In the Labyrinth of Drakes

ONE

There is very little pleasure in being snubbed over a task for which one is well qualified. There is, however, quite a bit of pleasure in watching the ones who did the snubbing later eat their own words.

Credit for this pleasure must go to Thomas Wilker, who had for many years been my colleague in matters scientific. He was a Fellow of the Philosophers’ Colloquium, as I was not—that august body having condescended to admit into their ranks the occasional man of less than gentle birth, but no ladies regardless of their ancestry. Strictly speaking, it was Tom and not I who received the snubbing.

The post refused to him was the focus of stiff competition. Natural history as a scholarly field was not so terribly old; the more specialized topic of dragon naturalism had only recently begun to emerge as an area of study in its own right. Tom’s publications and my own played a part in that trend, but we were not the only ones: there were easily half a dozen people in Anthiope with similar interests, the esteemed Herr Doktor Stanislau von Lösberg not least among them.

Those half-dozen lived abroad, though, in places such as Eiverheim and Thiessin. In Scirland there was no one whose qualifications truly challenged Tom’s, now that he was a Colloquium Fellow. When a position opened up that called specifically for a dragon naturalist, he should have been the first choice—as indeed he was.

Any rumour which says he refused the position is false. Tom did not refuse. On the contrary, he told his prospective employers that he and I would be delighted to accept. When they said the offer was for him alone, he assured them I would not need a salary, as my recent speaking tours and publications had left me with quite a comfortable income. (As it happens I would have appreciated the salary, for my income did not go so far as it might—but I would have foregone that for such an opportunity.) They made it clear that regardless of finances, I was not welcome in this endeavour. Tom maintained that to hire him was to hire us both; they hired Arthur Halstaff, Baron Tavenor in our stead; and that was the end of that.

For a time.

A year and a half later, the employers in question came crawling back. Lord Tavenor had resigned his position; he had met with no success thus far, and had difficulty with the locals besides. The offer to Tom was renewed. So in turn was his condition—only this time he said that, upon reflection, a salary for me might be just the thing after all. He made it quite clear that if they did not see fit to meet his conditions, then they could go hang.

This is, in brief, how I came to be employed by the Royal Scirling Army in the deserts of Akhia, to raise for them their very own flight of dragons.

The problem of dragon-breeding was not a new one. Ever since prehistoric times, mankind has dreamt of harnessing dragons for his own ends. This has taken every form imaginable, from leaping atop the back of a fully grown dragon in the hope of breaking it to saddle—an attempt which almost invariably ends with a broken rider instead—to stealing hatchlings or eggs on the theory that a young creature is easier to tame, to caging dragons and optimistically encouraging them to breed.

That last is difficult to do even with less hazardous wild animals. Cheetahs, for example, are notoriously selective about their mating habits, and will go very rapidly from disinterest to ardour to mauling their erstwhile paramours. Others refuse the task entirely: whether it is for reasons of embarrassment or some other cause, the giant pandas of Yelang have never been known to reproduce within the confines of an imperial menagerie.

(I suppose I should offer fair warning. Because this volume of my memoirs concerns itself with my research in Akhia, it will of necessity say more than a little about the mating habits of dragons and other creatures. Those whose sensibilities are too delicate to endure such frankness might well be advised to have a more stout-hearted friend read them a carefully expurgated version. Though I fear that edition might be rather short.)

Dragons are even less tractable in this regard. The Yelangese in particular have a long history of trying to breed their dragons, but despite some rather grandiose historical claims, there is no reliable evidence of success with anything other than the smallest kinds. Large dragons, the sort that come to mind when one hears the word, simply will not cooperate.

And yet it was the cooperation of large dragons that we needed most, in the third decade of this century.

The reason, of course, was their bones. Astonishingly light and phenomenally strong, dragonbone is a wondrous substance… when one can get it. The bones decay rapidly after death, once their peculiar chemical composition is no longer protected by flesh and blood. A Chiavoran named Gaetano Rossi had developed a method for preserving them; Tom Wilker and I had stolen that method; it was stolen from us in turn, and sold to a company in Va Hing. Three years before I went to Akhia, it became public knowledge that the Yelangese were using dragonbone to build effective caeligers: airships that could be used for more than mere novelty.

“If you had shared what you knew with the Crown when you learned it,” Lord Rossmere said to Tom and myself during our first meeting, “we wouldn’t be in this situation now.”

I did not say to him that I had kept the information secret precisely to avoid our current situation. First, because it was only true in part; and second, because Tom was stepping firmly on my foot. He had worked quite hard to get us this opportunity, and did not want to see me squander it by speaking impertinently to a brigadier in the Royal Army. I offered instead a more temperate rendition of my thoughts. “I know it may not seem like it, but we do have an edge over the Yelangese. I believe our research into dragonbone synthesis is quite a bit further along than theirs, owing to the good efforts of Frederick Kemble. He had several years to work on the problem while the world knew nothing of it.”

Lord Rossmere ignored my comment, addressing his next words to Tom. “I shed no tears for the deaths of dragons, if they can be useful to us. I’m also a pragmatist, though. Scirland has already exhausted most of its productive iron mines, and thanks to your companion, we’ve also lost our foothold in Bayembe. If we kill half the dragons now for raw material, then in a generation we’ll be fighting over the few that remain. We need a renewable supply, and that means breeding them.”

None of this was news to either Tom or myself. Lord Rossmere was not speaking to inform us, though; all that was prelude to his next statement. He said, “Your work must be carried out under conditions of strict security. The formula for bone preservation may be out in the world, but nobody has yet had much luck with breeding. The nation that harnesses dragons for that purpose will have a lasting advantage over its rivals, and we do not intend to lose that chance.”

There would be at least two nations with this particular secret. Scirland had no true dragons left, only draconic cousins such as the sparklings with which I had begun my research so many years before. Politics make for peculiar bedfellows; in this instance, we were in bed with Akhia, whose desert drakes would be ideally suited for the purpose—if we could induce the beasts to cooperate.

Tom said, “We will of course do what we can. It will take a good deal more than two people to manage the necessary work, though… I believe Lord Tavenor had a staff to assist?”

“Yes, of course. Some Akhian labourers, and the site doubles as a barracks for our military contingent in Qurrat. There is a gentleman you will liaise with—” Lord Rossmere twitched aside a few papers, searching. “Husam ibn Ramiz ibn Khalis al-Aritati. A sheikh of one of their tribes. We’ve been assured of his trustworthiness.”

“I presume we will also have access to Lord Tavenor’s notes?” I said. “He has published nothing of his work. Obviously he met with no success, or else you would not be looking for his replacement; but we must know what he has done, so that we do not waste time repeating his errors.” Depending on what we found in his notes, I anticipated spending quite a bit of time repeating his errors, to see whether it was his theories or his methodology that had failed him. But Tom and I had discussed this beforehand, and my dutiful question was merely to set the stage for Tom’s own response.

His brow artfully furrowed, my companion said, “Yes, the lack of publications is rather troubling, for a scientific endeavour of this sort. It seems rather a waste. I realize that matters related to the breeding of dragons must be kept under wraps—but we would like an understanding that Dame Isabella and I may publish our other discoveries as we see fit.”

It was peculiar to hear Tom refer to me as “Dame Isabella.” We had not been so formal with one another since Mouleen; indeed, we had an unspoken agreement never to let differences in rank stand between us. Formality was necessary, however, when dealing with men like Lord Rossmere. The brigadier swelled with indignation. “Other discoveries? We are sending you there to breed dragons, not to run about studying whatever you like.”

“We will of course devote our full attention to that task,” I said, my tone as conciliatory as I could contrive. “But in the process of so doing, we will undoubtedly observe a thousand details of anatomy and behaviour that need not be state secrets. Mathieu Sémery has won a fair bit of acclaim in Thiessin with his study of wyverns in Bulskevo. I should not like to see Scirland lag behind in the eyes of the scientific community, simply because we kept mum about everything we might discover.”

This was not a situation where I could form a private vow to do as I wished, and the consequences be damned. That might suffice for the wearing of trousers in the field, or my friendships with various men come what rumours might result… but violating our arrangement with the Royal Army could land Tom and myself in prison. I was determined not to squander this opportunity, but first we needed Lord Rossmere’s consent.

Not bothering to hide his suspicion, he said, “What sort of things do you imagine you would publish?”

I racked my brains for the most tediously scientific topic imaginable. “Oh, perhaps… the grooming behaviour of the desert drake after feeding. Do they lick themselves clean, as cats do? Or do they perhaps roll in sand—and if so, what effect does this abrasion have on their scales—”

“Thank you, Dame Isabella, that will do.” I had succeeded in sufficiently boring Lord Rossmere. “You will submit any materials you write to Colonel Pensyth in Qurrat, along with a list of the publications and individuals to whom you wish to send them. He will consult with General Lord Ferdigan as necessary—but if they approve, then yes, you may publish. But those men will have final authority in the matter.”

I did not much relish the notion of military oversight, but this was likely the best Tom and I could hope for. “Thank you,” I said, and tried to sound sincere.

“How soon shall we begin?” Tom asked.

Lord Rossmere snorted. “If I could put you on a boat tomorrow, I would. Unless you find a way to make dragons grow to full size more rapidly, it will be years before we have an adequate supply—and that is if you succeed right away. The Yelangese have undoubtedly been pursuing the same goal; we have no time to waste.”

“Since you cannot put us on a boat tomorrow…” I prompted.

“How soon can you depart?”

His manner of asking made it clear that “the day after tomorrow” would be an ideal answer, and his mood would deteriorate with every subsequent day he was forced to wait. Tom and I exchanged glances. “This Selemer week?” Tom ventured.

I had traveled enough in my life to be able to do so efficiently. “That should be feasible,” I agreed.

“Splendid.” Lord Rossmere made a note of it and said, “I’ll write directly once we have your passage booked. Mr. Wilker, you’ll be lodged in the Men’s House in the Segulist Quarter of Qurrat. Dame Isabella, you’ll be living with a local family, one Shimon ben Nadav. Also Segulist, of course, though as you might expect, a Temple-worshipper. There are few Magisterials in Akhia, I fear. Furnishings and the like will be provided; there’s no need to pack your entire household.”

Rumour had it that Lord Tavenor had done just that, and been made to ship his belongings home at his own expense after he resigned his position. Fortunately for Lord Rossmere, I was accustomed to making do with quite little. Compared with my cabin aboard the Basilisk, even the most parsimonious of lodgings would seem downright palatial—if only because I could roam more freely outside of them.

There were of course a hundred other details to arrange, but trivial matters were not for the likes of Lord Rossmere. He called in his adjutant and made the necessary introductions; that officer would handle the remainder on his behalf. Then we were dismissed to our own business.

Tom and I descended the stairs and went out into the bustling streets of Drawbury, which in those days still held the headquarters of the Royal Army in Falchester. We stood for a moment in silence, watching people go by; then, as if by a silent accord, we turned to regard one another.

“Akhia,” Tom said, a grin touching his expression.

“Indeed.” I knew why his grin had not fully come to rest. My own excitement was tempered with apprehension. Our research aboard the Basilisk had been carried out partially under the auspices of other groups—the Scirling Geographical Association, the Ornithological Society—but that was quite different from the kind of oversight that now loomed over us.

I would never say it to Tom, who had fought so hard for my inclusion in this enterprise, but I was not entirely sanguine about the prospect of working for the Royal Army. My adventures abroad had tangled me in such affairs on several occasions, but I had never sought them out deliberately before now. And I knew very well that if we succeeded in breeding dragons as the Crown desired, we would in effect be reducing them to the status of livestock: creatures fed and raised to adulthood in captivity, only so they could be slaughtered for human benefit.

The alternative, however, was worse. If dragons could not be bred, then they would only be hunted; the wild populations would be depleted in short order. I had grown up in the countryside, where the slaughter of sheep and fowl was entirely commonplace. I must persuade myself to think of the dragons in those terms—however difficult such thoughts might be.

Tom and I walked to the corner of Rafter Street, where a hansom cab might be hailed. By that point in my life I had enough money to maintain a carriage of my own if I wished, but I had gotten out of the habit. (My friends later had to persuade me that while Mrs. Camherst or Dame Isabella might do as she wished, it was not fitting for Lady Trent to go about in hired vehicles.) Once settled in and on our way, Tom caught my gaze and asked, “Will you look for him?”

There was no point in pretending I did not know who Tom was talking about. There was little more in pretending carelessness, but I did my best—more for the sake of my own dignity than out of any hope of deceiving Tom. “I doubt I could find him if I tried,” I said, gazing out the window at the city rattling past. “There must be a great many men in Akhia named Suhail.”

Our erstwhile companion from the Basilisk, the man who had gone with me to the cursed isle of Rahuahane, who had stolen a Yelangese caeliger and tried to rescue a princess. I had given him my direction in Falchester before we parted company in Phetayong, but had not received a single letter in the nearly three years since. Possibly he had lost the notebook page upon which I scrawled the information. But it was not so difficult to find me; there were few lady dragon naturalists in the world, and only one named Isabella Camherst.

My words were a mask for that sorrow, but also a nod to the truth. As well as I thought I knew Suhail, I knew very little about him: not his father’s name, not his family name, not even the city in which he lived.

As if he could hear those thoughts, Tom said, “I imagine the population of archaeologists named Suhail is rather smaller.”

“Presuming he still engages in such work,” I said with a sigh. “I had the distinct impression that his father’s death meant he was being called home to his duties. He may have been forced to lay aside his own interests.”

Although I meant my comment to be temperate, the word “forced” betrayed my own feelings. I had once forsworn all my customary interests for the sake of my family; the “grey years,” as I called them, had been one of the dreariest periods of my life—surpassed only by the time spent mourning my husband Jacob. I knew Suhail’s passion for his work; I could not imagine him giving it up without a qualm.

