Tooth and Claw

by Jo Walton

  Praise for Tooth and Claw

  “A delight . . . On a basic level, Tooth and Claw works much the same way that Watership Down worked. Highly recommended for anyone who loved the books of Austen, or Heyer, and wishes that someone was still writing social comedies that were just as sharp and just as pleasurable.”

  —Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen

  “Utterly sui generis . . . It’s a rare book that leaves me wishing it were twice as long, but Tooth and Claw is one such.”

  —Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “Plot strands come together just as they should, with delightful triumphs, resolutions, revelations, and comeuppances.”

  —Locus

  “Books as full of delights and excellent writing as Tooth and Claw are the rarest of prizes.”

  —The New York Review of Science Fiction

  “Have I mentioned how much I love this sly, witty, fast-paced, brilliant little book?”

  –Jane Yolen

  “Brilliantly riffs on Victorian society, with loyal family servants, prim and proper parsons, and country-house parties camouflaging hypocrisy, misogyny, and classism.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “The pacing is masterful, the characters distinctive, the climax exciting. . . . Definitely one for the Favorites shelf.”

  —Sherwood Smith

  Books by Jo Walton from Tom Doherty Associates

  The King’s Peace

  The King’s Name

  The Prize in the Game

  Tooth and Claw

  Farthing

  Ha’penny

  Half a Crown

  Tooth and

  Claw

  Jo Walton

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in

  this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  TOOTH AND CLAW

  Copyright © 2003 by Jo Walton

  All rights reserved.

  Design by Milenda Nan Ok Lee

  Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

  An Orb Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Walton, Jo.

  Tooth and Claw / Jo Walton.—1st Orb ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1951-7

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-1951-9

  1. Dragons—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6073.A448T66 2009

  823'.914—dc22

  2008038433

  First Tor Edition: November 2003

  First Orb Edition: January 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedication, Thanks, and Notes

  This is for my aunt, Mary Lace, for coming so far down the road toward fantasy for me, and for coming down so many other roads with me, plenty of them real as well as metaphorical.

  This novel owes a lot to Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage.

  I grew up reading Victorian novels. People since, from Joan Aiken to John Fowles and Margaret Forster, have done fascinating things with writing new Victorian novels from modern perspectives, putting in the things the Victorian novel leaves out. That gives you something very interesting, but it isn’t a Victorian novel. It has to be admitted that a number of the core axioms of the Victorian novel are just wrong. People aren’t like that. Women, especially, aren’t like that. This novel is the result of wondering what a world would be like if they were, if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology.

  I’d like to thank Patrick Nielsen Hayden for accepting a novel rather different from what he imagined he’d be getting; David Gold-farb, Mary Lace, and Emmet O’Brien for reading it in progress and making useful comments; Sasha Walton for drawing me a very helpful picture, making endless suggestions, some of them very good, and being forbearing (again) during the writing process; and Eleanor J. Evans, Janet Kegg, Katrina Lehto, Sarah Monette, Susan Ramirez, and Vicki Rosenzweig for beta reading for me.

  I’d also like to thank Westmount and Atwater libraries for having excellent collections of Trollope, and the Trollope-l mailing list, especially Ellen Moody, for thought-provoking discussion. Thanks are also due to Elise Matthesen for my beautiful necklace The Crowded Minds of Dragons, and my partner, Emmet O’Brien, for love and delight during the writing process. Without all this, this novel would not have been written.

  Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

  Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

  Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

  Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

  Who trusted God was love indeed

  And love Creation’s final law—

  Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

  With ravine, shrieked against his creed—

  Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

  Who battled for the True, the Just,

  Be blown about the desert dust,

  Or seal’d within the iron hills?

  No more? A monster then, a dream,

  A discord. Dragons of the prime,

  That tare each other in their slime,

  Were mellow music match’d with him.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from

  “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” 1850

  She’d like me to bring a dragon home, I suppose. It would serve her right if I did, some creature that would make the house intolerable to her.

  —Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage, 1859

  Tooth and

  Claw

  1

  The Death of Bon Agornin

  1. A CONFESSION

  Bon Agornin writhed on his deathbed, his wings beating as if he would fly to his new life in his old body. The doctors had shaken their heads and left, even his daughters had stopped telling him he was about to get well. He put his head down on the scant gold in his great draughty undercave, struggling to keep still and draw breath. He had only this little time left, to affect everything that was to come after. Perhaps it would be an hour, perhaps less. He would be glad to leave the pains of the flesh, but he wished he had not so much to regret.

