Voyage of the Basilisk

ONE

At no point did I form the conscious intention of founding an ad hoc university in my sitting room. It happened, as it were, by accident.

The process began soon after Natalie Oscott became my live-in companion, having been disowned by her father for running away to Eriga. My finances could not long support the two of us in my accustomed style, especially not with my growing son to consider. I had to surrender some portion of my life as it had been until then, and since I was unwilling to surrender my scholarship, other things had to go.

What went was the house in Pasterway. Not without a pang; it had been my home for several years, even if I had spent a goodly percentage of that time in foreign countries, and I had fond memories of the place. Moreover, it was the only home little Jacob had known, and I did question for some time whether it was advisable to uproot so young a boy, much less to transplant him into the chaotic environment of a city. It was, however, far more economical for us to take up residence in Falchester, and so in the end we went.

Ordinarily, of course, city life is far more expensive than rural—even when the “rural” town in question is Pasterway, which nowadays has become a direct suburb of the capital. But much of this expense assumes that one is living in the city for the purpose of enjoying its glittering social life: concerts and operas, art exhibitions and fashion, balls and drums and sherry breakfasts. I had no interest in such matters. My concern was with intellectual commerce, and in that regard Falchester was not only superior but much cheaper.

There I could make use of the splendid Alcroft lending library, now better known as one of the foundational institutions of the Royal Libraries. This saved me a great deal of expense, as my research needs had grown immensely, and to purchase everything I required (or to send books back to helpful friends via the post) would have bankrupted me in short order. I could also attend what lectures would grant a woman entrance, without the trouble of several hours’ drive; indeed, I no longer needed to maintain a carriage and all its associated equipment and personnel, but rather could hire one as necessary. The same held true for visits with friends, and here it is that the so-called “Flying University” began to take shape.

The early stages of it were driven by my need for a governess. Natalie Oscott, though a good companion to me, had no wish to take on the responsibility of raising and educating my son. I therefore cast my net for someone who would, taking pains to specify in advance that my household was not at all a usual one.

The lack of a husband was, for some applicants, a selling point. I imagine many of my readers are aware of the awkward position in which governesses often find themselves—or rather, the awkward position into which their male employers often put them, for it does no one any service to pretend this happens by some natural and inexorable process, devoid of connection with anyone’s behaviour. My requirements for their qualifications, however, were off-putting to many. Mathematics were unnecessary, as Natalie was more than willing to tutor my son in arithmetic, algebra, and geometry (and would, by the time he was ready for calculus, have taught it to herself), but I insisted upon a solid grounding in literature, languages, and a variety of sciences, not to mention the history not only of Scirland but other countries as well. This made the process of reviewing applicants quite arduous. But it paid an interesting dividend: by the time I hired Abigail Carew, I had also made the acquaintance of a number of young ladies who lacked sufficient learning, yet possessed the desire for it in spades.

I will not pretend I founded the Flying University in order to educate unsatisfactory governess candidates. Indeed, most of those young ladies I never saw again, as they moved on in search of less stringent employers. But the experience heightened my awareness of that lack in our society, and so once I had my subscription to the Alcroft, I made the contents of my library (both owned and borrowed) available to anyone who wished to make use of it.

The result was that, by the time my sea expedition began, on any given Athemer evening you might find anywhere from two to twenty people occupying my sitting room and study. The former room was a place of quiet reading, where friends might educate themselves on any subject my library could supply. Indeed, by then its reach extended far beyond my own shelves and items borrowed from the Alcroft, as it became a trading center for those who wished to avail themselves of others’ resources. Candles and lamps were one point upon which I did not scrimp, and so they could read in perfect comfort.

The study, by contrast, was a place of conversation. Here we might ask questions of one another, or debate issues on which we held differing views. Often these discussions became quite convivial, the lot of us raising one another up from the darkness of ignorance and into the light of, if not wisdom, then at least well-informed curiosity.

On other occasions, the discussions might better be termed “arguments.”

“You know I love wings as much as the next woman,” I said to Miriam Farnswood—who, as a lady ornithologist, was the next woman, and very fond of wings. “But you are overstating their significance in this instance. Bats fly, and so do insects, and yet no one is suggesting that they are close relatives of birds.”

“No one yet has found evidence of bats laying eggs,” she said dryly. Miriam was nearly twenty years my senior, and it was only in the last six months that I had ventured to address her by her given name. Not coincidentally, the last six months had also seen the commencement of this particular debate, in which we were very much at odds. “It’s your own work that persuades me, Isabella; I don’t know why you resist so strenuously. The skeletal structure of dragons shows many resemblances to that of birds.”

She was referring, of course, to the hollow structure of the bones. This was not often to be found in reptiles, which I championed as the nearest relation to dragons. I said impatiently, “Hollow bones may easily be evolved on separate occasions. After all, that is what seems to have happened with wings, is it not? Much less common to evolve a new set of forelegs, where none were before.”

“You think it more plausible that reptiles suddenly evolved wings, where none had previously been?” Miriam snorted. It was not a very ladylike snort. She was the sort of woman one expected to find tramping the countryside in tweeds with a gun under her arm and a bulldog at her side, probably one of her own breeding. The delicacy with which she moved when out birding was nothing short of startling. “Please, Isabella. By that reasoning, you should be arguing for their relation to insects. At least those have more than four limbs.”

The reference to insects diverted me from what I had been about to say. “Sparklings do complicate the picture,” I admitted. “I really am persuaded that they are an extremely dwarfish breed of dragon—though I am at a loss to explain how such a reduction in size might come about. Even those tiny dogs they have in Coyahuac are not so much smaller than the largest breed of hound.”

My comment brought a quiet chuckle from a few feet away. Tom Wilker had been in conversation with the suffragette Lucy Devere, discussing the politics of the Synedrion, but their talk had momentarily flagged, and he had overheard me. It was not the first time he had been subjected to my thoughts on sparklings, which were an endless conundrum to me in matters of taxonomy.

We could hardly avoid eavesdropping on one another’s words. My Hart Square townhouse was not so large as to give us much in the way of elbow room. And indeed, I often preferred it that way, for it encouraged us to wander from topic to topic and group to group, rather than separating off into little clusters for the duration of the evening. Tabitha Small and Peter Landenbury had been sharing their thoughts on a recent work of history, but as usual, Lucy had drawn them into her orbit. With Elizabeth Hardy rounding out their set, there were seven of us in my study, which more or less filled it to capacity.

Miriam’s eyebrows had gone up at my digression from the point. I shook my head to clear it and said, “Be that as it may. I think you are reading too much into the fact that the quetzalcoatls of Coyahuac have feathers. They are not true dragons, by Edgeworth’s definition—”

“Oh, come now, Isabella,” she said. “You can hardly use Edgeworth as your defense, when you yourself have led the charge in questioning his entire theory.”

“I have not yet reached any conclusions,” I said firmly. “Ask me again when this expedition is done. With any luck, I will observe a feathered serpent with my own eyes, and then I will be able to say with more certainty where they fit in the draconic family.”

The door opened quietly, and Abby Carew slipped through. She looked tired, even in the forgiving candlelight. Jake had been running her ragged lately. The prospect of going on a sea voyage had so fired his imagination that he could hardly be made to sit at his lessons.

The notion of bringing my son along had come to me about two years previously. When I first conceived the notion of a trip around the world, to study dragons in all the places they might be found, Jake had been a mere toddler—far too young to accompany me. But such a expedition is not organized overnight, nor even in a single year. By the time I was certain the expedition would happen, let alone had prepared myself for it, Jake was already seven. Boys have gone to war at sea that young. Why should one not go in the name of science?

I had not forgotten the opprobrium I faced when I went to Eriga, leaving my son behind. It seemed to me that the clear solution to this problem was not to stay forever at home, but rather to bring him with me the next time. I saw it as a splendid educational opportunity for a boy of nine. Others, of course, saw it as more of my characteristic madness.

I excused myself to Miriam Farnswood and crossed the room to meet Abby. She said, “Natalie sent me to tell you—”

“Oh dear,” I sighed, before she could finish. A guilty look at the clock confirmed my suspicion. “It has gotten late, hasn’t it?”

Abby was kind enough not to belabor the point. The truth was, I did not want to show my guests to the door. This was to be our last gathering before I left—or rather I should say my last gathering, since Natalie would continue to host them in my absence. As much as the upcoming voyage excited me, I would miss these evenings, where I could expand my mind and test its strengths against people whose intelligence dwarfed mine. Thanks to them, my understanding of the world had grown far beyond its early, naive beginnings. And I, for my part, had done what I could to share my knowledge in return, especially with those individuals, male or female, whose opportunities had not been as great as mine.

I write in the past tense now; I caught myself thinking in the past tense then, and shook myself. I was going on a voyage, not relocating to the other side of the world forever. What had started in my sitting room was not ending tonight. My part in it was merely pausing.

They went without a fuss, though with a great many good wishes for safe travels and great discoveries. The farewells took more than a half hour in all. The last to depart was Tom Wilker, who had no need to say farewell; we would be going on the voyage together, for I could not imagine trying to conduct research without his assistance.

“Did I overhear you promising specimens to Mrs. Farnswood?” he asked, when it was just him, myself, and Natalie in the foyer.

“Yes, of birds,” I said. “She will pay for them, or sell those she does not wish to keep for herself. It will be another source of funds, and a welcome one.”

He nodded, though his smile was rueful. “I don’t know when we’ll find the time to sleep. Or rather, when you will find the time. I’m not the one who has promised regular reports to the Winfield Courier.”

“I will sleep at night,” I said, very reasonably. “Writing by lamplight is a terrible waste of oil, and there are not so many species of nocturnal birds as to keep me busy every night.”

It got a laugh from him, as I had intended. “Sleep well, Isabella. You’ll need your rest.”

Natalie came out into the hall in time to bid him goodnight. When the door was shut behind him, she turned to face me. “Are you very tired, or can you spare a few moments?”

I was far too awake to sleep just yet, and would only read if I tried to go to bed. “Does it have to do with the arrangements for my absence?”

Natalie shook her head. We had been over those matters enough times already: my will, in case I should die; the transfer of my townhouse to her temporary stewardship; how to contact me once I was abroad; all the logistical hedges that must be leapt before I could depart. She said, “I spoke with Mr. Kemble again today.”

I sighed. “Come to my study. I shall want to sit for this, I think.”

My worn old chair was some comfort to me while pondering a topic that was not comfortable at all. Once ensconced in its embrace, I said to Natalie, “He wants me to make a deal with the Thiessois.”

“He is at a standstill,” Natalie said. “He has been for more than a year. The fine structure of dragonbone continues to elude him, and so long as it does, you do not have synthesis. M. Suderac’s aeration process may be what we need.”

The mere mention of this topic made me want to beat my head against my desk. Only the knowledge that Frederick Kemble had been beating his head against something far less yielding for nearly a decade now restrained me. Tom and I had hired him to create a synthetic replacement for preserved dragonbone, so that human society might enjoy the benefits of that substance without having to slaughter dragons to obtain it. Kemble had re-created its chemical composition, but the airy lattice of its structure, which reduced the already-slight weight without sacrificing strength, had proven less tractable.

Natalie was correct: the aeration process devised by M. Suderac might indeed help. I, however, could not abide the man—to the point where the mere thought of partnering with him for such a venture made me ill. He was a handsome Thiessois fellow, and clearly thought his good looks ought to earn him more than mere friendliness from me. After all, I was a widow, and if not as young as I had once been, I had not gathered so very much dust on the shelf yet. It was not marriage M. Suderac wanted from me; he had a wife, and even if he did not, I offered very little in the way of property to tempt him. He merely wanted unfettered access to my person. To say that I was disinclined to grant it to him is a howling understatement.

