Daughter of the Serpentine

by E. E. Knight

  Governor Raal agreed to help finance a garrison of three dragons in the north, decreased to two during the wild winter months when there was less shipping anyway. They would patrol the straits, from the Headlands to the widening past the Daphine coast where the straits met the Inland Ocean.

  The dragons dispersed, back to the Serpentine for the most part, where they could enjoy a long rest and be properly cared for. Ileth had been losing her sorrow in the endless work of runs between the Chalk Cuts and the Old Post, setting up the new station, watching the dragoneers make toast after toast to victory.

  Serena was kind. She seemed to have an inkling of the curtains around Ileth’s heart.

  * * *

  —

  Ileth was offered the dignity and estate of an aerial return by Hael Dun Huss and Mnasmanus. Dath Amrits had been among the first to leave—Etiennersea thought it wise to take two dragons at her wing and do a quick tour of the border with the Galantine Baronies and other borders, to let the eyes on the other side know that whatever power had been concentrated in the north, there was no laxity in the south. The Borderlander had asked for a short leave to visit his home mountains west of Pine Bay; it had been granted, and he and Catherix promised to return to the Serpentine with a barrel of elk and moose livers.

  “He’ll spend his leave in some hunting lodge drinking distilled forage rye and dealing cards and come back with a barrel of cow livers,” Dun Huss predicted, watching the Borderlander fly off.

  “You three are so different, sir. How did you ever fall in together?”

  “It was just chance posting that turned into habit. Usually when they station three dragoneers together there’s a very experienced older one, a dragoneer in his prime who is being tested with a heavy burden of responsibility, and a younger one in need of experience. But a mix-up of orders and names, three fresh dragoneers off in search of glory. Makes a good tale for a winter evening and a heavy dinner to settle. I’ll tell it sometime, when there’s less to do. I believe we need to settle up with our good governor.”

  Ileth said a few good-byes in camp as she prepared for her return to Stesside. There was still her bargain with the Governor. Dun Huss told her that she needn’t concern herself with it any further. She wondered if that meant she was to remain at Stesside until her eighteenth birthday.

  * * *

  —

  With leisure to choose good flying weather, they left on a fine clear morning. It was a good flight and they made it in a morning’s worth of air.

  Governor Raal, by arrangement, was at Stesside to welcome her back. As she and Gandy had predicted, he disliked the way her hair looked. “Ileth, what did you do to your hair? Were you ill?”

  She had an explanation ready. “There were lice at camp.”

  “Did you try a sulfur preparation? You look a fright.”

  “It’ll grow back,” Ileth said, which settled him.

  Dinner was quiet. Lady Raal, usually the moderator of conversations, sat quiet and ate the way Ileth had taken her wine at her first Stesside dinner, a fair amount of moving of food with utensils but very little eating. Her husband helped her to her room early, with Ileth bearing a tea that was mostly warm milk.

  “It was a brilliant campaign, I understand,” Raal said over his own Stesssource lifewater in the dining room after dinner. Ileth noted that though she’d spent the whole campaign there as his “observer,” he’d only inquired about her hair and her health.

  “From the Serpentine’s perspective, it could hardly have gone better,” Dun Huss said. “Not a single dragon lost or crippled.” Ileth didn’t know if it was usual to speak only in terms of the dragons. She’d seen, now, the Academy’s method ensuring that a lost dragoneer could be replaced quickly. But she’d never forget Vor Rapp’s corpse, still saddled.

  “I hope those odd ships the Auxiliaries wanted turned the battle in our favor. They cost enough.”

  “I’d say the loss of four hundred of their most cunning and experienced raiders and their most daring captains right at the outset made the greatest difference in the fighting,” Dun Huss said, refilling Ileth’s glass. Ileth imagined a game of coup where your opponent lost his captains and cavalry at the opening. The rest of the game would be a steady progression of picking up pieces. “Those ships were supposed to be a decoy, but we had no idea how well it would work. Their best ships and crews go out, and what comes back? Dragons, organized for war. Lucky there.”

