A Natural History of Dragons (15 page)

At first I was also glad to be traveling on my own feet, rather than being carried like a sack of meal. Three falls later, my joy had been firmly tempered. My cold feet were clumsy, and my attire, as I said before, was quite unsuitable; clutching the blanket about myself meant I could not use my hands for balance, until I knotted it around my shoulders like a lumpy shawl. I attempted to question the men about how they survived in the mountains, but was ordered into silence; and so we went down to Drustanev.

Most of the way. Before we came within sight of the village, however, we heard sound echoing up the narrow valley: shouts, and the barking of dogs. One of the men immediately grabbed my arm; the smuggler threw up a silencing hand. I swallowed a moan as my slow, sleep-deprived mind realized what the racket must be.

Jacob had turned out the population of Drustanev to search for me.

Guiltily, I thought what his morning must have been like. He awoke not long after dawn; I was not in bed. He went downstairs, thinking to find me, but found no sign. Dagmira or the cook might have arrived by then, and neither knew where I was. A quick glance would show that I had gone out without dressing. My tracks would lead out of the village, and then …

I had seen the care with which the smugglers broke and hid our trail on the way down. They might well have done the same during my abduction, which meant the search would not lead back to their camp. But to my husband, it would look like I had wandered inexplicably out of the village—then vanished.

And the most obvious explanation would be that I had been eaten by a dragon.

My heart ached for the panic I must have caused him. Ached, and then tightened in fear for what might yet go further wrong. “Let me go on alone,” I said in an urgent whisper. “You don’t wish to be seen, do you? I can find my way from here. And I’ll send the men to meet with you as planned.”

Daylight had revealed the leader’s face more clearly: weather-worn features, with blue Stauleren eyes and a fortnight’s growth of beard. That latter did not obscure the clenching of his jaw as he considered me. “You have my word of honor,” I said, drawing myself up with as much dignity as I could manage in my current state.

Whether the word of a Scirling gentlewoman meant anything to him, or whether he simply decided it wasn’t worth the trouble of keeping me, I do not know. But he waved me on with a curt hand. “Tomorrow,” he said as I passed him. “The spring beneath the cliff.”

I resolved that
someone
would be there to meet him, if I had to go by myself.

The barking grew louder as I scrambled down toward the searchers, trying to put distance between myself and my erstwhile hosts before I drew anyone’s attention. When I judged I had gone far enough, I began to shout, and soon they found me.

I will spare you the tedious details of what followed. (Much of it escaped me anyway, owing to my inferior grasp of Vystrani.) For posterity’s sake, however, I should note the reactions of two individuals upon my return.

The first, of course, was Jacob, who was leading the search. His first action upon seeing me was to crush me in the tightest embrace we had ever shared; and if the blanket over my shoulder was damp by the time we parted, I made no comment on it. “Thank the Lord you’re safe,” he said, and then on the heels of that, “Where in heaven have you been?”

He asked that question several more times before I managed to give him an answer, though not for lack of trying on my part; every time I opened my mouth, he declared anew his relief over my safe return, and soon this was further interrupted by orders to call off the search. We were halfway back to Drustanev—I had to insist to Jacob that I was perfectly capable of walking, or he might have carried me—before I could say, “It’s quite a complicated story, and I
will
tell it, but perhaps we should wait until Lord Hilford and Mr. Wilker can also hear. But oh, Jacob—I have solved our problems. I know where the dragons are lairing.”

“Dragons!” he exclaimed, stopping dead in a damp meadow. “Isabella, what are you talking about? Were you attacked?”

“No, no,” I said, fending off a renewed attempt to check me for injury. He had already catalogued the various scrapes resulting from my falls, and fussed over them as if they were a collection of broken legs. “Rather,
I
don’t know; someone else does—”

I remembered that we were surrounded by men from Drustanev, and stopped before I could say any more. We were speaking Scirling, of course, which I doubted any of the villagers understood, but better safe than sorry. Jacob finally agreed to wait for the full story, but I think it was more out of conviction that I was overwrought by my experiences than anything else.

