Voyage of the Basilisk

SIXTEEN

Had my brain worked only a little faster, I would have let go the instant I realized a cave lay ahead.

Every previous time the serpent dove, I had known that if I ran short of air, all I had to do was release my grip and kick for the surface. The beast was reluctant to dive very deeply while two people had hold of its head, so there was little chance of a repeat drowning. (My peril would come after, when the serpent was free to turn around and seek me out.) In a cave, however, there was no such safety: I was trapped, and the serpent was dragging its body along the roof of the cave, attempting (with very near success) to scrape its burden off.

If the preceding minutes had been one of the most glorious experiences of my life, the next few seconds were among the most dreadful. I wrestled with an impossible choice: should I relinquish my hold and hope I could swim free of the cave in time? Or should I stay where I was, and trust that the serpent would emerge into open water before it shredded me on the stone above?

In moments of such crisis, the mind becomes oddly focused. I remember calculating, in a very cold-blooded fashion, the likelihood that even if I escaped the cave, I would not make it to the surface before my air was depleted. In open water, however, I could hope that the canoes might find me. I had been revived from near death once before, after all. If I drowned inside the cave, however, I was surely doomed.

All of this passed through my mind in mere seconds. It could not go on for longer; indecision kept me where I was, and then we were too far into the cave for me to have any hope of escape under my own power. My only remaining chance of survival lay with the serpent, who might yet drag me to safety—if it did not grind me to powder first.

We often speak of hope as a “ray of light.” In this instance, that was less metaphorical than usual. The cave was not entirely dark; sun came in where we had entered and was refracted through the murk. But there was more light than a single opening could account for; other beams pierced the water here and there, and up ahead I saw more. The cave was in fact a tunnel.

With a surge of its great body, the serpent shot through into the warm, shallow waters of a lagoon. I did not wait to see where it might be going; the instant I saw light above my head, I kicked hard off the creature’s body and shot for the surface. The air that filled my lungs a moment later tasted sweeter than I can possibly describe.

I had lost track of Suhail during all of this, not because he had gone anywhere, but because the situation had so overwhelmed my thoughts, I could spare none for him. (An unlovely admission, but a true one.) When I turned to look, however, I found him floating only a meter or two away, gasping for breath and wild in the eyes at our near miss.

A miss which might yet turn to a hit, if we did not act. “Quick,” I cried, “out of the water”—for we still had an angry sea-serpent to contend with.

Land, at least, was not far away. To the left of the tunnel’s exit there was a gentle enough slope that we might ascend it. Suhail and I clawed our way out of the water, scraping our palms, for what lay before us was a coral face rather than a kindly beach. Plants had secured a footing on it in places, but this was not the volcanic terrain I was accustomed to, which told me I was not on Keonga. We had, without meaning to, violated the edict restricting us to that island. But which island were we on?

Still breathing hard, I surveyed our place of landing. The coral stretched above the waves to either side of us, a narrow and barren ring enclosing a lagoon scarcely deep enough for the serpent to swim in. (It was still thrashing about, looking for the creatures that had so vexed it.) Within the ring rose the more familiar shape of a volcano’s mass, badly gouged where landslides had sent its matter into the sea. It was not a large island, forming a green spot in the midst of its encircling coral—like the pupil of an eye.

The words I said then are not fit to print.

Suhail whirled in alarm. “What? What is it?” He looked about as if expecting the serpent to have climbed up on land after us.

With a laugh that sounded half-hysterical even to my own ears, I said, “We are on Rahuahane.”

The island did not look especially ill-omened. The waters of the lagoon were bright and clear where the sea-serpent had not disturbed them. Birds fluttered above the trees. The only ominous note was the total lack of human habitation—that, and the awareness of what our Keongan hosts might do when we returned.

If we returned. Looking the other way, I saw the sprawling mass of Keonga. It did not seem so very far away; we were close enough to make out the canoes, searching for us among the rocks that dotted the sea between the islands. My hand shot out, as if of its own accord, to seize Suhail’s shoulder, dragging him down until we both lay flat on the rough coral.

His dark eyes met mine. “What is it?” he whispered.

“The Keongans,” I said. “We are not supposed to be off the island; that is bad enough. But this island is tapu to everyone. If they see us here…”

He did not need me to say more. Suhail closed his eyes and murmured something I think was an Akhian curse. Then he crawled forward until he reached a point where he could study our position.

“Can we swim back to Keonga?” I asked. It was hard to make myself speak in a normal voice, even though I knew my voice would not carry to the men in the canoes. Sound may travel far over water, but they were windward of us.

“Not a chance,” Suhail said, without needing to pause for thought. “The current flows against us; that is why the serpent came this way. I am not sure I could reach Keonga—certainly not without rest. And we are both bleeding.”

My hands and knees were cut from the scales, as was my shoulder from where the serpent had nearly scraped me off on its passage through the coral ring. There were sharks in the waters here; we had both seen them. They did not come near the sea-serpents, but two humans on their own would be easy prey.

My heart was heavy in my chest. “Then we have no choice. We will have to signal the canoes, and hope for the best.”

“Perhaps not,” Suhail said.

He was looking the other way, toward Keonga’s neighbour Lahana. To my eye it lay farther off than Keonga… but given what he had said about the current, it might in truth be the easier target. Even so, the distance was daunting.

“Yes,” he said, when I mentioned this to him. “We would have to wait until our cuts stop bleeding. And we might fare better if we had something buoyant to cling to—even if it is just a branch.” Suhail curved his body on the stone until he could look directly at me. “But we do not know how long they will search for us. If we wait, we may lose any hope of rescue.”

I laid my forehead against the warm coral, trying to think. “They will not come here regardless. This reef is considered part of the island; they will not approach it. If we want rescue, we will have to swim out between the islands and hope to be spotted. Then we will have to pray they do not kill us for having been on Rahuahane, or simply for having left Keonga.” Not to mention praying that the sharks did not get us, or the serpents.

That thought gave me a new idea, but it was dashed an instant later. The lagoon behind us was quiet once more; the serpent that had brought us here was gone. Even had I been willing to risk mounting one again and steering it back through the underwater tunnel, there was no beast here that might carry us back to safety.

Which left us with only one real option. “We will try for Lahana,” Suhail said.

I crawled down the coral until I was concealed enough that I could sit up. This put me facing the central mass of Rahuahane, idyllic in the tropical sun.

Heali’i had said the serpents laid their eggs here.

And, as I had thought before, the possibility of impending death was no reason to cease being a naturalist.

“Before we go,” I said to Suhail, “might we look around a bit?”

With no serpent troubling the waters, it was an easy swim across the lagoon to the main body of the island. Even so, my arms were trembling with exhaustion by the time I reached the shore. Suhail knocked down some unripe cocoanuts and broke them open against a stone; we gulped the water inside with no attempt at delicacy. Our wild ride through the sea had left me parched.

After we were sated, he raised a curious eyebrow at me. “What precisely is the story of this island?”

He had heard fragments, but not the full account. I related to him what Heali’i had said, the tale of the ancient naka’i monsters and the hero who turned them to stone. “I wonder,” I began, and then stopped—for I had not told Suhail about dragonbone preservation. He had seen the fragments I gathered on Homa’apia, but I had taken care not to draw attention to them; likely he thought them in the process of decay. I could not tell him that I wondered whether more preserved skeletons might be found on this island.

Fortunately, Suhail took my aborted sentence in a different direction. “Whether there might be ruins? It does not sound all that different from the Book of Tyrants. And although there are no great cities here, there might be some smaller remains.”

Our shared intellectual enthusiasm restored some vitality to my body. I smiled at him and said, “Shall we go look?”

I soon had cause to be glad that I had gone barefoot so often in camp. Without that conditioning, my feet would not have fared well. Suhail and I followed the shore to begin with, but the sand here was littered with small, sharp bits of detritus. Even with calluses to protect me, I was forever stopping to pick something out of my skin or from between my toes.

“They are not amphibian, are they?” Suhail asked.

“Not that we know. They breathe air, but show no adaptation for land, and are likely too large regardless. I expect the eggs are in the water.” I shaded my eyes with one hand, trying to see any sign of them below the bright surface. I had removed my hat and kerchief before diving into the water, and my cropped hair was stiff with salt.

Suhail paused and craned his neck. “If I climb a tree, I might have a better view.”

He was not so skilled a climber as the locals. They are accustomed from childhood to swarming up palm trees with nothing more than their hands and feet to aid them. Suhail’s hands, while strong, were not so callused, and his feet took many splinters in this endeavour. But he made no complaint as he climbed, and after a few minutes he achieved a good vantage. I waited below, trying not to fidget with impatience, to hear his report.

“I think I see something that way,” he said at last, sparing one hand to point in the direction we had been circling.

Once back on the sand and relatively clear of splinters, he dusted himself off and followed me around the beach. Mindful of the time, I tried to move quickly; no one would believe we had not been on Rahuahane if we ended up spending the whole day here. I reached the relevant curve of beach before Suhail did and waded out into the water to see.

There were indeed clutches of sea-serpent eggs, in water so shallow I wondered how the creatures avoided fatally beaching themselves. They were half-buried in the sand and almost gelatinous to the touch; the material was partially translucent, so that I could make out the faintest outline of the embryo inside. Had I not assumed that removing an egg from water would abort it, I would have tried to carry one home with me, and never mind the question of how I would bring it along on our intended swim to Lahana.

I dove again and again to study these, while Suhail kept watch from the beach. Finally I surfaced, intending to offer a change of duties; he was not a dragon naturalist, but I thought he might enjoy seeing the eggs.

The words caught in my throat. I had noticed when I came to the beach that a thin stream of water ran through the sand, but had paid little heed to its source. From out here, though, I could see that it poured out of an opening that looked a great deal like a lava tube. The tunnel on Keonga had been beautifully carved; might the inhabitants of this island, whoever they were, have done the same?

“We should look for something to use for flotation,” Suhail called out as I came back to shore.

“You are right,” I said. “But there is something we may want to examine first.”

He was not difficult to persuade. (In fact, I do not recall applying any persuasion at all, apart from the bare description of what I had seen: that is the kind of man I was stranded with.) We picked our way up from the beach to the mouth of the tunnel, which was indeed a lava tube, though much more clogged with dirt and plant matter than its Keongan counterpart.

Suhail examined the walls closely, even running his hands over them to see if his fingertips might detect patterns that escaped his eyes, but found nothing. I, in the meanwhile, had been peering up the tunnel. We had no torches, nor any means of making fire, but I thought I saw a faint light in the distance. “We might go a little way in,” I said to Suhail. “Just to see.” And again he agreed.

I once answered a particularly cockle-headed question about how I conducted my research by saying, “I do one thing after another.” However malapert that response was at the time, there is truth in it. Many of my discoveries have been made by doing one thing after another. Each step leads to the next, and sometimes there is virtue in not allowing common sense to call you back.

The tunnel was narrow and difficult to navigate in places, for repeated subsidences of the ground had broken the ceiling. The light I had seen proved to come from one such opening, but by the time Suhail and I reached it, we could see more light ahead. So we continued on, and when we emerged from the tunnel at last, we found ourselves in a place of wonder.

It was no natural volcanic formation; a glance was enough to tell me that. A hollow may have existed in the volcano’s side, but hands and tools had carved it into more regular shape, creating a chamber walled off from everything around it. Only a collapse in the ceiling above, like the oculus of a dome, permitted a glimpse of the sky. With the sun’s light slanting down, the chamber seemed an enchanted place.

There could be no question now as to whether anyone had lived on Rahuahane. The statues around the chamber’s edge proclaimed it. Badly weathered as they were, with some of them fallen to stretch in pieces across the ground, the site was unmistakably Draconean.

Suhail sank to his knees, as if he did not want to spare even the smallest fraction of his attention for the task of remaining on his feet. He stared in awe at our discovery, lips moving soundlessly in something that might have been a prayer—or notes on what he observed.

Strange though it may seem, my own reverence was mixed with disappointment. I had, without realizing it, fixed my hopes upon the notion that the “people turned to stone” were preserved draconic skeletons. Instead this discovery was Suhail’s: a hitherto unknown Draconean ruin, undoubtedly of great archaeological interest, but holding little relevance for natural history.

