A Natural History of Dragons (11 page)

Relatively approachable Lord Hilford had called the Vystrani dragons, that first evening at Renwick’s when I heard of his expedition. It was not the phrase I would have chosen.

A young woman appeared out of nowhere at my elbow, tugging me away from the men now swarming through the downstairs of the building. Using a flood of incomprehensible Vystrani, she seemed to be trying to convince me to sit down in a quiet place and have vapors over my misfortune. I’m afraid I gravely disappointed her by haring off into the rain, my already-ruined bonnet listing to one side on my head, to make certain our things were being brought inside. It seemed a minor thing to worry about, with howls emanating from a back room where they were trying to set the driver’s broken legs, but I was no use there, and could not abide sitting around and doing nothing.

My efforts averted a buildup of trunks in the front hall that would have made passage impossible. By repeating those few parts of my Vystrani vocabulary that were relevant to the situation, accompanied by much gesticulation, I managed to get some of the local servants to shunt our luggage upstairs, to the rooms we would sleep in. Jacob found me in the midst of this, and insisted on examining me for injuries. He exclaimed over my skinned palms and had Mr. Wilker bind them up, although by then they were hardly bleeding at all. For my own part, I conducted a similar examination of Jacob, and was relieved to find that his coat might have been badly torn along the back, but his skin was nothing more than scratched. An inch less into our fall, and the dragon would have caught him like the driver.

The noise in the back room subsided at last, and Lord Hilford appeared, weary and bloodstained. “He’s asleep again,” the earl said. “Whether he’ll survive … well, we shall see. Come.” We followed him obediently, Jacob, Mr. Wilker, and myself, like very lost and unnerved ducklings, into a room off the front hall.

Someone had made an effort to transform this dark-paneled, low-ceilinged chamber into a sitting room, though whoever had done so appeared to have been operating from a thirdhand description of Scirling customs. There were couches at least, even if they were more like wooden benches with cushions placed along the seat and back, but we sank onto them gratefully. From somewhere Lord Hilford produced a bottle, and there were clay tumblers on a nearby table; he poured a small amount of brandy into four of these and passed them around, even to me. I had not tasted brandy since the physician sewed me up after the wolf-drake, and had to force myself to take a sip, momentarily overwhelmed by the memory.

As the warmth traveled through me, dispelling the chill of the rain, Lord Hilford said heavily, “I am so very sorry, Mrs. Camherst.”

I looked up at him. “Sorry? Why to me, more than another?”

“I know I spoke to you of the dangers of this expedition, but I did not anticipate anything like this.”

“What the devil got into that thing?” Mr. Wilker demanded, and got a reproving look from Jacob for his language.

“My question exactly,” I said, “if in rather more vivid terms than I am permitted to use. I was not under the impression that rock-wyrms tended to attack people.”

Lord Hilford scowled and knocked back the remainder of his brandy. “They don’t.”

“Then I don’t blame you for failing to warn me of a danger you could not have expected,” I told him. My fingers curled around the clay mug. “By all means, let us be sorry for the poor driver, and pray for his recovery. But I am not the one injured, Lord Hilford; I do not need your apology.”

It sounded well, and I meant it as much as I could. Under no circumstances was I going to begin by letting anyone think I would wilt at the first hint of peril. Such wilting could be done later, when there was no one present to see.

I was rewarded with a rueful smile from the earl. “You will tarnish my reputation as a gentleman, Mrs. Camherst, with such gallant courage as that.”

“We still have Mr. Wilker’s question to answer,” I said. It was easier to think of the dragon’s attack as a puzzle in need of solving; that gave me something to focus on. “What could provoke such behaviour? It can’t have been rabid.”

Jacob laid one hand on my forearm. “Isabella, we might leave such questions until morning. Now is not a suitable time.”

“If by ‘not suitable’ you mean that we don’t have any answers,” Lord Hilford said. He put his empty tumbler down on the scarred surface of the side table. “Or at least I don’t. Perhaps the excitement rattled my brains loose, but that was quite unlike anything I have seen from a rock-wyrm before, and I’ve been close to them many a time. I shall have to ponder it. At any rate, this is the house where we are to be staying; our luggage should be around here somewhere…” He stared about the ill-lit room as if the trunks might be lost in the shadows.

“Upstairs,” I said. When I rose to my feet, I was pleased to find my knees steady. I had feared the moment of sitting and relative relaxation would have persuaded them to give out. “Though where precisely I sent them, we must discover.”

We ascended the stairs in a damp herd, all bumbling against one another in the dark and cramped stairwell. The boards creaked alarmingly beneath my feet, let alone Lord Hilford’s, but held. Once in the corridor above we found that our luggage had gotten all mixed up, despite the tags with our names. By now, however, the hour was grown late enough that we did not care. We pulled out the valises that contained our traveling gear, allocated rooms, and fell into bed with hardly a pause to change out of our wet clothes.

D
RUSTANEV

All through the night, I dreamt of the dragon, and fell again and again to the hard Vystrani soil, just out of the range of its claws.

When I awoke the next morning, Jacob was already gone. Morning sunlight showed me the room in better detail than I had seen the previous night, disclosing a bleak and cheerless place. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all of that same dark wood; I stretched out one hand from where I lay and found it was painted with a kind of resin that presumably sealed it against weathering. The ceiling beams were low and heavy, giving the room a claustrophobic feel. Our furniture consisted of a bed without posters or canopy, a wardrobe, a dressing table with a mirror, and nothing else.

The air outside my coverlet was quite chill, as I discovered when I left the bed. Shivering, I made a quick search and pulled on my dressing robe and slippers. These warmed me enough that I could search more thoroughly for a trunk with suitable clothing in it. The previous day’s dress was piled on the floor, stained, torn, and utterly beyond repair.

