Within the Sanctuary of Wings

ONE

Members of the peerage, I need hardly tell you, are not always well behaved. Upon my ascension to their ranks, I might have become dissolute, gambling away my wealth in ways ranging from the respectable to quite otherwise. I might have ensconced myself in the social world of the aristocracy, filling my days with visits to the parlours of other ladies and the gossip of fashion and scandal. I might, were I a man, have involved myself in politics, attempting to carve out a place in the entourage of some more influential fellow.

I imagine that by now very few of my readers will be surprised to hear that I eschewed all these things. I have never been inclined to gamble (at least not with my money); I find both fashion and scandal to be tedious in the extreme; and my engagement with politics I have always limited as much as possible.

Of course this does not mean I divorced myself entirely from such matters. It would be more accurate to say I deceived myself: surely, I reasoned, it was not at all political to pursue certain goals. True, I lent my name and support to Lucy Devere, who for years had campaigned tirelessly on behalf of women’s suffrage, and I could not pretend anything other than a political motive there. My name carried a certain aura by then, and my support had become a meaningful asset. After all, was I not the renowned Lady Trent, the woman who had won the Battle of Keonga? Had I not marched on Point Miriam with an army of my own when the Ikwunde invaded Bayembe? Had I not unlocked the secrets of the Draconean language, undeciphered since that empire’s fall?

The answer to all these things, of course, was no. The popular narrative of my life has always outshone the reality by rather a lot. But I was aware of that radiance, and felt obliged to use it when and where I could.

But surely the other uses to which I put it were only scholarly. For example, I helped to found the Trent Academy for Girls in Falchester, educating its students not only in the usual female accomplishments of music and literature, but also in mathematics and various branches of science. When Merritford University began awarding the first degrees in Draconic Studies, I was pleased to endow the Trent Chair for that field. I contributed both monetary and social support to the International Fraternity for Draconic Research, an outgrowth of the work Sir Thomas Wilker and I had begun at Dar al-Tannaneen in Qurrat. Less formally, I encouraged the growth of the Flying University until it formed a network of friendships and lending libraries all across Scirland, catching in its net a great many people who would otherwise not have had access to such educational opportunities.

Such things accumulate, bit by bit, and one does not notice until it is too late that they have eaten one’s life whole.

On the day that I went to attend a certain lecture at Caffrey Hall, I was running behind schedule, which had become the common state of my life. Indeed, the only reason I did not miss it entirely was because I had purchased a clock of phenomenal ugliness, whose sole virtue—most would call it a flaw—was its intolerably loud chiming. This was the only force capable of rousing me from my haze of letter-writing, for our butler had recently joined the army, our housekeeper had left us to care for her elderly mother, and I was not yet on good enough terms with their replacements to rely on them to evict me from my study by force.

But they had the carriage waiting when I came flying down the stairs, and in short order I was on my way to Caffrey Hall. At the time I was grateful because I would have been sorely disappointed to miss the lecture. In hindsight, I would have missed out on a great deal more.

The crowd on the street outside was large enough that I directed my driver around the corner, where I disembarked and entered the hall by a side entrance. This deposited me much closer to my first port of call, which was a room near the lecture hall proper. I pressed my ear to the door and heard a voice murmuring inside, which warned me not to disturb him by knocking. Instead I eased the door open and slipped quietly through.

Suhail was pacing a narrow circuit across the floor, sheaf of papers in one hand, the other fiddling with the edge of his untied cravat as if it were a headscarf, muttering in a low, quick voice. It was his habit before any lecture to make one final pass through his points. When he saw me, though, he stopped and took out his pocket watch. “Is it time?”

“Not yet,” I said. One could not have guessed it by the hubbub, which was audible even through the door. “I am dreadfully late, though. There was a new report from Dar al-Tannaneen.”

This was the home of the International Fraternity for Draconic Research, and the report concerned the honeyseeker breeding effort, which was establishing the boundaries of developmental lability. Tom Wilker and I had discovered that principle quite by accident during our time there, while trying to determine how much environmental variation a draconic egg could endure without aborting or producing a defective organism; further research had confirmed that the issue was not so much defectiveness as mutation, which (when successful) adapted the resulting creature to its expected environment.

Of course the theory was not yet widely accepted. No such theory ever is: it has taken an astonishingly long time for the concept of germs to catch on, even though it has the benefit of saving lives. I cannot claim any such grand result for my own theory. But slowly, one generation of honeyseekers at a time, the Fraternity’s work was laying a foundation even the most skeptical of critics could not assail.

Suhail’s expression lightened into a smile. “I would say I am surprised…”

“…but it would be a lie. They have a new idea for how to encourage the growth of larger honeyseekers. I had to read it, and see if I could offer any suggestions. Speaking of which: is there anything you need, before you throw yourself to the wolves?”

He turned to lay the papers he held in a leather folder, lest his hand render them sweaty and crumpled. “I think it is beyond even your tremendous capabilities to produce a second Cataract Stone for me, which is what I most truly need.”

A second such artifact might exist; but we had been lucky even to find the first, and could not count upon a repeat of that good fortune. The Cataract Stone, which I had stumbled across in the jungles of Mouleen, was that most precious gift to linguists, a bilingual text: its upper half was written in the indecipherable Draconean script, and its lower half in the much more decipherable Ngaru. Proceeding from the assumption that the two halves contained the same text, we had, for the first time, been able to discover what a Draconean inscription said.

Being not a linguist myself, I had, in my naivete, assumed that would be enough—that with the door thus opened, the Draconean language would promptly unfold its secrets like a flower. But of course it was not so simple; we could not truly read the Cataract Stone. We only knew what it said, which did not assist us in deciphering any other text. It gave us a foothold, nothing more.

And while a foothold was a good deal more than we’d had in the past, it provided only a narrow place to stand while searching for the next step. Suhail lifted one hand to run it through his hair, then realized he would disarrange it, and put his hand back down again. “Without a more certain framework for the entire syllabary,” he said, “much of what I have to say today is guesswork.”

“Highly educated guesswork,” I reminded him, and reached out to tie his cravat. He did not need me to do so for him; when he began to adopt Scirling dress, he swore he would not be the sort of aristocrat who could not even tie his own cravat. Nor, of course, did he favour the elaborate knots and folds so beloved of my nation’s dandies in those days. Still, there was a simple pleasure in undertaking that task, feeling the rise and fall of his breath as I folded the cloth and pinned it into place.

“But guesswork nonetheless,” he said as I worked.

“If you are wrong, then we will know it in time; the hypothesis will not hold up. But you are not wrong.”

“God willing.” He laid a kiss on my forehead and stepped back. In a Scirling frock coat or an Akhian caftan, my husband cut a fine figure—especially at moments like these, when his thoughts were bent to matters academic. Some ladies’ hearts are captured by skill at dancing, others by poetry or extravagant gifts. It will surprise no one that I was taken in by his keen mind.

“You have a substantial crowd waiting for you,” I said, as the noise from outside continued to rise. “If it is all the same to you, I will take a seat at the back, so that others will have a better view.” I’d already enjoyed a private box for the development of his ideas, of which this was only the public revelation. Given the size of the waiting audience, I suspected more than a few people would be standing for the duration of his lecture, and I would gladly have ceded my chair to another; but being a peer, and a lady besides, I knew I would never succeed. The best I could hope for was to displace some fit young fellow, rather than an older gentleman who needed the seat far more than I.

Suhail nodded, distracted. He was always like this before a lecture, and I took no offense. “Then I will see if Miss Pantel needs anything,” I said, and slipped back out of the room.

I could hear chanting outside, with a distinctly unfriendly tone. The rise of interest in Draconean matters had sparked a concomitant rise in Segulist zealotry, which decried our newfound obsession with the pagan past. Suhail’s lecture was likely to inflame them more. Fortunately, the manager of Caffrey Hall had taken the precaution of hiring men to stand guard at the doors, and the worst of the rabble-rousers were kept outside.

That still left a great many people inside the building. The decipherment of the Cataract Stone and the discovery of the Watchers’ Heart in the depths of the Akhian desert had sparked a fad for that ancient civilization, with a great many cheap books of dubious accuracy or academic worth being published on the subject, and Draconean motifs becoming popular in everything from fashion to interior decoration. Earlier that same week, the poet Peter Flinders had sent me a copy of his epic poem Draconis, in the hope that I might endorse it.

But even in the depths of such a craze, historical linguistics is a sufficiently abstruse topic that it attracts a more limited audience, of (dare I say) a more elevated class. I do not necessarily mean birth or wealth: I saw men there who would never have been permitted into the august halls of the Society of Linguists. They had a serious look about them, though, as if they knew at least a little concerning the topic, and were eager to learn more.

It was a mark of how much Scirling society had changed since my girlhood that I was not the only woman there. Even in sedate afternoon dresses, the members of my sex stood out as bright spots amid the dull colours of the men’s suits, and there were more such spots than I had anticipated. There have been lady scholars for centuries, of course; the change was that they were finally out in public, rather than reading the articles and books alone in their parlours, or in the company of a few like-minded friends.

One such lady was on the stage, adjusting the placement of the large easel that would hold the placards illustrating Suhail’s argument. A goodly portion of the scandal that once attached to myself and Tom Wilker had moved on to Erica Pantel and my husband; there were far too many people who could not believe a man might take a young woman as his student, and mean the word as something other than a euphemism. I had lost count of the number of times someone implied within my hearing that I must be terribly jealous of her—especially as I was getting on in years, being nearly forty myself.

This troubled me very little, at least for my own sake, as I knew how false those rumours were. Not only did Suhail have little interest in straying, but Miss Pantel’s heart was already spoken for, by a young sailor in the Merchant Navy. They were madly in love and had every intention of marrying when he returned from his current voyage. In the meanwhile, she occupied herself with her other passion, which was dead languages. Her attachment to Suhail sprang from his familiarity with the Draconean tongue, and nothing else. Our fields of study might differ, but I considered her a fellow-traveller on the roads of scholarship; she reminded me a little of myself in my youth.