And yet, if financial partnership would save the lives of countless dragons…

The secret of preserving dragonbone was out in the world. That particular cat had escaped its bag before I went to Eriga, when thieves employed by the Marquess of Canlan broke into Kemble’s laboratory and stole his notes, and Canlan subsequently sold them to a Yelangese company, the Va Ren Shipping Association. The fellows there seemed to have kept a relatively tight lid on their information, for it had not become common knowledge yet, but I knew it was spreading. Which meant the need for a synthetic substitute was urgent.

I weighed these factors, until my heart sat like lead in my chest. “I do not trust him,” I said at last to Natalie. “I cannot. He is the sort of man who sees a thing and wants it, and thinks that alone entitles him to have it. I truly would not put it past him to crack the problem at last, but then keep the results for his own profit. And while I might forego my own stake if it meant having the answer, I cannot allow Kemble and the others to be robbed in such fashion.”

Natalie dropped her head against the back of the chair, staring in resignation at the ceiling. “Well, I tried. You are not wrong about Suderac, I think—but I do not know how else we will make it happen.”

“Perhaps I should try hiring thieves. They could break in and steal the secrets of the aeration process.”

“Thank God you’re about to get on board a ship,” Natalie said. “Otherwise, I think you might honestly follow through.”

She exaggerated—but not by much. For the sake of dragons, there was very little I would not do.

The next morning’s post brought a number of letters, some of them from people who had not noticed that I was about to be gone from home for an extended period of time and would not have much chance to answer them. One, however, caught my eye.

The handwriting on the outside of the envelope was unfamiliar to me. It was not merely that I did not recognize the hand; the entire style of it was strange, as if written by a foreigner. And yet it reminded me of something, but I could not say what.

Curious, I slit the flap with my knife. The note inside was written on excellent paper, again in that strange hand. It was an invitation to join one Wademi n Oforiro Dara for lunch at the Salburn that day, if I was not already engaged.

Now I knew what the handwriting had evoked. I was still in occasional contact with Galinke n Oforiro Dara, the half-sister of the oba of Bayembe. This man’s script showed traces of the same style, though in his case much fainter. From this I deduced that he was more accustomed to writing in Scirling than Galinke was.

Oforiro Dara. He was of the same lineage as Galinke. A brother? No, I was fairly certain she had no brothers born to the same mother, and the Yembe inherit their lineage names through the maternal line. He might be anything from Galinke’s mother’s sister’s son to a far more distant cousin than that. But the connection was enough to make me dash off a quick acceptance and send it to the man’s hotel. My alternative plans for lunch involved a quick meal gulped down while packing; this promised to be far more interesting.

In those days, I did not often dine at the Salburn—which is my polite way of saying that I could not really afford it. I minded very little; I have never been a gourmand. But it meant that Wademi n Oforiro Dara was either a wealthy man or well-funded by someone else, as lunch for two there was not a thing to undertake lightly.

I had no difficulty spotting him in the lobby. He was Yembe and dark, and dressed after their fashion in a wrapped and folded cloth, though he made concession to Scirland’s cooler climate and stricter sense of propriety with a mantle over his upper body. The coloration was almost Scirling-sober, too: black and gold in a simple geometric pattern. He was already on his feet when I entered, and approached me immediately.

We exchanged Yembe greetings, which served to show me just how badly my accent and grammar had deteriorated. When he shifted to my native tongue, I apologized to him for it. “I’m afraid my command of Yembe has atrophied terribly for lack of use—and it was not good to begin with. Galinke and I correspond in Scirling.”

His own Scirling was accented but fluent. “You should come for a visit! I hear that you are about to set off on a journey. Will you be stopping in Bayembe?”

“Would that I could go everywhere,” I said. “But I’m afraid that my research requires me to expand my knowledge in breadth, rather than depth. I must devote my time to new areas and new species.”

This was true, but not the entire story. I could not tell this man about my conversation with a certain member of the Synedrion (who shall remain nameless, though he is dead now and cannot be harmed by the gossip), wherein he made it clear to me that the government would not look kindly on my ever returning to Bayembe. What precisely they feared, I cannot say; I only ever knew the one state secret about our affairs there, and it was long since out of the bag. But having thus erred once, I could not be trusted not to err again.

To my surprise, Wademi and I did not dine in the main room. He had acquired one of the private rooms for us—perhaps because that way we attracted less attention, the Yembe man and the woman once accused of betraying her country for his. The mystery of how he could afford such a thing was soon cleared up, for it transpired that he was indeed the son of Galinke’s mother’s sister. Anyone so closely linked with the oba of Bayembe, even through a lesser wife, could easily purchase me and my entire household without so much as a blink.

We passed the starter course with pleasantries, but after the main course arrived, I discovered that he had another reason for arranging this private room.

“What have you heard of the dragons?” he asked, once the waiter was gone.

“The dragons?” I echoed. My mind was so full of various draconic species that it took me longer than it should have to see his meaning. “Do you mean the ones the Moulish have given to Bayembe?”

It was not that I had forgotten them. One does not easily forget about deals one has helped broker between two foreign peoples, especially when that assistance has caused one to be accused of treason. But my interest in dragons was biological, not political; the fact that there were now Moulish swamp-wyrms in Bayembe rivers was not at the forefront of my thoughts.

Wademi nodded, and I spread my hands. “I have heard very little, really. Galinke mentioned that the eggs had been brought as promised, and then had hatched—I believe she said the total was somewhat poor, though. There were arrangements to make sure the fangfish were sufficiently fed. But nothing since then.” Which, now that I thought of it, was peculiar. Granted, the dragons in the rivers of Bayembe were intended as a defense for that country’s border, and as such might be a protected secret. But Galinke would know very well that I wanted to hear more of their progress, and could have found some way to tell me something. Instead, her infrequent letters had diverted me with other matters.

It seemed that she had indeed found a way to tell me something, and his name was Wademi n Oforiro Dara. “The situation has become… odd,” he said, “and we are hoping you can make sense of it.”

This, of course, piqued my curiosity like nothing else. “What do you mean, ‘odd’?”

He spoke slowly, in between bites of his food. I reminded myself to eat my own, though I fear the best efforts of the Salburn chefs were entirely wasted on me that day.

Wademi said, “At first it was the eggs, which did not hatch in the quantities hoped. But the Moulish brought more the next year, so we have enough now. The fangfish ate one another, and those who survived grew—some of them. Many were runts. But even those which grew are not like the dragons in the swamp. They are more slender.”

“Juveniles,” I said. “Have you asked the Moulish? They would know how long it takes to reach full maturation.”

He shook his head. “They should be fully grown now. And their hide is different; their scales are more fine.”

I could not stop myself from asking, “Are you certain it is not a skin condition?”

By way of reply, he reached beneath his mantle and brought out a small box, which he laid on the table between us. When I opened it, a strong smell of formaldehyde marred the air. The box contained a scrap of skin, which I pinched gently between my fingernails and lifted for a better view.

It was not a skin condition. I had often observed the rough, crocodilian hides of swamp-wyrms, and while they were vulnerable to disease, what illness would refine their integument? What I held in my hand was more like the skin of a fish.

Or a savannah snake. “They cannot have bred with the dragons of Bayembe,” I said. Although some of that species ventured into the fringes of the Moulish jungle, they did not go far enough in to encounter swamp-wyrms. And even if they did—and succeeded in producing viable eggs—the Moulish would not have given those eggs to the oba. They had a very rigorous process for breeding their dragons, which involved taking the males of the swamp proper to the lake where the queens swam.

My fingernails pinched tighter on the skin. The queens…

I had not learned as much about swamp-wyrm biology as I would have liked. I knew that the Moulish took the eggs after their laying and distributed them about the swamp, and I knew that the different incubation of the eggs encouraged some to develop into queens, while the rest remained male. (At the time I suspected, but had not had a chance to prove, that some of the “males” were either neuter or infertile females. Neuter sex was known in other draconic types, and I had a sense that only some of the wyrms in the swamp were eligible to breed with the queens. But I had not gotten to examine enough dragons at sufficiently close range to be certain.)

My head was awhirl with these thoughts and others, various theories and observations colliding in untidy ways. What emerged from the scrum was this: what if the transplantation of the eggs to the rivers of Bayembe had produced queens instead of males?

My observations of the queen dragons had all been at quite a distance, so I was only speculating that their hides featured such fine, overlapping scales. It made sense, though. They swam in the turbulent waters of the lake below the Great Cataract, where they would benefit from a more streamlined surface.

But if that were the case, why had the Moulish not said anything to the Yembe?

Because they did not want the existence of the queens known. The oba would certainly try to trade for one, and if that failed, he might well try to take one by stealth or force. Or, if he learned enough of the incubation procedures, try to mimic them so that he might breed his own dragons, without needing to rely on the Moulish.

Which left me in rather a pickle. If my theory could be correct, then I desperately wanted confirmation. Moreover, Wademi—and through him, Galinke and all her people, half-brother included—were looking to me for aid. But it would not very well repay my Moulish friends if I spilled a secret they were trying to keep.

I laid the skin back in its box. “I am not certain what to say. It may be a response to the cleaner, fresher environment of the rivers; swamp water is very full of silt and organic matter, which I imagine is quite an irritant to the skin of the young dragons.” Certainly it had been an irritant to my own hide. “Do your dragons seem healthy?”

“For the most part,” Wademi said.

“I should like to know if they keep growing,” I said. “Some fishes change size according to their environment; it is possible that your dragons will grow larger than those in the swamp, because of the more open waters.” If they grew to more than four meters in length, that would tell me a great deal. The queens, from what I had seen of them, were much larger than the males.

Wademi made the humming noise that, among the Yembe, stood in for the refusal it would be rude to state directly. I thought about our private room, and Galinke’s reticence in her letters. He had invited me to lunch so as to convey information they did not want committed to paper. (It did not occur to me until some months later that someone in Scirland might even be reading my mail. If they did not want me going to Bayembe, they might have an interest in the letters I sent to and received from there. To this day, I do not know if it was so.)

My thoughts were not on such matters that day, but even then I knew it might be difficult to keep me informed. I sighed, saying, “It will be difficult to write to me regardless, as I shall be rather peripatetic for a while.”

“But what of the dragons?”

Even had I possessed the courage to defy that unnamed gentleman of the Synedrion, I could not change our itinerary now. Although there was room for diversion in it—as this account will demonstrate—we could not divert all the way to Bayembe, just so I could look in on the dragons in the rivers. “I’m afraid there is very little I can do from where I am, sir. If they are healthy, then surely that is enough.”

He looked dissatisfied. Had I given the Yembe such a high opinion of my knowledge that they believed I could resolve this question over lunch in a distant country? Or had they expected me to come to their aid in person? If so, it pained me to disappoint them. But there was nothing for it: too many things prevented me from going.

As a sop to Wademi, I said, “I anticipate a great expansion in my knowledge of dragons, thanks to this expedition. It is possible I will learn something of use to you.”

Which, as it happened, was true—albeit in a roundabout way. But that was no comfort to him at the time, and so we both left our meeting in less than good spirits.

TWO

This was my third time departing from Scirland, and by now the process was beginning to feel familiar. I had put my affairs in order and packed everything I anticipated needing to the point where I could not do without—as packing for shipboard life requires great thriftiness when it comes to volume. I had bid farewell to the family members with whom I was still on good terms, which is to say my father and my brother Andrew, and (less warmly) my brother-in-law Matthew Camherst. Leaving Natalie in Falchester, Tom, Abby, Jake, and I went down to Sennsmouth, where our vessel awaited the start of our great adventure.

For the sake of the maritime enthusiasts among my readership, and also so that my story may be more clearly understood, I will take a moment to acquaint you with the Royal Survey Ship Basilisk, which was to be my home for most (though not quite all) of my voyage.