“You could ask around,” Tom said gently. “What harm could there be?”

Embarrassment for Suhail’s family, perhaps—but having never met them, knowing nothing of them, I found it hard to muster much concern for their feelings. And yet, I did not want to get my own hopes up, only to see them dashed. “Perhaps,” I said. Tom was kind enough to let me leave it at that.

I did not have much leisure for melancholy after I returned to my Hart Square townhouse. If we were to leave in a week and a half, there was no time to lose. I sent the maid to begin an inventory of my travel wardrobe, and went into my study to consider which books I would bring along.

My study had, over the years, become a source of deep and quiet pleasure to me. It was not elegant, as some gentlemen’s studies are; one might rather call it “cluttered.” Apart from the books, I had notes, maps, sketches and finished paintings, field specimens, and assorted knick-knacks collected in my travels. Shells acquired by my son Jake weighed down stacks of paper; the replica of the egg I had taken from Rahuahane propped up a shelf of books. (The firestone carved out of the albumen of the real egg was still mostly hidden atop my wardrobe, although I had shaped a few of the pieces and sold them for funds along the way.) High on the wall, above the shelves, a series of plaster cast footprints marched in an unsteady line: the fossilized tracks of a prehistoric dragon, discovered the year before by Konrad Vigfusson in southern Otholé.

A large claw sat on my desk, where I had left it that morning. The claw was a complete mystery, sent to me by a fossil-hunter in Isnats; he guessed its age to be tens of thousands of years old, if not more. It was a fascinating glimpse into the distant past of dragons… presuming, of course, that the claw did indeed come from a dragon. The fossil-hunter had found no associated bones, which would ordinarily aid in classifying a specimen. In this instance, the lack of bones might be the identifier: if the owner of the claw had been a “true” dragon, then of course its bones would have decayed too rapidly for fossilization. (Although preservation can occur in nature, the chemical conditions for it are sufficiently rare as to make fossil dragon bones nearly unknown—although a great many hucksters and confidence men would have you believe otherwise.)

So: grant that it may have been a dragon. If so, then it was one of prodigious size, dwarfing even the largest breeds known today, as the claw measured nearly thirty centimeters around the curve from base to tip. Tom theorized that the claw might have been out of proportion to the rest of the dragon, which certainly made biological sense; what the purpose of such an overgrown talon might have been, however, is still a puzzle today. Hunting, defense, the attraction of mates… we have many guesses, but no facts.

My study also contained a box, high up on one shelf, whose battered exterior suggested that nothing of particular interest was contained therein. Unknown to any but Tom and myself, it held my greatest treasure.

This I lifted down, after first ensuring my door was locked. Shorn of its lid, it disclosed various plaster lumps held together with bits of wire. This, as readers of the previous volume may recall, was the cast I had taken of the gaps inside the Rahuahane egg—the emptiness where once an embryo had been.

The cast, unfortunately, was far too delicate to risk on a sea journey to Akhia, and as near to irreplaceable as made no difference. I had studied it a hundred times and drawn its appearance from every angle; the sketches I could take with me. Nothing replaced the experience of looking at it directly, though, and so I examined it one last time, fixing its shape in my mind.

I believed—but could not yet prove—that it constituted evidence of a lost breed of dragon, one which the ancient Draconeans had indeed tamed, as the legends said. Those legends had always been doubtful, owing to the intractability of most dragon types, but a breed now lost to us might have been more cooperative. Indeed, I sometimes wondered if that cooperative nature was why the breed was lost: we have so thoroughly domesticated certain kinds of dogs that they can no longer survive in the wild. If the Draconeans had developed such a creature, it might well have died out after the collapse of their civilization.

Such thoughts were mere speculation, though. Even the shape of the embryo was uncertain, owing to the petrification of the albumen and the flaws of the cast; who could guess what the adult form might have looked like? We knew too little of dragon embryology to say.

But with enough time in Akhia—and enough failed hatchings, which were inevitable—I might find a better answer.

A knock came at my study door. “One moment,” I called out, replacing the cast in its box, and standing atop a chair to put it once more on its disregarded shelf. A pang of guilt went through me as I did so: who was I to grumble about the Royal Army keeping its naturalists mum, when I myself was sitting on this kind of scientific secret? Nor was it the only one: I had two valuable pieces of information not yet shared with the world, and the other one was stuffed into a desk drawer a meter behind me.

The trouble with the cast was that I did not want to say where I had gotten it. My own landing on Rahuahane had been inadvertent; others would go on purpose, if they knew about the ruin there. And those others would become a flood if they knew that the cache of eggs there also constituted a massive cache of unshaped firestone. I had struggled since the day I made that cast to think of a plausible story for its origins that would not either distort true information with false or give away too much. I had yet to succeed.

As for the paper in my desk… there, my motivations were not a tenth so noble.

“Come in,” I called, once I was down and away from the relevant shelf.

The door opened to admit Natalie Oscott. Once my live-in companion, she had moved to her own lodgings shortly after Jake went away to school. “He does not need a tutor any longer,” she said at the time, “and you need more space for books.” This latter was something of a polite dodge. I had once promised to qualify her for a life of independent and eccentric spinsterhood; that had since been achieved, though I could hardly take the credit for it. Natalie had found her calling in engineering, and a circle of like-minded friends to go with it, who kept her tolerably employed. Her finances were somewhat strait—certainly far less than she could have expected in life had she remained a proper member of Society—but she could pay her own bills now, and chose to do so. I could hardly stand in her way; although with Jake gone, I sometimes missed having company in the house.

She gave me a curious look as she came in. “Living alone has done odd things to you. What were you up to, that I had to wait in the hall?”

“Oh, you know me,” I said with an airy smile. “Dancing about with my knickers on my head. I couldn’t let you see. Please, have a seat—did Tom tell you the news?”

“That you’re leaving next week? Yes, he did.” They did not live in the same neighbourhood, but it would not have been much out of Tom’s way home for him to stop by the workshop where Natalie and her friends tinkered with their devices. “What will you do with the house?”

I sat down behind my desk and slid a fresh sheet of paper onto my blotter. “Close it up, I think. I can afford to do that now, and this is dreadfully short notice to be looking for a temporary tenant. Though you’re welcome to the place if you like; you still have a key, after all.”

“No, closing it makes sense. I’ll come in for books, though, if you don’t mind me playing librarian on your behalf.”

That was an excellent thought, and I thanked her for it. The so-called “Flying University” that had begun in my sitting room was now a whole flock of gatherings, taking place in many houses around Falchester, but my library still occupied a vital position in that web. Though of course my shelves did not cover every topic—which gave me another thought. “I also have a few books that should be returned to their owners. One from Peter Landenbury, I think, and two or three from Georgina Hunt.”

“I’ll take them,” Natalie said. “You have enough to concern yourself with. Is that a letter to Jake that you are writing?”

It was, though I had not gotten any farther than the date and salutation. How does one tell one’s thirteen-year-old son that one is leaving for a foreign country in a week—not to return for who knew how long—and he is not permitted to come?

Natalie knew Jake as well as I did. Laughing, she said, “Be sure to examine the contents of your traveling chests before the ship casts off. Otherwise you may arrive in Akhia and find your son folded in with your hats.”

“Akhia is a desert, and therefore much less interesting to him.” But Jake would want to come along regardless. When he was very young, I had left him behind so I might go to Eriga; when he was older, I atoned for that abandonment by bringing him on my voyage around the world. The act had given him Notions. It was true that Jake’s greatest love was the sea, but more generally, he had it fixed in his head that traveling to foreign parts was something every boy should do on a regular schedule. I had enrolled him at the best school my rank and finances could arrange—Suntley College, which in those days was not quite in the upper tier—but for a boy who had gone swimming with dragon turtles, it was unavoidably tedious.

Thoughts of my son should not have led me to animals, but they did. After all, Jake was no longer dependent on me for care and feeding, but other creatures were. “Do you want the honeyseekers? Or shall I ask Miriam?”

Natalie made a face. “I should be a good friend and tell you that I will take them, but the truth is that I fall asleep at the workshop too often to be responsible for anything living. I should hate for you to come home and find your pets are dead.”

“Miriam it is, then.” They were not birds, which were Miriam Farnswood’s specialty, but she liked them well enough despite that. I set my pen aside, knowing that I would need my full attention for the letter to Jake, and steepled my fingers. “What am I missing?”

“Respectable clothing for when you are in town; trousers for when you are not. Hats. No, you’ll want a scarf, won’t you, to cover your hair? Your anatomical compendium. They will have scalpels and magnifying glasses and so forth waiting for you there, I presume, and Mr. Wilker has the set you gave him—but better safe than sorry. I’m told Akhians have a kind of oil or paste they use to protect their skin from the sun; you might want to acquire some.” Natalie rolled her eyes heavenward, studying my ceiling as if a list might be found there. “Do they have malaria in Akhia?”

“I believe so. But I shall have to take my chances: Amaneen do not approve of drinking.” Some were more observant than others, of course; but I did not want to give the wrong impression from the start by showing up with a case of gin in my baggage.

She inquired after my living arrangements, which I described; then she said, “Tents? Other gear for camping?”

“Lord Rossmere made it rather clear I am expected to stay in Qurrat and work on my assignment for the army.”

Natalie regarded me with an ironical eye, and I laughed. “Yes, yes. I know. But if I should happen to go wandering out into the desert in search of things to learn, I am sure I can acquire suitable tents from a local merchant. Also the camel to carry them for me.”

“Then you are prepared,” Natalie said. “As much as you can ever be.”

Which was to say, not half prepared enough. But I had long since resigned myself to that fact.

I could not help but think on the past when Tom and I met in Sennsmouth and looked out at the ship that would bear us to Akhia. Reflections on the past

Fourteen years before, we had stood in almost this precise spot, preparing to depart for Vystrana. But there were four of us then: myself and Jacob, Tom and his patron Lord Hilford. Jacob had not lived to come home again, and Lord Hilford had passed away the previous spring, after many years of worsening health. I was pleased he had at least lived to see his protégé become a Colloquium Fellow, though I had not been able to follow suit.

Tom’s thoughts must have gone along similar lines, for he said, “This isn’t much like our first departure.”

“No,” I agreed. “But I think they both would have been pleased to see where we are now.”

The wind was brisk and biting, causing me to think longingly of the desert heat that lay ahead. (I was somewhat erroneous in so doing: even in southern Anthiope, Acinis is not the warmest month. It was, however, warmer there than in Scirland.) If I felt a chill, though, I had only to cast my thoughts upon what lay in my future: the desert drakes of Akhia.

They are in many respects the quintessential dragons, the sort that come to mind the instant one hears the word. Scales as gold as the sun, giving rise to legends that dragons hoard gold and sleep atop mountainous piles of it, until their hides are plated with the precious metal; fiery breath that sears like the desert summer itself. I had seen many kinds of dragons in the course of my career, including some whose claim to the name was exceedingly tenuous… but the closest I had ever been to a desert drake was when I gazed upon a runt in the king’s menagerie, so many years before. Now, at last, I would see them in their full glory.

I said, “Thank you, Tom. I know I have said it before, and likely I will say it again—but it bears repeating. This opportunity I owe entirely to you.”

“And to your own work,” he said defensively. But then he smiled ruefully and added, “You’re welcome. And thank you. We got here together.”

His tone was awkward enough that I said nothing more. I merely lifted my face to the sea wind and waited for the ship that would bear me to Akhia.

TWO

Nature herself has provided the harbour of Rumaish with an awe-inspiring gate. Two rocky promontories rear pincer-like over a narrow strait between; in times of war it is easy to string chains between these to prevent the passage of enemy ships. The caliphs of the Sarqanid dynasty, however, felt this was not enough, and ornamented those two promontories with a pair of monumental Draconean statues taken from the so-called Temple of Silence in the Labyrinth of Drakes. The sea winds have taken their toll on the dragon-headed sculptures, and their features are now sadly all but indistinguishable; the effect of their steadfast presence, however, is no less impressive for that.

I stood at the ship’s rail and sketched while we approached these two guardians, looking up frequently at their massive forms. Sentimentality for that ancient civilization had never been among my weaknesses, but my interest in them had grown by leaps and bounds after we discovered the temple on Rahuahane. What breed of dragon had they hatched on that island? For what purpose? Was that dragon among the types alive today, or had it gone extinct during the intervening millennia? Entering the harbour that day, I permitted myself a moment of sentimentality, imagining those weathered stone eyes had seen the answers for themselves.

Then we passed through the gate and into the harbour itself. This is not so busy a place as Saydir, which lies at the mouth of Akhia’s middle river; a more generous entrance makes that harbour better suited for commercial traffic on a large scale. Rumaish sees its share of activity, however, with ships from all over Anthiope. Even in those days, it was necessary to coordinate passage through the gate with a local official, so that the channel would not become clogged to the point of danger with too many ships at once.

Two men in Scirling military drab were waiting for us on the quay as we disembarked. One of them wore the cap and shoulder boards of a colonel. The other needed no insignia to identify him, for I recognized him immediately.

“Andrew!” My delighted cry was almost lost in the clamour of the docks. I dropped the bag I was carrying and hastened forward to fling my arms around my brother—the one sibling with whom I could say I was on good terms, rather than merely tolerable. “I thought you were still in Coyahuac!”

“I was, until recently,” my brother said, swinging me around in a laughing circle. “But the rumour went around that you might be coming here, and so I asked for a transfer. Didn’t want to say anything, though, in case it fell through.”

“You mean, you could not pass up the chance to ambush me,” I said reprovingly.

Andrew’s unrepentant grin told me I had not missed my mark. Then a voice interrupted us: “Captain Hendemore.”