I could not remain disappointed for long, though—not in that place. It reminded me of the waterfall island in the Great Cataract of Mouleen, especially where lianas hung in a curtain from the oculus above and dripped the traces of rainwater on the ruins below. Shrouded in shadow, lichen, and vines, the statues seemed to hold terrible power. I was not surprised the Keongans held this place in dread. I cursed the circumstances that had prevented me from bringing a notebook along: any rendering I made of this scene would have to be done after the fact.

With that goal in mind, I set myself to observing every detail and recording it in my memory. So absorbed was I in this task that I jumped when Suhail spoke. “I have never heard of anything like this before,” he whispered.

“The statues look much like the others I have seen,” I said, gesturing at them.

“To a point, yes—but this chamber? They did not build in caves. And the statues…” He leapt atop a block of stone too deeply buried for me to tell whether it was natural or man-made. “I have seen fragments like them, but little that was intact.” He whirled, gazing upon me with a look of absolute rapture. “This is the discovery of a lifetime!”

I could not help but laugh at his delight. “I thought your interest was in the smaller things, sir. The lives of the ordinary people, the evidence of day-to-day existence—”

His answering laugh rang off the walls. “Yes, yes. But I would have a heart of stone if I were not moved by this!”

Suhail bounded over to study one of the fallen statues, dragging at the plant matter veiling its head to see if he could uncover the face. I picked my way with greater care around the chamber in the other direction, wincing whenever I put my bare foot down atop a hazard. There seemed to be a kind of broad, shallow pit in the floor on the far side, and I wanted to see what it contained.

When I finally saw, I did not care that something was stabbing me quite painfully in the foot. I stood there with a splinter of wood embedded in my sole, unable to believe my eyes.

Earthquakes had shifted them from their places; rain and the accumulation of clutter inside this chamber had choked the gaps between them. But for all of that, the shapes that lay within the pit were unmistakably the rounded forms of eggs.

I staggered forward, unsteady as much because of my shock as because of the splinter in my foot. Now it was my turn to fall to my knees and dig into the soil, trying to free one of the eggs from its bed.

It was surprisingly heavy and utterly hard to the touch. That was how the eggs had survived: they were fossilized, turned from organic matter to a kind of stone. I wondered what had transmuted them—some process akin to that which preserved dragonbone? And what species of dragon had laid them? They were not sea-serpent eggs; of that much I was sure. Some amphibian or terrestrial creature had produced these, one much larger than a fire-lizard. A dragon of some kind unknown in the Puian islands today… my breath stopped at the very thought.

Suhail was calling my name, but I could not find my tongue to answer. All disappointment had flown. There was enough here to make an academic reputation for both of us.

He came to see what had so entranced me, and fell silent at the sight. “It is proof,” I said reverently. “These eggs were not laid here by accident, by some opportunistic creature that found a safe hatching ground. The Draconeans placed them here. They did tame dragons—tame them, and breed them.” Even domesticate them? I could hardly begin to guess.

“It was a theory,” Suhail said, his voice hardly louder than my own. “That the statues we find now, the broken fragments I told you of, depicted fertility gods. Or guardians of the young—we are not sure. Were not.”

My gaze drifted across the array of stone eggs, abandoned here by their breeders. What calamity had forced the Draconeans to flee? Even if the seas had risen, as Suhail argued, they had not done so over the course of three days. Why did the people of this island not take their incubating dragons with them?

“The eggs must not have been viable,” I said out loud. “Otherwise they would have hatched long before they could be fossilized. But why so many? What happened?”

I picked the shard of wood from my foot and rose to search the pit. Many of the eggs were three-quarters buried and hard to dislodge from their places, but after a minute or so of searching, I found what I was looking for: an egg which had been smashed by a falling piece of stone, affording me a view of its interior. I tore my nail pulling it free, turned it over—and froze.

Even crusted with dirt, the inner stone glimmered. A dozen different colours danced beneath my trembling wrist as I used my sleeve to wipe it clean. I had never seen—never imagined—a piece even half so large; its light was dimmed by the sheer bulk and the dark backing of the shell behind. But there was no question in my mind as to what I held.

“Suhail,” I whispered.

He was at my side in a moment, and stopped dead when I held the broken egg out to him. “Is that—it cannot be—”

“The albumen of the egg,” I said. “Petrified. That is what firestone is.”

We had known for centuries that firestones were often associated with Draconean ruins… but scholars had always assumed that was because the lords of that ancient civilization had prized them. Their rarity and the lack of any natural source for them was explained away by the supposition that there was only one mine, or very few, and that its location had been lost or exhausted in prehistory. The closest thing to a “vein” of firestone anyone had ever found was a cache buried in the dirt, like the one we discovered in Vystrana.

Why had no one ever found one intact before? Time and weathering were not enough to explain it. A great many eggs must have been petrified, to create the world’s supply of firestone—petrified, and then smashed. As if by deliberate action.

I cannot recall how many of those thoughts came from my mouth while I stood there in the egg pit, how many came from Suhail, and how many we pieced together later on. Certainly we did not sort out everything there was to be known. That would require time and further discoveries. But that afternoon, on the cursed island of Rahuahane—the place where the naka’i had been turned to stone—I took hold of one end of a thread, and did not stop pulling until years later, when at last I had the whole of it in my grasp.

We dug out the remainder of the broken egg, and I brushed my finger over flaws within the firestone. “The embryonic skeleton,” I said. “If we were very careful in carving apart one of the intact eggs, we might see what kind of dragons they were breeding.”

“It will not be easy to carry back,” Suhail warned me.

“Would you have me leave them all here? I cannot be sure of ever visiting this island again.” I could not even be sure of surviving my return from it.

Suhail hesitated, torn between pragmatism and his own intellectual curiosity. Then he nodded. “Choose a small one, if you can. We will find a way.”

I took the smallest egg I thought had any hope of a recoverable skeleton. Even that would soon be a significant burden: it was fifteen centimeters long, and heavy to match (though firestone, fortunately, is among the lighter gems). Suhail tore his shirt to make a sling and bound the result around his body. I begged his pardon for the encumbrance, but he waved my apology away. We both knew he was by far the stronger swimmer of us two; if I was to have any hope of reaching Lahana, I could not be carrying a millstone around my neck.

We were both lost in thought as we made our way back through the lava tube toward the beach, variously pondering what we had seen, and what we must now face. This saved our lives: had we been chattering as we went, we would have been discovered and very likely killed.

Suhail was ahead of me. He stopped abruptly, and I almost ran into his back. “What—” I began.

I got no further than that one word. Clapping one hand over my mouth, Suhail seized me and pressed me against the side of the tunnel, behind a branch jammed there by some long-ago flood.

Through that imperfect cover, I could still see glimpses of the tunnel’s mouth. A shadow was moving out there—something too large to be a bird. And then I heard a voice.

It spoke neither Scirling nor Keongan; that was all the sense my disoriented mind could make of it. Then the tunnel mouth darkened as someone stood in front of it and crouched to look within.

Only the dimness of the tunnel and Suhail’s quick thinking kept us from discovery. I did not so much as dare to breathe, and squeezed my eyes shut lest their whiteness give me away. I held myself utterly still against the stone, my mind racing through a useless catalogue of everything that might be visible, about which I could do nothing now. My clothing? Usefully drab, and darkened by the seawater that had soaked it not long ago. My skin? Browned by the sun, though still far paler than Suhail’s; I prayed it was very dirty from our passage through this tunnel. I wore no jewelry of any kind, and my eyes were shut. It would have to do.

But with my eyes closed, I could not see what the man at the tunnel mouth was doing, and ignorance made the tension worse. I heard a crack as he stepped on a branch, and wished I could melt into the stone. If he entered the lava tube…

He did not. He called out to someone else, sounding annoyed, and then moved away. And as he went, I recognized the language, though I did not understand a word.

It was Yelangese.

We remained there until they were gone, and for several minutes afterward. Propriety had long since been flung to the wind, and I took comfort in the solidity of Suhail’s body against mine. But we could not stay there forever. Eventually he stepped back, and we stared wide-eyed at one another in the dim light.

“Could you understand them?” I whispered.

He nodded. “They are soldiers. On their way back to camp.”

The word jolted me like a fire-lizard’s spark. Yelangese soldiers, on Rahuahane. More than two of them, from the sound of it. How on earth had they gotten here without anyone seeing? Fewer people lived on the leeward sides of Keonga and Lahana, but “fewer” was not the same as “none.” I did not think even a single Yelangese vessel could have come in secret—not unless they came at night. In which case they were exceedingly lucky, for the reefs should have torn the bottom out of their ship.

Oddly, these pragmatic thoughts gave me strength, even as they frightened me. A part of me had been dreading the perilous swim across to Lahana. Having something else to focus on—anything else, even so ominous a thing as this—put a bit of steel back in my spine. “We must learn how many there are, and what they are planning.”

Suhail stared at me as if I had gone mad. “You want to go spy on soldiers?”

“If they are preparing for an invasion—” I stopped myself, shaking my head. “There cannot be that many of them yet; the Keongans would have seen. So these are scouts, perhaps. They may have a boat we can steal, or at least sabotage. And even if we cannot, the intelligence we might bring back to the islanders could make all the difference in the world.”

He had not ceased to stare. “I cannot tell if this is courage or foolhardiness.”

“They are not so very far apart,” I said dryly. “It is both, I imagine, and experience as well. I have found myself between an invading army and its target before. This time, at least, I am not a prisoner.” At least I was not yet. I hoped very much to remain that way.

By the look on Suhail’s face, someone—certainly not I—had told him a version of what occurred in Eriga. He tipped his head back, as if looking through the stone to heaven for aid. “I will go and look. You must swim for Lahana; that way if I am caught, the islanders at least know the Yelangese are here.”

“I will never make that crossing on my own, and we both know it. If we are to divide our efforts, then I will spy on the soldiers, and you will swim for Lahana.”

It was a sensible plan, I thought, but I also knew Suhail would never accept it. Anyone caught by the Yelangese would likely be taken prisoner, and he could not abandon a lady to that risk. He extracted a promise that, if we were seen, I would immediately run for safety, and swim for Lahana as soon as I could. This I gave; and so we went after the soldiers.

They were not particularly hard to find. Clearly they had scouted the island and found it abandoned; perhaps they even knew the reputation of Rahuahane. Knowing themselves to be alone, the men we followed made little effort to hide their trail, and their compatriots practiced no concealment at all.

When we heard voices ahead, Suhail and I sought a vantage point up the slope. This involved a good deal of belly crawling (I was extremely glad to be in trousers) and some swallowing of curses as my scale-cut knees were pressed into the dirt. Ahead of me Suhail had stopped; by this I knew he could see the camp, and thought he was so still only to keep the Yelangese from seeing him.

When at last I reached his side, though, I discovered a great deal more.

The Yelangese ship towered over their camp, stretching the full length of the curving beach. A net of ropes caged an enormous balloon that swayed gently in the wind. Below this hung a propeller and a long, narrow craft—and it was the sight of that craft, rather than the ship itself, that stopped my breath in my throat.

Lashings and tarpaulins obscured the shapes, but not enough. The structure beneath the balloon was unmistakably made from bones.

The Yelangese had made a caeliger.

And they had made it out of dragonbone.

SEVENTEEN

“That is how they got here in secret, without striking the reefs,” Suhail whispered to me, not taking his eyes off the camp. “They flew.”

He sounded impressed. I could only feel sick. There had been attempts to build caeligers before; I knew that from Natalie Oscott, though I did not share her interest and therefore remembered little of the specifics. Most of them had foundered on the problem of weight: the lifting methods available to us at the time were relatively weak, and so the burden of the internal framework, the machinery, and the gondola below had limited their ranges quite sharply.

Dragonbone offered the twin advantages of great strength and minimal weight. With it, caeligers could fly much greater distances. I had always known that society would find uses for dragonbone once they knew it could be preserved—and had myself once used the skeleton of a savannah snake to construct a makeshift glider—but I had not anticipated this.

It was to build these caeligers that the dragons of Yelang were being slaughtered.

My eye could not help but try to identify the bones. The long ones had been employed in greatest number, of course, with wires and lashings to hold them together in a framework, but someone had been quite clever in their use of the smaller and more irregular pieces. I saw vertebrae at corners, bone slices forming walls. The caeliger would have looked ominous to me regardless, owing to the circumstances, but the materials of its construction made it outright gruesome. And yet there was a morbid beauty to it; like the great ossuary of Kostratzy, which has been decorated with the bones of deceased villagers, this vessel transformed death into a kind of art.