It had, during the Nine Years’ War, been constructed as what they call a “brig sloop,” which is to say it had two masts, both of them rigged with square sails. Following the conclusion of the war, some enterprising shipwright transformed it into a bark by refitting it with a third or mizzen mast, lying astern of the first two, with a sail rigged fore and aft—for what reason, I am not sailor enough to say. The captain tried to explain the addition to me on more than one occasion, but my head was full of dragons and other such matters, leaving not much room for the finer points of nautical engineering. (And nowadays, I fear, my memory is not what it once was. Whatever understanding I once had is long gone, as I did not see fit to record it in my journals.)

She was a pretty thing, the Basilisk was, though perhaps my opinion is coloured by the memories of my experiences there—which, though not without their dark spots, are still on the whole pleasant. She had seen little action during the war, and therefore had taken little damage, so her railings and hull were bravely painted in white and green. Her measurements were seven or eight meters from one side to the other, and nearly thirty from stem to stern.

This sounds impressive, and when I first approached the vessel, I indeed found her enormous. Of course, what is spacious when seen from the dock or on a first tour rapidly becomes much smaller when it is your entire world. Before the first month was out, I felt I knew every last inch of that boat, at least from the deck on down. The rigging I left to others, except when my observations could not be made without a higher vantage point.

Her captain was Dione Aekinitos, and it takes some restraint on my part not to refer to him as “the mad Dione Aekinitos” every time I write his name. He certainly had that reputation before we came aboard, and did nothing to persuade me it was undeserved during my time there.

At first he seemed perfectly ordinary. To begin with, he lacked both peg-leg and parrot, which certain childhood stories had convinced me were the necessary accoutrements of any dashing captain. He kept, or attempted to keep, his dark, curly hair confined in a tail at the nape of his neck, but strands were forever escaping to blow in the wind. How they did not drive him mad, I cannot say, for I was more than once minded to cut my own hair off entirely and save myself the irritation. (Though in the end, the choice was not mine to make.) He was tall enough that he could stand fully upright only in the open air—the interior of a ship being rather a cramped place—and he had both a laugh and a bellow that could and did carry from the stern to the very tip of the figurehead’s nose.

His madness lay not in outward appearances, nor even in daily behaviour, but simply in the fact that he considered the sea a challenge. Like all sailors who survive for longer than a year, he had a healthy respect for the dangers the ocean poses… but “respect for” and “fear of” are not quite the same thing. One had no sooner to tell him a thing was difficult than he would immediately begin formulating plans to test himself against it.

As you may imagine, this gave him certain troubles in the keeping of crew. But over the years since the war, he had, by a cycle of attrition and recruitment, driven away all those who were not willing to tolerate his eccentricity and put together an assortment of men who did not mind overmuch. Very few of them were married, though most if not all availed themselves of the hospitality to be found in ports the world over, and I have no doubt that between them they could crew another ship with the natural children they had sired. The notion that their captain might get them killed in some doomed attempt to navigate an unnavigable channel or outrace a lethal storm was one they accepted with philosophical resignation. So long as they were paid on time, all was well.

These souls—some sixty-five in number—were to be my companions for the next two years. To that list I added Tom Wilker, Abby Carew, and my son, plus others encountered along the way. My social world had been restricted before, but through solitary hermitage, not confinement among a group of people whom I could not escape. I had my cabin, but I shared it with Abby and Jake, and furthermore I—who had enjoyed so much of the natural world in my past—could not endure being cooped up in it for long. I had no desire to escape into the rigging, however, as Jake habitually did (my son having taken to the ropes with the ease and confidence of the monkey he sometimes resembled). The best I could do, when the company became too much, was to seat myself in the bow of the ship, as far forward as I could go, and pretend there was nothing in the world but myself and the sea.

But I get ahead of myself. It was a bright Graminis morning when we arrived on the dock in Sennsmouth, baggage in tow, to get ourselves situated aboard the Basilisk. The captain had sent the jolly-boat to collect us, while a larger tender waited to take our gear; the ship’s draught was too great for it to come right up to the docks. We therefore had what seemed like all the time in the world to survey our new home as the sailors rowed us out.

Tom and I had both seen the Basilisk more than once before, when making the arrangements for this journey. For both Abby and Jake, however, this was their first sight. Abby studied it in silence; I knew her well enough by then to recognize it as a cover for nerves. Jake, by contrast, would have dived over the side if he thought he could swim there faster. I had to call him back rather sharply, for he was getting in the way of the oarsmen.

Abby was in skirts, as was I, for we had not yet left Scirland. Because of this, they lowered the bosun’s chair for the two of us, while Tom and Jake climbed the ladder. Tom, thank heaven, had the good sense to delay Jake as long as he could, such that by the time my son reached the deck, I was almost there myself.

Almost, but not quite. I could not reach out to restrain him as Jake attained the boards, took one wide-eyed look around, and bolted off to explore.

He did not get more than ten steps before a voice bellowed, “Halt!”

It was not a voice one could disobey. Even the sailors checked briefly in their movements, and they had long practice in determining who was the target of any given order. Jake skidded to so quick a stop, I almost laughed.

The voice had come from the raised quarterdeck. The sun stood just behind, so I had to squint against the light as I looked up, and saw only a looming figure at first. I do not put it past him to have been aware of that, and to have used it a-purpose.

It was, of course, the mad Dione Aekinitos. He descended to the main deck with a heavy tread, the ladder creaking beneath his boots. He was not so large of a man as all that, but he had a knack for making himself sound weighty when he chose; I think he knew where every board on his vessel groaned the most heavily. As he went, he said, “There is no running on this ship unless I command it. And I have not commanded you to run. What is your name, boy?”

My son licked his lips, staring up at him. “Jake. Jacob Camherst. Um. Sir.”

By then I was on deck. Maternal instinct—which I do possess, despite rumours to the contrary—urged me to go forward and intervene, for Aekinitos was looming over Jake in a menacing fashion. But I knew enough of shipboard etiquette to know that it would be the height of bad form to get in the captain’s way on a matter of discipline. We were not sailors under his command… but in the absence of a very good reason, it was better to behave as if we were. To do otherwise was to undermine his authority, create ill will, and generally get our voyage off to a very unfortunate start.

“Have you ever been on board a ship before, boy?” Aekinitos asked.

“No, sir.”

“Then here is your first lesson. You do not touch anything. Boys who have never been on ships before create problems. They play with ropes, and do not put them back properly. Then the rope does not uncoil smoothly when it is needed. Perhaps we are in a storm when the tangled rope is found. The items that need to be lashed down are not secured in time, and they go overboard. Perhaps it is a man who goes overboard. Perhaps he dies. Or a sail is not adjusted quickly enough, and the mast breaks, or we run aground. Perhaps we all die. All because a boy did not know to keep his hands off that which he does not understand.” Aekinitos paused in this impressive recitation. “Do you understand, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

Aekinitos bent ever so slightly over him. “What do you understand?”

To his credit, Jake stood his ground, instead of backing up. Or he might have simply been rooted to the spot. “That I shouldn’t touch anything, sir.”

“Good.” Aekinitos straightened and, without the slightest pause, turned to me with a broad smile upon his face. “Mrs. Camherst. Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you, captain,” I said. Now I did go to Jake’s side. I did not put my arm around him; the chastisement had been a necessary one, for without it he would have gotten into everything before the day was out. But I did not want him to feel wholly abandoned. “The lady behind you is Jake’s governess, Abigail Carew. Tom, of course, you know already.”

When the introductions were finished, Aekinitos sent his first mate, Mr. Dolin, to show us our living quarters. Tom bunked with the officers—we always used that word, “bunked,” even though he slept in a hammock, as we all did—but Abby, Jake, and I had been given the luxury of our own cabin in the stern, beneath the poop deck.

If I tell you that it was cramped, you will not truly catch my meaning, unless you have lived on board a ship yourself. Throughout most of the room, Abby could not stand fully upright; my own head almost brushed the beams. The exception was beneath the raised skylight, which gave us our only natural illumination. We had to learn to sleep through anything, for the officers carried out their work directly above our heads, and although Aekinitos could step quietly when he wished to, the same could not be said for a few of the others. The room as a whole was less than three meters on a side, and we shared it with the mizzenmast; I often had occasion to curse the fellow who decided to add it to the ship’s design, driving the thick post directly through our cabin.

Into this space we crammed ourselves, our trunks, our books (as well as every other book aboard the ship, not that there were many), and a table on which to work. And so we lived for two years.

To Jake, of course, it seemed at first like a great adventure. Every novelty is enjoyable, when you are nine. Too, he spent much less time in that cabin than I did, for while Abby, Tom, and I did keep up his lessons, he was not directly engaged in the work of the expedition. For my own part, I found my quarters at first shockingly small, then acceptable, then unbearable, and finally as unworthy of comment as the water in which a fish swims.

The reason for the cramped quarters was that I would have needed to be the richest woman in Scirland to hire a ship and crew for two years, solely for the purpose of looking at dragons. No amount of household economy could prepare me for such an expense. The voyage of the Basilisk was a joint venture, its burden shared with the Scirling Geographical Association, the Ornithological Society, and a Nichaean trading company, the Twelve Seas Fleet, which has since gone out of business. The first two meant I had obligations not only to the Winfield Courier and to my own research, but also to those intellectual bodies. The third meant that what space on the Basilisk was not taken up with people and supplies must be devoted to cargo—and those people and supplies must take up as little space as possible.

I had tried, of course, to interest the Philosophers’ Colloquium in our endeavour. Some of their members had spoken in praise of my research, and Tom had made inroads with that body, such that I fully expected him to be offered a fellowship upon our return. Despite pressure from our patron, however—Lord Hilford, now sadly ailing—they had declined to lend us any material assistance, or indeed anything beyond vague and halfhearted good wishes. The woman and the lower-class man from Niddey had yet to earn their respect.

At the time I resented it, but the sting has long since worn off. Besides: had they granted us financial support, we might not have been forced to take certain measures so as to keep the expedition funded. And had we not done that, how different might my life have been?

Many people assume that an expedition which would later become so famous must have departed with great fanfare, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Back then, all eyes were on the diplomatic voyage upon which the king’s niece Princess Miriam was soon to embark. It was a gesture of goodwill to a variety of countries with whom we were not on the best of terms at the time: Haggad, Yelang, Kehliyo, Thiessin, and others I have forgotten. The more political news-sheets were busy speculating as to whether her mission would result in conciliation, and if so, at what cost; the more frivolous ones filled their pages with gossip about whom Her Royal Highness would meet and what she would wear. Either way, they had very little attention to spare for a mere scientific survey.

I had been to sea before, but never for the purpose of being at sea. My previous voyages had been a means of arriving at my destination, nothing more. While that was true to some extent now—I did have an itinerary of places we intended to visit—the ship was to be my home for the duration, rather than merely a conveyance. I must confess there was a feeling of excitement to it, as if I were a child achieving something magical, though sailing had never been a girlhood dream of mine. That first evening, as we rode the tide out to sea, I stood with Jake in the bow and laughed into the wind. Perhaps it is hindsight only that says I knew this was the beginning of something significant. Perhaps not.

We headed first into northern waters, the seas around Svaltan and Siaure, taking advantage of what little summer that latitude could afford. Much of the region becomes icebound for the better part of the year, the sea freezing solid or nearly so for miles around. Nowadays, of course, we have icebreakers—vessels whose engines can force them through the pack—and owing to this, much polar exploration has become possible. At the time, however, we lacked such ships. The Basilisk was not even fitted with the kinds of reinforcement that could protect her against ice. But it hardly mattered, for what we came there to observe was only ever seen in the summer months, regardless.

The debate over the migration of sea-serpents was an old one. Sailors had reported them in latitudes ranging from the tropics to the far north, and some claimed the great beasts moved with the seasons. Others disputed this, citing various facts to support their position. Tendrils above the eyes and around the snout, for example, were often reported on tropical beasts, but rarely if ever on arctic ones. In the mid-latitudes, serpents were often seen year-round; those in the north were generally larger than those in the south, suggesting that perhaps they were different species. Round and round the points had gone, but most of those engaged in the debate were arguing from data that amounted to little more than anecdote and hearsay. I aimed to change that.

