The door banged open. A boy-man who was much more boy than man and mostly made of eyes and ears shuffled in. “Madam Joai—” he began, but the round eyes in a conking great head widened when he saw Ileth.
Ileth found the boy’s wide-eyed astonishment a little funny, but then she’d grown up in a crowded lodge. He looked as though he wasn’t entirely sure of what he was looking at, but he knew he liked it for some reason. Boys like this didn’t bother her the way the Captain’s leers and shambolic jests burned on exposed skin.
She held up the overdress like a curtain to ease the boy’s discomfort.
“What have you been doing, skint?” Joai asked, looking at the thick layer of dirt on the boy.
“They put me on gravel-making, madam,” he said, trying to look as though he were addressing Joai while still stealing glances at Ileth. “I’m flagging near to perishing, madam. I’m to have something to eat to put muscle on, sir says.”
Joai wiped her hands again—Ileth wondered how many times she wiped her hands—and extracted a few eggs from a tinted jar. They glistened. “Pickled eggs and some good bread is what you need, boy.” She tore a loaf in half, scooped out a handful of bread, and placed the eggs in the hollow of the half loaf so the boy could carry it like a basket. “Ask for milk tonight and don’t mind the comments, nothing wrong with a working man drinking milk, especially if he’s been busting stone. What’s your name again?”
“Apenite Sifler Heem Streeth,” the boy said.
“That mouthful will never do,” Joai objected. “Sifler is better.”
“If you say so, madam.”
“We use sira here, Sifler,” Joai said.
“Yes, sira,” the boy said, and moved toward a stool by the fire. Ileth rotated to keep the housecoat between herself and the boy.
“Be off with you. We’re busy,” Joai said.
“Sorry to walk in on your dressing, sira, should have knocked,” the boy said to Ileth, backing out the door, leaving chalky dust and footprints behind.
And that was the first time in her life Ileth, from the Captain’s Lodge in the Freesand, was called sira.
While she dressed again Joai turned a tap that ran out of the stove. Steaming hot water ran into the washing tub, and she added lye and flaked soap to the hot water.
“You won’t see this stuff again unless you go to the rag room, so if any of it has sentimental value, get it and hang it now,” Joai advised. “You’ll keep your boots. Is that how they do the lacing up north? All around the calf top? I have musk oil if you want to give them a cleaning.”
“Are you a . . . a dra—”
“Oh, skies, no. Tried it, flower. Tried. Made it through novice, initiate—they don’t use that term much anymore, it was dying out when I did it and we just use apprentice now—became a sojourner—that’s what they used to call a wingman. I was good at most everything back in my day. The dragons seemed to like me around them. Got a few compliments on my cooking. But every time I took one up, well, it turns out I’m fearful when it comes to heights. Paralyzed, my flower. Paralyzed with terror.” She stiffened and the whites of her eyes showed as she remembered. “I covered my face with my scarf until the dragon landed again every try; so much for that. They said I’d get over it, but I never did. But I was a good worker, so I kept on here. I like working with you young people, and there’s often excitement, as you’ll see. We get news first here, good and bad.”
“Did you know a dragoneer named Annis?”
“Why yes, Annis, terrible, died just before the armistice. The armistice might have even been signed when she died; they just didn’t hear about it in time. She came in as a novice, oh, I’d given up flying then but I was still working in the flight cave. Liked her right off. Are you two related? I don’t remember her as northern.”
“No. I-I met her and her . . . dragon once, when I was little. She put me in her own saddle. Wanted to come here ever since.”
“Sounds like her. She was like me, wanted to see the girls like you get a chance, and the fancy ones here to snag a husband and get their curls singed. I’m no leveler, mind, but just because you popped out of a chute with a fancy name attached, you don’t get to lord it over the rest of us. That’s my angle on the Republic and why I shouted for it when I was your size.”
Joai set her on a chair by the fire. It had little cushioned horsehide pads on the arms and an upholstered back. Ileth took a moment to think about what a wonderful thing chairs were as her feet basked in the warmth.
Faster than she would have thought possible, Joai appeared with a tray. Even so, Ileth was sliding into sleep.
“Do you take wine?” Joai asked.
She nodded. Wine was scarce on the North Coast, save for a few locals who did their own from berries or dandelions, but they left her with a thundering headache. Ales made her gassy. She’d had real grape wine a few times, though, out of the dregs of glasses from the Captain’s parties, and enjoyed its flavor and warmth, even if it was in tiny doses. The Captain himself drank brandied wine but never left a full swallow in the glass even when in his cups.
The wine appeared in a little sort of shell-design bowl with two handles. “Not an everyday practice, mind, but after what you’ve been through it’ll do you good.”
Joai continued talking and working as her charge ate.
“Remember, my flower: it’s sand and broken shell for girls here. They’ll ride you from the time you wake, hard, and ride you right out the gate, if they can, before they let you near a dragon saddle. Testing you, like. Watch that you don’t favor any single boy. It makes for trouble, though it seems to me that’s more the fault of them than the girls. Not that half of them are worth keeping, unless money’s all you’re after. Here hunting husbands? No? For the honor and glory of it, then? Some of these toppy nameseys, they saw a dragon in a parade with someone like your Annis on top of her in formal velvets and wanted to be her, covered in flower chains and laurel.”
“I never saw a parade. Dragoneers don’t come to the North Coast much. Wish they did. We wouldn’t lose so many sailors to the Rar-Rari.”
“Rari? Those pirate fellows?”
Ileth nodded. “They take our fishermen and sailors. Make slaves of them. Not many get away.”
“Well, what’s your governor about? Can’t afford the sheep it takes to garrison a couple dragons? Scared the riders will deflower his daughters?”
“I wouldn’t know. I w-wish I did.”
“Well then, maybe someday you can sort them out.”
Her belly was full now, or as full as her shrunken stomach could handle. The wine, warmth, and food teamed up with her exhaustion. She watched the fire and drowsed.
Joai took her shawl off the hook by the door and draped it over the snoozing girl. “Well, if you can sit out night after night with nothing to eat but rain, you should last at least through the first year. The rest is up to your wits—and the dragons.”
When she awoke, her first business was the introduction to her lodging. Joai walked her over after fortifying her with more soup, as she had slept right through the dinner bell.
Most of the female novices and apprentices of the Serpentine lived together in what could charitably be called a great house. They called it the Manor, at least to the girls’ faces, but Ileth soon found out it had other, coarser names. The Manor was a long rectangular building with narrow windows and a steeply pointed roofline and a decorative bell tower with no bell. It was old, dating to the aristocratic families who’d once claimed the peninsula. It had a high-ceilinged ground floor, a cramped second floor that was a warren of hallways and subdivided rooms, and an even more cramped attic arranged as a dormitory. Most of the new novices slept in the dormitory. A few sheets had been hung up to improvise dividers for dressing and toiletry. They were all under the watchful eye of a sort of human whiskbroom called the Matron. No one called her madam, or sira; she was the Matron and you’d better say it clearly and in a respectful tone that implied the capitalization.