A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent

by Marie Brennan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  PART FOUR

  In which many answers are found, not all of them pleasant, and some carrying an unfortunate price

  TWENTY

  The consequences of my bargain — An invitation from the boyar

  In most cases I believe the phrase “tearing his hair out” is meant metaphorically, but I’m fairly certain I saw a few strands caught between Mr. Wilker’s fingers when he took them away from his head.

  “Are you mad?” he demanded. I took the question as rhetorical, but he answered himself. “Of course you are. That much has been obvious since before we left Scirland. I knew it then; no sane woman would demand to be involved with this. But since you’ve gotten here—!”

  “Once there’s been a quiet night or two, people will begin to accept it,” Jacob said. “Isabella is right; Astimir will certainly not come back. Not tonight.”

  Mr. Wilker made an inarticulate noise of frustration. “He doesn’t have to. The villagers don’t want us here, and never have; now they know that all they must do to be rid of us is cause trouble tonight.”

  Pleasure over my cleverness had been glowing warmly inside me; his words were like a bucket of cold water dashed over that flame. I had thought about Astimir. I had not thought about everyone else.

  “Then we’ll just have to keep watch,” I said, trying to sound confident.

  “We?” Mr. Wilker’s eyes were bloodshot. He had not gotten any rest the night before, I remembered; that might have some bearing on his volatility now.

  I lifted my chin. “Yes, we. I am not too delicate to go a night without sleep. I will stand watch alone or with someone else; Dagmira might join me. Or Iljish. There are some people here sympathetic to us.”

  From Jacob I heard a grim murmur of “Not many,” but I paid it no heed. “Science will triumph, Mr. Wilker. I will not be driven out of Drustanev by peasant superstition.”

  His murmur was rather more audible than Jacob’s. “No, by peasant pitchforks and torches.” But apparently he considered the argument at an end, for he stormed out of the workroom. I wondered if I had won or lost.

  Jacob sighed and dropped into a chair. After a moment, he asked, “How many bottles did you say he had?”

  “Half a dozen.”

  My husband shook his head. “Where in heaven did he get them?”

  The bottles in question were with Lord Hilford and the mayor, but I remembered them well enough. “The writing on the labels was Chiavoran. Jacob, I’m wondering if the plan to drive us away was formed even before we came here.”

  The specter of the missing Gritelkin hung over us, more ominous than ever. Jacob said, “Then why wait so long? Why not cause trouble as soon as we arrived?”

  “We hadn’t been to the ruins yet. Astimir needed a justification for his haunting.”

  “He could have invited you sooner, though.”

  That was true. I thought back through our time in Drustanev. The invitation had come after my misadventure with the smugglers; perhaps it had something to do with them after all. They might have provided Astimir with the acid, though why they would have it on hand themselves, I could not guess. They had not killed me—but then, killing a Scirling gentlewoman would have brought a great deal of trouble down upon them. Scaring her off, on the other hand, would not. But why not threaten me then?

  Too many questions. I fingered the firestone in my pocket. Acid. Smugglers. Rock-wyrm attacks. Gritelkin missing. This charade with “Zhagrit Mat.” The dragon graveyard. The ruins. I could not tell if we had too little data or too much; I was convinced at least some of the pieces belonged together, but I could not tell which ones, and they all stubbornly refused to form a clear picture.

  I told myself to take one problem at a time. This is not always useful advice; one does not always have the leisure, and some problems are best tackled together. But at the moment, I could see no useful course of action except to make certain we were not driven out of Vystrana in the morning. That must come first.

  And—once again, addressing the nearest problem first—it might be best if we all got a little sleep that afternoon, so as to be fresh for the night. (Mr. Wilker particularly.) I drew breath to say as much to Jacob, when a knock at the workroom door forestalled me.

  Back home in Scirland, of course, we would have had servants to receive any visitors, inquire of their business, and then interrupt our conversation in as graceful a manner as possible. Here in Drustanev, we had Dagmira, Iljish, and our cook, whose name I h
ad never learned. The first two were somewhere in the village, talking of Astimir’s treachery, and the cook came only twice a day. Jacob and I therefore found ourselves blinking at a total stranger, without the faintest clue who he was or why he had decided to walk into our house without invitation.

  He was rather more finely dressed than your average Vystrani peasant. His heavy coat, hanging to the knees, was of fine wool, and the leather boots below shone beneath their dusting of dirt. It was a style of attire I had seen before, and as soon as I placed it, the words leapt from my mouth. “You’re one of the boyar’s men!”