The sound of his name caused my brother to stand bolt upright and tug his uniform straight, murmuring an apology to Colonel Pensyth. My own reproving look was put to shame by the colonel’s, for he meant his a great deal more. I could guess at the conversation that had preceded this encounter on the quay: Andrew begging (with his best effort at proper military dignity) to be there when I arrived, Pensyth granting it on the condition that Andrew behave himself. My brother had idled away some time at university before deciding army life would suit him better, but the fit was still not ideal. I had loaned him the funds to purchase a lieutenant’s commission—the highest I could buy without selling too much firestone at once—and he had gained a promotion to captain after his commanding officer was killed; I doubted he would ever rise higher, as he did not treat military life with the gravitas his superiors desired.

Tom distracted Pensyth with an extended hand and a greeting. “I take it you are here to lead us onward to Qurrat?” Tom asked.

“Yes, we’ve arranged a river barge,” Pensyth said. “They’ll be all day unloading your gear from the ship and loading it onto the barge, though, so Captain Hendemore and I have taken rooms at a hotel. After you’ve had a chance to clean up, perhaps you might join me in the smoking room.”

This last was very clearly directed at Tom, not me. Ladies were not expected to smoke (though of course some of them did, and more of them do now); the smoking room was therefore an entirely masculine precinct. I could not help but wonder if Pensyth had intended to exclude me, or whether it was merely thoughtless reflex.

Either way, I would look quarrelsome if I pointed it out—especially since Andrew elbowed me in the ribs, grinning. “You and I will have a chance to jaw, eh?”

“Indeed,” I said. Miffed though I might be at Pensyth, I could not deny that I looked forward to time with my brother. My relations with the rest of my immediate kin were not so bad as they had once been; the honour of a knighthood had at least partially mended the bridge with my mother, though from my own perspective it was more for the sake of familial harmony than because of any change of heart. And as well as I got on with my father, I had never quite discarded the childhood image of him as a minor pagan god, to be propitiated but never wholly embraced. Andrew was still the only relation with whom I felt truly warm—my son, of course, excepted.

Andrew stepped aside to chivvy a cluster of local men to their feet: dockside porters, who would undertake the labour of shifting our belongings from ship to barge. Then we went along to the hotel, situated up a very steep hill, which vantage allowed it to catch what cooling breezes were to be had.

The hotel, like many in the south of Anthiope, had separate women’s quarters for the privacy of its female guests. I therefore left Andrew in the courtyard while I saw to my room. When I returned, he had arranged for cups of tea, of a variety I had not tasted before. It was delightfully warming on a day which, despite the sun, was rather more chill than I had expected.

“You know,” Andrew said, with the air that could only mean he was about to say something appallingly blunt, “I can’t understand why anybody thinks you and that Wilker fellow are having an affair. All it takes is one look to know it’s utter nonsense.”

Setting down my drink, I said wryly, “Thank you—I think.”

“Oh, you know what I mean. He might as well be a eunuch, for all you care. There are eunuchs here, did you know that? Mostly in the government. I swear that half the ministers I’ve met are missing their bollocks.”

The army clearly had been a wonderful influence on my brother’s manners. “Have you dealt with a great many people in government?”

“Have I dealt with them? No, not hardly. Mostly that’s up to General Lord Ferdigan and his staff in Sarmizi, or sometimes Pensyth. People senior to me. I just trot along behind them with files and such.”

Andrew’s tone said he was glad to be at the back—a sentiment with which I could sympathize. I was unlikely to be invited to meetings with ministers here, as neither the Akhians nor my own countrymen would be eager to include me in matters diplomatic, and on the whole I was relieved… but I will admit there was a part of me that chafed at the exclusion, or rather at its cause.

It occurred to me that my brother had been present at a variety of meetings that might concern me. Whether he had paid attention, of course, was another matter. “Is there anything I should be aware of, before I go wading in?”

Andrew cocked his head to one side, considering. He had taken his hat off and was fanning himself with it, which was likely a breach of military protocol. Although I felt the day was rather cool, he had sweated through his uniform on the walk up to the hotel. “Everyone’s annoyed. They didn’t expect it to take this long—thought our superior scientific knowledge should make the problem easy, and never mind that people have been trying to breed desert drakes since time out of mind, with no success.” He stopped fanning and leaned forward, propping one elbow on his knee. “To be honest—and not to put pressure on you or anything, but—I don’t know how long this alliance will last. It’s only this business with Yelang and their caeligers that has us and the Akhians working together. If there isn’t some kind of progress soon, that may fall apart.”

Nothing in what he said surprised me, but it was distressing all the same. Tom and I would undoubtedly be blamed for the failure, if we were left holding the baton when the end came. In fact, the dreadful thought crossed my mind that perhaps we had been chosen for precisely that reason. We made much better scapegoats than Lord Tavenor would have.

Well, if that was the plan, then I was determined to thwart it. And in order to do so, I needed information. Our predecessor’s papers would be waiting for us in Qurrat, but I liked the notion of being well armed before we arrived. “Can you tell me anything about what Lord Tavenor was doing?” Andrew shook his head, and I remembered that he had only recently come into the country. “Have you at least met this sheikh? The one who is supposed to supply us with dragons?”

My brother brightened. “Yes! Only once, mind you, but Pensyth briefed me beforehand. Fairly important fellow, as I understand it. The Aritat helped put the current caliphate into power a few generations back, and he’s their most recent leader.”

“Why is he involved with the programme? Is it because of political influence?”

“No—or at least, not entirely. His tribe’s territory is in the Jefi, and apparently that’s where you find the most dragons.” Andrew grinned. “He sends his nomad cousins to capture a few, and then they drag them back to Qurrat for you.”

I could not help but perk up at his words. You may think me mad for doing so: the Jefi is the southernmost portion of Akhia, the inhospitable desert valley between the Qedem and Farayma mountain ranges. It receives perishingly little rainfall; the nomads there survive by grazing and watering their camels at scattered oases. Even for a heat-loving creature such as myself, it cannot be considered anything like an attractive destination.

But it will come as no surprise to my readers that the prevalence of drakes there drew my interest. The Jefi was not so far from Qurrat—which made sense, as no one would wish to transport captive drakes any farther than they must. I was determined to see the creatures in their natural habitat before I left this country; now I knew where to go, and to whom I must speak.

Andrew clearly guessed at my thoughts, for he grinned widely. It lasted only a moment, though, before he sobered. “I wouldn’t try to go down there without the sheikh’s permission, Isabella. For one thing, you’ll die. And if you don’t die, the Aritat will kill you. They don’t like trespassers.”

Not to mention that my actions would reflect on Scirland. Trespassing would endear me to no one. “I understand,” I said, and prayed for cordial relations with the sheikh.

The barge that took us up the river to Qurrat was not a swift vessel, but I did not mind, for it gave me opportunity to study the landscape around me.

The Zathrit, being the southernmost of Akhia’s three major waterways, has its origin in the Qedem Mountains that separate that country from Seghaye and Haggad. An extensive network of irrigation canals spreads out from it like the branches of a tree; they were dry in this season, but come spring the farmers would knock down the mud-brick barriers at their mouths and channel the life-giving water to their fields of barley, millet, and wheat.

Along the banks of the river itself, the desert was far greener than I had envisioned. There were tall grasses and reeds, palm trees and other species I could not identify. Wildlife abounded, too, from fish to foxes to birds in the sky. But from time to time I would see the ground rising past the alluvial plain, and then I could see it desiccating into the distance, a dun colour not much different from my brother’s uniform.

It was, in its own way, a landscape as lethal as the Green Hell. But whereas the jungle of Mouleen tries quite energetically to kill a person, with every tool at its disposal ranging from predators to parasites, the deserts of Akhia most often kill with indifference. Jackals may hasten one’s end and then feast upon the carcass, but they rarely go to great lengths to hunt one down. Heat and thirst will do that work for them: one dies because the means of life are long since spent and gone.

That, however, was not my destination—not yet, and not (from the perspective of my military employers) at any point to come. Of course I did go out into the desert, more than once; but for the time being, I turned my attention to the settled lands of the river valley, and the city that ruled them.

Qurrat is a complex city, as many old settlements are. Unlike the Akhian capital of Sarmizi, it evinces little in the way of planned arrangements; there has been no equivalent to the caliph Ulsutir to knock down half the place and rebuild it in a grand style. There is no Round City at its heart, no sensible grid of avenues dividing one class from another. Like the central parts of Falchester, it simply happened, and people live in it as chance and circumstance dictate.

This does not prevent it from achieving a certain grandeur, all the more striking for its serendipitous distribution. The city is ruled by an emir or commander, one of the three who serve the caliph, and his palace overlooks the river from the vantage of a low hill, with gardens spreading like a green skirt down to the water’s edge. Various plazas are decorated with stelae and statues taken from Draconean ruins, and these relics of the past alternate with Amaneen prayer courts, recognizable by their tall spires and elaborate mosaic tiling.

The area where Tom and I were to be lodged is not nearly so grand. The district known as the Segulist Quarter is one of the older parts of the city; and like many old neighbourhoods, it has long since been abandoned by the elite and given over to other segments of society. In this particular case, as the name suggests, the Quarter’s residents are almost all Segulist (though they do not constitute the whole Segulist population of the city). It is a polite simplification to say that most of them are Bayitist, with a leavening of Magisterials. One might more accurately say the Quarter is a concatenation of a hundred Segulist factions, some of them borderline or outright heretical. To this day, for example, it contains a small enclave of Eshites, who seek the destruction of the Temple so that it might be rebuilt in what they view as purer form. Needless to say, this goal does not make them popular in Haggad; but they are permitted to live in Qurrat, so long as they obey the caliph’s laws (and pay the caliph’s taxes).

As Lord Rossmere had said, Tom was to be lodged in the Men’s House, which some of the Quarter’s residents maintain for the benefit of travellers and new immigrants. It meant sharing a room with three other men, but he did not expect to spend many of his waking hours there; when he was not asleep, he was likely to be at the compound which would serve as our base of operations.

Female travellers and immigrants being less common, there was no comparable Women’s House for me to lodge in. I was instead to live with a local Bayitist family: Shimon ben Nadav and his wife Aviva.

Shimon was a merchant, dealing in fine linens from Haggad (as the intermittent hostility between those two nations does not preclude a certain amount of trade). They were an older pair, Shimon’s first wife dead and their children long since grown and gone; most were married, but two unwed sons assisted in their father’s business, accompanying caravans across the Qedem Mountains. They welcomed me in the courtyard of their house with a basin of water to clean my face and hands, and then dates and coffee to sate my hunger.

“Thank you so much for your hospitality,” I said, and meant it quite sincerely. My previous expeditions had put me in a variety of housing conditions ranging from a Chiavoran hotel to a ship’s cabin to a hut of branches in the middle of a swamp. Only the Chiavoran hotel had matched this for comfort, and I had not stayed there long.

“We are very pleased to have you,” Aviva said in Akhian. It was one of her two languages; she and her husband spoke no Scirling, and I, being Magisterial, spoke almost no Lashon, as our liturgy is in the vernacular.

Despite the barrier posed by my fledgling Akhian, and perhaps a larger barrier of religious difference, she did not hesitate to carry out her duty. Leaving Andrew in the courtyard to talk with Shimon, I followed Aviva farther into the house. Their household was arranged in the southern style, with women’s quarters not entered by male visitors, and a piercework screen looking out over the street, which permits the ladies to view the outside world without being watched in return. I expected to spend little more time there than Tom would in the Men’s House, though, and so I fear I was perhaps less interested in what Aviva showed me than I should have been.

My attention was instead on the meeting that came the next day, when Colonel Pensyth and my brother took us at last to the compound where we would carry out our work.

THREE

Our destination lay a little ways outside the city, not too far from the Segulist Quarter. It had been the residence of a wealthy minister in service to the emir some ninety years before, but after his fall from favour it became the emir’s property. That man being uninterested in an estate that did not benefit from river breezes, the site fell into disrepair. At his caliph’s command, the current emir had leased it to Scirling interests, for the propagation of dragons.

Its semi-ruinous state was to our advantage, for we needn’t concern ourselves with damaging the place further—always a concern when dragons are involved. The parts in decent repair served as offices or barracks for the small military garrison under Colonel Pensyth’s command, while others had been gutted for scientific use. Tom and I would explore the entirety in detail quite soon… but first, we had to meet the sheikh who would be overseeing much of our work.

Hajj Husam ibn Ramiz ibn Khalis al-Aritati was not quite what I expected. Hearing that he was the sheikh of a Jefi tribe made me expect an aged nomad, of the sort occasionally depicted in romantic tales of the Anthiopean south: a headscarf and dusty robes, skin tanned to leather by the punishing sun and wind. Instead I met a man of about forty who appeared in every way to be a city-dwelling Akhian, from his clothing (turban and embroidered caftan) to his personal condition (soft and perfumed skin). My expectation was based on a misapprehension regarding the Akhian people; but I did not learn better until later.

He greeted us in the forecourt of the estate, along with an entourage of both Scirling and Akhian soldiers. Tom’s hand he shook; mine I did not offer, replacing the gesture instead with a respectful curtsey. (As I was not yet in anything that could be called “the field,” I was still in skirts, rather than the trousers which are my working habit. In truth I wore skirts a great deal in Akhia, or on some occasions robes after the local manner—though I did don trousers for certain strenuous undertakings.)

He spoke in Scirling, with a heavy enough accent that I suspected he had only begun to learn the language after our two nations formed their accord. My own Akhian being rather worse, I was grateful for the consideration. “Peace be upon you,” he said. “Welcome to Dar al-Tannaneen—the House of Dragons.”