  “There’s already talk of a parade in Sammerdam. I expect the governors will agree with the Assembly. It has my vote. Weather should be lovely for it, if you in the Serpentine can get your dragons organized soon enough. Don’t want to delay too much; good news goes stale fast.”

  “We have a few dragons who are always in the mood for a parade. Will you allow your, um, daughter to attend in her role as a member of our company?”

  “I could not deny Ileth the pride of taking part. She and I have come to an understanding about her hopes with the dragoneers. Or has seeing war up close made you appreciate the quiet hills and woods and views around Stesside, my dear?”

  Ileth collected her words. “Your conditions limited my exposure to it. I hardly missed a meal, so at least I proved myself your daughter in that respect.”

  “You should be careful with that tongue if you want to ride a dragon in Sammerdam under the Archway.”

  “I don’t deserve to ride a dragon,” Ileth said. “That’s only for people who fought.”

  “That’s not quite true, Ileth,” Dun Huss said, leaving open which part of her statement wasn’t true. “Governor, it’s a lovely evening and the summer twilight is worth a few insects. I like to have a short walk after dinner,” Dun Huss said. “I’ve heard there’s an excellent path up to the source of the Stess, and I should visit before departing. Everyone who’s been there has told me it’s worth the climb.”

  “Watch your step in the dark,” Governor Raal said. “Would you like a lantern?”

  “You don’t wish to point out the family history yourself?”

  “My old legs would only slow you down. No, I will catch up with Ileth. It’s about time my observer offered me the benefit of her experience.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary. My eyes are still reliable. Ileth, look in on Mnasmanus before it gets too dark. His dressing may need changing.”

  “Was he wounded?” Raal asked.

  “Only slightly.”

  Dun Huss departed.

  “Excellent!” the Governor said, after watching Dun Huss from the door where he’d seen him out. “This is your chance, Ileth.”

  “Yes. But I should like to hear more about my mother first. I’ve already guessed you aren’t my father.”

  “We don’t have time for—”

  “Lies are what take time. Truth can be out in a moment.”

  Raal considered.

  “You are correct. I’m not your father. Yet, Ileth, I feel, no, that’s not quite right, I am responsible for you. After you were born, I never did work my way back and determine anything other than that there was enough doubt about the wheres and whens that it’s not an impossibility. You don’t favor or resemble me, other than that you seem to be very good at getting your way when you set your mind to something.”

  “Do you know who my father might be?”

  “Only from rumor. I never attempted to find out the tale in full, from your mother or anyone else. To seek an answer seemed—desperate. Or pathetic. There was a dragoneer connection. I don’t even know his name. Part of the garrison at the Old Post. Your mother—I think she had designs about something or someone from her childhood. She arranged a journey in great secrecy with the dragoneers there, maybe having to do with her own birthplace. Perhaps they even flew her back to the Baronies. She was away some months. So your mother and father may both be Galantine. She never spoke to me of it; I found out what
I could on my own. I don’t know what she intended to do, if it was love or if it was—was a transaction. There was a period where I didn’t see her or know what had happened to her. One day she appeared again at my door, ill, heavy with you, asking for my help. You were born a few weeks later, in this very house.”

  “What did you tell Lady Raal?”

  “The truth, of course.”

  Ileth wondered if the Governor wasn’t able to make the truth dance better than Ottavia could direct a novice. “She still took my mother into her house?”

  “Which do you doubt, Ileth, Lady Raal’s charity or her sympathy?”

  Ileth lowered her face.

  “You didn’t ask for an explanation from my mother?”