  The bow he executed looked foreign, to my inexperienced eye, and when he spoke even my ear could detect a different accent in his Vystrani. “I am Ruvin Danylovich Ledinsky, stolnik to the boyar, yes.” He glanced past me to Jacob. “You are one of the Scirling companions to the Earl of Hilford?”

  Jacob gathered his wits and came forward. I did not mind a little more time to gather my own; my first, nonsensical thought was that this man—this stolnik, whatever that was—had come to evict us from Drustanev where the locals could not. “Yes, I’m Jacob Camherst, and this is my wife.”

  This was not, I thought, the same man I had spied upon at the ruins, overseeing the smugglers’ work. Ledinsky was older than that fellow, with gray salted into his hair; the fur-trimmed cap the man at the ruins had worn might have concealed that, but I did not think so. Which removed, or at least weakened, one of the other possibilities for why he might be there.

  “I come bearing a message from Iosif Abramovich Khirzoff,” Ledinksy said. “He regrets the unfriendly welcome he gave to your lord, which was a consequence of his surprise. Iosif Abramovich did not know Gritelkin was bringing such honored visitors to this village, and was displeased to learn his razesh had been so inconsiderate. But he wishes to make amends now. He invites all of your party to visit his hunting lodge and enjoy his hospitality.” A dubious glance cast around our workroom spoke volumes as to Ledinsky’s opinion of the low conditions in which we had lodged all this time.

  Those low conditions had (mostly) ceased to bother me, but the prospect of a few nights in the boyar’s lodge did appeal. Time away from the hostility of the villagers—which I suspected would persist even after we had made our point regarding Zhagrit Mat—and a chance to put the matter of Astimir and the smugglers to Khirzoff; possibly even news of Gritelkin. When I glanced at Jacob, I saw him thinking much the same. “I will have to speak to Lord Hilford, of course,” he said, “but your master honors us with the invitation. When would he like us to come?”

  “I have brought horses for you all,” Ledinsky said.

  Neither of us understood right away. Jacob said, not quite believing, “You wish us to leave today?”

  Ledinsky nodded. “The cook is preparing a feast in your honor.”

  In our honor, perhaps—but this Vystrani boyar had some cheek, expecting Lord Hilford to leap at his command. I knew from Lord Hilford’s comments that the boyar class had many distinctions within it; where the Vystrani ones ranked, I did not precisely know, but given the client-state condition of Vystrana, I doubted it trumped the status of a Scirling earl. Jacob’s frown mirrored my own. “I will let Lord Hilford know,” he said, his tone hinting at cool disapproval.

  Whether Ledinsky heard it or not, I could not tell. He said, “I will send a boy to help you pack your things,” and bowed himself out of the room.

  Jacob held up a cautioning hand when I would have spoken. “You should fetch Dagmira and Iljish; we’ll want them with us, at least for the journey there. No doubt Khirzoff has servants of his own to wait on us once we’re arrived. I’ll send Wilker back in, and go tell Hilford.”

  Very well; I would not say what I thought of such a peremptory invitation. If we were going to tell Ledinsky to wait, it would be better coming from the earl.

  In the meantime, I was not going to let some stranger pack our things. I hurried outside and saw Dagmira in the distance, arguing with two women at their front gate. Cupping my hands around my mouth, I called her name, and beckoned for her to come. “Fetch your brother,” I said with a sigh as she drew near. “It seems we may be guests of the boyar for a few days.”

  We did not refuse the invitation. Urjash Mazhustin had, it seemed, had quite enough of the trouble we were causing in his heretofore quiet village, be it supernatural or otherwise. He was not quite vexed enough to run us out of town, but when presented with such an ideal chance to be rid of us for a few days, he spoke volubly in favor.

  Ledinsky seemed to think we could depart immediately, but of course it was not so easy. The lodge lay three days’ ride away, even on horseback; the beasts had little advantage over donkeys or our own feet, along such tracks as the mountains afforded. We would need to pack clothes for that journey, and then better clothes for our time at the boyar’s lodge, and of course the stolnik was unhelpful as to how long that time might be. “It will depend on his master’s pleasure,” Lord Hilford said, resigned. “Which might be anything from a day to a month.”