“We are very glad to be here, Hajj,” I said. It was, as I understood it, not merely a courtesy title; he had completed the pilgrimage to the holy city of Dharrib, and earned that mark of respect. “We are also very eager to get to work.”

Speaking to him was peculiar, for I had drawn a corner of my own scarf across my face to form a veil. This was, I had been told, the way to show respect to a man of his eminence. But it muffled my words sufficiently that I was always concerned about whether I had spoken loudly enough, and in this case I was not reassured: the sheikh made no response to my words, instead turning and leading us through to a courtyard.

One of his underlings had prepared coffee and dates, the traditional materials of hospitality. None was offered to me, Akhia being one of the countries where men and women do not eat together in public. Since I have always been more partial to tea than coffee, especially as the latter is prepared in Akhia, I did not mind overmuch—not to mention that I would have difficulty managing the veil, and I did not know whether it would be an insult to lower it so soon.

Once enough time had passed to avoid a rude show of haste, the sheikh said, “If there is anything I or my tribe may offer to assist you, then you have but to ask. Everything we have is yours, for the good of both our peoples.”

This was not, of course, to be taken literally. Generosity is highly prized in Akhia, but just because a man speaks the words as custom demands does not mean he is eager to share all of his wealth and belongings with strangers—even if his caliph has commanded it. Tom and I had no intention of imposing more than we had to. I said, “We shall first take an inventory of what is here, and familiarize ourselves with the work our predecessor did. Until that is done, we cannot possibly guess what else we might need. Your kindness is greatly appreciated, though.”

He snapped his fingers, and one of the younger men with him leapt to his side. “Naseef ibn Ismail will take you to see the dragons,” he said.

Had he spoken Akhian instead of Scirling, I would have known which “you” he meant. But in my language, we no longer differentiate between the singular and plural of the second person, much less the gender of the one addressed. All I had to go on was his body language, the angle of his shoulders and his head—and these told me that not only his most recent statement, but the one before, were directed at Tom, not the two of us together.

Such behaviour was of a piece with the snubbing Colonel Pensyth had given me in Rumaish, and the countless other snubs I have received in my life. My patience for such things has grown shorter by the year. “Oh, delightful,” I said, and both Tom and Andrew knew me well enough not to take my bright tone for true. “I should be very glad to see the dragons—as they are, after all, the reason I have come all this way.”

Pensyth would not have been given his post if he were deaf to the nuances of social interaction. He said hastily, “Dame Isabella, perhaps you would like to get started on Lord Tavenor’s papers. Lieutenant Marton can show you those—that will get you out of the sun.”

And out of the way. I wanted to object, for clearly, in Pensyth’s mind, secretarial work was the best use for me. On the other hand, I did not wish to make a scene on my first day; and that hand was double, for our predecessor’s notes were likely to be of more immediate use than the dragons themselves. The latter could only show us what was happening now. The former could show us what had happened up until now.

But for all that, it rankled to give in. I wanted to see the dragons, and I did not want to be excluded. Only a beseeching and sympathetic look from Tom persuaded me. Very well: I would play along, and prove my value in time.

The lieutenant delegated to be my handler led me through an arch to a smaller, dustier courtyard, and past that into a building that was fairly intact. “Lord Tavenor worked in the office here,” he said, gesturing through a doorway to a larger room beyond. I peeked in to find a desk and various shelves, all of them echoingly vacant. The tiled floor was cracked, and the piercework shutters missing bits here and there. “The files themselves are down the hall. Shall I fetch them for you, miss—er, ma’am—er, my lady?”

“Dame Isabella will do,” I said, lowering my veil. Lieutenant Marton did not deserve to be cowed, but for the time being I felt the need to stand on ceremony: if people would not accord me respect of their own free will, then I would enforce it where I could.

“Yes, Dame Isabella,” he said. By the way his posture straightened, I think he almost saluted. Had I been so very commanding? I did not think so; and yet. “What would you like to see first?”

Lacking much in the way of information, I did not even know how to answer that question. “What are my options?”

“There are three major groups of files,” Marton said. “Records of the dragon-breeding project, records of the egg-hatching project, and accounts.”

Certainly not accounts… but the other two categories were quite broad. Ostensibly the breeding programme was the main endeavour here, but all the authorities on dragon naturalism agreed that success, if it were to happen at all, was more likely to come by way of dragons raised from the egg, and thus acclimated to human contact. Whichever choice I made, depending on how thorough Lord Tavenor had been in his record-keeping, I might be looking at mountains of paper.

Well, it could not possibly take me longer to read through his notes than it had taken him to write them, and I might as well start at the beginning. “Is there any sort of diary for the egg-hatching?” I asked. Tom would no doubt be learning something of the other project during his tour. Marton nodded, and I said, “Then bring me that—however many volumes it may be.”

It was not so dauntingly many as it might have been. After all, in the progress of any given egg, there is a long stretch of time wherein nothing much happens. I could skim quickly past Lord Tavenor’s meticulous daily notations of “no change” or weekly measurements, pausing only for the entries of greater substance.

Even so, I had not finished by the time Andrew came in, bearing an enormous tray of food. He looked sheepish and said, “The sheikh laid on a good picnic, but men and women don’t generally eat together here—or so I’m told. Since I’m family, I volunteered to bring you your share.”

I had encountered this kind of practice before, when we were stranded on Keonga. There, however, I had Abby Carew for company, and my son, who by dint of his youth was not yet considered a part of the male sphere. Furthermore, my own unusual gender status there had left me usefully ambiguous, so that I could dine with either sex, as I chose. Here it would be different: as the only woman in the House of Dragons, I would be eating alone every day, unless Andrew was present.

“For today, this will do,” I said. “The sheikh will not be here every day, though, will he? I thought not. The Akhians may keep to their own customs, but I have no intention of separating myself from our Scirling companions going forward. It is too valuable an opportunity for us to discuss our work.”

At least no one had stinted me on food. I persuaded Lieutenant Marton to join us, but even by our efforts combined, we could not finish what had been provided. “You’re not expected to, Dame Isabella,” the lieutenant told me. “It’s a sign of generosity. What’s left over goes to the servants. Most days we’re less formal; we just send somebody to the market to bring back some nosh.”

When the meal was done, I spent a few minutes writing out a list of the supplies I would need—which was virtually everything, as Lord Tavenor had not left so much as a blotter behind. I had brought my desk set with me to Akhia, but would prefer to keep it at the house, so that I could work in the evening if necessary. That done, I immersed myself once more in the records; and there I remained until Tom came in at last.

He must have poked his head in the door some time before; his polite cough had the sound of a man who has been waiting for the room’s occupant to notice him without prompting. “Oh!” I said, putting my pencil in the latest diary as a marker and closing it. “I’m so sorry. Good heavens, is it that late already?” The light in the office had dimmed quite a lot, though I had not noticed it except to tilt the pages toward the window.

“There were a lot of formalities,” Tom said feelingly. “Though it wasn’t all a waste of time. I take it this room out front is meant for a secretary?”

“For Lieutenant Marton, unless we replace him. He asked if I wished to have a second office set up elsewhere in the building. For me, of course, though he did not say it.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose, wondering if my headache meant I should look into getting spectacles. “I, er, may have said I would ask you if you wanted one. People are used to coming here; I do not like the thought of being shuffled off to some dusty corner where I can be ignored.”

“Quite right.” Tom came and perched on the edge of the desk, there being nowhere else to sit save the chair I currently occupied. “This room is big enough for us both; we’re neither of us likely to fill it up with elephant tusks and Erigan masks. We can start out sharing it, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll move elsewhere.”

I gave him a look of wordless gratitude. My eagerness to head off Marton’s condescension had provoked me into taking advantage of my greater social status over Tom, which I ordinarily took care to avoid. Besides, it was he, not I, who was a Colloquium Fellow. If either of us was to have the main office here, it ought to be him.

Tom gestured at the piles of books on the shelves behind me. “What have you learned?”

“Quite a bit,” I said, “alternately discouraging and frustrating. Were it not for this scarf, I might have torn half my hair out by now.”

(Before I continue onward, I must issue an apology. There is no way I could conceal our predecessor’s identity; it is a matter of public record who originally held the Akhian post, and many people remember his name. I fear that what I am about to say may border on the libellous, though, for I cannot tell this tale without being openly critical of Lord Tavenor’s work. I may only hope to mitigate it by also saying that I have a great deal of respect for the man, and indeed his work—flaws and all—was the foundation upon which Tom and I built our own efforts. Without him, I do not know how we might have proceeded. Nonetheless, I am sorry.)

Tom waited while I opened my notebook and found the necessary pages. “The eggs,” I said, “are delivered to Qurrat by the Aritat—the sheikh’s people. But it isn’t systematic: when they find a clutch of eggs, they collect them, regardless of their developmental stage. This means Lord Tavenor received everything from new-laid eggs to ones about to hatch.” Indeed, one of them had hatched in transit, causing no little trouble for the tribesmen.

My description provoked a wince from Tom. “That explains one of the juveniles I saw, then. It was clearly not in sound health.”

“It likely explains several of them, though ill health may not have been as obvious in the others.” Our knowledge of dragon development was still scant in those days, but everyone with even a rudimentary awareness of the subject knew that dragon eggs were notoriously sensitive to handling. Transit from the desert to this compound had caused many to spontaneously abort, and those which did not often hatched bad specimens. The earlier in their incubation they were moved, the worse the prognosis.

If all we cared about was obtaining hatchlings, then we could have requested that the Aritat mark egg caches and return to collect them when they were nearly ready. But of course that would not solve our actual problem: presuming we could get our captive dragons to breed, we would need to be capable of incubating their eggs to a healthy finish, under artificial conditions.

The diary in front of me made a useful prop. I picked it up solely that I might drop it again on the desk with a dismissive hand. “He never went out into the field. Oh, he collected reports, and did his best to replicate the natural environment here—but it was all secondhand and guesswork. He didn’t actually know what the usual incubation conditions were, not to the degree that is clearly necessary.”

It was the way of the gentleman-scholar, which had once been widespread. In some circles it still was, though the practice—or rather, the respect accorded to it—was on the decline. Our predecessors in all fields of science had once been content to work from the scattered observations of non-specialists and the unfounded declarations of ancient writers, rather than from empirical evidence. It was truly embarrassing to think how many centuries had passed during which even our great minds had believed, without a shred of proof, that a spider would not cross a line of salt—to choose but one particularly egregious example. The exact sciences had shed that mentality some time ago; the field sciences, such as natural history or anthropology, had taken longer, and were not yet done shedding.

Lord Tavenor was of the school of thought which said that a gentleman should not dirty his hands collecting data himself. His information came from travellers, sheluhim, merchants trading in various locales. In this case he had the reports of the Aritat, who undoubtedly were keen observers of the world in which they lived—but they did not deal in the sort of precise measurements that were necessary for scientific work. And Lord Tavenor, it seemed, had not asked them to.

“You want to go into the field,” Tom said. “We can try—we always planned to try—but I get the impression the sheikh will not be in favour. It’s possible Lord Tavenor asked, and was refused.”

“If so, he made no note of it here,” I said. Then I softened. “But you may be correct. These diaries are entirely devoted to the eggs themselves, not to conversations he may have had about them.”

Tom picked up the diary, flipped through it (taking care to leave my pencil in place as a marker), and laid it down again. “At the very least, we’ll want to finish orienting ourselves here before we ask any favours.”

Which in practice would likely mean sending Tom to ask, though the prospect galled me. To distract myself, I said, “What of the dragons themselves?”

He sighed. “More of the same, I suppose. Certainly neither the sheikh nor Pensyth had as detailed a description of their natural mating habits as I would like. Though in fairness, I very much doubt Lord Tavenor would have been able to replicate those conditions even if he knew them.”

Nor would we be able to, however scientific our methodology. Among the dragons capable of flight, mating often involves an aerial dance. Allowing the same here would be a quick way to lose our captive dragons.

“What did he try, then?” I asked, for I had not yet touched those records.

I will spare my readers a full recounting of what Tom described—though interested parties can find the details in Dragons of Akhia, which has a chapter on the efforts carried out at Dar al-Tannaneen. Suffice it to say that Lord Tavenor was a keen horse-breeder (this being part of what had secured him the Akhian post), and he had applied both his knowledge and his ingenuity to the problem, searching for ways to bring together two desert drakes without them injuring themselves, each other, or their handlers. A great many restraints had been involved, and at one point he had even resorted to a process I will call “mediated by human assistance,” and leave it at that.

When Tom was done, I asked, “The sheikh is gone now, yes?” He nodded, and I stood up so rapidly that my chair caught on a broken edge of tiling and nearly fell over. “Then there is no reason for me not to go see the dragons with my own eyes.”

Tom stood as well, but with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “Isabella—I did not say.” He hesitated, one hand tapping nervously on the surface of the desk. “You saw the dragons in the king’s menagerie, all those years ago. They were runts, and easy to control. Some of the hatchlings here are defective, but not all of them, and not the adults that were captured for breeding. Lord Tavenor had to find a way to keep them. It… will distress you.”

I stilled, laying my fingers flat against my skirts. “What do you mean?”

“He tried chains and muzzles,” Tom said, clearly reluctant. “But the drakes developed sores on their hides, which became infected; he lost three that way. And two men died unmuzzling one of them for a meal—they got burned. He had to resort to other methods.”

“Tom.” I swallowed, and realized my throat had become very dry. “Delaying will not make it any more palatable.”

“The supracoracoideal tendons,” Tom said. “He cut them, so the dragons cannot fly. And he tested a method on one of the carcasses—a heated knife, to cauterize the organ that produces their extraordinary breath.”

With one hand I felt behind me until my fingers met the arm of my chair. Then I sat down again, very carefully.

“If you do not wish to see them in person,” Tom said, “then I will take those duties.”