“There’s no easy way to prove it in one direction or another,” Tom said our first night at sea. He and I were dining in the wardroom with the captain and his officers, which is a courtesy sometimes extended to passengers. The table had low railings around the edge, which helped prevent our dishes from sliding into our laps when the seas were rough. That night, however, there was only a mild swell: enough to serve as a reminder that one was at sea, but not enough to inconvenience. (Unless one happened to be Abby, who struggled greatly with seasickness at first.)

I said, “If it were possible to mark the serpents, as they do with cattle or His Majesty’s swans, we could know for certain. Simply brand them with something to indicate the latitude at which they are found, and the date, and then see if you find them far distant in a different season. But even supposing we could persuade them to hold still for such an operation, how would we ever find them again? Needles in haystacks do not enter into it.”

Aekinitos nodded. He did not need me to tell him how vast the sea was, and how dangerous its creatures.

Curious, Tom asked, “What is your opinion, sir? Do you think they migrate?”

The captain gazed meditatively at the beams supporting the deck above. “They do not behave the same, those in the north and the south. You know of this?”

“Do you mean their method of defense?” I asked. “Yes, of course. It is one of the key points in my broader consideration of taxonomy. How much does extraordinary breath matter, in terming something a ‘dragon’ or a mere ‘cousin’? In the tropics, sea-serpents suck in water and then expel it in a great jet.”

“It can kill a whale,” Aekinitos said. “Or crack the hull of a ship.”

He sounded entirely delighted with this, as if admiring another man’s strength, and nevermind that said strength could mean the end of him and all his crew. I said, “If they expel the water from their stomachs, rather than as a form of breath—and the observations generally agree that this is the case—then it is not extraordinary breath, and traditional taxonomy says they are not dragons. Regardless, this is not seen in the north. The serpents there constrict their prey instead.”

“It is not breath,” he agreed. “We have killed sea-serpents before, and in their stomachs, we find water. But only in the south. Is this because they are different?” He shrugged. “Perhaps it is only because the water in the north is colder.”

This was precisely my theory: that the variation in behaviour was due to environment, not species difference. Filling one’s stomach with icy arctic water would be a tremendous shock to the system. But that did not prove migration one way or another; for that, we would need better observation of the creatures themselves.

Achieving this was no easy matter. We had no difficulty finding the serpents; among our equipment was a set of very good telescopes, and during those first weeks Tom and I spent hours staring through them, our hands going cold inside our gloves, watching the great coils rise and fall through the chill blue waters of those northern waves. The men in the rigging soon developed a habit of bellowing down to us any time they spotted one—which became tedious when we were engaged in other, more pressing work. But that was in movement, at a distance, and we only ever saw bits at a time. This was the sort of data upon which the current theories had been founded, and it was not enough. To establish anything for certain, we needed to do as we had done before: hunt one of the creatures, like mariners out of a tale.

THREE

Much like sharks, sea-serpents can be attracted with chum. To do so is a risky business, however, if there is more than one serpent in the neighbourhood.

We had to choose our spot carefully, in waters that, according to the Svaltansk sailors we questioned, were less haunted by the beasts. This meant it took us several attempts to attract our prey, but it was a sacrifice all were willing to make, if it meant not attracting four at once.

The sailors took in fish, chopped them up, and filled a tarpaulin with the stinking results, which the jolly-boat carried some distance away before tipping it over the side. Then those aboard rowed with all haste back to the Basilisk, for the entire purpose of that part of the exercise was to make sure the bait was not too close to the ship. This having been done, several lookouts were posted in the rigging to scan the waves for coils, telltale wakes, or dark shadows moving beneath the surface.

The first three times we did this, our watch was fruitless. Countless other predators and scavengers came to enjoy the bounty—and in fact they, not the fish, were our true bait, for while sea-serpents will swallow any meat they can get, no matter how small, they prefer to eat larger creatures such as arctic sharks. Despite the lure, however, we saw nothing draconic in the water.

Our effort was not entirely wasted, for the hides or meat or teeth of various predators will fetch a good price in the right places. We had a good hunt of our own. I keenly felt the need for our expedition to turn a profit whenever possible, though. Much discouraged, I told the captain we should abandon the effort and move on; but he was not a man who abandoned anything without great cause. He insisted on trying once more.

The day was a bright one, the sky an intense blue that only seems possible at sea. The air for once was warm enough that I was prepared to call it “bracing,” instead of complaining that I could not feel my fingers. We caught and butchered our fish, cast our bait, and waited.

A few sharks became embroiled in a conflict over the bounty. One was enormous—surely at least six meters in length—but even slower than most of his breed, and two others were attempting to take advantage of that fact. Their quarrel drifted toward the port side of the Basilisk, and many of us were engaged in watching the fight. Jake, who had permission to remain topside until a serpent was sighted, was standing on a crate with one hand wrapped tight around the rigging, observing the whole thing with eyes so wide, you half-expected his eyeballs to fall right out of their sockets. “Mama,” he called out to me, “is that the biggest shark in the world?”

Even when one wishes to foster intellectual curiosity in one’s offspring, it can be vexing to be asked a question to which one hasn’t the faintest clue of an answer. I was racking my brains for what I knew of shark breeds when a frantic bellow came from above: “Port beam!”

Perhaps the lookouts had been distracted by the fight. They later claimed, and I believed them, that the fault was not with their vigilance, but with the serpent, who came up from deep waters completely without warning. Directly off to our left—which is what “port beam” means—a shadow came surging upward. The sharks attempted to scatter, but they are not quick beasts; an instant later, one was in the serpent’s jaws.

This was entirely too close to the ship for comfort. The men had their guns and harpoons ready, and began to fire. “Jake, get down,” I said, reaching up for him. “You must go below, now.” I did not fear him toppling overboard, for his grip upon the ropes was firm; but with that many firearms about, it was much too easy to imagine a bullet going astray.

Abby joined me, and together we got him down (though not without many protests) and headed for safety. I was climbing to the poop deck for a better view when the guns fell silent, and I turned to see what had happened.

The waves off our port beam were sloshing restlessly, but there was no sign of the serpent.

Aekinitos was a few feet away, standing next to the helmsman, Mr. Forde. “Has it fled?” I asked him—and then I had my answer.

The ship staggered to one side. I have no better word for it; the entire frame lurched, quite out of its usual motion. The men shouted, and a few more fired shots. Aekinitos bellowed for them to hold fire. The serpent had struck us below the waterline; on the lower decks, men raced to stop the leaks that began spraying water into the hold. Silence fell again, ragged and broken by the occasional call. Guns in hand, the crew scattered to the railings on both sides, looking for their target.

“Two points off the starboard bow!” came the cry, and Aekinitos bellowed again for his men to hold. He knew the behaviour of sea-serpents well; an instant later the creature was curving around our bow and back to port, and had the men all rushed to shoot at where it had been, they would have missed where it was. More gunfire, but no one had yet gotten a clear shot with the harpoons, and only those can be trusted to penetrate a sea-serpent’s tough hide deeply enough to do it any true harm.

All bullets generally do is anger the creature.

Sailors tell exaggerated tales. So far as I have seen, this is true the world over; and so one easily grows into the habit of discounting anything one hears from a sailor as being more than the reality. A four-meter shark becomes six, or eight. A bad storm becomes a hurricane. A narwhal sunning itself on a rock becomes a beautiful maiden combing her hair.

I am not a sailor, and I tell you with utter and scientific honesty: a sea-serpent can and will come hurtling up out of the sea like a geyser, just as the stories say, a column of grey-blue scales five, ten, fifteen meters high, streaming water from its length—and then curve itself midair so that when it falls, its head enters the water on the far side of its prey.

The lighter ropes of the rigging snapped like twine. The great stays that held the masts, cables as thick around as my arm, gave it more trouble. The serpent’s head dove between two of these and splashed into the sea once more—but stays are meant to withstand the worst storms the ocean can devise. The shining coil of body was suspended from the mainstay, sliding forward as it tightened, until halted by the foremast.

The serpent did not know what transpired above. It knew only that there was a great beast in the water, as big as the largest whale, and that the beast was the source of its wounds. Had we been hunting in southern waters, our mark might have struck us with a jet of water, and the Basilisk might have taken a wound from which she could not recover. But this was the icy northern sea, and the serpent therefore aimed to crush us to death.

Men rushed forward, howling. One fellow at the starboard rail put the barrel of his gun right against the serpent’s scales and pulled the trigger; gore exploded outward from the wound. Others followed Aekinitos’ shouts and concentrated their fire together, chewing ragged holes in the creature’s side. These then became targets for the men with harpoons, who hurled their spears with all the force they could muster, hoping to strike something vital within.

But all the while, the coil was tightening. The mainstay groaned in protest; then, with a dreadful tearing sound, it snapped. The serpent’s body crashed into the deck, splintering the railings on both sides. With the Basilisk now properly in its grip, the beast settled in to crush us.

The one advantage was that the serpent’s body was now within better reach. With cutlasses, a few of the men hacked away enough scales to make a good opening. Then, roaring, a knot of sailors threw their weight behind a harpoon, driving the point deep into the creature’s side.

It reached vital organs, and the serpent spasmed. The movement nearly threw Tom off its back, for he, along with two others, was climbing atop the coil. They too had cutlasses, and began chopping with desperate ferocity at the scales. Blood and bits of scale flew, while the decking below creaked and bent. Their blades finally exposed their target: the creature’s spine.

By then the beast was trying to escape. Its length slithered across the deck, doing more damage as it went; two of the men atop it lost their balance and fell. Tom, the last of the three, followed a moment later—but his cutlass did not. It remained lodged in between the vertebrae, and when the serpent slipped free of the Basilisk, it was apparent that the front half was dragging the dead weight of the back.

Though it still moved, the serpent was finished. Half-paralyzed, a harpoon in its vitals, and bleeding from the great rents in its sides, it tried to swim away, but soon it floated lifeless atop the waves.

And what did I do, while this epic battle raged?

I crouched in front of the helm and took notes. Not on the fighting, you understand, but the creature itself: its movement, its behaviour. It is exceedingly difficult to observe a sea-serpent at close range, and as this might be my only opportunity, I did not want to squander it. I would not have been any use in the fight regardless, as my last (and only) experience with a gun had been when I was fourteen.

In some ways I think it might have been easier had I thrown my lot in with the men after all. When one is in a fight, the hot blood of the moment overwhelms many other considerations. Watching from a slight distance as I did, with my mind set to record every detail, I could not help but be sickened by the butchery. We had dissected dragons before, but that was clinical, conducted after the beasts were dead. As for the killing itself, it had always been done neatly, with a few shots fired from a rifle. Never had it been this sort of mêlée, with swords and spears and men howling to give themselves courage. Nor, for that matter, had the lives of my companions ever been in such direct danger—as I had no doubt that, given a little time more, the serpent might have broken the Basilisk’s back.

All things considered, we escaped rather less scathed than we might have been. A few men had been injured by falling debris and the recoil of snapped ropes, but none of the rest suffered more than scrapes. The burst stay was a serious concern, but our mast had not been broken, nor our hull too badly ruptured. We could afford to stay for a time and enjoy the fruits of our victory.

I could also release my pent-up feelings by chastising my son. Fixed as I was upon the battle against the serpent, I did not realize until afterward that Jake had not gone below with Abby as instructed. He had instead climbed the rigging up to the “top”—the platform where the lower section of the mast met the one above. He had taken with him a knife concealed inside his shirt, which he intended to use against the serpent by diving heroically on it from above. Fortunately for both his safety and my own sanity, common sense had prevented him from following through with this plan when he saw the bloody reality below him.

