I don’t know why Lord Hilford chose Vystrana, except that he hates the desert, and it’s relatively close to Scirland, as such things go. But—” I belatedly tried to gather my wits. “We are here for scholarly purposes, I assure you. My father has some Minsurgrad brandy that may very well have come through these mountains by, shall we say, an unofficial route; he would not thank me if I interfered with your work.”

My unwise reference to that work hardened his face, but it did not produce violence, as it might have done. The leader sat back on his heels, pulling the kerchief through his fingers as if to smooth it out. “You said three others.” I nodded. “All here to study the dragons?”

I nodded again, and he glanced over at one of his companions—not the young lover. The other man knelt to mutter in his ear, and between the low volume and the dialect I could not catch a word. The leader scowled, and I tensed. But the scowl, it seemed, was not for me. “Your friends,” he said, addressing me. “They can make the dragons stop attacking people?”

My gaze slid past him to the other men. Now that I looked properly, I saw that one leaned on a crutch that looked new-cut, and the clothing of another was stained with an ominous amount of blood, likely not his own. Of course they would be in danger, as much as or more than the people of Drustanev.

Could we make the dragons stop? We had debated possible causes, but without observational data, it was all just speculation. And until we knew the cause, I could only guess at whether we’d be able to affect it.

It is the prerogative of old women to give unlooked-for advice, so let me offer you this, friend reader: when you are lost in the woods and your safe return home depends on telling a Stauleren smuggler that you can help him, that is not the time for a scientific evaluation of your chances. It is the time for smiling and saying, “Yes, absolutely.”

The leader considered this, then stood without replying and went off to the side, gathering his men with him. No one bothered to keep watch over me; there was no need. What was I going to do, run off into the night? I had no sense of which way Drustanev lay, except “downhill.” And there were wolves and bears in these mountains—not to mention angry dragons.

My interlocutor had made some effort to speak distinctly while addressing me, but in conversation with his men it all dissolved into an incomprehensible smear. Besides, I rather thought it would not do to seem like I was eavesdropping. I occupied myself by trying to straighten my nightgown and robe, then hunching over into the most heat-conserving posture I could achieve.

To my surprise, after a minute or so of this, a rough and smelly blanket was dropped over my shoulders. I looked up in time to see the young lover returning to the group. Even that small gesture of charity gladdened my heart, and changed my perspective on these men. They were not the romanticized figures you think of when you hear the words “Stauleren” or “smuggler”—but neither were they vicious cutthroats, ready to murder at the first opportunity. They were simply men, mostly on the youngish side, who made their living by carting boxes of illicit cargo through the mountains. It is a trade that has gone on for ages in this region, though the boundaries, goods, and carriers have changed with time; as occupations go, it is nearly as venerable as sheep-herding, and the local boyars rarely rouse themselves to stop it.

Even the “leader” seemed a democratic sort, consulting with his fellows before arriving at a decision. This did not take very long, though. Soon they broke up, and he returned to kneel before me. “At first light,” he said, “we take you back down to the village. You tell your men we want to meet with them, at the spring below the cliff. Can they find the place?”

I had drawn it on the map myself. “Yes.”

“We want money,” he said. “And help. Money first; then we tell them where the dragons are. Then they quiet the beasts down. So long as they do that, and don’t try to interfere with us, we’ll leave you alone.”

He hadn’t named a figure, but bargaining over the price of my safety was a task I would gladly leave to the gentlemen. “I understand.”

The smuggler reached out and untied my hands, then my feet. “Get some sleep.”

He turned to go, and the words burst out of me: a deep-seated Scirling impulse toward good manners, entirely out of place in my current surroundings. “I am Isabella Camherst.”

He cast a glance back over his shoulder at me, eyebrows raised. Then a hint of a smile lifted the corner of his mouth. “Chatzkel,” he said. Only his given name: well, I could not blame a criminal for not wanting to identify himself more than was necessary.

“Thank you,” I said, and he went on his way.

By then it was long past the time that my midnight wakefulness should have ended. With my blood still racing, though, and the ground hard and cold beneath me, I did not manage a second sleep that night.

TEN

Sunrise, as seen from high on a mountain, is a truly glorious thing.

The light cut like a knife blade through the trees, setting aglow the mist that had gathered in the valleys below. Its cold brilliance hurt my eyes, but I was glad to see it all the same; it meant I would soon be going—

Not home. In fact, that sleepless dawn in the mountains brought with it the strongest tide of homesickness I have ever felt. I often miss Scirland during my travels; there is a great deal to be said for the place where one need not think, all the time, about the right thing to do or say, but simply behave according to well-worn habit, and that feeling has never been more intense than on my morning with the smugglers. But I had spent enough time in Gritelkin’s dark house for it to feel like the closest thing to safety I would find in Vystrana. I very much wanted to return.

My cold-stiffened legs had other ideas. I tried to stand, failed entirely, and turned my back on the men so I could massage my calves and thighs into something resembling life. My feet remained frozen, but I could not bring myself to beg for stockings. No one gave me breakfast, either; I suspected, by their lean and hungry looks, that they had little enough for themselves.

Most of the men stayed behind; the leader and two others formed my escort. Each carried a rifle and a pistol, which I hoped were only for such wildlife as we might encounter on the way. I tried to return the blanket to the young lover with a smile and thanks in Eiversch, but he pressed it back onto me, and in truth I was glad for its warmth as we began our hike.

At first I was also glad to be traveling on my own feet, rather than being carried like a sack of meal. Three falls later, my joy had been firmly tempered. My cold feet were clumsy, and my attire, as I said before, was quite unsuitable; clutching the blanket about myself meant I could not use my hands for balance, until I knotted it around my shoulders like a lumpy shawl. I attempted to question the men about how they survived in the mountains, but was ordered into silence; and so we went down to Drustanev.

Most of the way. Before we came within sight of the village, however, we heard sound echoing up the narrow valley: shouts, and the barking of dogs. One of the men immediately grabbed my arm; the smuggler threw up a silencing hand. I swallowed a moan as my slow, sleep-deprived mind realized what the racket must be.

Jacob had turned out the population of Drustanev to search for me.

Guiltily, I thought what his morning must have been like. He awoke not long after dawn; I was not in bed. He went downstairs, thinking to find me, but found no sign. Dagmira or the cook might have arrived by then, and neither knew where I was. A quick glance would show that I had gone out without dressing. My tracks would lead out of the village, and then…

I had seen the care with which the smugglers broke and hid our trail on the way down. They might well have done the same during my abduction, which meant the search would not lead back to their camp. But to my husband, it would look like I had wandered inexplicably out of the village—then vanished.

And the most obvious explanation would be that I had been eaten by a dragon.

My heart ached for the panic I must have caused him. Ached, and then tightened in fear for what might yet go further wrong. “Let me go on alone,” I said in an urgent whisper. “You don’t wish to be seen, do you? I can find my way from here. And I’ll send the men to meet with you as planned.”

Daylight had revealed the leader’s face more clearly: weather-worn features, with blue Stauleren eyes and a fortnight’s growth of beard. That latter did not obscure the clenching of his jaw as he considered me. “You have my word of honor,” I said, drawing myself up with as much dignity as I could manage in my current state.

Whether the word of a Scirling gentlewoman meant anything to him, or whether he simply decided it wasn’t worth the trouble of keeping me, I do not know. But he waved me on with a curt hand. “Tomorrow,” he said as I passed him. “The spring beneath the cliff.”

I resolved that someone would be there to meet him, if I had to go by myself.

The barking grew louder as I scrambled down toward the searchers, trying to put distance between myself and my erstwhile hosts before I drew anyone’s attention. When I judged I had gone far enough, I began to shout, and soon they found me.

I will spare you the tedious details of what followed. (Much of it escaped me anyway, owing to my inferior grasp of Vystrani.) For posterity’s sake, however, I should note the reactions of two individuals upon my return.