“No.” The word came out of me of its own accord, a reflex as natural and unstoppable as breath. “No—I will see them.”

It was not professional ambition that drove me to say so. True, that was a consideration: to abdicate any portion of our scientific work to Tom alone would reinforce the very assumptions we both fought against. But that was not why I insisted on going.

I refused because I cared about the dragons too much to hide from their suffering.

Men commonly criticize women, and women scientists especially, for an over-abundance of sentiment. The reasoning goes that we feel too deeply; and our feelings, being unscientific, damage our scholarly detachment. Thus, by the logic of this syllogism, women are unsuited to scientific work. I have given this a variety of responses over the years, some longer and more elaborately constructed than others, but this being a memoir (and therefore by definition personal in tone), I will simply say that this is utter tosh.

Yes, I felt physically ill at the thought of what had been done to the dragons. I am indeed partial to their kind; I have not hidden that fact in these volumes, though for many years in my early career I strove to do exactly that, so as to establish some kind of credibility among my peers. I also recognized the pragmatic necessity that underlay Lord Tavenor’s actions: it is simply not practical to keep healthy adult dragons captive, without taking some kind of measures to restrain their capabilities. But I do not believe that recognition of that necessity should mean abandoning all human feeling about our methods and their consequences. Indeed, a science which has no concern for such matters is a science with which I do not care to associate.

When I went to see our captive dragons, therefore, it was with a heavy heart; and I no longer shrink from saying so. What I saw did not make me feel better in the slightest.

The dragons were kept in large open pits within a perimeter wall that had been added onto the original compound. The edges were higher than they could leap without the assistance of their wings, and slightly overhung so the beasts could get no footing to climb out. Each had a small subterranean chamber adjoining, into which they could retire to escape the heat of the sun as needed; this was lined with stone, to mimic the rock shelters in which they often reside, and was pleasantly cool compared to the open sand.

But the dragons themselves were not happy. Beasts though they are, they are capable of feeling, and this can be read in their posture and behaviour. Our dragons were listless, dull-eyed, their scales dusty and neglected. Their crippled wings dragged in the sand; I saw that one had a bandage affixed to her left wing-edge, to protect a chafed spot from further aggravation.

In short, they were nothing like the dragons of the tales, great golden beasts soaring over their desert kingdoms, and the difference made my heart ache.

“No wonder they will not breed,” I said to Tom. “An upset horse is less likely to conceive; I expect the same is true of dragons.”

“Then we must find a way to please them,” he replied. “Though how we will do that, I don’t know.”

Our stable at the time consisted of two females and one male; a third female had pined away during the gap between Lord Tavenor’s departure and our arrival. Lord Tavenor, showing more education but little more imagination than I had when I was seven, had named them sequentially: one of the females was Prima, the male Quartus, and the other female Quinta. (Secundus and Tertia had perished some time ago, along with Sexta, Septimus, and Octa.) I walked the circuit of all three inhabited pits, and went down into the fourth to examine it from the inside. It was not all that much like the landscape in which they ordinarily roamed, but I could imagine the reactions of Colonel Pensyth and the sheikh if I asked them to create an enormous desert park.

Tom was leaning on the railing above, watching me explore. “Perhaps an enormous cage,” I called up to him. “Two cages, one layered inside the other. We can measure the fullest reach of their flame, and make that the gap between the two cages, so that no one will be burnt. And build it high—a framework like the one they used for the Invisible House during the Exhibition. Forty meters would not be much for the dragons, but they would be able to fly at least a little.”

I could see Tom smiling, even at this range. “With some kind of cart on rails to deliver their food. Though cleaning the interior might be difficult, I fear—we’d have to sneak in while they were sleeping.”

If we could make the drakes reproduce reliably, the Crown might build a hundred dragon cages to our specifications, be they never so lavish. The creatures were unlikely to oblige us, though, if we could not better their conditions: and so my thoughts went around in circles. But there was value in imagining the possibilities, as that might give us notions of more feasible solutions.

I climbed up the ladder and stood for a moment, the dry wind brushing like silk against my skin. I felt utterly drained.

Tom put one hand on my arm: a gesture of support he did not often give where others might see. “We’ll find a way, Isabella.”

I nodded. “And if we fail, it will not be for lack of trying.”

FOUR

I made a point of visiting the dragon pits every day, including the smaller enclosures where the juveniles were kept. There were eleven of these, ranging from a hatchling barely six months old to one I thought would soon enter draconic adolescence.

The younglings were a good deal easier to keep than their elders, as desert drakes only develop their extraordinary breath when they reach physical maturity. Lord Tavenor had not named them, except with numerical designations; I suspect he felt they were not worth the effort, given how many of them emerged from the shell in poor form and died soon after. From another angle, one might say it was unwise to name them, for names create attachment, and attachment creates grief when a life ends. But it being winter, we were receiving no eggs, and I did not like calling them by numbers, so I gave them names instead.

I had a certain fondness for the eldest, whom I dubbed Ascelin, after the legendary Scirling outlaw: although Lord Tavenor had hoped that being in captivity from birth would habituate the drake to human contact, he was a feisty creature, not much inclined to cooperate with anybody. It was likely to doom him in the end—if he would not settle down in adulthood, he might well be slaughtered for his bones—but until then, he was the closest thing we had to a healthy wild drake. His wings had not yet been crippled, for fear it would send him to an early grave, but he was not permitted to fly.

The youngest of the lot, however, was the one with whom I formed a special bond. My sentimental choice of words may raise your eyebrows—as well they should—but my interactions with this creature were more like those between an owner and a pet than a scientist and her subject.

Our relationship began when I visited the juvenile pens and said to Tom, “That must be the one you were referring to earlier—the lumpy one.”

He was thereafter known as Lumpy. His egg had been brought to the House of Dragons when it was quite new, and what hatched therefrom was obviously abnormal. Lord Tavenor had weighed the hatchling and confirmed his suspicions: the creature was much too heavy for his size, indicating that his bones had formed as solid masses, rather than acquiring the airy structure typical of the species.

My heart went out to him from the start. I knew from reading Lord Tavenor’s records that our predecessor had considered having Lumpy put down: the little creature was nothing more than a drain on resources, being of no use to our scientific inquiry. The order was never given before Lord Tavenor’s departure, though, and so Lumpy remained, crawling about his enclosure, occasionally flapping the undersized wings that could never hope to carry his adult weight.

I could not bear to have him put down, and told Tom as much. “I can make a scientific argument for it, if you like,” I said while we ate lunch in our shared office. “I’m sure I could come up with quite a splendid one, if you give me a moment to prepare. Something about understanding development by observing both successful and unsuccessful examples. If the abnormality is congenital, we might even have an advance in the captive breeding problem: after all, a dragon too heavy to fly need not have its tendons cut.”

“But none of those,” Tom said, “are your real reasons.”

“Of course not. The truth is that I do not feel the poor creature should die just because someone bungled his care.”

I meant to say more, but hesitated, wiping seasoned yoghurt from my plate with a scrap of flatbread. Tom read my hesitation correctly. “You wonder what kind of life it will be, though.”

A heavy sigh escaped me. “He will never fly. I look at how the grown ones pine… though of course they have known flight, and lost it. Perhaps he would not miss it in the same way. But his health is not good; it is entirely possible that as he grows, it will become worse. Should we condemn him to an earthbound existence, laden with suffering, because of misplaced pity? Is that kinder than giving him a merciful end?”

Tom shrugged helplessly. “How can we judge? We have no way of knowing what he thinks.”

“With a horse or a cat,” I said, “one can tell. Or at least guess. But that is because we know their ways, and can recognize the signs of their moods. My father had a dog who drooped about the house as if she had three paws in the grave already, but she would curl up at his feet and whack her tail occasionally against his shins, and you could see she still took pleasure in his company.” I wondered, but had never asked, what happened to that dog in the end. She had passed, of course—but had it happened naturally, or had the day come when the tail-whacking stopped? Had my father put her down, out of mercy? Had I not been a woman grown, thirty-three years of age, I might have written him to ask for advice.

“There is our answer, perhaps,” Tom said. “Learn their ways, before we make a decision we cannot take back.”

And so Lumpy lived. He never became a true pet; I did not let him out of his pen to follow around at my heels, for fear he might bite those heels off. But I visited him regularly, and brought him choice bits of meat, and did what I could to improve his health. When later events took me away from Qurrat for an extended period of time, I was told that Lumpy became quite dejected—inasmuch as we could discern such things by then. He did not live as long as his species might ordinarily hope for; a desert drake that survives its first three years (during which time many of them are killed by other predators) may hope to see as many as forty, and there are tales of some living far longer than that. Lumpy perished after a mere seven, as his increasing size exacerbated his physical difficulties. But that was a good deal longer than he might have had otherwise; and although I cannot read a dragon’s mind, I believe he enjoyed the time he had.

Dealing with Lumpy put my mind on thoughts of life expectancy and maturation rates, which were of prime importance to any breeding programme. Indeed, if Lumpy’s continued existence had scientific benefit, it was that he gave me an idea which ultimately proved to have revolutionary consequences.

The problem was this: desert drakes mate but once a year, near the end of the wet season, and lay ten or so eggs. The resulting offspring take approximately five years to reach sexual maturity; they ordinarily do not begin producing offspring until they are seven. Even if Tom and I met with success the moment we arrived and kidnapped every dragon in the desert for our needs, it would have taken years for the breeding programme to reach anything like regular production; and of course we could not be expected to succeed the moment we arrived. That much was understood, and allowed for. But each failed season would mean another year of delay.

In short, we needed to practice on something that bred a good deal faster.

We were making our morning circuit of the pens when the idea came to me. Lieutenant Marton was serving as our interpreter—Tom and I had both studied Akhian, but what one learns from a textbook and what a man speaks on the streets of Qurrat are rather different things—and we were taking notes on what the labourers could tell us of the dragons’ health and behaviour. Before we could make any useful changes, we had to know the current situation inside and out.

But of course I could not stop myself from beginning to form theories and hypothetical scenarios. This put me to thinking about a draconic species that is far less finicky about its mating habits—which gave me an idea. In such a state of excitement that I nearly dropped my notebook into one of the enclosures, I said, “Honeyseekers!”

“What?” Tom said.

“My honeyseekers! Miriam Farnswood can send them to us!”

Tom frowned. Already his nose was peeling from the intense Akhian sun, even at the gentler angle of winter; his Niddey ancestry was simply not suited to this latitude. “And why should she do that?”

“Because they,” I said triumphantly, “will breed like anything.”

It was not simply that they would breed. The females lay a single egg at a time, but these are watched over by the male honeyseeker; he repeats his mating display until he has what he considers to be a sufficient number of eggs. By removing those eggs when his back is turned, one can persuade him to mate again and again, much more frequently than he would have under ordinary conditions. It is therefore possible, even with just a pair of honeyseekers, to produce a moderately regular supply of eggs—a fact I had discovered when I took one clutch away for dissection.

I had not made much use of this so far, as honeyseekers do not make such good pets that I wanted to send hatchlings to all of my friends. But the man who had gifted my pair to me was Benedetto Passaglia, the great explorer; and he had taken extremely detailed notice of their habits in the wild. Experimentation with those conditions might teach us valuable lessons about egg incubation in draconic species.

“It isn’t going to be anything like a precise match,” Tom said when I was done explaining this to him. (I fear I was somewhat less coherent in the actual moment, producing a great many fragmentary sentences which lacked vital bits of information.) “Honeyseekers aren’t what I would call close cousins of desert drakes.”

They were barely cousins at all, except in the broadest taxonomic sense. As my readers with an interest in dragon naturalism will know, they hail from the eucalyptus forests of Lutjarro, clear on the other side of the world from Akhia. “It would still be data, though,” I said. “And more than we have now.”

“True enough. Let’s speak to Colonel Pensyth, and see if he will arrange for them to be shipped here.”

Honeyseekers were far from the strangest things we might have asked for; Pensyth acceded to the request without a quibble. We ran into a difficulty, however, with our plans for keeping them.

“They are insectivores when the season requires,” I told Andrew as he escorted me from Shimon and Aviva’s house to Dar al-Tannaneen, “but their primary sustenance comes from eucalyptus nectar. I have a stand of trees in my greenhouse at home—do you suppose it would be possible to uproot one and ship it? Or would the shock of transition kill it?”

My brother laughed. Although an escort was (in my opinion) not necessary, I had come to enjoy these walks, passing through the bustle of the city to the estate outside the walls and back again at sunset. Andrew had always been my closest sibling, both in age and in our rapport, but we had not seen much of one another for years: he had joined the army just after I departed on the Basilisk, and his military assignments had kept us almost completely separate since then. Now I spoke to him morning and evening, on topics ranging from our respective duties to family to the places we had seen.

“You’re asking me?” he said, in a tone that made it clear just how fruitless this line of inquiry would be.

I was forestalled from answering by our passage through the city gate. There were wider ones elsewhere, suited to the passage of carts two abreast, but those would take us too far out of our way; I went in and out of Qurrat by the old Camel Gate, so named because it was scarcely wide enough to admit one camel laden with goods. By the time we had squeezed through to the other side (Akhian propriety about contact between unrelated men and women bowing to necessity in such spaces), Andrew was looking thoughtful instead of amused. “Actually, there are a lot of gardens and parks here, and some of them are full of exotics. The ones belonging to rich people, of course. Marton would know more; he’s a keen gardener. Maybe one of them has eucalyptus trees already.”

That would be a good deal better than trying to transplant my own trees to Qurrat, or growing new ones from cuttings. “Thank you,” I said, and we hurried on to the House of Dragons.

Marton did not know where eucalyptus trees might be found, but he promised to ask around. A few days later, he came to the office while both Tom and I were there, looking excited. “It’s easier than I thought!” he said. “One of the Akhian fellows told me he thinks the sheikh has trees like that in his garden. Hajj Husam ibn Ramiz, I mean.”

