“My—the patron of the Lodge, he was in shipping. Galantine family, but he was born under the Republic. They were Directist, though, so his family fled to the Vales to escape the p-p-purges. He had friends from both coasts and the Inland Ocean, so that’s where I picked up Poss. He had a friend who liked music. I know a few Daphine songs. I’m not much of a singer.”
“Did they raise the children in your lodge Directist?”
“Commonist. Our patron wanted everyone placed out of his lodge to mix easily in society. We had a Directist shrine in the Lodge and he taught us to use it. He wasn’t strict about his faith.”
“How would you describe the civic organization of the Vales?”
Ileth thought that was an odd question, but she did her best to answer it. She struggled more with the words than the ideas, explaining that they lived in a classical republic: juries at the local level, then the district or provincial governor, whose duty it is to obey the national laws of the Assembly and decisions of the Grand Appeal. She skipped the differences between a district and a province. The real strength of the system was the juries. Wrongdoers weren’t hauled off to some faraway court and left to rot until the judges got around to hearing their case, a jury was assembled, and a decision made. The Governor could only lessen the severity of the sentence or issue a pardon; he could not overturn an innocent verdict.
“That’s a good enough schoolroom answer,” he said, with his jagged smile. “Do you feel up to a little walk now?” Caseen asked.
She nodded.
“Then follow me. We’ll walk around the Serpentine. You haven’t been here these six days, so it will help if everyone sees you with me. Saves questions. You’re a young woman, so they’ll notice you. I hope you’re comfortable mixing with boys and men; you’ll find yourself in a minority here.”
He beckoned her into the sunlight. She nodded and followed.
“I take it you left no one behind? We had a girl a year older than you come through the gate to escape a bad marriage, once.”
“No, nothing like that, ma-ma—”
“Sir is an ample honorific for the Serpentine, just like outside the walls. Use it on anyone in uniform or with a colored sash—that should be good enough to begin. There are a few special circumstances, like facing a jury, where you’ll be expected to use Your Honor, but we don’t hold many exams or inquiries here. If you do your job well, we’ll know about it and give you a better job when there’s a need. The dragons expect to be called by name. If you get a chance to learn any Drakine, take it. But as a novice you won’t see overmuch of the dragons, so until you learn their names you can say sir to them as well.
“Remember,” he continued, “in the Republic dragons have the same rights as a man. That’s what the Troth was all about, long before the Republic. If you need one to accommodate you in some manner, say, shift so you can get by in a passage, beg favor is expected, even if it’s a bit old-fashioned for these modern times. Some of these dragons were alive when the Hypatian Empire was all over this side of the Inland Ocean.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You are a little sheath of a thing, but that may be to your advantage. Even a new-fledged dragon could carry you. You’d be surprised how often a dragon passes over a great, broad-shouldered sculptor’s model of a man and picks the scrawniest teen. Dragons get tired bearing a load, same as any man or animal.”
They walked out into the sun, along a gravel path that led up to a wide road running the spine of the peninsula. Ileth felt lighter in her worn old boots, as though she were floating next to this scarred old specimen of dragoneer. Gods and Fates bless Falth for giving her hope when she had none. She would be a silent watcher of that Dun Troot girl.
“Don’t take the ‘Academy’ part of the Serpentine too seriously. You won’t sit on a stool memorizing Hypatian declensions. The name’s for the gloves-and-laces set. We run on an apprenticeship system here. The Names wouldn’t like it—their heirs being trained the same as a bricklayer. During your novice year, we’ll find out what sort of person you are; then you’ll move on to one or more apprenticeships under contract to the Academy. It’s a distinction for the law and clerks of accounts you needn’t worry about.
“Now the geography of the Serpentine,” he began, taking her out onto the great field enclosed by the walls. Off by the gate she heard music, faintly. Caseen ignored it, pointing out landmarks.
She knew the names of some of the features from tales and ballads of the dragoneers. She counted them off under the brassy mountain sun. The Master of Novices added his own bits and bobs of apocrypha to her knowledge from tales:
The Serpentine, on its long, rocky neck, had three sections. Up by the main gate the jumble of principal buildings could be found. From there the peninsula fell away into more uneven land in the middle section, often compared to a dish like a long platter, complete with a lip of the walls to keep the juices from running off onto the table. At the center of the platter was a garden, both functional and decorative, built around the fortress’s reservoir—not that much of one was needed in the rainy mountains. On the other side of the gardens it became rocky. An amphitheater, with columns in the center for tenting, filled a hillside where the ground started to rise again toward the rock piles about the Pillar Rocks. A road—the Bridge Lane—ran the whole length of the Serpentine in three great bends, which gave the peninsula fortress its name and threaded through the Pillar Rocks, over the long bridge, and to the third and greatest portion of the fortress: the Beehive with its famous lighthouse. The dragons lived within the Beehive.
The Beehive, from a distance, looked like an unusually symmetrical mountain of uniform rock, but it was actually a blend of natural stone and man-made masonry, plated in places with gray granite façades of the muted papery color of an ordinary beehive.
Ileth burned everything Caseen said into her brain. She felt lost in her personal exaltation (perhaps brought on by her first real food in eight days), an exaltation so profound she wobbled at the knees as she walked alongside him with a head threatening to give up into a swoon. The geography of the peninsula, the little huddles of buildings, the quarrylike amphitheater in the distance, and the unimaginable size of the caverns under its lighthouse with its dragons and legends and secrets beneath were more than a view.
It made her head swim. Her thoughts kept circling back to the realization that she wouldn’t have to beg for work as a housemaid or work in a wharfside tavern, or chafe in some laundry with the lye eating away at her like age. Or worse, return defeated to the Captain to beg forgiveness.
A pair of spotty-cheeked youths trotted along a gravel path running at the base of the wall, panting with effort, their faces red with more than just blemishes. They gave her, or rather the Master, a wide berth. “Only two more times, boys,” he said. One managed a bleak smile, and both stepped up their pace.
Ileth was forming and discarding questions when the Master of Novices began pointing. “Oh, and if you ask directions, it’s important to know the Serpentine’s informal compass. That’s Bayside,” he said, gesturing north toward a wide bay with a few farms on the slope leading up from it and old boats in the grass above the waterline. “You were waiting at the door Harborside, above the town of Vyenn. No harm comes to Vyenn, we see to that, and it’s done well out of its association with the Serpentine. Here, at the gate and the halls, is up. Down is at the other end with the Beehive and the lighthouse. There are some older ruins farther out on the point, including the old lighthouse, but they’re half flooded and full of rusty grates. Keep out of them. Understand?”