Suhail’s attention had been on the camp and the Yelangese soldiers, who numbered four. When his gaze returned to the caeliger, he frowned. “What is that made of?”

“Bone,” I said. “I will explain later.”

A resolve had formed in me, as strong as the bones of those slaughtered dragons, that I would turn this discovery against its discoverers. I now knew, or at least guessed, the identity of that shape I had seen out at sea, the day the fleet arrived from Raengaui. And if the caeliger was capable of flying such a distance, I could not leave it in their hands.

I turned my head and regarded Suhail fiercely. “Can we steal that ship?”

His eyes went wide. “Can we get ourselves on board? Very likely. Can we move it once we do? Perhaps. Can we take it where we want to go?” His breath hissed out. “I have flown in a balloon before, but that is no simple balloon.”

It was still more experience than I had. My only aerial adventure had been in a glider, and I had crashed. “We must try,” I whispered. “It cannot be any more hazardous than attempting to swim to Lahana. And if we deprive them of their ship, we may well prevent whatever they are here to do.” If we could not steal it, I was determined to sabotage it somehow.

We crept down and around the perimeter of their camp until we were as close as we could get to the ship without revealing ourselves. I blessed the technical considerations that limited the crew to four rather small men, and the cursed reputation of Rahuahane that meant they did not have to post a guard. Otherwise Suhail and I would not have stood a chance.

They were settling in for their meal, cooked over a well-sheltered fire. Suhail’s brows knit as he watched them—no, I realized, as he listened. “What are they saying?” I asked, scarcely doing more than mouth the words.

“It sounds as if they are looking for someone,” he murmured back.

Waikango, I thought. The king of Raengaui, whom the Yelangese called a pirate, fearing his growing power. Had he escaped captivity? His cousin was married to the king here; he might take refuge with her, thinking the Yelangese would not look for him in the Keongan Islands. Perhaps the foreign canoes I had seen had been carrying an important passenger.

Suhail went on, sounding puzzled. “They are discussing how best to get over to the other islands in secret to search for.…”

I waited, but he did not finish the sentence. Finally I nudged him. Suhail looked at me, shaking his head minutely. “Her,” he said. “They are looking for a woman.”

Only with great effort did I stifle my exclamation of surprise. “Are you certain?” I whispered.

He nodded. I tried to think of what woman could possibly merit a Yelangese caeliger looking for her in secret—and then clutched at the palm tree concealing me as one possibility suggested itself.

It was mad. They had deported me from Yelang, and I had gone. I knew enough now to speculate that this caeliger was the reason for my deportation; they did not want me investigating where the dragon bones were going and uncovering their new innovation. But why pursue me to Keonga? No, it was even madder than that; no one knew I was in the Keongan Islands. It was sheer chance that the storm had blown us here. The only way anyone could find me was if they went through the Broken Sea with a fine-toothed comb. Why on earth would the Yelangese trouble to do that—and send in pursuit the very thing they wanted to keep secret from me?

That was not a question I could answer while hiding on the edge of a tropical beach, waiting to steal a caeliger. Nor could I explain my suspicions to Suhail. I shook off the matter (or tried to, with limited success) and addressed myself to that task once more. “Should we wait until dark?” I asked him.

Suhail shook his head. “I would not be able to see the controls. The sooner we go, the better.”

We did not bother with a diversion. Any such thing would have only roused the Yelangese to alertness, making it likely they would respond with much greater speed once they realized we were stealing the ship. Our plan was quite simple: we went down to the water’s edge, out of sight of the men, and swam out into the lagoon. Then we swam around and back in, keeping the ship itself between us and the soldiers at their supper. The rushing of the waves covered what little noise we made. Then it was a quick dash across the sand to the caeliger itself.

The sides of the gondola were high enough to conceal us if we crouched. I stayed low while Suhail oriented himself. At least he could read the Yelangese script on the controls, which I could not. I diverted myself by examining the gondola, noting how the floor was a taut mosaic of scapulae wired together. At least the Yelangese were not squandering carcasses needlessly.

Then Suhail tapped my shoulder. He gave me my instructions in mime: I should flip this lever when he signaled, spin that wheel counter-clockwise, and then man a crank with every ounce of strength in my body. I nodded, my heart beating so loud I was certain the soldiers must hear it. This was madness. Madder than hurling myself off a waterfall. Gravity, at least, had no personal animus against me; it had not travelled through the Broken Sea to find me.

Suhail unwrapped a series of small ropes around the edges of the gondola, leaving them only loosely looped about their cleats. Then he took a deep, steadying breath, and yanked them all free.

The caeliger, freed of its ballast, began to rise.

The Yelangese, laughing around their fire, did not immediately notice. I flipped my lever, spun my wheel, then stood to reach for the crank. Once on my feet, I felt terribly exposed. The soldiers were not so careless as to leave their guns lying about; each man had one alongside him, lying in the sand. I could not take my eyes from those, so certain was I that they were soon to be aimed my way.

One of the men’s faces turned upward to the rising caeliger. He stared openmouthed for one long moment; under any other circumstances, it would have been comical. Then he scrambled to his feet, arm outstretched, and began to shout.

Now it was a race. Suhail was doing things behind me; I had no idea what, except that they made an engine grumble to life. I kept labouring over my crank. The propeller began to turn. All of the soldiers were on their feet now, guns in hand. One of them aimed it at me and I flinched, trying to hunch as much of myself as possible behind the dragonbone without stopping my work on the crank.

I could not duck very far, and so I saw one of the other men slap the rifle down, sending its shot cracking well below us. He screamed something at the one who had fired. A third fellow was running down the beach; he took a flying leap off a large stone and tried to seize one of our trailing ropes, but splashed harmlessly into the water. The others were shouting and racing about, but none of them were firing. Why were they not firing?

We were high enough now that they stood little chance of striking us even if they did. “You may stop turning that,” Suhail said breathlessly, and I complied. “Come—hold this for me.”

The wind had caught us now; we were drifting away from Rahuahane. Unfortunately, that meant we were also drifting away from where we wanted to go. The caeliger had a rudder of sorts, attached beneath the balloon, and it was the control for this that I held. The gondola rocked alarmingly as Suhail darted about, attempting to direct us into the wind, toward the inhabited islands.

He found a way. We came about, passing the bulk of Rahuahane’s peak. I drew what felt like my first proper breath in days, and realized that we were flying. It was less personal than my experience in the glider, which had simply been a matter of me and my wings; but it was also more comfortable. In the blazing sunset light, I found myself smiling.

The caeliger settled into its course. Suhail, satisfied with the current state of the engine, untied the egg from around his body and laid it in the bottom of the gondola. Then he stopped, gazing down, not meeting my eyes. “Do you know what they were shouting as we rose?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I said. “I do not speak above twenty words of Yelangese.”

Suhail turned to face me. “They said, ‘It’s her.’”

We stood in silence, except for the growl of the engine and the rush of the wind. I could think of nothing to say. Suhail was looking at me as if he had never seen me before. I felt rather as if I did not know myself.

He asked, “Why would they be looking for you?”

“I do not know,” I said. “I can speculate at bits of it—this ship—when we were in Va Hing, someone arranged to have me deported, I think because they feared I would learn about the caeliger. Caeligers, I should say; I doubt there is only one. But why they would trouble themselves to—” I stopped and peered over the side of the gondola, taking care not to shift the rudder. “Should we be dropping like this?”

Suhail swore. We were losing altitude rapidly; I judged we were no more than a hundred feet above the water now. He began to dart once more about the gondola, but even I could tell his efforts were futile, as much from the brief and frustrated movements of his hands as from the fact that we continued to sink. The waves were quite close now—but so, I realized, was the shore of an island. Not Keonga: I could see its familiar mass off to my right, much too far away. The caeliger, fighting against the wind, had brought us to the neighbouring island of Lahana. The only question was whether we would strike land or sea; for my second flight, like my first, was going to end by crashing.

We braced ourselves against the gondola at the last moment, trusting to the dragonbone and its lashings to protect us. The latter failed in places, though not catastrophically. The balloon, sinking down to strike the gondola, knocked us headlong, and my landing drove all the air from my body; but I suffered nothing worse than a few additions to my assortment of bruises.

Lying there on the bony surface of the gondola’s floor, I found myself laughing. It was born of hysteria, the sudden release of tension. Whatever else lay ahead—and I knew, even then, that our troubles were not done—I was finally back on safe ground.

Or so I thought, for a few, blessed moments.

Shouting drew us both up from where we had fallen. The people of Lahana had not failed to miss the caeliger drifting toward them from the cursed isle. They had enough warning to assemble a force of warriors, who were even now sprinting across the sand to us; and judging by the weapons they held, they were not coming to make certain we were unharmed.

Suhail attempted to put himself between me and them, but the gondola’s open structure doomed him to failure. Large hands reached through and dragged me out, with Suhail following after. “Let us explain,” I cried in Keongan, and heard Suhail doing the same. No one had struck me yet, but neither were they showing much willingness to listen.

Then I heard a high, forceful voice crying, “Leave them alone!”—in Scirling.

Abby Carew was the only woman I had heard speaking my tongue in months, but the voice was not hers. I twisted in my captors’ grasp and saw, to my utter shock, the crowd parting to allow an Anthiopean woman through.

She was tall, though not in comparison to the islanders, and had the carriage of the well-born. Unlike myself, she wore a dress; I thought it had once been moderately fine, but it had clearly seen hard wearing for quite a few days. She pushed through to me and pried the islanders’ hands off me with, as near as I could tell, nothing more than force of will.

This stranger commenced to arguing with the Lahana warriors in their own language, though with an accent that made me suspect she had learned some other dialect first. The thrust of her argument was that Suhail and I had to be questioned, and she was the only one likely to be able to speak with us. From this I guessed that she had not heard us speaking Keongan before she drew near—nor did she have any idea that we had spent nearly two months living on the neighbouring island.

It did not surprise me that she should be ignorant of us. In all that time, I had never imagined a Scirling woman was on Lahana. Now, however, the pieces began to fit together: the injunction against leaving Keonga for the other islands, the Yelangese soldiers looking for a woman. Perhaps it was not me they sought after all, but her. As for why… studying her profile, with its strong jaw and full lips, a terrible suspicion began to grow in my heart.

I looked at the ground and saw that the Keongans were taking care neither to stand on her shadow, nor to allow theirs to fall upon her.

“We have heard of these people,” one of the warriors said, cutting her argument short. He gestured at me. “This is the ke’anaka’i who has been on Keonga—the husband of Liluakame. And this man is one of the other strangers there.”

Naturally they had heard of us. Why should there be so many warriors on the sparsely inhabited leeward side of Lahana, unless they were guarding something—someone—here? Such guards would certainly be kept apprised of important developments in the Keongan archipelago: for example, the shipwreck of a group of foreigners. You are not Yelangese, they had said when we arrived. Are you Scirling? Yes, they had reason to look for my people.

“Please,” I said, in Keongan. The woman looked at me sharply. “We must give you a warning. The Yelangese are attempting to search your islands in secret; we saw them with our own eyes. They are looking for someone.” I carefully did not look at the stranger when I said this, though Suhail was not quite so restrained.

“How do you know this?” one of the warriors demanded.

I chose my words with exquisite care, knowing they might mean the difference between life and death for both Suhail and myself. “We did not leave Keonga intentionally. The warriors there took the two of us out on the water, that we might attempt to ride a sea-serpent. This we succeeded at, but when we finally tumbled from its back, we were in waters far from Keonga, and too far for us to swim home. But we saw the Yelangese on Rahuahane and stole this, their ship, so that we might return and warn you.”

My words set off a flurry of discussion among the warriors, much of it too rapid for me to follow. No one asked whether we had set foot on the cursed island, for which I breathed a sigh of relief. That question would come in time, I was sure… but in the interim, we might have a chance to think of some way to forestall punishment.

For the time being, they were far more concerned with the Yelangese, and what must be done to address that threat. Even with such incentive, none of them were willing to launch their war canoes for Rahuahane, but they took a variety of other precautions: mounting a search in the area for any other Yelangese; sending word to Keonga that two lambs had strayed; warning someone—that last was quickly silenced, with a glance toward us that said it was not for our ears. And, of course, they had to inform their chief. This was not Pa’oarakiki, the man we had dealt with on Keonga, but the chief of Lahana, to whom these warriors answered.