He was not as much daunted by this as I should have liked, though, nor did my reprimand leave much more of a mark. Mine was not the only tongue-lashing he received, though—Abby had already delivered one, as did the sailors in the top, several of the ship’s officers, Aekinitos himself, and Tom—and in the aggregate, they did have the effect of making him promise to be more obedient in the future.

In the meanwhile, we had other tasks to which we must attend. The crew lowered the ship’s boats and used them to tow the beast back to our side, as they do with whales. We had to work quickly; already the carcass was drawing attention. Gulls flapped down to consider it, but disdained the meat after a few pecks; as with terrestrial dragons, the flesh of a sea-serpent is rather foul, owing to the chemical composition of the blood. There are scavengers in the sea, however, who do not mind its taste, and many of these came to investigate as we conducted our studies.

This at least was familiar work, although I had never before carried it out while straddling the carcass with my feet turning to ice in the sea. (I was, of course, wearing trousers, and had been since we left Sennsmouth.) I had to sit atop a piece of tough sailcloth, for the edges of the scales are viciously sharp; their serration had contributed to the destruction of the mainstay. Tom and his two allies had suffered numerous cuts, though that did not prevent him from joining me in the dissection once bandaged.

Those scales were the first focus of our interest. We had studied a few specimens donated to museums, for they are sometimes kept as items of curiosity by the sailors who kill the beasts. Without detailed information on their collection, however, those scales told us little. We hoped that by examining these closely and then comparing them against scales taken from a serpent in the tropics, we might establish more about the relation between the two. We also had the chemical equipment to try preserving a bit of bone, and extracted a vertebra for the purpose.

Then it was the basics, as we had practiced them before: we took a variety of measurements, and then Tom (whose tolerance for the cold water was much greater than my own) cut open the body to survey the internal organs. I meanwhile had the sailors remove the head and bring it on board, where I could study it in peace and relative warmth.

Jake knew I was a naturalist, of course. He had looked through my scholarly works, more for the plates that illustrated them than out of any deep interest in the text. Enough of the plates depicted anatomical drawings that he knew perfectly well what his mother did in her work. Knowing, however, was quite a different matter from seeing her in communion with a severed head.

He made an awed noise and laid his hand on one of its fangs. “Pray do not block my view,” I said, sketching rapidly. I wanted to finish quickly, so that I could deflesh the head and draw the skull. There appeared to be faint scars above its eyes, which suggested it might have once possessed the tendrils seen on its tropical kin.

“Is this bigger than the other dragons you’ve killed?” Jake asked.

“I have not killed any dragons myself,” I said. “Can you open its mouth? Or call one of the sailors to do it.”

Jake pried the head open, giving me a look when I warned him not to cut himself on the teeth. It is a look I think all children master at about his age—the one that insists the looker needs no warning while, by its very confidence, convincing the one looked at that the warning was very necessary indeed.

Open, the jaws could easily have swallowed my son. That gave me an idea. I said, “Stay where you are; I want to use you for scale.”

He mimed being eaten by the serpent, which would have been less unnerving had I not just been reminded of precisely how much danger I was placing him in by bringing him on this voyage. I had underestimated the hazards of hunting a sea-serpent. But I would not do so a second time; I vowed to put him ashore before we went after one in the tropics.

Jake soon tired of pretending to be a victim and so began mock-wrestling with the head, pretending to be its mighty slayer. “I’m going to kill one of these someday,” he proclaimed.

“I should prefer you didn’t,” I said, rather sharply. “I did this for science, but it having now been done, I hope it needn’t be done again. Only the fangs have any real value on the market, and those only as curiosities and raw material for carving; should an entire animal die, just so we might take four of its teeth? I almost feel sorry for it. At the end, it was trying to swim away. It only wanted to live.”

“She,” Tom said, climbing over the railing. He was dripping with bloody water. “No eggs in her abdomen, but the ovipositor marks her very clearly as female. I wonder where they lay them?”

My chastisement had made little mark on my son, but Tom’s revelation silenced him. Much later, he admitted to me that the pronoun was what struck him so forcefully: the pronoun, and the possibility of eggs. With those two words, the sea-serpent changed from a terrible beast to a simple animal, not entirely different from the broken-winged sparrow we had once nursed back to health together. A dangerous beast, true, and one that could have sent the Basilisk to the bottom of the ocean. But she had been alive, and had wanted to go on living; now she was dead, and any progeny she might have borne with her. Jake was very quiet after that, and remained so for several days.

Tom set to work defleshing the skull, and talked with me while he did. “The lungs are much like those we’ve seen in other dragons—more avian in structure than mammalian.” I sighed, thinking of my debate with Miriam Farnswood. I feared I was likely to lose that particular argument. “The musculature around the stomach and oesophagus is interesting, too. I’ll have to look at one of the tropical serpents to compare, but I think the purpose is to allow the creature to suck in water very swiftly, without having to swallow, and then vomit it back up again.”

“The jet of water,” I said, excited. “Yes, we’ll have to compare. If they do not migrate, perhaps their life cycle leads them further north as they age? A creature this large might have a difficult time keeping itself cool in tropical waters. That would explain why those in the north are generally larger, if their growth continues throughout their lives.”

We debated this point until the skull was clear of the bulk of its flesh. As I began sketching again, he asked me, “What do you think? Taxonomically.”

“It’s difficult,” I admitted. By then my hand was capable of going about its work without demanding all of my attention; I could ponder issues of classification at the same time. “The dentition bears some similarities to those reported or observed in other breeds, at least in number and disposition of teeth… though of course baleen plates are not a usual feature. The vertebrae certainly pose a problem. This creature has quite a lot of them, and we do not usually consider animals to be close cousins who differ so greatly in such a fundamental characteristic.”

Tom nodded, wiping his hands clean—or at least less filthy—with a cloth. “Not to mention the utter lack of hind limbs. I saw nothing in the dissection, not even anything vestigial. The closest thing it has to forelimbs are some rather inadequate fins.”

“And yet there are similarities. The generally reptilian appearance, and more significantly, the degradation of the bones.” I thought of the six criteria customarily used to distinguish “true dragons” from draconic creatures: quadripedalism, flight-capable wings, a ruff or fan behind the skull, bones frangible after death, oviparity, and extraordinary breath. We might, if we were very generous, count the serpent’s supraorbital tendrils (presuming it had once possessed them) as the ruff, and Tom had just confirmed that the creatures laid eggs. Together with the bones—which decayed more slowly than those of terrestrial dragons, but did become frangible quite rapidly—that made three of six. But was there any significance to the distinction between “true dragons” and their mere cousins? What if there was only one characteristic that mattered?

Yet there were problems as well with declaring osteological degradation the true determinant of draconic nature. We had established a fair degree of variation in the exact chemical makeup of different breeds, ranging from the rock-wyrms on whom the process had originally been developed to the simple sparklings who could be preserved in vinegar. There was every chance that it would prove to be a spectrum rather than a simple binary. Where, then, would we draw our boundary?

I could not answer those questions that day—nor, indeed, for years to come. But that dead sea-serpent, for whom I had conceived a belated sympathy, brought me one step closer to understanding.

FOUR

I had not forgotten the message Wademi brought to me regarding the peculiar appearance of the dragons in Bayembe’s rivers. I had, however, put my thoughts on the matter to one side for a time.

There had been enough to do in preparing for our departure that I told myself I would discuss the matter with Tom after we had gotten settled on the Basilisk. Once on board, however, I found the flaw in my reasoning: there was simply no privacy on such a ship.

The sailors attended very little to our scientific discussions, caring naught for such matters. I could not trust, however, that they would continue to ignore us if phrases like “queen dragons” caught their attention. There were opportunists among them who might pursue such a prize—or at least sell word of it to an interested buyer. Even if they did not, they might reference it in their dockside gossip. Whether this might rebound ill upon Bayembe and Mouleen, I could not say for certain; but I did not like to risk it.

I therefore had to wait. Fortunately, we were not always ship-bound, and in time I had my chance.

The Basilisk stopped in Svaltan to replace the broken stay and repair the other damage inflicted by the sea-serpent, then rounded the northern edge of Anthiope and dropped anchor off the shore of Lezhnema at the mouth of the Olovtun River, some distance north of Kupelyi. We had the goodwill of the tsar; he had not forgotten that we were instrumental in the discovery of a firestone deposit in Vystrana, from which he had profited handsomely. Because of this, not only had we been granted visas, but he had arranged for a guide to take us inland, where we might observe wyverns.

These haunt the mountains of eastern Bulskevo and up into Siaure. A part of me wished that scientific rigor did not require me to carry out research in such places; even in late Caloris and early Fructis, and even confining ourselves to the foothills rather than going up into the mountains proper, what passed for their “summer” was decidedly on the chill side. The long days gave us ample opportunity to chase our prey, though, while the Basilisk continued down to Kupelyi and the markets there before returning to retrieve us from Lezhnema.

I will not say much of the wyvern-hunting itself, for it has little bearing on the key aspects of this narrative, and its scientific significance has been recorded elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the limb configuration of a wyvern—wings and two legs, instead of four—was of interest to us, chiefly as a possible link between the near-limbless serpents of the ocean and the quadripedal winged dragons.

This terrestrial detour gave me ample time to speak with Tom, particularly when we lay in interminable wait for a wyvern to happen past. I recounted what Wademi had said to me, and my speculations as to its possible import.

He frowned, laying one hand over the stock of his rifle. “I have a hard time believing the Moulish would make such an error.”

“We must consider the possibility,” I said. “Their usual treatment of the eggs is traditional, handed down to them through who knows how many generations. Things become habit, done because that is how one’s father and grandfather did them, rather than because their import is fully understood.” I paused, dissatisfied, and then was distracted by movement that proved to be some farmer’s errant goat.

When it was gone, I returned to the point. “But I must consider other possibilities, too. For example: what if the Moulish want queens in the rivers?”

Tom blew out his breath in a quick huff. “To what end? Do they mean to conquer Bayembe for themselves?”

We both knew that was ludicrous. The Moulish loved their swampy forest, even when it was trying to kill them; to them, the arid savannah of Bayembe was a wasteland. And they had no government at a scale larger than the elders who happened to be in camp at any given time, no warfare beyond small gangs of young men scuffling over personal insults. They had no desire to conquer Bayembe, nor the means to do so if they did. Not even with dragons.

“I wish I could go see them for myself,” I murmured—not least because an icy wind chose to blow through at that precise moment, reminding me of how much warmer it was in Eriga.

Tom knew why I could not. He was no more free to travel there than I. “What you need,” he mused, “is a protégé you can send in your stead.”

This made me sigh. “I am not likely to ever have one of those.”

He said nothing. After a moment, I became aware of his gaze on me. When I turned my head to look, he was staring. “What?” I asked.

“What of all those people who flock to your house every Athemer?”

“None of them are dragon naturalists.”

“Well, no—but gather enough bright young things about you, and sooner or later one of them will be. Likely sooner, if you go on a speaking tour after this expedition.”

I wanted to protest that the speaking tour, if it even happened, would simply be a means of raising money (which I expected to be in short supply by the time I returned home). My talks would be popular, not scholarly. But if I could be inspired to my career by something as trivial as a sparkling preserved in vinegar, was it so ludicrous to think that someone else might be inspired by hearing my tales? I thought of protégés as the sort of thing a man like Lord Hilford had: a respected peer, a Colloquium Fellow. Yet I might someday have one, too.

It even crossed my mind that Jake might go, though of course he might have been refused on the grounds that he was my son, and in any event it would have been at least six or seven years before he was old enough to send to Eriga on his own. By then, the matter was likely to be resolved in one way or another. But as I soon discovered, he seemed unlikely to follow that path regardless.