The first, of course, was Jacob, who was leading the search. His first action upon seeing me was to crush me in the tightest embrace we had ever shared; and if the blanket over my shoulder was damp by the time we parted, I made no comment on it. “Thank the Lord you’re safe,” he said, and then on the heels of that, “Where in heaven have you been?”

He asked that question several more times before I managed to give him an answer, though not for lack of trying on my part; every time I opened my mouth, he declared anew his relief over my safe return, and soon this was further interrupted by orders to call off the search. We were halfway back to Drustanev—I had to insist to Jacob that I was perfectly capable of walking, or he might have carried me—before I could say, “It’s quite a complicated story, and I will tell it, but perhaps we should wait until Lord Hilford and Mr. Wilker can also hear. But oh, Jacob—I have solved our problems. I know where the dragons are lairing.”

“Dragons!” he exclaimed, stopping dead in a damp meadow. “Isabella, what are you talking about? Were you attacked?”

“No, no,” I said, fending off a renewed attempt to check me for injury. He had already catalogued the various scrapes resulting from my falls, and fussed over them as if they were a collection of broken legs. “Rather, I don’t know; someone else does—”

I remembered that we were surrounded by men from Drustanev, and stopped before I could say any more. We were speaking Scirling, of course, which I doubted any of the villagers understood, but better safe than sorry. Jacob finally agreed to wait for the full story, but I think it was more out of conviction that I was overwrought by my experiences than anything else.

The other noteworthy reaction came later, after I had been fed, doctored, buried under a pile of fire-warmed blankets, and finally permitted to dress. Dagmira undertook this task, and lambasted me up one side and down the other for my stupidity in going out like that.

“There was a man lurking about,” I said in frustration, trying to stop her tirade. An indiscretion—I had not meant to bring up the man—and one that did no good.

“A man? A man! Of course there was a man,” she said furiously. “Everyone knows Reveka has her lover, ever since her husband died. One of those Stauleren smugglers. Anyone could have told you that. No need to go running around the mountains to find out!”

So much for my indiscretion in mentioning him; the smugglers, it seemed, were no secret at all in Drustanev. Except, of course, where the Scirling interlopers were concerned. “Would you have told me, if I asked? Would anyone?”

“Of course not,” Dagmira snapped. “It’s none of your business.”

I forebore to point out that then there was need to go running about the mountains. My fractured interactions with Dagmira—nothing like so fluent as I represent them here, but for my readers’ sakes I will not subject you to a reconstruction of my appalling grammar and circumlocutions—had made it clear to me that the villagers of Drustanev had very little understanding of, let alone sympathy for, our reasons for being there. Gritelkin, I suspected, had not told them much, except that we intended to tramp around the mountains looking for dragons. As a result, we were an intrusion, an imposition upon their lives, and the sooner we were gone the better. As Dagmira said, their affairs were none of our business.

I let her finish dressing me, and went at last to speak with the three men whose affairs very much were my business—as mine were theirs.

They let me tell my story in peace, barring the occasional yelp of alarm or disbelief from Jacob. He withheld actual comment until I was done, though, at which point he dropped his face into his hands. “I should never have let you come here,” he said through their muffling barrier.

“I took no real harm,” I said defiantly. “A scraped knee, at worst. And how much time have I saved you? We could waste the entire summer up here, waiting for Mr. Gritelkin to come back—well, this way we can get on with our research.”

“If this smuggler can help,” Mr. Wilker said, not bothering to hide his doubt. “His trade may teach him a great deal about the mountains—but dragons?”

“You can hardly know the one without the other—not if you wish to avoid being eaten,” I said.

Lord Hilford huffed thoughtfully, sending his moustaches fluttering. “I tell you again, they do not ordinarily attack people. But we stand to lose very little by following this lead. Mrs. Camherst has given her word that the men will be paid for her return; we cannot dishonor that. Furthermore, it sounds likely that the smugglers can tell us more about the dragons’ sudden aggressiveness, which will be of value even without directions to their lairs. Yes, it will do,” he said, with a decisive air. “Tomorrow we will go to meet them.”

I had, during our journeys, seen Mr. Wilker argue with other men, and often with me; but never with the earl. “You can’t be serious! Trusting these fellows—”

“Who said anything about trusting them?” Lord Hilford asked in surprise. “I intend to bring both of you with me, you and Camherst both, and you can argue about who gets to skulk in the bushes with a rifle. Not you, though, Mrs. Camherst, or your husband will have an apoplexy.”

I think that a rather unfair word for Jacob’s sentiments, but it is true that his nerves hadn’t yet recovered from the scare. A part of me sorely wished to argue that I could mark the map, but any of the others could do that as well as me; only their marks would not be as elegant. And that argumentative part drooped its ears and tucked its tail between its legs upon seeing the look in Jacob’s eyes. I am not the sort of lady for whom protectiveness sets her heart aflutter, but the incident had revealed an intensity of feeling in my husband that took me quite by surprise. I had thought us friends, and so we were; but the word fell short of describing all.

(Indeed, that same night we discovered one of the primary uses for that wakeful period between one’s first sleep and one’s second—the same use to which Reveka and her young lover had put their time.)

(Oh, for goodness’ sake. I have already spoken about my fears when facing the smugglers; why should I not address the other side of that coin? It isn’t as if the people reading this book are unlikely to be familiar with the activity. And if they are, I heartily encourage the adults among them to put the book down this instant and discover one of the simpler pleasures in life. I am a natural historian; I assure you, it is common to all species, and nothing to be ashamed of.)

So, for my husband’s peace of mind, I agreed to be left behind.

By dawn the next day, I was just as glad not to be going out to the spring. My stockingless feet had been rubbed raw by the hike down from the smugglers’ camp; I padded about our borrowed house in thick wool socks, a compromise between protecting my blisters and keeping my toes warm. I soon discovered, though, the downside to sparing my husband’s nerves: I quite destroyed my own.

“What do you know of these smugglers?” I asked Dagmira as she beat out a rug on the slope behind our house. Her various looks were gradually becoming more familiar to me; I recognized this one as exasperation that I should ask so stupid a question. I clarified. “Are they violent men?”

Dagmira did not know the gentlemen had gone out to meet the smugglers—or rather, I thought she did not know; village gossips can uncover the strangest things. At any rate, she seemed to take my question as an aftereffect of my own experience. “They didn’t hurt you, did they? They keep away from people, mostly. Unless people chase after them.”

The barb sailed right past me. My attention was on her earlier words, so reminiscent of Lord Hilford’s statement about the rock-wyrms. “Dragons have attacked people before, haven’t they? I mean, in past years.”

Clearly Dagmira had no idea why I had seemingly changed topics. “You hear stories,” she said with a shrug. “A cousin’s cousin, from the next valley over.”

“Does it happen on any kind of cycle? Generationally, perhaps—” I stopped, for the exasperated look was back. Teach a dragon to hatch eggs, as they say nowadays. If the problem was anything like so regular, these people, dwelling in the mountains for centuries, would have noticed. “But it hasn’t happened in Drustanev before, at least not for a long time. When did it start?”

She delivered a particularly vicious blow to the rug, sending dust flying. “Last autumn. Nebulis.”

Mating season, perhaps? We knew very little about dragon mating habits. (We knew very little about dragon anything; hence this expedition.) But it would have taken Gritelkin some time to be sure of the problem, and by then, the mountains would be all but impassable. So he waited for spring—which I still was not convinced had arrived; I could see snow not a hundred feet from where I stood—and then sent his message. It was not his fault that the vagaries of travel and communication prevented him from warning us off.

Pulling my notebook from my skirt pocket, I asked, “What about injuries? Or deaths?”

The thwack of Dagmira’s rug-beater punctuated her words, which came out terse with the force of it. “Two deaths. Don’t know how many hurt. Half a dozen, maybe.”

Plus Mingelo, the Chiavoran driver. Averaged across six months, it was not so bad—but of course that did not tell me how many had narrowly missed harm. Dagmira, however, had redoubled her efforts, and the noise prevented me from asking more. I tried not to calculate the odds of an attack on any given day—and refrained from asking whether a cousin’s cousin from the next valley over had ever been killed by smugglers—and went back to pacing in my thick wool socks.

