“It’s not far. There’d be some flying in the mountains.”
“Where, exactly?”
“By that volcano to the north. There are silver mines there.” She explained the rest of the scheme to bring them kegs of beer.
“Hmmm. Fairly easy. The prevailing winds will be on my rear quarter, which will help a great deal if I’m flying with a load. Well, if you can arrange so nobody gets the wrong idea and starts shooting crossbows at me, we can try it. Let’s hazard it and not think about the catgut.”
The mental activity of the plans ended up doing Ileth and the dragon good. The Baron had to send letters to his “cousin” in the north who had the lands around the silver mines, which led to further complications involving that Baron, who had another one of those complicated Galantine titles that Ileth reduced to Blue Heron because that animal was named in one of the orders he belonged to and she found it easy to remember. Anyway, the Baron of the Blue Heron something-or-other thought if the dragon was bringing beer for the miners, he could also bring some spirits from a distillery on his own lands, with the dragon getting the same percentage of the sale that he received from Baron Hryasmess. Baron Blue Heron could send an agent to the plateau who would receive the shipments and pay out the dragon’s share of silver. Baron Hryasmess, in turn, wanted to send his own agent to make sure everything was correctly recorded and fairly done, which led to an argument over letters with the Baron Blue Heron threatening to go to Court and get a royal warrant to have a King’s commissioner sent to the plateau, until Ileth offered to copy all the tally sheets and verify them and let Baron Hryasmess inspect them himself. The Barons found that acceptable.
“It’s not me, so much, it’s the brewers,” the Baron said. “They have to order smaller barrels than they are used to using, and the cooper is complaining to me that he needs a new guide for bending wood. At least Taf is being sweet about the streamers.”
The streamers were in Chapalaine’s own colors, turquoise and green, with a long white tail. They’d identify Fespanarax as being on the Baron’s business, on the off chance they ran into one of the Galantine King’s dragons.
In the midst of this activity Griff returned, still in his uniform, and did some riding about with Dandas but apparently had no other aim beyond enjoying summer weather and the Baron’s cuisine. There were new icons on his collar and shoulder, and his coat seemed to be cut of a thicker material. Ileth wondered what he’d done to earn a promotion, or if the Galantine half of his family’s money was buying him promotions. Galia had been making much about the fact that after his first commission, Dandas had never had to purchase higher rank in the Fencibles; he’d been promoted “on distinction,” as they phrased it.
She spent extra time with Fespanarax, but like a spurned suitor, Griff either had lost interest or was good at pretending that he had.
In the midst of the beer-delivery negotiations, with the Baron riding his couriers hard, she and Galia received a packet of letters from the Serpentine. They’d been carefully opened and resealed by Galantine agents, she knew, as was their right for the correspondence of prisoners, and they contained nothing of importance beyond names of those at the Serpentine. Caseen joked that things were quiet without Ileth about and that he would soon be busy with a new batch of novices. Some books the Lodger had requested for Ileth had arrived and were waiting in the Serpentine’s archives. Santeel wrote that her father was complaining about the bills for her flying leathers and dance costumes (he’d been under the impression that with his daughter installed at the Serpentine there would be a reduction in expenditures on her keep and had been proven wrong). Rapoto was now a wingman for Dath Amrits. Rapoto wrote a short, colorless letter saying that he thought of Ileth often, missed her dancing, and hoped she would be allowed to return soon, as it didn’t seem fair that one Serpentine person in the form of Heem Zwollen had been replaced by two captives. Galia received a whole packet of letters from Yael Duskirk.
“Same old Serpentine,” Galia said, having read the letters, leaving the Duskirk bundle unopened—at least while Ileth was with her. All but Duskirk’s were addressed to both of them, after all. “A big crab pot with everyone scrabbling for position. The weather here is much nicer, don’t you think?”
Ileth shrugged. “The sun gives me a head-headache when I’m out in it too much.”
“I sit patiently through your stuttering, and when it’s done it’s usually a complaint,” Galia said.
“Sorry,” Ileth said. The letters would need answering and she’d have to beg the Baron for paper and ink.
At last, the day for the test run arrived. There was so much excitement that Fespanarax was going to fly, even Galia took an interest and made sure the dead dragoneer’s saddle was still safe to use. It was.
The only landmark Ileth and Fespanarax needed to remember was a small plateau about halfway up to the main one, on a little saddle that joined the volcanic mountain to its eastern neighbor, which was this Cowshead plateau with the silver miners. She could just see the outline of it from the Baron’s estate. There was a good road up to the saddle, built in the days of the thriving mine, and only a precarious trail up to the plateau after that. The saddle had a posthouse, red roofed and otherwise painted white as so many Galantine establishments were, a place where they’d once changed teams of horses bearing loads. It was the only spot near the mine where there was any sort of meadow, built up gradually over the years from horse droppings. An agent of Baron Blue Heron would meet them there with his cases of spirits, and up they’d go.
With Galia’s assistance they’d managed to fix Fespanarax’s saddle so it held two full kegs of beer under his chest, using netting reinforced by a pair of chains. Fespanarax, testing the weight, thought he could carry perhaps two more, but for the test run they limited it. Ileth would carry the spirits on the saddle behind her (with the proviso that Fespanarax had the last say on his flying burden). They hung a couple of goatskins of wine from the saddle as well. Apparently with a certain class of Galantine, wine fermented in the scraped-out-and-sealed skin of a goat was a traditional drink at celebrations.
Galia and Dandas wished her luck, jointly. Their couple-ish manner of speaking troubled her, but she was too busy to think much on it. Galia lent her an additional cloak, big enough for her to wrap herself up in if she had to spend the night atop the plateau. They were warned that it was chilly up there. The Tribe gave her a little good-luck charm, some semiprecious stones and an old silver coin with a hole punched in it and a small feather from a bird she didn’t know threaded onto a loop that went around her ear. It felt odd at first, but she wore it. She’d learned the value of a little luck.
“Here I go,” Fespanarax said to Ileth, as he put himself in what he judged the best spot for his takeoff. Fespanarax wasn’t the kind of dragon to say we. “You do all the talking, I do all the flying, and the silver is mine. Right?”
“Right,” Ileth said. “Minus expenses. I receive only the pleasure of it.” The dragon eventually understood that they’d have to give most of the silver to the Barons and the brewer, but he could look at all the expenses written down on paper.
Fespanarax, who had been doing circuits over Chapalaine to reawaken his flying muscles so often that the village kids no longer ran all the way to the gates of Chapalaine to see him, did a running takeoff into the wind, then turned for the saddle between the volcano and the plateau.
He was fast. Nearly as fast as Vithleen, it seemed to Ileth, though she didn’t have much experience at flying dragons, even with his load. Maybe they all flew at about the same speed, though the dragoneers didn’t talk that way in their chats about speed against thickness of scale or strength climbing or ability to carry an awkward load.