They also locked us up. Not with literal locks; the only metal the islanders have is that which they trade for, and locks are of little practical use in a society like theirs. Some distance down the beach, however, there was a cluster of several huts, over which other warriors stood guard. Suhail was shoved into the largest of these, and I was escorted, with slightly more dignity, to a smaller one. The Scirling woman accompanied me, saying, “You will have to share this with myself and Hannah, but we have it rather better than the men do.”

Unlike the hut in which I had resided since my wedding, this one had closed walls, which made the air within decidedly stuffy. Despite that, the interior was reasonably well appointed by Keongan standards, with soft mats for the floor. Another woman waited there, likewise with a look about her that said she was well-born but somewhat battered by her recent trials. I judged this Hannah to be perhaps a few years older than her companion—though still younger than I—but when the stranger raised a hand to silence her questions, Hannah complied without hesitation.

Which did not mean I was to be spared questions at all. The stranger faced me and said, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

“My name is Isabella Camherst,” I said.

Her brow furrowed delicately. “Camherst. Where have I heard that name?”

“I am a dragon naturalist—”

“Ah,” she said, her expression clearing. “Yes. You were involved with that business in Bayembe.”

The business to which she referred had been bruited about in the gossip-sheets, but I doubted that was where she had heard of me. I wondered: should I speak, or hold my tongue?

I have never been terribly good at holding my tongue.

“Yes, I was,” I said. “Your Highness.”

Hannah came forward a quick step, but was stopped by the other woman’s hand. They both studied me as if I were a new species of insect, which might yet prove to be poisonous. “How did you know?” the princess asked.

“You look rather like your uncle,” I said. “And the Keongans avoided your shadow.”

Princess Miriam: niece to the king, envoy on a diplomatic journey around the world, following an itinerary that included Yelang. It did not begin to explain what she was doing in the Keongan Islands, living as an honoured prisoner, with Yelangese soldiers hunting her in secret… but she, not I, was the one they were searching for. (We did not look so very much alike, but the Yelangese had no reason to expect two Scirling women to be running about where there should not even be one. And they had not gotten a terribly good look at me.)

Sighing, she gestured for me to sit. “Forgive me, but I hoped you had been sent by Admiral Longstead. He is no doubt searching for me.”

“I’m afraid I do not know the admiral, Your Highness.” I spread my hands helplessly. “I truly am a natural historian, travelling the Broken Sea to study dragons. I did not even know you had… gone astray.” I hesitated, then added, “I fear I may have made quite a hash of things. The Yelangese came in the caeliger you saw on the beach. Without it, I am not certain they have any way to send word that you have been found.”

I expected her to chastise me for it, or at best to magnanimously forgive me my error. Instead her jaw set in a firm line. “It is just as well. I should prefer not to be ‘rescued’ by the Yelangese, if I can possibly avoid it.”

The irony scarring that word was unmistakable. “Do you not want their aid?” I asked, astonished. “I know they are not our friends, but if the Keongans are holding you prisoner…”

The princess looked to Hannah, who shook her head as if to say, the choice is yours. I did not keep abreast of Society’s doings; I could not for the life of me remember who Hannah might be, as I knew only people’s titles, not their given names. Some peeress, undoubtedly, serving as companion to the princess. (I later learned she was the Countess of Astonby.)

“It has all gone rather sideways,” the princess said at last. “We are, as you say, not friends with Yelang, and one of my duties on this voyage was to gather information that would assist my uncle and his ministers in determining how eager we should be to mend that.”

“You are a spy!” I exclaimed—which is yet another demonstration of why I have refused all offers of a diplomatic post, no matter where it is the Crown offers to send me.

Her eyebrows rose. “Not a spy, Mrs. Camherst. But I had made arrangements to call at a few ports that were not on my official itinerary. One of these was Lu’aka, on the island of Raengaui.”

“To meet with Waikango,” I said, beginning to understand. “Are we intending to ally with him? No, that is a foolish question; he has been captured.”

“A fact we did not discover until we reached the Broken Sea,” the princess said. “After some debate with Captain Emery, I settled on visiting Raengaui regardless. He is by far the strongest candidate in the region for opposing Yelangese expansion, but that does not mean he is the only one. At the very least, it would be worth our while to know who might lead the islanders in his absence—or whether the coalition he has built will collapse, now that he is a prisoner. As for an alliance…”

She trailed off, studying me. I did not know what she was looking for; all I could do was sit quietly, attempting to seem intelligent and trustworthy.

“I cannot say whether the Scirling crown will involve itself or not,” she said at last. “That decision has not been made.”

But it was clearly a possibility. Would we offer diplomatic recognition, I wondered, or military aid? We had tried the latter in Bayembe, and while my actions had inadvertently scuttled our plans there, that did not mean we would not try it elsewhere. An outpost like Point Miriam—named for the very princess now seated across from me—would be a nice foothold for Scirling dominance of trade through the Broken Sea, blocking the Yelangese and potentially even challenging the Heuvaarse.

I had the wit not to say that out loud, at least. “So that is why you do not want the Yelangese to rescue you. It would give them a good deal of bargaining power in their dealings with Scirland. But why did the islanders take you prisoner?”

Hannah made a noise that suggested she had not forgiven that outrage, and never would. The princess only sighed. “They saw an opportunity, and seized it. When I said Scirland might consider offering aid, they asked for us to raid Houtiong and free Waikango. I refused, naturally—though I did say that we might eventually be able to bring diplomatic pressure to bear on the matter. Such distant promises were hardly persuasive, I’m afraid… and so they took all of us prisoner, in the hopes that they might be able to trade me to the Yelangese in exchange for their captured leader.”

A princess in the hand was worth two promises of diplomatic aid in the bush, I supposed. There was no guarantee she could have convinced her uncle and his ministers—let alone the Synedrion—to intervene on Waikango’s behalf. And even if she had, it would have taken a year, two years, five. Such things rarely moved quickly, when it was some other land’s dignitary languishing in prison. “I suppose they hid you here because they knew the Yelangese would look for you in the Raengaui Islands.”

“Yelang and Scirland both,” she said. “I cannot imagine that Admiral Longstead sat idly by when Captain Emery’s ship failed to return to the fleet as expected.”

It was inevitable, then, that the search would eventually reach even the relatively inaccessible waters of Keonga. I supposed the only reason they had not done so sooner was that they did not want to advertise to the world that Princess Miriam had gone missing. But it was a race to see who could find her first, Yelang or Scirland… and at the moment, Yelang had the edge.

Her thoughts tended in the same direction as mine. “What of you? Is there any way you could get a message out to the fleet?”

“I fear not, Your Highness,” I said glumly, and told her of the Basilisk’s injured state. Aekinitos was likely mad enough to steal a Keongan canoe and attempt sailing it back to more familiar waters, but he was not a Scirling subject. I did not think he would be eager to risk himself in that fashion—at least, not without a sizable reward. Before I could decide whether to mention that to the princess, however, another possibility came to me, this one even madder than the last.

She arrived at the same thought even as I did. “The caeliger,” we said in unison.

“Suhail and I did not have very much luck with it,” I warned her. “Perhaps if he had more time to study the controls… but time is not a luxury we are likely to have.”

“Who is this Suhail?” she asked me. “An Akhian, clearly—but how did he come to be here?”

I gave her a précis of my dealings with Suhail, from our partnership in Namiquitlan to our chance encounter in Seungdal, and all that had followed after. “Do you trust him?” the princess asked when I was done.

“Yes,” I said. The word came forth without any need for my brain to approve it first. “I do not know his lineage, but he is a gentleman in every other sense of the word, and very brave. I am certain he will help us if he can.”

Hannah looked unconvinced. “Miriam, to reveal your identity to a foreigner…”

“The alternative is to remain a prisoner, or to risk the Yelangese using me as political leverage. But it is a moot point if escape is impossible regardless.” Miriam focused her attention on me once more. “Tell me what you can of this caeliger.”

Under other circumstances—when I was rested, perhaps, or at least had not been subjected to one of the more harrowing days of my life—I might have been able to make a more considered decision as to what I should communicate to the princess, and what might best be retained as a secret. But I was not rested, and my day had been harrowing; and so I sat there in that small, airless room and told her very nearly everything.

The only reason “very nearly” did not become “all” was because the princess remained attentive enough to draw us back to the purpose when I strayed too far into digression. She did not hear the tale of how Jacob and I had discovered the secret of natural dragonbone preservation, nor much of what had transpired in Vystrana. But I told her of Frederick Kemble, the chemist I had hired to continue Gaetano Rossi’s research; of the break-in, which I believed to have been orchestrated by the Marquess of Canlan; of the Va Ren Shipping Assocation, which was now profiting from that research. And I told her of the recent interest in the hunting of dragons, which seemed to have military backing.

“Then they likely have more than one of these,” she said. I knew from her quiet tone that I had just added another few kilograms to the burden of her worries. “It seems, Mrs. Camherst, that you also have a pressing need to speak with the admiral. He must know of this at once.”

I did not contradict her, but neither did I share her enthusiasm for the notion. While it was true that Scirland needed to be apprised of this Yelangese innovation, I did not much relish the prospect of explaining dragonbone preservation to men who were likely to immediately begin planning how to exploit it for their own benefit.

Regardless, it was true that escape needed to happen, for the princess’ sake if not my own. And limited although its range must be, the caeliger seemed our best prospect for doing that.

If escape were to happen at all, it must happen soon. The Scirling delegation had been kept in friendly captivity, insofar as such a thing is possible; the Keongans felt no animosity toward the princess or her people. They only held her because she was their best bargaining chip for getting Waikango back. House arrest had been imposed when the warriors saw the caeliger approaching, because they did not know what it portended, and it continued now because of the Yelangese. “They were reluctant to lay hands directly on me,” Miriam said, when I asked how she had gotten free earlier. The rest of the time, the Scirlings were permitted to move about in small groups—albeit under guard to ensure that no one attempted to slip away into the interior of Lahana.

“There has been no need to keep us under closer watch,” Hannah said. “What good would it do for the men to overpower the guards? They put us on this side of the island because there are so few settlements here, and what few are nearby have had their canoes taken away. We could escape this location, but we would still have no way off the island. They would find and stop us well before we could steal long-distance vessels from anywhere else.”

The caeliger, of course, changed that. Our bad landing would not have inspired the Keongans to believe it was capable of travelling very far, but even if they did not think that craft a danger, the Yelangese most certainly were. Messengers had been sent; soon additional warriors would come and take the princess to a more secure location.

It could not spirit us all to safety, though. Only a few could go; the question was which few those should be.

From the start of her captivity, the princess had insisted upon sharing meals with the rest of her crew. This violated the tapu which said men and women should eat separately, but Miriam had thought it wise to preserve opportunities for conversation with Captain Emery, precisely for eventualities such as this one. The Keongans permitted no fire that evening, but did allow us out of our huts to share a cold meal of cocoanut meat, bananas, and taro paste, which gave us a chance to speak.

The men had spent their time questioning Suhail, much as Miriam had questioned me, and had unsurprisingly lit upon a very similar notion. Under the guise of asking one another to pass platters of food, Hannah and the captain arranged the plan. Four would go in the caeliger: Suhail, for his previous experience and knowledge of hot air balloons; one Lieutenant Handeson, who knew balloons and engines both; the princess; and myself.

I would have argued this last point if I could have. The full range of the caeliger was unknown, but would certainly be improved the less weight it carried. My presence might mean the difference between Princess Miriam reaching Kapa Hoa (which was the closest island outside the archipelago) and Her Highness drowning in the sea. But she considered it vital that my knowledge of the Yelangese caeligers be shared as soon as possible; and so I must go. I could not dispute it too strenuously, not without the Keongans noticing something amiss. They did not speak Scirling, but they could recognize the sound of an argument.

“They are good people,” the princess said to me quietly, as we waited for the moment to strike. It must come soon; the island was falling into dusk, and soon there would not be enough light to see the caeliger’s controls. “I do not applaud their actions, of course—they should not have taken me prisoner. But I have a good deal of sympathy for their position. By all accounts, Waikango is not only a gifted war-leader—a gifted king—but a just and decent man. I would rather have him for an ally than the Yelangese emperor.”

