Daughter of the Serpentine

by E. E. Knight

  The door opened. A man who had benefited from an excellent shave that morning beckoned her inside. She smelled the same sort of body powder Santeel used on him.

  “Do you care for scent, dragoneer?” He wore a wig. Wigs marked one as someone who missed the fashions of the days when the Vales were under the king and his court. Ileth was only a “dragoneer” in the very loosest sense of the term, but its use warmed her. “I have several individually distinct scents that can sweeten the air about you socially, or be placed into a handkerchief for working around the dragons. No? I happen to have just received a new batch of face powder. Not only does it conceal blemishes, and, errr, even the most obvious damage, it heals them at the same time. I’m prepared to offer you a special price for it, as it will work such wonders with your skin your friends up in the Manor will wish to know its name and where you acquired it.”

  “Oh, she’s lovely, a treasure!” another male voice said from within. Ileth made out a figure standing near a worktable littered with material in the back. He had measuring lengths about his neck and a marking pencil behind his ear. “Invite her in here and let me get a look at her, such a graceful neck.” He didn’t say it lustfully, more like an art collector wanting a painting lit to advantage. “You have a fine carriage, young lady. Are you out of the Great Stair in Sammerdam? Asposis Academy for young ladies?”

  Ileth knew very well that lovely wasn’t a word that applied to her; she was more the sort who was told, “Oh, you’re pretty enough” in an encouraging sort of voice.

  “Thank you. You have . . . you have a v-very nice shop. But I only paused to admire,” Ileth said, accenting in her thickest northern.

  She’d learned why some in the Academy spoke warmly of the Kingfisher’s. You didn’t get much well-meaning flattery, or any kind of flattery, for that matter, up in the Serpentine.

  She decided that nothing on the main streets would fulfill her commission.

  The sensation of being on the hunt for something amiss in a town was as new to her as being fawned over in a shop. In the Freesand, as a girl, she’d always shrunk out of the way in passing. They were good people; she was a lodge-girl living on charity. In Galantine lands, on her rare visits to the Baron’s town, she’d quietly followed instructions and tried to be the next thing to invisible, being something of a cross between guest and prisoner. Vyenn was larger than Wesport in the Freesand or the Baron’s village, and yet here she might be called, to use the Galantine phrase, a person of significance.

  She tried the wide street that led to the old wall opening in the west. Like Broad Street it was paved with stones, at least to the old wall. The shouts of children grew louder. She followed the noise up the street toward the old wall and saw two groups of boys hurling dirt clods at each other. As the weather had been unusually dry, the clods exploded into clouds of dirt and dust in a boy-satisfying fashion, whether they struck boy, wall, or cobbled road.

  “Turn the invaders back!” one of the taller boys shouted from a position atop a parked cart that showed no trace of horse or harness. He brandished a dented and tarnished serving platter as a shield, banging on it with a gardening trowel when he wasn’t hurling dirt. He had a similar version of himself, no doubt a younger brother, feeding him lumps of dirt to throw.

  Gradually, she distinguished the two forces. The group trying to force their way up the street were somewhat older boys, barefoot and mostly in canvas clothes and loose shirts such as the fishermen and boatmen she’d seen in the Catch Basin wear. They stuck tightly together in a disciplined wedge. Facing them were smaller and younger boys—no, there was a girl among them who’d sensibly put a metal bowl on her head to protect herself from the flying dirt, but her loose dress and long hair gave her away as she hurled clumps of pulled-up weeds—scattered in the alleys and atop a horseless cart defending their territory. The defenders wore shoes, for the most part, and a few of them had neckerchiefs wound and knotted about the throat. Definitely town-bred.

  Ileth passed up through the crossfire and everyone stopped by seeming mutual agreement to catch their breath. And gather more clods of dirt.

  “What’s this?” Ileth asked the boy with the platter-shield in the commanding position on the cart. His brother hurried to refill the dirt clod supply from one of the rutted roads branching off from the cobblestones.

