Ileth went to bed nervous and had difficulty sleeping.
3
On the morning of the oathing ceremony, Ileth studied the long string of words the Matron placed in front of her. The others had already seen copies their first day in the Serpentine Academy, and again after the failed applicants were dismissed. This was Ileth’s first encounter with the words she was to speak. The dread of the ceremony unfolded from the paper and enveloped her like a burial shroud.
“M-M-Must I say it aloud?” she asked the Matron. “I could . . . sign it, with witnesses.”
The Matron thrust out her lips in disapproval. The expression looked oddly like one of her “sisters” at the Lodge when she imitated a kiss from her latest swain.
“Everyone here has spoken it, from the dragoneers on down, when they enrolled. If you’re going to be here, you’re going to speak it. Even the dragons swear in on the winds or the elements or their fire and water. But by the judgment they swear on something when they join.”
“Could I do it in private?”
“The rules here are the rules.” The Matron thrust the paper into Ileth’s hand and sent her out the door to join the others with something like a shove. “Be grateful the gods gave you a lovely morning for it.”
The Manor had a tall female apprentice whose duty it was to supervise the younger girls. Her name was Galia. She was watchful and confident and still in the dangerously poised manner of a perching hawk. Galia did not talk or flitter about much, which Ileth found refreshing.
Galia put them in line and walked them to the amphitheater. Ileth decided Galia was probably city-bred, as she nipped in and around others as though she’d been doing it since learning to walk. She cut her hair into bangs, an urban fashion that Ileth had been told dated back to Ancient Hypat. She also presented well in her brown uniform dress, since she’d had the time to properly alter it and remove the pilling.
The morning sun was already hot and the air unusually still. Ileth heard bells echoing up from Vyenn.
On she marched them, down into the quarrylike stone amphitheater. She paused them at a little canopy, where a Commonist priestess and her assistant dabbed them with mud under each eye and shook a wet, leafy birch branch over them, reciting some prayers in Hypatian as they were presented to her three at a time.
“Half of you will be gone by next year,” said a man holding a pair of painted mules, probably the priestess’s conveyance. He smiled, happy in his knowledge that so many of them would fail. They shuffled past, hands clasped to suppress the instinct to wipe the mud off their cheeks. “It’s only one in four for the boys,” he added.
Whatever ritual the boys had gone through, they had it worse. Their heads had been so closely cropped that almost nothing remained but a dusting of their original hair color, and their faces were streaked with mud and soot. The boys wore a sort of stablehand uniform of the same soap-faded oat color that might charitably be called “white.” They stood barefoot in patchy trousers that ended somewhat randomly. Some were practically wearing a child’s short pants; others had to roll up the cuffs to keep from stepping on them.
Her chambermates, one of whom was a moon-faced, friendly girl named Quith, said the boys underwent all sorts of humiliations in the first week before they were oathed in. In any case the boys, being the larger contingent, had several apprentices supervising them. They set about arranging them into ranks of ten according to their enrollment order, finally mixing the sexes.
Out on the stage, with an assembly of faces already in the audience and more showing up every minute, Ileth stood, acutely aware that she looked like a bad, last-place finisher in her thick, shapeless overdress at the end of the line of one hundred and nine novices. Their place in the lineup, the Master of Novices took pains to explain, had nothing to do with any kind of grading, it just happened to reflect the order in which their names had been entered on the official roll.
The Master of Novices, Galia, and a few male apprentices counted heads and faces. The new novices silently recited the oath, or double-checked against a printed paper copy. Many had been practicing since the first night they’d slept in the Serpentine.
The audience was formally attired, for the most part. Even Ileth, a newcomer, knew the rankings, from both common tales and her introduction to the Serpentine. The dragoneers were splendid in their velvet dress uniforms of gray and wine-red, high riding boots polished to a gleam, each with a sash for their sword-belt that matched their dragon’s color. Reds and golds predominated, but there were also greens, silvers, blacks, and a white. They were seated closest to the stage but mostly ignored the novices, calling out to comrades they hadn’t seen recently and talking as they waited. Above them, in little groups, were the wingmen, not full dragoneers but wearing the sash of one in black or red or gray, it seemed. Almost all wore swords; carrying arms marked one as a wingman, and some of the swords showed a good deal of pearl and gold at the hilt in defiance of republican simplicity. The wingmen acted as seconds to their dragoneers, flying in their place at need, acting as a pool of fliers for dragons who had not chosen to have a dragoneer, but otherwise supervising the conditioning and feeding of their dragoneer or their dragon. Then there were the apprentices in brown or blue or gray work clothes, rotating through the various specializations as servants who took care of meals, clothing, and tools, flying with them and learning their skills on all but the most dangerous of commissions. Most wore white sashes but there was a smattering of brilliant green, though whether this was some mark of achievement or just an indication that they could afford sammarind Ileth didn’t know. She searched out and marked Yael Duskirk up there in a plain shirt and brown coat. She tried to catch his eye, but he appeared to be watching Galia as she paced about behind the group of novices. Those few from the previous year’s group who were still novices lurked at the back, standing or sitting on the top stairs of the amphitheater, their white dragon-scale pins holding their work jackets closed at the neck.
On the “stage” to either side of them, in high-backed wooden chairs, were the Masters of the Serpentine, senior dragoneers who were no longer tasked to ride dragonback and now saw to the internal workings of the complex machine maintaining dragon and rider that was the Serpentine. Caseen, Master of Novices, sat right at the edge of the stage. As soon as Galia reported to him that all novices of the ’66 draft were present, he stood.
“Welcome, novices. I congratulate you on your achievements so far. But before your service to the Serpentine can begin, we must go through a formality. Perhaps you’ve heard that expression before, go through the formalities, probably as something that must be hurried through to get to a pleasure. For all of us fortunate enough to be a part of the Serpentine, this formality deserves respect, for it is a matter of life and death. You are about to be sworn in to the service of the Republic as protectors of the Vales, and through it our citizens, and to the company of the Serpentine, present or attending to their duties elsewhere. You were taught the oath but have not yet said it aloud to an audience. I hope you have committed the words to a place deeper than memory and considered their consequence.”
With that, they brought out the young dragon.
Ileth thought the dragon looked about as uncomfortable as she felt. It was a male, its scale the color of a brass mirror reflecting a roaring fire. The dragon’s back still had scar tissue visible under new scale where it had uncased its wings sometime in the last year. Perhaps the others had been told the significance of the young dragon to the ceremony while she was on her vigil outside the gate, but Ileth supposed the dragons wished to show that they took the formalities as seriously as the humans and sent a representative, young and new as the novices.