I looked at her sidelong. “Do you intend to speak on their behalf, once you have returned? Despite what they have done?”

She gave it due thought. Unlike myself, the princess was a woman who considered everything before she committed to it. “I do,” she said at last. “There must be repercussions for the ones who kidnapped me; we cannot let that go unanswered. But I think the men responsible knew that they would ultimately be punished for what they have done. I am not held in the same esteem as a princess of their own people, but they have violated proper behaviour nonetheless. Such actions have consequences. They accepted those consequences, for the sake of their people.”

Her tone was one of quiet respect. In her shoes, I do not know that I could have been as forgiving. The Labane who took me prisoner in Mouleen were loyal soldiers of their inkosi, and they knew that by venturing into the Green Hell they risked death, but that did not make me any more charitable toward them. Then again, the Labane had not treated me half so kindly as the Keongans had treated Miriam.

The princess caught my gaze and held it. “Remember that,” she said.

Before I could ask her precisely what it was I should remember, the men sprang into action.

It was not an easy fight. The Keongan guards were all large men, and armed; the Scirlings and Suhail were unarmed, and moreover were attempting to avoid killing anyone, on Miriam’s orders. But they also outnumbered the islanders, with so many having been sent away on various tasks. Nor did they have to achieve permanent victory: they only had to occupy the guards sufficiently that we four could run for the caeliger.

We pounded across the sand toward that distant craft, tipped askew on the beach high above the breaking surf. Lieutenant Handeson took quick stock of the machinery and then all but threw two containers at me. “Quick! Fill those. Salt water is not the best, but—” I did not hear the end of his sentence, for Miriam had taken one of the containers, and we were already moving toward the sea.

While the two of us worked, the lieutenant and Suhail banged about the caeliger, cursing steadily. It seemed that something had broken, and must be wedged. “A branch!” Suhail shouted as we returned with water. “About this long—no thicker than my thumb—”

The beach was a bad place to look for branches; every tree in the vicinity was a palm. But Miriam and I ran up the slope and began rooting around in the fallen leaves, trying to find one whose stem was of a suitable size. In the middle distance, the knot of men was still deep in their scuffle around the huts. Someone had begun running toward us—a Keongan, by his size—but the engine of the caeliger was going; as soon as we found a wedge, we might take off and leave him behind. My hand closed on one at last, and I sprinted for the caeliger, calling for the princess to follow me.

From behind me, I heard a cry.

The messengers had gone for reinforcements; now the reinforcements had arrived. Two had come out of the trees, and they must have overcome their reluctance to lay hands on royalty, for they had Miriam in their grasp. I stopped dead in the sand, palm leaf clutched in my hand. I could not possibly free her from them, and if Suhail and the lieutenant came to my aid, the Keongan running toward us would stop the caeliger from taking off.

“Go!” Princess Miriam called, her voice more steady than I would have believed possible. Steady, and commanding. “Go! Find the admiral, and tell him where I am!”

To this day, I do not know if it was obedience or cowardice that turned my feet toward the caeliger. Suhail helped me over the edge; I tumbled to the floor, and a moment later that floor swayed beneath me as we left the beach behind.

EIGHTEEN

“She expected that to happen,” I said dully, staring up at the web of ropes that held the caeliger’s balloon. “She did not think she would get away with us.”

“I think it would be better to say, she planned for the possibility.” Suhail took the palm leaf from me, stripped it, and jammed it in among the recalcitrant machinery.

Lieutenant Handeson helped me to my feet. “She gave the orders ages ago, not long after we were taken. If anybody had a chance to escape, they should go. The Keongans won’t hurt her, and this way, we can send a rescue.”

Whereas if she came with us, they would move heaven and earth to retrieve her. I wondered suddenly if she had ever intended to get on board the caeliger. It would fly farther and faster with only three passengers—and if we were lost at sea, she would not be lost with us. No, I thought, not that last; she had shown no fear of drowning. But our chances were indeed better without her, even if Hannah and Captain Emery would have preferred to have her away from the Keongans at once.

Of course, any rescue would depend upon our speed. The Yelangese did not yet know that the missing princess was on Lahana, but no doubt they would wonder at the failure of their caeliger to return. Furthermore, the Keongans must assume that we would reach other territory and pass word along to our people. They would move Miriam, and soon.

I rose to my feet, moving carefully in the gondola. Dragonbone might be highly resistant to impact, but its light weight made the whole structure feel alarmingly flimsy. “What can I do to help?”

The answer was, very little. Between the two of them, Suhail and Lieutenant Handeson had sorted out the controls; the caeliger did not need three people to operate it. “Ordinarily I would say that flying at night is very hazardous,” the lieutenant said dryly. “But there is nothing out here for us to hit except the sea, and perhaps the occasional gull. So long as we keep a reasonable altitude, we should be fine. You should get some rest, Mrs.…” He trailed off, plainly realizing he had no idea who I was and why I had been included in the escape group.

“Camherst,” I said. We had a brief discussion of our plans; they amounted to “fly toward Kapa Hoa and hope we do not crash before we get there,” which did not leave much to discuss. Then I attempted to bed down, for I was indeed very tired.

There was a straw mat in one end of the gondola that I thought was intended as a place for crewmen to catch naps. When I settled into it, however, I found something else occupying the corner: the petrified egg from Rahuahane. Suhail had untied it from his body while we flew across to Lahana, and it had been overlooked in the crash.

I angled myself to hide the egg from Handeson’s eyes. This, too, was a secret, and one I could yet protect. If the Scirling navy learned there was an enormous cache of firestone on Rahuahane, the princess would not be the only thing they brought home from Keonga. I did not want the island raided for its treasure, and especially not before it could be properly studied.

Fortunately Handeson was busy with Suhail. They seemed quite impressed with the engine, which was, I gathered, a substantial improvement in smallness over the ones to which Handeson was accustomed. I wondered if that, too, had dragonbone components in it. (I later discovered that it did.) I tucked the egg into a coil of rope and then lay before it, hoping I could smuggle it off the caeliger without anyone else seeing. It did not look like firestone—the outer shell was dull rock—but I did not want it to attract any curiosity.

My thoughts would not permit me to rest. It was all too much, and too rapid; our discoveries on Rahuahane had been knocked clean out of my head by the encounter with the princess, let alone my breathless experience riding the sea-serpent. I wanted a moment somewhere quiet to ponder what I had seen, and paper on which to sketch it before the details slipped from my memory. But the gondola of the world’s first truly effective caeliger was not the place for such things, and our flight to obtain a rescue for the king’s niece was not the moment. I lay in the darkness, looking at Suhail’s profile against the brilliant background of the stars, listening to him murmur belated prayers in Akhian. I could not remember the last time I had prayed. I hoped Tom, Jake, and Abby were not too worried for me. Had anyone told them we had been found on Lahana?

And so the hours passed, until dawn came, and with it, sails on the horizon.

I had risen as soon as the light began to grow, having slept only in the most fitful snatches. Suhail had not slept at all, and looked as drawn and weary as I had ever seen him. He and the lieutenant were growing concerned about fuel; the wind was not entirely cooperating in our efforts to reach Kapa Hoa, and their best guess at reading the Yelangese navigational instruments said we were at risk of falling short. It was a pity, I reflected, that no one had thought to make the gondola watertight, for dragonbone floats quite well. Cut away the balloon, and we might have had ourselves a perfectly serviceable canoe—albeit one without a sail or paddles.

Because they were occupied with the caeliger’s machinery, I was the one who first spotted the sails. “Come look,” I said, breaking into their low-voiced discussion. “Are those not ships in the distance?”

They were both at my side in an instant. “They are,” Handeson said, bright with relief. “We’ll have to fly into the wind to get at them, but that’s better than hoping to make Kapa Hoa. Let’s come about.”

The hope of rescue put new life into our limbs. We brought the caeliger about, its propeller beating against the wind, and made our way toward the sails. Now, with the wind in our faces, I felt our speed at last, as I had not when we flew over the featureless nighttime sea. The engine truly was a remarkable achievement, and although the Yelangese had been partly responsible for putting us into our current predicament, I must own that without their engineering, we would not have come out of it alive.

Even with that speed, the sails drew closer but slowly. I went into the prow of the gondola and peered toward them, as if squinting would lessen the distance between us. There seemed to be quite a lot of them—three ships? No, five. Quite a fleet, to be in this part of the Broken Sea. And the shape of their sails was odd, to my Anthiopean eye…

“Suhail,” I said, loudly enough for him to hear. “Lieutenant. I am not a sailor, nor terribly familiar with this part of the world—but I believe that style of sail is common on Yelangese ships, is it not?”

Once again they rushed to my side, studying the ships in tense silence. Then Handeson swore (proving that a man may be both a gentleman and a sailor, but when the spurs bite home, he is more sailor than gentleman). “Those are junk sails, all right. The Yelangese aren’t the only ones who use them, though. Those might be from Seungdal, or—”

Something was bobbing alongside one of the vessels in that little fleet. A large, ellipsoid shape, which did not seem to touch water. At this distance we could not see the gondola below, but it was impossible to mistake for anything but another caeliger.

“It’s the Yelangese,” Suhail said, in that remarkably calm-sounding voice I had come to recognize as a sign of great tension in him. “And they are coming this way.”

The three of us looked at each other. No one had to put the question into words: would we allow ourselves to be taken by the Yelangese, or would we risk death in the open sea?

“Regardless of the princess’ situation,” I said, “they will be exceedingly displeased to know that we have discovered the secret of their caeligers.”

“Discovered, and stolen,” Suhail added.

Handeson swore once more and lunged for the caeliger’s controls.

To this day, I wonder what the Yelangese thought when they saw one of their own caeligers first approach, then turn tail and run. Whatever discussions took place on their decks at the time, however, it did not take them long to correctly interpret the significance of our behaviour. As we put the wind to our backs and began to fly away with all haste, the second caeliger rose majestically into the air and gave chase.

Our lead on them was substantial, but that only benefits the fleeing party if there is somewhere to lose the pursuer. We had only the open sea—not even any cloud cover in which to hide. Moreover, the Yelangese had both fresh supplies of fuel and a vastly superior knowledge of how to operate their craft. It would take them some time to catch us… but catch us they would. It was inevitable, and all three of us knew it.

Our caeliger fled across the waves, with the second one following. We soon lost the Yelangese fleet; it evened the odds, at least, and I had wild visions of a boarding engagement fought high above the sea. (Surely, I reasoned, the Yelangese would not fire guns at us, not when they might puncture the caeliger’s bag and send us crashing into the waves.) An hour passed, perhaps more, with the second craft slowly gaining on us. But before they drew close enough to take action, Suhail cried, “Ahead! Look!”

Once more, there were masts upon the horizon. “More Yelangese?” I said under my breath. They were searching the Broken Sea for the princess, and might well have divided their efforts. If we had indeed found more ships from the empire, it would no longer be a choice between capture and the risk of death: we would have to choose between capture and the certainty of death. Provided, of course, that the former did not lead inevitably to the latter.

Handeson crowed. “No! Square rigs! They’re Anthiopean! And—” He stopped, and seemed to be quite literally holding his breath.

The sails grew larger. There were three ships, grouped in a loose formation, and the men aboard them were scrambling about, clearly alarmed by the two approaching caeligers. I could see them quite well, because our own craft was losing altitude rapidly. Even I could tell that the sounds emerging from its machinery were not encouraging. The sailors appeared to be racing to aim their cannon in our general direction, but they would not need them; we would be coming down even without interference from artillery.

The gunshots I heard, though, came from behind us. It was the Yelangese, firing their rifles at the three of us. We took cover behind the dragonbone walls of the gondola, which began to drop even more precipitously; they had pierced the bag (which may have been their target to begin with), and we were losing air. Then, without warning, their caeliger sheered off, turning back into the wind and heading once more toward their own distant fleet.

Perhaps they hoped we would sink into the sea, leaving no example of a caeliger in foreign hands. As I have said, though, dragonbone floats quite well. “Quick,” I cried, “throw everything overboard that you can”—for if we lightened the gondola by enough, it might stay afloat long enough for that remarkable engine to be retrieved.

We splashed into the waves before we could get very far in shedding ballast, however. The falling bag dragged the gondola onto its side; Suhail and Handeson both leapt clear rather than burden it with their weight. I clung to the bones, because tucked into my arm I had a bundle of fabric that concealed the petrified egg.