“Is everything in order?” I asked her.

“For now,” she said, with a meaningful glance toward the audience.

The manager of Caffrey Hall might be keeping the obvious rabble-rousers outside, but I had no doubt a few would slip into the building. And even those who came for scholarly reasons might find themselves incited to anger, once they heard what Suhail had to say.

I said, “I meant with the placards and such.”

“I know,” she said, flashing me a brief smile. “Is Lord Trent ready?”

“Very nearly. Here, let me help you with that.” The placards had to be large, in order to be at all visible from the back of the hall; the carrying-case Miss Pantel had sewn to hold them was almost as large as she, for my husband’s student was a diminutive woman. Together we wrestled the case into position and unbuckled its straps. She had cleverly stacked the placards so they faced toward the wall, with the first card outermost, which meant we need not fear anyone catching an advance peek at Suhail’s ideas.

Unless, of course, someone were to come up and rifle through them. Miss Pantel nodded before I could say anything. “I will guard them with my life.”

“I doubt that shall be necessary, but I thank you all the same,” I said with a laugh. No dragon could be a fiercer guardian. “If you don’t need anything further from me, I shall go play hostess.”

I meant the phrase as a euphemism. Necessity had taught me to be a hostess in the usual sense, though I still vastly preferred a meeting of the Flying University to a formal dinner. A baroness does have certain obligations, however, and although in my youth I would have thrown them off as useless constraints, in my maturity I had come to see the value they held. All the same, my true purpose in circulating about the hall and the lobby was to take a census of men I expected to cause trouble. I made particular note of a certain magister, whose name I shall not disclose here. If his past behaviour was any guide, he would find something to argue about even if Suhail’s lecture concerned nothing more substantive than the weather—and my husband would be giving him a good deal more fodder than that.

When it was time for the lecture to begin, I dawdled in the lobby for as long as I could. By the time I entered the main hall, every seat was filled, and people lined the walls besides. Despite my best efforts, however, my attempt to discreetly join the gentlemen at the back wall failed as expected. The best I could do was to accept the seat offered to me by a fellow only a little older than myself, rather than the venerable gentleman who was eighty if he was a day.

Following a short introduction by the president of the grandly named Association for the Advancement of Understanding of the Draconean Language, Suhail took the stage, to a generous measure of applause. Our discovery of the Watchers’ Heart (not to mention our romanticized wedding) had made him famous; his scholarly work since then had made him respected. It was not interest in Draconeans alone that brought such a large audience to Caffrey Hall that afternoon.

Suhail opened his speech with a brief summary of what we knew for certain, and what we guessed with moderate confidence, regarding the Draconean language. Had he been speaking to the Society of Linguists, such an explanation would not have been necessary; they were all well familiar with the topic, as even those who previously showed no interest in it had taken it up as a hobby after the publication of the Cataract Stone texts. But the Society, being one of the older scholarly institutions in Scirland, showed a dismaying tendency to sit upon information, disseminating it only by circulars to their members. Suhail wished the general public to know more. After all, it was still very much the age of the amateur scholar, where a newcomer to a field might happen upon some tremendous insight without the benefit of formal schooling. Suhail therefore delivered his lecture to the world at large, some of whom did not know declensions from décolletage.

It began with the portion of the Stone’s Ngaru text that gave a lineage of ancient Erigan kings. This was of some interest to scholars of Erigan history, and of a great deal more interest to linguists, for proper names are much more likely than ordinary words to be preserved in more or less the same form from one language to the next. The names of the kings gave us a foundation, an array of sounds we knew were likely to be in the Draconean text, with a good guess as to where in the text those sounds fell. Although incomplete, this partial syllabary gave us a tremendous advantage over our past knowledge.

Having a sense of Draconean pronunciation, however, does not get us much further. What use is it to have confidence that a given symbol is pronounced “ka” when I do not know what any of the words containing “ka” mean? In order to progress further, linguists must try a different tactic.

The word “king” occurs eight times in that recitation of lineage. Suhail and his compatriots had analyzed the frequency with which different series of symbols occurred in the Draconean text, seeking out any grouping that occurred eight (and only eight) times. They found a great many, of course, the vast majority of which were coincidental: the fact that the combination “th” occurs eight times in this paragraph before the word “coincidental” is not a significant matter. (Anyone reading this memoir in translation will, I suppose, have to take me at my word that eight is the proper count.) But the linguists became confident that they had, through their statistical efforts, identified the Draconean word for “king.”

This is only the tip of the dragon’s nose, when it comes to the methods of linguistic decipherment, but I will not attempt to explain further; I would soon outpace my limited expertise, and the means by which they identified the inflection for plural nouns or other such arcana is not necessary to understand what follows. Suffice it to say that on that afternoon, we knew two things with moderate certainty: the proper pronunciation for roughly two-fifths of the Draconean syllabary, and a scattered handful of words we had tentatively reconstructed, not all of which we were capable of pronouncing. It was a good deal more than we once had; but it was a good deal less than the entirety of what we hoped for.

My husband was an excellent lecturer; he laid all these matters out with both speed and clarity (the latter a quality so often lacking among scholars), before embarking upon the main portion of his speech. “Ideally,” Suhail said, “we should only use direct evidence in carrying our work forward. Hypotheses are of limited use; with so little data available to us, it is easy to build an entire castle in the air, positing one speculation after another whose validity—or lack thereof—can be neither proved nor disproved. But in the absence of another Cataract Stone or other breakthrough, we have no choice but to hypothesize, and see what results.”

Miss Pantel, knowing her cue, moved to the next placard in the series. This showed the entire Draconean syllabary, laid out in something like a chart, with the characters whose pronunciations we knew coloured red. Scholars had made charts of the symbols many times before, in many different configurations; as Suhail had just noted, what facts we possessed could easily be poured into any number of speculative molds. This one, however, had more than mere guesswork to back it.

My husband’s resonant voice carried easily throughout the hall. “This is a modified version of the chart assembled by Shakur ibn Jibran, based on what we currently know regarding the pronunciation of established Draconean glyphs. He noted an underlying similarity between the symbols for ‘ka’ and ‘ki,’ and another similarity between ‘mi’ and ‘mu,’ and so forth. His hypothesis is that each initial consonant possesses its own template, which is modified in relatively predictable ways by a vowel marker. By grouping the symbols according to these templates and markers, we may theorize as to the pronunciation of glyphs not included in the proper names of the Cataract Stone.”

The process was not, of course, as straightforward as his description made it sound. Languages are rarely tidy; with the exception of the Kaegang script, designed a century ago for use in writing Jeosan, they show a distressing tendency to break their own rules. Although many linguists had accepted Shakur ibn Jibran’s general principle in arranging the glyphs, they argued over the specifics, and easily half a dozen variant charts had their own partisan supporters. Already there were murmurs in the hall, as gentlemen grumbled at not seeing their preferred arrangement on display.

Those murmurs would grow louder soon enough. For now, the chart gave us a place to begin—and Suhail’s own speculation depended upon his fellow countryman’s as his foundation. Miss Pantel revealed another placard, this one with lines of Draconean text printed upon it, interleaved with an alphabetic transcription.

My husband said, “If we take that speculation as provisionally true, then this selection—taken from later in the Cataract Stone text—would be pronounced as glossed here. But we have no way to test this theory: here there are no proper names to guide us. We will never know whether this is accurate… unless we speculate again.”

Taking up a long pointer, Suhail underlined a word in the first line. “Presuming for the moment that our chart is correct, these characters would be pronounced aris. One of the fundamental principles of historical linguistics is that languages change over time; tongues that are spoken today may have their roots in older forms, now extinct. The Thiessois word terre and the Murñe word tierra both derive from the Spureni terra, meaning ‘earth.’ So, too, may we hypothesize that aris gave rise to the Lashon ’eretz and the Akhian ’ard—also meaning ‘earth.’”

Had I been inclined to place a bet with myself, I would have won it in that moment, as the lecture hall burst into uproar.

Linguists had spun theories of this kind before, imagining the Draconean language to be ancestral to a wild variety of modern tongues, Lashon and Akhian not excepted. After all, the deserts of southern Anthiope were the most likely homeland of that civilization. But the common wisdom held that the Draconean lineage was linguistically extinct: the Draconeans had been a separate ethnic group, ruling over their subjects much as Scirland currently ruled over parts of Vidwatha, and with the downfall of their empire their language had vanished forever. It was almost literally an article of faith, as everyone from Scirling magisters to Bayitist priests and Amaneen prayer-leaders agreed that our modern peoples owed nothing to those ancient tyrants.

I had advised Suhail to stop after that statement, lest the clamour drown out his next words. He took my advice, but the pause lasted longer than either of us had anticipated. Finally he gave up on waiting for silence and went on, pitching his voice to be heard above the din of audience commentary. His point did not rest upon that single example: he believed he had found cognates for a number of words, methodically connecting them to examples in Akhian, Lashon, Seghar, and historically attested languages no longer spoken today. It was, as he had said to me, guesswork; all he could do was tentatively identify specific glosses from the Ngaru text, and then extrapolate into speculation on other Draconean inscriptions. One tablet from a site in Isnats, for example, seemed to be a kind of tax record, as he found probable words for “sheep,” “cow,” “grain,” and more.

Any one example could easily be shot down. Assembled together, however, they constituted a very reasonable theory—or so I thought. But I was not a linguist, and there were gentlemen in the audience that day who laid claim to that title. They were more than prepared to disagree with Suhail.