  “We haven’t the clothes with us to look fine for a month,” I said, “even with laundry. But I will do what I can. At a minimum, I suppose we want enough to be respectable for a week; that will give enough time for someone to come back here and fetch the remainder, if it falls out such that we stay there longer.” I did not like the thought of staying there longer; the lodge was quite in the opposite direction from the cavern graveyard, which we’d had no chance to show to the other two men.

  The panniers on Ledinsky’s horses were not enough to hold everything we wished to bring. But he had not brought horses for Dagmira and Iljish, either; they would have to ride donkeys, and so we might as well bring a third for the remainder of our baggage. Sorting all of this took the better part of what remained of the day, with the stolnik frowning impatiently over us. When it became apparent that we would not be able to make any distance worth mentioning, Lord Hilford insisted we stay in Drustanev one more night.

  Jacob stepped aside with the earl and asked quietly, “What will that mean for our situation here?”

  Lord Hilford shrugged, looking philosophical. “We may as well sleep, if we can. Mazhustin was quite adamant that we would not set even a toe beyond our door tonight; he and a few of his fellows will keep their own watch. They’ll do a better job of it than we could, anyway.”

  “If none of them decide they’d rather have us gone.”

  “The mayor is a fair-minded man,” Lord Hilford said, unperturbed. “He admitted, when I put it to him, that the local children dare each other to visit those ruins all the time. They may not want to consider that Astimir would fake such a thing, being that he’s one of their own—but if this is a trick, then Mazhustin is determined to pillory whoever is responsible.”

  With that, we had to be content. And it seemed to suffice, at least for one night, for when we rose the next morning, there were no new disturbances to report. So it was, with a feeling of vindication, that we rode to meet Iosif Abramovich Khirzoff.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Iosif Abramovich Khirzoff — Gaetano Rossi — Opinions of Jindrik Gritelkin

  The term “hunting lodge” had led me to expect something small and on the rustic side: the sort of place a gentleman or peer might retire for a week or two of shooting before returning to the comforts of a less isolated residence.

  Whatever else might be said of Khirzoff’s lodge, it was not small.

  The fence that surrounded it was no wattle-and-daub affair, but sturdy planks of wood, with a shingled roof over the gateway, which had doors sized to admit both carts and people on foot. For our distinguished party, the larger was unbarred and swung open, admitting us to the spacious courtyard beyond.

  Above us reared a three-story dwelling of roughly dressed stone walls that, as Mr. Wilker muttered under his breath, might have been dropped there by a dragon migrating from Bulskevo. I had little eye for such things, but the crude scallops of decorative woodwork along the edges of the roof an
d the octagonal bay at one end certainly resembled nothing I had seen in Drustanev. The place would have been charmingly rustic, were it not for an unpleasant smell in the air. I hoped the odor did not originate in the kitchens, or the promised feast would be difficult to choke down.

  Someone must have been keeping watch for our arrival, as a man stood on the steps of the lodge, ready to greet us. It took no great deductive mind to guess that this was Khirzoff himself. His knee-length coat was of imported silk, and held more embroidery than all of his followers’ clothing combined. The man beneath all that splendor I judged to be about fifty or fifty-five, with a beard gone mostly grey springing magnificently from his jaw.

  He remained at his post while we dismounted from our horses, but spread his arms wide and said in a voice that boomed across the courtyard, “Welcome, honored guests, welcome!”

  To my surprise, he spoke in Chiavoran. That country’s favorable trade position in Anthiope has made its language known to many, of course, and all within our party spoke it more fluently than we did Vystrani. (Also, as I later learned, few of the boyars of Vystrana actually speak the language of their own subjects; they hold instead to Bulskoi, the language of the tsar, relying on underlings to communicate with the locals, and in this Khirzoff was no exception.) But I suspected the reason for that choice stood at his right hand: a man whose olive complexion and manner of dress marked him as Chiavoran himself. This must be his scholar friend.

  Taking his cue from this, the earl returned the greeting in kind. “We are honored to be welcomed in your home, Iosif Abramovich,” Lord Hilford said, climbing the stairs. He could not suppress a wince as he went; even with the fine tent Ledinsky supplied, the journey had taken its toll on the man’s aching joints. “I am Maxwell Oscott, Earl of Hilford.” He introduced each of us in turn. I suffered Khirzoff to kiss both of my cheeks in the Bulskoi manner, wishing he had forgone the friendly gesture of greeting us as we arrived in favor of the more civilized Scirling practice of allowing guests to freshen themselves briefly first. There was sap in my hair where a tree branch had knocked my bonnet askew.