A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent

THIRTEEN

The twisting of my ankle cut our trip to the ruins short, although I maintained that it would be perfectly easy for me to rest somewhere with my foot elevated, sketching, while Lord Hilford concluded his tour. He insisted he was quite finished, however, and that we should depart for the hunters’ hut forthwith. I only just barely dissuaded him from making poor Astimir hike through the night back to Drustanev, so as to return with a rescue party at first light. “I’ve had quite enough of dawn rescue parties,” I said tartly. “Let us at least see how my foot feels come morning, before you call in the cavalry.”

We made the mistake of taking my boot off once we got to the hut; my ankle was swollen, and without the boot to restrain it, the swelling increased. But I bathed it in a stream—grateful, this once, for the frigid quality of mountain water—and got Astimir to select a fat log from the woodpile that I could use to elevate my foot for the night, so that in the morning it was close enough to its ordinary size that I could cram the boot back on. With that laced up as tight as it would go, I told Lord Hilford I would be fine, and off we went.

Before long I was regretting that choice but refusing to admit so to my companions. It’s nasty business, walking on a twisted ankle—even one only mildly wrenched. You step carefully so as not to provoke the injury, but walking in that fashion is inconvenient enough that your body keeps trying to return to more natural patterns, which of course causes discomfort. And such awkward movements eventually cause their own discomfort, as your knees and hips and back begin to complain. Alas for my well-being, I was young, and therefore far too stupidly stubborn to admit to any of this; and so we trekked on.

By the time we reached Drustanev, I wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed, with Jacob to bring me a soothing drink. But I knew luck was not with me the moment I saw the people gathered in the center of the village.

I had names for only a few; we had, in the regrettable manner of Scirling travelers the world over, held ourselves almost entirely aloof from the locals. Dagmira was there, however, and with her, a distraught man I recognized as Menkem Goen, the village priest.

Even had I not seen him during the festival, his clothing would have identified him; he wore full religious garb—shawl, sash, embroidered headdress, and all—and even stood barefoot on the rocky ground, as if he were in the tabernacle. Furthermore, no sooner had we spied him than he raised both hands in the air and began, in a loud voice, to recite Scripture in our general direction.

Loudly—but not enough to be heard over the racket that immediately followed, as all the gathered villagers ran toward us waving graggers. Lord Hilford and I stopped dead, gaping, as their noise filled the air.

“What on earth?” I said, but I don’t think Lord Hilford heard me.

I had only ever encountered the wooden rattles during the tale of the Casting of Lots, when they are used to drown out the name of wicked Khumban. That day I discovered they have another use in the superstitions of rural Vystrana: driving out evil spirits.

It took some time to discover this, however. Dagmira glared furiously at me while Menkem continued to recite, and everyone else surrounded us such that we could not progress even a single step farther. We were not to be permitted in Drustanev, it seemed, until the prayers were done. I could not hear enough of Menkem’s words to understand their meaning—then as now, the Vystrani conduct all religious matters in Lashon, rather than the vernacular—but Temple and Magisterial traditions both make use of the same blessing at the end, with the fingers divided. On the last words—“give you peace”—Menkem lifted and blew the sacred horn, and the rattles stopped.

Into the twitchy silence that followed, I said, “What is the meaning of this?”

Dagmira stormed forward. “You didn’t tell me where you were going! I had to find out from that one’s mother!” She jabbed a finger at Astimir, who flinched back as if her finger were a sword.

“What does that matter?” I asked, bewildered. The truth was that I didn’t know the Vystrani word for “ruins,” and didn’t feel like undergoing the tedious circumlocutions necessary to find out; so I had just told her we were going for a walk.

My supposed maid spat on the ground, then kicked the wet spot for good measure. The priest, who had followed at a more sedate pace, laid a calming hand on her shoulder. He didn’t look calm, though; he looked worried. “There is a gorost on the isdevyit,” he said, giving me a good guess as to what the word for “ruins” might be. What gorost was, however, I couldn’t guess.

Lord Hilford’s Vystrani was better than mine, and he frowned. “What kind of gorost?” he asked skeptically.

The priest pronounced two more words, these with an air of doom. “It is a milgri place; the ancients practiced many ovyet there, and the effects remain. It is bad luck to go there, my lord. You should not have gone.”

My limited vocabulary frustrated me, but I was beginning to guess his general meaning. Ghosts or demons or some such, and disaster for whoever crossed them. There were many such famous legends associated with ruins in Akhia; I shouldn’t have been surprised to encounter them elsewhere. “We saw nothing of the sort,” I told him sharply.

“You may not see them,” he said ominously, “but they are there.”

By now my uninjured foot was hurting almost as much as the other because it had to bear the greater part of my weight whenever I stopped. The pain made me snappish. “Nonsense. Or if there are—spirits,” I said, substituting the Scirling word because I could not spare the patience to remember what words he’d used, “then I’m sure your most excellent prayers have banished them. We thank you, and we’ll be on our way.”

Now it was Lord Hilford’s turn to lay a calming hand on my shoulder. “My good man, I’m sure all will be well. But Mrs. Camherst has suffered an injury to her ankle, and needs to lie down. If you’ll pardon us—”

They did not in the least want to pardon us; his words produced a great stir, as everyone began insisting my twisted ankle must be the work of demons. Lord Hilford told them I had not sprained it at the ruins—which strictly speaking I had not; I told him I twisted it on a slope behind them, and he elided the specifics even further—but that mollified no one. I forebore to tell them their “evil spirits” were only smugglers, as by then anything I said would have come out laced with generous amounts of Scirling profanity.

The white, pinched quality of my face at least persuaded Dagmira to help. Ignoring my protests, she slung one of my arms over her shoulder, and together we hobbled off toward the house.

Or perhaps her sympathy was merely a strategem, allowing her to lambast me without interruption. “Idiot!” she said fiercely, dumping me into a chair so she could pull my boot off. “Dragons, smugglers, ruins—is there any danger you won’t go running to meet?”

I said something extremely foul as the boot came off. My ankle had swollen a great deal more with all that walking, and she had to tug quite hard. When I had my breath back, I snapped, “You never tell me about these dangers until afterward!”

“I expect a fancy lady from foreign parts to have the sense the angels gave a babe in arms!” The other boot came off more easily, and was a blessing when it did.

“More fool you,” I muttered in Scirling, thinking of some of the brainless young things (not to mention middle-aged ones) I had met during my Season. Before Dagmira could glare a hole in me, I added, “Astimir suggested it, you know. Or don’t Drustanev men have the sense the angels gave a babe, either?”

She spat a few words I suspected were curses. Then, to my surprise, she added something further, in a grim tone. “One of the smugglers has been killed. A dragon attack.”

It distracted me from the pain in my ankle. A fresh incident did not explain all of the alarm in the village; there would be no reason for Menkem Goen and the others to focus their attention on our ruins trip, if what they feared was dragons. But it might account for the vehemence of their response. Wetting my lips, I asked, “Where?”

“Down.”

From the perspective of Drustanev, that meant the sharp descent to Chiavora. The smugglers must have been taking a shipment to the lowlands. “How far?” I asked, but Dagmira only shook her head; she did not know.

Surely it could not be far. The dragons would never leave their mountains. Or would they? These attacks were already unusual; all certainties must now be questioned.

Chastened, I cooperated as Dagmira more or less carried me up the stairs and deposited me in bed. There I lay in troubled thought until Jacob appeared.

After the scare over my disappearance with the smugglers, I was afraid of what his mood might be, but he came in grinning. “I hear you alarmed the locals,” he said, perching on the edge of the bed and taking my hand.

“Lord Hilford did his part,” I said, then grimaced as Jacob inspected my ankle. “That part is all my doing, I own. A foolish misstep.” And that was true enough.

My husband shook his head. “Oh, Isabella. I know you crave the freedom to explore, but—”

“But you wish I could do it without spraining my ankle?” I coaxed him into lying down at my side, and fitted my head onto his shoulder. “I quite agree. At least I was not eaten by a dragon, though.”

Jacob went still, then shifted out from under my head. “What aren’t you saying?”

The question surprised me. “Have you not heard? About the smuggler?”

His frown made it clear that he had not. Was this something the mayor had been saving to tell Lord Hilford, rather than his men? Or had Dagmira spilled a secret not meant to be shared with the outsiders? I told Jacob what little I knew, reluctantly surrendering the pleasant moment in favor of more important matters.

“I’ll talk to the others,” he said when I was done. “We need to find out how far down this happened.”

I heard the warning before he could voice it. “My ankle will keep me safely at home, filing papers like I’m supposed to.” I could not suppress a sigh. “Mr. Wilker shall be pleased.”

Our companion might be, but my husband was not. Frowning still, Jacob kissed the top of my head, then slid off the lumpy mattress and left me to my rest.

True to my prediction, I was completely housebound for several days. The first morning, I abandoned dignity and went down the staircase on my rump; the steps were narrow, dark, uneven, and prone to bending underfoot, and I did not like the prospect of pitching down them headfirst if my ankle gave out. I was certainly not fit to go anywhere. I occupied myself filling out my rough sketches of the ruins, but soon enough something else came along to engage me.

Our sample of hide from the dragon’s wing had not well survived its journey back to Drustanev. Lord Hilford had examined it under the microscope, but was unable to make much out. I was quite surprised when, three days after the trip to the ruins, a boy came charging into the workroom and shoved a pottery jar into my hands.

Mystified, I picked apart the knotted string holding the lid in place. A powerful smell greeted me as soon as I opened the jar; it was mostly filled with the plum-based spirit they call tzuika, which is alcoholic enough to drop a mule in its tracks. But something floated inside, and I rose and hobbled carefully over to the window to see.

It was a piece of dragon hide, nearly fresh. “Where did you get this?” I asked the boy.

His broad smile showed missing teeth; I guessed his age to be about ten. “A dragon came after us,” he said. “Tata shot him.”

Another attack. It had been less than a week since the smuggler was killed; the pace, it seemed, was picking up. I bit my lip in worry.

The child in front of me was not obviously bleeding or bandaged, nor did he look terribly upset; still, I had to ask. “Was anyone hurt?”

The boy shook his head. “We were hunting deer. Hidden, you know? Tata said the lord’s man wanted skin, so he sent me back with that.”

The lord’s man? Mr. Wilker, I guessed. I hadn’t been aware that he asked the locals for help. “Not a bad idea,” I murmured under my breath, fetching a pair of tweezers and lifting the scrap of hide from its aromatic container. Many of the shepherds carried jars of tzuika with them; it was my pet theory for how they survived without anything one could call a proper summer. “Light more candles, if you wouldn’t mind—”

The boy obeyed, then hovered to watch eagerly over my shoulder as I gently patted the hide into a semblance of dryness and laid it on the microscope. My familiarity with the device was minimal, but I dared not wait until the men returned. Biting my lower lip, I bent to look through the eyepiece.

Microscopes are fiddly things; it took endless minute adjustments of the knobs before I had a clear image. I held out my hand and called for a needle, several times, before the boy said, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” and I realized I’d been commanding him in Scirling. I surfaced long enough to point at my pincushion (I had been mending my much-abused ruins dress—ruined dress, rather—when he arrived), and he brought it to me. Instrument in hand, I returned to the microscope, and began to prod at the magnified hide.

What I discovered will be no surprise to those familiar with dragon anatomy; it has since been found in many different species. At the time, however, it was quite a revelation. The roughness on the underside of the wing comes from tiny scales, which are not present on the upper surface. These cover tiny holes that perforate the wing, and are hinged to form a sort of valve. When the wing lifts, the valves open, reducing the resistance the dragon’s muscles must overcome. When it sweeps down again, the valves close, allowing the stroke to have its fullest effect.

I did not immediately understand the function of what I saw, but began drawing it nonetheless. When the epiphany came, I exclaimed out loud—quite startling the boy, who had wandered off in boredom as I drew, and was now aiming Jacob’s rifle about the room. “Careful with that,” I said absently, scribbling notes on my drawing.

(I have long been accused of having no motherly instinct. As near as I can tell, this instinct consists of attempting to wrap anyone below the age of eighteen in swaddling bands, so that they never learn anything about the world and its dangers. I fail to see the use of this, especially from the point of view of species survival; but I do confess that on this occasion I may have let my intellectual excitement distract me from the peril of allowing a ten-year-old boy to wave a loaded rifle about.)

Fortunately for all involved, the boy’s boredom soon overwhelmed him. I flapped my hand in his general direction when he asked if I needed the jar of tzuika any longer; he collected it and departed, and I fetched out Gotherham’s Avian Anatomy to assist me in my speculations on the mechanics of dragon-wing flight. When the sun began to set, I did not even notice, except to hunch closer over my sketches as the light failed; and thus did the menfolk find me.

I knew as soon as I surfaced that now was not the time to share my discovery. Jacob and Lord Hilford entered together, deep in worried conversation. “—haven’t been any rains,” the earl was saying, “nor enough snow, even up here, to justify it. Much less in the lowlands. It’s been nearly a month; he should have returned long since.”

“Who should have?” I asked, diverted from my work, and rubbing my fatigued eyes.

“Gritelkin,” Jacob said, dropping with a frown into the nearest seat.

Our host, supposedly: the razesh who should have been our local guide in this work. To my shame, I had nearly forgotten him. “Returned from Chiavora, you mean,” I said.

Jacob’s face was grim. “If he ever went.”

At this, I laid down my pen and sat straighter, hardly noticing the cramps in my shoulders from hunching so long. “You think someone lied to us?”

“I don’t,” Lord Hilford said, pacing along the creaking floor. “Your husband is a more suspicious sort. No, too many people agree that Gritelkin went to intercept us. I fear that something happened to him along the way.”

In the gloom of our workroom, the suggestion was more than ominous; it was frightening. But I was determined not to behave like a nit. I made certain my voice was steady before I asked, “The dragons?”

Lord Hilford shrugged. “Any number of things can befall a lone man on the road. Illness, bandits—he might have been thrown from his horse.”

“But you think it’s the dragons,” I said.

“A scientist must never reason ahead of his data, Mrs. Camherst.”

We had data. We knew the local rock-wyrms were attacking human beings, and furthermore that although the bulk of the incidents had taken place higher up, at least two had occurred in the direction of Chiavora. But this, I was willing to concede, hardly constituted proof that Mr. Gritelkin had been eaten by a dragon. The question was, what would? “Should we send someone toward Chiavora?” I asked. “They could inquire along the way—see if anyone recalls him passing through.” Though the land was peopled sparsely enough that our odds were not very good.

“Perhaps,” the earl said, “but who? I’m loath to abandon our research.”

The answer seemed obvious to me. “I could go.”

“Absolutely not,” Jacob said, coming bolt upright in his chair.

His vehemence was startling. “Were you not encouraging me to return to Chiavora, not long past?”