I nearly melted in relief when the gentlemen returned. My eyes went to Jacob first; he looked thoughtful. Mr. Wilker looked faintly sulky, and Lord Hilford, to my secret satisfaction, looked jubilant. “Well done, Mrs. Camherst,” he said once we had all withdrawn to our workroom. “Tom, lay that map out on the table, so she can see. They do indeed know where the dragons are, and more besides.”

Jacob had marked the various locations with a lead pencil, which told me Mr. Wilker must have been the one lurking in the bushes with the rifle. “We will have to adjust them as we go looking,” he said when I clicked my tongue over the rough marks defacing my pretty map. “The smugglers knew a fair bit, but they say the dragons move around, so none of this is certain.”

“Some things are certain,” Lord Hilford said, settling into a chair. “Dragons lair in caves, and so do smugglers—or rather, their goods do. And Vystrani rock-wyrms have a fiercely territorial streak, it seems.”

“Fierce enough to cause these attacks?” I asked, glancing up from the map.

Jacob shook his head. “If it were, incidents like this would be much more common, and the smugglers would know the cause.”

“But,” the earl said, holding up one finger, “the territorial response is not always the same. Rock-wyrms wishing to chase off an interloper most often breathe particles of ice. Sometimes, however, they attack more closely. And the accepted theory among smugglers is that this happens when the dragon is sick.”

I immediately saw possibilities in this. “Illness might interfere with the operation of their extraordinary breath. Could it be the dragons are sick? But no—they aren’t defending their territory, not unless one was lairing near the road by which we came.”

“It depends on the size of the territory,” Jacob said. “But from what the smugglers told us, the range for such attacks is fairly small.”

I sat to take the weight off my complaining feet, and propped my elbows on my knees to think. “How many dragons have been attacking people, anyway? If it’s only one or two, it might be something exceptional—some kind of degeneration, perhaps, that causes them to run mad. If it seems widespread, though…”

“Then the entire local population might be diseased,” Lord Hilford said.

This grim possibility put us all into silence for a few moments. My experience thus far with dragons in the wild had given me no reason to feel kindly toward them, but I did not like the notion of so many falling victim to contagion.

Of course, we had no proof of the theory; only the speculation of smugglers. We did, however, have information that might let us proceed. “Now that we have the map,” I asked, “what next?”

Lord Hilford levered himself out of his chair and went to study the map. “We confirm these reports—carefully, mind you—and then get on with the work we should have been doing a fortnight ago, if Gritelkin hadn’t gone haring off. I think, under the circumstances, that we might turn our attention first to anatomical study.”

Mr. Wilker frowned at him. “Observation? Or do you mean to hunt one of them?”

The earl tapped the map, frowning as he weighed one location against another. “Hunting, I should think; we can catch two wolves with one snare. We’ve brought an artist with us; well, she needs a specimen to draw, at closer range than on the wing. And if there is some kind of disease among them, we may find signs of it.”

I was sadly slow to catch his meaning about the artist. “You mean—I am to help you?”

He gave me a conspiratorial smile. “It’s why we brought you, isn’t it? That and to file papers—but we don’t yet have any, so there you have it.”

Is it any wonder I developed such reckless habits later in life? Chase after smugglers in the middle of the night; achieve information and a chance to further my dreams. With rewards such as those, I naturally concluded that such behavior was a splendid idea.

Blisters and scrapes forgotten, I stood, unable to contain my grin. “I should gather my materials, then.”

ELEVEN

Yes, we shot a dragon.

I find it fascinating that so many people take exception to this. Not simply in light of my later attitudes on the matter; no, the objections began long before then, as soon as the book detailing our research in Vystrana was published. People exclaimed over our “monstrous” actions, destroying a dragon simply so that we might understand how it worked.

These same people do not seem to care in the least that at the height of the Great Sparkling Inquiry, I had no less than six hundred and fourteen specimens in my shed—very few of them dead from natural causes. Entomologists trap insects in their killing jars and then pin their corpses to cards, and no one utters a single squeak of protest. For that matter, let a gentleman hunt a tiger for its skin, and everyone applauds his courage. But to shoot a dragon for science? That, for some reason, is cruel.

Mind you, these objections come exclusively from men and women in Scirland and similar countries, most of them (I imagine) extolling the sanctity of dragons from the comfort of their homes, far from any actual beast of the breed. Indeed, few of those letter-writers seem to have seen a single dragon in their lives. They certainly have not spent days among Vystrani shepherds, for whom dragons are neither sacred nor even likable, but rather troublesome predators who all too often make off with the shepherds’ livelihood in their jaws. The men of Drustanev did not hesitate to shoot dragons, I assure you. We might even have waited for one of them to do the deed, at which point my letter-writers might have been better satisfied with our virtue. But Vystrani shepherds try very hard to avoid dragons when possible, and we were impatient to get on with our work. So the gentlemen of our party studied the map, shouldered their guns, and went out to find their prey.

And I went with them. It was not at all like my first journey out from Drustanev; this time I was fully dressed and properly shod, and the piercing mountain sun illuminated our path. This second expedition did much to improve my feelings toward the region: by my standards the air was still bitterly cold for the season, but the brilliance and life of my surroundings could not be denied. We saw eagles and thrushes, rabbits and deer, and even one bear lumbering down the far side of the valley. When I stepped apart from the men to take care of a certain biological matter, I startled a lynx, which stared at me with flat, unfriendly eyes before melting away into the trees.

We had chosen for our destination the nearest and most isolated of the dragon lairs the smugglers had identified, in the hopes of disturbing only one beast. (While we might have gotten a great deal of observational data from having three or four wyrms descend upon us at once, I feared it would all be lost to science ten minutes later.) With us came the servant lad Iljish and another, Relesku, to act as our porters; they carried food and tents, for this expedition was expected to keep us out for several days. The gentlemen carried their guns and other tools, and I had my artistic materials, which I insisted upon carrying myself.

I had studied the map a great deal before we left, and formed a private theory as to where the smugglers’ camp was, based on my recollection of the climb down. Our hunt took us westward of that place, over a sharp ridge and into another valley, bisected by a snowmelt stream. Pausing for breath at the top of the ridge, I thought I saw something in the lower distance: a shape too far and too shrouded in trees to be made out clearly, but also too blocky to be mistaken for an ordinary mountain. I squinted, to very little effect; the field glass was in Lord Hilford’s keeping. And the others had gotten ahead of me, so that there was no one nearby to ask about it. By the time I puffed my way down to them, I had grown too embarrassed by my slowness to ask any questions; but as it turned out, the answers came to me a few days later, and so I will return to the mysterious shape in time.

We were not going tremendously far—only seven miles or so. Lord Hilford stopped us mid-afternoon, in a steep little defile too narrow and overhung with trees for a rock-wyrm to stoop on us from above. “You will stay here, Mrs. Camherst, with Iljish and the tents,” he said. “I trust we can leave the arrangement of the camp in your capable hands? Many thanks. We’ll scout out the place before the light fades, and pick a location for our blind; then, with any luck, we’ll nail the beast tomorrow morning.”

Being no kind of hunter myself, I accepted this with grace. The men departed; Iljish began erecting the tents, and I set about making the camp, if not comfortable, then at least an efficient place from which to work.

Lord Hilford, Jacob, and Relesku returned shortly before sunset, with the news that they had found both the lair and sufficient sign as to persuade them it was in current use. Mr. Wilker had stayed behind to wait for the dragon’s return, so as to forestall the possibility of the men watching an empty hole come morning.

The food—garlic-laden sausages, bread, and a spicy bean paste I was growing tolerant of—required little in the way of preparation, so I tugged Jacob’s sleeve until he bent to listen. “Could we not see the dragon from here?”

“In the sky, perhaps—but there’s more than one cave nearby, and we didn’t have time to check them all,” Jacob said, frowning. “That’s why it was necessary to leave Wilker keeping watch.”