This was indeed fortuitous—perhaps. “I’ll write him a letter asking if we can come look,” Tom said, reaching for paper and pen as he spoke. “You’ll know better than I will whether they’ll be sufficient for your honeyseekers.”

He dispatched his letter post-haste, and the next morning a reply was waiting for us when we arrived. Tom’s brow creased in a frown before he had even finished reading. “What is it?” I asked.

“He says I can come tomorrow,” Tom said, laying clear stress on the third word.

Tom alone. Not us both together. “You did mention us both, yes?”

“Of course I did.” It came out with a hard Niddey lilt—a sure sign that Tom was angry. “And his phrasing here is very clear. He doesn’t say outright ‘leave Isabella at home’… but that’s what he means.”

I was at a loss. I have been snubbed many a time for my sex, but rarely with such bluntness, under circumstances where my purpose is so solid. Nor could I think it some kind of misunderstanding—not after how I had been treated on my arrival here. Lieutenant Marton, who had delivered the letter, was hanging about in the doorway. I turned to him and asked, “Is the sheikh noted for being especially insulting to women?”

“No, Dame Isabella,” the young man said promptly, his tone anxious. “He’s got two wives, I think.”

I forebore to say that a man may have any number of wives and still not be pleasant to them. “Then perhaps it is Scirling women he does not like,” I said. “Or Segulist women. Or scientific women. Or women who are overly fond of the colour blue.” The words were coming out with an increasing edge; I made myself stop and take a slow breath. Once that had been expelled, I said more quietly, “Then I suppose you will go, Tom.”

He straightened up to an almost military bearing. “No. We’ll go together. The Crown hired us both, Isabella—under duress, maybe, and none too happy about doing it—but they hired us both. I’ll not be leaving you at home as if you were some mere assistant of mine, here only to file papers and make tea.”

That had been precisely the grounds on which I accompanied our first expedition, to the mountains of Vystrana. My heart contracted sharply at his words, with the sort of pain that is very nearly sweet. To think that we had come so far: not only myself, from such trivial beginnings to my current position, but the pair of us together, from rivals circling one another like suspicious cats to this unshakeable alliance. I would not have predicted, so many years before, that we would end up in such an arrangement… but it made me more glad than I could say.

“Thank you,” I said, very sincerely. Then I shook myself straight. “Tomorrow, you said? That gives us all of today to be useful. Let us not waste it.”

The sheikh had asked us—or rather, Tom—to come by in the late afternoon, near the close of our usual working day. I brought a change of clothes to the compound that morning, and had a quick scrub with a rag and a basin of water before shifting into them. I could not prevent myself from accumulating dust on the way to the sheikh’s house, as dust was inevitable in that climate… but I could at least make certain there were no drips of blood from Lumpy’s breakfast on my skirts.

Hajj Husam ibn Ramiz ibn Khalis al-Aritati dwelt in a large and gracious estate on the bank of the river, with the main buildings situated on a low rise that would catch what breeze might be had. A servant greeted us in the forecourt of this compound and brought us through an archway to an inner courtyard. It was apparent even then that we had thrown them off their stride: the man clearly had been prepared to take Tom to some other, more masculine preserve… but it would not be appropriate to bring a woman there. (My Scirling readers can imagine this location as a gentleman’s smoking room. I leave it to the invention of my readers in other lands to substitute an appropriate venue.) We sat on wickerwork chairs in the courtyard, without even coffee and dates to occupy us, and waited.

After a few minutes had elapsed, I murmured to Tom, “I imagine he is debating with himself whether to come down and greet us at all.”

“He had better,” Tom said. “I’ve got Pensyth’s measure now. I can make quite a stink if the sheikh doesn’t cooperate.”

I did not like to think of us having to cause trouble just to get our work done. To distract myself, I occupied my time studying the courtyard. As I had not yet seen the caliphal estates outside Sarmizi, I thought this place the pinnacle of Akhian elegance; even by those standards, it was exceedingly pleasant. Detailed panels of stucco adorned the walls, some of them painted in bright colours, and jardinières edging the gallery above spilled a wealth of greenery into the air. The fountain at the center held a Nichaean figure that was either a reproduction or a relic in surprisingly good condition. Given the sheikh’s apparent status and wealth, my bet was on the latter.

Tom, however, grew steadily more restless. I think he was on the verge of speaking again, or even getting up to leave, when the sheikh emerged from an archway to our left.

He was not pleased to see us—not pleased to see me, I suspected—and made very little effort to hide this fact. He neglected the usual greetings and said to Tom, “Is it customary in your land to arrive with an unwelcome guest?”

This was a shocking breach of hospitality on his part. Tradition there holds that no guest is unwelcome: an Akhian nomad may be starving in the middle of the wastes, and he will still be expected to share his last scraps with a visitor. At the time I did not know how egregious his behaviour was, but it still rocked me back on my heels, metaphorically speaking.

Tom took it in better stride than I did. He merely said, “I beg your pardon, Hajj, but we’re here on a matter of business, and our duties to the Crown have to take precedence. I requested an audience for Dame Isabella and myself together because we’re partners in our work. Even if we weren’t, the idea we’re pursuing right now is hers. She understands far better than I do what is required. If I came here alone, I would be wasting both my time and yours.”

The sheikh looked as if he wanted to say we were still wasting his time. I wanted to cast subtlety to the wind and ask him what grievance he had against me; it was increasingly apparent that his animus went beyond the ordinary sort of prejudice I had dealt with before. But however much I boiled inside, I could not ignore the fact that I was representing the Scirling Crown, and that any action I took would reflect not only upon my own character, but upon that of my country. So instead I bit my tongue—literally, though only for an instant—and said, “Your pardon, Hajj. We will make this as quick and painless as we may.”

Perhaps he had thoughts similar to mine. He was, after all, our designated liaison with the Akhian government; his actions reflected on his people as well. With bad grace, he sat in one of the wickerwork chairs and gestured for us to do the same. “What is it, then?”

Fortunately I had spent some time preparing my reply. In as concise a manner as I could, I related to him the potential value of honeyseekers as comparative subjects, and the necessity for feeding them upon eucalyptus nectar to maintain proper health. “We are told you have some here in your gardens,” I said. “If I were permitted to see the stand for myself, I might judge whether it would provide enough sustenance for a breeding pair. Should that be the case, then we will have my honeyseekers shipped here, to supplement our research.”

During this explanation, the sheikh had been looking fixedly at the centerpiece of the fountain, with an expression that said the sight did not bring him much pleasure, but was preferable to the alternative. As I came to a close, he opened his mouth to reply—but he was forestalled by the entrance of another visitor.

I had heard this one approach as I spoke: a clatter in the courtyard, as of a horse’s hooves on the pavement, followed by a brief exchange of speech, too muffled for me to hear. But I did not realize the horseman was coming inside until the sheikh’s gaze shot to the archway through which Tom and I had entered. From behind me a voice rang out in Akhian, saying, “Brother, I have bad news.”

If Husam ibn Ramiz had disappointed my expectations of a desert nomad, this man fulfilled them. He wore the dusty, bleached-linen robe, the boots of worn camel leather, the dark cloak over it all. His headscarf flared behind him as he strode in, kept in place by its encircling cord, and he even had one corner of the scarf drawn up over his nose and mouth, to keep the dust out. He reached up to unfasten this veil as he spoke—but even before that covering dropped, I knew him.

Instinct alone kept me from whispering, “Suhail.”

He was in a bad temper; that was obvious from the jarring motion of his stride. Dismay overwrote this as he realized the sheikh was not alone: his momentum faltered just past the threshold, and he said, “My apologies. I didn’t realize you had guests.”

I had put my own scarf across my face in deference to the sheikh; now I turned my head, so that even my eyes were concealed. My heart was beating triple-time. Gears clicked together in my head, fitting together with the precision of clockwork. I no longer needed to ask why the sheikh detested me so, for I knew the troubles I had experienced with my own family, those members of it who disapproved of my life and my actions. And I knew that my behaviour in these next few moments—mine and Suhail’s—would leave an indelible stamp on all that followed.

“You,” the sheikh said in a tone fit to freeze water, “are supposed to be in the desert.”

“I know,” Suhail said. “The Banu Safr—Wait.” He changed to Scirling. “Wilker, is that you?”

Tom rose awkwardly from his chair. “It is. I—did not expect to see you here.”

I almost laughed. I had imagined that trying to find Suhail would be like looking for one grain of sand in the desert. He could have been anywhere in Akhia, or nowhere in the country at all. Instead he was the brother of the very man with whom our duties required us to work.

Suhail sounded baffled, as well he might. “Nor I. What brings you to Akhia?”

I could not continue staring at the tiles of the courtyard floor forever, however complex and fascinating their design. I lifted my head, gazing at a spot just to Suhail’s right, and gave him a polite nod. “Peace be upon you, sir.”

He stared at me. My face was half concealed, but surely he must recognize my voice, as I had his. And what other Scirling woman would be sitting here with Tom Wilker?

I could read nothing from his expression, so blank had it become. Perhaps he did not recall me after all. Then he drew in a breath and gave me a brief nod, not touching his heart as he might have done. “And upon you, peace.” He directed his attention once more to Tom. “Let me guess. You are Lord Tavenor’s successor.”

Whether Tom missed his choice of singular noun or simply chose to disregard it, I cannot say. All I know is that for once, I wished him to be less energetic in defending my status. “Yes, Isabella and myself both. We didn’t realize you were involved.”

“I’m not, really,” Suhail said carelessly. “My duties are out in the desert.” He reverted to Akhian, turning once more to the sheikh. “But I’m interrupting—I do apologize. Brother, when you have a moment, we should talk.”

His disinterest in speaking with us was palpable. Tom cleared his throat awkwardly and said, “We are only here to see the eucalyptus trees in the garden. Hajj, if it pleases you, a servant could show us what we need. That way we won’t keep you from your business any longer.”

This suited the sheikh very well, who was calling for a servant almost before Tom was done speaking. Suhail did not wait around for us to be handed off, but vanished through one of the archways. I waited in my chair, with what I hoped looked like demureness, until someone came to guide us to the garden, but what kept echoing through my mind was: Suhail ibn Ramiz ibn Khalis al-Aritati.

It would have meant nothing to me three years ago, when I first met Suhail. I was not sufficiently au courant to name the influential families of Thiessin, let alone Akhia. But he was the younger brother of a sheikh, the scion of a tribe that had helped put the current caliph on the caliphal throne. Oh, I could imagine how his brother had seethed to hear the rumours about our conduct as we traveled the world together. Did anyone on the Scirling side of things know my archaeological companion was the sheikh’s brother? Or had Hajj Husam kept that connection sufficiently hidden? The latter, I suspected, or someone would have thrown this in Tom’s face when he insisted on the Crown hiring us both.

I saw nothing of the gardens as we walked through, though in hindsight I can say they were magnificent. Only my awareness of duty made me capable of focusing on the eucalyptus trees, when they were put in front of me. It was a luxuriant stand, capable of supporting at least a dozen honeyseekers, let alone my little pair. “Yes, this will do,” I said, and then: “Let us get back to work, Tom. We don’t want to distract the sheikh any more than we must.”

He kept his mouth closed until we were well clear of the house. Finally he said, “That was surprisingly cold.”

“It had to be.” I stopped and leaned against the wall of a shop, because I could not face threading through the crowds while my thoughts were in such turmoil. “Duties in the desert, indeed. Tom, I believe the sheikh has gone to some effort to keep me from encountering Suhail, and vice versa. Now that has blown up under his feet.”

“You think Suhail was pretending, then?”

The question put a chill in my stomach. That I had read the sheikh’s intentions correctly, I was sure; it explained his animosity toward me, his refusal to acknowledge me except when necessity forced it upon him. But what if his fears were unfounded? What if his brother did not care that I had come to Akhia?

I could not believe that. Even if the warmth of our friendship had faded utterly from Suhail’s mind, he would not have been so cool toward me. Indeed, the very fact of his coolness told me he had not forgotten: he would only act so if he needed to persuade his brother that nothing untoward would occur.

“He did not even ask after Jake,” I said. My son had grown exceedingly fond of Suhail during our travels, the two of them bonding over a shared love of the ocean. “Yes, I am sure it was pretense.”

Tom did not argue. “What now, then?”

A very good question. I had put more time than I should admit into imagining what might happen when I encountered Suhail again… but none of it had accounted for the possibility that our meeting would not be as free and easy as our previous interactions.

There was only one answer I could give.

“I will do my work,” I said, and pushed off the wall. It would have been better had we been returning to the House of Dragons, rather than our lodgings in the Segulist Quarter. Then I might have distracted myself properly. “I will not give anyone cause to say it was a mistake to send me here.”

But even as I spoke those words, I knew them for a lie. I had in my desk at Shimon and Aviva’s house a folded piece of paper, and I would see it in Suhail’s hands if I had to climb the walls of the sheikh’s house to do it.

FIVE

Alas—or perhaps I should say “fortunately”—climbing the walls of the sheikh’s house would not have done me any good.

I had the sense to turn for aid to someone I trusted not to make the problem worse: my brother, Andrew. That he might laugh at me was entirely possible, but I could admit my conflicted position to him without fear of it rebounding upon my public reputation. (Tom I trusted even more, but any action he took would be read in light of the stories told about the two of us.)

When Andrew walked me home the next day, I invited him to the courtyard, where we might converse in relative privacy. “I was wondering if I might ask a favour of you,” I said.

“Of course,” Andrew said without hesitation. Then he grinned. “Am I going to regret saying that?”

