Daughter of the Serpentine

by E. E. Knight

  The door to the writing room opened. “They’re back,” the page said.

  Since the inevitable was going to happen, best not worry about it. Ileth tested her hands to make sure they weren’t trembling and went up.

  The Masters Traskeer and Caseen walked the hallway at baby-crawl speed, heads together in conversation, faces and shoes still wet from the rain, but they must have taken the precaution of putting on their oilskins. Ileth retreated to the shadows in the hallway by Traskeer’s office and let them talk.

  “Cuts will be endured. It’ll roll down, as always. The poor apprentices and novices,” Caseen said. “Handed-down clothes and old shoes and one less meal of meat.”

  “Will the dragons stand for it, is what I want to know. We may lose some,” Traskeer said. “Perhaps that’s the plan.”

  “If it is a plan, it’s the work of a cretin.”

  Ileth was trying to hear more when a throat-clearing interrupted her.

  Another apprentice, the shaggy-haired boy she’d seen cleaning the plaza, waited on the bench. He must be from the draft that came in while she was in Galantine lands.

  “I’m Ileth,” she said. She saw he too had a sheet of paper. He kept folding and refolding it.

  “Bellerin,” he replied. “Sixty-seven draft.”

  “Si-sixty-six,” she said.

  “He’s making me write up on the Big Ti—on the Beehive. Find if something needed fixing.”

  “Same. Vyenn.”

  They could go no further on the conversation, as Traskeer squelched down the hall in his wet shoes.

  “Just a moment,” he said to them as they rose to acknowledge the Master’s arrival. Ileth bobbed, and Bellerin gave a short bow.

  He called them in. His office was cool and stuffy and still just as bare as the last time. He sat in his chair and it creaked.

  “Well?”

  Bellerin and Ileth looked at each other, then placed their commissions on his desk.

  Ileth, being senior, said, “Our com-commissions.”

  “At last, Bellerin,” he said, taking the boy’s sheet. He glanced at the paper. “Improve your hand, apprentice. This won’t do for a formal report. I’ll have Kess at the archives saying he can’t read it to categorize. And do something about your hair. You look like a shepherd boy. Dismissed.”

  Bellerin ducked out. The Master looked at Ileth’s paper, turning up the pages.

  “That was quick work, Ileth.”

  “I’m trying to catch up with the rest of my draft.”

  “Creditable.”

  He set her commission aside without another glance and rubbed at the bridge of his nose, eyes closed. He opened them again, and his gaze fell on her waistline. “Dooms, what happened to your sash?”

  “I’m s-sorry, sir, I realize it’s in a . . . in a state. I only just found the cloth. I shall improve it.”

  “If you’re not resourceful enough to come up with a decent sash, I’m not sure what to do about you.”

  “As I said, I can . . . I can im-improve it.”

  “What is it? Bandages?”

  “A s-s-signal s-streamer from a dragon’s wing.”

  “Remove it. Let me examine it.”

  Ileth stood still, too shocked to move.

  “I’m not asking you to disrobe. Your sash, please.”

  Ileth fumbled with the knot, then handed it to him.

  “It’s a rag. Is that all the pride you have in your position as an apprentice to the Serpentine Academy? Walk around in a rag?”

  In an instant she was eight again, in the Captain’s Lodge, getting another one of his dressing downs. Though in some ways this was better; her sash was a genuine disgrace. The Captain just turned ferocious on his charges the way some men would kick a dog. If you looked at your shoes, he cursed you and told you to look at him when he was speaking. Another time, if you were looking at him as he spoke, he cursed you and ordered you to keep your eyes averted. Whatever you did he could find fault.

  He touched it to his lamp and squelched over to the stove, where he discovered that the wet sash had failed to properly ignite. He went back to the lamp, found a dry length, saw that it was lit, and tossed it into the stove.

  “Sir!” Ileth managed. “I could have m-made something of that.”

  “Be quiet. You’re out of uniform, Ileth. I’ll make a note in your index file. You’re off to a poor start as an apprentice. I was perhaps swayed too much by the good accounts of others when we first met. Now that I’ve observed you, I’m surprised they trusted you with a trip to the Baronies.” He searched her face. Did he expect tears? He wouldn’t get them; girls from the Captain’s Lodge did their crying in private. She took a hot little pleasure in denying them to him.

  “Dumb insolence, eh?”

  “May I retrieve my—”

  “No. You’re dismissed.”

  “May I . . . may I ask about where I’m to start apprenticing, sir?”

  “Once you present yourself to me properly dressed, I’ll assign you to a lot. Not until then.”

  She slipped out as quietly as possible. Well, her commission was done.

  Maybe she should stay with the dancers. Ottavia was demanding but not cruel. She could have made something of the sash. So much for the luck knot.

  The walk back in the rain gave her time to think.

  It was full dark by the time she returned to the Beehive. The rain had tapered off into puddles and dripping sounds. She walked down to the Dancers’ Quarter, took a little hand lamp such as the dancers used to accompany themselves through the darker stretches of the narrow human tunnels in the Beehive, made sure it was out of oil, and went to the mirror well in the Rotunda. From there it was a short trip to the flight cave.