I waved this away with an impatient hand. “No, I meant—I wish to see the dragon, Jacob. Before you’ve shot it and laid it out for me to draw. See that boulder up there?” I directed his attention to a rock I’d had my eye on since we arrived at the gully. “If we cut a few branches to hide ourselves, and sat very still…”

I expected him to protest. But Jacob gave me an amused look and kissed the top of my head. “I knew the moment I saw that rock that you would not rest until you could perch atop it and watch for dragons. Yes, as long as we take precautions, it should be safe. They say dragons see movement better than shapes, and pine boughs should hide our scent.”

So it was that, when sunset came, I was seated on a lofty boulder, with the sharp bite of pine sap in my nose and my husband’s arms encircling my shoulders. The fading light flamed across the tops of the ridges, sending the valleys into deep shadow, and the stark contrast was breathtaking.

And then the dragon came.

It flew in from the west, so that all I truly saw at first was a black silhouette against the fiery sky. Then it caught an updraft and skimmed up the mountain’s slope, barely above the trees, and that gave me a better view: the blocky plates of the hide; the close-tucked legs and trailing tail; the enormous expanse of wings dwarfing the body they bore.

I did not realize I had stopped breathing until the dragon backwinged to land in some clearing hidden from my view, and Jacob kissed the top of my head once more. Then I let out my stale air in a wavering breath, drew in fresh, and leaned back to return my husband’s kiss.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Thank you,” he murmured. “Were it not for your prodding, I likely would not be here.”

Atop this boulder? Or in Vystrana at all? I didn’t ask, because in the end it didn’t matter. He had come—both of us had—and I felt a surge of emotion I can only describe as terrified joy at the thought of having missed this. Had we not met Lord Hilford—had Jacob refused to let me join the expedition—

I might have missed my chance at the life I was always meant to live.

I must have spoken that thought aloud, for Jacob’s hands stilled on my shoulders, and then he said, “You truly mean that, don’t you.”

My mouth opened silently, as if hoping the right words would alight on my tongue, and give me some way of explaining the fierce, indescribable thing that swelled in my heart. No such happy incident occurred, but I tried anyway. “Ever since I was a girl. I want to understand things, Jacob; and we understand dragons so very little. We can’t breed them, we can barely keep them in captivity—” I stopped, for my tongue was leading me down intellectual paths, when it was passion I needed to explain. “This will sound very silly.”

He squeezed my shoulders, as if supporting me. “I promise not to laugh.”

“It’s—it’s as if there is a dragon inside me. I don’t know how big she is; she may still be growing. But she has wings, and strength, and—and I can’t keep her in a cage. She’ll die. I’ll die. I know it isn’t modest to say these things, but I know I’m capable of more than life in Scirland will allow. It’s all right for women to study theology, or literature, but nothing so rough and ready as this. And yet this is what I want. Even if it’s hard, even if it’s dangerous. I don’t care. I need to see where my wings can carry me.”

I had reason to be glad that I was leaning back against Jacob; it meant I did not have to look in his face as I said these things, which sounded like pure foolishness to my own prosaic ears.

But it also meant I could feel the tension in his body, resisting my declaration of unconcern for danger. Our society did not only dictate the boundaries of my life; it also circumscribed him, saying he would fail as a man and a husband if he permitted me to risk myself in such fashion.

He was holding his breath, I realized, and a moment later released it in a long gust. “Oh, Isabella,” he murmured. “I thought—at times, while we were planning this journey, I thought I was like an indulgent father, who could not bear to see a child unhappy. But that was a disservice to us both. You are no child. You—” Something shook his body. I was surprised to identify it as a suppressed laugh. “This will sound terrible.”

“Tell me.”

“Do you remember the Vystrani runt in the menagerie?”

“The albino? Of course.” Lord Hilford’s prize, and in so many ways, the reason both Jacob and I were here.

“You remind me of that dragon.”

Now I sat up and twisted to face him, torn between outrage and hilarity. “I’m a pale, sexless runt?!”

He fended me off with his hands, laughter getting the better of him. “Not in the least. But Mr. Swargin always said it was surprisingly robust. I think if Hilford hadn’t captured it, the creature would have lived a fine life somewhere in these mountains.” Jacob sobered, hands sliding down my arms to grip my hands. “I don’t want you to pine away, Isabella. If it’s my job, as your husband, to take care of you, then I will do so—by giving you the life you need.”

Something else swelled in my heart, then, that was not in the least dragonlike. I could not bring myself to let it free, though; it was too personal, with our companions so close. I swallowed down three different responses, and finally managed to say, “Thank you. I should not like to be neighbours with a Moulish swamp-wyrm.”

We stared at each other for a moment, then burst into laughter that must have scared off every nonhuman animal for half a mile around.

Once we had regained our composure, we climbed back down, ate our sausages reeking of garlic, and welcomed Mr. Wilker when he returned bearing word that the dragon had indeed gone where expected. The men retired immediately, for theirs would be a very early rising, and if it were not for the exertion of carrying my artistic materials across miles of mountain terrain, I would not have slept a wink that night.

I certainly roused with ease when the men did, and chewed my fingernails to nubs after they were gone. Vystrani rock-wyrms are primarily crepuscular hunters, hunting in the morning and evening, but subsiding into wary sleep during the brightest part of the day. Catching one napping is extremely difficult; far easier to accost one in the awkward moment of leaving its lair, before it can take to wing.

The abrupt crack of a rifle a little over an hour later brought me whirling around to face the direction they’d gone. Before I’d completed half the turn, two more shots echoed the first; then a fourth. Then, as I held my breath once again, a fifth, much belated—as if to put a dying beast out of its misery.

“They got it,” I murmured, staring toward the upper end of the gully as if my gaze could penetrate rock and tree to see the men. (In fact I was staring in the wrong direction; the cave lay about forty degrees westward of the way the gully pointed.)

If I thought I could find the location unaided, I would have gone charging off that instant, without pen or paper or anything else of use. Since I had to wait, I gathered everything up, and went to wait at the top of the gully. The moment I saw Jacob, I hurried to greet him, and to meet my dragon in person.

The carcass sprawled across a bare shoulder of limestone, whose scored surface gave testament to the dragon’s leaps and landings. Its grey, plated hide blended very well with that backdrop, giving me a sudden jolt as I wondered how many of the stony outcrops we had passed the day before might have included drowsing dragons. The head had fallen more or less in the direction of our approach, and the mighty jaw gaped open, the green eyes already glazing over in death.

The memory of the attack we suffered on our way to Drustanev had not left me. Even knowing the beast was quite dead, I hesitated to approach the dragon. It seemed both larger and smaller than I expected; larger because I was so near, and smaller because it lay so still. I held my breath as I put one foot forward, and then the next, until at last I was close enough to lay my hand upon the grey hide, its warmth already fading in the chill mountain air.

A dragon. More than a badly drawn shape on the page; more than a sudden threat from above. Real, and in front of me—and now we would begin to learn its secrets.

Lord Hilford and Mr. Wilker were already busy taking measurements: wingspan, girth, length from nose to tail. (Ours was quite a good specimen, nearly five meters in total length, and very well proportioned.) Then smaller divisions: the head, the neck, the spread of its claws, and so on. We had no convenient way to weigh the beast, alas; only Mr. Chiggins’s formula, which has since been proven woefully inadequate for calculating the mass of a dragon. But we did our best.

My job, of course, was to draw. I had given a great deal of thought to how I wished to approach this task, and so did not hesitate before giving orders. “Jacob, darling, could you spread out one wing? The right one will do very nicely, yes, across the stone there. Relesku may begin the task of skinning the other, for the muscular and skeletal drawings; I expect that will take him a little while. Best we do the more delicate parts before proceeding to the main body.”

The exposed location was good for our purposes; it would receive sunlight for almost the entire day. We posted Iljish to keep watch for dragons, and set to work.