“There is no reason why you should. It is not dangerous—oh, don’t look so disappointed,” I said, laughing. “It has to do with the sheikh’s family. As it happens, his younger brother Suhail was our traveling companion during my time aboard the Basilisk.”

“I see,” Andrew said, and then: “Oh. I see.”

As separate as we had been these past few years, he still knew the rumours. No doubt he had some of them from our mother. “The tales are stuff and nonsense,” I assured him. “Suhail is only a friend, and a respectable scholar. But it seems the sheikh disapproves of our association, and I do not wish to antagonize him by doing anything that might be seen as forward. I was wondering if you might carry a message for me—nothing inappropriate, you have my word. Merely that I have acquired a piece of research material, which I think would be of interest to Suhail.”

Andrew forbore to mention that I referred to Suhail by his given name alone. It was habit, left over from our time on the Basilisk, when I had not known any more of his name than that, nor any title to gild it. “You want me to take the research to him? Or should I just tell him you have it?”

“I should like to give it to him myself, if I can,” I admitted. “Though if that fails, then yes, I would like you to convey it on my behalf.”

My brother shrugged. “Very well. I’ll see what I can do.”

What he could do, unfortunately, was to inform me the next evening that Suhail was already gone from Qurrat. “Back to the desert,” Andrew said. “The sheikh doesn’t go out there very often himself, so he’s got his brother acting as his representative with the nomads.”

And when, I wondered, had that practice begun? After Suhail came home following the death of his father? Or when word came that Tom and I would be assuming Lord Tavenor’s duties?

Either way, it put Suhail quite neatly beyond my reach: a most frustrating situation. I could only hope that he came back to Qurrat soon, or Tom and I received permission to go out into the desert ourselves. As Andrew had said, he was the sheikh’s representative to the Aritat, and they were the ones providing us with our eggs and live drakes. He should not be terribly difficult to find.

Neither of those things happened right away, however, and in the meanwhile I had my work to keep me busy.

Dar al-Tannaneen had its own rhythm, established under Lord Tavenor’s oversight. The beasts must be fed, their enclosures cleaned, their health monitored. On Eromer the Scirling soldiers took up the burden of these tasks, so the Akhians could go to their prayer courts; on Cromer the Akhians returned the favour. (Our soldiers largely spent the resulting time idling about rather than reading Scripture. There were no Assembly-Houses in Qurrat, only Bayitist tabernacles; and Andrew told me the piety of his fellows varied in direct proportion to how much danger their lives were in.)

Tom and I spent those weeks familiarizing ourselves with things: the procedures of Dar al-Tannaneen, Lord Tavenor’s records of what he had done there, and of course the drakes themselves, with whom I became acquainted to a degree wholly unlike any I had experienced before.

Always we had been chasing them in the wild, watching them from cover, ordinarily getting close observation only once our subjects were dead. In Akhia, by contrast, I came to know the dragons as individuals. Quartus was lazy, seeming content to idle about in his enclosure, some days rousing no further than the minimum necessary to gulp down his meal. Quinta was fretful, and the reason the enclosures had been deepened partway through Lord Tavenor’s tenure, for she had almost escaped her pit on several occasions. The juvenile we called Sniffer had endless curiosity, and would play with objects we threw into his cage as toys.

None of that was immediately useful to our task, and I confined my notes on such matters to a private book, rather than the official records of Dar al-Tannaneen. This was the sort of thing Tom and I wanted to publish, separately from the business that had brought us here: it added to our store of knowledge about desert drakes, if not our ability to breed them. But we were not going to rush anything into print, regardless of military oversight. We needed to know more.

I knew perfectly well what was said about me around the compound. Tom had insisted I work at his side; this fed all the rumours that he and I had been lovers for years. I suspect, but do not know for certain, that Andrew got into fistfights in defense of my honour. Certainly Pensyth disciplined him for something, and more than once. I never asked why. Eventually the gossip among the Scirlings stopped. Whether it continued among the Akhians, I did not know, and did not want to.

Despite such vexations, it was a comfortable routine, and continued for nearly a month. And then, as they so often do, things seemed to happen all at once.

It began with Prima dying. She had been the first adult drake brought to the House of Dragons, and her health had been failing her for some time; but she was a tough old thing, and clung to life long after our assistants expected her to go. In the end, however, the trials of captivity won out, and she passed away.

The loss troubled me. It felt like a failure on my part and Tom’s, even though Prima had begun to sicken well before we arrived in Akhia. It did, however, afford us a chance to examine her quite thoroughly, which was of great benefit. We dissected the carcass from muzzle to tail, handed off the bones to be preserved—nothing here would be wasted—and studied the remaining matter in detail. I spent an entire day doing nothing but sketching the intricate lace of blood vessels that covered the underside of her wing, which, along with similar structures on the underside of the ruff, assist in the regulation of body temperature.

Mere days after the loss of Prima, however, we received word that the Aritat had captured another dragon, and were in the process of bringing it to Qurrat. “Another female,” Tom said with relief when he read the message. “Her tendons have been cut and her throat cauterized, and they say she’s healing well.” We had discussed more possibilities for keeping the dragons un-maimed, but the truth was that even if we could devise suitable pens for them—something the drakes could not melt their way out of—transporting them to said pens would still be problematic.

On the assumption that the scent of another dragon might cause distress, we put her into one of the enclosures that had not been used for some time, rather than Prima’s recently vacated pen. Then we waited, and tried not to fret.

She arrived in late Nebulis, amid a cavalcade of desert tribesmen. They had bound her to a large cart, drawn on a long tether by a team of camels. The journey had clearly not acclimated the camels to their burden, for their nostrils flared with alarm every time the wind brought the drake’s scent forward. Once they had dragged the cart into position near the enclosure, the beasts were unclipped and led away. I hoped they would be given some kind of suitable treat; the nomads are renowned for the care and affection they lavish upon their camels, and any creature which has been forced to serve as draught power for its own natural predator deserves a reward.

A new arrivalTom and I watched their approach from atop the compound wall. “Dear God,” Tom said when he got a good look at the chains binding the dragon to the cart. “We have to find a better system than this.”

“A better system would be relocating our whole enterprise to the desert proper,” I muttered. “Better for the drakes, better for the eggs, if we don’t transport them as far.” Of course, then we would have to transport everything else we needed, which would be costly. The desert can support bands of nomadic herders, but not a permanent base—not without a great deal of money and trouble.

Tom went to examine the drake while I hung back, sketching. This was in part for others’ peace of mind: no matter that I had been around the world studying dragons, including rather publicly riding upon the back of one; nobody wanted to let Dame Isabella anywhere near a dangerous beast until it was properly confined. (There were some disadvantages to my social elevation.) But I also had an ulterior motive, which was that sketching gave me an excuse to observe the scene in detail. If I paused on occasion to watch the men moving back and forth, looking for a stride I recognized… well, my hand needed a respite.

I had spotted two potential candidates among the nomads by the time our own men were ready to pull the dragon down from the cart, but any action regarding either of them would have to wait. It was probably just as well: I did not even know what I intended to do. Better that I should attend to the business at hand.

Tom had injected the drake with a syringe of chloral hydrate, following guidelines laid down by Lord Tavenor. Despite the sedative, however, this was still a tricky process. We were only beginning to guess at the appropriate dosage for a dragon, and had to walk a fine line between leaving the beast too lively, and inducing possibly fatal convulsions. Tom watched our new charge very closely, and finally gave the signal to move forward. Our men had tied ropes around the dragon’s body; now they unfastened the chains that held her to the cart and began to drag her toward the enclosure.

This might have gone well had we kept the surrounding earth in better repair. But the ground outside the compound was quite rocky, and a large stone had begun to protrude from the soil. The ropes caught against this, halting all forward progress, and two of the men went to drag them clear.

Whether the drake was somehow roused by this movement, or had merely been biding her time until an opportunity arose, I cannot say. I know only that she strained with sudden violence against her bonds, long body writhing—and then one of her feet slipped free. She raked the soldier nearest, knocking him to the ground, and the other leapt back with a shout. This gave her more slack in the ropes; a moment later all four feet were loose.

This did not mean she was free. The ropes binding her legs were only part of the set constraining her, with the bulk holding her wings against her body and connecting her to the men pulling her along. But with her feet under her, she now had leverage to pull back against that restraint… and so she did, with great force.

Had Tom not gotten the sedative into her, there would likely have been a very angry wing-clipped desert drake charging about outside of Qurrat, and she almost certainly would have been shot. Instead a tug-of-war commenced, with many shouting men on one side and the drake on the other, swinging her bound muzzle back and forth in a manner that said she would have burnt them all to a crisp if she could.

She managed to get one foot up and over a draught rope, and the sudden downward yank brought half a dozen men tumbling to the ground. I dropped my sketch pad and hurried forward—to do what, I cannot say, for my slight weight would have made little difference in the equation. But I was not the only one leaping to assist.

One of the nomads hurled himself toward the rope now whipping loose. He caught it—skidded across the ground—then lost it a moment later when he stumbled on the hem of his robe, tearing the fabric with a noise that sounded almost like the drake’s snarls. The words that came out of him then I could not translate, but the tone was recognizable: furious expostulation, in a voice I knew very well.

Suhail’s headscarf slid from his head as he staggered to his feet. His jaw set in a determined grin, he leapt once more for the rope. The drake’s foreleg came for him again; he kicked it away, then went swinging across the ground as she threw her head upward. But the men had regained their feet, and some of them came forward to help him. Suhail surrendered that cord to them and caught another one thrown by his fellow tribesman. This one had a loop in the end, and on his second try Suhail got that around the dragon’s foreleg.

She went down heavily when he pulled her support out from under her. A frantic scurry commenced, and within a minute or two she was bound once again, sagging as if the exertion had taken all the fight out of her—or as if the chloral hydrate was finally doing its work. The hauling resumed, and soon she was confined to her pit, an exhausted lump underneath the inward-slanting edge.

Suhail saw me as he turned away from the pit. He could not have missed me; I was standing barely ten meters away, the only woman anywhere in sight. His lack of reaction said he knew precisely where I was, and had known for some time; but he did not meet my gaze, nor acknowledge my presence in any way. He merely went to reclaim his headscarf, shaking his head over the damage to his robe.

Surely there could be nothing wrong with approaching him and thanking him for his assistance. But I stayed where I was, silent and unmoving, until Tom returned to my side.

He had been on one of the ropes himself, and was soaked with sweat. Breathing heavily, he said, “We have to find a better way.”

“Yes,” I said, watching the nomads leave, Suhail in their midst. “We do.”

SIX

The death of Prima and the acquisition of Saeva (whom I named for her ferocity) were only two of the changes we experienced around that time. Not three days after that incident, my honeyseekers arrived on a ship from Scirland.

I had named them Amamis and Hicara, after the brother and sister who founded Spurena in myth. They were as hardy as their namesakes, surviving not one but two ocean voyages—albeit in far more luxurious conditions. I had been concerned that the rigors of travel would put them sufficiently off their feed that they would require special care upon arrival, but they fell with gusto upon the dishes of honey I laid out for them, dipping their brushy little tongues into the sweet liquid. When drab Hicara shouldered her brighter mate out of the way, he tried to spit at her—their defense mechanism, and arguably a form of extraordinary breath—but it did little good. The noxiousness of their spray comes from toxins in the eucalyptus itself, and my little dragons had been subsisting on clover honey during their journey.

They would have better soon enough. Despite the tensions between us, the sheikh had given permission for me to use the trees in his garden for the sake of our research. I had yet to determine, though, how that would be done. He would hardly wish me on his doorstep every day; and I had been very clear about not asking for that, lest he ascribe impure motivations to my presence. But that meant someone in his household would need to care for the honeyseekers in my stead.

Of course I hoped this might be Suhail. I had little expectation he would take it up, though, and was correct in that—but I could never have predicted who wound up shouldering the task.

I arrived at the House of Dragons one morning and learned from Lieutenant Marton that a woman from the sheikh’s household was waiting in my office. “A woman?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“Very sure,” he said, as if my question were not entirely foolish. “Hajjah Mahira, her name is.”

The woman sitting in my office was garbed like an Amaneen prayer-leader’s wife. She wore the long cloak, and had veiled her face even though I was hardly a man to whom she need demonstrate respect. When I entered, she rose to her feet and said in Akhian, “Peace be upon you, Umm Yaqub.”

“And upon you, peace,” I said by reflex. “Umm Yaqub” was my appellation there: parents are commonly known as the mothers and fathers of their children, and “Yaqub” is the Akhian form of “Jacob.” “You—were sent here by the sheikh?” He was not a prayer-leader, so far as I knew; but if one of his wives was extremely pious, she might dress in such fashion. And she, too, had completed the pilgrimage.

The woman gestured at the door and windows. “Will it bother you to close these?”

It would make the room stuffy, but I could endure that. I shut the door behind me and then crossed the room to tend to the shutters. Our privacy thus assured, I turned to find she had lowered her veil.

The line of her nose, the fine edge to her lips: these and other details were immediately familiar. The sheikh did not have such features, and I wondered whom Suhail and his sister took after, their mother or their father.

“I am Mahira bint Ramiz,” she said, confirming my guess. “I live with my brother Husam, and when I heard of your research, I offered to assist. If this is agreeable for you, then you may show me what care these creatures require.”

My time in Akhia had already done a great deal to improve my command of the language, but much of the improvement had been in the field of giving instructions to and receiving reports from our labourers, which left me less than wholly prepared for courteous conversation. I gestured for her to take a chair, wishing we had some kind of reception room in the compound, furnished in a more comfortable manner. It would be a useful thing overall, given the length of time this enterprise was likely to persist, and I made a mental note to inquire about the possibility. I did not even have coffee and dates on hand to offer her.

All I had were questions. “Are you a natural historian?”