When I heard voices rising at the back of the hall, I assumed it was an argument over the substance of the lecture. The magister I mentioned before, ten rows ahead of me, had risen to his feet so as better to shout his disagreement at my husband; presumably the noise behind me was more of the same. When I turned to look, however, I saw a small knot of men at the door, facing one another rather than the stage.

Surely they would not begin an altercation over a matter of historical linguistics? But I have spent enough of my life among scholars to know that academic conflicts and fisticuffs are not always so far apart as one might expect. Rising from my seat, I went to see if I could defuse the situation before it reached that point.

But the argument at the door had nothing to do with Suhail’s lecture. From my seat, I had been unable to see the man at the center of the knot; now that I drew near, I caught a glimpse between the shoulders of the other men. He dressed in the manner of a northern Anthiopean and had his hair trimmed short, but a suit did nothing to change his features. The man was Yelangese.

Now, on the surface of it there was nothing so terribly strange about a Yelangese man attending a public lecture in Falchester. Ever since long-range maritime trade became a common feature of life, there have been sailors and other immigrants in Scirling ports, Yelangese not excepted. At the time of Suhail’s lecture, though, we were firmly in the grip of what the papers had dubbed our “aerial war” against Yelang, wherein our caeligers and theirs jockeyed for position all around the globe, and our respective military forces clashed in a series of minor skirmishes that kept threatening to break out into full-scale war. Men of that nation were not exactly welcome in Falchester, regardless of how long it had been since they called the empire home.

Furthermore, readers of my memoirs know that I had quarreled with the Yelangese on multiple occasions: when I was deported from Va Hing, when I stole one of their caeligers in the Keongan Islands, and when they made organized efforts to sabotage our work at Dar al-Tannaneen. This was public knowledge at the time, too—which meant that the gentlemen near the door, seeing a Yelangese man show up at my husband’s lecture, had leapt to some very hostile conclusions.

I kept my voice low, not wishing to draw any more attention than this incident already had. Fortunately, the magister who had stood up was still on his feet, along with another man who was attempting to shout over him. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I suggest we take this matter out into the lobby. We do not wish to disturb the lecture.”

There are benefits to having a famous reputation. The men recognized me, and were more inclined than they might otherwise have been to heed my suggestion—which was, of course, a thinly disguised order. One of them shouldered the door open, and we escaped into the relative quiet and privacy of the lobby.

“Now,” I said, once the door had swung shut behind us. “What appears to be the problem?”

“He’s the problem,” the tallest of the Scirlings said, jerking his chin at the foreigner. He topped the Yelangese man by more than a head, and was using his height to loom menacingly. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s about, coming here—”

“Have you tried asking him?”

A brief pause followed. “Well, yeah,” another man admitted. “He said he was here for the lecture.”

“Anybody can say that,” the tall man scoffed. “That doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Nor does it mean it’s false,” I said. In truth, though, I suspected there was indeed more to the story. The Yelangese stranger, though doing his best to keep a bland expression, had clearly recognized me. Which was all well and good—as I have said, I was very recognizable—but something in his manner made me suspect I was his reason for coming to Caffrey Hall that day.

My tone was therefore sharp as I addressed the stranger. “What is your name?”

“Thu Phim-lat,” he said, in a heavily accented voice. “Lady Trent.”

So he would not attempt to pretend that he did not know me. Under the circumstances, none of us would have believed him anyway. “How long have you been in Scirland?”

“Three weeks.”

My heart stuttered in its beat. Perhaps you think it was a foolish reaction; I will not argue with you. But I had been on the receiving end of Yelangese trying to kill me, and could not forget that so easily. Had Thu Phim-lat been a longtime resident of Falchester, I might have persuaded myself that he was no threat. But if he had just arrived…

I decided to press the matter. “You may be here for the lecture, Mr. Thu, but I doubt that is your only purpose. Tell me what you hope to accomplish.”

His eyes darted from side to side, taking in the men watching us. They had arrayed themselves quite close, clearly ready to interpose their bodies if Mr. Thu made a single move toward me. “Oh, come now,” I said impatiently—as much to myself as to them. I did not like feeling afraid in my home city, and I liked even less feeling afraid when I had so little cause. “If he wished me any harm, there are far easier ways for him to achieve it than by walking into a public lecture hall.” He could have accosted me on the street, appearing out of the crowd before I even knew he was there. A cosh to the back of the head, a knife between the ribs… but that was foolishness. Yelang had only troubled me when I troubled them, by investigating dragons in their country or attempting to breed my own for the Royal Army. There was no reason for them to assassinate me at home, unless I had made a much more personal enemy than I knew. And doing so would only make them look dreadful in the court of public opinion.

The Scirling men looked unconvinced, but I had persuaded myself, and reassured Mr. Thu enough that he answered me. “I wished to meet you,” he said, speaking very slowly. I realized later that this was because his grasp of the Scirling language was far from perfect, and he wanted to make certain he committed no errors of grammar or word choice that might cause his point to be taken awry. “I have news of a thing I think you would like to hear.”

“News may be sent by letter,” I said. “Or you could present yourself at my townhouse—its location is hardly a secret. Why come to a public lecture?”

“If I came to your home, would I be let in the door?” he asked. “Would my letter be read?”

“Yes, or else my servants would have a great deal to answer for. I do not pay them to make such decisions on my behalf.”

“Ah,” Mr. Thu said once he had taken in these words. “But how would you know?”

I dismissed this with a wave of my hand. “Clearly you have not been rebuffed in such fashion, or you would have said as much already. Let us not waste time with hypotheticals. What tidings are you so eager to convey?”

At many points in my life I have been on Mr. Thu’s end of such a conversation, stumbling along in a language of which I have only a rudimentary command. My rapid speech and elevated diction had lost him. “Your news,” I said, when I saw he did not understand. “You have found me; say what you came to say.”

He glanced again at the men so energetically looming at him. “A dragon,” he said at last. “The body of a dragon. Not like any kind I know. I think not like any kind alive.”

My heart stuttered again, this time with excitement instead of irrational fear. Not like any kind alive. An extinct breed… I had scoured the world, corresponding with scholars from a dozen countries and more, trying to find evidence of the dragons created by the Draconeans so many thousands of years ago. Could it be this man had found what I sought?

It was unlikely. Even if he had only discovered evidence of some other extinct strain, though, he had my keen interest. “Where?”

“In the mountains,” Mr. Thu said. “You will see.”

TWO

Further discussion of extinct dragons had to wait. The lobby of Caffrey Hall was no place for such matters, especially with a phalanx of overeager bodyguards ready to pitch Mr. Thu out on his ear. And it was clear that the barrier of language would hamper any attempt on his part to explain; we would proceed much more rapidly with Suhail’s assistance.

I arranged for Mr. Thu to come by my house that evening, assuring him that my footman would certainly let him in. I also gathered the names of the gentlemen who had accosted him—ostensibly so I could thank them properly for their assistance, but also as insurance. When Mr. Thu was gone, I said to them all, “If he does not arrive safely, I will be most vexed.” Whether they would have caused trouble for him or not, I have no idea, but I felt it was best to issue a warning just in case.

By the time I made it back into the main room, Suhail’s lecture had, as expected, devolved into a public debate. This went on until the organizer ejected us from the premises; then it continued for a time in the street outside, with several opinionated fellows cornering my husband to argue some more. “Thank you,” Suhail said fervently, after I rescued him by worming my way to the center of the crowd and asserting my superior claim to my husband’s person. “I’m fairly certain they would not of their own accord have stopped before dawn tomorrow.”

“I hope you are not too tired,” I said. “I suspect that we have an interesting evening ahead of us.”

He listened with growing surprise as I told him about Thu Phim-lat. When I was done, Suhail said, “He is not the first man to claim he has evidence of some undiscovered breed, Draconean or otherwise.”

“Oh, I am skeptical,” I assured him. “But also curious. If this is some Yelangese plot against me, then whoever crafted it has done their work well. I cannot let Mr. Thu go without at least inquiring further.”

The delay also gave me time to contact Tom Wilker, so that there were three of us waiting when my visitor came calling a few hours later. Tom spent the time between his own arrival and Mr. Thu’s pestering me with questions. “What did he mean by ‘the body of a dragon’? A skeleton, or a recent carcass? Which mountains? What makes it so different from current breeds?”

“I spent all of five minutes speaking with the man, and half of that dealing with excessively zealous protectors,” I said with some asperity. “Wait until he gets here; then you may question him to your heart’s content.”

Judging by Mr. Thu’s wary posture when he arrived, he expected precisely the kind of interrogation he was going to get. I did my best to put him at ease with introductions and an offer of refreshment; he turned down both tea and brandy, and perched on the edge of his chair as if afraid it would sprout manacles around his wrists if he relaxed. I said, “My husband speaks some Yelangese, though not fluently. My hope is that between that and your own knowledge of Scirling, we will be able to piece together a proper explanation. Now. Tell us what you know.”

It has been my habit in these memoirs to smooth over my own awkard conversations in other tongues, for the sake of not taxing my readers’ patience; I will do the same for Mr. Thu here, bypassing the many halting exchanges in Yelangese which punctuated his Scirling comments, and his sporadic failures of grammar or vocabulary. (Among other things, there are multiple Yelangese languages, and the one Suhail spoke was not Mr. Thu’s mother tongue. But they were both fluent enough in it that we got by, albeit with difficulty.)

“I found the body of a dragon,” he said. “Or rather, part of one. It was incomplete, but there was enough for me to be certain that I did not recognize its breed.”

“Are you a natural historian, that you are very familiar with different kinds of dragons?”

Mr. Thu shook his head. “No, Lady Trent. But I have been in the mountains before; I know the dragons that are found there. This was not of any kind I know.”

Tom frowned. When questioning someone, it is often effective to have one interrogator behave in a skeptical fashion, while the other is more credulous; but I fear both Tom and I took on the role of skeptic at the start of that evening. He said, “It might not be a mountain breed.”