I laid out my drawing board, charcoal, ink, and pens, and clipped a sheet of paper into place. I half expected my hands to tremble: I was standing scarcely one foot from a dragon—albeit a dead one—and the time had come for me to justify my presence with the expedition; surely that was enough to make any young woman nervous. And so I was; but my hands knew their business, and carried it out without concerning themselves over the state of my brain.

The first priority, of course, was a rapid sketch of the carcass, providing suggestions of the surrounding terrain, and including Jacob for scale as he crouched to take a cast of the dragon’s teeth. Although the drawings of details would be more useful to science, it was just as vital to depict the whole; most dragon illustrations at the time still held deplorable inaccuracies, showing the beasts with humanlike shoulder joints, or bodies far too thick, or wings far too small. My first sketch would be the frame into which we would fit the later details. But I could not take too long at it, and so once I had the most necessary lines, I bent to the task of drawing the wing.

Its structure is remarkable. The uninformed often say that dragons have “batlike wings,” which is a gross oversimplification. It is true that the appearance of a dragon’s wing (and here I speak of the most common terrestrial species) is more akin to that of a bat than a bird, with a membrane stretched between elongated phalanges. But it is more accurate to say there are four major types of wings extant in the animal kingdom: birdlike, batlike, insectlike, and dragonlike. The spacing of the phalangeal joints makes the fourth type entirely distinct.

But all of that thought came later, once I was in a more scientific frame of mind. That particular day, two things distracted me as I worked. The first, of course, was the periodic spurts of giddy joy: I was drawing a dragon wing! All my girlhood obsession had come to fruition in most spectacular fashion.

The second was less pleasant. Relesku had dutifully gone to work skinning the beast’s other wing, adding to the blood shed by the hunt, and the odor rapidly grew from “noticeable” to “appalling.” It occurred to me to wonder whether airborne predators posed the greatest danger after all; any number of creatures in these mountains would be drawn to the smell of fresh meat. Then again, most were leery of humans, and none were currently on a rampage against us. But the stench was very distracting, even for one as little squeamish as I.

There was no avoiding it, though. A tiger may be killed and preserved by a taxidermist, or defleshed and its skeleton studied at leisure; not so with a dragon. They did not fall to ash as sparklings did, but it was well known at the time that dragon bones rapidly became frangible postmortem, defying even the most careful padding to keep them intact. Even one day after death, simply picking up a bone in your hand could be enough to crack it, and the degeneration grew worse with time. This, of course, was one of the primary reasons we had so few accurate sketches; such work must be done in the field, and rapidly, before the decay progressed too far.

Relesku had not yet finished skinning the other wing when I finished drawing my own. I took a moment to lift the limb and study the underside. Despite common sense, I expected it to be heavy; a rock-wyrm’s wingspan is often comparable to its length, and my brain was convinced anything so large must be correspondingly weighty. But of course a heavy wing would not permit flight. The humerus, radius, and ulna are hollow, and the phalanges consist of tough, lightweight cartilage. The membrane of the wing itself is shockingly thin, to the point where I expected it to tear in my hand. But it stretched over my fingers without rupturing, a smoothly pebbled surface.

At least, it felt pebbled when I drew my fingers from the bones toward the wing edge. As I slid my hand back in the other direction, though, intending to lift the wing higher, the membrane rasped at my skin like a cat’s tongue.

“Lord Hilford,” I said to the earl, who was taking a cast of a nearby taloned foot, “have you noticed this before?”

He came and ran his hand over the wing’s underside. The roughness was only palpable there; the top surface felt quite smooth, if a little porous. “Hmm!” he exclaimed, bracing the wing higher so as to get a better look. “Indeed I have not. Mind you, I’ve only ever been within touching distance of my little runt, never a fully grown rock-wyrm. Is this a skin condition the beast is suffering, or a common feature my runt lacked? I wonder.”

The earl retrieved a piece of hide from Relesku’s work and slid his palm across it. “Same thing here. Tom, bring me the magnifying glass—” He examined it beneath the lens. “Hmm. It’s clearly textured in some fashion, but I can’t make out enough at this magnification. We’ll have to try it under the microscope, back at the house. Damnation—your pardon, Mrs. Camherst—I knew I should have brought brandy. The skin and flesh don’t degenerate in the same way as the bones, but they do decay. Well, cut a good sample, and we’ll hope this chill works in our favor, for once.”

His mention of decay recalled me to my purpose, and its urgency. I drew the body, sprawled inelegantly across the stone, and then the opposite wing was ready for me, stench and all. Dragon’s blood is truly a pungent thing; I recommend avoiding it if possible. I ended up sacrificing dignity for comfort, cutting two pieces from my handkerchief and stuffing them up my nostrils for relief.

Thus protected, I sketched the musculature and skeletal structure of the wing. Then the true butchery began. Mr. Wilker, whose veterinary knowledge surpassed my own, was determined to dig for whatever organ gave rise to a rock-wyrm’s extraordinary breath. This necessitated turning the carcass onto its back and thoroughly gutting it. (I caught a glimpse of the wishbone, and did not try to suppress my smile.) I had not yet drawn the feet in anything like sufficient detail, but since we had casts of those, it was decided that I should first devote my time to the skull. Mr. Wilker, in an oddly chosen attempt to protect my feminine sensibilities, had Relesku hack off the necessary bit and carry it a little distance away from the rest of the body.

There are undoubtedly stranger experiences in life than sitting cross-legged on an outcropping of stone with a severed dragon head facing you like the skull of Gortos himself—indeed, I have had my share over the years—but I must say that one ranks fairly high.

Especially when one begins conversing with the head. “This is most undignified for you,” I confided to the staring eyes, their green filming over with grey already. “My apologies. You were on your way to find breakfast, and instead you found us. I don’t suppose it would comfort you to know how much we are learning? No, I imagine not.”

The jaws remained silent and shut. (A good thing, too, or I would have fallen to my death from that stone in shock.)

“Why are you attacking people?” I mused, turning the head so I could draw its profile. Relesku had helpfully cut through the spine several vertebrae down from the skull, leaving the ruff undamaged, like a proud fan of stony plates. I was surprised to find them stiffly flexible to the touch. “Of course, you may not have harmed anyone. But what about your kin? Not that you could have told us if you knew. Do you communicate with one another at all, beyond mating and territorial disputes? Do rock-wyrms have some way of signaling that there is a fat, unguarded flock of sheep the next valley over?”

“What are you doing?” Jacob asked from behind me. My pencil skidded across the paper as I squawked and nearly toppled over. “My apologies,” he said, all contrition; but then—“Were you talking to the skull?”

“No,” I said, and then, “Perhaps,” which as responses go is not very good for covering up the truth. Jacob shook his head, but forebore to comment further. “Is there something you need?”

“Only to ask how long you think it will be before you’re done with the skull. Lord Hilford wants to try defleshing it before the bones become too brittle.”

The customary methods of defleshing, of course, involve boiling or leaving the material in a container with a large number of hungry insects. Neither is suitable for dragon bones; we would have to rely on knives. “I’ll be done presently,” I said, and bent once more to my work, this time without talking.

We worked until the light began to fail, leaving ourselves just enough time to return to our camp before it became too dark. With the exception of our Vystrani lads, none of us wanted to go; we knew very well that during the night, scavengers would be at the carcass, and the bones would continue their inevitable decay. But the location was far too exposed to be safe.

As soon as dawn came we clambered back up to our carcass—only to find it gone.

We stood in a ragged line, staring comically at the empty expanse of stone. Blood yet stained the ground, and shreds of offal swarming with ants, but of the body itself, nothing.

Faintly, I said, “Bears…?”

“Or wolves,” Jacob added, as if wolves were capable of carrying off anything a tenth so large. Even for bears, it was too much.

Lord Hilford stirred himself and began to quarter the area, examining the ground. He had been a great hunter in his youth, I knew; for the first time, I could see it in him. “I don’t think so,” he said. “See here? Scratches in the stone—but they cut through the blood. These were made last night.”

Mr. Wilker had joined him, and was frowning over the scene. “It looks like they tore the carcass to pieces before carrying it off. A fight, I suppose.”