While Tom and I were lying in wait for wyverns (and occasionally venturing into their dens, which did lead to Tom getting poisoned, wyverns having no extraordinary breath but more than adequate venom to take its place), I had left Jake in the keeping of Abby Carew and Feodor Lukovich Gavrilenko, the guide the tsar had provided. This was, to my way of thinking, a splendid example of the sort of education Jake could receive by travelling the world: Feodor Lukovich was a hardy man, very familiar with the environs of the Olovtun Mountains, and could teach my son a great deal about the environment and the creatures to be found there. After more than a month cooped up aboard the Basilisk, I expected Jake would welcome the opportunity to tear about the countryside.

Upon my return, however, I learned that such was not the case. “It’s cold up here,” Jake complained, huddling inside his coat.

I might not have been closely involved with his early rearing, but it seemed that some things were transmitted in utero. I had, after all, been shivering in Vystrana when he was conceived. “Yes, it is,” I agreed. “But did you not want to go hiking? Feodor Lukovich told me he would show you how his falcon hunts.”

Jake shrugged, in the way that only nine-year-old children can manage—and usually male children at that, girls not being permitted the same kind of insouciance. “It would only kill rabbits and such. I want to go back to the ship.”

Whatever kindred feeling had been engendered by his complaint of cold, it vanished in the face of this inconceivable prospect: that any son of mine might not be interested in something with wings. “At your age, I would have been mad to see a falcon hunt, only no one will take a girl for such outings.”

This did not sway him. He wanted to go back to the ship; Haward, one of the sailors, had promised to teach him knots. “I am sure Feodor Lukovich could teach you some,” I said, whereupon Jake informed me (with no little scorn) that he already knew all of those.

Cruel mother that I am, I forced him to stay there a while longer. Tom and I were not done with our work, and I was not about to send Jake down the Olovtun with nobody but his governess for company. If he would not learn about northern Bulskevo, then he could sit and drill Spureni verbs with Abby.

When I spoke with her privately about his behaviour, she spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “He likes it on board the ship. He’ll settle down once we get back.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said. “If he is this contrary for the entire expedition, there will be no living with him. And I do not want to shackle you to the Basilisk simply because that is where Jake would rather be.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Abby demurred.

This was exceedingly kind of her to say, but I knew it was not true. “Ah, well,” I said with a philosophical sigh. “He is only nine. I imagine he will tire of it soon enough, and long for some variety.”

Which just goes to show how little I understood my son.

From Bulskevo we could have continued down the eastern coast of Anthiope, for there were certainly dragons to be found in places like Zmayet and Uhwase and Akhia. But Tom and I, after assembling the most complete list we could of dragons and draconic cousins, had agreed that it would be better if we focused our efforts elsewhere. For one thing, the existing literature on such creatures was heavily biased toward Anthiopean observations, with much less known about them elsewhere. For another, there was relatively little taxonomic variation to be found in Anthiope, apart from cousins like sparklings, wyverns, and wolf-drakes. To truly question the nature of dragons, I needed to look farther afield.

The Basilisk therefore provisioned herself in Kupelyi, then struck out across the ocean toward the continent of Otholé. On this passage—a journey of nearly two months, during which the cramped conditions ceased to be awkward and started to become intolerable—I began to grasp the truth of what was happening with Jake.

As related in the first volume of my memoirs, a tipping point in my life came early on, when at the age of seven I first learned how to preserve a sparkling and then dissected a dove to study what the wishbone was for. From those two events I formed an obsession with all things winged, which eventually settled more firmly upon dragons (though I still retain a great fondness for birds and some insects).

Jake’s tipping point was the Basilisk. From the moment he set foot on her decks, he knew—though he did not articulate it this way until years later—that he was home. He loved the great and complex array of rigging and sails that brought the ship to life. He loved the clever way the necessities of life were miniaturized and tucked into every available corner. He loved the tang of salt water and the whip of the sea wind and above all, the sheer feeling of freedom that came from being in flight across the waves.

I did not understand this at first. While I enjoyed being at sea, it was not an unmitigated delight. And Tamshire, my childhood home, is a landlocked county, so I had no personal familiarity with the way in which the ocean calls to some hearts. It was inexplicable to me that Jake, who had grown up in the quiet suburb of Pasterway and the busy streets of Falchester, would take so instinctively to the sea. But so it seemed to be; and if indeed it was a passing infatuation, as I had at first assumed, then it was exhibiting a notable failure to pass on schedule.

Of course, Jake being nine, he did not take to shipboard life in anything like a dignified fashion. Despite that early admonition from the captain and his experience with the sea-serpent, he went where he should not, touched things he should not. And one day when we were in the middle of the ocean, with the Basilisk standing almost motionless on a glassy plate, Aekinitos hauled my son before me by the scruff of his neck.

We were then in the region sailors call “the doldrums,” near the equator. Here the winds sometimes fail altogether, leaving sailing ships utterly becalmed. The sky was hot copper above us, the water flat gold below. I was on deck, taking advantage of the stillness to produce more finished drawings of the sea-serpents and wyverns. I did hear the commotion down below, but I disregarded it, as I had learned to disregard many of the noises and activities that periodically roiled the crew.

I did not even look up when a clump of people began moving toward me across the deck. Not until they stopped before me did I pause in my pencil work. Then, to my dismay, I saw Aekinitos standing with one hand clenched around the collar of my son’s shirt, and Jake looking both sullen and guilty. Sweat plastered his hair to the edges of his face in damp swags that could not muster the will to be curls.

“What is going on?” I asked.

Aekinitos gave a quick shake of his hand, making my son twitch. “Mr. Dolin caught him playing with this.”

The first mate handed him an object, which Aekinitos then thrust toward me. A sextant, I saw. “Whose is that?”

“Mine,” the captain rumbled. “Your boy stole it, and was using it as a toy.”

I had no doubt that Jake had borrowed rather than stolen it; what would he do with a sextant of his own? But such a distinction would not mean much to the captain, nor should it. “Jake,” I said, my own voice hardening, “is this true?”

Shame-faced, my son nodded.

We were gathering more of a crowd: not just the sailors who had followed Aekinitos and Dolin and Jake from belowdecks, but others who were up above, and Tom and Abby besides. The captain raised his voice slightly, no doubt for their benefit. “I cannot have such disobedience aboard my ship. For theft, the penalty is flogging.”

“Now see here,” I said, shooting to my feet. My drawing board and pencil clattered to the deck. I knew enough of sea life to know there was a world of difference between the switching a disobedient boy might get at school and the sort of flogging practiced on board ships. Aekinitos could not be serious.

Nor was he. But neither was he speaking in jest. I met his gaze, and saw that while he did not intend to flog my son like a common sailor, he did intend to leave an impression Jake would not soon forget.

And I had a notion of how to accomplish that.

“You will not flog my son,” I said, the words as firm as I could make them. Then I allowed myself to wilt, sighing. “But you are right. You cannot have such behaviour on the Basilisk. This is not the first time Jake has been disobedient, and it will not be the last. Our next port of call is, what—Axohuilli? Not ideal, but it can’t be helped, I suppose. If the winds will cooperate and take us there, then I will make arrangements for Jake and Miss Carew to sail back to Scirland.”

“Mama, no!” Jake cried, jerking in the captain’s grip.

I met his gaze, letting my sorrow show. “I am sorry, Jake. I said too much of the adventure to be had here, and not enough of the responsibilities that would come with it. I did not prepare you adequately for this, and perhaps you are simply too young.”

“I’m not,” he said desperately. “I won’t do it again, I promise. I’ll behave—don’t send me home!”jake’s promise

“And when you grow tired of behaving? I cannot leave you in a situation where you might be flogged. It would be very irresponsible of me.”

Reckless, he said, “I won’t get tired of behaving. I’ll prove it! If I don’t, you can beat me, just like he said.”

To Jake, who had never suffered anything worse than a spanking, a flogging probably sounded very romantic. (I had overheard him talking gleefully to Tom about keelhauling not three days prior.) I sighed again, putting my head in my hand, then lifted it and addressed the captain once more. “Surely there can be some sort of allowance made for first offenses—provided there is not a second. What else would you do to punish a sailor who had erred so grievously?”

“I would break an officer,” Aekinitos said. “But this boy has no rank to strip from him.”

I opened my hands, half in pleading, half a shrug. “Then treat him as if he did. Demote him to—oh, I do not know my sailing terms well enough. Some lowly position, from which he might learn proper naval conduct.”

Jake’s face, which had fallen like a mudslide when I spoke of sending him home, began to light up. To him, this would sound less like punishment, more like a wondrous treat. But I trusted Aekinitos to disabuse him of that notion. “Boy,” Aekinitos rumbled. “That is the lowest position he could have, and if there were a lower, I would give it to him.”

“What sort of tasks does a ship’s boy do?” I asked.

Although his fate hung in the balance, Jake could not resist saying, “Swabbing the decks?”

Aekinitos’ heavy brows drew inward and down. I imagine his glare must have looked very fierce from below, for Jake quailed. “The bilges,” the captain said.

He was as good as his word. Aekinitos could guess as well as I could that Jake adored the notion of learning to be a proper sailor; accordingly, the captain at first did not let him do anything that seemed sailorly in the least. Jake spent that first day down in the filth of the bilge, about which the only good thing one could say was that it was out of the blistering sun. After that he assisted the cook in the galley or helped drag stores about in some arcane maneuver designed to improve the balance of the ship—always supposing its sole purpose was not to keep a disobedient boy busy.

It would have broken the spirit of any child staying on a whim. Had Jake come to me and begged for mercy, I would have told the captain to desist… and then, as I had said before, put him on a ship for home. I could neither torment my son nor ask Aekinitos to tolerate his misbehaviour. But Jake’s desire to stay was no whim, and so he persevered, though he be up to his eyebrows in muck. And so, one step at a time, Aekinitos began to teach him more.

Not directly, of course. The captain of the Basilisk had better things to do with his time than train a single boy. But he put Jake into the care of his bosun, a fellow of mixed Anthiopean and Erigan ancestry named Cranby, and that fellow undertook to make my son a sailor. Jake learned the parts of the ship, the points of the compass, how to tie more knots than I knew were geometrically possible. He did tedious work like picking oakum out of old ropes, scraping barnacles off the hull, and (yes) swabbing the decks. Eventually he did more interesting things like holding the reel when someone else threw out the log-line to measure our speed. Much, much later, Aekinitos let him hold the sextant again, and learn how to take a sighting so as to chart our position.

And Jake loved it. Sailing is exhausting, back-breaking work, but the complaint I heard most often from my son was that he was neither large enough nor strong enough to do more. A boy his age was no use in handling sails or hauling on ropes; he would only get in the way. But Jake vowed that he would someday be like those men, and after seeing the labor he was willing to endure so long as it was on a ship, I believed him.

The bulk of that, however, lay in the future. In the immediate term, we finally escaped the doldrums, and when we came to port at Axohuilli in Coyahuac, I did not send Jake home. We reprovisioned and asked some questions, then set sail for Namiquitlan… where, we were told, there were feathered serpents to be found.

FIVE

Coyahuac reminded me a great deal of Mouleen, the only other tropical country of which I had personal experience. Here the vegetation was equally thick, the trees towering giants laced together with vines and ferns. Beneath the canopy, I sweltered almost as much as I had in that swampy land. But there were differences: rather than being half-drowned by muddy rivers, Coyahuac had no surface water, all rainfall soaking through the porous ground to gather in underground streams and wells. The verdant life that rose above it was a thin skin over rocky bones, and here and there the bones showed through.

Such was the case with Namiquitlan, where we went in search of feathered serpents—quetzalcoatls, as they are known in the local tongue. The waters in the region of that town are an intense, deep blue, even close to shore, for the ground there drops off precipitously; even the harbour of Namiquitlan is a mere pause in the sheer face the land presents to the sea. We passed close to one of these sea cliffs as we came into port, and those of us not occupied in the task of keeping the Basilisk safely clear of that peril crowded to the rail for a good look.