  No dragons were being readied; only a couple of apprentices were cleaning saddles and securing harnesses.

  “I need lamp oil. May I draw some?” she asked.

  One of the cleaners stood, went to the offices for the keys to the storeroom, and handed them to her. They were used to supplying needs for the dancers, as they practiced nearby. The flight cave always had plenty of lamp oil; you wanted to be able to see what you were doing when rigging a saddle to a dragon.

  Ileth took the key and opened the lock of the storeroom. She went in, filled her lamp, checked the passage again, and lit it, and then explored further into the recesses where she’d been that morning. Nothing had been altered, and she found another white streamer right away. It was new from the loom, wound tight on a roll.

  Might as well be hanged for gold, she thought, taking the best one she could find. She wrapped it around her waist several times—it was plenty long—feeling the new material pass through her fingers, already planning how she’d fold it thrice before sewing it.

  Well, no going back now. She glanced out in the passage, then jangled the keys as she returned them. One of the apprentices waved.

  She’d pilfered from the Serpentine. She’d done that. Well, she’d stolen before.

  Back in the Dancers’ Quarter, she sat at Ottavia’s worktable with needle and thread, which was always kept handy given the stress the dancers put on their clothing. She trimmed the sash neatly, carefully trimmed the ends to an ideal length, then folded the sash so it was about the width of a man’s palm. It took her until well past midnight, she guessed; the bells didn’t penetrate this deep into the Beehive.

  She tried it on, knotted it, and used Ottavia’s small hand mirror to examine herself top to bottom. She found a comb, tucked it in her overdress, and walked back to the up end of the Serpentine. The rain was coming down heavier. Fall had arrived early, it seemed.

  The Masters’ Hall was all but lightless. A single night attendant paced the lower floor and startled as she banged through the door, dripping.

  “Ileth reporting to Master Traskeer,” she said, not both
ering to wait for a reply.

  Upstairs, she stood in front of her reflection in one of the dark hallway windows to tame her wet hair. She judged herself presentable.

  She pounded on his door as though to wake him to escape a fire. “Master Traskeer!” She gave it a moment, then pounded again.

  The door was flung open. Traskeer was in nightclothes, holding a night-candle. “Ileth!”

  “R-reporting for my assignment, sir.” Water dripped off everything drippable. Traskeer stepped away from her, perhaps fearful of the snarl she suspected she displayed.

  “At this hour?” He didn’t invite her into his office.

  “Properly dressed. As you . . . as you s-see.”

  “You made me dream of gravestones toppling with your pounding, Ileth.”

  Ileth couldn’t see how she needed to apologize for dream-gravestones.

  “My assignment?”

  “You want an assignment at this hour? Very well. Go out and run the walls until you fall and break your neck. That’s your assignment.”

  “You’ll notice I have my sash, sir.”

  He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and brought the candle forward. “So you do. So you do indeed. Simple, I see you went with something to go under a sword-belt rather than the wide ones currently in fashion with some of the young ladies. Quick work, considering you only left my office this evening. Where did you get it?”

  “I stole it out of the flight-caves stores, sir.”

  “You stole material that might be needed to identify our dragons? For your own use?” But he said it quietly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He snorted.

  “Well, that is a terrible mark against you. I shall have you in front of an honor court.”

  Ileth was wondering how else she could provoke him, short of violence, when Traskeer yawned in an exaggerated fashion.

  “And yet sometimes, Ileth, just sometimes, when I’m woken at night and go right back to sleep again, I forget everything that transpired, except for sort of vague impressions. Like gravestones toppling. Can’t remember what was written on them now. Hope it wasn’t my name. That’s supposed to be a bad omen. I want to get back into my bed before it goes cold. Hopefully all I’ll remember in the morning is that you finally showed up with a proper sash. Dismissed.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He half closed the door, then turned a baleful eye toward her.

  “Enjoy your run. I’ll send someone to retrieve your body.”

  PART TWO

  Preparation

  “The spider designs for the fly, but must be prepared for the broom.”

  —a Vale proverb

  5

  It was often said that the looms of the Serpentine Academy work slowly but produce the finest material in the Vales. Ileth had heard the expression a few times and had always taken it literally, assuming there was a little workshop somewhere that wove material for the dragoneer dress uniforms.

  It turned out to be a metaphor, patiently explained to her by Santeel Dun Troot as Ileth waited for her formal apprenticeship to start.

  What it really meant was that the Serpentine’s traditions worked in their own way, making sure no novice rose to apprentice without showing some quality, and that the apprentices were worked, warp and woof, until they became wingmen practically unrecognizable to anyone who’d known them as sheepish novices coming through the door.

  They had to learn how to maintain themselves and their equipment, how to cooperate with each other and pass information up and orders down the hierarchy of command, and most importantly of all, the art of keeping a dragon in fighting trim.