“When you could go with the Chiavorans,” Jacob said. “Who would escort you now? I’m not concerned with propriety,” he added, waving away my objection before I could speak it. “Rather your safety. All the things that can befall a lone man on the road can as easily befall a lone woman.”

Perhaps it was due to the darkness of the room that I focused so much on his voice, rather than his expression. The latter, I expect, was fairly well controlled, but I heard real tension in the former. Even fear.

A thousand counterarguments rose to my tongue. I was a fully competent horsewoman; Dagmira could accompany me; better me than, say, Mr. Wilker, who was of far more use to the expedition. I voiced none of them. Because one thing was stronger than my argumentative streak, and that was my desire not to cause my husband distress. I had failed signally at that goal since coming to Vystrana; but I did not want to fail again right now.

I rose from my chair and went over to him. Wordlessly, I held out my hand, and wordlessly he took it; we gripped each other’s fingers tight in the dark, and that touch communicated everything that was needed. We were in a foreign place, surrounded by more danger than either of us wanted to admit, and we had very little beyond each other, and our companions. But that might be enough.

Mr. Wilker arrived then, breaking the spell, and while Lord Hilford explained the situation I went around the room and lit candles, which I should have done long since. In their warm light, our circumstances seemed far less bleak than they had a moment before. “Could we ask some of the village men to go?” I said.

“I thought of that,” Lord Hilford said, “and we may try—but it’s a bad time to be asking. The shepherds will be taking their flocks up to the high pastures soon. They won’t have anyone to spare.”

For one brief, irrational moment, I entertained the notion of finding the smugglers and asking them to inquire. But Chatzkel would not want to see me; not after my reckless promise to him in the mountains that we could make the dragons stop attacking. A promise I was no closer to upholding now than I had been that night.

Then a better thought came to me. “Could we ask the boyar for help?”

I knew by the sudden quiet that I had hit upon a very real possibility. When I turned from lighting the last candle, I found the men exchanging looks. “You haven’t met the man, have you?” Mr. Wilker asked.

Lord Hilford shook his head. “Gritelkin was to introduce us. They’re a standoffish lot, the boyars of Vystrana; not a one of them is Vystrani himself, and they all look down on the peasantry. Half of them spend all their time at the tsar’s court in Kupelyi and leave the actual running of their domains to their agents, the razeshi and so on. But Gritelkin said this one has taken to spending more time here. Out of favor in Kupelyi, maybe; or he just likes the mountain air. Iosif Abramovich Khirzoff is his name.”

Though I had hardly ingratiated myself with the locals, I had overheard a few comments, which I hastened to share. “He isn’t much liked in Drustanev, I’m afraid. He thinks himself too good for this place, even though he isn’t rich—well, he’s rich compared to the villagers, but it doesn’t sound like much to me. He has a good friend from Chiavora, though, some kind of doctor or scholar, who’s staying with him right now; we may hope from the evidence that he’s friendly to foreigners.”

“And who does this information come from?” Mr. Wilker asked.

“The women of the village.”

He muttered something dismissive beneath his breath, from which I only caught the word “gossip,” but Lord Hilford nodded. “I could believe it. Gritelkin said the man was ambitious, and not very loyal to the tsar. Whether that makes him amenable to helping us, I couldn’t say.”

“It’s at least worth a try,” Jacob said. “You’ll have to be the one to go, though.”

A Scirling earl should impress a boyar, at least enough to get Lord Hilford through the door. After that, we would have to see how helpful Iosif Abramovich Khirzoff was willing to be.

FOURTEEN

Lord Hilford set off the very next morning, with a local man for escort; it was two or three days’ journey to the boyar’s hunting lodge. No sooner had he departed, though, than a new trouble reared its head.

It began while I was in the sauna. For those unfamiliar with the practice, saunas are what the Vystrani use in place of bathing. Rather than subjecting themselves to the ice-cold waters of their homeland, or heating water for individual use (a wasteful practice, when one considers it), they build structures in which they burn wood to heat stones. After the smoke has been released, one may sit inside and enjoy the warmth. This induces sweating, and when the moisture is scraped away it carries the dirt with it.

But as the mention of sweating may indicate, one uses the sauna completely naked. Because of this, the Vystrani strictly regulate who may use the building when. Women stoke the fires in the morning, then clean themselves while the men are out. In the evening, the men have their turn.

Each sex uses the building communally, though, and here my Scirling sensibilities put their foot down. I could not bring myself to sit naked with the village women while they exchanged gossip too rapidly for me to follow—or, more likely, sat in awkward silence. I imagine they preferred not to have me among them, either; the sauna is expected to be a time of convivial relaxation, and the presence of a stranger rather inhibits that. We had therefore arrived at a compromise, which was that I put up with the blistering heat and smoke-tinged atmosphere immediately after the sauna’s airing in exchange for privacy.

I should have overcome my hesitation; it would have been better to socialize more with the people of Drustanev, and participating in such rituals of daily life is very effective in that regard. As it was, though, I preferred our arrangement. After the initial, smothering effect of the warmth—such a contrast to the crisp mountain air—I settled in comfortably, sweating out my tension along with my dirt. Lord Hilford had ridden away that morning to visit the boyar; Iosif Abramovich Khirzoff would send out men; Jindrik Gritelkin would be found; and all would be well.

A coughing, moaning, snarling noise brought me bolt upright on my wooden bench.

Initially, it was simple startlement. What had that been? I wondered. It sounded as if it came from outside. I listened, but heard nothing more, and moved to lean against the wall once more.

An instant before my back touched the warm planks, the noise came again.

This time, it sounded closer.

Every hair on my body tried to stand up—a difficult task, in the stifling heat. The noise, whatever it was, came from no human throat. Nor was it a sheep, or a wolf, or anything I was familiar with. The most likely candidates, my mind informed me in a rational fashion entirely at odds with the chill running down my spine, were bear… and dragon.

Fear gains particular force when one is naked. It doesn’t matter whether clothing would be of any use in the situation; linen and wool would do nothing to protect me against the claws of whatever creature lurked outside. What matters is the psychological effect. I felt vulnerable, with only the wooden boards of the sauna to protect me. And yet, I wished the boards were not there, because they meant I could not see the source of the noise.

Could not see, and could not easily run from.

Silence. I held my breath, then forced myself to release it when the heat swiftly made me light-headed. The exhalation turned into a pitiful yelp as something scraped along the logs of the outer wall. Where were the villagers? The sauna stood a little distance apart from the houses of Drustanev, but not all that far, and surely a bear or a dragon or whatever was stalking me was too large to be overlooked. I thought about crying for help, but fear of provoking an attack paralyzed my throat.

A rasping, grating sound. Moving as silently as I could, I pressed myself to the far wall, and cast my gaze about for anything that might be used as a weapon. The hot stones could surely burn the creature, but I had nothing with which to lift them except my own tender hands. The benches? Could I swing one at the creature’s head? Only if I first maneuvered it out the door—or the beast tore out one of the walls. Nonetheless, it seemed my best option, and so I wrapped my hands around the planks that formed the seat.

It was heavier than I expected, and I grunted a little as I lifted it. Then I stood, waiting, until my arms began to tremble and I had to put my makeshift weapon back down. But I remained crouching over it, ready to snatch it up once more.

Nothing.

And still nothing.

Then a knock at the sauna door.

I screamed. Every nerve in my body was drawn so tight, the slightest noise would have snapped them like harp strings, and this was a brisk, impatient rapping. “Others are waiting,” Dagmira called through the door. Then, as my scream registered—“Are you all right?”

“Yes, I—I’m fine,” I called back, panting with fright. What a lie that was! I stumbled over my own feet as I passed through the inner door into the dark little anteroom that kept too much heat from escaping when people went in and out. I always disrobed there, not quite trusting the village etiquette that made everyone look the other way as their fellows stripped down outside, and not willing to subject my flesh to the mountain chill, either. Hastily I shoved myself back into clothing and shoes, snatched up my bonnet, and then tore the outer door open, to find Dagmira waiting.

She peered at me closely. “What happened?”

I ignored her, plunging leftward to make a circuit of the sauna hut. And here something impossible greeted my eyes: nothing. No tracks, save those left by human feet as people went around the building, taking firewood from the nearby pile, leaving their clothes in baskets by the door. I was not much of a huntswoman, to read the ground and know what had passed there, but surely anything as large as that sound suggested must have left an impression.

Dagmira was waiting when I completed my circuit, with her hands on her hips. “What are you looking for?”

Already doubt was beginning to creep into my mind. Had I imagined it? Nodded off on my bench, perhaps, and been awoken by a bad dream. The heat made me light-headed, I knew that; I could have become delirious. It didn’t seem likely—but no less so than that sound, and the lack of evidence for its source.

But I didn’t have the presence of mind to form a convincing lie for Dagmira, either. (Not that it would have done anything to change what followed later.) “Nothing,” I said, then added, “I’m sorry I took so long. If anyone is looking for me, I’ll be in the workroom.” Cramming my bonnet back atop my head, I floundered up the slope toward Gritelkin’s empty house.

I slept badly that night. When I awoke, though, I thought it only the usual pause between first sleep and second, and lay for a moment considering what I wanted to do with myself during that wakeful time.

Then I heard a sound outside, and knew what had woken me.

It wasn’t the same sound as before, that moaning, rattling snarl. No, this was a more familiar sound—and more frightening for it, in a way.

The flapping of enormous, leathery wings.

If the rock-wyrms were attacking humans, might they go so far as to attack the village?

I rammed the point of my elbow under Jacob’s ribs, unceremoniously rousing him. “Wha?” he mumbled, coming bolt upright in bed.

“Shhhh!” I hissed, as if I hadn’t provoked his too-loud response. “Listen.”

“Isabella, what—” He fell silent as the flapping sound came again.

The childish instinct in me wanted to curl up under the covers, as if those were proof against all monsters in the night. The part of me that remembered being naked in the sauna sent me on a hunt for shoes. If I had to do anything, I’d prefer not to be barefoot while I did it. In a quiet, tense voice, I related my thoughts to Jacob. “The rifles are downstairs,” he said, his tone matching mine.

“Do you think we should go outside and shoot at it?” I whispered.

The bedroom windows were shuttered for the night, but a small louver over them admitted fresh air and just enough light to make out the indecision in Jacob’s face. His thoughts, I guessed, were much like mine: would that drive the beast off, or simply enrage it?

“Wake Mr. Wilker,” he said at last. “I’ll load the guns.”

This I did with alacrity. Mr. Wilker, it turned out, was not an easy man to rouse, and I did not quite dare elbow him as if he were my husband. I don’t think he was quite fully conscious when he stumbled downstairs to join Jacob, and in retrospect it might have been better to trust that ten-year-old boy with the rifle I pushed into his hands. Remembering the wolf-drake incident, I wasn’t entirely certain I should have one, either; no one had taught me to shoot in the intervening years.

But I could at least aim the barrel skyward and make noise to frighten the creature off, so out I went with the men, gun in hand.

Fog had settled into the valley that cradled Drustanev, and its touch made my skin crawl. Of course it could not be a clear night: I was doomed never to see this threat properly. There was an unpleasant stink in the air, too, that made me wrinkle my nose. Then I glimpsed movement through the fog. “There!”

I bless the chance that made me point with my finger instead of the rifle. Jacob and Mr. Wilker both brought their guns swinging around, but they were seasoned enough men not to pull the trigger immediately; and so we avoided shooting Relesku, one of our porters from the hunt.

He, too, carried a rifle. “You heard it?” he whispered, hurrying to our side.

Many people had, it seemed. There were others outside that night, most of them armed. But, as with my fright in the sauna, the sound had stopped. Whatever had brought the dragon to Drustanev, it seemed to have gotten bored and flown away.

At least, I thought it was a dragon—until we heard a cry from behind our house.

Everyone rushed in that direction. The cry was human, though, and one of shock and fear rather than pain. We arrived on the slope behind the house to find Astimir pressed against the wall, eyes wide in horror and rifle dropped to the ground.

Some ten paces away, the grass was blackened and scorched as if with fire. In four places, I saw as I forced myself closer; and the unpleasant smell was strongest here. Jacob came with me, then went ahead and knelt alongside one of the marks. After a moment’s study, he lifted his head and looked at me in confused alarm. “It—it looks like a footprint.”

My hands wrapped tighter around the rifle. The print—if so it was—stretched nearly two feet front to back, and there were four of them. The size of beast that implied…

Mr. Wilker had joined Jacob. “It’s almost like a dragon’s print—but not quite. And it seems to be burnt into the soil, not pressed.”

He spoke quietly, but not quietly enough. Murmurs sprang up among the villagers, and then Astimir shattered the tension by wailing, “Zhagrit Mat!”

A swift glance showed me the words meant nothing to either Scirling gentleman. The Vystrani, however, were murmuring prayers, and gripping their rifles as if no longer sure they would do any good.

I knew they would not like me asking, but I had no choice. “What, or who, is Zhagrit Mat?”

Everyone immediately spread their fingers against evil. No one answered. Astimir flung himself forward, though, and seized the nightshirt of a man toward the back of the group, who I realized was the village priest. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Astimir babbled, falling to his knees. “I should never have taken them. I thought it was just a story—something to keep the children from being hurt in the ruins—I’ve been there before! Nothing had ever happened!”

The ruins. I remembered the crowd that had greeted us on our return to Drustanev, the graggers and prayers. Evil spirits, or some such. At the time I had dismissed it as local superstition. But now…

Astimir suddenly wheeled on his knees to point at me. “Her! She must have done something! She wandered off, I don’t know where she went—she must have roused him!”

The accusation did not banish my fear, but it gave me something else to feel as well: annoyance. “I roused nothing,” I said sharply. “What is this creature supposed to be? Some kind of dragon? You have enough of those about; no need to go inventing demonic ones.” Though no rock-wyrm had ever left its prints burned into the ground, that I knew of. Their extraordinary breath was ice, not fire, and even an Akhian desert drake did not have feet of flame.

“He was not—” Astimir began, but stopped when the priest gripped his shoulder.

“We should not speak of it here, now,” the priest said, glancing about. Whether he meant at night, so near the prints, or when the beast might still be about, I do not know, but everyone spread their fingers again. “Tomorrow. You will come to the tabernacle—we may speak there safely—and I will tell you.”

I stiffened at the thought of entering that idolatrous place. Recall, I was very young; to me, Temple-worshippers were pagans. I had not yet been to parts of the world where Segulism of any sort held no sway at all, and the various heathen rites I underwent later would have given my nineteen-year-old self indignant vapors.

But my desire for knowledge was stronger than my religious sensibilities, which after all were more a matter of unthinking habit than real conviction. I nodded. “Very well. But I sincerely hope what you have to say is not a waste of time.”

FIFTEEN

I was young, and Scirling, born and raised in a pragmatic land where many of the more intricate points of religion had long since been discarded as unnecessary complications.

I’m afraid I gave very great offense to the priest of Drustanev by walking in the front door of his tabernacle.

