“I am sorry as well, sir,” Ileth said. Galia squeezed her hand.
“The only apology you should be offering is that you didn’t dump the soup where it should have gone, atop my thoughtless head. My stomach committed no offense I know of beyond growling in hunger.”
Galia laughed at that. Ileth just smiled.
“By way of apology: I understand you mountain-breds love tea. I have a small chest here of fine tea that was intended for my hostess, the Baroness Hryasmess. I am willing to temporarily injure her—until I can find an appropriate replacement—in order to make it up to you. What do you say, dragoneers? War, an armistice, or a peace treaty?”
He bowed, perhaps a trifle too expertly, as he presented it to her. Looking back on it later, she wondered if the whole performance wasn’t mechanical, much in the vein of Ottavia’s music boxes.
“A peace treaty,” Ileth said, taking the box and bobbing an obeisance. “Thank you, sir.”
“Justice!” Azal said. “Best of the three.”
“They should send you to the negotiating table, sir,” Galia said in her improved Galantine. “If you can soothe my dear Ileth, you can persuade anybody.”
They broke into small talk over the weather and the cat’s accident with the milk.
Galia expressed an interest in taking in the morning air, and Dandas offered to walk with her. Ileth said she’d remain behind and enjoy her tea, though she’d have to make it camp-style in a boiling pan as they had no kettle. Azal looked as though he’d like to remain behind and have some tea as well, but being alone with Ileth in the house would be inappropriate, so he walked with Dandas and Galia.
Ileth was glad to have them gone. She felt oddly like a passenger on a boat going with the river current, rudderless. She needed to rest and think.
But she had duties to do. She dressed and saw to Fespanarax. Griff had beaten her there and appeared to be in a conversation with Fespanarax, albeit in the dragon’s usual style of discourse, which was to ignore you until you gave up and wandered away. She smelled hot grease. Someone had brought breakfast. Ileth pretended to turn away, but she circled around to the other side of the arena and did her best to listen.
Fespanarax’s tail twitched. He was irritated, but whatever they were saying to each other was blocked by the dragon’s bulk as effectively as if the conversation were taking place on the other side of a fishing boat.
With little to do but think, Ileth went over in her head last night’s events. No, she doubted she’d been deliberately provoked. She was pretty sure that you weren’t supposed to build a plan around the reaction of your enemy. But given the circumstances, Dandas could have told Griff that he would keep the foreign “guests” occupied with his apology, giving Griff a chance at a private conversation—
“Enough,” Fespanarax said in Montangyan. “Rotten breakfast and worse company. Mount up on your promises and ride them away, see how far they take you.”
Ileth changed her position so she was just behind Fespanarax and watched Griff stalk away, head bowed, hands clasped behind him.
Fespanarax settled his hindquarters. “Girl! Don’t go poking around a dragon’s flanks. You’re liable to get your back broken by a tail that way.”
“Sorry,” Ileth said.
“Can you believe what that fool brought me for breakfast? Come look.”
Ileth ventured out around the dragon. A barrow filled with the remains of last night’s dinner rested there, mostly untouched.
“Slops! Last night’s leavings, as if I were a pig to be fattened cheaply.”
“Shall I get—”
“I’m in too bad a mood to be hungry.” He dropped his head between his forearms and snorted. “I want nothing more to do with humans today.”
“If I may ask, sir, what business did he have with you?”
“Nothing I cared to hear. You’re not usually this slow, outside your speech. Go off. Dance for the birds. I want none of it. Keep your plans and your wars, or better yet, keep at them until you kill each other off and we dragons can enjoy some peace again.”
That afternoon the entire Tribal encampment was at the grounds of Chapalaine. They did use the old theater, parking their wagons around it and driving the horses into its sandy expanse at night. During the day the horses grazed the fields within smelling distance of the dragon, which surprised Ileth.
The Baron was right. They half worshiped the dragon. They tended Fespanarax from nostril to tail tip, doing many of the jobs the staff at the Serpentine performed, and did them even better, if a good deal more slowly. They collected filings from his scales when they smoothed them and inspected his droppings for bits of bone that had passed through. Anything that fell from the dragon, including saliva, was collected.
They also would dance for him. It seemed a religious rite to them. The moon had to be in its proper phase: visible and increasing. Dancing for a dragon in decreasing moonlight brought all manner of ill fortune, one old Tribal who could no longer dance whispered to Ileth in an accented Galantine so strange she could hardly be sure what she said.
They certainly improved Fespanarax’s mood. Maybe that was what was missing, an army of people attending to him. He became positively conversational. Even Galia, who visited the dragon for only a few moments each day, noticed.
One morning, after Ileth finished dancing for him (he still only occasionally glanced her way, though he did take a deep breath of the air about her now and then), he talked to her about their dances.
“So are they different from the Serpentine dancers?” Ileth asked.
“Yes. Their dances aren’t as exacting. I know they don’t sweat as much, unless it is warm. They’ll work in shifts, as you do, usually in groups of three.
“I’m lucky they don’t ask to bleed me, not with you around, anyway. Last year they asked several times for blood, whenever Zwollen and the Galantines weren’t about. I refused. There was too much of that in the past, and it didn’t end well for the dragons or the people who drank of it. Though I haven’t heard of Tribals drinking it themselves; I think they use it in potions and whatnot.”
“You’re familiar with these people?”
“Oh, yes, they’ve been here for ages. They’re the descendants of Hypatians who served dragons as slaves. We used to call them”—and here he used the Drakine term for thralls. “The tribe is older than I am. They don’t visit the Vales. I think the people are unfriendly to them.”
As he’d been obliging in conversation, Ileth pressed her luck. “May I ask you s-something else, nothing to do with the Tribals?”
“I’d welcome a change of subject.”
“Why don’t you ever watch me dance?”
Fespanarax chuckled. “I am an old-fashioned dragon, in some ways. There is an old adage against giving attention to your kind. I was taught to beware of humans of your age and sex. The way some humans won’t touch a snake, poisonous or no. You can cast bewitchments on dragons and send them to their doom.”
The idea that a dragon might ever be afraid of her would take some getting used to. Or perhaps he was just teasing. “Doom? Never.”
“You do not need intend any wrong—it is, well, the idea is difficult to express in human terms. You attract the fate just with your presence, the way a flower draws the bee.”