The other noteworthy reaction came later, after I had been fed, doctored, buried under a pile of fire-warmed blankets, and finally permitted to dress. Dagmira undertook this task, and lambasted me up one side and down the other for my stupidity in going out like that.

“There was a
man
lurking about,” I said in frustration, trying to stop her tirade. An indiscretion—I had not meant to bring up the man—and one that did no good.

“A man? A man! Of course there was a man,” she said furiously. “Everyone knows Reveka has her lover, ever since her husband died. One of those Stauleren smugglers. Anyone could have told you that. No need to go running around the mountains to find out!”

So much for my indiscretion in mentioning him; the smugglers, it seemed, were no secret at all in Drustanev. Except, of course, where the Scirling interlopers were concerned. “
Would
you have told me, if I asked? Would anyone?”

“Of course not,” Dagmira snapped. “It’s none of your business.”

I forebore to point out that then there
was
need to go running about the mountains. My fractured interactions with Dagmira—nothing like so fluent as I represent them here, but for my readers’ sakes I will not subject you to a reconstruction of my appalling grammar and circumlocutions—had made it clear to me that the villagers of Drustanev had very little understanding of, let alone sympathy for, our reasons for being there. Gritelkin, I suspected, had not told them much, except that we intended to tramp around the mountains looking for dragons. As a result, we were an intrusion, an imposition upon their lives, and the sooner we were gone the better. As Dagmira said, their affairs were none of our business.

I let her finish dressing me, and went at last to speak with the three men whose affairs very much
were
my business—as mine were theirs.

They let me tell my story in peace, barring the occasional yelp of alarm or disbelief from Jacob. He withheld actual comment until I was done, though, at which point he dropped his face into his hands. “I should never have let you come here,” he said through their muffling barrier.

“I took no real harm,” I said defiantly. “A scraped knee, at worst. And how much time have I saved you? We could waste the entire summer up here, waiting for Mr. Gritelkin to come back—well, this way we can get on with our research.”

“
If
this smuggler can help,” Mr. Wilker said, not bothering to hide his doubt. “His trade may teach him a great deal about the mountains—but dragons?”

“You can hardly know the one without the other—not if you wish to avoid being eaten,” I said.

Lord Hilford huffed thoughtfully, sending his moustaches fluttering. “I tell you again, they do
not
ordinarily attack people. But we stand to lose very little by following this lead. Mrs. Camherst has given her word that the men will be paid for her return; we cannot dishonor that. Furthermore, it sounds likely that the smugglers can tell us more about the dragons’ sudden aggressiveness, which will be of value even without directions to their lairs. Yes, it will do,” he said, with a decisive air. “Tomorrow we will go to meet them.”

I had, during our journeys, seen Mr. Wilker argue with other men, and often with me; but never with the earl. “You can’t be serious! Trusting these fellows—”

“Who said anything about trusting them?” Lord Hilford asked in surprise. “I intend to bring both of you with me, you and Camherst both, and you can argue about who gets to skulk in the bushes with a rifle. Not you, though, Mrs. Camherst, or your husband will have an apoplexy.”

I think that a rather unfair word for Jacob’s sentiments, but it is true that his nerves hadn’t yet recovered from the scare. A part of me sorely wished to argue that I could mark the map, but any of the others could do that as well as me; only their marks would not be as elegant. And that argumentative part drooped its ears and tucked its tail between its legs upon seeing the look in Jacob’s eyes. I am not the sort of lady for whom protectiveness sets her heart aflutter, but the incident had revealed an intensity of feeling in my husband that took me quite by surprise. I had thought us friends, and so we were; but the word fell short of describing all.

(Indeed, that same night we discovered one of the primary uses for that wakeful period between one’s first sleep and one’s second—the same use to which Reveka and her young lover had put their time.)

(Oh, for goodness’ sake. I have already spoken about my fears when facing the smugglers; why should I not address the other side of that coin? It isn’t as if the people reading this book are unlikely to be familiar with the activity. And if they are, I heartily encourage the adults among them to put the book down this instant and discover one of the simpler pleasures in life. I am a natural historian; I assure you, it is common to all species, and nothing to be ashamed of.)