“Perhaps. But then what was it doing there?”

“Where is ‘there’?” I asked. “Which mountains?”

“The Mrtyahaima.”

His answer startled me into silence. The Mrtyahaima Mountains are, of course, one of the great geological features of the Dajin continent. Comprising a number of interlocking ranges, they dwarf what we call “mountains” in many other parts of the world. If the measurements of surveyors are accurate, the fifteen tallest peaks in existence are all found in that region, each one more than eight thousand meters high.

Long famous to the inhabitants of Dajin, they had become more well known in Anthiope since the advent of mountaineering as an athletic activity. Our early climbers were content to test themselves against the lesser peaks of the Vystrani Mountains or the Netsjas in Bulskevo, but as more and more of those were conquered, the ambitious turned their attentions to Dajin and the Mrtyahaima. No one even knew whether it was possible to climb an eight-thousand-meter peak: could human beings survive at such altitude? Nowadays we believe they can, but no one has yet succeeded in reaching a summit that high.

The Mrtyahaima were of interest to us for other reasons as well. The various ranges grouped under that name, running as they do from near the northern coast well into the interior, almost bisect the continent. To the east lies Vidwatha; to the west, Yelang. And Scirland, of course, had various colonial possessions in Vidwatha—which meant the two nations had spent years glaring at one another across the nearly impassable barrier of the mountains.

I racked my memory for what I knew of Mrtyahaiman draconic breeds. It was disappointingly little: the region was so remote, what reports we had largely came from non-scholarly sources. They described everything from small, cat-like dragons supposedly kept as pets by the peoples of the high valleys to demonic beasts composed entirely of ice. “Describe to me what you found. It was a fresh kill?”

Mr. Thu shook his head. “No. I don’t know how long it had been dead, but it must have been at least a year. Or longer.”

Could bones preserve naturally under the geologic conditions of that range? I had no idea. “With only a skeleton to study, how can you be sure it was a strange breed?”

“It was not a skeleton,” Mr. Thu said. “No bones at all. Meat and hide.”

We ground to a halt for a terribly long time on this point, for Tom and I were sure that something must be going awry in the translation. But Suhail, questioning Mr. Thu in Yelangese, suddenly uttered an oath. In Scirling, he said, “Like a bog body!”

“What?” I asked, even more confused than before.

He hastened to explain. In Uaine and some parts of Heuvaar, ancient societies made a practice of sacrificing people by strangling them and sinking their bodies into peat bogs. The chemical composition of the water naturally pickles the flesh, preserving the soft tissues that would ordinarily decay—but it dissolves the bones, leaching away the calcium until what remains is, in Suhail’s words, “a slimy, boneless sack.”

A similar thing had happened to the specimen Thu Phim-lat found, but for entirely different reasons. The bones of the dead creature had long since disintegrated, as is common among draconic species. But the carcass, high in the Mrtyahaima peaks, had frozen after death, which kept the flesh from rotting as it ordinarily would. “They’ve found mammoths in the permafrost of northern Siaure,” Tom pointed out. “This sounds much the same.”

“Half mammoth, half bog body,” I murmured. The prospect was enchanting. Paleontologists, scientists who study extinct organisms, are accustomed to working from nothing more than skeletons. In my field of research, where we are rarely so lucky as to have skeletons to study, the evolution of draconic species is a near-total mystery. We had some theories, but most of them had fallen to pieces with the discovery of developmental lability. Facts were very thin on the ground, and preserved tissue was nothing short of a miracle.

But when I asked Mr. Thu where the specimen was now, he shook his head sadly. “I do not have it any longer. I think it froze above the snow line, and was carried by an avalanche down to a warmer elevation. By the time I found it, much of it had decayed, or been eaten by scavengers.”

“Much of it,” I said. “Surely there must still have been something, though, or you would not be here, assuring me it hailed from an unknown species.”

“Yes. The head, the neck; a little material below that, badly torn and malformed. Scraps detached from the remainder of the body.” He spread his hands helplessly. “I brought what there was with me to our camp, but we had nothing with which to preserve it. I made sketches, though.”

“Your camp,” Tom said, before I could spring on that word “sketches.” He was frowning and tapping one fingertip against his knee. “How many of you were there? Where precisely were you? And what, pray tell, were you doing there?”

His tone was colder than mine, and with good reason. While thoughts of dragons had carried me away, Tom had remained with his feet firmly grounded in current reality. Yelang’s easternmost territory was Khavtlai, the high plain to the west of the Mrtyahaima. They did not lay claim to any land in the mountains themselves—not yet. So what was a Yelangese party doing there?

Mr. Thu hesitated. I exchanged a glance with Suhail, and saw that he, too, was troubled. Then Mr. Thu nodded, as if concluding an internal argument. He said, “We were a party of mountaineers, exploring the high ranges.”

“Looking for a way through,” Tom said.

My blood chilled. A way through the Mrtyahaima… such things existed already, of course. The mountains are not wholly impassable; only mostly so. The nations of the high ranges, Tser-nga and Khavtlai and Lepthang and Drenj, had conducted trade with one another for centuries. But the major passes are not well known to outsiders, and are closely guarded besides; any attempt to bring an army through them would meet with stiff resistance. Yelang was looking for other routes, ways to slip a force across and gain a foothold on the eastern side, from which to control the whole region.

It was almost precisely the same tactic the Ikwunde had attempted in Eriga, approaching Bayembe from its theoretically unassailable southern border with Mouleen.

Controlling my voice took effort. “The only thing that persuades me not to throw you out right now is my perplexity. Why on earth should you admit that you are a scout for the Yelangese army?”

“Because sooner or later someone would discover it, and then I would look dishonest for not admitting the truth.” Mr. Thu sighed. “And also because I am not a scout for the army. I was one. But no longer.”

“Why not?”

“They discovered I was Khiam Siu,” he said.

My interest might lie primarily with matters scientific, but even I could not escape recognition of that name. Some fifteen years previously, Yelang had begun to suffer internal difficulties, in the form of a revolutionary movement that wished to overthrow the current Taisên Dynasty (which had ruled for nearly three hundred years) and replace the emperor with a new claimant. This movement called itself Khiam, or Renewal, and the Siu were its adherents.

As Mr. Thu explained to us, he had not been a member of the army per se. He was a mountaineer, hired to work with surveyors so that Yelang might have more accurate maps of the mountains to their east. But it seemed he had made copies of those maps and passed them along to his Khiam Siu brethren, whose leaders had been driven out of Yelang after a tremendous defeat at Diéziò. Someone above him in the imperial hierarchy had discovered this fact, and Mr. Thu barely escaped with his life.

He delivered this tale in the simple, matter-of-fact tone one might use to relate events read from a news-sheet. To many people this might have seemed like evidence of falsity, but for me, it made the entire affair ring true. I knew that tone well, for I have used it myself when I am deeply upset by a thing, and must detach myself from it so as not to surrender my dignity before strangers. When he finished by saying, “So you see, I am an exile,” I felt a pang of sympathy.

“I am very sorry to hear that,” I told him, and was quite sincere.

An awkward silence fell, until Tom took it upon himself to break it. “But why come here?”

“Because of Lady Trent,” Mr. Thu said, with a little bow toward me. “I wish her help. In exchange, I offer what I know.”

“What manner of help?” I asked warily.

He straightened his back, hands placed precisely atop his knees. Now we had come to the heart of it, for which all the rest had been prelude. “Your support. We—the Khiam Siu—have approached your government, seeking an alliance against the Taisên. But many look at us and see only Yelangese, and say we can never be allies. You can speak against them. You can help us gain our alliance.”

I would have a great deal of difficulty speaking if I did not first retrieve my jaw from the floor. The proposed alliance with the Khiam Siu was a matter of hot debate. The magazines and newspapers generally fell into two camps: those who, as Mr. Thu said, saw only Yelangese, and trusted them no further than the door; and those who understood the Khiam Siu to be the enemies of the Taisên, but saw no reason we should not stand back and let the two chew on one another to their hearts’ content. In less public corners the issue was acknowledged as more complex—but relatively few with the power to do anything were inclined to show favour to the Khiam Siu. Mr. Thu was quite right in thinking they needed support.

Where I parted company with his reasoning was the point at which he thought my support would get him anywhere. I might have engaged with politics more often than I intended—for we cannot pretend the education of girls and the forging of international bonds for the well-being of dragons are apolitical acts—but that did not make me anything like a force to be reckoned with on the diplomatic front.

Tom had resumed the role of skeptic, while I attempted to find my tongue. “What assurance do we have that this information of yours is any good? You could feed us a load of rubbish, and we would never know until after Lady Trent staked her reputation on you and your allies.”

“It is not… rubbish,” Mr. Thu said, employing the new word with quiet dignity. “And I have faith that you and Lady Trent would see through it if it were.”

I had my own question for Mr. Thu, which was as much a test as it was a genuine query. Looking him directly in the eye, I asked, “What makes you think I will trust you? My history with your countrymen has not been good.”

He nodded, unsurprised. “You do not like Yelangese. I understand this. But they say you care more about dragons than things such as that. I am hoping this is true.”

And, of course, it was.

THREE

We met with predictable disbelief when we presented our situation to members of the Synedrion.

My brother Paul laughed in my face. I approached him first, for while we were not close, we were at least on cordial terms (my elevation to the peerage having done a good deal to mend my contentious relations with the bulk of my family.) As he still held a seat in the Open House of the Synedrion, I thought I stood a better chance with him than with someone I knew only from public functions. “It’s a trap, Isabella,” he said over dinner at my house. “I thought you clever enough to see that on your own.”

“A trap to what end?” I asked. My impatience, I fear, was not as well concealed as I might have wished. “To lure me off into the Mrtyahaima Mountains so I may be killed? Dear heaven—if someone wants me dead, there are far less convoluted ways to arrange it.”