  “The Boat-Rats have mounted a sally,” the boy reported, mixing up his tactical terms, but the patter made sense to those involved. “I’ve called the Town-Cats to arms. No Boat-Rat crosses Broad, they know that full well.” His face was well caked with grime.

  “Rain and piss on the Town-Cats!” shouted a Boat-Rat. A clod flew and detonated near Ileth.

  With the armistice broken, Ileth had to be quick as dirt clods flew with refreshed vigor. New Town-Cats arrived on the Boat-Rats’ northern flank, and the older boys started a tactical retreat toward Broad but didn’t give ground easily. A fusillade of clods proved to be too many for the Town-Cat leader to block with his shield, and he and his brother dived behind the cart as puffs of dust and pebbles exploded all around.

  She left the battle and explored the area around the old wall. It proved to be a kind of informal park, though apple trees and an assortment of berry bushes had been planted all around the overgrown walls, with tended beehives keeping them company. The citizens of the Vales loved honey as much as they did their paintings and flower boxes.

  The old fortifications looked safe enough and the bees had other business. She investigated a tower first but didn’t like the look of the rotted wooden stairs, sturdy enough for the spiders inhabiting them but not her. She found a flight of stone stairs going up to the wall, ascended them, and enjoyed the view from there. Vyenn was a pretty town from this angle with the Skylake behind, though all the laundry fluttering in the breeze might be left out by a painter keen on selling their work. Enjoying the sense of being busy at nothing much, she decided to walk along the wall for a bit. It seemed a popular walk. The town or public-spirited citizens kept the wall path free from creepers and probing weeds.

  On the other side of the wall were smaller houses, most with coops or pens and extensive gardens, not quite town and not quite country. Only along the lanes did they cluster together. South of the town the ground rose gradually again to a mighty cliff in profile at a distance, perhaps two leagues* of lakefront away. She’d heard it called Heartbreak Cliff.

  An angry grunt sounded another stairway down, and she leaned over to look. Fallen leaves and growth had turned a sheltered exterior stairwell to a kind of bower. A tousle-haired youth with blood on his arms startled from where he bent over a bare-legged female form, and Ileth gasped.

  She had something very wrong in Vyenn to report now.

  Or perhaps she didn’t. She gasped again and covered her mouth with her hand when she realized he’d draped a butcher’s leather apron over the stairwell wall and the girl sitting up was half-dressed, very alive, and some mix of angry and embarrassed that Ileth had interrupted whatever was going on. The formerly prone girl half shielded her face with her hand, but one eye still glared angrily up at Ileth.

  “Fly off, reeker. We’re not takin’ turns,” she said.

  Ileth had heard enough talk in the Serpentine to know that reeker was a Vyenn insult reserved for the Serpentine’s people.

  “I see the butcher . . . d-delivers. Is there a sp-special surcharge?” Ileth laughed. She hurried south along the wall.

  “Did you hear that?” the girl asked the butcher’s apprentice. “Did you? You going to take that?”

  The boy said something in response that might have been “Serpentine priss” and added something in a soothing tone, but Ileth was too far away to make out much of it.

  Parts of the wall had been pulled down south of town, and there looked to be nothing more interesting than a garbage heap and a gravel pit here, where the hills leading up from the lake became steeper and forested toward
the cliff, so Ileth found a ruined spot where she could safely jump down from the wall. She turned toward the domed building she’d seen at the end of Broad Street, the only real landmark on the south side of town.

  The houses here huddled around narrow, twisting streets, probably the oldest part of town. Women were out at the public water basins with small children and such handwork as could easily be carried. They moved around the square, washing and talking and trading fussing littles. Some eyed her curiously, some nodded and smiled, and Ileth had a chance to roll a marvelously stitched canvas-covered ball that felt resilient—it was probably stuffed with cork or perhaps coconut coir brought from some far-off voyage on the Blue Ocean to the south—with a couple of the younger children who were using it to knock down empty thick green bottles they’d set up for that purpose in a blind alley. It was a fun game and the children were happy to have what amounted to an adult playing with them, but Ileth was no closer to fulfilling her commission than she’d been when she first set foot in town. She moved on to the temple.