  “Ileth, among my—the way I was—if a woman, round with child, appears at your door some months after she’s been in your bed, you don’t interrogate her. I helped her as best as I could. As . . . after . . . once you were born and the infection took hold, she told me what she wanted: her child to keep her Galantine name and be raised in a Directist house. I forgot if Captain Congrave was born Galantine or just had parents who fled, but I did know he kept a Directist house, though he took his charges to the local priests to make sure they would fit in with Montangyan traditions. I asked him, as a special favor, to take you and said that one day I’d see you happily situated. At that point he was fairly reliable, despite the loss of his ships and flags.”

  “You must have heard gossip.”

  “Very little. The dragoneers were always high-handed with me. I did have one of my secretaries make an offhand comment about the dragoneers treating government property that properly belonged to the province as their own and a few of the clerks snickered, so I called the youngest clerk who’d laughed into my office and he confessed that there was a rumor that a dragoneer was involved with my own jade—sorry, it’s a coarse term and it shouldn’t have been applied to your mother, but he was a coarse young man and it slipped out.”

  “I wish Ignata were still here.” Ileth was sick of being a coup piece, moved this way and that. Ignata had been the only one who’d been honest with her from her first word.

  “She’s set up comfortably in Stavanzer. We can talk about her after you fulfill your part of the bargain.”

  Ileth nodded and left.

  Mnasmanus was out in the paddock, on the far side where the fencing came up against the forest. He was itching himself with a branch plucked from a tree.

  “What are you doing out here, sir?”

  “They forgot to take the horses out of the barn,” the dragon said. “The poor things are terrified. I’m trying to stay upwind. They won’t listen to reason. Silly brutes.”

  She trooped over to the barn, did her best to calm the horses, and after achieving little except the knowledge that her best wasn’t good enough, she grabbed Dun Huss’s little kit of grooming supplies and its attached back with spare dressings and sticking plaster for Mnasmanus’s battle wounds.

  A non-horse sound from behind startled her. She squeaked.

  It was Dun Huss. “You scared me, sir.”

  “I’m not our mutual friend but I can be quick and quiet at need. I wanted to make sure you weren’t followed.”

  “I thought you really had gone to the source.”

  “I’ve never been much of a believer in the virtues of this or that lifewater. It’s all just drink. I have that blood for you.” He held out a camp bottle. It had a label on it but it was too dark to read the small letters.

  Ileth waited perhaps just a moment too long before taking it.

  “It must be very carefully used. There’s still a great deal you don’t know, apprentice.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Dun Huss smiled at her. “Better be off. The longer a conspiracy proceeds, the better its chance of failure.”

  She returned, concealing the bottle of dragon blood in the bib of her overdress.

  “I have it.”

  Raal let out a breath in a way that suggested it had been held in his lungs for months, if not years. “You look nervous. Don’t worry, it’s just us. I’ve sent the servants off to bed.”

  She nodded.

  Raal touched her, gently, on the elbow, in the way he supported his wife when she moved. “I . . . I understand this is hard for you. I know you’re running a risk.”

  For the first time in the months she’d known him, he’d shown some regard for her feelings. Ileth thought it odd that it only appeared now, after he more or less admitted that there was little chance of his being her real father.

  “Mnasmanus didn’t notice anything. He wasn’t even looking at me.”

  “The sooner she drinks it, the better,” Raal said.

  “I’d like to see it prepared,” Ileth said. “You say you’ve consulted experts?”

  “I don’t even want her to know she’s getting it. I brought the subject up to her once or twice and she said she’d rather die than take it. She’s listened to too many old wives’ tales. I’ve spoken to experts. They believe it will help.”

  Another conspiracy. Well, best carry it out quickly. “We could pour it in a meat pie.”

  “I have just the thing. Cold tomato soup. She loves it on warm summer days.”

  He brought her the tray. Ileth tasted the soup, added the contents of the phial, mixed it, and tasted it again.

  “Do you have some pepper?”

  “Aren’t you afraid of taking dragon blood?”

  “I’ve had so much on me one way or another, more than that has gotten into me,” Ileth lied. Why was lying such a sin when it made so many matters easier?

  He reached for a thick bowl with a pestle in it. “There’s pepper in that.”