“And what if they want to capture you instead?”

“Yes,” I said dryly. “It is so much easier to do that by hunting me down in the icy wilderness of the world’s highest peaks than by, say, knocking me over the head on my way to visit a friend. Besides, he is Khiam Siu, not a follower of the Taisên. They want our assistance; foul play would hardly aid them in that goal.” (I forbore to mention that certain members of the Synedrion might applaud them for doing me in.)

Paul put his fork down with an impatient clack. “What other reason could these Yelangese have for approaching you? If they believe this information is so valuable—a point which I am not at all prepared to concede—then why not have their envoy formally present that offer to the Synedrion?”

Suhail laughed, as much to defuse the tension as from amusement. “Because they know our dear Lady Trent well enough to understand what good bait this is.” When I gave him an exasperated look, he said, “My heart, you know it is true.”

“That it is good bait, yes.” I could hardly pretend otherwise, when it had already produced such a marked effect. “But what benefit do they gain from spearing me on their hook?”

“Your vote, for one.”

We were then in that odd period between the passage of the Female Peers Act and the General Representation Act. The former gave me the right to vote in the Closed House of the Synedrion, as befitted my rank as a baroness who held the title in her own right; prior to the passage of that bill, I would have required a male family member to occupy my seat and vote in my stead. (Ordinarily this would have been my husband, but since another law prohibits foreign-born individuals from holding seats in either house of the Synedrion, I would have had to look farther afield.) The latter, of course, extended the right of suffrage to all women—but at the moment, I had the odd privilege of voting on Synedrion bills, but not in the elections which filled the Open House of that body.

Still my vote did not count for much. “If it comes down to so close a division that a single vote makes the difference, they are depending on a very slender reed.”

“It would be one vote more than they had before,” Suhail said. “And I would not undervalue yourself. If you speak in favour of this, it will have an effect.”

I gave him a dry look. “An effect, yes. But a positive one? That remains to be seen.”

My undertaking thus did not begin well, nor did it improve much in the following days. It seemed that everyone had a theory for what this supposed conspiracy might hope to accomplish. “He’ll feed us false intelligence,” Lord Rossmere said when I met with him a few days later. My readers may recall him as the brigadier who sent Tom and myself to Akhia—and as such, a man who knew how well the prospect of dragons would motivate me to action. “He’ll say things about the mountains to lead our own men astray, so that we won’t find a way through to the western side.”

“We’re in the mountains, too?” I said, startled.

“Of course we are. We’ve had surveyors there for the past two years. Ostensibly just to measure the peaks more accurately, but Yelang knows perfectly well what we’re doing. Just as we know what they’re up to.”

I frowned, one finger tapping my lip. “Have any of them reported finding unusual remains? Carcasses, bones—”

Lord Rossmere gave me a look fit to freeze a specimen solid. “They are not there to study the wildlife, Lady Trent. Their attention is on other things.”

Thu Phim-lat had spared a fragment of his attention for this matter. Assuming, of course, that he was telling the truth.

He was maddeningly close-mouthed about his find. I knew why; it was his one bargaining chip, apart from what he knew about the terrain of the Mrtyahaima, which the Khiam Siu were not going to surrender without gaining a good deal more in return. Mr. Thu did let slip at one point, however, that the location was not of any particular use for invading Yelang, as the mountains there were much too difficult to traverse.

That narrowed down the list of places he might have been… to only half of an impossibly large area. It was still too much. I tried again with Paul, this time accosting him at a garden party. “Mr. Thu believes more specimens may be found in the region, if we search. But if we wait, someone else will discover them first, and then we shall lose this scholarly coup. Possibly even to Yelang!”

Paul only snorted. “No one in the government cares about that, Isabella. Dragon specimens, however interesting, have no military value.”

I swallowed the impulse to point out that the bone specimens we discovered in Vystrana had turned out to have tremendous value, both military and otherwise. Bringing up that matter would only do me more harm than good.

Despite my restraint, one Synedrion member (who shall remain nameless here) was blunt enough to say it to my face, in the lobby of the chamber where the Closed House met. “Why in God’s name do you expect anyone here to do you favours, Lady Trent? It’s your fault we’re facing caeligers from half a dozen nations in this aerial war, instead of just Yelang.”

“I had nothing to do with Mr. Broadmay’s actions,” I snapped. The words came out by reflex; it was not the first time I had uttered them.

The gentleman grunted, as if the response he wanted to make was a good deal more vulgar. “Do you deny that you encouraged him?”

“I most certainly do. That I spoke out against the slaughter of dragons for their bones, I confess; but I never spoke directly to Mr. Broadmay, and had he introduced himself and explained his plan, I would have dissuaded him.”

I would have tried, at least. Even now, I am not certain how sincere I would have been in my hypothetical attempt to stop him. Justin Broadmay, having heard my lectures and read my essays, had sought out a position at one of the factories producing synthetic dragonbone. His express intent, as confessed before a judge, was to learn both the chemical makeup of the substance and the process used to give it the proper structure, and then disseminate his collected information around the world.

I cannot even say that I think he was wrong. Once upon a time, I feared that the discovery of a method for preserving natural dragonbone would have disastrous consequences for the beasts, as humans slaughtered them for material. I had poured all I could afford and more into pursuing a replacement, especially once the preservation method became known in other countries. When Scirling scientists finally developed that replacement, however, I realized that it had created a new problem.

The availability of a form of dragonbone we could produce at will, in the shapes desired, spurred a great many subsequent developments, not least of all in the field of war. And if other countries wished to keep up, they would have no choice but to harvest as much as they could… from natural sources.

The only solution was to make the replacement formula as widely available as the one for preservation. It did not entirely remove the competition, of course: now everyone was racing to acquire the necessary raw materials, and flogging their own engineers to build newer and better devices from this miracle substance. But there was no putting that jinni back in the bottle; once preservation had been achieved—and it was inevitable that someday it should be—we could only move forward.

For better or for worse, Justin Broadmay had the courage of his convictions—a courage I myself lacked. As a consequence, a judge had sentenced him to prison two years previously, and ultimately he spent the greater part of a decade there. It was only through the efforts of my legal-minded and charitable friends that he was freed so soon.

But the whole Broadmay incident left me on less than advantageous footing with Her Majesty’s government. In the end, I only achieved my goal by trading shamelessly on a connection I was not even supposed to have: my past encounter with Queen Miriam herself.

I did not meet with Her Majesty in person. A baroness I might be, but a title alone does not grant sufficient clout to be able to call upon the sovereign at will—especially when the circumstances in which we met were, at the time, still considered a state secret. Instead I had tea with Lady Astonby, whom my readers may recall as “Hannah,” the woman whom, along with then-Princess Miriam, I met on the island of Lahana in the Broken Sea.

A conversation over tea is not as irrelevant as you might think. Lady Astonby was not a peeress in her own right; she had her title by virtue of marrying her husband, and as such she had no vote in the Synedrion. But she belonged to that cadre of noblewomen surrounding the queen who participated in politics by other means. Through their social duties as hostesses, they gathered information; through their patronage and networks of friends, they dispensed influence. It was indirect, but not ineffective, and it permitted the queen to exercise more control over the Synedrion than she might otherwise have had.

“You believe this man’s offer to be of value,” Lady Astonby said, once I had explained the situation to her.

“Yes. I know that most would consider such information to be insignificant at best; but I believe it may be a discovery of great import to my field. And while draconic studies are not so impressive as the movement of armies, achievements in that area do raise our credit with other nations.”

Lady Astonby studied me with a gaze that took in everything and gave nothing back. “But gaining that information requires you to support the Khiam revolutionaries. I would not have expected you to extend such charity to the Yelangese.”

She had observed the Battle of Keonga, and I had to assume she knew of my other unpleasant encounters. I said, “I have been kidnapped, threatened, and otherwise mistreated by Eiversch, Bulskoi, Chiavorans, Yembe, Ikwunde, Keongans, Akhians, and my own countrymen. If I allowed that to discourage me, I should soon become a hermit, trusting no one at all.”

It was a pert answer more than an honest one, but Lady Astonby allowed it to stand for the time being. “You have said in your publications and letters that you believe the Draconeans bred a unique species for their use. Do you think this specimen might be an example of that creature?”

I knew perfectly well that if I said “yes,” my odds of success would go up dramatically. In theory any extinct variety should be of scientific interest; but that one, of course, was the Lost Ark of paleontological draconic research. Unfortunately, that would have been untrue, and I am not a very good liar. “As much as I might hope so, Lady Astonby, I doubt it. There were Draconean settlements in the lower reaches of the Mrtyahaima, but not up at the elevations where soft tissue might be preserved. And although we have evidence of breeding in various parts of the world, developmental lability makes it quite unlikely that the same species could have been bred in such a cold climate. Not without a great deal of effort, at least.”

No doubt to Lady Astonby it looked like artifice when I hesitated. Upon my honour, though, it was genuine inspiration that made me go on to say, “Unless they bred more than one sort. Which is possible, I suppose.”

The countess’s eyebrows rose. “I see. But that is nothing more than speculation.”

“I’m afraid so. Nonetheless…” I bit my lip, casting my gaze toward the ceiling. “I do not recall whether any breeding grounds have been discovered in the local ruins. My husband would know. Though of course a great deal depends on what we mean by ‘local’—as we do not know where in the Mrtyahaima the specimen was found.”

My intellectual enthusiasm had begun to run away with me once more. Lady Astonby brought me back to earth with a pointed question. “Other than greater scientific knowledge, what gain is there for Scirland in extending the hand of friendship to these revolutionaries?”

It was clear that my plea had made no impression, and was unlikely to do so. Still, I could not give up yet. “They oppose the Taisên,” I said lamely.