Dragons. “Do they eat carrion?” I asked, stammering slightly. “Their own kind?”

“As to the first, I imagine so,” Lord Hilford said. “We may idealize predators as noble hunters, but the truth is that very few of them will turn their noses up at a meal that can’t run away. As to the latter… it does happen among animal-kind. I have known lions to do it.”

My readers may recall that I am the woman who, at the tender age of seven, dismembered a dove with my brother’s penknife. I am not squeamish. But I must confess that the notion of dragons committing cannibal acts—tearing apart the body of their fallen brother, then carrying the pieces off to eat—made me sufficiently ill that I pivoted and went rapidly down the slope, stumbling and nearly falling as I went.

I did not, in the end, vomit into a bush. But I am glad I removed myself from the immediate vicinity of that smell, or my fortitude might have failed.

Jacob came and stood at my side. His expression was much like the one I’d seen the day our Chiavoran drivers went on to the boyar’s house: he was regretting having brought me along. It was to banish that look from his face that I mustered my best smile and said, “Well. I don’t imagine the carcass would have been useful for much further study anyway, and now we have learned something new.”

I watched him very nearly say three or four things, discarding them all, before he settled on answering me in kind: with scholarly detachment. He had not forgotten our conversation before the hunt. “It may be related to the attacks. There are many legends telling of people sent mad by eating human flesh; the same might well be true of dragons.”

If so, it answered one question and raised another. Why had dragons begun eating their own kind? For they must not do so habitually, not if what Dagmira had said was correct.

It was not a question we could answer that day. At Jacob’s suggestion, I went back down to the camp and began packing things up; there was nothing more for me to draw at the kill site. The gentlemen investigated the now-abandoned lair, collecting droppings and other materials for later study. And so, much chastened, we returned to Drustanev.

TWELVE

The village, of course, did not cease its usual activity simply because there were Scirling visitors present. The calendar followed its usual course, and not long after our dragon hunt the Feast of the Reception came around.

I have not discussed religious matters yet. (Not in this book, and my earlier publication is, again, not to be relied upon for this matter. Please do me the kindness of ignoring all references to religion in that work.) Vystrana, of course, was and is a land of devout Temple-worshippers. All of our Scirling party were proper followers of the Magisterial path, which made us very much the odd men (and woman) out in Drustanev. But we held a brief conference two nights before the feast and agreed that, although we were loath to interrupt the pace of our work—which had most recently produced evidence of the differences in male and female rock-wyrm anatomy—for the sake of harmony, we should at least make a nod to the local practice.

We did not enter the tabernacle and participate in their ceremony. But we stayed awake through the night—a harder job in the Temple calendar, I must say; they celebrate the feast a good fortnight earlier than we do, in late Floris instead of early Graminis—reading our scriptures, and then joined them outside the next morning for a celebration.

There would be no pleasant strolls through the surrounding countryside for flowers; snow had fallen during the night, though fortunately not very much of it. But the villagers set up trestle tables in what passed for the center of Drustanev, and there was singing and dancing, and everyone dressed in their finest. For that morning, Vystrana looked more like it does in the stories: yokes of colorful embroidery stretching across snowy-white shirts, men playing lively tunes on their violins, and so on.

In keeping with the generosity of the season, we Scirlings gave out small trinkets from among our belongings, such as we could spare, and received pipes and beads and a fine wool shawl in return. This latter I wore draped over my arms as I attempted to learn the local dances, which everyone else seemed to execute without the slightest trouble—even when so drunk they could scarcely stand. I wondered if some of the smugglers’ brandy finished its journey in Drustanev, or rather in the bellies of its inhabitants.

One young fellow asked me in comically simplified Vystrani whether I had seen much of the surrounding countryside, and upon hearing I had not, brightened like the dawning sun. “No? You must go to the—” And then he said a word I did not know. When I shook my head, he said, “Building! Go down!” He gestured with his hands: something toppling, with a crash at the end. “Very old. Very old.”

“Ruins!” I said in Scirling, and then all at once remembered the blocky shape I had seen during our hunt.

Draconean ruins are rare in Scirland—or rather, the ones that exist are none too impressive. I had seen one as a girl, shortly before the beginning of my gray years, but it took a scholar to recognize it for what it was; the remains had none of the distinctive art that gave the ancient civilization its name. I did not mind; the illustrations I had seen in books were enough to show me that fantastical dragon-headed gods were much less interesting than actual dragons. But my recent tastes of freedom had given me a hunger for more; I had much rather visit Draconean ruins than sit cooped up in Gritelkin’s dark house, failing to have conversations with the incomprehensible Dagmira.

A blind man might have missed my sudden excitement; my interlocutor did not. “I show you! I take you!” Then he gave up on keeping his sentences simple enough for my poor ear, and let spill a flood of words, from which I gathered that he would be more than happy to guide me there and back at my earliest convenience—tomorrow, if I liked.

I extracted the young man’s name from him—Astimir—and the location of his house, a shabby place he occupied with his ailing mother. Though he had said nothing about payment yet, I suspected that was his eventual goal. Well, so be it; by the standards of Drustanev we were absurdly wealthy, and could afford to share a bit of it with this energetic young man. “Not tomorrow, though,” I said, laughing, when he tried to urge me onward. “A few days. We will go soon enough.”

Whether the others would be interested or not, I could not say. Draconean ruins had very little to do with actual dragons, and our reasons for being here. But there was only so much paper-filing I could do; I was determined to go, even if I had to go alone.

For a time it seemed I might be going alone. “It’s hardly worth our time,” Mr. Wilker said. “We aren’t archaeologists, and I hardly think anything in the ruins would shed light on why the dragons are attacking people—which is, you may have forgotten, a rather more pressing question. It leaves little time for sightseeing.”

“I have a great deal of time, which I am permitted to spend on very little other than sightseeing,” I replied sweetly. “Perhaps if you could arrange to produce more in the way of useful observations, I would have more work to do here.”

That sounds cattish, and it was. Our research was at last making something like progress, and a good deal of that was owing to Mr. Wilker’s effort. Indeed, it was one of the things about him that annoyed me, for I would gladly have taken on some of his labors, if he would only let me. But he was jealous of anything that might diminish his usefulness in Lord Hilford’s eyes. I might have said as much, too—embarrassing all parties in the process, myself included—but Jacob intervened. “Wilker and I cannot both go to the ruins and do useful work, Isabella. And we must gather data, if we’re to have any hope of stopping these attacks. Too many of the lairs we’ve visited so far have been abandoned; we need to find occupied ones, so we may examine the evidence of their eating habits. If they’re eating their own kind, of course, the bones won’t be there—but a lack of bones from other animals would tell us something.”

Since we could hardly take the pulse and examine the tongues of the local wyrms, I had to concede that made sense. “But why can’t I be spared? It will hardly end the world if your notes remain unfiled for a day or two.”

My husband had the grace to look awkward. “It may seem a silly concern, but—I do not like you going alone. With that fellow, I mean. It would not look right.”

I raised my eyebrows at him. I was kidnapped by smugglers in the night, and he worried about my reputation if I went sightseeing with Astimir? But Lord Hilford spoke up. “Eh, that’s easily solved. My joints would never permit me a strenuous climb; that’s a job for younger men. I’ll go with your wife, and keep her safe. Unless you don’t trust my intentions.” He mock-leered, and I laughed; and that settled the matter.

It was a mark of the relaxed standards creeping upon us during this expedition that everyone accepted the propriety of this arrangement: Lord Hilford, though unmarried and not my husband, was judged a suitable enough chaperon, at least in comparison to a Vystrani villager. I have often found this to be true since, that matters which seem terribly important in the early days of such a journey (what will people back home say?) fade into triviality with the passage of time. It has the consequent effect of making one question how vital those matters truly are—which goes some way toward explaining my increasingly extravagant behavior, as time went on.

We set out at the crack of dawn. No camping gear this time; it would take about half the day to reach the ruins, but there was a hut used by the boyar’s huntsmen, Astimir told us, in which we could pass the night before returning to Drustanev.