Those among my readers who are Temple-worshippers have likely just dropped this book in horror. Alas, I was (and still am) a natural historian, not an anthropologist or a student of history, and although in these enlightened times we acknowledge men to be a higher order of animal, I concerned myself only with the nonhuman sort.

This is my grandiose way of saying: I hadn’t paid the blindest bit of attention to the local tabernacle, even during the Feast of the Reception. I had not noticed that only men went in the front door, while women used one on the side. The Grand Magister of Scirland, after all, ended segregation by sex nearly two hundred years ago, though some Magisterial traditions in other countries maintain the practice in their Assembly Houses. Jacob, it seems, no more thought of that issue than I did, for he walked in along with me, and we were ten feet in before our brains figured out what the low wooden wall at our side was.

We stopped at the same instant, and exchanged looks of identical dismay. And that, of course, was the moment that the priest chose to enter and spot us.

Had I thought I could manage it gracefully in my dress, I might have tried to vault over the wall. (It only came to my waist.) Images of my skirts catching and sending me over face-first stopped me. Would it be better to retreat and come back in by the side door I had now spotted, much too late? Paralysis over this question resulted, as it so often does, in me taking a third, entirely unsatisfactory, route: I curtsied to Menkem Goen and offered a stammering apology. “I did not realize—it’s quite different in Scirland, you see—”

He scowled at me. He had been scowling the night before, too; clearly my status as the bringer of evil spirits did not endear me to him in the slightest, and this error compounded it. I was not surprised to see him in full religious garb once more, though at least we were spared the racket of graggers. Wordlessly, he pointed at the door behind me.

Was I to leave permanently, or come back in the proper way? I decided on the latter, mostly because I refused to be shamed into scurrying away. If he wanted me gone, let him say so.

But when I came back in through the women’s door, Menkem made no comment. He simply gestured for both of us to sit down on our respective sides—we both chose the frontmost benches—and then went through a routine not unlike the one he had performed upon my return from the ruins. Over both of us; perhaps Jacob was contaminated by virtue of our marriage.

I filled the time by studying the interior of the tabernacle. When I was six, we briefly had a nursery maid with very strong opinions on the goat-killing heathens (her phrase) that followed the Temple. To hear her talk, the interior of the building should have been a dank, foul place, liberally decorated with entrails, with perhaps a baby’s skull rolling forgotten in some corner.

It was stuffy, but no more so than any other building in this freezing and near-windowless land. The priest had lit candles for this meeting—proper candles, not the tallow dips used by most Vystrani peasants. There was an altar, but its stone surface was ruthlessly clean apart from the scorch marks, and the air smelled of nothing worse than incense. Behind the altar, an oil lamp burned with a steady flame, carried from the sacred fire in the Temple itself; it would be used to light the fires for the sacrifices, and was never permitted to go out.

Menkem finished his prayers. He turned to face us, and then stopped, appalled anew, at the sight of me with my pocket journal braced against one knee.

“You’re going to write this down?” he asked, disbelieving.

Confused, I glanced down at the journal. “Should I not?”

From across the dividing wall, I heard a muffled sound from Jacob that might have been a laugh.

It was, after all, a very Magisterial response. Ours is a religion of scholarship and intellectual debate, rather different from the sacrifice-and-purity concerns of the Temple. It baffled Menkem—or perhaps he simply did not expect such a response from a woman; I could not say. Either way, I had thrown him off his script, and he chose to ignore me in favor of recovering. “If I’d known you were going to the ruins, I would have forbade it, for your own sake. There is evil there.”

“So you said, when we came back.” Jacob sent me a quelling look across the wall, and I went on more temperately. “Where does this evil come from?”

Menkem cast a glance over his shoulder toward the altar and the eternal flame, as if looking to them for strength, or protection. Then he took a deep breath and began.

I will not attempt to reproduce his exact wording here. Between my imperfect Vystrani, the haste of my notes, and his tendency to punctuate every sentence with an invocation to the Lord, the result would be unreadable. Instead I will give you the tale as I understood it then.

“Zhagrit Mat” is the name the inhabitants of Drustanev give to the man who supposedly once ruled the kingdom surrounding the ruins I had seen, back in Draconean times. Such kings are invariably either well beloved by their subjects or complete tyrants; Zhagrit Mat, to my surprise, was the former. But it seems he had one ambition that led him badly astray: the desire to become a dragon.

For many years he prayed to the gods to transform him, but with no success. At last, unhinged by this obsession, he turned the other way, and instead made a pact with a demon.

But the demon, of course, did not properly fulfill his end of the bargain. Some error in wording on the king’s part, or simple maliciousness on the demon’s, led to a terrible result: the king became not a dragon, nor the man he had been, but a monstrosity, caught forever halfway between. And not in the manner of those heathen gods, either, Menkem was careful to tell us, with a draconic head on a more or less human body; he was four legged like a wyrm, but with human skin, and a half-human face, and human hands at the ends of his twisted wings.

Driven mad by this transformation, the king became a plague on his own people. He declared himself a god, and hoarded all the riches to be had, while his subjects starved; worse yet, he demanded humans for sacrifice, and the blood ran out the front door of his shrine like a river. His evil grew and grew, until one night he took flight in a storm, and lightning struck him; he fell atop the roof of his own shrine, collapsing it, and that was the end of both king and kingdom.

Those who have read David Parnell’s Reliques of Vystrani Wisdom will recognize this tale. It is told in other parts of the mountains as well, though the details differ; in some versions the evil dragon-king is slain by an angel of the Lord, or by a brave hero, or else the pact was for a limited time and afterward the demon claimed him. Even the notion of the monstrous king’s spirit haunting a nearby ruin is not unique, though that epilogue is not as often heard.

I knew nothing of such tales that day, taking notes in the Drustanev tabernacle. And although the struggle to follow Menkem’s account gave me some distance from what he said, the dim interior, and the memory of those monstrous footprints burned into the ground behind our house, made me shiver. Did I believe what the priest was saying? No, of course not; I prided myself on being a rational woman, and the notion that the spirit of a twisted dragon-human hybrid would lurk about for thousands of years after the downfall of his civilization, ignoring all visitors to his ruins (for certainly there had been some), only to latch on to me for no good reason—

Then I remembered the firestone.

Nonsense, my rational mind said again, once it had recovered from its brief stagger. True, we knew the Draconeans had valued the stones; many had been found in their ruins (which is why so many sites have been ransacked by looters). But the story Menkem told said nothing about treasure.

The part of my mind that remembered the noise outside the sauna, and the footprints in the grass, was not reassured.

Then— “Lord Hilford!” I said abruptly, interrupting the priest.

Menkem nodded gravely. “Yes.”

I might have imagined the noise, but the footprints were undeniably real. Which meant something was out there—something that might, based on the evidence thus far, have an interest in me—and if that interest had anything to do with our trip to the ruins, then both Astimir and Lord Hilford might be in danger. The young man was here in the village, but the earl…

Jacob stood swiftly. “I’ll go talk to Wilker.”

I could tell he was not convinced. Neither was I, really—but I didn’t have to be. I would far rather take the precaution of sending Mr. Wilker after Lord Hilford and feel a fool for it later than not take that precaution, and feel an even bigger fool if something did happen.

To my husband as much as the priest, I said, “I have a few more questions. If I may?”

Jacob’s hand extended as if to grip my shoulder briefly in comfort, but the wall kept us too far apart, and it might have been a breach of etiquette to reach over anyway. His fingers curled into a fist that jerked once, a curiously masculine gesture that seemed to exhort me to strength. Then he went out.

The end of my pencil was between my teeth, I realized, as I glanced down at my notes. I removed it and said, “If this is some kind of… evil spirit.” A little of my doubt crept into my voice, but I did my best to sound agreeable. “What would you recommend?”

“You must be cleansed,” the priest said with an air of finality. “It should have been done when you came back from the ruins; I said so at the time. But we will do it now.”

The Temple’s obsession with washing had not been part of my nursery maid’s tales—she was too convinced their followers were all dirty and foul—but I knew of it from other sources. Well, if this was the price for laying Menkem’s fears to rest, then it was a small one to pay. Tucking my pencil into the journal, I held out my hands. “Where is your basin?”

It required rather more than a basin.

Menkem sent me to gather Jacob, Mr. Wilker, and Astimir; the latter certainly needed purification along with me, and it was judged best to give a scrub to the gentlemen as well, just to be on the safe side. Lord Hilford could be cleansed when he returned.

By the time I had done this, somehow the entire village knew what was afoot. (This might have been the Drustanev gossips at work, but I think it more likely Menkem had said something the night before.) Quite a crowd of them gathered outside the tabernacle, including Dagmira. “I’m told this is to be a full bath,” I said to her. The notion was rather appealing; I never felt quite properly clean after using the sauna. “Will that be done inside the tabernacle?”

Her look was scandalized, as if she sincerely hoped I had botched my Vystrani and meant to say something else entirely. “Of course not! I’m surprised he let you in there, heathens as you are. No, it has to be living water.”

Reciting Scripture in a loud voice, Menkem began leading the crowd forth. “Living water?” I repeated, unsure if I’d heard her correctly.

Dagmira nodded, but seemed uninclined to explain. I translated the words into Scirling for my companions, and Jacob stumbled over a rock. “Living water? Oh, surely they don’t mean— Yes, they do.”

I followed his gaze, and saw the icy stream up ahead.

No amount of protest would convince the priest to back down. His rural theology included nothing that would cover this situation, but he was determined to use what little he had. Jacob, whose scholarly interests had at one point included religious history, mustered some very learned-sounding arguments that lost half their force when translated into broken Vystrani; to no avail. Nothing would do but that we be dropped into the deepest part of the stream, where the water could cover every last inch of our bodies.

Every last inch. I realized, halfway through the argument, that Jacob was less concerned with the cold, and more concerned with the spectating villagers who were about to see his wife stripped naked in front of them. And I had thought the sauna was bad! Menkem seemed to believe that this being a ritual affair meant it didn’t matter who saw me; I could only chalk that up to rural practicality, since surely any religion that requires women to sit apart from men in tabernacle ought not to approve of nudity in mixed company.

My willingness to tolerate their superstition only went so far. “You have a choice,” I told Menkem firmly. “You can bathe me publicly with my clothes on; you can bathe me privately with my clothes off; or you can bathe me not at all. But I am not removing a stitch out in the open like this, nor so long as any of these other men are around.” My gesture took in everyone but Jacob and the priest himself. I would have excluded Menkem, too, except that I was fairly certain the ritual required him to be present.

The priest did not like it, but Jacob and I stood firm, with Mr. Wilker’s support; I rather thought the latter less than eager to expose himself to the locals, either. Finally it was agreed that the villagers would be sent away, except for a few assistants; these would help Menkem bathe Astimir and my two companions, after which Jacob and Dagmira would bathe me under cover of one of our tents.

I accordingly gave them their privacy. Unfortunately, this left me to sit alone on a line of barrels with Dagmira, who glared at me. “You bring trouble.”

Several possible responses rose to my tongue, all of them defensive. Menkem’s story had placed a worm of doubt in my heart, though, and it gave me pause. Even without evil spirits in the picture, we were a disruption to this village.

For a good cause, of course; despite our awkward start, we had gathered a great deal of valuable information, ranging from simple matters like a reliable description of a mating flight to my observation of the tiny valves in the wing membrane.

But what did that matter to Dagmira? It would bring us acclaim in Scirland—well, it would bring the gentlemen acclaim, once they presented our findings to the Philosophers’ Colloquium—and, of course, I had the satisfaction of the scholar, uncovering things never before known to man. That meant nothing in Drustanev, though.

They had our coin, I told myself; Lord Hilford had paid for any number of things in the course of arranging this expedition. Much of that, though, had gone to the missing Gritelkin, and this boyar above him. Was what remained sufficient compensation for all the disruption our presence caused?

These thoughts had occupied me long enough in silence that Dagmira made a disgusted noise and looked away. She turned back, however, when I said in a small voice, “I am sorry.”

The surprise in her eyes would have made me laugh, had I been feeling less low. “What we’re doing—well, I tell myself it is for the benefit of all mankind, and I do believe that’s true. But the benefit to you is very distant, I must admit. Is there something that could make it better? Should I tell Lord Hilford to distribute more payment?”

The offer produced a wealth of conflicting reactions in her face, less than half of them positive. Finally Dagmira said bluntly, “Get rid of the dragons.”

“Get rid of them!” I shot to my feet, appalled.

She flung one impatient hand at the sky. “They eat our sheep, attack the shepherds—what good do they do us?”

All my childhood obsession with dragons welled up in my throat, choking me. “But they’re—they’re—” I was not capable of having this conversation in Vystrani, where my vocabulary lacked the word for “magnificent.” Perhaps it was for the best; the struggle to convey my meaning gave my brain time to catch up. Beauty and splendor are all very well, but they put no food on the table for a mountain peasant, nor do they keep the house warm in winter.

But I could hardly commit myself to their eradication, either. Suddenly fierce, I said, “I cannot do anything about the sheep; dragons must eat, just as wolves and bears and humans must. But we will find out what is making them attack the shepherds, and put a stop to it. That is one thing our science can do for you.”

It was the same promise I had made Chatzkel during my night with the smugglers, and I had yet to fulfill it. But my words then had been driven by a desire to get away safely. This time, my motivation was quite the reverse; I did not want to go anywhere. Not when going would mean admitting defeat, and abandoning these people to further attacks, further deaths.

And so my promise carried a silent echo: I would not leave until I had made good on my word.

Even if it meant freezing to death in a Vystrani winter.

By the pursing of her lips, Dagmira was less than entirely confident, but she accepted it with a grudging nod. “That would help.”

As would laying their minds to rest on the matter of this curse, whether it was superstition or not. Jacob came, wet-haired and irritable, to summon me, and together we went back to the stream, where one of our tents had been pitched across the flow.

It was not large enough that I could stand anywhere both sheltered and dry. Mouth set tight, I took off my shoes and stockings, drew a deep breath, and waded in.

The first touch of water against my bare foot was enough to persuade me that the sauna was a splendid device when the alternative was this frigid stream. It only got worse as I went deeper, my skirts plastering themselves against my calves like clammy hands, and my toes going numb enough to render my footing uncertain. I counted my blessings, though; the stream here was barely deep enough to submerge me lying down, and rose no higher than my knees while standing.

I ducked into the tent, crouching to fit under the stretched canvas. Dagmira followed me, and Jacob stood outside to receive my clothing. I would have preferred it the other way about, but Menkem insisted; we Scirlings were all heretics, after all, and could not be trusted to do the thing right.

Any shyness I might have felt was vanquished by my desire to finish this quickly. I stripped off dress, petticoat, stays, and shift in record time, while Menkem prayed outside. Dagmira stopped me, though, as I steeled myself to descend into the water. “Your hair,” she said.