It would have been a stroke of pure luck—and not entirely outside the realm of possibility, given Suhail’s own scholarly tendencies. She shook her head, though, disappointing me. “No, I am studying to be a prayer-leader. For women,” she added, when I showed my surprise.

That explained her mode of dress. I bit down on the urge to say I did not expect any sister of Suhail’s to be so religious: like me, he followed his faith, but not with any particular zeal. Indeed, sitting with Hajjah Mahira made me feel like I was having tea with my cousin Joseph, who was a magister in Kenway. He never chided me for my lack of piety, but his mere presence always sufficed to make me feel vaguely guilty.

“I hope this is not a burden for you, or in any way detracts from your studies,” I said.

“Not at all,” she assured me. “I asked Husam to allow me to help. I often study in the garden, so it will be easy for me to do whatever is necessary out there.”

The gears of my mind were clicking along, some of them weighing issues related to the honeyseekers, others performing calculations that had nothing to do with professional matters at all. If Mahira had responsibility for the honeyseekers, then I could deal with her instead of the sheikh. Indeed, I would have to deal with her, as it would be inappropriate for Tom to do so in my stead; and doubly so when she was so pious. The same rules of propriety that said I should not be conducting business with strange men might for once operate in my favour. And that, in turn, might open up certain possibilities.

Such considerations, though, had to wait. “They don’t require a great deal,” I said. “Honeyseekers are a good deal more cooperative in that regard than desert drakes! If you can arrange netting around the eucalyptus trees, to prevent them from flying away, that should be all the confinement they need—and really, even that may not be necessary. But I would rather not have to send all the way to Lutjarro for replacements.”

When she smiled, her resemblance to Suhail grew even stronger. “Indeed. Will the eucalyptus trees provide all they need?”

“That and insects ought to be sufficient, but I will tell you what signs of ill health to look for. If they seem underfed, then you can notify me and I will investigate.” I rummaged in a drawer and came up with the notebook in which I had begun to sketch out my plans. “The most important thing is the eggs. You will need to look for them every day; there will not be one every day, but I would like them collected at precise intervals after their laying, which means we will need to know when that occurs.”

She cocked her head to one side, curious. “What do you intend to do with them? I understand this is for your research, but I cannot see how it relates to desert drakes.”

“If all goes as I hope, it will teach us something useful about which environmental variations can be tolerated, and which ones cannot; also when such variations can be introduced without causing undue difficulty.” I had an extensive outline of test cases in my notebook, the fruit of my association with other scientific members of the Flying University. Mine was not a field that often suited itself to laboratory-style experimentation, but in this instance a rigorous comparative approach was possible. Depending on how long I was permitted to continue the experiment, I might be able to test every significant variable in a wide range of degrees and combinations.

She followed my explanation with the attentiveness of an intelligent woman who does not know the subject at all, but is willing to give it the necessary thought. When I was done, she said, “Presuming that some of them are healthy… what will you do with all these honeyseekers?”

That was an excellent question. Their bones could be preserved, but they had limited use, on account of their minute size; even a full-grown honeyseeker is rarely more than fourteen centimeters long. “Distribute them as pets, I suppose,” I said with a laugh. “You may certainly have a pair for your own keeping, if you decide you like them. We might make diplomatic gifts of some others.”

“Eucalyptus trees are not so common,” she said. “But we might grow more, and give those along with the animals themselves.”

Mahira departed soon after, on the understanding that I would bring the honeyseekers by the next morning for them to be settled in their new home. I exited the office to find that our closeted state had excited a great deal of speculation around the compound, which I had to quell with actual answers. “The sheikh’s sister?” Tom said when I told him. I could hear his unspoken question behind those words.

“Yes,” I said, and smiled. What need climbing the walls, when I had a reason to walk through the front door?

I arrived the next morning to find Mahira in the garden, veiled, issuing instructions to servants who were fixing the last nets in place. They had shifted a trellis arch to serve as a doorway into the eucalyptus grove, and the whole effect was far more elegant than I had envisioned.

My honeyseekers were chattering in their cage, clinging to the bars and poking their delicate snouts out through the gaps. Once Mahira had dismissed the servants, she lowered her veil and bent to study them. “They are smaller than I expected.”

“If they were not,” I said, “they would be a good deal harder to keep.” I opened the cage door and stepped back, beckoning for Mahira to do the same. Honeyseekers are inquisitive and relatively calm, but they would be more adventurous if we were not standing over them.

They crept out of the cage after a minute or two, and quickly found their way to the nearest eucalyptus blossoms. Hicara buried her face in one straight off, as if I had been starving them for a month. “Little glutton,” I said, smiling fondly.

We discussed their care for a time, and were nearly finished when I caught a glimpse, through the nets and eucalyptus leaves, of someone approaching. “Are we expecting company?” I asked Mahira.

She did not reach for her veil, nor did she look surprised. “I was beginning to think he would not come.”

The newcomer ducked under the nets of the arch and straightened up: Suhail.

My heart thumped in my chest. I had hoped this arrangement might give me an opportunity to speak with him, but I had not expected it to occur so promptly. “Oh dear,” I said involuntarily, looking about like a guilty thing. “Are we going to get in trouble for this?”

He laughed, though I noted a strained edge to it. Mahira said, “Why should there be trouble, when you are so well chaperoned?”

I supposed if she did not suffice—a woman, related to Suhail, and studying to be a prayer-leader—then no one would. “Thank you,” I said, and tried not to give away how heartfelt it was.

She shrugged. “Husam is being excessively cautious. That will excite far more rumour than allowing you two to behave like rational adults. If anyone needs me, I will be studying over here.” She took a book from the pocket of her cloak and went to sit on a small bench in the corner of the grove, near to where Amamis and Hicara were exploring.

Which left Suhail and myself standing near the entrance, awkwardly not looking at one another. He spoke first, in his lightly accented Scirling. “I am sorry I did not write.”

“Oh, it’s quite all right,” I assured him. The words came out too loudly. Moderating my tone, I said, “I am glad to know you are well.”

He nodded; I saw it out of the corner of my eye. His hands were locked behind his back. “My family—my tribe as a whole—we have been having some difficulties of late. For a while now, I should say. Years. I’ve been rather occupied dealing with that.”

I searched for something to say that would not sound inane, and failed. “Your family seems to be doing well now.”

“Well enough.” He reached out and touched one of the eucalyptus leaves, tugged it free and inhaled its clean scent. “Husam has kept me busy seeing to business matters, mostly here in Qurrat, while he goes to the caliph’s court. Until he sent me to the desert, that is.”

I could not repress the urge to ask, “How many months ago was this?”

His smile was ironic. “Not long before your predecessor left.”

Meaning the sheikh had probably learned of Lord Tavenor’s impending departure, and the likelihood of me coming in his place—or if not me, then at least Tom, who was thoroughly tainted by association. But I could not say that, and so I turned to what I thought would be a lighter topic. “What have you been doing in the desert? Seeking out Draconean ruins?”

It was the wrong thing to ask. Suhail’s expression became shuttered. “No. Fighting the Banu Safr. One of the rebellious tribes.”

The phrase meant nothing to me at the time, and I did not pursue it; Akhian politics were not what interested me just then. “I am sorry. I hope there has not been much bloodshed.”

“Not until recently.”

I thought of the bad news that Suhail had brought with him on his first arrival, and felt sick at heart.

“What of you, though?” Suhail asked, with the air of a man making an effort to be less grim. “It seems you have done well.”

I gave him an abbreviated version of the events that had brought Tom and myself to Akhia, and spent a pleasant moment in tales of Jake’s exploits at Suntley. Suhail seemed more like himself as I went on, and even laughed at an incident involving the school fish-pond. He was the one, after all, who had taught my son to improve his swimming—though I doubted he had intended it to be put to such ends.

But I recognized the look in Suhail’s eyes. I had seen it in the mirror for two long years when I was growing up: the period I referred to as the “grey years” in the first volume of my memoirs. For the sake of my family, I had sworn off my interest in dragons, and the lack of it had leached all colour from my life. As it happened, my good behaviour was ultimately rewarded, and I did not regret the path I had taken to my present point. Suhail, on the other hand…

I could not say this to him. I knew too little of his situation; it would be the height of arrogance for me to barge in, thinking I knew what was best for him simply because I had once experienced a similar thing. Perhaps a marriage was being arranged for him, with a wife of good family who would not mind her husband gallivanting off to study ancient ruins. Or perhaps Suhail did not begrudge his brother the aid their tribe required. His circumstances might be of limited duration, a thing for him to endure for a little while before returning to the life he loved. All of these might be possible—and none of them were my business.

One thing was my business, though, and it had been tucked into my sleeve since that first encounter in the courtyard, waiting for the moment when I might deliver it. And if it brought a spot of colour into Suhail’s own grey years, that would ease my mind a great deal.

I pulled the paper loose from my sleeve and tried to smooth it out into a more respectable-looking packet. “Here. This is for you.” When Suhail eyed it warily, I said, “It is nothing inappropriate. You could post it in the town square and no one would think anything of it.” Indeed, most of them would have no idea what it was.

He took the paper and unfolded it the rest of the way. This took a fair bit of unfolding; it was thin tissue, and quite a large piece when stretched to its full extent. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mahira watching in curiosity, and not bothering to hide it.

Suhail saw what I had given him, and his hands trembled. “It is the stone.”

The Cataract Stone, as it is known these days, though it had not yet been given that name anywhere outside of my own head. I found the engraved slab during my exploration of the Great Cataract of Mouleen, but had not known its significance at the time. The stone, as most of my readers no doubt know, contains a bilingual inscription: the same text, rendered in both Draconean and Ngaru. The former was at the time unintelligible to us, but the latter could be translated; the Cataract Stone therefore served as a key to the code, a way to decipher the Draconean language and unlock its secrets at last.

“Someone went back to the waterfall,” I said, forgetting that I had not told Suhail where the stone lay. “He took a rubbing for me. I wanted you to have it.”

He looked at me, startled, and then studied the paper more closely. “This is an original. Isabella—” He caught himself. “Umm Yaqub. Even now, I would have heard if this had been published. How long have you been sitting on this?”

My cheeks heated. I almost dug my toe into the ground, as if I were a child caught out in a prank. “A little while.” Suhail waited. “All right, I’ve had it for more than a year.”

He made an inarticulate noise: half laugh, half horrified roar. “For the love of—you know better than that! To keep private something this important—”

“I haven’t been a complete fool,” I said tartly, well aware that I had been at least a partial fool. “There are several copies of that, and my will contains instructions that they should be released to the scholarly community if I die. I would never let such important data be lost! But…” My face was still hot. I looked away, and found myself meeting Mahira’s eyes, which did not help at all. She was staring at us both with open curiosity. “You are the one who made me see the importance of the inscription. Without that, I would never have known to ask someone to go back and take a rubbing. And I cannot translate it; I can barely learn languages spoken today. There are other scholars of my acquaintance who have worked on the problem of Draconean, but none with your dedication, and none with any connection to the discovery of this stone. I thought it only right that you should be the first to work on the text.”

He stood silent through my explanation. I finally dragged my gaze back to his, and lost my breath when I did. Yes, these had been grey years for him—and I had just poured a torrent of colour into them. He looked fully alive, as he had not since he strode into the courtyard that first day.

I might have cast my professionalism to the wind when I kept the rubbing secret, hoping someday to give it to him… but I did not regret the decision at all.

Suhail folded the paper carefully along the original lines, cautious lest he smear anything. It had been painted with a fixative, but care was still warranted. “I cannot bring myself to complain any further,” he admitted. “This is a gift beyond price—thank you. But promise me you will make the text public now.”

“I will.” (A promise, I should note, that I fully intended to keep. But having given Suhail the original, I could do nothing without one of the copies I had left in Scirland. My duties to the Royal Army meant I would not have much leisure to prepare it for publication, and my employers would not be pleased with me if I spent my time on something so irrelevant to the task at hand. All of which sounds like a justification, I know—but upon my honour, the delay in ultimately publishing the text was not intentional.)

At that point Suhail noticed Mahira staring at us, and spoke in Akhian rapid enough that I caught barely one word in four. I could at least make out that it was an explanation of the paper, and his reaction to it. Rather than try to follow the words, I watched Mahira. She looked pensive, giving little away; but I thought she might be pleased. If she was as fond of Suhail as I suspected, she must be glad to see him receive a gift of such personal value. And she did not seem to disapprove of me giving it.

Suhail tucked the paper into a pocket of his embroidered caftan and laid his right hand over his heart. “I will not forget your generosity,” he said. “But… I should go.”

“Of course,” I said—and then, without thinking, I extended my hand to him.

He retreated a step, smiling regretfully. “You are not ke’anaka’i here.”

It was a reference to our time stranded together in Keonga. There I had been considered neither male nor female, but something else entirely: dragon-spirited, the soul of an ancient creature reborn in a human body. Neither Suhail nor I believed in the metaphysical truth of the concept, but the social aspect had been real enough, and it had given us an excuse to bypass many of the constraints of propriety.

But only for a time, and that time was now ended. “Yes, of course—forgive me.” I folded my hands against my stomach and gave him an awkward little curtsey. “I do hope I will see you again. Tom and I will need to go out into the desert, I think, if we are to improve matters here; it would be very valuable to have your assistance with that.”

“All things may be possible, God willing,” Suhail said. It was a ritual phrase, and for all his sincerity, I did not think he was optimistic.

Then he was gone, leaving me with Mahira, who laid her book aside and rejoined me. With surprising candour, she said, “He wanted very much to speak with you.”

And I with him. “Thank you for arranging this,” I said, and was surprised to hear my own words come out melancholy. It was that as much as any sense of duty which made me say, “I should return to my work now. Please do let me know how the honeyseekers fare.”