The faint hubbub of the market faded and vanished. She settled down in her usual spot. She noted, humorlessly, that her butt had scraped the lichen away in all her shifts in the long nighttime vigils. This life as a kind of doorstep decoration felt strangely normal now. The only question was how it would end. She wondered how long she’d last, and what they’d do with her body once she died. She wasn’t truly starving yet. In the Lodge she’d heard stories of shipwrecked mariners lasting weeks on nothing but rainwater caught in their shirts and sun-dried seaweed. But those were hardened men. She’d collapse before then. Some said the dragons were allowed to feast on enemy corpses after a battle or pluck drowned sailors out of the water: “Secure your hatch or you’ll be pickled drakemeat!” the Captain used to say. It made her think there was some truth to the tales.
She shuddered.
Falth’s three blank letters could have the addresses covered and be sold, she supposed. It would certainly be enough to get her a good dinner and a loaf of bread for tomorrow. They were fine paper and paid up. Maybe she’d send him one, confessing that she didn’t get in and had to sell the other two.
She stepped to the cliff. She marked where the birds were feeding when the bolt in the door made its familiar scrape. She turned. A man in velvets with a day cape watched her from the doorway. A face mostly hidden by a black party mask with gold linework covering the eyes and cheeks—a bad burn, it looked like—gleamed pale in the sun.
“I told you the applicants were all inside,” he said. She recognized the voice as the first gruff one to turn her away from the door. “Yet here you are. Still.”
A tempting cooking smell came out the door with him. Ileth’s stomach growled in reply. She could hear music, as well as horns and whistles being sounded in celebration.
More to mask the noises in her stomach than to impress the man, she spoke: “I’ve b-been w-waiting seven years to touch a dra-dragon again. If I . . . if I need to wait one more, that’s what I’ll do.”
“I’m beginning to think you would.” She saw he had a rich red sash wrapped around his waist, with a gold tassel dangling where the sword-frog would be on a dragoneer. His fore-and-aft-rigged cap had some nice fringe, and there was a white cockade on the side where the two halves of the hat folded up and buttoned together. He had a strange lean and dragged a foot as he stepped out, reminding her of one of the locals back home who’d suffered a terrible rupture at the docks and cleaned the streets on the Governor’s pension.
He was obviously someone of importance. The splendid uniform dazzled; it had a dash about it, so different from the grim plainclothes of most officials in the Republic. She was trapped between shrugging his question off and bobbing a greeting. Her body decided to try to do both and erupted in a spasm that must have been a curious sight.
He tilted his head and a ghastly smile opened. “You handle your stutter well. I like that you just talk your way across it. I’ve met some who just confine themselves to a word or two. Were you injured?”
“N-Not that I remember. I can . . . I can control it better when I’m . . . when I’m rested. Just tired now.”
He removed his hat and dabbed the sweat at his scalp. A single patch of hair remained at the back, grown long and braided into a tail, but the few surviving growths elsewhere, black and spiky and looking like trees desperately clinging to a patch of soil on a cliff, were cut into stubble. He was clean-shaven on the parts of his visible face still able to grow hair. It was hard to guess his age.
Their gazes met. It wasn’t that sort of look, the kind she had seen so often at the Captain’s. More of a test, a search to see if some lie hid within her. She met it as defiantly as she could but broke and looked down, ashamed for some reason, and then angry because she was ashamed, and then ashamed again because she let a single stare from a scarred man anger her.
“You don’t have to look away. I wear my injuries with pride. Doesn’t hurt the younger generation to know that dragons aren’t all parades and waving at the fishermen and farmers below. Some people get by on fixing on my nose. It was my best feature even before Ramshill.”
She knew Ramshill was a great victory for the Republic, but not much more than that. He was also having trouble with his lower lip—Ramshill came out more like wamshill, but he also ignored it and just spoke as best as he could.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, I’m lucky. Ramshill was a disaster for us, though not for war. Two dead dragons and another crippled; fifteen of the Serpentine lost one way or another.” When she didn’t question him further, he continued: “The strange chance was, my portrait was sketched before my little scrape. The artist was just doing the color when I was struck off the flying list. I had him redo it once I’d healed up a little. But I’m vain enough to have kept the half-finished one. Not for display, just memories.”
“I’m still sorry,” she said. “I’d like to see that portrait. From before.”
“You know how to flatter an old man,” he said. “Where are you from, girl?”
“The North Coast,” she said, heart pounding. This strange conversation was allowing her to hope again. “The-The Freesand, near St-Stavanzer.”
“Who are your people?”
That inevitable question.
“I’m not from any kind of name. Grew up in an orphans’ lodge. My name is Ileth, sir.” She bobbed, a little more slowly and deeply this time. She’d settled on that story, even before her escape from the Lodge. She’d grown up there, that was true, and as soon as you say “orphan” she’d noticed people stopped asking questions. So far no one had asked her if she was an orphan, so she hadn’t had to lie yet.
“That’s a Galantine name. You look like you might have Galantine in your line. Perhaps around the eyes.”
“I don’t know, sir. I’m told my mother wasn’t from the Freesand.”
“Your father?”
There it was.
“A . . . a sailor.”
“You ever do any work, Ileth of the Freesand?”
“Domestic, keeping house for the gen-gentleman who owned the Lodge. Some of us helped the shepherds who didn’t have families yet. From seven to eleven I had . . . sheep and goats in summer pasture. I started ou-out with a pair of goats and took care of the sheep when I got old enough.”
“That’s lonely work. What about wolves and such?”
“None around our bit of the coast. There were wild dogs, but I had a sling.”
“A slinger, eh? You northerners are supposed to be good with slings. Ever hit anything?”
“We had . . . had our own d-dogs. I fed them on rabbit.”
“Do you have your sling?”
“No,” she said. She’d not used her sling in two years and had given it away to a shepherd boy, as she didn’t enjoy hunting and dressing rabbits. “If you could l-lend me one, I could show you.”
“Oh, I don’t have time for an exhibition of skill. I’m just curious. If you know how to use a weapon you get to prove it at the trials. Too bad you missed them.”
“I didn’t so much m-miss them as I was . . . was barred from them.”
“Don’t sauce me, girl.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
He paused and folded his arms and rubbed his elbows. Ileth thought it was a strange gesture. On a man without a burned face it might be off-putting, but on him it could be called endearing.
“Well, I shouldn’t talk your ear off; stars know I miss mine. Come in and I’ll get you a pudding. Maybe we’ll find you a sling and you can take shots at seagulls fouling our rain catchers or drive away those filthy pigeons in the upper dome of the Rotunda.”