I was lucky enough to find one of the plain, sturdy dresses I had commissioned before leaving Scirland, with buttons I could reach on my own. Just as I finished with the last of them, the door creaked open, and the young woman from the night before poked her head tentatively in.

She was tall and of that build we so politely call “strapping” and applaud when found in peasant folk, with strong features and a wealth of dark hair. She also, at that moment, had an alarmed expression, apparently provoked by the sight of me dressing myself without aid.

From the words that poured out of her mouth, I gathered that she was supposed to be my lady’s maid. I had been afraid of that. She would need to be educated in her duties, starting with the purchase of a bell I could use to summon her when I awoke. I laid that aside for the moment, however, and held up my hand to silence her.

When she subsided, I asked,
“Tcha prodvyr e straiz?” What is your name?
—or at least, that is what I hoped I had said.

“Dagmira,” she replied.

“Dagmira,” I said.
“Isabella Camherst eiy. Zhe Mrs. Camherst tchi vek ahlych.”
This was a line I had rehearsed many times, until I was certain I pronounced it at least as well as our Chiavoran drivers did.
I am Isabella Camherst. You will call me Mrs. Camherst.
If I was to train this young woman to be my lady’s maid, then we would have to start by establishing boundaries. I was her employer, not a child to be chivvied around. Proper respect was essential.

I did not want to reflect that a Vystrani child would know more of the area and local customs than I did, let alone the language.

For my next display of linguistic accomplishment, I asked Dagmira where my husband had gone, and received in return a second flood of words too quick to comprehend. Another attempt, this time prefaced by
setkasti, setkasti—slower, slower
—rewarded me with a more suitable pace, but still far too many words I did not understand. Jacob had gone out; no more could I discern.

Frustrated by this, I gave Dagmira broken instructions to bring to that room all the trunks with mine or Jacob’s name on them, and to remove all those with Lord Hilford’s or Mr. Wilker’s, then went downstairs. The kitchen was cold and empty, the only smell a lingering one of blood from the doctoring of the driver. It drove out any thought I had for breakfast.

Compared with the dank interior of the house, the street outside (if I could dignify the hard-packed dirt path with such a grand name) was painfully bright. I squinted and shielded my eyes until they adjusted. In the distance, I could hear voices chattering in fluent Vystrani, but none were familiar to me.

The exterior of the house was not much more promising. Weather had faded the dark resin to more of a golden color, but it was bereft of decoration, showing just bare planks, broken here and there by narrow windows, and capped by a steeply sloping thatched roof. The bedroom had not exhibited such an angle; there must have been attic space above us. A glance around showed me there were few houses nearby, and those downslope; they appeared to be single story, apart from the presumed attics. Our lodging appeared to be the best Drustanev had to offer.

The path led downward to the rest of the village. Descending, I saw that most of the houses, unlike our own, had low fences enclosing geese-filled yards. Women stood at the gates, spinning thread and chatting with one another, not bothering to disguise the way they watched me. I smiled pleasantly at them as I passed, but my attention was mostly on the familiar wagons drawn up around the village well, with one of our Chiavoran drivers fixing a horse into harness. “Are you leaving so soon?” I asked him, a little surprised.

He glanced over his shoulder at one of the houses. “Soon as they bring Mingelo out. We have to go on to the boyar’s lodge.”

I knew they still needed to deliver their cargo, but Mingelo was the injured man. “Oh, surely it would be kinder to leave him here to heal, rather than subject him to such a journey.”

The driver spat into the dirt, unconcerned with propriety. “They say there’s a doctor at the boyar’s house. Chiavoran. Better than some Vystrani peasant any day.”

Even allowing for partisan national pride, I had to admit his assessment was probably fair; surely the boyar’s man would be better educated than the village bonesetter. I pitied Mingelo, though, having to endure the trip.

Jacob found me shortly after that. He, too, had apparently dug clothing out of a chest in random haste; his suit was rather finer than the situation called for. “Isabella, there you are,” he said, as if I had been the one to vanish so early this morning. “The drivers have to continue on to the boyar’s lodge, but after that, they’re going back to Chiavora. You—”

I stopped him with a hand on his wrist, very aware of Vystrani eyes on us. “Please don’t,” I said in a soft voice, so no one could eavesdrop, even if they spoke Scirling. “Don’t ask it of me. You know I will not go, and I don’t want to argue in front of these strangers.”

His hazel eyes searched mine. The mountain wind disarranged his hair, adding a touch of distress I would have found charming under other circumstances. Only then did it occur to me that I had left without so much as brushing my own, let alone pinning it up. What sort of image was I presenting now, argument or no argument?

Perhaps my own distress charmed him. Jacob sighed, though the worry did not leave his eyes. “Can I at least ask you to keep close to home for now? Hilford is asking questions of the village leader—what’s going on with the dragons, and where Gritelkin is. Until we have that settled, please, behave yourself.”

I resented the implication that I was misbehaving already, but that faded next to other concerns. I had assumed that Jindrik Gritelkin, Lord Hilford’s local contact, was one of the men rushing about last night. “He’s not here?”

“No, he isn’t. Will you go back to the house?”

The house, where I would have to face the incomprehensible Dagmira. “Yes, dear. Please let me know what’s going on, when you can. And what we are supposed to do for food.”

“There should be a cook; that’s another thing Hilford’s asking about. I think.” Jacob tried to smooth his hair back down, only to have it blown astray again by the wind. “I will arrange for something.”

I climbed the stony path back toward our borrowed house, resolutely not looking back toward the Chiavoran wagons, and my chance to depart.

EIGHT

An introduction to Drustanev — Mr. Gritelkin’s absence — We attempt to proceed