“What of it?” I snapped, my teeth chattering. Goose pimples had sprung up all over, until my skin felt as pebbly as a dragon’s.

“The water must touch everything,” she said, turning me about so she could drag the pins from my hair. It tumbled over my shoulders, a warm touch I was sorely reluctant to ruin. But delay only made things worse, and so the moment Dagmira’s fingers finished their rough combing, I sucked in a deep breath and dropped.

The sheer, appalling shock of it caused me to lose most of that air an instant later. I think I yelled, though I cannot be sure. I know I surged partway up again, only to be met by Dagmira’s hand, mercilessly forcing me back down. By then I had very little air, but rationality had managed to recover enough that I knew I needed to last only a few moments.

Without warning, a foot planted itself against my ribs, driving me against the hard rocks and slimy mud of the stream’s bed. I clawed at it, and Dagmira caught my hands—no, just my right hand, and she was prying at my fingers. I would have screamed at her if my head weren’t underwater. Just before I could be certain she was trying to murder me, though, I realized what she was after: my wedding ring. The water had to touch everything.

That ring had not been off my finger since Jacob placed it there. But right then, it was standing between me and the chance to breathe again; I did not think he would begrudge its brief absence. I let Dagmira take the ring, and dropped my arms beneath the water again.

Her foot vanished, and a moment later, when I truly could not stay down any longer, I floundered to the surface. Air, blessed air, rushed into my lungs. Then Dagmira helped me to my feet. I needed the aid; every part of me seemed to have gone numb, and I was shaking so badly that I surely would have fallen.

The clothing Jacob thrust into the tent was not my own. I could not have gotten such closely tailored garments on just then, and they had all gotten soaked besides. The robe Dagmira flung over my head was soon the same way, but it was thick wool, warm even when wet. She then helped me from the tent and back up onto shore, where Menkem finished his prayers with the holy gesture.

At that moment, I did not care in the slightest what spiritual benefit I might have gained from the exercise. I was in sunlight, and no longer in the stream—all to the good—but the wind cut like a knife. The sooner I got indoors, the better. I stumbled badly, trying to walk, until Jacob took the simple expedient of picking me up and carrying me onward. “You d-d-d-on’t have to do that,” I said, my chattering teeth contradicting my body, which was more than glad to curl up against his chest.

I felt the quick jerk of his laugh. “Nonsense. Carrying you helps warm me up. We both benefit.”

Who could argue with that?

My wet hair was the worst, holding the chill long after my body had started to recover. Jacob and I huddled under the blankets in our bed until I had stopped shaking; then he went out again. I remained there a while longer, feeling like a small child in winter, reluctant to leave my cocoon. Finally I forced myself out, pinned my hair up in a messy knot that at least would not freeze my back, and went downstairs.

Jacob came through the front door as I did. “Wilker and Menkem are off, with Astimir to guide them,” he said, to my questioning look. “Astimir has been to the boyar’s lodge before, and knows the way. I will give the priest this much; when I pointed out that Lord Hilford would be on his way back by the time Wilker caught him, and then it would be days yet before they got back here, he immediately insisted on going with them.” Jacob snorted with quiet laughter. “I should like to be there to see Hilford’s expression, when Wilker tells him he must be dunked in a mountain stream.”

Lord Hilford was not a religious man; he joined us in our studies on Sabbath night, but only because he would spend the night reading anyway. But I hoped, with the superstitious chill that had been plaguing me since the previous night, that he would cooperate.

“Will they be safe?” I asked, rubbing my arms for warmth. “I don’t mean this Zhagrit Mat business—well, that, too—but from the dragons.”

“They’re armed,” Jacob said, “and know to keep an eye out. It’s as safe as they can be, short of hiding indoors.”

He had a point. There had been no trouble in the village—perhaps because there were so many people; predators often prefer lone prey—but anyone who ventured beyond its boundaries was at risk. Mr. Wilker was likely safer than if he were going out with Jacob for research.

I was selfishly glad my husband would not be leaving the village. And yet, how could we answer our questions, and fulfill my promises to Dagmira and Chatzkel, without risking ourselves in the field? We would have to dare it eventually. And as much as I wished to pretend otherwise, we had to do it soon.

SIXTEEN

With both of the other gentlemen gone, Jacob was at loose ends. He tried to talk to the villagers, but none of them wanted to come near him until they knew whether the evil of Zhagrit Mat had been banished. Back home in Pasterway, he would have passed the time answering his correspondence; but the difficulty of receiving mail in Drustanev meant no one was writing to us. I recognized the signs of frustrated idleness, and took steps to mitigate them.

I had, as originally advertised, been filing the gentlemen’s notes. It was a more haphazard affair than I would have liked, though, because I had never done such work before, and had no system. Together Jacob and I went through the pages, discussing what we had learned, and writing fair copy of many things that had been jotted down in a messy scrawl.

It was tedious work, but at the same time, it gave me a deep, wordless pleasure. I remembered the naive girl that had stood in the king’s menagerie, never dreaming that Jacob Camherst would become her husband, but hoping he would be her friend. My naivete had been vindicated; we were friends now, in what I thought of (at the time) as a queerly masculine way. Ladies did not have these sorts of conversations, speculating as to how the daytime torpor and winter hibernation of rock-wyrms allowed those enormous predators to survive without eating everything in sight—not with each other, nor with gentlemen either, who were not supposed to tax our minds with such weighty matters.

The Manda Lewises of the world will say that is not love, at least not of a romantic kind. I will grant that it certainly is not the sort one finds in plays and sensational novels—but that sort always seems to be causing trouble for everyone involved, and the occasional innocent bystander. (I thought so then, and I think so even more now, having seen that very principle in action.) I argue, to the contrary of Manda and her ilk, that such a deep and pleasant rapport is love, the common thread that may link friends and relations and spouses; and furthermore, the mightiest torrent of passion, without that thread woven into it, is mere animal lust.

Such were the thoughts filling the depths of my mind, while the surface occupied itself noting down changes on our map. Many of the lairs marked by the smugglers had proved to be abandoned; Jacob and Mr. Wilker, in the course of their explorations, had found a handful more with new inhabitants within. Clearly the dragons had moved house… but why?

I scowled down at the paper, for I had not thought to provide for alterations when I made my marks, overwriting Jacob’s hasty pencil scratches in more careful ink. Finally I blacked out the X’s of empty lairs until they were solid squares, and drew new X’s where Jacob said they had found dragons unexpectedly in residence. “I should like to know how long ago they started migrating—and where the rest of them have migrated to,” I said, and he murmured in agreement.

My eye drifted over the revised map. If migration was occurring, I wondered whether there might be an underlying pattern—a certain distance traveled, or a certain direction—which would help us understand the process, and to find the remainder of the dragons.

I did not see an answer to that question. But I saw something else.

My finger traced an arc of lairs, curving around from east to south. It continued, with interruptions, through the west and north, with a diameter of several miles. Not a perfect circle, but…

“Jacob,” I said, “what’s here?”

He leaned over to see where my fingertip rested, in the center of that circle. The map there was blank—entirely without lairs, so far as we had recorded. “There? Let’s see—that’s past the ravine…” He shrugged. “Nothing in particular, that I can think of.”

“You’ve been in there?”

“Not yet,” he said. “Those lairs you just marked are the farthest Wilker and I have been; it’s a fair hike, getting up there.”

“So there could be something there, that you haven’t seen?”

Jacob sat back, frowning at me. “Such as what? I’ll grant you it looks oddly regular, but our map is hardly perfect; some of our distances are wrong, and I’m sure we don’t have all the lairs. There might be one right in the middle of that apparent circle.”

“Which is one possible answer to your question,” I pointed out. “We think that rock-wyrms are solitary, coming together only to mate, and that they have no hierarchy amongst themselves. What if we’re wrong? There might be some kind of… oh, queen dragon lairing there, and all the others keep their distance.”

“Or it could be there are no suitable caves there.”

A fair point; the reason rock-wyrms are found in clusters, and fly such distances to hunt, is because not all parts of the Vystrani highlands have caves that meet the dragons’ needs. But that circle seemed so very regular. Could it possibly be an accident?

(The answer, by the way, is yes. In this case it proved not to be, but such things happen all the time, when one’s data is as scanty as ours was. The human mind is very good at imagining patterns where none truly exist. If you are reading this book because you have an interest in pursuing a science, whether natural history or some other, bear that warning in mind. It will save you a great deal of humiliation—I speak from experience. But that is a tale for a later book.)

I had enough sense to know I should not leap to conclusions. In fact, there was only one sensible way to proceed. “We must go and look.”

Jacob’s eyebrows rose at the word “we.” “This is where I remind you that it will be at least four days, more likely five, before Wilker and Hilford return.”

I gave him my most charming smile, and the reply he knew was coming. “And where I suggest that we need not wait for them.”

“Isabella…”

“You took me on the hunt.”

“Because it would have been inefficient to lug a dragon’s carcass all the way back here for you to draw. And the attacks are coming more and more often.”

“The fact remains that you took me,” I pointed out. “The dangers were no less simply because you had reason. And you have reason now, too: it will be four days, more likely five, before Mr. Wilker and Lord Hilford return, which is four or five days wasted—not to mention four or five days in which the dragons might grow even more aggressive than they already have.”

“You don’t know how to shoot, Isabella.”

A lack I was acutely aware of, these days. “But I can keep watch with the best of them. Truly, can we afford to delay, when we might learn something that could save someone’s life?”

Jacob bit his lip; he was wavering. I pressed my advantage. “If you go out alone, you will certainly not be safe; think of the time you fell, when you and Mr. Wilker were mapping caves. What if you had hurt your leg? You need a companion, and I am volunteering.”

“You are supposedly being haunted by the spirit of a dead monster,” he said drily.

By that, I knew I was winning the debate. In all honesty, I cannot think of anything Jacob ever truly refused me—even things others would say he should have done.

I was bright enough not to say that myself, though. Instead I addressed his point, as if it were a genuine concern. “We’ll see if anything troubles us tonight. If not, then we can trust that either Menkem Goen’s ritual did some good, or it was some kind of chance occurence, not to be repeated.” We could hardly have set out that day regardless; it was far too late. So it cost me nothing to wait.

Jacob, I suspect, performed the same calculation for himself, but he said nothing of it. “We shall see.”

I must have woken up eight times that night, but I heard nothing, and neither did Jacob. And in the morning, the grass was clear of any new marks, though the ones behind the house remained.

Still, we didn’t leave that day. I think Jacob was quietly looking for ways to dissuade me; we had a number of brief conversations on such matters as the weather (cold and relentlessly windy, as always, but otherwise fair) and the suitability of my clothing for such a hike (I told him I would borrow a pair of his trousers).

Jacob’s own impatience settled the matter. I had not thought of him before as a restless man, but he had none of his usual hobbies to occupy him in Drustanev; and having spent the better part of a month going out nigh daily, he found himself chafing at this sudden inaction. He did not like any better than I did the thought of sitting idle when we might be learning something that could help the villagers.

“If tonight passes quietly,” he said at last, “we’ll go tomorrow.”

I spent the afternoon in preparation, so that we would not waste any time the following morning. The area was a strenuous day’s hike away; allowing a day to explore, that would be three days altogether. We would return when Mr. Wilker and Lord Hilford did, or possibly just before.

My preparations were hardly secret; it is no surprise that Dagmira guessed their general purpose. “Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded, hands on her hips.

Before, I might have fobbed her off with some vague answer, not wanting to face the possibility of argument. Ever since our conversation, though, I felt guilty about the extent to which we ignored the villagers of Drustanev. I told myself we had reason; they’d been largely sullen and unhelpful where our researches were concerned, seeing us as a disruption and possibly a threat. But if Dagmira knew of any danger, she might unbend enough to warn me. “Come with me,” I said, leaving off my packing, and led her downstairs.

Our map still lay on the workroom’s one large table. I pointed to the center of the circle and asked her, “What’s there?”

Dagmira frowned in puzzlement at the map. “On the paper?”

“No, in—” I caught myself. “Do you know how to read a map?”

I actually said “picture of the land”; although I knew the Vystrani term, it temporarily escaped me. Dagmira mouthed through my odd choice of words, even more puzzled. Then her brow cleared. “Ulyin! Mayor Mazhustin has one, and Menkem Goen keeps one of Akhia. They’re pretty—much prettier than this.”

Her casual denigration of my work, I surmised, amounted to a “no.” Why should she know how to read a map? Drustanev was so isolated, she might never have been as far as another village. The people here navigated by landmarks, not drawings of them. I described the area to her, based on what Jacob had said of it, and then Dagmira nodded. “In the middle of that area,” I said. “Is there anything there? Anything special, I mean.”

The young woman shook her head. (As I write this, it occurs to me, for the first time, that Dagmira cannot have been much younger than I was. She was not yet married—they wed surprisingly late in the Vystrani highlands; she would not seek a husband until her dowry of weavings was complete—and perhaps that was part of it; but I suspect the larger part of it was simply that I saw myself as a worldly, sophisticated woman, and her as a rural child. What an unfortunate thing to realize, long after I could possibly apologize to her for it.)

“Too rocky,” she said of the region in question. “There’s no point in cutting or burning the trees; it wouldn’t make good pasture.”

“You don’t have any legends about it? Evil spirits I should be wary of?” I could not undo my ruins trip, but I could at least try to prevent another one.

Dagmira looked at me sharply, to see if I was mocking her, but I was quite sincere. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just more mountain.”

When she heard that Jacob and I intended to go see for ourselves, she shrugged philosophically. By then she had resigned herself to the fact that I would behave neither like a sensible Vystrani peasant girl, nor like a fancy lady from foreign parts. But she laughed at the notion of me carrying a proper share of our supplies—not over the proposed terrain. “You wouldn’t even make it halfway,” she said, and was probably right. “I’ll make my brother go with you.”

“Your brother?”

She looked at me as if I were simple in the head, and soon I found out why. “Iljish?”

The lad who acted as the gentlemen’s valet—though in truth he’d become more a man-of-all-work than manservant. I had not realized he was Dagmira’s brother. They did not look much alike.

Stammering with embarrassment, I said, “Won’t your parents mind?”

Dagmira shrugged with unconcern that was, I think, partially real, and partially a scab over an old wound I had just prodded without knowing. “They’re dead.”

My face heated even further. This young woman had been my maidservant for weeks, and I had not bothered to learn the first thing about her family. I had never thought of myself as particularly arrogant, or prone to ignoring the world around me, yet I had devoted far more thought to the doings of rock-wyrms than to the people who kept our house.

I managed to accept Dagmira’s offer with something like grace, but the shame of my blindness stayed with me. How difficult was it for her, orphaned in this village, having to be both mother and sister to Iljish? No wonder she had taken this position, serving the strange foreigners. I was very quiet through supper that night, wondering if our placid cook had some sorrow in her own past I was ignorant of. She did not dress in a widow’s weeds, at least, but beyond that I could not muster the nerve to ask. I did not know her well enough, and that was not the way to start.