“And if their rebellion were going well, that might be of use to us. Of course, if it were going well, they would not need our aid. So we are asked to gamble upon the possibility that they might succeed in overthrowing the Taisên.”

Such a result would be beneficial to us in the long run, as it would remove an unfriendly dynasty and replace it with one that had reason to view us as friends. In the short term, however, it would require us to lay out resources and manpower, with no certainty of return. The mathematics of it made my head ache: this was why I stayed away from politics whenever I could. I was comfortable with risking my own life, but not those of our nation’s soldiers.

Lady Astonby’s gaze became curious. “Let us lay aside for the moment the question of the revolutionaries’ chances, and the logistics of their rebellion. And let us also lay aside this dragon specimen of which you are so enamoured. Speaking only of the personal level—or the moral, if you will—do you truly support this alliance?”

When people asked my political opinion, their true question was usually whether I would support their pet cause or not. If Lady Astonby had any such purpose in mind, though, I could not discern it; and so I gave her question due thought, sitting silently for a long minute.

Finally I said, “There is a degree of hypocrisy in our opposition to the Taisên. Our two nations detest one another because we are too much alike: both of us are grabbing for territory and resources. We condemn them for their rapacity, and I would not be surprised to learn they condemn us for the same reason. But I do not believe we will ever find peace with the Taisên, and a continuation of the Aerial War will not be good for anyone—least of all the people whose lands we fight over. If the Khiam Siu take power, we might at least end that conflict. So yes, I support it.” Then I permitted myself a small, deprecating smile. “But if you ask me to swear that my own self-interest plays no role in that statement, I’m afraid I shall have to decline.”

Lady Astonby nodded, as if she had reached a decision. “So Lady Trent supports the Khiam Siu. We can use that.”

I had cause to regret my words in the weeks that followed. Use me they did, in ways I should have predicted, were I not so determinedly naive in the realm of politics. Lady Trent extending the hand of friendship to the Yelangese made a noteworthy symbol, given my history of hostility with that people: they arranged for me to do so not just metaphorically but literally, during a diplomatic meeting with representatives from both the Khiam rebellion (including their would-be emperor, Giat Jip-hau) and members of the Synedrion. And that, of course, was only the beginning. I sat through endless state dinners, smiled and made small talk with Yelangese men and women who were as single-minded in pursuit of their cause as I was in pursuit of dragons. We had very little in common, and I found myself recalling, almost with longing, my perilous experiences in other parts of the world. At least there, I felt I was equal to the challenge.

In the end, however, I cannot complain too much. Thu Phim-lat obtained his alliance, and I obtained access to his notes.

“Is this all?” I said, gesturing at the small notebook on the table in my study.

Mr. Thu shrugged apologetically. “There was only the one specimen, Lady Trent, and only a few scraps of it at that. How much could I record?”

He had a point, but I had irrationally hoped for more. With Suhail leaning in at my left shoulder and Tom at my right, I opened the notebook and found myself looking at a pencil sketch of a decomposing dragon.

Pieces of one, at least. Mr. Thu had not been exaggerating the scantiness of his material. We were fortunate that he found most of the head; his theory was that it had been the last part to emerge from the snow and ice, and therefore the least damaged by the warmer temperatures and passing scavengers. Apart from this, there were a few scraps of flesh, one of which might have been part of a leg, and a piece of wing, so thoroughly separated from the rest of the body that it must have been torn off by an animal. “Or by the avalanche,” Mr. Thu added. “Either before or after it died.”

I shuddered to think of such annihilating force. I had taken up mountain climbing in recent years, partly as a hobby, but more to toughen myself for future expeditions. I had only rarely climbed above the snow line—almost every instance taking place the previous summer, when my son Jake persuaded me to take him on a holiday with the mountain pioneers Mr. and Mrs. Winstow to the southern Netsja Mountains—and had narrowly escaped what our Bulskoi guides assured me was a very small avalanche. A collapse strong enough to separate wing from body was harrowing even to think of.

“This can’t possibly be the normal shape of its muzzle,” Tom said. “Even allowing for the collapse of the bone within.”

“The flesh is very—” Mr. Thu paused, searching for the word. “Dry, and thin.”

“Desiccated,” I said.

He nodded. “By the ice. And I think the weight of the snow crushed it over time, pushed it out of shape.”

“That often happens with frozen bodies,” Suhail agreed. “Like the pair found in the Netsjas thirty years ago. Without bone to provide support, I imagine the effect would be even stronger.”

With Suhail’s assistance, Thu translated the notes scribbled below and around the images. The head was approximately forty centimeters from back to front, and thirty centimeters from base to crown. Many of the teeth had fallen out, making dentition uncertain. There were sketches of the remaining teeth on the following page: a few incisors, one surprisingly small cuspid or “canine tooth,” which Mr. Thu had tentatively identified as mandibular. A broken piece of what might have been a carnassial. We were lucky to have even that many, without bone to anchor them in place. The neck was set low on the skull, suggesting a head carried more high than forward. Mr. Thu could only guess at its intact length, but thought it was possibly quite short.

“Not surprising,” Tom said. “In a cold climate like that, a long neck is only a way to lose vital heat.”

Indeed, the neck of a rock-wyrm is much shorter and stouter than that of a desert drake—and the Vystrani Mountains are mere foothills in comparison with the Mrtyahaima. “What of the hide?” I asked.

In reply, Mr. Thu delved within his pocket and brought out a small silk bag. With great care, he opened its drawstrings and slid the contents onto the table.

It was a pair of… scales, I thought, but they were unlike any I’d seen before. One was long and thin: sized, I thought, to a beast much larger than that head would suggest. The other was a good deal smaller, and irregularly shaped. They were exceedingly pale and bluish in tone, but not the same colour; the larger one was mottled with darker grey spots. When I picked it up and tapped my fingernail against it, the sound was dull and heavy, though the scale itself was light.

“I had more,” Mr. Thu said, “but they were confiscated by my commanding officer. I kept these only by hiding them in the lining of my clothing.”

Tom and I grilled him on the shape, size, and thickness of the ones he had lost, and the details of where on the carcass the remaining pair had been found. At one point during this conversation, Suhail pounded his fist against the table in a rare display of frustration. “Oh, to have been there myself! I know you did not have much time to search,” he hastened to assure Mr. Thu. “But there may have been other scales or teeth scattered along the ground, not obvious to the eye. And even looking at where they fell… we might have guessed at the path your carcass took on the way down, how the scavengers tore at it, and used that to tentatively reconstruct where the loose scales had been.”

I understood Suhail’s vexation, feeling much the same myself. It was maddening to have such disconnected fragments. I was no archaeologist, accustomed to making do with what little evidence the depredations of time and decay saw fit to leave behind; my subjects were usually alive or recently dead, and in either case they were whole. If only we had been there when this specimen was discovered, to see it with our own eyes!

My brain had not yet carried that thought through to its logical conclusion when I rose and pulled down the world map from its roller on one wall. I was thinking only of elevation, temperature, possible food sources. “Can you show me where you found this?”

Mr. Thu came to join me. “You do not have a more detailed map?”

“Not of that region. Though I can certainly obtain one.”

He bent to peer at the area shaded to represent the heights of the Mrtyahaima. After a moment’s consideration, he stabbed one finger onto the sheet. “Here. Roughly.”

I looked, and my shoulders drooped. “Of course it was.”

He had pointed at a spot in the hinterlands of Tser-nga, an area very poorly known to outsiders. Sheluhim and various emissaries had visited in past ages, but the kingdom periodically closed its borders, and at present they were shut. It was no surprise that Mr. Thu and his compatriots would have been exploring there: to their east lay the high plateau of Khavtlai, which had been a Yelangese possession for more than a century. Given the remoteness and seclusion of Tser-nga, if the Yelangese came through the mountains there, they could be well established on the eastern side before we heard anything of it.

It also made going there myself more than a little difficult.

Only then did I realize what plan had been taking shape below conscious thought. I said nothing of it yet, though. Instead I asked Mr. Thu, “And what was the terrain like where you found the specimen? You said it was above the snow line?”

“Not when I found it,” he said, returning to his seat and opening the notebook to another page. It was not, I later learned, the same book in which he had originally recorded his observations, for that held too much in the way of other information he did not wish to share. Once the notes on the specimen were safely copied over, drawings and all, he gave the original to his Khiam Siu allies. But the copy included a terrain sketch of some truly forbidding mountains and the valleys beneath.

He indicated a specific location with the tip of his finger. “Here. But I believe it fell from higher up.”

“Six thousand meters,” Suhail said, translating the unfamiliar numerals written above. “More or less. Assuming I’m converting the units properly.”

That elevation marked a high col or saddle between two peaks. If Mr. Thu was correct, the specimen had fallen several hundred meters down a nearly sheer face to the spot where he found it. “What makes you think it was up there originally?” Tom asked.

“It would not have remained frozen otherwise,” Mr. Thu said with certainty. “Down in the valley, it is very sheltered from wind, and can become quite hot. And besides…”

His hesitation could not have been more effective at piquing my interest had he deliberately calculated it for that purpose. “Besides?” I prompted him.

“I think,” he said, uncertainty dragging at his words, “there may have been another up above.”

FOUR

From the moment Mr. Thu said “another,” I believe my fate was set.

That Tser-nga was closed to outsiders was not enough to deter me; I had to go and see. “That site is barely within their territory at all,” I said every time someone protested. “I can skirt their borders almost entirely, if I travel up the Lerg-pa River—”

But everyone who knew the first thing about the region assured me I could not possibly do that. The river, though it may look appealing on paper, is apparently the next best thing to impassable in person. “Very well,” I said, “then I will come at it from the west—” But of course that meant Khavtlai, which meant Yelang. And no one was prepared to let me sneak into a country I had been formally deported from, with whom we were currently at war. Nor could I go through Tser-nga itself.