  He groaned and shifted on the gold, and tried to feel as positive as possible about the events of his life. The Church taught that it was neither wings nor flame that gave one a fortunate rebirth, but rather innocence and calmness of spirit. He strove for that fortunate calm. It was hard to achieve.

  “What is wrong, Father?” asked his son Penn, approaching now that Bon was still and putting out a gentle claw to touch Bon’s shoulder.

  Penn Agornin, or rather the Blessed Penn Agornin, for young Penn was already a parson, imagined he understood what troubled his father. He had attended many deathbeds in his professional capacity, and was glad to be here to help ease his father into death and to spare him the presence of a stranger at such a time. The local parson, Blessed Frelt, was far from being his father’s friend. They had been at quiet feud for years, of a kind Penn thought quite unbecoming to a parson.

  “Calm yourself, Father,” he said. “You have lived a good life. Indeed, it is hard to think of anyone who should have less to fret them on their deathbed.” Penn admired his father greatly. “Beginning from very little more than a gentle name, you have grown to be seventy feet long, with wings and flame, a splendid establishment and the respect of all the district. Five of your children survive to this day. I am in the Church therefore s
afe.” He raised a wing, bound with the red cord that, to the pious, symbolized the parson’s dedication to gods and dragonkind, and to others meant mere immunity. “Berend is well married and has children, her husband is powerful and an Illustrious Lord. Avan is making his way in Irieth. His is perhaps the most perilous course, but he has strong friends and has done well thus far, as you did before him. As for the other two, Haner and Selendra, though they are young and vulnerable do not fear. Berend will take in Haner and see her well married under her husband’s protection, while I will do the same for Selendra.”

  Bon drew a careful breath, then exhaled with a little puff of flame and smoke. Penn skipped nimbly aside. “You must all stick to my agreement,” Bon said. “The younger ones who are not settled must have my gold, what there is of it. You and Berend have begun your hoards already, let you each take only one symbolic piece of mine, and let the other three share what little is left. I have not amassed a great store, but it will be enough to help them.”

  “We had already agreed that, Father,” Penn said. “And of course they will likewise take the greater shares when we eat you. Berend and I are established, while our brother and sisters are still in need.”

  “You have always been just what brothers and sisters should be to each other,” Bon said, and sighed more smoke. “I want to confess, Penn, before I die. Will you hear my confession?”

  Penn drew back, folding his wings hard around him. “Father, you know the teaching of the Church. Not for three thousand years, six lifetimes of dragons, has confession been a sacrament. It reeks of the Time of Subjugation and the heathen ways of the Yarge.”

  Bon rolled his huge golden eyes. Sometimes his son, so careful of propriety, seemed a stranger to him. Penn could never have endured what he had endured, never have survived. “Six lifetimes you may have been taught, but when I was young there were priests who would still give absolution to those who wanted it. It is only in my lifetime and yours that it is forgiveness that has become a sin. What was wrong was paying for absolution, not forgiving the burdens of those who would lay them down. The rite of absolution is still in the book of prayers. Frelt would have refused me this, I know, out of spite, but I had thought you would have had spirit enough to do it.”

  “Yet it is a sin, Father, and one the Church preaches against as strongly as priest-flight.” Penn flexed his bound wing again. “It is not an article of religion, true, but a difference in practice that has arisen over time. Confession is now abhorrent. I cannot possibly give you absolution. If anyone discovered it, I would lose my position. Besides, my own conscience would not allow it.”

  Bon shifted again, and felt loose scales falling from him down to the gold below. He did not have long left, and he was afraid. “I am not asking you for absolution, if you cannot give it. I merely think I will die more easily if I do not take this secret on with me.” His voice sounded weak even to himself.

  “You may tell me anything you wish, dear Father,” Penn said, drawing closer again. “But you may not call it confession, or say that you are doing it because I am a parson. That could endanger my calling if it became known.”

  Bon looked at the red cords on his son’s wings, remembering what he had paid to have him accepted into the Church and all the good fortune he had encountered there since. “Isn’t it wonderful how so much came of your little friend Sher?” he said. Then he felt the pain spreading from his lungs, and wanted to cough, but did not dare. Penn had drawn breath to answer, but he subsided, letting it trickle out of his snout, watching his father’s struggle in silence. Little Sher, once his schoolfellow, was the Exalted Sher Benandi now, lord of his own domain, and Penn was his parson, with his own house and wife and children.

  “It is the way of the dragon to eat each other,” Bon said at last.

  “These days—” Penn began.