But I could not dwell on that matter forever. At the crack of dawn the next morning, Jacob, Iljish, and I departed, on what surely must be accounted one of the more momentous hikes of even my adventure-filled life.

SEVENTEEN

Talking to Dagmira about our journey was one of the better decisions I made in Vystrana, for she was absolutely right: I would not have made it even two hours into that hike if she had not sent Iljish along.

He had inherited none of his sister’s robust build. But he was a wiry thing, far more capable of scrambling over the rough terrain than I, even with a pack on his back. Iljish scampered across the stones and hacked through the brambles with the boundless energy of a squirrel. I came second, and Jacob brought up the rear. In theory he held his gun at the ready, prepared to shoot at any dragons that might think to trouble us, but in practice he had to sling it across his back as often as not, needing his hands for balance on the broken terrain.

We set out in the direction the smugglers had taken me, but soon diverged from that course, into terrain where we need not fear running into them, or indeed anyone except the occasional hunter. The limestone bones of the mountains came to the surface in jagged blocks there, where the walls of steep valleys had collapsed downward in the not-too-distant past. The forest across much of this had reached the stage where it supported a dense undergrowth of flowering brambles, making our progress far more laborious than under the venerable fir.

We went up, and up, and up. Lowlanders that we were—I had never lived more than a thousand feet above sea level—Jacob and I made heavy going of it, though nothing like so bad as we would have done on our arrival, before we had a chance to adapt. During one of our rare breaks, Jacob admitted that he and Mr. Wilker had been thoroughly blown by their first few explorations. “I thought myself fit enough,” he said, “but this air is so much thinner; I had no idea it would make exertion so hard.” He spoke in Vystrani, but Iljish still looked mystified. Having lived his entire life in the mountains, he found nothing odd at all in the quality of the air.

When I could spare the energy to think, I made up my mind to speak to Iljish about his family. He was, I judged, a bit younger than his sister, and I had no awkward history with him (though Dagmira might have shared her side of our own); these combined to make him seem more approachable, to my embarrassed mind. But by then he had begun ranging outward from our progress, snapping off shots at anything whose fur he might sell. The rifle was ours, and better than any in Drustanev; the use of it was as much a payment to him as whatever Jacob had offered.

Iljish came back at last with a pair of rabbits slung over his shoulder. Jacob and I had paused for breath in a congenial spot, where sunlight broke through the trees to warm the air, and an edge of limestone formed a handy bench. Nerving myself, I began, “I was talking with your sister, Iljish, and—”

“Hush!” Jacob hissed, in a low, urgent voice.

My husband had never once spoken so peremptorily to me. I hushed, more out of surprise than obedience; and then I heard what he had.

A single flap of wings. And then, just when I thought I might have imagined it, another.

We recoiled back from the sunlight, so inviting a moment before, so dangerous now. A shadow passed overhead. Through the trees, I caught a glimpse of the dragon, banking on a warm updraft of air to continue its exploration of the area. Had the beast spotted some animal prey? No, it wasn’t nearly close enough to sunset; no rock-wyrm should be hunting at this hour.

I dared not pull out my notebook to jot the line aggression linked to disturbance in sleep patterns? But I thought it, and even while I crouched at the base of a tree, trying not to feel too much like one of the rabbits over Iljish’s shoulder, I wondered if there was any way to test the theory.

Jacob had slid his rifle free, and now knelt with the barrel pointed at the ground. I met his gaze, and saw the hesitation there. Should he shoot to defend us, and risk failure, which would almost certainly bring the full threat upon us?

I shook my head, a tiny gesture, as if the dragon would hear my face moving through the air. Under cover, Jacob would be shooting half blind. And he dared not go into the open for a better angle.

The dragon coughed out a noise that sounded, to my excitable ear, like annoyance. A moment later we heard the renewed flapping of its wings fading into the distance; nevertheless, it was several long minutes before any of us could move.

“That,” I said at last, “was not Zhagrit Mat.”

Jacob let out the breath he had been holding. “No. An ordinary dragon—perhaps.” He ran his left hand through sweat-damp hair, then said, “I know why we argue so rarely. I can predict enough of what you will say that there isn’t much point in starting it. We’re far enough along that it hardly makes sense to turn back.”

The point was debatable. But I was hardly going to argue Jacob’s side for him, if he would not. “Let us continue on, then, and get out of that dragon’s range before sunset.”

We did not make it quite so far after that as any of us had hoped, but Jacob, in consultation with Iljish, decided it was best to stop where we found a defensible campsite, and cover the last bit the following day. I forced myself through my share of the work in setting up that camp, but fell on my nose as soon as I could, and slept so deeply a dragon could have eaten my legs for a snack and I would not have discovered it until morning.

The next day, we began our exploration.

No more the headlong marching of the previous day; now we picked our way carefully, one eye on the sky above, one on the ground ahead. Approaching from Drustanev sent us through one of the gaps in the circle I had noted; there were, so far as we knew, no lairs in the immediate vicinity. But once inside the circle, who knew what we might find?

It was wildly beautiful terrain, if you have the spirit within you to appreciate true wilderness, rather than the groomed version that appears in romantic paintings. I have never liked Vystrana so much as I did on that journey, though how much of that was the scenery and how much my circumstances—stretching my wings, with my husband at my side—I cannot say. The stone here was quite porous, so that we heard a steady soft rushing from snowmelt flowing along below the ground, and here and there found a small waterfall cascading from the broken rock. (For once my exertions were strenuous enough that I was actually glad for its icy touch upon my face, though it still left me gasping.)

“I expect there are caves,” Jacob said, peering up one of the cracks from which water issued forth, “but they may not be large enough for lairing.”

I retied the laces of my boots and shoved errant strands of hair back beneath the Vystrani kerchief with which I had restrained their fellows. “Whatever accounts for the circle—if indeed there is any such thing—will be found at the center.” We forged onward.

Until we found our way blocked by another ravine, even more forbidding than the one we had traversed on our way here. This one looked like the mountain had been split open by a giant’s axe: a steep crevasse, too wide to be bridged by a fallen tree, too long to be conveniently circled. “Have you ever been here before?” I asked Iljish.

He shook his head, peering over the edge in a way that made my muscles twitch with the desire to pull him back. “What do you think is at the bottom?”

More brambles, in all likelihood, but I did not say it; I heard in his voice the buoyant energy of a young man who cannot see a challenge like that ravine slope without wanting to conquer it. I shared his impulse, in more feminine form. This was not precisely the center of the circle I had marked, but perhaps the secret lay here. Our map was not exact, after all, and dragons might be less than entirely precise themselves.

Jacob had caught the same enthusiasm. He grinned at me and said, “I once climbed Matherly Crag, without ropes, on a dare. But I think we will use ropes here.”

I was glad of that, as I had never climbed anything more challenging than a tree, and that in skirts. Fortunately, this slope was not quite vertical—at least not on our side. The far wall was a different matter, overhanging the base of the ravine and casting it into shadow. If we had to go up that side to continue our search, I suspected our exploration would end here.

We tied our first rope around a sturdy tree, and then Jacob used it to steady himself as he descended. Once he found a suitable place to stop and attach another, I began to follow him. The disadvantage to this method, I discovered, was that I must face the cliff; not all portions of the slope required me to cling to the line, but if I turned to see where I was placing my feet, it put me in a bad position for those times when I did require it.

The final stage of our descent was even steeper; in the end, Jacob had to teach me how to abseil, which I was not very good at. I cracked my knees repeatedly against the stony wall, and my ribs were quite bruised from the constriction of the rope by the time I reached the comparatively level floor of the ravine. Once Jacob had extricated me, I staggered off a few steps to lean against a boulder and nurse my pains in private while he guided Iljish through the process.

The sheer quiet of the place struck me. The curve of the ravine was such that it blocked the wind rather than channeling it; I had not realized just how ever-present that sound was here until it faded. The verdant undergrowth rose around me like some kind of enchanted jungle, until I almost expected a talking fox to walk out of it, like in one of my old nurse’s tales. I did not fancy the notion of climbing that rock face again, even with the ropes—but it was worth it, and so were my bruises and scrapes, for the sheer pleasure of this place.

And for the sight that greeted my eyes, when I looked around the curve to what lay beyond.

The overhanging wall on the far side of the ravine concealed an enormous black opening, easily fifty feet across, and deep enough that I could see nothing of what lay inside. A cave, most definitely, and far larger than any we had seen used as a lair… but I remembered my half-serious comment about a queen dragon, and my mouth went very dry.

“Isabella!” Jacob called out. I nearly jumped from my skin. Swiftly I turned to wave at him, both to show him where I’d gone, and to silence him.

He frowned in puzzlement at my urgent gesture, but did not argue; moving as quietly as he could across the rough ground, he joined me, while Iljish unwrapped himself from the rope. “What is—” Jacob began.

He never finished the question. His gaze fell upon the cave opening, just as mine had, and I suspect I had gaped in much the same way. “I haven’t seen anything moving,” I said in a murmur that went no farther than us.

Jacob shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t… they are crepuscular hunters, after all. At this time of day, any rock-wyrm would be sleeping in the sun. Any healthy one, at least. But they prefer their lairs far smaller.”

To be precise, they preferred their lairs a bit bigger than themselves. “You haven’t seen anything that large in the sky, have you?”

Of course not; he and Mr. Wilker would have fallen over their own feet to come tell us. Jacob frowned. “I don’t see how anything that large could fly. Granted, we don’t understand very well how it works even with the dragons we’ve seen; we don’t know enough about their anatomy yet. But surely there must be a limit.”

“A limit to what?”

I took some comfort from the fact that Jacob, too, leapt a foot in the air at Iljish’s question. The boy was far quieter across the ground than either of us, but spoke far more loudly. He looked taken aback when I frantically hushed him.

“Nobody’s ever seen a dragon that large,” he said, in a lower tone, once we had explained. “Not outside of stories.”

Stories like those about Zhagrit Mat? I was not going to calculate what that creature’s wingspan might supposedly have been. He was associated with the ruins, anyway, not with this cave. Assuming Dagmira was correct.

Jacob straightened, looking back to where he’d dropped the supplies we brought down with us. “Well. Now would be the safest time to explore; we gain nothing by delaying.”

Thinking back, I suspect him of a degree of bravado, not wanting to show fear in front of his wife. It had the salutary effect of inducing a similar bravado in me, though, which may not have been what he intended. “I couldn’t agree more. Do we have torches of any kind in that pack?”

Bravado or no, we approached the cave carefully, skulking along the base of the overhanging wall until we reached the mouth. There we paused, all three of us listening mightily for any sound within.

The only things we heard were the steady drip of water, and the echoing silence of empty space.

Jacob went first, followed by Iljish, both of them gripping rifles tight. I remained outside for the moment, unlit torch in hand. They kept close to the wall, not wanting to silhouette themselves against the brightness outside. The ground sloped down before them, and I realized what had seemed like a low ceiling—serrated with stalactites like a dragon’s maw; an image I could not shake—was nothing of the sort; the cavern broke through to open air near its top, and the men were now descending toward the depths.

Down they went, Jacob drawing ahead of Iljish, farther and farther until I could scarcely make him out at all in the darkness.

Then he moved, and a moment later Iljish turned to beckon me. Jacob had seen nothing, heard nothing; we could risk light.

I struck a match and lit the torch. We had lanterns, too, but those would not make the slightest difference in this enormous, black void. Even the blazing light of the torch created only a small island of light, bobbing nervously around me as I picked my way down to join the men.

“Stay behind me, Isabella,” Jacob murmured, not turning. “I don’t want the torch to blind me.”

In case he had to shoot something. But the cave had a dead feeling about it; the subconscious mind hears breathing, tiny movements, all the little sounds of life, and here we heard none. Nor, as we began to examine our surroundings, did we see any of the castings or marks we associated with a dragon’s lair. The stone all about us was formed into queer shapes, stalactites and stalagmites and things I didn’t have names for, flowing sheets of stone I would not have believed until I saw them for myself.

What we did note, faintly near the entrance, and more strongly the farther we went, was the smell. “Faugh!” I whispered, wishing, for the first time in my life, that I had one of those ridiculous little nosegays young ladies carry around and sniff from every time they want to politely imply an insult. “What is that? Are there dragon eggs down here that have gone rotten?”

“Sulfur,” Jacob murmured back. Our sibilants rebounded from the stone, whispering off into the depths of the cavern. “There must be a source of it here somewhere.”

Neither of us was a chemist, so I will annotate my husband’s comment with a detail from Mr. Pegshaw’s excellent geological treatise, Methods of Cavern Formation in a Variety of Environments, which will become quite relevant later. The rotten-egg smell came not from deposits of sulfur, but from hydrogen sulfide gas seeping up from some source far below. (We were fortunate in the extreme that its concentration was not high enough to pose an incendiary risk—and that we did not go deep enough into the cavern to encounter the stronger pockets.) When this gas meets water, it forms sulfuric acid, which created the cave system whose topmost chamber we were now exploring. The Drustanev Caverns, as they are now called, have been the object of mapping efforts by later speleologists, and as I understand it their more accessible parts have become something of a tourist attraction in recent years; but the full extent of the system is still unknown, and the mighty void we had entered is off-limits to all.

We certainly felt like trespassers. But as the floor leveled out for a time, Jacob ventured outward from the wall; we had no fear of becoming lost, not so long as we could see the pale oval of the cavern mouth at the top of the slope. And, before we had gone very far at all, we found something entirely unexpected.

I thought at first it was another rock formation. The light glistened off it oddly, though, and I realized—first with curious surprise; then with an unpleasant jolt—that it was a pile of rotting meat.

A pile in which a limb could be discerned.

To be precise, the hind leg of a dragon.

Had the sulfur stench not obliterated the competing smell, I suspect I would have felt very ill. As it was, my thoughts leapt instead to my original, nearly discarded hypothesis: that this was, in fact, the lair of a mighty rock-wyrm, and furthermore one that ate its own kindred. That, not the rot, was what turned my stomach.

Iljish was morbidly fascinated, going forward to inspect it. Jacob turned, quite incautiously, to stare straight at me and the torch. “Isabella—” he said.

My own logic had followed the same trail. The leg had not been eaten; it had been dropped here, perhaps in rather battered condition to begin with, and then left. I could not guess at rates of decay, not in this environment, where even flies would not come… but I only knew of two rock-wyrms that had died so recently. And one of them I had examined in quite a bit of detail before its body vanished.

This was, I was certain, the hind leg of our own missing dragon.

Nor was it alone. Farther up, we discovered what I could only surmise were the remaining pieces of the beast, though by then it was far enough gone that I was not eager to conduct a tally. We could discern enough to be sure that it had indeed been torn apart, as Mr. Wilker indicated that shocking morning; but it had not been carried off as food. Instead the dragons had borne the remains here.

Why?