“Ahoy the—the wreck,” a voice called from above, in the blessedly familiar accents of the Estershire coast. “Just who the bleeding hell are you?”

We had found the Scirling navy.

They fished us out of the sea, and the caeliger along with us, balloon and all. The latter had not sunk; it proved to have a framework inside it, likewise built of dragonbone, which kept it afloat. I looked grimly at all the bones and half-wished they had all gone to the bottom of the sea. But I had already told the princess about dragonbone, and she had sent me here to tell the admiral; the only way that cat could be stuffed back into its bag was if Miriam were to die. (And I hope I need not say I wished very much for that not to happen.)

Lieutenant Handeson took over in the first instance, saluting with proper naval precision despite looking like a drowned and unshaven rat. His bedraggled state, not to mention the shirtless Akhian and the woman in man’s dress who accompanied him, meant it took a moment for the sailors around us to recognize him; Captain Emery’s ship had been part of this very fleet. Once they realized what they had caught, they immediately began signaling the next closest vessel, which was the Conborough, the admiral’s flagship.

It was no coincidence that we found them where we did. I soon understood that the Scirling officers knew the Yelangese were searching for Miriam, and were attempting to beat those men to their shared quarry. Both groups had gotten far enough in searching the Broken Sea that their thoughts bent to Kapa Hoa, and if they did not find her there, they intended to continue on to Keonga. Given but a little while longer, then, it seemed that rescue might have come to us, without any need to fetch it.

Such a rescue, however, would have arrived ill-informed. And so I soon found myself standing in front of the admiral, still clad in male garments, but these at least dry and in one piece.

Most of Admiral Longstead’s attention was on Lieutenant Handeson, the only member of our little crew who seemed at all reliable. I was after all a woman, and a mildly notorious one at that—yes, he recognized my name—and Suhail was Akhian. But the princess had sent me because I knew about the caeligers, and given that he had just seen a second one fly away with all speed, he needed an explanation. Moreover, I now suspected that Miriam’s words just before the escape had not been mere idle musing. She wanted to be certain I understood her views.

When we had finished telling him our tale, I added, “You may wish to make haste, sir. Not that you would tarry, of course—but I suspect the Yelangese may be making their way to Keonga as we speak.”

He frowned at me. “They were headed for Kapa Hoa, the last we heard.”

“Indeed. But if the caeliger we… commandeered—” Handeson had used that word; it had a better ring than stole. “If it originated with that group of ships, they will know where it had been sent. They will also know, by our decision to flee from them, that there was no longer a Yelangese crew aboard; the fact that we fled toward you, however accidental it was in truth, will suggest that the caeliger was in Scirling hands. They may think the princess was with us. But regardless, they will want to investigate Keonga, and retrieve their men if they can.”

Longstead mulled this over, then shook his head. “You may be right, Mrs. Camherst. It hardly matters, though. We will want to reach Keonga before those island devils move Her Highness elsewhere. I do not fancy starting our hunt anew. The Broken Sea is far too large of a haystack for that.”

His choice of term for the Keongans made me apprehensive. “Sir—I do beg your pardon. But before I left, Her Highness spoke quite a bit about her feelings toward the islanders. She acknowledged that those directly involved in her capture and imprisonment must be punished, but did not want to see retribution visited on all their people. She is quite sympathetic to their cause, even if she deplores their most recent method of fighting for it.”

“I don’t give a damn about their cause, Mrs. Camherst,” the admiral snapped. “I will do whatever it takes to bring Her Highness back to safety.”

“Your pardon, sir, but I am not speaking on my own behalf in saying this—though for my own part, I will add that I have found the Keongans generally to be friendly hosts, and certainly I have more cause to consider them my friends than I do the Yelangese. But I am conveying the princess’ wishes. She would be very displeased if you initiated hostilities with the Keongans.”

Admiral Longstead’s neck reddened. “This is my ship, madam—”

“I do not dispute that. But I believe Her Highness was appointed the senior envoy of this embassy, was she not? Was the secret detour to Raengaui excluded from her brief, or included?”

When the admiral did not answer right away, Handeson murmured, “It was included, ma’am.”

“There you have it,” I said. “If you are attacked, then by all means defend yourselves—though I should hope you would, out of common decency, attempt to limit the carnage to a minimum and move toward peace at the first opportunity. But to strike against the Keongans, without first attempting diplomacy, would be in direct contravention of the wishes of your senior envoy.”

This account of my speech makes me sound quite levelheaded, but the truth is that however moderate my choice of words, my temper was hanging by a rather thin thread. I had sympathy for the admiral’s frustration; he had misplaced his most valuable charge for an extended period of time, and wanted to expunge that failure, along with everyone who knew of it. But I had family and friends on those islands, and I counted some of the local inhabitants among the latter. Nor did I want to fail at the task I believed Miriam had set me.

“We sail for Keonga,” the admiral snarled. “What happens when we get there… we shall see.”

The winds were not fair for Keonga; they seemed to fight us, as if defending the islands. Or so I was told: I was awake for very little of it, exhaustion having vanquished me at last. The admiral was gentleman enough to cede his cabin to me for the time being, and there I collapsed, regaining my strength while I could.

I woke long enough to eat supper and to be told that we would not reach Keonga until the following morning. We were not that far, but as I have mentioned before, a number of reefs surrounded the archipelago, adorning the tops of islands either unborn or long deceased. However impatient Longstead was, he would not risk his ships by charging blindly ahead when it was too dark to see the warning surf.

Suhail also spoke to me during this time. “What happened to our find from Rahuahane?” he asked. His tone was casual, as if speaking of nothing terribly important, but he had chosen a moment when no sailors were near, and he avoided naming the thing directly.

“It is here,” I said. “The lieutenant who helped me stow it did not see why I place such importance on a superstitious trinket—a mere carving of an egg—but, well, he is not a naturalist. I could hardly expect him to understand.”

“Indeed,” Suhail said. He did not grin, but his eyes were merry at my explanation. So long as no one broke the egg, the nonsense I had spun would stand.

I slept again after that and woke a while before dawn. On deck, I discovered our little fleet of three was proceeding cautiously, men standing at the rails with log-lines to constantly monitor the depth. We had entered the treacherous waters girding the Keongan Islands; all about us were patches of troubled surf, the easy swell of the waves sent into turmoil by the changing terrain below. I found myself holding my breath, and made myself exhale.

One of the ways sailors find islands—particularly if they do not have the benefit of modern navigational equipment—is by looking to the sky. Clouds often form above land, and these can be seen on the horizon long before the land itself is near enough to make out. So it was with our approach to Keonga… but as we drew near, it seemed to me there was something peculiar about the clouds I saw. Over the rush of the waves, I could hear an odd sound, almost like a drumbeat.

From behind me Suhail murmured, “Smoke.”

I gripped the railing until my knuckles ached. He was right: smoke was casting a pall over the island. It might have been ash from a volcanic eruption; a part of me almost hoped it was. But I heard one of the lieutenants bellow, “Cannon fire!” and knew that it was not.

The Yelangese had indeed made sail for Keonga, and they had arrived before us.

They must have rendezvoused with allies along the way. Seven of their ships were arrayed off the coast; an eighth had run aground on a reef and was now burning. Smoke also rose from Rahuahane—a signal fire, lit on the beach by the stranded men of the caeliger when they saw their countrymen approaching. But the Keongans had been keeping watch as well, and by the time the Yelangese ships drew near, they were ready.

Princess Miriam was not the only thing they had been hiding from us. Aekinitos had said, mostly in jest, that there might be an entire war fleet on the far side of Lahana. He was wrong only in his choice of location. They had been arrayed throughout the archipelago, a great mustering of Puian canoes from many parts of the Broken Sea, in preparation for the possibility—the likelihood—that their attempts to trade Her Highness for Waikango would not succeed before the Yelangese found her. They had paddled out as the Yelangese approached, forming a defensive line a little distance from shore, and there they had waited.

The Yelangese, taking this as proof of Miriam’s presence, had not hesitated to fire, and so the battle was joined.

Battles are not pretty things, but this one was especially ugly. The Puian war fleet had but few guns and no artillery. Aekinitos had ordered his men to drag their cannon up to the promontory, from which they offered what supporting fire they could, but it was very scant. Many of those engaged in the battle had only spears and shark-tooth clubs with which to fight. The agility and speed of their canoes gave them a certain advantage in shallow coastal waters over the Yelangese ships, and their small size and great number meant that although a cannonball might strike one craft, five others would continue onward—but the shots did strike, crushing many warriors and sending them into the sea. Where the canoe fleet reached a ship, men swarmed up on too many sides to repel them all at once, but the casualties were great.

Such was the fruit of the ordinary elements. Both sides, however, had unexpected weapons, and did not hesitate to deploy them.

I have recounted my own ride upon the back of a sea-serpent, and said that the more experienced Keongans are capable of steering the beasts to a limited extent. On that day, in the waters around the archipelago, I saw the truth of it with my own eyes. They do not ride the serpents merely for entertainment, or to prove their virility and strength: they had also been practicing for war.

Half a dozen serpents raged in the waters around the fleet. Two of the seven ships were sinking, I realized, their hulls cracked by the terrible force of the serpents’ water blasts. These had destroyed some canoes as well, for a serpent lashes out when and where it will; the rider can only attempt to direct its head toward the enemy or else into open water. As weapons and as mounts, they are nearly as dangerous to their own side as they are to the opponent. But the psychological effect of them that day cannot be understated. The Yelangese came to the islands expecting to brush past a few dozen canoes, but found themselves facing hundreds, with the great beasts of the sea fighting on their side.

They had a weapon of their own, however, and it rained death from the sky. The other caeliger swooped across the bloodstained waters again and again, too high for even the strongest island warrior to hurl a spear, but low enough for the men in its gondola to shoot accurately into the fracas below. They had begun by picking men off from the canoes, but when the serpents entered the fray, they shifted their efforts to those beasts and the men who controlled them. There had been more serpents before; now two floated dead in the water, and a third rampaged freely, attacking anything in its path.

I had not forgotten Admiral Longstead’s declaration of his resolve to rescue the princess. If she had not been moved, she was on Lahana, and the Battle of Keonga stood in his path. I ran to the quarterdeck, hoping against hope to persuade him not to add his cannon to the weapons aimed at the islanders.

To my surprise, I found him standing quietly, watching the battle with close attention, but giving no orders to join it. “You will not fight?” I asked.

“Let them carve one another up,” he said. “I suspect the Yelangese will win, with that thing in the air, but they will be badly bloodied. Then we will move into range and hail them. They will give way, or if they do not, we will take appropriate steps.”

As little as I wanted him to fire on the Keongans, I found myself almost equally dismayed to hear him say he would stand aside. “You will just sit here and watch men die?”

“Should I risk my own men on their behalf, Mrs. Camherst? I was not sent here to involve myself in a local war. If I could sail past them to reach the princess, I would do so. If they fire upon us, I will answer in kind. But otherwise, I will wait.”

The most infuriating part of it all, then and now, was that Admiral Longstead was right. He could easily have routed the Yelangese if he moved in; they were already beleaguered, and the Scirling ships were both larger and superior in firepower. But why should he do so? We were not so much at odds with Yelang as to risk starting a war with them in this fashion.

And yet it tore my heart to stand there while the battle raged, watching the caeliger slaughter helpless men and beasts from above, and do nothing.

I hate above all else to do nothing.

People have accused me of lying on this point, but I truly do not remember making a decision. I remember thinking only that I must do something. Then I was over the railing and plummeting toward the sea, with Suhail shouting after me.

I hit the water with a great splash and sank deep, but soon kicked back up to the surface. A second splash inundated me; when it receded, Suhail was nearby, dashing the water from his face with a quick shake of his head. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

“The admiral will not go closer to the battle,” I said breathlessly. “I must find my own conveyance.”

The creature was almost to us. I had seen it approaching before I went over the rail: a sea-serpent, one of those which lost its rider in the battle, perhaps, or else a curious visitor. I struck out for it before Suhail could get more than two words into his description of exactly how mad I was. He was not wrong; but he must claim a share of madness for himself, along with a good helping of chivalric honour—for when he saw what I intended, he did not abandon me to do it alone.