Twenty meters of stone gleamed gold in the westering sun, an emerald cap of thick vegetation spilling from its edge. I looked at that cap and sighed. I knew from experience that finding dragons in such an environment was not easily done; and here, unlike in Bulskevo, we had no guide arranged in advance.

I was about to say something on this matter to Tom when Jake tugged at my sleeve. “Mama, look! There are men on the cliff!”

My son had good eyes. The movement was well hidden in the vegetation, and not easily identified. After a moment, however, three men came up to the edge. Two hung back; the third, dressed only in loose slops, went to the very brink. A local, I presumed: his skin was rich brown against the pale fabric. “What is he doing?” Jake asked.

The man had peered over the edge briefly; now he retreated some distance, almost to the trees. I opened my mouth to say, “Perhaps something blew into the sea,” when the man turned and, sweeping his arms in a great arc for momentum, sprinted forward and leapt from the cliff.

It was no suicide. His body gathered itself in a graceful line as he plummeted downward. Despite his care, the sound when he struck the water reached us clearly, and Abby flinched back. My own breathing stopped. I could not draw air again until his dark head and gleaming shoulders broke the surface once more, followed shortly by a shout of delight.

“He is mad,” I said, staring.

Next to me, Tom snorted. “So says the woman who once threw herself off a cliff.”

“I had a glider,” I reminded him.

Tom forbore to mention that it had been of untested design. (We had long since agreed that we should be cautious as to which of my various deeds we allowed my son to hear of at what age, lest Jake get Ideas.) I returned my attention to the top of the cliff. The men there chose not to follow their friend, but clapped one another on the shoulders and vanished back into the trees. Before I could ask whether we should send the longboat after the fellow in the water, he set off with a powerful stroke, heading, I thought, for the harbour.

The wind was carrying us onward regardless, and it would likely have been dangerous to veer so close to shore, lest we be blown onto the rocks. I watched the swimmer recede in our wake, wondering if he begrudged us leaving him behind, or was enjoying his time in the water. I did not know whether to call the season autumn or spring—we were south of the equator, though not by much—but the air was warm and the seas mild enough to make for a pleasant swim.

Soon enough I had to turn my attention elsewhere, for we were coming into port. The swift descent of the land meant the harbour, though small, was deep enough that we could approach quite close to shore. Had Namiquitlan been a great city, they might have built piers alongside which we could dock, and then we could have disembarked directly. But it was merely a small town, noteworthy only because several of the local trading routes converged there for the monthly market, and so we had to use the ship’s boats—a procedure that had been exotic five months previously, but was now almost routine.

There was a small hotel in Namiquitlan. I immediately sent Tom to book a pair of rooms there, so grateful for the chance to escape the confines of the Basilisk that I nearly wept. While he did that, I oversaw the gathering of our luggage and equipment. We intended to stay in Namiquitlan for at least a month, during which time the ship would go elsewhere for trade; we could not leave behind anything we might need.

Partway through this process, shouts drew my attention down to the beach, where a small knot of men had gathered. Someone had just come out of the surf, and those around him were slapping his back and shaking his hand. They eddied our way, and I understood—not from their words, which were a polyglot salad, but from their tone—that they were taking the fellow for a drink.

As they drew closer, I recognized the man at the center as the cliff diver we had seen. He was not, as I had assumed, a local. His skin was nearly as dark as theirs and his nose aquiline, but his face was not so broad nor his lips as full, and his dripping hair was loosely curled. Akhian, perhaps—especially now that I could see his slops were the loose trousers they call sirwal.

They were also rather torn from the force of his dive. I looked away, my cheeks heating. I had seen men in far less clothing than that on my Erigan expedition… but I had still been grieving then, for all I had thought myself recovered. I was not nearly an old woman yet, though, and my long solitude itched.

The knot of men passed, seeking one of the dockside establishments where they could celebrate the diver’s deed. I put him from my mind, and prepared to hunt for dragons.

I knew better than to blunder about aimlessly in the forest, hoping to find my quarry. The region was unfamiliar to us all and prone to sinkholes, which (thanks to the vegetation) we might not see until we fell into them. Tom put it about that we were looking for a guide who could show us where the beasts might be found, and in the meanwhile we turned our thoughts to birds. I had promised Miriam Farnswood and the Ornithological Society that we would collect new species wherever we could and ship them home for further study.

Namiquitlan was a splendid place for acquiring bird specimens, though not an inexpensive one. The people of Coyahuac make great use of feathers in their art and clothing, which means there are many sellers but their prices are steep. The monthly market, which convened two days after our arrival, was a raucous plaza filled with people in triangular mantles of patterned cotton, dickering over everything from coffee beans to coral. After so long at sea, with no one but my companions and sailors for company, I found it almost overwhelming.

I was therefore glad, when the market ended, to retreat to the verandah of our hotel. It was not the most comfortable of refuges; the boards creaked alarmingly when trod upon, and were so weathered by the elements that one could peel strips up with a fingernail. It did, however, have the virtue of being quiet. I retired there and paged through the birding book Miriam had given me, comparing its plates against the sketches I had drawn in the market.

From behind me, a man said in Scirling, “I hear you’re looking for feathered serpents.”

I turned in my seat and found the voice belonged to the cliff diver. He was properly dressed now, with jacket and sash over his mended sirwal, his hair dry and curling about his face. The garb and his light accent both confirmed him as Akhian. “I am, sir,” I said guardedly. “But not to hunt them.”

He waved this away, as if the very notion were absurd. “No, of course not. I’ve seen several out near my site, though. Or one, several times; it’s hard to say which.”

“Your site? Do you mean the cliff?”

His delighted expression transformed his face. Grave in thought, it lit up like the sun when he smiled. “You saw that? Please, tell everyone who will listen. Half the men don’t believe I did it.”

“I hardly believe it myself,” I said dryly. “Why ever did you?”

“To see if I could,” he said, in the tone of one who needs no better reason. “And because it’s exhilarating—the flight through the air, and then the slap of the sea. I have never felt more alive. But that isn’t what I meant by my site, no. There’s a ruin a few miles southeast of here where I’ve been doing my work.”

Belatedly recalling my manners, I invited him to sit in the verandah’s sole remaining chair, the battered twin of my own. I hoped it would not break beneath him. “I am Isabella Camherst,” I said.

He touched his heart. “Peace be upon you. I am Suhail.”

I waited, but he said no more. The pause grew long enough to be awkward, and he cocked his head in inquiry. “Forgive me,” I said, colouring. “You are Akhian, are you not? I was given to understand there is usually more to an Akhian name than that.”

His elegant mouth twisted in a rueful line. “There is, but my father would not thank me for using it. So I am only Suhail.”

“Mr. Suhail, then,” I said, making the best of an odd situation. (With little success. I am not certain I ever addressed him formally apart from that one time. It is difficult to be formal with someone you first saw half-naked and hurling himself from a cliff.) “What work is it that you do?”

The chair creaked ominously behind him as he leaned back. “I’m an archaeologist.”

I might have guessed that without asking. Coyahuac is rife with ruins, half of them the remnants of a great empire that had dominated the place some hundreds of years prior, before its collapse broke the region into its current array of city-states and Anthiopean protectorates. The other half… “Are you studying the Draconeans?”

Suhail’s grin came easily, I discovered. “What they left behind, at least.”

They had left a great deal behind in Akhia. Many believed the center of that ancient civilization, if indeed it had possessed a center, had been in the deserts of southern Anthiope. It was no surprise that Suhail might take an interest in them.

He dismissed the Draconeans with a wave of one hand. “I imagine you want living dragons, though.”

“I do,” I conceded. “In fact, my companions and I are on a voyage around the world to study them.”

“Your companions,” Suhail said. “Even the little boy?”

Less than a week off the ship, and already Jake was complaining about the absence. “He is my son.”

Suhail made a gesture I interpreted as apologetic. “I did not realize the other Scirling man was your husband.”

“He isn’t.” I sighed and laid the birding book down. I suspected—and was not wrong—that I would be explaining our arrangement from one side of the world to the other. “I am a widow. Tom Wilker is my colleague. Our fourth, Miss Carew, is my son’s governess. Tom and I are the ones looking for dragons. Could you direct us to your site?”

“I can do better than that,” Suhail said. “If you wish, I will lead you there tomorrow.”

For a moment, my mind’s eye was filled with visions of feathered serpents. Then common sense and basic self-preservation asserted themselves. “I will have to consult with Tom,” I said. “We have several other obligations here, and I am not certain what arrangements he has made.”

Suhail nodded. “By which you mean, all you know of me is that I dive off cliffs and claim to be an archaeologist. Speak with your colleague, and if, when tomorrow morning comes, you have decided that I can be trusted, meet me at the town market’s eastern end.”

This was blunt, but accurate. “Thank you,” I said. He rose gingerly from his chair, eyebrows twitching in relief when it bore this process without disintegrating, then touched his hand to his heart and was gone.

“They didn’t use the word ‘archaeologist,’” Tom said, “but that seems accurate enough. He’s been here for the better part of a month. Started out combing the area for ruins, and eventually settled on the place he mentioned to you. No one can understand why; it’s too close to Namiquitlan. Antiquarians and treasure-hunters have already picked the place clean.”

“Then he is either incompetent, or better than the rest of them.” I shrugged. “Regardless, he doesn’t sound like the sort to crack our skulls and leave us in the forest.” I caught Tom’s expression and sighed in exasperation. “What? Are you shocked that I have, after nearly thirty years of life, learned a degree of caution at last?”

Tom laughed. “Something like that.”

We met Suhail outside the market plaza the next morning. He was rising from his prayers as we approached; when he saw us, the serene stillness of his body gave way to sudden energy. From this I surmised that he had not been certain of our coming. I made the introductions, after which he said, “I forgot to warn you, the way is not easy.”

I gestured to my attire: a practical shirt, men’s trousers, and sturdy boots. “As you can see, I am prepared. And I have been in rough territory before.”

Too late, I realized that my gesture had not been what one could call modest—certainly not when I was in trousers. I had grown accustomed to the company of Tom, who saw me only as a colleague. Now I was abruptly aware of my own body, to which I had just drawn a stranger’s attention.

Fortunately, Suhail’s concern lay in more practical directions. He led us out of Namiquitlan and into the forest, where the close, humid air soon drenched us all in sweat. He had not exaggerated: the way was quite strenuous, and would have been worse had he not cut a path with a machete. “I cut this every time I come,” he said ruefully, hacking away. “It grows over again as soon as I turn my back.”

A trek that should have taken perhaps an hour therefore took more than two, and I was quite blown by the time we arrived. But the result… it was more than worth the effort.

I had never truly understood the fascination Draconean ruins held for so many. I had seen a few in Scirland, which were sadly decayed and had never been all that grand to begin with; I had seen the remains near Drustanev in Vystrana. I had glanced at any number of woodcuts and engravings in books.

None of that prepared me for the experience of seeing a Draconean city.

Half a dozen pyramids rose from the jungle, their stepped sides festooned with greenery like oversized jardinières. In between the tree trunks and vines, I could glimpse the weathered outlines of carved murals. Birds flitted between these ruinous perches, calling to one another, and sunlight made golden the air through which they flew.

It was, in short, the sort of place I had heretofore thought existed only in tales. I stared at it for a time, my mouth agape, while Suhail spread his hands in the manner of a conjurer who has just revealed his crowning trick.

“The entire place has been thoroughly looted,” he said when I had collected my wits. “More’s the pity. But there is still a great deal to learn here.”

Incompetent, I had said to Tom—or better than the rest of them. “Such as what?”