We had been long enough about our explorations that my torch was beginning to gutter. The noxious air, too, took its toll on us. Collecting Iljish, we fled back to the green quiet of the ravine, and there collapsed on handy bits of stone to stare at one another and conduct a discussion the boy could not follow in the least, for we spoke Scirling. Neither of us was in any state of mind to force our ideas into Vystrani.

“Have you ever heard of elephant graveyards?” Jacob asked.

“Only in very sentimental tales,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow. The sun now stood overhead, bathing the still air with heat, but I could not say with honesty that was the cause of my perspiration. “I thought them a cloying notion invented for children.”

Jacob rinsed his mouth with water and spat into the underbrush, trying to clear away the sulfuric tinge. “They may or may not be real. Hilford would know. But dragon graveyards… no one has even speculated as to those.”

“We don’t know it is a graveyard,” I pointed out. “One burial—or deposition, or whatever I should call it—is not a pattern. But if there were others, they will have disintegrated by now.”

Because I am a practical woman, the thought did cross my mind that we could test the graveyard theory by killing another dragon, and seeing if his fellows carried him off in the same way. But although I am not above shooting creatures for science, I balked at doing it so callously, to answer only a single question.

Indeed, I was rather less sanguine about having done it at all, now that I faced the notion of dragons actually caring what happened to their brethren. It seemed such a peculiarly human thing to do—something that set us apart from the beasts. If they mourned their own kind…

At least we no longer feared the return of a hypothetical queen dragon, though we kept one wary eye out in case dragons of ordinary size were to visit the ravine. Indeed, I found myself wondering if the reason our dead beast had been torn to bits was because he was otherwise too heavy for his fellows to carry here. Without a tame dragon to try with different loads, I couldn’t be certain. Or perhaps if we observed one in the act of carrying off a bear… I dragged my thoughts back to the present question. Was this an aberration, or a pattern?

Mindful of the need to climb back out of the ravine before it grew too late, we could only explore a little farther. Torches in hand, we went back into the cave, finding once more the rotting pile (we had not imagined it, then), and branching out from there.

We almost overlooked the evidence. There were, as I have said, many peculiar rock formations in that cave; an additional knob or stick here or there hardly attracted the eye. I am embarrassed to say we might have missed it entirely had I not quite literally tripped over it.

My torch skittered across the ground, and Iljish picked it up. Jacob came to help me to my feet, and stopped halfway through the act of pulling me up. My heels slid across the slick stone, dropping me hard on my rump, and I made an indignant sound. “If you are going to offer, then kindly do not—”

Then I saw what he had already spotted.

It stuck out from the side of a lumpy pile, encrusted with needlelike crystals (those I had not shattered with my foot), but still recognizable as the epiphysis of a long bone. Deformed and half buried as it was, I could not identify it precisely; the femur of a small dragon, perhaps, or the brachial humerus of a larger one. Too large to come from a bear—that much was certain.

In a low voice, Jacob said, “Why has it not disintegrated?”

All in a rush, my brain started working again. I had been so distracted by the wonder of a dragon graveyard that I had clean forgotten the simplest fact of dragon osteology: their bones did not long survive their deaths. Even the one we had hunted should have long since deteriorated to the point of collapsing under its own weight. This one had clearly been here long enough for stone to form around it; by now, it should have been dust.

Jacob and I exchanged wide-eyed stares. Scrambling to my feet without his hand, I seized my torch from Iljish and ran back across the cavern floor to where we had left the dragon carcass.

Rotting meat could not deter me now. I plunged my hand into the mess, seeking. Sure enough, some of the bone crumbled beneath my fingers—but not all. I shouted toward Jacob, my voice echoing madly off the stone. “It should be entirely gone by now, should it not? Lord Hilford said.”

“Yes,” he shouted back. “Isabella, come see! I think all of this is bone!”

Once more across the cavern; how I did not fall and break my neck, running on that slick and uneven surface, I will never know. Jacob had given his torch to the mystified Iljish, and was hammering at the lumpy stone with the butt of his rifle. Soon he had cracked a bit off, and I realized what he meant: what I had taken for a cave formation was in fact a layer of accretion over a pile of dragon bone.

There could be no question now; any bone that had been there long enough for such a process to occur should have been dust ages since. “It’s somehow… petrified,” I said, dumbfounded.

Jacob raised his rifle again, then lowered it abruptly. “No, I’m just destroying it. We need—”

He stopped, helpless. What we needed was a stone carver’s tools, something delicate enough to chisel these remains out of their stony matrix without damaging them. But we had brought nothing of the sort with us—not to this cave, and not to Vystrana. Who would ever have thought we would need them?

“There are bound to be more samples here,” I said, though I shared his frustration. “What’s important is that we bring something back for Lord Hilford and Mr. Wilker to see. Get a few more chips, and we’ll break off this long bone; we don’t have all of it, but some is better than none.”

With a pained look on his face, Jacob smashed his rifle down where the long bone vanished into the pile, cracking it clean through. We collected all we could, and might have gone looking for more, save that Iljish tugged at my sleeve. “Please, ma’am—”

I looked where he was pointing, and saw the light beginning to dim at the cave mouth. If we were to climb out of the ravine before it got dark, we needed to go soon.

Reluctantly Jacob and I bundled up our prizes and left the cavern. Even with our ropes, getting up the ravine wall was no easy matter; I could manage the partially walkable bits, but that bottom twenty feet, purely vertical, defeated me. I had not the first clue how to climb a rope, nor the arm strength with which to follow Jacob’s well-meant advice. I finally allowed Iljish to go before me, then clung to the line while the two of them hauled me up by main force. (Between that and the abseiling, I think I left enough skin behind on those rocks to cover an entire second person.)

With our bone fragments packed away as carefully as we could manage, we ate a hasty meal, then lay down to sleep. Or to try; Jacob took the first watch, and I knew it was because he was as wakeful as I.

Curling up on my side to regard him, I said, “Jacob—do you think this has anything to do with the attacks?”

He had, of course, been considering the same thing. He crossed his arms over his knees. “At first I thought it might—when we found the carcass. It might have been some change in the dragons’ behavior, them bringing their dead here, and showing aggression to people. But with those new bones, or rather the older ones… those must have been there for years, Isabella. Who knows how many. Long before the attacks began.”

“Unless it comes and goes. Dragons might have been attacking people when those older bones were placed there, too. If there were people in the region; as you say, who knows how old they are.”

“But what’s the logic, then? Why should dragons start bringing their dead here, then stop, then start again—and why should that have anything to do with this aggression? No, it makes more sense that it’s a disease.”

Not one brought about by eating their own kind, though. I picked up a twig and stabbed at the ground beyond the edge of my blanket. “Perhaps it’s something to do with this Zhagrit Mat.”

Jacob’s eyes glittered with the last flickers of the fire. He did not answer at first; then he shook his head, bowing it until it nearly rested on his folded arms. “I should say that’s superstitious nonsense. But I’m not certain of anything any longer.”

“Zhagrit Mat didn’t start haunting the village until after I went to the ruins,” I said. “The attacks started far earlier. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some connection that I’m missing.”

The last log-end collapsed into a heap of embers with a muffled sigh. Jacob said, “You won’t figure it out by fretting. Get some rest, Isabella.”

And hope for answers in the morning. I drew the blanket closer around my shoulders and waited for sleep to come.

EIGHTEEN

The hike back to Drustanev was quicker (though more punishing to the knees) as we descended toward the village, and blessedly undisturbed by dragons. We had a splendid view of Gritelkin’s house as we came in, and I saw the telltale signs of activity that said someone had returned.

It proved to be both Lord Hilford and Mr. Wilker, each of who must have pressed quite hard on their journey for them to be back so soon. Unless— “Did you manage to see the boyar?” I burst out as we came into the workroom, suddenly worried that something might have turned Lord Hilford back.

“I did, and where the devil have you two been?” the earl said. He went on before I could answer him, making it clear the question had been rhetorical. “Really, Camherst—for a man who was so reluctant to let his wife come to Vystrana in the first place, you’re remarkably willing to drag her all over it now that she’s here.”

Jacob looked shamefaced at the accusation. For my own part, I was taken aback; it was unlike Lord Hilford to speak that way, when he had been so readily agreeable before. “Jacob dragged me nowhere,” I said with asperity. “We went for a lovely hike and discovered something completely unknown to the science of dragon naturalism—but you will not hear it until you say what has put this burr in your brain, that you should accuse my husband like that.”

Mr. Wilker had been seated on a stool by the window, his face in his hands; now he sat up and said, “The creature was stalking him.”

I blinked. “What?”

All my thoughts had been bent upon the wonderful news we had to tell them once they returned; I had quite forgotten what had sent Mr. Wilker after Lord Hilford in the first place. “We found more prints burned into the ground,” he said. “Along the path toward the boyar’s lodge.”

“Did you see it?” I asked Lord Hilford, with perhaps a touch more eagerness than was polite. I suppose I should have asked first if he was well, but I could see with my own eyes that he was; the other had to be asked.

“No,” the earl said, “and I wasn’t about to let that priest drown me in a stream, either. But that night…” He harrumphed into his mustache. “Well, I don’t know what I heard. Menkem declared I wasn’t coming back to Drustanev, though, unless I let him do his little ritual. It seemed more politic to agree.”

Jacob admitted, “We’ve had no trouble—not of that sort—since we let him, ah, ‘purify’ us.”

“Neither did we,” Mr. Wilker said.

“That’s settled, then,” I said briskly. “No more hauntings—and we can show you this.”

In the interests of not misleading the reader, I should admit that more than scientific rationality led me to dismiss the specter of Zhagrit Mat so quickly. I had managed to half forget the sounds I heard, and the footprint burned into the slope behind our house; I did not deny the evidence, but I did trivialize it, for it had not been repeated. Hearing that Lord Hilford had been stalked by the beast—or whatever it was—unnerved me badly, and I responded by ignoring it.

This is not, of course, a terribly profitable response, and I do not recommend it to the reader. Problems rarely go away because you ignore them, and this one would prove no different.

But the choice was made, and the samples from our cave expedition laid out. These distracted Lord Hilford on the spot. He snatched them up, exclaiming, and Mr. Wilker was not far behind. The earl’s assistant, however, withheld his acclaim, examining the fragments closely.

“It’s a damned shame you could not get anything intact,” he said. I bristled at his critical tone, which seemed to imply that the shortcoming was due to sheer laziness on our part, and not a lack of suitable equipment. “With pieces this incomplete, and so crusted with minerals, I can’t agree that they are certainly dragon bone. More likely some other large predator—a bear, perhaps.”

“It is not a bear,” I said sharply before Jacob or the earl could respond.

Mr. Wilker gave me a pitying look. “On what do you base your declaration, Mrs. Camherst?” He laid the faintest stress on my title of courtesy, which put my back up as if I had been laced into the most severe of corsets. “What are the skeletal characteristics which mark ursine anatomy? Unless you have been studying a great many books we have not brought with us, my knowledge of such matters is far more complete than yours; it is my judgment we shall be trusting in this matter.”

“And my knowledge of what we saw in the cave is far more complete than yours, Mr. Wilker,” I shot back. “I saw with my own eyes the carcass of our slain dragon, whose bones should have fallen to dust long since; and on that I base my judgment of these fragments.”

It was not kind of me, but I laid my own stress—not nearly as faint—on his own form of address. He heard my implication very clearly. Mr. Wilker was not a gentleman by birth, and in those days I did not understand what effort had been required for him to lift himself above his humble birth, obtain an education, and bring himself into the circle of a man as socially and scientifically exalted as Lord Hilford. I therefore did not understand why he should resent me, and my presence on this expedition. But the blame must be shared equally; neither of us behaved very well toward the other, as I was in the process of proving.

Mr. Wilker reddened. “Your judgment, Mrs. Camherst? I was not aware that you had any authority in this expedition, except that of which pencil to choose in your drawing. But as you seem to have adopted your husband’s trousers, perhaps I was wrong.”

“Now see here—” Jacob said, his voice rising.

“I should hardly—” I began.

“Enough!” Lord Hilford slammed one hand down on the table before we could answer the question of who was about to say the more unforgivable thing, me or my husband. “For God’s sake, Tom; you know these aren’t bear bones. Even with the mineralization, they aren’t nearly heavy enough. Mrs. Camherst, Tom Wilker’s birth may be below your own, but he has raised himself up by his own brilliance and effort, which is something I should expect you of all people to respect.”

He paused long enough for shame to secure its grip on me. Then, in a more moderate tone, he said, “Now, if someone will fetch me a magnifying glass—”

Mr. Wilker leapt to do so, caught halfway between scowling and red-faced embarrassment. My hands went by reflex to straighten my skirts, encountered the trousers, and sprang away as if burned; my own face heated. But I bit down on the impulse to excuse myself and go change.

Lord Hilford accepted the magnifying glass and spent a long moment peering at the various fragments, murmuring excitedly to himself. “How I wish we had brought a bone saw!” he said. “If we could cut a thin enough slice of this—” Then he recalled our presence, and looked up. “It’s difficult to be certain; the bone has become saturated with all manner of minerals. But I’ve long speculated that dragon bone, where not hollow, is spongy, far beyond what we find in other creatures’ skeletons; in fact, a crystallographer of my acquaintance thinks the material may be arranged quite regularly, to provide strength while minimizing weight. We may at last have a sample with which to answer that question! Where did you say you found this?”

I left it for Jacob to explain. Lord Hilford was, of course, correct; but his insight did not go far enough. I envied Mr. Wilker, for the simple fact that our society made it easier to transcend class than sex. Which was not only unfair of me, but in some respects inaccurate: there is sometimes a greater willingness to make an exception for a woman than a man, so long as her breeding is good enough. But at the tender age of nineteen, I had not yet seen enough of the world to understand that.

Fortunately, Mr. Wilker seemed as eager as I to sweep the matter under the rug, at least for the moment. I sent Dagmira to roust up our cook; our group of four talked animatedly all the time we waited for supper, and all the way through it. “I should set out tomorrow morning to see it for myself,” Lord Hilford said, “except these old feet demand a rest. The day after, perhaps.”

I had nearly forgotten about his own journey, and its purpose. “What did the boyar say?” Jacob asked.

“Ah, that’s right; Tom’s heard, but you haven’t.” The earl laid his napkin aside, looking sober. “It didn’t go as well as we might have hoped. Khirzoff didn’t come out and say this—it would have made him look rather foolish—but I don’t think Gritelkin’s arrangements with him were nearly so extensive as I’d been led to believe. Arrangements concerning our visit, that is. He seems to have expected us to be Scirling tourists.”

“Not natural historians on an expedition,” I said.

The earl nodded. “He knows now, of course; some gossip carried word to him, no doubt. He’s not unfriendly to science, mind you. That guest of his, Gaetano Rossi, is a scientist himself. But our welcome was chillier than I might have hoped for.”

