“‘Interesting thing for someone who trains to saddle up a dragon to say,’” she repeated.
He smiled at her and she smiled back. Nice to have someone who gives and takes jokes. Perhaps he was lost in similar thoughts, because he grew quiet and thoughtful.
“So family life not for you, children and such.”
“Never . . . never met anyone who made me want to, want to have his babies.”
“I’d like them, someday. Give them an ordinary name. No responsibilities attached. Freedom to pick their own path.”
It was the sort of thing that someone who’d never had to share one pot of oat porridge out among ten said, and it didn’t much impress her. But he meant well. Meaning well went far with her, a lot farther than a pot of oat porridge did at the Lodge.
They crossed the open plaza under the loom of the gate. “Where are we going?”
“The stables.”
“Your pile-in.” Ileth had seen enough carousing in the Captain’s Lodge to last her a lifetime, but perhaps the well-bred apprentices with their triple-bar names were different.
In the pre-dragoneer days of the fortress, there’d been a stable and a hippodrome for exercising the horses in the wet weather. Now there were just a few veteran mounts inured to the constant arrival of dragon smells. She knew in a vague sort of way that there was still a Master of Horse who taught the apprentices to ride—horse riding was good training for being on a dragon, and a horse was still the best way to send messages over a short distance, saving the dragons work. She hadn’t been introduced to him yet.
“The Master of Horse is a good sort of fellow. The harder you work, the harder he lets you play. But I should warn you, it gets a bit charry in there. Most of the girls tie up and cover their hair. The stable’s dusty and people will be smoking.”
“I-I don’t have a—”
“Here, have mine.” He handed her a handkerchief. It was a little hard to tell what color it was in the dark, but at least it was clean.
“I meant, I don’t have any hair to tie up.”
“Oh, yes, well, I thought you might object to what’s left stinking. No, keep it, I have others.”
Secretly, she was a little worried that they’d demand a retelling of the duel. She dreaded the idea of speaking, answering questions, watching her audience exchange looks and fidget. She’d have to admit that if Galia hadn’t intervened, she’d be either dead or dying, run through the stomach or liver or womb. Worse, they could ask about her upbringing, the Lodge, who her parents were and what had happened to them. If they suspected she was attempting to hide something, the hard questions would start. She’d been around the Manor apprentices enough to know that they could sniff out weakness and lies better than a jury.
She decided she’d just decline to talk about it. Nervous exhaustion. She thought she could rely on Rapoto’s name and kindness to spare her any long speeches.
Best start laying the groundwork now.
“Rapoto,” she said, as they cut through the crowd of old buildings about the up end of the Serpentine, “I hope I don’t have to talk about the duel.”
“Why not? If I knocked a bear like Gorgantern out of his cave, you couldn’t get me to shut up about it.”
But he let the subject alone, and soon they were at the stables.
The wide, horse-height main doors of the hippodrome were shut, so Rapoto knocked at the smaller, human-sized one on the side of the stable next to the storeroom. They were admitted by one of the wingmen, acting as both a lookout and a filter to make sure only approved personages would get in.
Ileth saw a few curious, big-eyed horse heads glance at them from the mostly empty stalls as she followed Rapoto.
The pile-in appeared to be much as Rapoto had described it, something just for the apprentices and a couple of the younger and more social wingmen. They’d taken over a low-beamed storeroom with hayloft and workshops and arranged a snug retreat.
The storeroom’s sacks of grain had been removed from the heavy wooden racks that kept the feed up off the floor and turned into floor cushions or approximations of lounges and chairs. You could climb into the hayloft above through a rough ladder nailed onto one of the vertical supports. Two lamps and a few candles were the only illumination, unless you counted a small stove. It sat in one corner of the storeroom that had used to be a blacksmithing workshop, she supposed, as it jutted out from the stable and had a skylight and a masonry floor. A few old tools that were still of use maintaining the place and shoeing the horses hung from the walls. A black soup pot bubbled with something that smelled like licorice on the stove.
“Is that gripe?” Ileth asked. She’d had grog, a mix of tea and molasses-spirits, at the Lodge, and she knew gripe was mountain-style grog, heavy on the licorice. Same tea, different spirits and flavorings, and both an all-purpose remedy for ailments of the nose, throat, and chest. Grog pots reminded her of the Captain. He mostly drank brandied wine, but he used to make a pot for friends and old shipmates. She’d smelled gripe only once or twice before in shepherd campsites.
“I believe so.” He watched one of the apprentice girls who had somehow also escaped the Manor tonight pour a little in a wooden soup bowl with a handle, taste it, make a face, and add some syrup from a glass jar and then what was probably liquor from a big earthenware jug. Ileth recognized it as the sort of vessel that country folk use to make their farmhouse wine out of dandelions or blackberries.
She heard laughter from above. A pair of dainty but callused bare feet dangled, a little silver chain on one ankle. She recognized the bauble; it belonged to Galia. Galia had told her that ankle bracelets were popular in Sammerdam, the city where she grew up. Ileth was relieved. She had one ally here, if matters became truly desperate.
“Way-hey, we have our heroine,” somebody called, as Rapoto took her up to the grog pot. Or gripe pot. The libation.
“Well, do you dare?” Rapoto asked.
“A . . . a little.” She’d had spirits forced on her when she was ill. It might be interesting to try some just for fun.
Rapoto had the girl pour him a cup (everyone was drinking out of a different type of cup, and a few were just using kitchen ladles or small saucepots) and split the measure out into a small soup bowl, after checking to make sure it was clean. He gave her the smaller of the two portions.
The girl at the grog pot did something with her tongue and lips that Ileth suspected was obscene.
“Quit it, Evire,” Rapoto said, scowling at the pot-stirrer. “We’re celebrating. It’s not like that at all.”
“If you say so. She may have other designs,” Evire said.
Rapoto raised his voice: “A toast, to Ileth, banisher of Gorgantern.”
It wasn’t received in the same spirit. After a few curious glances and a smile or two, the membership of the pile-in returned to their former conversations. So much for Rapoto and his belief that she would be the celebrity of the pile-in.
The gripe was sharp but sweet and awfully strong. She suspected they were using the licorice and what tasted like cloves to cover up the amount of spirits inside.
“It’s my own recipe,” Evire said.
She counted heads. A good thirty apprentices were here. She didn’t know how many apprentices worked in the Serpentine entire, but guessed it was in the hundreds.
“Bend an elbow for our savior,” Yael Duskirk, the apprentice feeder she’d met outside the red door and one of her friends from the kitchen, said from the loft next to Galia’s feet, raising a wooden bowl. Galia’s foot rubbed against his suggestively. “Brims up to love and havoc!”