We had learned some lessons from our previous ride. I felt almost competent as we caught our holds with a minimum of trouble; soon we were atop the serpent as before, and together encouraged it to swim in the direction of the battle. This was not difficult, as the blood in the water had attracted its attention. But once there, we faced two challenges, each one alone far greater than the simple task of riding: we must figure out something of value to do, and then find a way to do it.

I thought at first to go for the Yelangese ships, as the other riders were doing. But there were any number of difficulties in doing that: a churning sea of chaos lay between us and those targets; we should have to steer through the canoes, which I did not at all trust our ability to achieve; the Yelangese would be shooting at us the whole way, both from the ships and from the caeliger; and we might do more damage to the side I intended to support. The sea was simply too crowded for me to have any certainty of directing the serpent’s blast in a safe direction—given that I had not practiced for it at all.

Suhail was shouting something at me, but I did not hear it. My gaze had fallen upon the caeliger.

Had ours been functional, we might have used it in the battle, but the puncturing of its bag had released whatever gas the Yelangese were using to create lift, and the engine had taken a wetting besides. I had no way to get at the enemy caeliger, and would not have been much use with a rifle even had I thought to take one from our ship.

But it was possible that someone else—some thing else, I should say—might be able to strike that high.

The caeliger was approaching, completing one pass across the battle and preparing to make a turn. I saw one of the men above notice us. He was too distant to have a good shot, but held his rifle and waited. That, I realized might be my death—or Suhail’s.

“Pull!” I cried to him, and suited action to words, hauling with all my might upon the tendrils we held.

Even our combined strength could not have moved the serpent’s great head. I did not expect it to: I sought instead to vex the creature enough that it would lift its head of its own accord. And so it did, flanks rippling with the motion I knew meant it had drawn in water, preparatory to expelling it. But its head barely crested the waves, which would not be enough at all.

Half a dozen thoughts and more flashed through my head at once: serpent cranial anatomy, the tendrils we held, rings in bulls’ noses. The strength of dragonbone. The likelihood that I would fall into the water before I could even test my theory. The bullets now piercing the water around us as the caeliger drew near—and above all, an internal voice crying, What are you doing?

What I was doing was releasing my grip upon the tendrils behind the head and hurling myself forward, down the serpent’s long snout. There were tendrils there, too, much smaller, fringing the serpent’s nose… and it was these I now seized hold of and pulled.

I thought to bring the serpent’s head up to an angle where it would expel its blast of water at the caeliger, hopefully damaging it as the other serpents had damaged the ships. The dragonbone components would likely survive unbroken, but if I could break the machinery, or knock the men from their perch, or rupture the caeliger’s bag, I might yet save some of those below.

It shames me as a natural historian to admit this, but: I had not stopped to consider that I was riding a younger cousin of the beast we had killed in the arctic.

The serpent did not merely lift its head. The entire front of its body rose snakelike into the air, just as its cousin had done in attacking the Basilisk. I found myself dangling from its snout by a desperate grip on the edge of one of its nostrils. It did indeed release its water—I could not see where it aimed—but a moment later it struck something hard, as its head collided with the passing caeliger.

We all crashed into the water together, serpent, riders, and flying machine. They had swooped too low in approaching us, believing that we had no way of striking back at them. No one else had been foolish enough to try what I had done (for the Keongan riders know that the anatomy of the snout is exceedingly tender, and that interfering with it is a good way to send the beast out of control). It would not even have worked had we not been at the edge of the battle, in waters quiet enough that the caeliger felt safe in descending for a better shot.

But descended they had, and I was too ignorant to know how unwise it was to try and take a serpent by the nose. In my recklessness, I had succeeded in removing the caeliger from the sky.

I saw quite a few engravings of that moment in subsequent months and years; some of them are still to be found today. All of them depict me standing proudly atop the serpent, feet planted firm on its scales, hair blowing majestically in the wind (conveniently ignoring that it was less than ten centimeters long at the time), and often in a dress. (Skirts, I suppose, blow more majestically than trousers.) None of them show me dangling for dear life from the serpent’s nostril. However prosaic the reality of my act, though, it made for very good storytelling later on, and I am not surprised it became so widely known. The crew of the Scirling ships had seen it; the Yelangese had seen it; the islanders had seen it. My son had not, and I thank heaven for that, as it was bad enough once he heard the tale of what his mother had done. But I made myself well and truly famous with that act, which many say ended the Battle of Keonga.

NINETEEN

Reality, again, is somewhat less dramatic. The fighting continued; the Yelangese were not vanquished for some time, and then only because it occurred to Admiral Longstead that he could gain a degree of goodwill from both sides by moving in to halt what would otherwise have been a long grind to the finish. The Scirlings ended up playing peacemaker between the two sides, at first militarily, then diplomatically, once the princess stepped in.

The process by which that occurred was a marvel of misdirection, and even now I am not sure how it was arranged. No one wanted to say out loud where Her Highness had been; there were too many onlookers, ranging from some of the Yelangese sailors to the men of the Basilisk to a surprising percentage of the islanders, both local and visiting with the war fleet, who did not know she had been on Lahana. Admitting the truth would not have made anyone look terribly good. So everyone pretended she had come in with the fleet; that Suhail and I had never flown away on a stolen caeliger; and that when I rode into battle on the back of a sea-serpent, I did so from the shores of Lahana, where I had been recuperating after my harrowing first ride. There were rumours, of course—there are always rumours—but it has never, until now, been public knowledge that Her Majesty was once a political hostage in the Broken Sea. (I would not reveal it here, save that I have royal permission to do so.)

All of that, however, came later. In the immediate aftermath of my deed, Suhail and I floundered in the water, putting as much distance as possible between us and the downed caeliger. The sea-serpent had decided that vehicle was the cause of its suffering, and set about destroying the thing with all dispatch. The Yelangese crewmen floundered with us, and one seemed to have a notion of setting upon us as the sea-serpent had upon the caeliger; but fortunately he was forestalled by the arrival of a longboat. Men aboard the Boyne, one of the other ships in Admiral Longstead’s little fleet, had seen me go over the side and, not having any notion of what was going on, had set out to rescue me.

The sailors pulled us in, then took on the Yelangese, who judged that captivity in Scirling hands was preferable to remaining in the water with an angry sea-serpent that might soon go looking for new prey. It had done quite a good job on the caeliger, considering all the dragonbone; the bones themselves had survived its bite, but the lashings had not, and so the waves were now littered with a motley osteological assortment.

When the battle was done, we came ashore on Keonga, escorted by a dozen war canoes. There the chief greeted Admiral Longstead, but I saw very little of that meeting: Liluakame wormed her way through the crowd to my side, the first friendly face I had seen, and beckoned for me to follow her. “Where are we going?” I asked. Fear sprang up in my heart. I could think of no reason that my wife should be there, but not my companions or my son, save that something dreadful had happened to them.

“To the temple,” Liluakame said. “Quickly.”

This was the platform I had seen when we first came to Keonga, high upon the promontory that divided the Basilisk’s cove from the place where the chief dwelt. There were still a few sailors up there, watching over the cannon Aekinitos had brought up for the battle, but I did not pause to speak with them. Apart from reassuring me that the others were safe and well, Liluakame had discouraged any conversation. This was a side to my wife I had not seen before, in our brief cohabitation: focused and urgent, taking me in hand as if I were a child she could not spare the time to educate. Weary and confused as I was, I found myself happy to follow her lead.

The temple itself was a modest structure by Scirling standards, but an impressive feat of engineering for the islanders, being a series of stone platforms and low walls constructed entirely without mortar. The walls demarcate a system of enclosures, the inner ones being more tapu than the outer, and ceremonies of different sorts are performed at different locations depending on their nature. Liluakame took me only within the outermost enclosure, that being the only one I was considered fit to enter. There I found Heali’i waiting.

She led me through a process of purification and repentance, which, she said, might earn me a degree of mercy from Pa’oarakiki when he was done with Admiral Longstead. (Suhail, I later learned, had been taken to a temple the warriors use.) She spoke as if the transgression for which I repented was departing from Keonga against orders, and that indeed was part of it; I did not ask whether she knew my crime was greater still. Ke’anaka’i were believed to die if they set foot upon Rahuahane, yet I had gone and lived. I suspect Heali’i knew, but to this day I cannot tell you what she made of that: whether she questioned my identity as dragon-spirited, or the reality of the curse upon that island, or merely chalked me up as a very fortunate exception.

My Scirling companions were waiting outside the temple when I emerged. Jake flung his arms around my middle hard enough to squeeze all the breath from me; Abby did much the same. Tom, looking more haggard than usual, tried to offer me his hand; I flung my arms around him instead, and damned what the gossips might say if they heard. The last few days had been distressing enough that I could not be content with a mere handshake.

Fortunately, dealing with two errant birds was not particularly high on the Keongan agenda, not with the aftermath of the battle to address. Four of the Yelangese ships had fled, but that still left the islanders with a great many prisoners to sort out, agreements to settle, and other matters to arrange. All of us from the Basilisk were told to remain in the area of our cove, where the sailors alternately worked on repairs or stood around and gossiped about recent events, depending on how closely Aekinitos was watching them. I fear I may have doomed them to a lot of profane shouting, for I was not free to tell the captain where I had been and what I had done, and the lack made him as grumpy as he had been when he broke his leg.

There I remained for three days, until Heali’i came to us once more.

“You are lucky,” she said. “Because you made sacrifices at the temple”—sacrifices of flowers, I should say; I do not want anyone thinking I cut a pig’s throat—“you are only to be sent away.”

“Sent away?” I repeated, as if I had not understood her. I had spent those three days planning another excursion to the peak of Homa’apia, so as to give the sea-serpents time to calm themselves. My research had scarcely begun. How could I leave?

Heali’i gave me a look which said I should be grateful for my good fortune. “Yes. You earned great mana with your deeds, but you also violated tapu. Even ke’anaka’i can only go so far, and this one does not have that protection.” She nodded at Suhail. “You must leave, and not return.”

I had been exiled from Bayembe, but by my own government; I had been deported from Yelang, but as a result of political machinations I deplored in any case. This was the first time I had been sent away by the people whose goodwill I had hoped to earn, and it stung me deeply. Telling myself that I had earned their goodwill—that was why I was not being threatened with execution—did little to assuage the hurt.

But I could not argue, for Admiral Longstead had no intention of leaving me on Keonga in any case. The diplomatic arrangements the princess had made were delicate things; he could not risk me trampling all over them. And trample I would, even if I did not mean to, simply by the nature of my involvement with preceding events. I had stolen a caeliger from the Yelangese navy; I had violated tapu in Keonga; I knew far more than was good for anybody about what had really transpired with Her Highness. He wanted me well away from this place before I made anything worse.

The Basilisk, unfortunately, was not yet seaworthy, though supplies from the little Scirling fleet meant she was close to it. So it was that we found ourselves bundled onto the Boyne, the smallest of the admiral’s three ships, and bound for the port of Phetayong: myself and Suhail, of course, for we had been exiled, but also Tom, Jake, and Abby, for they would not be separated from us.

It was a bitter leave-taking. I divorced Liluakame before I went, breaking the promise of marriage in order to fulfill my promise of freedom. She thanked me with a brilliant smile, no doubt already dreaming of her sweetheart. I would not have wanted to take her to Scirland regardless, nor would she have wanted to go; and yet it was peculiar to bid farewell to someone who, for however short a time and under whatever strange pretenses, had been my wife. But I was lucky even to have that farewell: I had no opportunity to speak with the other islanders we had come to know, such as the men who took us to ride the sea-serpent. Furthermore, I could not stop thinking of the work I was leaving undone. I had hoped to make a stealthy visit to Rahuahane when the Basilisk departed; that was now barred to me. I could not return to the peak of Homa’apia and continue observing the fire-lizards there. I could not question Heali’i about the stories her people told of the creatures that had dwelt on the cursed island, to see what nuggets of truth might have survived the intervening centuries of narrative embroidery. I had only my notes, my memories, and the petrified egg, which I had retrieved from the admiral’s flagship.

Heali’i’s final words to me before I departed were, “Do not be so sad. You are dragon-spirited. Your soul will return here when you die.” I suppose she meant it to be comforting.