  Ileth and nearly three hundred other junior apprentices found themselves grouped into drafts according to the year they entered. These were then broken down into manageable “lots” of about thirty for general training and “crews” of up to a dozen for more specialized duty. (Ileth, as the draft of ’66 had been already rotated through much of their first-year training, found herself in a “lot” with the draft of ’67 novices who’d already been promoted to apprentice along with a few others of her class who’d been late to be appointed apprentice for one reason or another.)

  Her “cross lot,” as these mixes were referred to, had twenty-two members, fifteen from the draft of ’67.

  One of the first things they did with a new lot of apprentices was get them on a dragon and in the air. Ileth found herself in the unaccustomed position of being the most flight-experienced apprentice, and did what she could to help the others along. They always gave a very easy first flight (which had any number of crude names attached) on a placid dragon in the mood for a few leisurely turns above the Skylake at a modest altitude. Any overconfidence brought on by the first easy flight was tested quickly with more demanding trips to the limit of human and dragon altitude and aggressive maneuvers designed to shake up the unfit. A few had unsound teeth, or fainted whenever they were in the air, or had constant dizzy spells and nausea from the motion, or grew so panicked that they were useless to themselves and the dragon. They were found other duties. Joai, who ran a little kitchen and nursed the slight injuries that happened throughout a typical day, was one of these. Ileth took a few more “introduction flights” while their lot was filled up by bright new novices from the draft of ’67. Nobody in her lot decided to become a groundling for failure of nerve or physical soundness, though about half returned from one of their test flights with their breakfasts splattered across their flight coats and cloaks.

  Their “introductory” flights were on an energetic young dragon Ileth knew named Aurue. He’d been born scaleless, giving him a dull gray color and making his lighter underside look sickly as there was no bright scale to contrast against it. But because of his youth he was easy to mount, he could fly longer without much tiring, and she believed him the fastest and most nimble of wing in the Serpentine complement. He was capable of speeds, both on the flat and in turns, that no other dragon of the Serpentine could match. If you could survive Aurue, you could handle anything.

  Aurue took particular pleasure in swoops at terrifying speed beneath the Long Bridge. He built up enough speed so that at the peak of the rise, the feeling of weightlessness ended with the splatters and stains Ileth had seen. Ileth’s stomach didn’t so much as gurgle. She loved the sensation of clinging to a dragon’s neck as it spun and swooped and dived and rose.

  “Does nothing frighten you?” Aurue asked as they landed lightly back in the flight cave. Landing there instead of on open ground was considered something of a stunt, but Ileth was game for anything Aurue threw at her.

  “Not when I’m in the air,” she said. When she was little, the Captain had sometimes liked to take his charges out on the bay in a one-mast sailboat. It could be a very lively ride in rough seas, and Ileth had delighted in clinging to the masthead. Dragoneering was even better; sometimes you were upside down.

  It was fascinating to watch a dragon’s head in these evolutions. It stayed as fixed as a star on the horizon. Aurue’s body would gyrate out of an inversion while his head remained dead level, a fixed point in a whirl of earth, horizon, and cloud.

  Later, as she unsaddled him—she was the last flight of the day, the flight cave was emptying—he grumbled about pressure being brought on him to choose a dragoneer. “I can hardly tell one human from another. I’m always grateful when one of you is unusually dark or pale or tall or short; I have a chance of remembering their name. How am I supposed to choose one out of the lot of you?”

  “I thought the Masters presented one,” Ileth said.

  “They give names. What can I do with names? If I like a groom, they tell me: No! Not suitable. Frustrating.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ileth said. “I thought you’d have wingmen lining up to get to know you.”

  “They come. They talk. And talk. And talk. I do not like it. Either the listening
or the speaking.”

  Ileth could appreciate that.

  She took off his harness and saddle and hung them up. “I sympathize with you on listening all the time. Your Montangyan is excellent. It flows.”

  “Perhaps. I—to speak honest, humans frighten me.”

  “You don’t seem frightened of me.”

  “I like your smell. The others are right, you are one of those humans who love dragons. Never tense with the prey-smell, unless you have blood flowing.”

  Ileth ignored that by wiping off the saddle. Dragons didn’t sweat, as far as she could tell, but their riders did.

  Aurue decided to change the subject. “Vithleen’s eggs are tapping now. Did you hear?”

  “No!”

  “Heard for myself this morning.”

  Ileth nodded. Dragons didn’t always appreciate a smile. “They say once they hatch there will be a special feast.”

  Aurue’s tongue flicked out, testing the air. “The dragon shelf-chat passed the same news, so it must be true.”

  Ileth had seen a herd of cattle penned up near the gardens. She thought it might be for the Feast of Follies, which held unhappy memories for her. She’d volunteered to miss it and be on duty to dance or assist the grooms and feeders should they need it, giving others a chance to dress up and celebrate.

  Aurue continued: “As you are a human who can be trusted to help, I wanted to ask your advice.”

  “My advice?”

  “To choose a dragoneer. I’m not a judge of humans. I don’t know a good one from a bad one. I trust you to make a sensible choice. Taresscon will not let me have peace until I name one.”