So, for my husband’s peace of mind, I agreed to be left behind.

By dawn the next day, I was just as glad not to be going out to the spring. My stockingless feet had been rubbed raw by the hike down from the smugglers’ camp; I padded about our borrowed house in thick wool socks, a compromise between protecting my blisters and keeping my toes warm. I soon discovered, though, the downside to sparing my husband’s nerves: I quite destroyed my own.

“What do you know of these smugglers?” I asked Dagmira as she beat out a rug on the slope behind our house. Her various looks were gradually becoming more familiar to me; I recognized this one as exasperation that I should ask so stupid a question. I clarified. “Are they violent men?”

Dagmira did not know the gentlemen had gone out to meet the smugglers—or rather, I
thought
she did not know; village gossips can uncover the strangest things. At any rate, she seemed to take my question as an aftereffect of my own experience. “They didn’t hurt you, did they? They keep away from people, mostly. Unless people chase after them.”

The barb sailed right past me. My attention was on her earlier words, so reminiscent of Lord Hilford’s statement about the rock-wyrms. “Dragons have attacked people before, haven’t they? I mean, in past years.”

Clearly Dagmira had no idea why I had seemingly changed topics. “You hear stories,” she said with a shrug. “A cousin’s cousin, from the next valley over.”

“Does it happen on any kind of cycle? Generationally, perhaps—” I stopped, for the exasperated look was back.
Teach a dragon to hatch eggs,
as they say nowadays. If the problem was anything like so regular, these people, dwelling in the mountains for centuries, would have noticed. “But it hasn’t happened in Drustanev before, at least not for a long time. When did it start?”

She delivered a particularly vicious blow to the rug, sending dust flying. “Last autumn. Nebulis.”

Mating season, perhaps? We knew very little about dragon mating habits. (We knew very little about dragon
anything;
hence this expedition.) But it would have taken Gritelkin some time to be sure of the problem, and by then, the mountains would be all but impassable. So he waited for spring—which I still was not convinced had arrived; I could see snow not a hundred feet from where I stood—and then sent his message. It was not his fault that the vagaries of travel and communication prevented him from warning us off.

Pulling my notebook from my skirt pocket, I asked, “What about injuries? Or deaths?”

The thwack of Dagmira’s rug-beater punctuated her words, which came out terse with the force of it. “Two deaths. Don’t know how many hurt. Half a dozen, maybe.”

Plus Mingelo, the Chiavoran driver. Averaged across six months, it was not so bad—but of course that did not tell me how many had narrowly missed harm. Dagmira, however, had redoubled her efforts, and the noise prevented me from asking more. I tried not to calculate the odds of an attack on any given day—and refrained from asking whether a cousin’s cousin from the next valley over had ever been killed by smugglers—and went back to pacing in my thick wool socks.

I nearly melted in relief when the gentlemen returned. My eyes went to Jacob first; he looked thoughtful. Mr. Wilker looked faintly sulky, and Lord Hilford, to my secret satisfaction, looked jubilant. “Well
done,
Mrs. Camherst,” he said once we had all withdrawn to our workroom. “Tom, lay that map out on the table, so she can see. They do indeed know where the dragons are, and more besides.”

Jacob had marked the various locations with a lead pencil, which told me Mr. Wilker must have been the one lurking in the bushes with the rifle. “We will have to adjust them as we go looking,” he said when I clicked my tongue over the rough marks defacing my pretty map. “The smugglers knew a fair bit, but they say the dragons move around, so none of this is certain.”

“
Some
things are certain,” Lord Hilford said, settling into a chair. “Dragons lair in caves, and so do smugglers—or rather, their goods do. And Vystrani rock-wyrms have a fiercely territorial streak, it seems.”

“Fierce enough to cause these attacks?” I asked, glancing up from the map.

Jacob shook his head. “If it were, incidents like this would be much more common, and the smugglers would know the cause.”

“
But,
” the earl said, holding up one finger, “the territorial response is not always the same. Rock-wyrms wishing to chase off an interloper most often breathe particles of ice. Sometimes, however, they attack more closely. And the accepted theory among smugglers is that this happens when the dragon is sick.”