  Ileth ground it further, then added a generous pinch. She tasted it again. “That helps.”

  “Take it to her, then,” Governor Raal said.

  “Shouldn’t you?”

  “She’d like to see you.”

  Ileth wondered if he was afraid of the dragon blood or wanted to avoid a direct act if matters went ill with it. Ileth was indifferent. She carried the tray upstairs and went down to the farthest bedroom.

  Raal knocked on the door and they were admitted. Lady Raal was sitting up in bed, books and needlework about her. Both inquired how she was feeling.

  “Other than being tired of being in this bed, well enough,” Lady Raal said. “Tomorrow I must get about more. It is often so, a good day follows a bad.”

  Ileth set the tray down. Lady Raal sniffed it. “How nice, Ileth. I was just thinking I wanted something sharp; just because I’m idle my palate doesn’t have to be. I was going to ask for summer peppers and onions but this is better.”

  She tried not to watch too closely as Lady Raal ate, and instead occupied herself with a tapestry of a wedding procession. The faces were very good. It made her think of Astler. She’d gone almost the whole evening without thinking of him.

  Lady Raal set down her spoon. “Delicious. I love a good cold tomato soup in summer. Did you have some, Ileth?”

  “I tasted it. I like it with cucumbers and mint in the summer, and I thought I saw some in the kitchen. I can make my own.”

  Lady Raal smiled. “That’s how the Galantines take it. I always say, blood will out.”

  She picked up the spoon again and ate with enthusiasm and relayed the humorous story from her novel about a man escaping a dull marriage because he’d fallen in love with a model who sat for a famous portrait, only to find that while the portrait did the subject’s features justice, she made his life miserable. “Normally that wouldn’t be funny at all, we’re talking about lives being ruined, but when it’s written in an entertaining fashion—oh dear.”

  She dropped her spoon on the bedsheet and sank back on her pillow.

  “Dear!” Raal said.

  For one dreadful moment
, Ileth’s mind seized on the idea that Raal had poisoned his wife and would use the dragon blood in the soup as an excuse.

  Ileth grabbed her hand and squeezed it. She groped for a pulse as she’d seen physikers do but couldn’t tell if her heart had ceased to beat or she was just bad at finding the blood vessel in the wrist.

  Lady Raal’s eyes fluttered open. “That was—odd. I felt faint there, like, well, dizzy like after drinking lifewater. How very strange. I don’t usually react so to pepper; did you put a great deal in?”

  Ileth stammered a bit about liking pepper, and remained long enough to be polite and slipped out, using getting the dishes clean as an excuse.

  As she passed down the now-dark hall, the Governor caught up with her.

  “You didn’t tell me it would have such a dramatic effect,” he said.

  “I didn’t know. You’re the one who consulted with experts. Didn’t they . . . didn’t they warn you?”

  “They only said the effects began to show almost immediately.”

  * * *

  —

  Lady Raal was the first one up the next morning, other than her new cook, Eloana. Ileth delighted Eloana by speaking in her native tongue as they made breakfast together, though she annoyed Ileth a little when she pointed out that a sure cure for a stutter was to carry a pin with you and prick yourself with it so the pain would draw the attention of the evil spirit in your body causing the stutter.

  “The Lady is much better this morning,” Eloana said.

  “I’m happy to hear it,” Ileth said, hoping that Eloana wouldn’t start poking Lady Raal as she slept to draw out spirits.

  “I never see her so well.”

  Ileth decided to see for herself. Lady Raal was dressed in more finery than Ileth had ever seen, on her feet, walking with the aid of a cane. She was pointing out moldings in the dining room to Severan.

  “You and Eloana can’t just wipe them off, Severan. Really go over them with a cloth, little circles, that’s the only thing that gets the dust out of this beading. Oh, Ileth, I see you look surprised. You didn’t know I could walk unaided, did you? Well, I can, though lately I haven’t felt up to it. This morning I decided I really must force myself more.”