Jacob had been picking at his remaining food; now he laid his knife down. “So he will not help us?”

“Oh, he will,” Lord Hilford said. “The man is a razesh of his, after all, and can’t be permitted to simply vanish. Khirzoff’s guess is that Gritelkin fell prey to a dragon; his people have had quite a bit of trouble with the attacks. But he has promised to mount a search, and someone will come around to inform us if they find anything. Or, for that matter, if they don’t.”

It should have reassured me, but it did not. Very few things since our arrival had made it quite so clear to me how isolated we were here: Gritelkin was more than an ordinary villager, and still, his absence had managed to go unremarked for all this time.

The natural thought, following on that, sprang from my mouth without waiting for permission. “Did none of the villagers report the disappearance to him?”

Lord Hilford frowned, shaking his head. “This was the first Khirzoff had heard of it.”

“A villager would not have got in to see the boyar himself. Perhaps they reported it, but no one wanted to trouble Khirzoff himself with the matter,” Mr. Wilker said. He did not sound as if he was even convincing himself.

“I can ask the mayor tomorrow,” Jacob said. Then he sobered. “If the man will help us. The villagers haven’t been fond of us at any point, and these strange troubles have soured opinion even worse.”

“Would you like me to ask Dagmira?” I offered. “I would not go so far as to say that she likes me, but I think she would answer.”

Mr. Wilker did not make the disparaging comment he might have indulged in before. Lord Hilford said, “You may as well try, Mrs. Camherst, and if that fails we can approach the mayor.” The gentlemen then agreed that they should spend the next day studying the bone fragments and asking about for delicate stone-cutting tools (though for the latter, they did not hold out much hope), and so we all went to bed.

But as so often happened during this expedition, nothing went as we had planned.

I did not hear any sounds in the night. But others did, and even had their neighbors doubted their word, the remainder of the evidence was plain for all to see.

There must have been a dozen prints burned into the ground, all around the village. Perhaps more; I did not count. I might have—as before, scientific modes of thought provided me with some refuge against fear—but we were not permitted to go in search.

We were not permitted past our front door.

I would not term them a mob, precisely. As Mr. Wilker said, rather sourly, there were not enough people in Drustanev to get up a proper mob. Nor, it being daylight, did they have burning torches. But there were various tools in their hands, from shepherd’s crooks to hoes to, yes, a couple of pitchforks, and there was a great deal of angry shouting.

Menkem did not lead the charge, but he was up among the leaders, just behind Urjash Mazhustin, the mayor. When Lord Hilford stepped out to speak with him, the man held up one hand, looking regretful, but also frightened and determined.

“You must leave,” Mazhustin said. “All of you. Gather your things and go, and take the demon with you.”

“Come now, man,” Lord Hilford answered him, with poorly concealed impatience. “Your priest there dunked me in the stream; wasn’t that to wash this ‘demon’ of yours away?”

That was when we heard of the disturbances elsewhere in Drustanev. Not in any orderly fashion; despite the fact that Mazhustin had clearly been nominated to speak for them, the villagers called out a dozen accusations, each more panicked-sounding than the last. I was standing behind Lord Hilford, on the bottom step of the stairs, with my robe clutched around me; Jacob drew me back with one careful hand on my arm and bent to speak in my ear. “Isabella—it might be best if you go upstairs.”

“Will that protect me if they decide to break in here and thrash us all?” I whispered back.

Jacob’s jaw tightened. “No—but I would just as soon you not be where they can make an easy target of you.”

Guilt twanged in my heart again. Though Jacob was too polite to say it, the ruins expedition had happened because of me; I was the one who had leapt upon Astimir’s suggestion, and persuaded Lord Hilford to join me. Some out there might remember that. I wondered, with brief bitterness, whether anybody was mobbing Astimir’s house—and then, with much less brief fear, whether they had already dealt with him in some fashion.

It might be better after all if I were not where the villagers could see me. The mayor’s voice pursued me as I went up the stairs. “This creature is beyond Menkem’s strength to conquer. You carry Zhagrit Mat’s corruption with you now, and for the safety of my people, I cannot allow it to remain in my village!”

My toe caught against the edge of the top stair, and I nearly measured my length on the floor. Mazhustin’s words echoed in my ears: You carry Zhagrit Mat’s corruption with you.

Dagmira was in the bedroom Jacob and I shared, throwing my dresses into a chest without any attempt at folding. “What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Better if you go now,” she said. “There are donkeys that can carry your things. Some of them, at least,” she added doubtfully, as if thinking of Lord Hilford’s beloved chair.

She seemed willing to arrange the donkeys for us, which was more charity than I expected, given the mood outside. But it was a different favor I needed from her now. I crossed the room with quick strides and addressed her over my shoulder as I rummaged through a pile of my stockings. “Dagmira, do you know how to get to the ruins?”

By her stare, she thought I had gone completely mad. “Why would you go there?”

The object I was looking for fell into my palm, out of the stocking I had concealed it in. “To return this.”

Even in the wan light coming through the louver, the firestone glimmered. Dagmira’s jaw sagged. “Where did you—” She caught herself before the foolish question could make it the rest of the way from her mouth. “You’ve had that, all this time?”

“Is there anything about firestones in the legend of Zhagrit Mat?”

“No. Well, he was very rich, they say.”

It was good enough for me. “This and some drawings are all I carried away from the ruins. A rubbing, too. Unless you think one of those is responsible for this trouble, it must be the stone.”

Dagmira backed away, shaking her head. “I cannot go there. It would only make things worse.”

“You needn’t go into the ruins,” I said impatiently. “Just bring me within sight of them—or not even that far, if you prefer. I can find it well enough, if you bring me most of the way. But if we are going to do this, we must do it soon.” I threw off my robe and reached for the nearest shift.

I had not intended to put her friendship to the test in such fashion, not when I was still uncertain whether I could even call it “friendship.” It might only be grudging neutrality. But she had unbent enough to send Iljish with us to the cave, and now, after a moment’s hesitation, she came forward and helped me dress.

“I know a quicker path,” she said. “But it’s hard.”

After the journey to the cave, I no longer felt so daunted by the prospect of a strenuous hike. And even if Lord Hilford managed to talk the mob down—which, by the sound of it, he was making some progress at—the sooner this was settled, the better.

It almost made sense… so long as I did not let myself think about danger from the dragons.

I tore a page from my notebook and scribbled a quick message on it, then nodded at Dagmira. “Lead the way.”

Dagmira’s way was indeed quicker than Astimir’s—and far, far harder. Rather than curving south into the gentler part of the valley, and then back up again toward the ruins, we went at them straight, along a path better suited to deer than women, and very nearly vertical.

My legs complained mightily after their exertions of the previous days, but I clamped my jaw shut, refusing to let my voice do the same. At least we had packed very light; since I had no intention of sightseeing this time, Dagmira promised we would be back before dark.

I’d thought to ask her about Gritelkin as we went, but I had no breath to spare for it as I picked my way down one side of the valley, then hauled myself back up the other side, puffing like a bellows all the way. I managed only one brief, regretful curse that I had not thought to put on trousers again. Not for the first time in my life, I envied dragons their wings.

Dagmira’s path at least had the virtue of being heavily sheltered by trees, which reduced the risk that we might attract draconic attention. And if my calculations were correct, it would bring us up to the back of the ruins, which suited me entirely. It seemed best to leave the firestone where I had found it, and the less time I spent in that accursed place, the happier I would be.

Just when I thought I might have reached the limit of my strength, Dagmira stopped and turned to wait for me. “We’re nearly there,” she said, while I tried to slow my breathing enough to drink water without aspirating it. “I will not go with you,” she added fiercely, as if I might have forgotten.

I nodded and wiped away the water dribbling down my chin. “I understand. Just show me which way to go.”

“You can see them from up here,” she said, gesturing to a large outcropping of rock. I withheld my sigh; if she was willing to come within eyesight of the ruins, it was more than I had expected, and surely climbing a boulder was not such a large price to pay.

After casting a wary look around for dragons, Dagmira scrambled up it like a mountain goat. I followed with much less agility, splitting one of the seams of my skirt with a noise like breaking wood. I half expected her to frown at me for the sound, but Dagmira, I realized as I achieved a better foothold, was lying flat on the stone, and staring unblinking toward the ruins.

Had she seen a dragon? I eased myself up alongside her, and found that she had not.

We had a fine view of the back end of the ruins, the place where I had fallen through into the little cave below. The slope there was crawling with men: only a dozen at most, but busy as ants on a hill that’s been kicked. We were not so far from them that I could not make out their yellow hair. The Stauleren smugglers were visiting their cache.

“Damnation,” I swore under my breath, in Scirling. Why had they not moved on yet? This would make it a great deal harder to return the stone. Did I dare circle around to the front of the site, and throw it down any old where? But I had no certainty they were not keeping watch, or that there were more men where I could not see.

I opened my mouth to ask Dagmira what she thought, and stopped.

A dozen men there, not just behind the ruins but in them; I could see one man on the same bit of wall I had climbed, who I thought might be Chatzkel, their leader. They had surely been there before. And why in heaven’s name should Dagmira know of a quick path to the ruins—one direct enough to allow an energetic hiker to go and return in a single day—if no one ever went there, for fear of Zhagrit Mat?

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you,” I whispered.

Dagmira flushed and did not meet my eyes. “Children do stupid things. But we all know better than to disturb the demon!”

So none of them had ever carried anything away from the site? Not a firestone, I would wager; that would be unimaginable wealth in Drustanev. Such a tale would be as famous as that of Zhagrit Mat. But I was increasingly unconvinced the stone had anything to do with it.

I was about to press her further when she made a small, startled noise. Following her gaze, I saw a new man moving through the trees, one with dark hair cut to just above his collar, and a fur-trimmed hat on his head. Not Stauleren, and by his finer clothing, not a smuggler of any race. “You recognize him?” I asked, still keeping my voice low. They could not hear us, not at this distance—at least, I did not think they could—but my nerves demanded it.

“No,” Dagmira murmured, still staring. “But—”

She paused. “But?” I prompted.

Dagmira flattened herself even more against the stone, as if newly afraid of being seen. “He’s one of the boyar’s men.”

The fellow in question carried a rifle, but was not pointing it at the smugglers; rather he strolled among them with the attitude of an overseer as they lifted bags from the hole. Small bags, but apparently heavy. What was in them? Not brandy; that much was certain. Opium? I knew almost nothing of it, except that the plant had been brought over from Yelang, and was now grown widely in certain parts of Bulskevo; addicts smoked it, and doctors used it for medicine. But its form was unknown to me. It might be carried in sacks.

An entirely new explanation for the haunting incidents was taking shape in my mind. This one had very little to do with ancient demons, and a great deal more to do with the note I had left on the smugglers’ crate.

I pounded my hand against the stone, cursing my stupidity. I had honestly forgotten about that note. A lie is most plausible when the teller believes it; I had so rehearsed the false tale of how I hurt my ankle that it had all but painted over the truth in my memory. Now that I remembered—

Dagmira’s hand landed atop my own, trapping it. “Stop that!” she hissed. “Do you want them to see us?”

No, I most certainly did not; the smugglers might think of something worse to do than strange sounds and alien footprints. Gritting my teeth, I wriggled backward down the boulder until I could no longer see the men, then turned and dropped to the ground. The breeze through my split skirt felt very cold indeed, and woke up my mind. Jacob and Lord Hilford should hear of my theory first, before I went babbling it to anyone in the village; but that meant securing Dagmira’s cooperation. “Never mind returning the stone,” I said. “I must tell my companions about this, as soon as possible. But I must also ask you to keep silent, at least until we have had a chance to confer.”

She gave me a withering look. “We know better than to talk about the smugglers’ business. Or the boyar’s.”

Did that apply also to Reveka, I wondered, with her smuggler for a lover? But it seemed a great many things could go on in Drustanev without anyone talking about them. My skirt flapped annoyingly; I tore it the rest of the way, then knotted the free ends, so that it was kilted up like some hoyden’s dress. At least it would be easier to move in, and there was no one here to see.

The valley gaped before me, looking nearly as steep as the ravine of the dragon graveyard. Sighing, I put myself to it. Even the steepest path was preferable to going anywhere near those men, and I could not wait to tell what I had seen.

NINETEEN

I half expected Jacob to rage at me when I returned, and went into the workroom alone so I might have a modicum of privacy while he did it. My husband, however, did not move from his seated position at the table. Wearily, not raising his head from his hands, he said, “I suppose they could not make an easy target of you if you were not here at all.”

“Was there violence?” I asked, glancing around. The other men were not there, but I saw no signs of a disturbance, nor were our things packed to leave.

“No,” Jacob said, sitting up at last. “They’re in the sauna,” he added, seeing my curiosity. “They should be back soon. Did you dispose of your stone?”

I dropped into the chair opposite him. “No, and for good reason—but I should wait until the others return, so as not to repeat myself. What happened after I left?”

Jacob sighed. “Hilford promised we would all attend a service in their tabernacle, next Sabbath. It was like pulling teeth for him to agree; he scarcely has any patience with our own religion, let alone anyone else’s. But the general consensus was that this trouble came about because we are all heathens. Hilford bargained Mazhustin down from conversion to a simple service, which I call quite a feat.”

I had not considered the religious aspect, when I realized that smugglers and village children went to the ruins without bringing back a demon. But the spell of our various terrors had been broken; I found it far more likely that they had a human origin than a supernatural one. Impatience made me bounce in my seat, wishing the other two men would return. Jacob raised one eyebrow at this, mouth lifting at last into a hint of a smile. “You seem excited.”

“Does it have anything to do with what this girl says you have to tell us?” Lord Hilford came into the room, Dagmira between him and Mr. Wilker like a prisoner being marched to the bar. He would be feeling none too charitable toward the locals, I imagined, after this morning’s strife.

“Yes,” I said, rising to rescue Dagmira. “I think our problems may actually be quite ordinary.”

I outlined the situation in broad strokes, partly for the sake of brevity, and partly because I spoke in Vystrani, so that Dagmira might understand me. She confirmed my observations readily. And she alone was not astonished when I admitted the truth of how I’d hurt my ankle; that girl was too clever by half. Of the note, I said, “I didn’t see any better solution; they would know someone had been there, and if I made it clear it was the mad Scirling woman, they might not see any danger in it. Chatzkel had been agreeable enough, when we met before. But it seems I was wrong.”

“It was damned stupid of you,” Mr. Wilker said, not bothering to hide his fury. “You endangered this entire expedition! All because you could not do as you were told, and stay here!”

Jacob shot to his feet. “Now see here, Wilker. Isabella has been an asset to our work. It is my business, not yours, to decide whether she should be kept on any kind of leash, and I have told you already that I will not do it.”