In Phetayong we sorted out our affairs and waited for the Basilisk to rejoin us. The admiral had at least been kind enough to send us with a letter of credit, so we could afford a respectable hotel; if that was the princess’ idea (and I think it may have been), then I am grateful to her for it.

I struggled with the question of what to report to the Winfield Courier. I had been out of contact since before the Basilisk was wrecked; how could I resume the thread of my narrative now? I must account for more than two months of silence and explain what had transpired during my absence, but the full story could not possibly fit into a single missive. Furthermore, some parts of it must be omitted—Rahuahane, the caeliger, Her Royal Highness—but I could not pretend nothing had occurred, for stories would soon be reaching home by other routes, and what I said must not look like a falsehood.

You may see the result in Around the World in Search of Dragons, and entertain yourself by comparing that text with this one to find the points of divergence. It is a brief account, which sufficed for the moment, if not very well; by the time I returned to Scirland, word of the battle had reached audiences there, and I was pressed into telling a much more detailed story. But by then I was prepared to do so.

The Basilisk rejoined us a little over a week later, bearing in its hold the diving bell we had abandoned on the reef of Keonga. It was a gesture of friendship from Aekinitos to Suhail, and did much to make us feel as if the proper order of our expedition had been restored. We made energetic plans to sail to Ala’ase’ama, where (as many of you know) I resumed my study of fire-lizards.

Before we could depart, however, our arrangements underwent a sudden and unexpected change.

A packet of mail found us in Phetayong, having in some cases chased us from port to port for months. It was like receiving letters from another lifetime, so far had the world of my correspondents faded from my thoughts. I learned that the Journal of Maritime Studies would be publishing my article with its incorrect theory of sea-serpent evolution, and dashed off a note begging them to withhold it until I could write a new version; this, alas, did not arrive in time. I read and answered a great many other letters… and, in so doing, discovered at last what rumours had grown from my supposedly innocuous reports.

My first instinct was to burn the letters and pretend I had never read them. After all, the rumours merited no better treatment. But it was not fair to hide something that involved another person, and so, after much pacing (and more cursing than I should admit to), I went in search of Suhail.

I found him on the shore near the docks, slumped against the algae-covered stump of a post, a letter fluttering in his hands. It was covered in flowing lines of Akhian script; that much I saw before he noticed me and put it away, though he knew I could not have read it regardless. “Is everything all right?” I asked him. Surely, I thought, rumours from Scirland had not reached his own people—not so quickly, at least.

My question was a foolish one. I knew by his expression that everything was not all right. Before he saw me and put the letter away, he was as grim as I had ever seen him, though now he looked resigned. “A message from home,” he said. “My father has died.”

“Oh,” I said. Words seemed to have escaped me entirely. Here I had been fretting over scurrilous gossip, as if the tattered state of my reputation were the most important thing in the world. I felt ashamed of myself. “My condolences.”

Suhail shook his head. He seemed to be dismissing my unspoken imputation of grief. I still knew nothing of his family, save that he was estranged from them to a sufficient degree that he did not even use their names. Whatever had lain between him and his father, it meant he did not weep now.

“Thank you,” he said, as if realizing that a shake of the head was not a proper response to condolences. “But I’m afraid it means I must return to Akhia.”

I blinked. “What—now?”

“Yes.”

The grimness was there again, a stony layer beneath the resignation. “Yes, of course; how foolish of me. Your family will want you with them at a time like this.”

“It is not that—not precisely. Rather—” Suhail caught himself, stopped, and shook his head again. “It does not matter. But I will not be able to go with you to Ala’ase’ama.”

My heart sank. I had, without realizing it, begun thinking of him as a member of our expedition, fully as much a part of my work as Tom was. But chance had brought him to me, and now chance would take him away again.

I have written before about the regret I feel upon parting from the individuals I come to know in my travels. This parting, I confess, struck deeper than any other. Suhail had weathered more trials at my side than anyone save Tom; with him I shared secrets I could not even permit Tom to know. My association with him was not respectable—and I would bear the consequences of that for some time—but I had come to treasure it. Only a determination not to end our partnership by embarrassing myself kept me from showing the depths of that loss.

To conceal it, I reached into my pocket and took out my little notebook, then tore a page from it and scribbled a few brief lines. “Here,” I said, giving it to Suhail. “That is my direction in Falchester. I hope you will at least write to me, as occasion permits.”

He accepted it with a smile that was a mere ghost of its usual brightness. I noticed that he took care not to brush my fingers as he did so: we had returned once more to propriety. “Thank you,” he said. “And I wish you the best of luck in the rest of your journey. Peace be upon you, sadiqati”—which means “my friend” in the Akhian tongue.

By the next evening he was gone, having taken passage on a ship bound for Elerqa. That quickly, he was lost to me, and the melancholy of it stayed with me for a long time after.

There is little I can say about the remainder of the expedition that would hold a tenth so much interest as what has come before. I will instead speak of what happened after I returned to Scirland, which was not documented in my reports to the Winfield Courier, nor collected in my travelogue afterward.

Part of it is widespread knowledge regardless. As I had predicted, Tom became a Fellow of the Colloquium, because of the work he had done during our expedition. It both pleased and saddened him: acceptance from that body was a goal we both pursued, but his Fellowship did not magically transform the world around him into one where his birth did not matter. He had not expected it, but the disappointment was there nonetheless.

The Colloquium did not unbend so far as to admit me to their ranks, but the following Acinis, in a grand ceremony of the Synedrion, the king inducted me into the Order of the White Horn, making me Dame Isabella Camherst. Officially, this honour was given in gratitude for my courage and quick action in saving the fort at Point Miriam from attack by the Ikwunde army. The Crown had reviewed those events and concluded that, accusations of treason notwithstanding, I had indeed acted in the best interests of Scirland, and so they wished to reward me. (This did not, however, prevent the aforementioned unnamed member of the Synedrion from drawing me aside and reminding me that I was still under no circumstances permitted to return to Bayembe.)

That story, of course, was cover for the truth, which is that I was knighted for my part in the rescue of Her Highness: the woman who now rules as our queen. This, again, was Her Highness’ doing, but naturally none of us could speak of it directly. Admiral Longstead had told me before I left Keonga that any whisper of that matter would see me put on trial and likely imprisoned, and so I held my tongue.

It is often said that the poor are insane, while the rich are merely eccentric. So it is with knighthood, I discovered: as Mrs. Camherst I was disreputable, but as Dame Isabella Camherst, I was just scandalous enough to be worth inviting places. The more frivolously social invitations I declined, but the Nyland Brothers approached me about publishing my travelogue as Around the World in Search of Dragons, which sold through its first edition in less than two months, and I soon embarked upon a lecture tour throughout the kingdom. If my audiences at times asked more questions about my personal life than my professional work, and if I suffered the occasional heckler who chose to mock my retraction of my sea-serpent theory, I took care not to complain where any but my closest friends could hear.

As pleasing as these developments were (not to mention a welcome improvement to my financial situation), I found myself wishing for the peace and quiet of my Hart Square townhouse, where I might work on the material I had gathered during my expedition.

Much of this work concerned my taxonomical questions. I had learned my lesson from the premature publication of that article in the Journal of Maritime Studies; I would not publish this theory until I was certain of its strength, and moreover could prove it with an abundance of supporting evidence. As it transpired, that evidence would not come into my hands for some years yet, but in the interim I accomplished a great deal that laid the groundwork for the discoveries that would follow.

I also took up a hobby that puzzled many around me. I told everyone I was interested in the fossils then being uncovered in several parts of the world, and in pursuit of that, I studied with both a sculptor and a lapidary, learning to cut and carve stone.

My true aim, of course, was the dissection of the petrified egg. It sat for the better part of a year on one of my bookshelves, seeming like nothing more than a stone carving of an egg (which is what I told everyone it was). Given the wealth of firestone concealed inside, I could not trust its dissection to an outsider; I must learn to do the work myself. When at last I deemed myself ready, I made a plaster cast of the egg, weighted the cast with lead (so the housekeeper would not notice a change in its mass), and began the process of extracting the embryo within.

First I chipped away the rocky exterior, which had formerly been the shell. The mass of firestone glowed with muted light, its usual brilliance dimmed by sheer thickness. I held an inconceivable fortune in my hands, and was about to cut it to pieces. (Somewhere, I fancied, the lapidary who had taught me gem-carving was weeping inconsolably, and did not know why.)

I was more concerned with what the firestone held. When I held it up to a lamp, I could see the outline of the embryo within, and nearly melted with relief. For a year I had worried that the egg we carried away from Rahuahane would prove to be sterile, or that its contents would have been destroyed by the petrification.

With the greatest of care, I carved my way toward the nearest extension of the embryo. When I broke through, however, my disappointment was intense: instead of a bone, I found only a dust-filled hollow. I had hoped the petrification process was like that which preserved dragonbone, and that I might extract the skeleton entire. To find nothing but dust so discouraged me that I gave up for the day, hiding the egg where the maid would not find it.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a fresh idea. Natalie, woken by the noise of me banging about, found me carefully pouring plaster into that hollow. “What on earth are you doing?” she asked.

“Taking a cast of where the skeleton was,” I said. (She and Tom both knew of my inadvertent visit to Rahuahane, and what Suhail and I had found there.) “If I am very careful, I may yet be able to learn something.”

“Could you not learn it during daylight hours?” Natalie asked, yawning. But by then I had enough money that I need not worry at all about the expense of candles or lamp oil, and I went on working.

The entire process took weeks. I would carve until I neared a hollow, then drill through and fill it with plaster. When I had done this with all the easily accessible portions, I removed them and began the procedure anew with the deeper portions. The vacuoles did not quite form a continuous whole, and so I had to take my casts in stages, pausing each time to draw the current appearance of the mass, in order to be certain I could reassemble the plaster in the correct configuration afterward.

But at last it was done, and I could see what manner of dragon the ancients of Draconean civilization had been breeding.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Tom said when I showed it to him.

“Indeed,” I said. “I have already ordered several books on embryology; they should be delivered soon.” (We knew virtually nothing of draconic embryology in those days, and do not know nearly enough about it now, though our understanding has at least advanced from the total disgrace it once was.)

Tom bent to peer at the lumpy, imperfect casts, which I had wired together in my best approximation of their original posture. “The tail and wings are clearly not well-developed yet—the tail in particular,” he said.

“Perhaps full development of the tail came after hatching. Human children, after all, are born with strikingly different proportions than they attain as adults.” I turned the casts around so he might view them from another angle. “Underdeveloped wings are certainly to be expected; it is a common feature of birds. But the jointing of the legs—well, it is difficult to make out, given the state of the casts. But it seems peculiar. I cannot tell whether this is an ordinary stage in draconic embryo development, or whether it indicates an extinct species.”

“Or one not yet discovered—though that seems less likely, especially nowadays.” Tom straightened and grinned at me. “Admit it. You are already planning how to gather specimens of dragon eggs so that you can dissect them and sketch out the sequence of development.”

I could not help returning his smile. “You only guess that because your thoughts tended in the same direction. But yes, I need comparative materials. It might go quite some way toward reconciling the stories of the Draconeans with the reality of modern dragons if the ones they tamed were in fact a species that has since gone extinct.”

Tom gestured at the casts. “Will you be publishing this?”

The question made me hesitate. It is a scientist’s obligation to share what she learns; only then may others examine her work and find where it is wanting. Nor can a single person discover everything there is to know, which makes it imperative that those investigating a topic build on each other’s efforts. But my error with the sea-serpent theory had left me shy of publishing anything I was not certain of—and besides, there was the matter of where and how I had acquired this specimen. I did not want to send treasure-hunters flocking to Rahuahane.

“Not yet,” I said slowly. “It must be known eventually, yes—and I will write it up, though not send the paper to anyone, so that if something happens to me the information will not be lost. But I do not feel that I am ready to share this with others until I know more.”

In hindsight, I am more glad than ever that I made that choice. Ordinarily I believe secrecy to be anathema in scientific endeavours; in this case, however, it allowed subsequent events to fall out in a fashion rather more controlled than it might otherwise have been.

But as I so often do, I get ahead of myself. The answers I sought lay some years in my future still; they would have to wait upon news from Bayembe and fresh work in other parts of the world. The treasure I had retrieved from Rahuahane, though, was not the pile of poorly carved firestone stuffed in a hatbox at the top of my wardrobe. It was that plaster cast, and all of the questions it created.