We were at an impasse.

“Just wait,” people said to me, over and over again. “In a few years, when the Aerial War is over and Tser-nga has opened its borders—”

They presumed, of course, that the Aerial War would conclude in favour of Scirland, instead of with the Yelangese occupying Tser-nga and barring my entry even more thoroughly than the locals had. They also presumed that the specimen Mr. Thu had seen (if indeed there was more than one) would still be there in a few years, unharmed by the intervening time, rather than tumbling to the valley below and rotting away as the first one had.

“However old that first one may have been,” Tom said, trying to reassure me, “it survived all this time. There’s no reason to assume the others will perish in a few short years.”

He was endeavouring to be optimistic, and so he did not say the rest of what we were both thinking: it has already been more than a year since Mr. Thu found the first one. It would be longer still before I got there, even if I went immediately. My chance might already be gone.

But I could not allow myself to believe that. I had to hold tight to possibility and move as rapidly as I could. At least then, if my hopes were dashed, I could tell myself I had done everything in my power.

How, though, to reach my destination?

My difficulties could have been worse. Had Mr. Thu found the specimen on the western side of the mountains, I would have needed to dodge Yelangese forces at every turn. But his expedition was unable to scout the Khavtlai edge of the Mrtyahaima satisfactorily; sickness in the district had turned them away, forcing them to seek an approach from the far side. And the area he indicated was so far removed from the Tser-zhag heartland that which nation controlled it depended on which map you consulted: some said Tser-nga, some Khavtlai and Yelang. Either way it was a mere fiction, for the mountains in between were uninhabited.

But never had such tempting bait been dangled in front of me, with so many obstacles between.

Suhail watched me chew on this problem for days. Then, one evening as we sat in my study, he said, “Please do not take this the wrong way. But… why are you so determined to go?”

Another man might have failed to understand the magnitude of my obsession with dragons, but not Suhail. He had come with me into the depths of the Jefi in summer; he knew that risking life and limb for knowledge was nothing new to me. His question carried a different implication. “You mean, why am I pursuing this so passionately, when there are other, easier goals I might more plausibly attain. Goals which would have a much better chance of furthering our knowledge of dragonkind.”

“Even Mr. Thu is not certain there was another specimen in the col. He saw it through field glasses, not in person.”

Meaning that I might go all that way, moving heaven and earth to do so, only to have nothing to show for it at the end. I rose and paced my study, as I so often did—to the point that my carpet had a distinctly worn track in it. “My scholarly contributions of late…” I sighed. “I feel like I haven’t done anything.”

This took Suhail aback. “But the Fraternity’s work in Qurrat—your correspondence with the dragon-breeders in Bayembe—”

“Is all letters, letters, letters. Sitting on my posterior in this room, applying my brain to things, but not applying my spirit. And how much of my time is eaten up by other affairs? Patronage, public speaking, advice to others. It’s all very useful, I’m sure.” I meant the words to be sincere, but they came out scathing. My shoulders sagged. “I haven’t been out in the field since we discovered the Watchers’ Heart. I could go somewhere—Otholé, perhaps—but what would I do there? What question would I be answering, beyond some basic study of dragons not yet examined?”

Suhail rose and stopped me mid-stride, his hands on my arms. “Isabella. Why this doubt? It has never disappointed you to do basic study before.” He smiled, trying to coax a similar lightness from me. “Sometimes I think there is nothing in the world you love better than to describe some characteristic or behaviour never before set down in print.”

I had no answer for that. I could not explain the restlessness within me, the feeling that I must do something tremendous or my time would be wasted. Was it simply that I had grown so accustomed to making spectacular discoveries that the thought of doing the work of an ordinary scientist was tiresome to me? Dear heaven: if so, then I would have to go ice my head until the swelling went down. I had already been more fortunate than most scientists are in their entire lives.

Then the truth became clear to me. Without even thinking, I pulled free of Suhail’s hands, turning away to resume my pacing.

“Isabella.” His voice was very quiet, but no less fervent for that. “Tell me.”

I could not face him while I said this—but it must be said. I fixed my gaze upon the wall map, pocked with symbols and notes marking dragon breeds and Draconean ruins. Addressing the map, I said, “I think I am jealous.”

Silence fell. Then he said, “Of me?”

His tone was disbelieving, as well it might be. “I do not begrudge you your work,” I said hastily, my hands twisting themselves into knots. “Never think I am jealous of that—indeed, it is one of the things I love best about you. But…”

I could not go on. Suhail finished the sentence for me. “But I have been making great advances in my field, while you sit here and answer letters.”

“You have been honoured for your advances,” I said. The sudden bitterness that coloured my words was not for him; it was for myself, and the realization that I had at last found the true core of what troubled me so. “Your lecture at Caffrey Hall was conducted outside the chambers of the Society of Linguists not because they would not have you, but because you chose to share your work with a broader audience. But the Philosophers’ Colloquium will not have me. And they never will.”

Unless I went on making discoveries so great, even that pack of hide-bound, close-minded sticks in the mud had to acknowledge them. At the time I would never have phrased it that way in public, but that was how I had come to think of them. And yet, despite my scorn… yes, I still wished to join their number.

This time I did not pull away. Suhail wrapped his arms around me and laid his cheek upon my hair. He asked no further questions; he only murmured, “Then God willing, we will find a way.”

After that night, not a day went by that we did not pursue our goal of reaching the Mrtyahaima. I obtained a better map, tacked it to my wall, and began studying the topography of the region as obsessively as any mountaineer. Could we make our way along the range itself, from some starting point farther north? Not if I wished to arrive at my destination any time in the next ten years, Mr. Thu assured me. Perhaps I might approach from the west after all; I could dodge those Yelangese troops and come at the col from the far side. Nevermind that Mr. Thu had not the slightest notion what the terrain on the Khavtlek side looked like, and undertaking such an expedition would likely be suicidal. I was not so desperate as to gamble myself upon so slender a chance; but I was determined that I should not dismiss any possibility out of hand, however unlikely it might seem at first glance.

Which is, I suppose, why the answer came at the dinner table one night, when my son Jake was home from Merritford for a visit.

I had of course explained the entire situation to him, and introduced him to Mr. Thu. Jake’s first impulse, naturally, was to insist that I must take him along. “There is no sea for thousands of kilometers,” I reminded him as we sat down to dinner. Though he had scarcely begun at university, Jake had already made clear his intention to study the oceans as his life’s work: our voyage aboard the Basilisk had left a stronger mark on him than I ever could have predicted.

“I’ll find a way to rub along,” he said, with a melodramatic sigh. “But the Mrtyahaima! How many people ever have an opportunity to go there?”

“One fewer than you are hoping.”

Jake grinned. “You know that only encourages me to find a way.”

“You are too large to fit into her baggage,” Suhail pointed out. “I don’t think you can sneak aboard without her noticing.”

“Besides,” I said, “we still haven’t the slightest idea how we will get there.” My own sigh was more full of discouragement than melodrama. “At the rate this is going, by the time I have a plan, you will have attained your majority. And then I will not be able to stop you.”

Although Jake might not go so far as to sneak after us, he was quite serious about finding a way—for us, if not for himself. He said, “Have you asked Uncle Andrew?”

Much to the surprise of my family, the youngest of my brothers was still in the army. It was not his passion in life, but it gave him purpose and direction—and, dare I say, discipline—which was more than he had ever found on his own. “I have written to him, but he is only a captain. He cannot order the army into Tser-nga to clear a path for us.”

Jake brooded over this as the footman brought out the soup course. Suhail and I began eating, but Jake only fiddled with his spoon. Since he ordinarily devoured his food almost before his dish touched the table, I found this worrisome. Before I could ask, though, he burst out with a sudden, uproarious laugh. “A path through Tser-nga, no. So you should go over!”

My spoon slid gently from my fingers and vanished up to the tip of its handle in my soup bowl. I did not attempt to retrieve it, staring blindly into the liquid.

Go over.

“Pardon me,” I said. Abandoning my soup, with my son and my husband grinning after me, I went to write a letter.

My relationship with the military authorities of Scirland has always been a contentious one. I unwittingly undermined them in Bayembe, but aided them in Keonga; with Tom’s assistance I strong-armed my way into a job posting they did not want to give me, but then redeemed myself with the discoveries in the Labyrinth of Drakes and the principle of developmental lability. I was instrumental in Scirland gaining knowledge of dragonbone preservation; lost that secret to foreign powers; funded the early research into synthesis; then inspired a man to spill the results as widely as he could. To say they detested me would be an overstatment… but to say they liked me would be false.

I would have gained no traction at all were it not for my brother Andrew. As I had told Jake, a mere captain had relatively little influence within the army—but he had once saved the life of another man in Coyahuac. Samuel Humboldt was a colonel at the time; now he was a major-general, and closely involved in the nascent enterprise that a few years later would detach itself from the army, becoming the Royal Scirling Aerial Corps. Thanks to his fondness for my brother, I was able to gain an audience and explain myself.

“Show me where you mean,” Humboldt said when I was done.

I was quite incapable of reading the man’s expression and voice for any hint of his thoughts. He had not laughed at me, though, and I chose to take that as an encouraging sign. I spread the map I had brought onto a large table already occupied by many other papers. The drawing was far from as detailed as any of us would like (maps of Tser-nga in those days being more imaginative than accurate), but it was the best we had, and supplemented by Mr. Thu’s own observations. “There is a village up here,” I said, indicating a spot at the foot of the massif which demarcated the edge of the inhabited zone. “We were hoping that it might be possible for a caeliger to fly us there—or if it cannot go that high, then as close as possible—so that we could explore around the col between these two peaks.”

