The crowd liked Duskirk’s toast a little better, there was a stir toward her. “To love and havoc!” most repeated, drinking, smiling at her through gripe-washed teeth. Even the wingmen bridged the social gap with the apprentices—and one out-of-her-home-waters novice—in the salute.
She accepted the toast, then tried to look around and acknowledge all the faces. That was what you were supposed to do, anyway, but it was hard in a dimly lit sort of hay barn full of shadows and motion.
“Where are your laudii, Ileth?” joked a young woman who had a waterfall of thick dark hair falling out of her scarf. Ileth had an idea that she was one of the girls who lived in the Beehive practically under the dragons’ snouts. What they did was still a subject of much conjecture and not a few wild stories in the Manor, but they were generally called the dancers. “Well done. Well done, indeed. I did six months gutting and salting under that towering prong. He used to stick fish tails down my back.”
“I’ll drift behind that,” said another young man with the long, thick sideburns Quith had told her were favored by the stylish youths in artist free-cities like Zland and Tyrenna. He extracted a white pipe and began to fill it from a leather pouch that had a name crest embroidered on it. She’d passed the young man on the bridge a few times and knew in a vague sort of way that he was a new-fledged wingman. Sleng, something. Pasfa Sleng. That was it. Quith had a terrible crush on him. She’d described him, in detail, several times and the thing that had stuck in Ileth’s head was his sideburns, so whenever she’d seen him she’d mentally called him that. On closer examination, they were as thick and well-tended as a rich house’s border hedge. She’d keep the way he was nestled up next to the dark-haired dancer from Quith, when she’d inevitably beg for details later.
The pair who’d spoken to her shifted closer to each other and made room on a pile of grain sacks. They shifted about until they formed a rough sort of horseshoe. Ileth sat on the end of the horseshoe, giving Rapoto ample room to sit between her and the others. Galia and Yael were laughing and chatting above.
Stripped to her sheath, as sure as I’ve hay in my hair!
Ileth tried to ignore the half-heard conversation above. The first thing they did was ask to see the whistle. Word had passed around that the dragoneer Amrits had given her his silver whistle as a token of his esteem. Ileth had shortened the lanyard and wore it around her neck beneath her work shirt.
With that out of the way, the party settled in.
Sideburns tamped down the tobacco in his pipe, extracted a thin stick of wood, and stood to set it aflame at the gripe pot. He put the flaming end of his kindling to his tobacco, and his cheeks worked until smoke blossomed from the pipe’s pot. He passed it to the thick-haired girl, who took a few puffs and handed it back.
“How about you, uhh, Ileth, you game?” asked Sideburns.
“Thank you,” she said. She’d tried a pipe several times before; tobacco was almost as popular as tea and potato-crust lamb pies with the people on the North Coast. She took the pipe, made of the white clay favored by society but small and simple in size, and tried to check the mouthpiece without making a show of it. She stuck it in her mouth and took a pull of the smoke. It was sweet and a little spicy, softer in the mouth with a good deal less bite to the tongue than the rough square-cut tobacco cubes she knew from the provinces.
“Thank you, s-sir,” she said, passing it back. She exhaled slowly, letting it out in a thin column.
“Dragon style! Wings out, girl,” Sideburns said. He put his fists together with knuckles toward her.
“Good tobacco there,” Ileth said. She meant to ask him about the fists-together gesture, but he started speaking and her natural reticence left him to his discourse.
“It’s called Blue Mood, from Sammerdam. I’d send you a bag as a mark of my esteem for putting Gorgantern on his vent, but I’ve none to spare. My family seems to think this place supplies everything I need. If I’d known tobacco would be so dear up on the lakeshore, I’d have filled up another couple pouches from my father’s crock. They shave it close here, don’t they? No spare money for anything.”
“Be lucky you get meat twice a day,” Galia called from the loft above. “Dragons eat a lot of coin.”
“Fa! Fish isn’t meat where I come from,” Sideburns said, taking his pipe back. “Fates, I should have gone to the art academy in Zland. Sketched milkmaids instead of picking scale nits. This isn’t an academy, it’s a labor camp with statues. Smells besides.”
Ileth didn’t mind the smell as much as some. It was an oily stink and clung to you, but it wasn’t that unpleasant to her nose.
“The dragons only take coin on holidays and feast days,” the dark-haired girl said. “Mostly they eat ores and scrap metal for their scale.”
“I always heard it was coin,” Ileth said. “Up north they talk about taxes going down a dragon’s hatch.”
“Novices,” Sideburns said. “You’ll learn soon enough. It’s not like the ballads and paintings here.”
The dark-haired girl shrugged. “This whole Academy is a swindle, I’m starting to think. They work a couple hundred boys and girls like slaves, promote six or seven now and then, let the quality ride a dragon a few times just so they can say they done it, and when the poor kids wise up and quit, just bring in a new batch.”
Sideburns took the pipe out of his mouth and passed it to the dark-haired girl. “Apprenticeship’s almost as bad. Six years is a long time when you’re pulling nits out of scale and raking dragon waste checking for worms.”
“Beats the Auxiliary or the Sea Lines Warrants,” Evire said from the pot. “I lost a sister to the Auxiliaries and a brother in a whaler in the North Bay.”
“If the armistice with the Galantines breaks down again, they’ll have us all flying quick enough,” Rapoto said. “Blood and fire all over the Scab.”
Ileth just listened. She knew the Scab was a sort of fortress on the great river that ran the Republic’s border, some point of long contention, and that the Galantine flag now flew above it.
Sideburns shrugged. “My family wants one son a dragoneer.”
“Lucky you ended up here,” Rapoto said. He picked up Sideburns’s pipe and studied it. “I’d rather be on dragonback than clerking at the Assembly.”
“My father always spreads his bets,” Sideburns answered. “We’re wealthy enough, but not a Name. It’s on me now to get a Heem into the family name, or better yet a Dun.”
“I wouldn’t mind walking out with a Name, one way or another,” the dark-haired girl said, and the others laughed.
“That’s the spirit, Peak,” Galia said from above. “Marry for place. As long as it’s first place.”
The talk moved on to smaller doings among the apprentices.
“I’m . . . feeling that drink,” Ileth said quietly to Rapoto. In truth, she was just tired.
“You’re looking it,” Sideburns said. “It’s been quite a day for you. Rapoto, you need to get this girl to bed.”
Rapoto looked up from Sideburns’s pipe. He started to say something but thought better of it, and he looked over at Ileth with that appreciative stare of his. She’d never held a man’s gaze for so long—at least a young man’s gaze. The Old Croakers in the village street would stare at her, but they stared at any woman. Here, now, in this stuffy storeroom that smelled like mold and tobacco and oil lamps, with six other girls her age to look at, he chose her.