He led us up one of the pyramids, but not to investigate the place itself. Ignoring what remained of the temple at the top, he began sketching in the air, overlaying our surroundings with imaginary lines. “The pyramids are obvious, but not the interesting part. There used to be streets—see? And if you walk over the ground there, or there, it is not even. Little hillocks beneath you. Even the Draconeans could not all have lived in great pyramids and halls; there must have been ordinary residences, workshops, marketplaces. The ruins of those are here, too. I’ve dug about a bit to see. The wood has all rotted away, but there are little things. Nothing that’s much of interest to antiquarians, the sort of people who only want gold and firestones and terrible statues of ancient deities. Broken pottery and the like. But it tells its own tale.”

Suhail’s tone was one I recognized in my marrow: the passionate intensity of someone who has found his intellectual calling and will pursue it to the ends of the earth. “What do you think of their relationship with dragons?” I asked—for that point of connection had generally been my only real interest in the ancient civilization.

“You will not laugh?” he said. I thought this time his grin was a shield: pre-emptive self-mockery. I shook my head, promising solemnity, and he said, “I think they tamed them.”

The legends claimed it was so, and yet— “People have tried, many times. The Yelangese supposedly have had success with breeding them in captivity; that is something I should like to look into. I have seen dragons chained to act as guards. But actually taming them? Domesticating them, as we have done with horses? We have no evidence of it.”

“Unless you have found some,” Tom said.

Suhail turned to look out over the ruined city. “These aren’t the first ruins I’ve studied. In Akhia, there are enclosures, large ones, with high walls and little areas inside, like cells. Everyone has a different interpretation for what those places were. Markets, prisons, storehouses for valuable goods. Most of the interpretations assume there used to be a ceiling, now gone. But we find no broken tiles, no holes in the walls for support beams. If they were open to the sky—and I think they were—they would not be good storehouses.”

“But they could be dragon pens,” I said, understanding. “Presuming, of course, that they either tethered the dragons, or trained them sufficiently to keep them from flying away. It’s a possibility, I’ll grant you… but not proof.”

“Of course not. That’s why I’m here. I’m looking for proof.” Then Suhail shrugged, his expression lightening. “Of that, and many other things. Come—I promised you feathered serpents. I hope they cooperate.”

He led us down from our vantage point and across the tangled ground of the city. It was treacherous going, with roots and stones always ready to turn the ankle and trap the foot, and made no easier by the need for stealth. “They often sun themselves at this hour,” Suhail told me, “but any close approach and they flee. Or it—I’m not sure if it’s always the same one. Perhaps you will be able to tell.”

“Few of the large ones are gregarious,” I said. “But I am surprised to find even one this close to Namiquitlan. I knew there were some in the region, but with the demand for their feathers being what it is, I expected I would have to go much farther afield.”

Suhail nodded. “I had not told anyone about this, until you. I do not want hunters tramping through here trying to kill it.”

He stopped us then and pointed at the last pyramid, lying some distance out from the others. “Near the peak—two tiers down—do you see?”the feathered serpent

At first I did not. We were too far away, and the thick vegetation acted as both cover and camouflage. But I followed Suhail’s pointing finger, and then, indeed, I saw.

The quetzalcoatl lay along the stone tier of the pyramid as if it were a great bed, its body curling through and around the surrounding growth. Its feathers gleamed iridescent green in the sun, the same shade as the quetzal bird from which it took its name. I estimated it to be at least five meters in length, quite possibly more.

Could the creature hear us at this range? I had read what was known about quetzalcoatls, but there had been no mention of the quality of their hearing. In a low voice, I asked Suhail, “How close can you get before it flees?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t really tried. The first time, I stumbled on it by accident. I was at the base of the pyramid.”

Then I could get closer. I spent a few moments studying the beast through my field glasses, then picked my way with care across the rough ground, not wanting to trip and startle him off. To my chagrin, I discovered that approaching closer was of very little use; I could hardly see anything at all through the bushes and trees that had taken root along the pyramid’s sides. If I wanted to see more, I would have to climb—and surely that would provoke it into fleeing.

I considered what I knew of them. Crepuscular hunters (as many dragons were), and flightless. If I contrived to be atop the pyramid before it came for its midday nap, could I observe it from above?

I could indeed, though Suhail was astonished when he heard I wanted to try, and Tom insisted on standing ready with a gun in case the creature noticed our presence and took offense. It required a dreadfully early start the next morning, not to mention a trip through the forest in the dim light of dawn, but the climb was the worst part. We identified the path by which the quetzalcoatl usually ascended, then made our way up on the far side, so as not to leave a scent trail that might alarm it. Since our quarry had chosen the easy route for its ascent, that perforce left us with a more difficult one. But once atop the pyramid, we were able to build a blind, and from there observe the thing to our heart’s content.

Thanks to these efforts, which continued over the next fortnight, I was able to tell Suhail that his site had only the one draconic visitor, and that she was female. (Males possess a patch of red feathers on the throat beneath the head, which this one lacked.) I never did discover where she spent her nights; it was not at the ruin, and we could not track her well enough to find the location. But she was atop that pyramid more days than not, and I came to know her rather well.

This, perhaps, is why we did not shoot her. At the time I named other reasons, chief among them the fact that her return to an area from which her kind had been driven was a good thing, one I did not wish to undo. We also knew the skeletal details moderately well, for while the bones of a quetzalcoatl are delicate, they do not decay as those of true dragons do—this being one of the chief arguments against classifying them as dragons.

And yet I was not sure. We gathered feathers she had molted where she lay, and haggled with a local hunter for samples from the quetzal bird. At the hotel one evening, I sat fingering them both. “They are so alike,” I said to Tom. “I look at these and think that Miriam must be right—that dragons must be related to birds. And yet, if that were true, why should there be only one breed that exhibits feathers? Unless we count the kukulkan as a second—but by all accounts, it is as like the quetzalcoatl as a crested quetzal is to a resplendent one. And drakeflies, I suppose, if we stretch the family tree to include them. Conversely, if dragons are not related to birds, why is there a feathered breed at all? Why should they not all have scales?”more taxonomy

Tom was conducting repairs on one of his boots. Indistinctly, because of the needle clamped in his mouth, he said, “Perhaps they aren’t dragons at all.”

It was the simplest answer. After all, what grounds did I have for calling them dragons? A serpentine body and a draconic head, the latter quite unlike the head of either a snake or a bird. But they had no extraordinary breath, their bones did not decay, and they lacked limbs entirely, let alone wings. Yet sea-serpents had only fins as forelimbs, and wyverns had only hind limbs and wings. Which created the possibility of a continuum, with the feathered serpents at the far end from, say, a desert drake.

At which point I had to ask myself how such a continuum came to be. It made no sense. Primates might encompass everything from human beings to lemurs, but there were no ocean monkeys, no feathered gorillas. The very notion was absurd.

Suhail mostly worked at the far end of the site, tramping across the rough ground with a methodical regularity that refused to let anything short of an entire tree divert him from his path. He was, he explained to us, attempting to map the old city—not merely the pyramids, which everybody knew about, but the smaller bits that were of interest only to him. Periodically he would stop and dig, and then on the trek home we would listen to his grandiose plans of hiring a hundred workers to excavate the entire site. “I’ll never do it, though,” he admitted. “Not for many years, at least. I am like you—I aim to circle the world and see it all. Only then will I know where to focus my effort.”

When that day came, I was certain his effort would be formidable. He seemed incapable of exhaustion: he would labor all day at the ruin, pausing only to pray, then come back to Namiquitlan and teach Jake to swim. My son was already able to keep himself afloat, but Suhail taught him how to use his movements more effectively, how to protect his ears when he dove. This did much to reconcile Jake to being shore-bound; he spent half his day in the water, collecting shells and other marine life to show to Abby. “He isn’t learning what he’s supposed to,” she confided wearily to me, “but I can’t say he isn’t learning.”

I shrugged, accepting it with philosophical resignation. “He already has a better education than I did when I married. The history and such he can acquire later.”

He certainly had more than enough opportunity to pick up odds and ends of knowledge, for he was present in the evenings when Tom and I argued points of natural history, sometimes with Suhail in attendance. On those nights, our conversations often turned to the question I had raised before: the relationship between the Draconeans and the creatures they had worshipped, from which we derived their name.

“They never domesticated dragons,” I said very firmly, early on in this debate. “Not as we have done with dogs or cattle. Domestication does not simply mean that you keep such animals around; it implies a host of changes, from the behavioural to the physical. Think of the differences between your average hound and a wolf. If anything similar had ever taken place, we would know, because domesticated dragons would still be around today.”

The chairs in our rooms were sturdier than those on the verandah. Suhail had a habit of leaning back in his, the front legs slightly off the floor, while he alternately steepled and interlaced his fingers. I had seen him teasing delicate remains out of the ground with those fingers, and knew he could be very still and slow when he wished—but without something to excavate, he very rarely wished. Now he tapped his forefingers together, thinking. “They could have gone feral.”

“But that is not the same as returning to their wild form. Besides, they would make dreadful candidates for domestication. Have you not noticed that most of the creatures we alter in such fashion are social? It is easier to domesticate a species that is accustomed to co-existing with others. They understand the concept of hierarchy and will follow humans as their leaders. But most of the bigger draconic breeds are solitary—or near to it.”

Tom grinned. “And I have yet to hear anyone claim the Draconeans rode into battle on the backs of fire-lizards.”

Since fire-lizards are the size of small cats, the mere thought was laughable. Suhail grinned, too, but it was brief; he lapsed back into thoughtfulness. “Men have tamed cheetahs, though. Even to the point of sending the cats to hunt for them.”

I was rapidly learning that he relished a good debate and was not afraid to throw himself fully into one, armed with whatever information he had to hand—and his memory was encyclopedic. Fortunately, he was equally unafraid of conceding the point when faced with superior knowledge. I said, “Yes, but taming is a different matter. A tame animal has merely been socialized to tolerate human contact, and perhaps a modicum of control. But the change is individual: its offspring will need taming all over again.”

“Is it possible the Draconeans did that?” He waved a hand before I could respond, dismissing one interpretation of his question. “I mean from a biological perspective. The practical considerations are another matter. Can dragons be tamed?”

“It isn’t as simple as that,” I said. “I can’t answer yes or no. Much depends on which breed you mean, and what degree of effect you require before you would call the creature ‘tamed.’ In Bayembe, the oba keeps savannah snakes on chains. The Moulish have ways of shepherding a swamp-wyrm where they want it to go. But none of that is comparable to, say, a falcon on your wrist, hunting at your command.”

The conversation devolved then into a discussion of the different draconic breeds and their characteristics, which might make them more or less suitable for taming; and this topic we revisited many times over subsequent days, interrupted by digressions onto matters ranging from Draconean architecture to survival tactics while out in the jungle.

Suhail was a fascinating man to converse with. His intellectual curiosity matched my own, but his field of knowledge stretched in different directions, intersecting with mine in just enough places to give us common ground on which to range. I have written before about my growing sense of myself as a scholar; those conversations in Namiquitlan were an affirmation of that truth and, in a small way, consolation for the temporary loss of the Flying University. It is a wonderful feeling to have one’s brain stretched and tested, to know both that one has knowledge, and that one is gaining more.

So congenial were those days that I felt quite regretful when the time came to bid Suhail farewell. I could have stayed for six months in Namiquitlan, studying the local quetzalcoatl and searching the region for others, but the rest of our journey beckoned, along with our obligations to our various financial backers. “If you should find yourself in Scirland,” I said, “then do not hesitate to seek me out. I am easily found.”

Suhail wrinkled his nose. “Scirland’s Draconean ruins are not very interesting.”

“True,” I said, and chided myself inwardly for feeling so crestfallen. I knew from my previous expeditions, and especially from the peripatetic nature of this voyage, that I would form friendships and then leave them behind. From the start, I had known that this one would not persist beyond our association in Namiquitlan. Yet knowing did not prevent me from wishing.

At the time, I thought I concealed that desire well. As later gossip would prove, however, I did not succeed half so well as I might have hoped.