  The temple dominated the south end of town. The older residents sat about its steps or in the square before it, which had a raised pool in the center that was more of a slow, intricate trickle off a dragon head projecting from the pool like a sea serpent than anything that could be called a “fountain.” A gift for the people of Vyenn read the legend on the pool and something in Hypatian Ileth didn’t understand. A yellowish dog with a curled tail couldn’t read the Hypatian either, but it didn’t stop him from lapping up water before returning to run with two other dogs chasing about the square.

  The older men watched her, some smoking from pipes, some sitting with amiable dogs equally elderly at their feet; some read or played cards.

  A pair of beggars, husband and wife, claiming to be travelers going to the bedside of a dying mother, worked the assembly, such as it was. Ileth overheard some of the story: they had just sold their last spoons to get them this far but needed funds for their journey north. Ileth had no purse and was dressed as poorly as the beggars; in fact, her old bootlaces were in worse shape than the husband’s, so they passed her after a single appraising glance.

  Back on Broad Street, the only thing that interested her was a music shop. They had a couple of music boxes in the window along with instruments and folios of sheet music. INSTRUMENTS AND WINDINGS BOUGHT AND SOLD read a sign leaning up against a small harp. She supposed she could sell the music box the old dragon had bought her before his death, though it would tear out her heart to do so.

  As though summoned by her thoughts, an instrument tuned and then started to play back from the temple. She retraced her steps to the plaza and followed the sound around the fountain until she saw a barefooted boatman seated on the ground with his back to the fountain with a flexible wheeze-box opening and shutting the hand-paddles with great skill. It sounded like two instruments playing together. He nodded up at her and she smiled in return.

  Rather than greeting her, he changed up to a more sprightly tune. Dance came so naturally to her at this point that her feet moved before she was fully aware of it. She couldn’t dance in boots properly, so she undid the laces and stepped out of them. The overdress wasn’t ideal for dancing, but her arms could move.

  It felt wonderful to dance for just the enjoyment of the act in the summer sun. No dragon glowering down at her as his nostrils opened and closed, and Ottavia wasn’t here to correct her alignment; just music and motion and the fresh Skylake air.

  She felt gloriously happy.

  Another elderly couple set to dancing, facing the same direction with his right hand in her left, doing a simple folk dance, constantly turning to face a new direction together. Now and then the man would slip an arm behind his partner and pull her hip to hip with him for a fast turn, then release her to arm’s length again. Ileth admired their grace.

  Seeing feet move in courtly steps among the growing ring of watchers, she took the hand of one of the older gentlemen watching. He had an elaborately wound and tied neckerchief on his rather saggy neck. He just stood and turned, shifting his feet to the music (a little unsteadily as he tired) and she did the real work of dancing around him, though he gave her hand a friendly squeeze when she reached the limit of her steps away as if to reassure her that she wouldn’t pull him over.

  The old man started coughing and the music and dance stopped.

  He extracted a handkerchief and coughed into it. “Oh, girl, that does take me back. My lungs aren’t what they were.” He caught his breath. “Feet were willing enough, my wind gave out.”

  Ileth heard a few figs bounce onto the cobbles as the party broke up. She bent to retrieve only her boots; she couldn’t bring herself to scramble for coppers on the ground. The boatman with the wheeze-box had no such reservations.

  “Young lady,” the old man with the elegant neckerchief said, “here.”

  He held a silver coin in his trembling hand.

  “Sir,” she began.

  “I know you weren’t dancing for coin,” he said, pressing it firmly into her palm. “I know a Serpentine girl when I see one. Back in my time, your favorite partner from the evening’s dances, well, you gave her flowers as a thank-you. They sold them outside the assemblies, and it offered the perfect excuse for conversation. Now, as it’s not a market day Teesa isn’t here with her flower cart, but the next market day I want your promise that you’re buying yourself flowers. Lots of flowers, so they fill your arms all the way up to that fine regal neck you keep so pretty and straight. A girl like you who dances so deserves them. Put them next to you as you sleep so’s you get relief from dragon-reek and think of the lovely new memories your hand gave to an old man, an old man who hasn’t had any new memories worth the thought in too long.”