Buoyed by the exciting prospect of our goal, we hiked quickly. After a few hours the overgrown, rectangular silhouettes of the ruins became visible on the opposite slope, but Astimir did not lead us directly toward them. Lord Hilford questioned him, but got enigmatical replies. “I’ve half a mind to leave him; we can find our way from here,” the earl grumbled.

I persuaded him not to—if anything went wrong, I could not hope to carry Lord Hilford back on my own—and soon had cause to be glad. The reason for our roundabout path, it seemed, was Astimir’s sense of the dramatic: he led us down into the valley, then back up again by another trail, so that we might approach the ruins by way of their great gate.

This stood cloaked in pines nearly as tall as the ancient stones, but the trees had no foothold on the gateway itself. The central figure strode out boldly on an outcropping of solid rock, its human feet planted on the ground, its draconic head staring through the clear mountain air toward Chiavora. Vystrani winters had been harsh to the mighty sculpture; its features were so eroded as to be almost indistinguishable, and the lintel of the right-hand passage had fallen, leaving the unknown god with only one wing. The damage somehow made the figure more inspiring: nowadays we may carve as large as the Draconeans—the Archangel in Falchester is even larger—but no amount of artistic “weathering” can counterfeit the sheer weight of time.

I stood, awestruck, pinned as surely as if a rock-wyrm had stooped on me from the sky. My reverie was only broken by Lord Hilford’s chuckle. “Never been to the ruins at Nedel Tor, have you?”

My gaze was still riveted to the statue, but the spell was weakened enough for me to respond. “Only Millbridge, and those aren’t very impressive.”

“No, they aren’t,” he agreed. “Nor is Nedel Tor—not compared with what one can find in the Akhian desert—too much looting of stone for later use. But the gateway is in moderately good condition, aside from the loss of the head.”

He went on talking; I think he said something about double gateways, so characteristic of Draconean architecture, and theories as to their purpose. (My favourite is the one promoted by Mr. Charving, the great urban reformer: that the Draconeans regulated traffic into their settlements by guiding arriving riders and carts through the left gate, and those departing through the right. It is utterly fanciful, as no one has ever discovered evidence of sufficient traffic at these ruins to require such measures—but as Mr. Charving parlayed this into a very successful scheme for the regulation of traffic in Falchester, where it very much was needed, I cannot but applaud his rhetoric.)

I hardly attended to Lord Hilford’s lecture, however, for I was already fumbling my sketch pad from the bag I carried. My hands found it and the pencil by touch alone, while my eyes gauged proportions and noted evocative details. There would not be enough time at these ruins to draw them properly—not on this trip, at least, though my subconscious had begun to plot a return—but I could at least compose a brief sketch.

Astimir was impatient with this plan; he could not understand why I wanted to stop out here, without even entering the ruins. “A moment more,” I said absently, casting onto the page a rough outline of the fallen lintel stone, cracked in two. How long ago had it fallen? It had rolled forward when it did; the face pressed into the earth might preserve more detail of the wing than now visible in the one still standing. But it would take a crane to lift the thing, and so its mysteries would remain hidden, alas.

The promise of further wonders finally tore me from my work. I turned to a blank page and kept the sketchbook out as we walked beneath the surviving arch and into the ruins. That single day in Vystrana taught me more about working at speed than anything that has happened since: I threw down the most cursory lines, suggesting the perspective and decay of the structures we encountered, and spent days afterward filling in the details from memory. (You may still see the results in Sketches from the Vystrani Highlands, published when I began to acquire enough notoriety that anything from my pen could turn a tidy profit. I do not recommend them for scholarly purposes—too many of those “remembered” details are generic or downright fanciful—but they will give you a sense of the place.)

The Drustanev ruins are not extensive. Inside the gateway lay a large, open courtyard, now thoroughly choked with underbrush and trees. Lord Hilford scuffed at the ground in one exposed spot and uncovered the chipped corner of a paving stone, tilted up at a sharp angle by a root thrusting beneath. But we did not linger long, for Astimir was urging us onward, to the main temple ahead.

I call it a “temple,” though of course the function of those places has been debated ever since the days of the Nichaeans. All Draconean structures are built on such an imposing scale as to inspire awe; we therefore naturally associate them with religion. Lesser edifices did not survive the thousands of years that elapsed since the dissolution of that ancient civilization; all we have now are the great works. And to what purpose would such buildings be raised, if not for the glory of their dragon-headed deities?

A little further inward lay the pylons of the temple’s front wall, too massive even for time to collapse them. Like the right-hand half of the gateway, the lintel between them had fallen, and an accumulation of debris and dirt raised the passage to nearly a third the height of the wall. Astimir assisted Lord Hilford up this slope, then bent to aid me. My skirts caught on the undergrowth, and one wicked thorn tore a long rent in the fabric, but I did not mind. From the top of that passage I could see into the hypostyle hall, now open to the elements, the thin stones of its roof long since having relocated to the ground, where they lay nearly as buried as the paving in the courtyard.

Some of the columns themselves had toppled, leaning against one another like drunken gentlemen exhausted after a night’s carouse, or rolling in hefty cylinders on the ground. The sun was now high enough to make the space within a warm shelter, secret and still. The proud figures of Draconean gods spanned the walls, flat and odd to an eye accustomed to modern conventions of perspective, but hinting at mysteries forgotten ages ago. I wished I were a painter, to capture the quality of the light as it poured across those weathered shapes; being only a poor woman with a pencil, I marshaled my sketchbook and did what I could.

That particular sketch included Lord Hilford bending to peer underneath one of the tilting pillars, pulling at the tall grasses that choked the space below. Before long, he called out to me. “Mrs. Camherst! You must come look at this. Have you brought anything that might do a rubbing?”

I obligingly fetched out a charcoal stick and a large sheet of loose paper, then picked my way across the space to join him. “What is it?”

“Run your hand across this,” he instructed me, as I had done with the dragon wing.

What greeted my fingers, however, was not the microscopic roughness of the rock-wyrm’s hide. Instead it was deep grooves, somewhat softened by the passage of time, but still clearly perceptible.

I crouched, trying to see, but after the brilliance of the sun, the shadow defeated me. With the assistance of Lord Hilford and Astimir, one man on each side of the pillar, holding my paper in place, I rubbed the charcoal stick everywhere I could reach.

When we pulled it free, a white gap ran down much of the center, but to either side the charcoal’s smear was broken by an arrangement of lines I had seen before, in books. “It’s an inscription!” I exclaimed.

Even more than the art—whose strange, stylized nature had never really caught my interest—Draconean script excited a feeling of mystery and wonder. The markings were indubitably language, though men had once dismissed them as the scratchings of dragon claws. (This is largely owing to the poor preservation of ruins in Anthiope. Once our scholars became aware of less-weathered inscriptions elsewhere in the world, opinions changed—after a certain amount of hidebound resistance, of course.) What message they conveyed, however, was completely inscrutable. Draconean writing had frustrated all efforts to decipher it.

With that clear example to hand, I gazed about with new eyes, and saw the weathering on the other columns for what it was: the faint, nearly obliterated remnants of more writing. There had once been inscriptions all over the columns of the hypostyle, but the exposed surfaces had been badly degraded.

Lord Hilford ran his hand across the leaning column and brushed grit off his fingers. “Limestone. It hasn’t survived well. The walls are marble; that does better. I wonder where they brought it in from, and how?”

My finger traced along one of the gaps in the charcoal, following its raking line. “Why is it that no one can read what this says? Do we not have enough samples yet?” If so, this one might be of some value.

But the earl shook his head. “That used to be the notion, but a fellow named ibn Khattusi made a concerted effort, oh, ten or fifteen years ago, to gather together all the known inscriptions, and encouraged people to document more. He published his findings in a great fat book, and a few years later the Akhian government offered a prize for the man who deciphered the language; but no one has claimed it yet.”

“We don’t even know what language it was, do we?” I asked. “That is—obviously it’s Draconean, or rather, that is the name we’ve given it. But we don’t know what languages Draconean might be ancestral to.”