I expected the major-general to ask me what benefit this could possibly bring. The monetary costs, I was prepared to defray; the days when I had to scrape for patronage to fund my expeditions had ended for good the day we announced the discovery of the Watchers’ Heart. Money alone, however, could not buy me the army’s goodwill.

But Humboldt ignored that issue. He studied the map, one blunt finger tracing the edge of the massif, then venturing across the blank space between that and the eastern edge of Khavtlai.

How high, I wondered, could a caeliger fly?

The answer to that was a classified military secret. I had not gone terribly high on either of my flights—but those, of course, were carried out in some of the earliest dragonbone caeligers, before the art developed to its present state. Furthermore, none of us on board had more than the vaguest sense of what we were doing in flying the thing. A modern caeliger, with a skilled pilot on board… I had not the faintest clue what it might achieve.

But I might find out.

“It would be exceedingly dangerous,” Humboldt mused, still looking at the map. “The winds are fierce at high altitudes, and while a caeliger is safe enough high in the air, any landing or takeoff risks the craft being flung into a mountainside.”

He did not speak in the subjunctive or the conditional, as if speculating about what would happen if a caeliger were to test the heights. Someone, somewhere, had already flown one of those craft through similarly hazardous terrain—perhaps even in the Mrtyahaima itself. But not, apparently, at the western border of Tser-nga, where uninhabited mountains offered the chance to sneak a caeliger and its occupants across where they were not expected.

I curled my fingers around one another, uncertain of what to say. Back when Tom and I were hired to breed dragons, I had harboured reservations about the wisdom of allowing my research to be turned to a military purpose. Now I had planted a tactical notion in Humboldt’s head, without at all meaning to.

It helped only a little to tell myself that someone would have thought of it eventually: if not the major-general, then someone else in the military or the government. If we had scouts in the Mrtyahaima, as the Yelangese did, then sooner or later someone might have looked at that blank stretch of map and contemplated its potential. After all, was that not the exact reason Mr. Thu himself had been sent there? And if feet would not avail us in that terrain, caeligers might.

I knew all that was true… but it did not erase my apprehension over being the one who first called the possibility to mind.

On the other hand, I had a strong suspicion that even if I abandoned my ambition on the spot, a caeliger might well be sent up into the peaks regardless. Much like the formula for bone preservation, that notion was a dragon that could not easily be stuffed back into its shell.

I drew a deep breath and thought of Suhail’s common assertion, that I was both the most practical woman he had ever met, and the most deranged.

“If the army is willing to consider such a venture,” I said, “then I should look into what an expedition would entail. Such things do not plan themselves overnight.”

Not overnight; nor even in a month. It took far longer than I would have liked to make the arrangements, and I fretted at every day that passed.

For more than a month we hung in limbo, without even a tentative assurance that a caeliger would attempt to bear us up into the mountains. Despite that lack, we spent most of our time on preparations, knowing that if this scheme gained approval, we did not want to delay our departure by so much as an hour. (It would only give those in charge time to reconsider the wisdom of their decision.)

Tom had turned green when he heard the plan, and was slow to recover his colour. He had ridden in a caeliger precisely once, when Natalie and her engineering friends debuted an experimental model (not composed of dragonbone) at an exhibition. Mountaintops and cliff edges did not trouble him—but as soon as the “floor” beneath his feet became an ephemeral thing of fabric and rods, his equanimity vanished. Jake elbowed him, grinning with all the irrepressible perversity of an eighteen-year-old boy. “Think you’ll be able to do it, old chap?”

“I’m trying not to think about it,” Tom muttered, but with a good nature.

Suhail had been in hot-air balloons before, as well as caeligers. They troubled him not at all; the frowning line between his brows was there for a different reason. He said, “It’s all well and good to have ourselves flown in—but how will we get back out again?”

“If push comes to shove, we walk out. The Tser-zhag are in the habit of evicting outsiders found within their borders, not imprisoning or executing them.” I laughed. My mood had improved tremendously since Jake put this notion into my mind. It mattered little to me that the possibility was so far-fetched; merely the dream of it was enough to give my spirit wings. “It might even make our lives easier if they capture us, so long as they do not do so before we complete our work. Then at least we would have experienced guides showing us the way out.”

Tom drew in a deep breath and straightened in his chair. “Speaking of guides. Thu said they found the specimen a good four days’ hike from the village—what’s it called, again? Hlamtse Rong. That’s a long way to go with nothing more than a small notebook sketch to lead us.”

“He said they hired porters in the village. Presumably those men would know where the Yelangese party went.”

Tom grimaced. “Assuming those men are still there, and haven’t died or gone elsewhere for work. Assuming they’re willing to hire out with more foreigners. Assuming they haven’t decided that it’s better to keep people away from where those remains were found.”

He had a point—several of them, really—and after this many years together, I knew where his thoughts were headed. “You think we should bring Mr. Thu with us.”

Jake had been leaning back in his chair so that it balanced on two legs only, a habit of which I had failed to break him. Now he almost overbalanced, and came down with a heavy thump. “That Yelangese fellow! The major-general will love that.”

I thought it through out loud, speaking slowly as each part came to me. “He will say it is out of the question, of course, because they are still not certain of him—or of the Khiam Siu… but there will be three of us and only one of Thu Phim-lat. Not counting any soldiers they send along, of course. Even if we hypothesize his intentions to be false, no one can possibly suggest with a straight face that he has left an ambush waiting there for us. Not when our arrival is so improbable in the first place. If the Yelangese were doing anything there they did not want us to see, they would not send him to draw our attention; and if they have begun doing something since his exile, we are just as likely to wander upon it without him as with. The greatest danger is that he will, for some obscure reason of his own, lead us into the wildnerness to die.”

“And that,” Suhail said dryly, “is again just as likely to happen without his help as with. If not more so.”

He did not exaggerate. Although we had done a bit of mountaineering in recent years, this was like someone who has dog-paddled across a quiet lake proposing to swim the channel between Scirland and Eiverheim. Of the lot of us, Mr. Thu was by far the most experienced. “We could take other mountaineers with us; Mr. Brucker has been to the Mrtyahaima before. But none of them will know the place we seek.”

I looked at Suhail, and at Tom. It was not only my own life I would be placing in a stranger’s hands.

My husband nodded. “We need someone. Let it be the man who found the specimen to begin with.”

I got up and went to my desk, where I slid a fresh sheet of paper onto the blotter. “Then first let us see if he agrees.”

Thu Phim-lat stared at me as if I were mad. “One day, I cannot be allowed to listen to a lecture without being thrown out. Now you trust me with this?”

“I see no reason not to.”

His mouth opened and closed once, as if he had too many possible rejoinders, and none could make it through the scrum. I would not have heeded them regardless. He drew in a breath, then said, “And what if I do not wish to go?”

“Then I would ask your reason.”

Mr. Thu spread his hands. “Here I am safe—as safe as I may be, at least. You ask me to go into danger again.”

“We will be travelling for the most part through Scirling-controlled territory in Vidwatha, and Yelang does not have an eastern foothold yet. Would they have any cause to expect your return to Tser-nga?” He shook his head, and I gave him a bright smile. “Then one could argue that you will be even safer there than here, for the simple reason that no one will be looking for you there. Though I must allow that the risk of avalanches and rocks falling on your head is greater in the Mrtyahaima.”

“Rocks and avalanches I fear only as much as they deserve.” This statement reassured me more than if he had declared no fear at all. A man who has no fear in the mountains is soon rendered a dark smear upon the valley floor. Mr. Thu held his breath, considering, then asked his final question. “If I refuse, will this harm the Khiam cause?”

“No,” I said. The major-general did not even yet know we wanted Mr. Thu to come, for we judged it best to get the man’s cooperation before that of the authorities. In that moment, though, I wished we had done it the other way around, for I was certain my truthful admission would cause him to refuse.

He said, “But it would aid my people if I came.”

“Among those who would take your participation as an encouraging sign of cooperation, yes. Among those who suspect treachery every time you sneeze, no. I cannot begin to tell you which might win out in the balance. But if this carries any weight with you, I should like to see you come. And not only,” I hastened to add, “because your expertise would be useful.”

“Why, then?” he asked curiously.

The last time I brought a man along on an expedition of this kind, it was because I loved him. In the case of Thu Phim-lat, my answer was much less scandalous. “Because you found the first specimen. You deserve to be there when—if—we find the second, and document it for the world.”

I spoke with pure honesty, not out of calculation. My acquaintance with Mr. Thu was so short, I had no way of anticipating whether my words would move him or not.

Despite my ignorance, I chose the perfect reply.

Thu said, “Then I will come.”

On the very day we received our permission to go, I sat down in my study for one final conversation—this one with my son.

“If you tell me not to go,” I said, “then I will not.”

Jake gaped at me. “Why would I say that?”

“Because the Mrtyahaima peaks are possibly the most lethal region in the world. I cannot promise I will come back alive.” No more than I could have promised my survival in the Green Hell… but back then I had been grieving for my first husband, fighting to establish myself as a scholar, and fleeing a responsibility I had never particularly desired. Moreover, I was young and naive enough not to realize just how much risk I was facing. Now I knew, and a portion of my heart would have been content to remain at home, secure in what I had already achieved.

But not all of it—and Jake knew that. “If I wanted you to stay here,” he said, “I would have already told you so. This is who you are, Mother. If you don’t go, you’ll always wonder what might have happened. What you might have learned. Besides, you need something new to shove in the faces of those—” (He used a phrase to describe the gentlemen of the Philosophers’ Colloquium that I will not repeat here.)

My eyes pricked hot, and hotter still when he added, “But don’t get yourself killed. Or arrested by some foreign government. Getting arrested at home is quite enough.”

“I have only done that the once,” I said. Our tones were light, but the sentiment behind them was not. Sniffling a little, I embraced my son; and not long after, I left Scirland for the heights of the Mrtyahaima.