  She looked around, feeling strangely guilty. No one watched the byplay but the boatman, who gave her a quick wink.

  “Sir, it’s . . . it’s t-too m-much.”

  “Oh, I’ve enough to keep myself, just me these days, and I’ll have no need of coin for my next stage. No. Take it. But for flowers, girl.”

  “Flowers,” she said. Problems dissolved and plans rose to take their place. With a silver guildmark she could easily buy a pure white sash, nothing fancy, just sturdy, quality cotton such as many of the men wore, long enough to wind around her waist twice and knot, and have figs left over to buy a great basket of summer flowers and keep her promise.

  It would be fun. She’d never bought flowers in her life. She imagined what the Captain would say if she brought home flowers after being sent to the market for oats and milk.

  Skipping back toward the Serpentine on Broad Street, she just spotted the Kingfisher’s. She took the time to admire the sign. It had a very nice oval sign featuring a blue belted kingfisher hanging on an elaborate wrought-iron gibbet, or whatever the correct word was for the rail the sign hung from, Ileth wasn’t sure. She could walk in there, a paying customer this time, and spend her time picking and choosing. The commission could wait.

  She heard quick steps behind. She turned, a little alarmed.

  The beggars from the fountain plaza bobbed in front of her. He was unshaven, with bright, hungry eyes; she was ragged and tired-looking and obviously footsore.

  He spoke: “Miss, miss, begging your pardon, but I happened to overhear the exchange between you and that gentleman. Now a good deed’s worth more than all the riches of the earth as the prayerbooks have it, and I memorized mine same as I’m sure you did, and hearing from your accent that you’re a northern girl, well, me and my wife are in a hurry to get back to Stavanzer, but this is as far as the river will take us and we have to buy medicine here for my sick mother before going north again. That silver coin could mean life to her. We beg you to help!”

  He did have a faint northern accent. Or was good at imitating one.

  The copybook moralizing pulled at her. She’d neglected her rites and prayers since coming to
the Serpentine, save on the odd feast day here and there when everyone else was attending to their souls by stuffing food in their mouths.

  His wife looked at her pleadingly, silently mouthing please-please-please-please with her hand over her heart and bending a little in the old-fashioned obeisance of the plain to the aristocratic.

  “A . . . a s-sick mother?” Ileth asked.

  “I’m her only son, since my brother died in Reester at the hands of the Galantines defending the Scab. You know what that was like, being of the dragoneers, unless you were spared on account of youth.”

  They must have seen her receive the silver coin. How did they know she was with the dragoneers, if they weren’t from Vyenn? Perhaps they saw her brooch.

  “I’m sure . . . I’m sure she is a good woman. L-long l-life to her.”

  “That may depend on you.”

  “What was your f-favorite meal of hers when you . . . when you were a boy?” Ileth asked.

  He flinched a little at the question and his brows furrowed. “My favorite meal?”

  “Yes.”

  They both looked hungry. Perhaps some evil instinct prompted her to make them talk of food.

  “I loved oat porridge poured over good sour toast,” he said, bright eyes looking up. He licked his lips. “When we were too skint of meat, she’d soften it in hoof-broth gelatin. Gave them a lovely meaty mouth, the oats. Molasses she’d put on too. My brother and I worked all day on that.”

  Ileth relaxed. Porridge was common throughout the Vales, but around Stavanzer and Freesand in the north they made an art of it. They’d used the gelatin trick in the Lodge to add something like meat but cheaper. Pouring the oat porridge over toast was also something she hadn’t seen outside the north.

  She looked over her shoulder. The old man who’d given her the coin had his back to her, washing out his neckerchief in the fountain. “I . . . I have this. Take it.”