With a grunt for his stiff knees, Lord Hilford knelt at my side to study the paper. “Precisely. So we have no idea what sounds these symbols might represent, or indeed whether they do represent sounds; they may be ideographic, like the archaic script of the Ikwunde. Codes can be deciphered, but codes represent a known language, which means one side of the equation is already in hand. Draconean is a complete mystery.” He smiled sideways at me. “Fancy taking a shot at it yourself, Mrs. Camherst? The Akhian declaration did say their prize was for the man who sorted it out, but I daresay you could argue them into paying out for a woman.”

The notion had honestly not even crossed my mind. I laughed. “Oh, no, my lord. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. You’ve heard me butcher Vystrani.” I nodded in the general direction of Astimir, who, having brought us as far as the hypostyle hall, seemed to think his work was done—that, or he’d given up on the tedious Scirling scholars who kept pausing to examine things rather than continuing onward to new sights. “I am no linguist, much less an expert.”

I folded the rubbing carefully, though, on the possibility that ibn Khattusi might want it for his collection, and we spent some time poking about the ruined stones to find other bits with inscriptions not too badly weathered to record. I tore several fingernails digging up a fragment mostly buried in the earth, but was rewarded with the clearest bit yet, once I’d brushed the dirt away.

The central chamber of the temple, unfortunately, had collapsed too thoroughly for us to enter. We instead toured the remainder of the small site, including the bit of wall I had glimpsed on our hunt; I clambered rather higher atop it than was likely wise, and spent some time attempting to guess which open bit of stone in the distance might be stained with that dragon’s blood.

When I climbed back down, peering past my skirts to see where I should set my feet, a twinkle of vivid color caught my eye.

My foot, already descending, almost landed atop it; I swung wide and stumbled, but managed to avoid falling. As soon as my balance was secure, I bent double, searching for that glint of color.

The grass half buried it, such that I almost missed it. But my fingers, sweeping through the blades, touched something hard; and I lifted it to my eyes.

And promptly dropped it again.

This time the finding went faster; I knew what I was looking for. A firestone, the size of my thumbnail, and brilliant in the light. I cradled it carefully in my palm, marveling. There was no mistaking this for a piece of jewelry lost by some previous visitor: quite apart from the unlikelihood of anyone so wealthy coming here in their formal gems, it was raw, not shaped by any lapidary’s tools.

What on earth was it doing in an obscure Vystrani ruin?

I dropped to my knees and cast around in the grass, stabbing my hands on every twig and turning over every pebble. I covered an area at least five feet in radius before I conceded that my find was a solitary one. But tremendously valuable; I had seen only a handful of firestones during my days in the marriage market, and those adorning the fingers or necks or ears of people far beyond my own class. This one, set into a pendant or ring, would be the finest jewel the Camherst lineage owned.

Do understand, I am not a covetous woman. Not for physical things, at least; where knowledge is concerned, I am as greedy as the mythical dragons in the stories, sitting atop their glittering hoards. (Though I, unlike those dragons, am not only willing but eager to share.) But the firestone entranced me, for it was the first I’d ever held in my own hands. I knelt there in the dirt, tilting it in my fingers so the fire within danced back and forth, until I became aware that I’d lost all feeling in my feet. Then I staggered upright, and realized my companions had gone missing somewhere during my ascent of the wall.

I wasn’t unduly concerned. Astimir was likely relaxing in a comfortable spot, waiting for us to be done. As for Lord Hilford, I thought it most probable that he’d returned to the hypostyle hall, or the great double gateway. With my sketches of the site, I knew the most direct route back would be to go left, across a broken, ruin-less bit of ground.

Halfway across that ground, something snapped beneath my foot, and I plummeted into darkness.

Not far, but it does not take much of a fall to twist one’s ankle—not when the fall is so entirely unexpected. I landed awkwardly and tumbled without grace to one side, fetching up at last on my rear, with one palm skinned and my cry of surprise still ringing from the walls.

I clamped my mouth shut before a second cry could escape my lips, because two thoughts occured to me in quick succession. The first was cave, and the second was dragon.

My surroundings were undoubtedly natural. The light spilling in from above showed me rough walls and a sloping floor, unshaped by human hands. The hole I’d come in by wasn’t nearly large enough for a dragon, but such a passage might exist elsewhere; the cave extended into the darkness, well beyond my ability to see. I sniffed, thinking I might catch a scent that would at least confirm my mortal peril, but all I smelled was pine.

Pine—because those were the boughs that had been laid across the opening, and then covered in needles until they matched the surrounding forest floor. A convincing disguise, but not one that could support my weight, and so I had fallen.

A disguise implied a disguiser. Someone had gone to effort to hide the opening, and not out of concern for public safety.

I went very still. Only my ears moved, drawing back along my skull as if that would make any significant improvement to my hearing.

Eventually those muscles tired, and I rubbed them with my fingers, thinking. I’d heard nothing in the darkness, and only the wind and the cry of an eagle above. The sensible thing to do would be to shout for help; there did not seem to be any person here at present, and if this was a dragon’s lair farther along, I would do well to vacate the premises before the owner returned.

But I am not always sensible.

My eyes had adjusted as far as they could. Peering into the gloom, I saw that I had fallen quite near one end of the cave; to my right, the floor sloped away into impenetrable blackness. But I thought I could make out some shapes at the edge of the void. Brushing my skinned palm clear of debris, I rose to my knees and made my way carefully toward those shapes.

(Crawling in a dress, for those gentlemen who have never had occasion to try it, is an exercise in frustration, all but guaranteed to produce feelings of homicidal annoyance in the crawler. But there was not enough room to stand without crouching, and I did not want to test my ankle just yet.)

The shapes, when I arrived at them, proved to be a pair of crates. I brushed my hand over the top of one, and realized with a mingled feeling of horror and disbelieving hilarity what I had found.

Stauleren smugglers, as I have noted before, make extensive use of caves in their work.

The two crates were empty, so I could not be sure of my conclusion. It seemed likely, though; they were shoved against the wall as if left there temporarily, not quite far enough out of sight. The cache, if there was one, undoubtedly lay deeper in the darkness.

I was not about to go looking for it. Already it was unlikely that I could hide the evidence of my fall; it might have been the work of a bear or deer, but then where was the animal? And to leave the cave without yelling for help, I would have to drag one of the crates over and stand on it, which a bear surely would not do. To hide my trespass, I would have to shout for Lord Hilford, and then there would be more questions. He might even feel honor bound to send word to the boyar, and it would all be a tremendous mess I did not want in the slightest.

The entire incident had me giddy with surprise. That giddiness made certain courses of action seem much more reasonable than they ought to be. With the firm convinction that I was thinking good sense, I dragged one of the empty crates into position beneath the hole, then retrieved my sketchbook, which I had dropped on landing. A quick thought led to a frantic search of my pocket, soon reassured: my firestone was still there.

Then I took my pencil and wrote a quick note in Eiversch.

My apologies for the intrusion. It was an accident, and I will speak of it to no one.

I didn’t sign the note, figuring that my feminine handwriting would be identifier enough—and if it was not, then no sense helping Chatzkel and his men draw the right conclusion. I tucked the paper beneath the lid of the crate, leaving most of it visible, then took my sketch pad in my teeth and climbed grimly to my feet.

My ankle was not pleased with this decision. But although it complained, it would hold me. The only bad part was when I had to climb atop the crate, putting all my weight on that foot for longer than I would have liked. That done, however, my head and shoulders emerged once more into the open air, and from there I was able to drag myself onto the ground above.

(The penny dreadfuls that purport to relate my adventures would have had me braiding grasses together into a sturdy rope, or leaping ten feet in the air to grab the lip and haul myself out by the strength of one hand. My life would have been far easier if such things were truly possible.)

Outside once more, I permitted myself three heaving breaths of relief. Then I got up, found a stick that would support my weight, and hobbled off to find Lord Hilford, planning my lies as I went.