  “You know I was the only survivor of my family, the only one of my brothers and sisters to grow wings,” Bon went on, speaking over his son. “You thought that Eminent Telstie had eaten them, or perhaps his wife, Eminence Telstie? They did eat some of them, swooping down out of the sky to devour the weaklings, always leaving me alive, because I was the oldest and strongest. They held hard to the idea the Church teaches that they were improving dragonkind by eating the weaklings, they were even kind to me. I did not forgive them for eating my father and my siblings. Yet I pretended to be a friend to them, and to their children, for my mother had little power to protect me or prevent them eating us all if they chose. They had taken my father’s gold and we had nothing but our name. When there were but three of us left, I had grown wings, but was only seven feet long, ready to leave home to seek my fortune but in great peril if I did. I needed length and strength I could not gain from beef. I ate my remaining brother and sister myself.”

  Penn lay frozen beside his dying father, shocked far beyond anything he could have imagined the old dragon could have said.

  “Will I die entire?” Bon asked. “Will my spirit fall like ash from smoke as the Church teaches? Or will I be reborn as a muttonwool to catch in the teeth of someone’s hunger, or worse, a creeping worm or a loathsome wingless Yarge?” His eyes caught his son’s, and still Penn stared dumbstruck at his father. “I have lived a good life since, as you said. I have regretted it bitterly many times, but I was young and hungry and had nobody to help me and a great need to fly away.”

  Bon’s scales were falling with a steady pattering. His breath was more smoke than air. His eyes were beginning to dim. Penn was a parson and had attended many deaths. He knew there were only minutes left. He spread his wings and began the last prayer, “Fly now with Veld, go free to rebirth with Camran at your side—” but the smoke caught in his throat and he could not go on. He had read the old rite of absolution once, in horrified fascination; his father was right that it was still printed in the prayerbook. It was absolution his father needed, and a clear spirit to go on. Penn was a conventional young dragon, and a parson, but he loved his father. “It is a custom, there is no theology behind it,” he muttered. He held his claws up before his father’s eyes, where he could see them. “I have heard your—” He hesitated an instant, it was the word that seemed so bad. Could he call it something else? No, not to give his father the comfort and absolution he needed. “Your confession, Dignified Bon Agornin, and I absolve and forgive you in the name of Camran, in the name of Jurale, in the name of Veld.”

  He saw a smile deep in his father’s fading eyes, which was replaced by peace, and then, last, as always, a profound surprise. However many times Penn saw this he never became accustomed to it. He often wondered what there was beyond the gate of death that, however prepared the dying dragon was, it should always astonish them. He waited the prescribed moment, repeating the last prayer three times, in case the eyes should begin to whirl again. As always, nothing happened, death was death. He delicately reached out a claw and ate both eyes, as was always the parson’s part. Only then did he call his sibs, with the ritual cry, “The good dragon Bon Agornin has begun his journey towards the light, let the family be gathered to feast!”

  He felt no grief, no shame at having gone against the teachings of the Church to give his father absolution, no horror at what his father had done. He felt nothing whatsoever, for he knew that he was in a state of shock and that once it wore off he would be quietly miserable for a long time.

  2. THE SPEAKING ROOM

  The whole family had gathered in the upper caves as soon as the doctors had shaken their heads and Bon Agornin had crawled down to the undercave to die, accompanied only by Penn. In addition to Bon’s four remaining children, the party consisted of the Illustrious Daverak, Berend’s husband, the three dragonets that were the fruits of her first clutch, now four years past, and the local parson, Blessed Frelt. They were attended by four of Berend’s servants, their wings tightly bound back. Also present in a serving capacity was the family’s old retainer Amer, whose wings were fastened down, to be sure, but through long trust and casual habit of th
e family, scarcely tighter than those of a parson. None of them approached the full length of old Bon. Illustrious Daverak came closest at forty feet from head to tail-tip, but even so, eleven grown dragons and three dragonets can make anywhere but a ballroom seem crowded.

  In consequence, after the first greetings and lamentations and exclamations as to who had come farthest to be there, they had divided themselves into two groups. The first, consisting of Berend and her party, accompanied by Blessed Frelt, went into the elegant speaking room to the right of the entrance, and the rest withdrew to the big dining room.

  There was nothing whatsoever for any of them to do but wait and quarrel and they might just as well have remained in their own homes and waited for the cry to go up and then come circling down to swoop on the corpse. But some say this is what dragons did long ago, and this is why nowadays they know better and make themselves caves and undercaves so they can retreat into the undercaves to die in peace. This means that only those they choose can share the body. Still, it seems very hard to some that civilization and modern ethical beliefs should lead to such interminable waits as the one imposed on Bon Agornin’s family.