He was ready to go on, and a part of me wished he would; I had no idea he’d been defending me to Mr. Wilker, and was childishly eager to hear what more he had to say. But as it would not serve the greater purpose, I stopped him with one hand on his arm. Addressing Mr. Wilker, I said quietly, “You’re right. It was stupid of me, and it did endanger the expedition. They want to scare us off, or provoke the village into driving us out; if they don’t succeed, they may try something more direct. I can’t do anything to change what happened. But if we can prove this is mere trickery, it may all yet be well.”

Mr. Wilker had prepared himself for an argument; my capitulation left him at a momentary loss. The resulting silence was awkward in the extreme. Jacob, drawing in a steadying breath, sought to resolve it by changing the subject. “Could anyone fake the events?” he asked, slipping out from under my hand to pace. “I mean—I’m certain they could. But how?”

I snapped my fingers at a sudden thought. “Dagmira. The day I seemed so uneasy, coming out of the sauna—before the first footprint appeared. Did you see anyone hanging about as you approached?”

She shook her head, but it proved nothing either way; the trickster would have wanted to stay hidden. “Some kind of device to make the sound,” Lord Hilford said, from where he slouched in his favourite chair, hands steepled before him. He’d been very quiet through my entire tale, brows drawn close, eyes staring into the middle distance as if watching a scene no one else could see. “It sounds rather like a bullroarer, perhaps. The footprints… it’s hard to be both controlled and subtle with fire.”

Mr. Wilker also snapped his fingers; I had not realized we shared that habit. “Not fire—acid! A strong acid could burn the grass like that. It would be easy to pour out in the appropriate shape. I smelled something around the print, I thought; that could be it.”

“Means and motive,” Lord Hilford said, sounding like a barrister. “Opportunity…”

“They’re sneaky bastards, smugglers,” Mr. Wilker said. “Begging Mrs. Camherst’s pardon.” This puzzle, once entered into, seemed to have distracted him from his annoyance with me.

“Sneaky enough to be in and out of the village without being seen? In broad daylight, even?” Jacob asked dubiously.

Dagmira spoke up, startling us all. “Reveka’s lover, maybe.”

No one would think anything of seeing him skulking about at night, after all. “Can you ask her if he’s been about lately?”

That earned me a frown. I had overstepped my boundaries again, meddling in village business. I raised my hands to placate her. “We must do something to stop it; guessing isn’t enough. If Reveka will help us, we can simply speak to the man; otherwise we must—oh, lay in wait, I suppose.”

The phrase was calculated to conjure suitably alarming images. Dagmira’s nod was grudging, but there. “I will go now.”

She suited actions to words without delay. Once she was gone, Jacob turned to me. “You say one of the boyar’s men was with the smugglers?”

“Supervising them,” I confirmed. “Lord Hilford, do you think the man was acting on his own behalf? Collaborating with the smugglers, as it were.”

“Corruption among the boyar’s guards,” Jacob said. “He might be grateful to us for informing him.”

Lord Hilford blew out his mustaches with a thoughtful sigh. “Perhaps. But think of what we know of Khirzoff: he is ambitious, and connected in Chiavora. The man might have been there to make certain the boyar got his fair share.”

“Would he do that?” I asked, scandalized. (Recall: I spent my youth reading scientific works, not sensational novels. Manda Lewis could have told me all about the motif of corrupt noblemen.)

The earl shrugged. “I wouldn’t be half surprised. If he stops the smugglers, he can usually confiscate everything they had—but then no others will follow them along this route. He’d kill the goose that lays the golden egg, so to speak. By letting them carry out their business, for a modest bribe, he can enjoy a continuing profit, with no effort on his part. And that’s presuming he’s not an opium-eater himself.”

“You met him,” Mr. Wilker said. “Did he seem like one?”

It earned him a snort. “How many opium-eaters are there in my acquaintance, that I should know the signs? That companion of his might be an addict—Gaetano Rossi. But they go hunting a great deal, from what Astimir said, which sounds rather more active than I’d expect from an opium-eater.”

Dagmira returned before long. We knew by her frown that it hadn’t gone as we’d hoped. “Reveka hasn’t seen him since this one went chasing after them,” she said with a jerk of her hand at me.

Hadn’t I once been determined to teach her the proper manners of a lady’s maid? Well, too late for that now, and not much use. “That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been here,” Mr. Wilker said.

Lord Hilford snorted. “You’re a young man yet, Tom. If you were skulking about the village, on orders to scare the visitors away, would you pass up a chance to visit your pretty young widow?”

Mr. Wilker flushed, gaze darting at me as if trying to decide how to use my presence to make the earl stop speaking so coarsely. He neither received nor needed a chance; Lord Hilford continued on as if unaware he’d said anything inappropriate. “Right, then. We need to catch our culprit in the act. It’s better that way, regardless. Will he—or they; can’t discard the possibility of there being more than one—will they wait until after we’ve attended this damned Sabbath, to show it’s done no good? Or will they try to force us out faster?”

Privately I suspected there was only one; it would explain why Jacob and I had that period of quiet after our purification in the river. The fellow had to chase off after Lord Hilford instead. And it would be harder to keep multiple men out of sight. But I agreed with Jacob when he said, “It doesn’t much matter either way. The obvious thing to do is keep watch, every night until we catch somebody. But how shall we do it?”

I let the gentlemen discuss the logistics of it; they were far better at planning such things than I. The difficulty, of course, was that we could not look to the villagers for help: they were convinced Zhagrit Mat haunted the night, and the only way we could persuade them otherwise was to bring proof of fakery.

My gaze fell upon Dagmira. Rising and going to her side, I murmured, “Do you believe us? That it isn’t a monster?”

She shrugged and answered in a pragmatic tone. “If it is a monster, you’ll see it soon enough. If it isn’t… either way, I want this to end.”

For once, she and I were in complete accord.

We were none of us spies, nor detectives either. The final plan—if I may call it that without laughing, which I confess is rather difficult to do—depended primarily upon the use of strong coffee: one gentleman would stay up each night, keeping watch for miscreants, and would rouse the others as soon as he heard anything. Mr. Wilker would take the first night, and Jacob the second. Judging by the way I saw them whispering to each other, they were already plotting how to divide all the nights between their two selves, and spare Lord Hilford the duty of standing watch.

(I, of course, had already been exempted, on account of my sex. Though I suspect Jacob feared I would go charging after the perpetrator myself, without first calling for aid. Privately, I calculated the odds of Mr. Wilker doing just that as roughly eighty per cent.)

Whether this would have succeeded in time, we never had the chance to discover.

Have you ever awoken in the morning with a thought in your head that seems to spring full-grown from nowhere? I am told this comes about because the mind ruminates upon a topic while asleep, and presents its conclusions when you wake, without any of the intervening steps. As such, it almost feels as if the thought comes from a source outside yourself—an enlightening or unnerving sensation.

Either the mind is capable of exercising the same process while the body is awake, or mine is a terrible sluggard, quite tardy in the presentation of its overnight conclusions.

When I awoke the next morning, a bleary-eyed Mr. Wilker reported hearing nothing in the night; but Dagmira, coming in a moment later, told us there were footprints all around the village, as if the creature had been pacing a circuit of the place. This, of course, did not endear us to the locals. I feared the smugglers might achieve their aim and drive us out before we even had a chance to make good on our Sabbath promise.

The gentlemen went out—even the exhausted Mr. Wilker—with guns in hand, to at least give a show of trying to address this supernatural threat. I gathered my things and went to use the sauna, for it was bathing-day (or rather steaming-day), and Dagmira had promised to keep watch while I was inside, in case someone tried to haunt me again.

But when I opened the sauna door, I found three withered old Drustanev aunties already occupying the place.

It was no accident; they knew, for we had arranged it, that I always used the sauna first—and alone—before the air cleared to the point where it was pleasant to breathe. Their glares dared me to protest, or to join them.

Even had I been accustomed to using the sauna communally, the atmosphere of hostile defiance would have dissuaded me. I took refuge in the manners of a Scirling gentlewoman: I murmured the politest Vystrani apology I knew and closed the door, for all the world as if it had been a simple misunderstanding. Then, fuming, I put my clothes back on, and went back out into the bright air.

At least I didn’t have to explain to Dagmira. She had already found the aunties’ clothing in the baskets outside. Seeing me emerge so quickly, she scowled and muttered something under her breath that was not, I think, a polite apology. Together we began the trek back to the house.

Partway there, my brain offered up its conclusion, quite without warning.

I stopped dead on the path. The thought that had just occurred to me, seemingly out of nowhere, did not fit the chain of causality we were taking for granted. But that did not mean it was wrong. Carefully, step by step, I reviewed what I knew, half hoping to find something that would prove me wrong, almost entirely certain I would not.

“Are you sick?” Dagmira hissed, stepping in front of me and stooping to peer into my blank face.

I came back to myself with a jerk. “Dagmira. You know where everyone in the village lives, don’t you?”

Suspicion drew her brows together. “Why?”

The girl was clever; I ignored her question and gave her the name, and it was enough. Her eyes narrowed. “What do you think you’re going to find?”

“Let’s keep walking,” I muttered, suiting action to words. The weather was developing quite fine—by Vystrani standards, anyway—and many of the village women were in their yards, tending the chickens and geese or spinning wool into thread, or gossiping at their front gates. They were already staring at me because of Zhagrit Mat, but I didn’t want to give them additional reason.

Dagmira followed me. “That many tracks would take quite a bit of acid,” I said quietly to her. I used the Scirling word, not knowing how to say it in Vystrani, but my meaning was clear enough. “And where it came from is a good question—but there must be bottles of it on hand. If I can find those, it will be proof enough.”

“I’ll look for you,” she offered.

It was kindly meant, and I appreciated it, but— “With two, one can keep watch,” I said. I judged that less likely to put Dagmira’s back up than the suggestion that she would not recognize acid if she saw it. There was not much call for such things up here (as they tanned their furs by vegetable means), and though I was no chemist, I knew enough to be worried about her safety. Any acid strong enough to burn the grass could badly damage skin.

One bit of luck, at least, was in our favor: my target’s mother was bedridden, and according to Dagmira spent most of her time asleep. So long as we were quiet, we could slip in and out with relative secrecy.

We opted for disguise over skulking. Returning to the house, I collected my art supplies, and Dagmira and I sallied forth again in quite the wrong direction, as if looking for something suitable to draw. I sketched a view of Drustanev—something I should have done long since, regardless—then wandered toward the edge of the village, pausing for a flower, a rock, an interesting tree. I started to sketch a house, but got no more than three lines in before the woman charged up to her gate and sent me on my way with a harangue. Bit by bit, looking as if we were headed everywhere but our destination, Dagmira and I worked our way over to the right house. Once she had darted a quick glance inside to make certain it was clear, she kept watch at the door, and I slipped in.

For this to be properly mysterious, I should tell you about a secret panel hidden in the wall, or a trapdoor concealed beneath a rug, discovered only after an arduous search. But the truth is that I found the box shoved under a bench, and it took me no more than two minutes.

Bottles of sulfuric acid, labeled in Chiavoran. Several of them empty, and surrounded by charred straw where dribbles had tracked down the sides.

The noise was faint—no more than a tap of foot upon floor. My nerves were so tightly wound, though, that I shot upright… and found Astimir standing in the door to the inner room.

It is hard to say who was more horrified, him or me.

He certainly broke the paralysis first. Astimir flung himself at the outer door before I could even think to shout, racing past a startled Dagmira and vaulting the low fence in one long-legged hurdle, scattering chickens everywhere. “Catch him!” I bellowed, but it was too late; by the time I reached the door myself, he was off down the slope, drawing plenty of perplexed stares, but no attempts to halt his flight.

Of course not. Why should the villagers stop him? They had no idea he was the man behind the so-called haunting.

“Damn it!” I kicked the doorpost, which at least had the salutary effect of hurting badly enough to bring me to my senses. From within the house, a querulous voice arose; Dagmira shoved past me to reassure Astimir’s mother with some kind of empty lie.

Astimir, all along. I should have seen it. He’d guided Mr. Wilker to find Lord Hilford; that must have given him opportunity to plant signs of “Zhagrit Mat.” No wonder Jacob and I had enjoyed a few days of peace while he was gone. Come to that, Astimir had “found” the first print, behind our house; he’d even been the one to cry out the monster’s name, setting everyone’s thoughts in the proper direction.

But he’d also taken Lord Hilford and me to the ruins in the first place. And that did not fit with our smuggler theory at all.

People were beginning to look toward Astimir’s house. I could not blame them; we had made some amount of noise. Or rather, I had. And it was far too late to duck back inside and hope no one had seen me.

I marshaled my Vystrani vocabulary (woefully inadequate though it still was), preparing a speech to explain matters to everyone. Fortunately, before I opened my mouth, I thought the better of it. Ducking my head back inside, I said, “Dagmira? I’m afraid they’ll think I’ve—” Why did travellers’ phrasebooks never include useful words like “framed”? “Made it look like Astimir did this.” (One would think my weeks in Drustanev would have inured me to my own awkward phrasings, but no; I winced at the clumsy circumlocution.) “It might be better if you explained matters.”

After a moment—a tense moment; in which I could hear the suspicious whispers growing behind me, and the skin between my shoulder blades itched as if expecting something to hit it—Dagmira appeared in the inner doorway. She gave me a sour look, which I translated as meaning that she knew I was foisting an unwelcome duty off on her, but could not argue with my logic. I pointed at the box of acid bottles, trying to be helpful. Muttering curses under her breath, she picked it up and went outside.

She spoke far too rapidly for me to follow, of course. I concentrated more on the replies from the gathered crowd; they were the important part, after all. People did not seem convinced. I resisted the urge to prompt Dagmira; she could figure out for herself, and tell them, that the test would come tonight. If it passed peacefully, then it would prove our point—or at least start to.

They wanted more than that, though. The mutters were still ugly. I bit my lip, thinking of what Mr. Wilker would say… then stepped up to Dagmira’s side.

In my best, most careful Vystrani, I said, “If Dagmira is wrong—if the village is troubled again—then we will leave. I give you my word.”

It was, I thought, a reasonable gamble. I did not think Astimir would return; he had seen me with the bottles, and would know I had exposed him for a fraud. Not to mention that without his acid, he would be hard-pressed to burn any more mysterious prints into the ground. But it was nevertheless a gamble, and I held my breath after I finished speaking.

The mutters sounded more promising, at least. I caught Mazhustin’s name once or twice, and Menkem’s. “Lord Hilford would be more than glad to talk to them,” I offered. Inwardly I began formulating plans for how to ensure that I talked to Lord Hilford first—then discarded them. It might be better if the gentlemen were not forewarned. Their surprise at hearing Astimir accused would help allay suspicions that the Scirling outsiders had colluded to frame a Drustanev lad.

“Come on,” Dagmira said under her breath, shoving at me with the box of acid. “Let them think it over—without you.”

I could only trust her judgment of her neighbors. Belatedly, I ducked inside to retrieve my art supplies, and then we made our way toward the gate—villagers parting around us like a reluctant sea—and back to our house.