She jumped down the two-man-high wall and bumped down the slope after him, at cruel cost to the skin on her legs and her feet. She hit the ankle-deep water at the lakeside and hurried along the shoreline just as the Lodger dragged himself up onto the beach, taking deep, strained breaths.
“For all the gods’ sake, what is wrong?” she said.
“Air,” he said around his tongue, which stuck stiffly from his mouth. He didn’t seem to be speaking to her. He used the Drakine word. She sensed a dragon circling overhead and glanced up. There were several, turning tight circles. She could see part of the Long Bridge from here, with its festive lights, and the lighthouse atop the Beehive.
He panted for what felt like an eternity, ignoring her pleas to come to his aid. Where were the physikers?
Finally he blinked a few times. “Ileth?” he said in her own language, dry and breathy.
“Sir?” she said. “It’s Ileth, I’m here.”
“Did I make it?”
“You’re on the beach. Your back legs are in the bay. Don’t you feel the water?”
He gulped air around that horrid outthrust tongue, then managed to retract it. “I had the horrors of—being chopped up—and dragged out in hunks. Better here. Better now.”
“No!”
“I’m dying, Ileth. Something broke inside. Heart, I believe, or a blood—oh, what’s the word. Blood pipe.”
He raised his head a little so he could gaze at her with both eyes. “So you are the last thing this life gave me to love. Fate could hardly have done better. A daughter of sorts.”
Ileth tried to speak but choked on her words. “Love?” she finally managed.
“Read Lermonton’s On Planes of Love. The only flaw is he does not speak of how . . . they sometimes blend.”
“See! You’re doing w-well. You wouldn’t be quoting—”
“That’s better. Warm,” he said. “Warm,” he repeated, this time in Drakine.
He gave a shudder. “See that I’m properly burned, Ileth. See to it! Vhanesh luss.”
The last was in Drakine.
“Don’t talk. Breathe. The physikers are here. They say you need to rest and keep breathing. Keep breathing!”
They weren’t. He didn’t.
He took a deep breath and laid his head down at a more comfortable angle, as though settling in for a nap. One of his wings rattled and his griff relaxed.
“Sir,” she prodded.
“SIR.” She struck him, hard, where she thought the neck-heart was.
“Vhanesh luss! You’re not going to t-tell me what that means, are you? You old fox! I’ll have to—to figure it out for myself, won’t I?”
He stirred, nuzzled her with his snout. She caressed the pebbled skin with her hand. His eye opened, twinkling merrily, as if he were looking forward to seeing what came next. Then the lid opened wide. The eye emptied.
His griff rattled and went limp.
“Gods!” Ileth threw herself down on his neck and cried. Sobbed as she had never sobbed before. Not for herself, not for anyone. Vhanesh luss, vhanesh luss. She repeated it over and over, committing it to memory.
Orphaned. Orphaned again, and she didn’t even know his real name.
A presence loomed up behind, large, much bigger than a horse, but quiet.
“I am Aurue,” the dragon said.
She couldn’t answer him. The sobs wouldn’t stop.
“This noble one is dead.” His Montangyan was terrible, thick and utterly flat, but he could get his point across.
The gray nudged her with his snout.
“Be back on your way, Ileth,” he said. “You are wet. You are cold. Go, take our gratitude. We will finish.”
“I’ll stay.”
“Jizara and I, we are of his connected line, through my sire and sire-sire. Jizara is away. The vigil starts.”
“Don’t cut-cut him up,” she managed. “He made me promise.” She cast about at the boats and broke off an old tiller handle. It had an evil-looking pair of nails like fangs. “I’m not moving.”
“When stop the vigil, we burn him. Until then, none will touch at him.”
“Then,” she said, feeling half-dead herself, “I sh-shall wait until he is bu-burned.”
“Have your will,” Aurue said.
So she sat by the body, with her improvised club across her lap. She dragged over one of the smaller overturned flat-bottomed boats that had once been the border of the dueling ground and set it by the Lodger’s head and sat. The sun came up. She vaguely sensed that some dragoneers came down to the beach, milled about, spoke with Aurue or one of the other dragons, and left. Eventually, the sun went down. Galia came out with a blanket and some soup in a crock. She accepted the blanket and thanked her for the soup but didn’t eat any. After two futile attempts at conversation, Galia gave up and returned to the Serpentine.
Three days she sat, not eating, taking a mouthful of lake water when the thirst became too awful, hurling rocks at scavenging birds who came to worry at the tender flesh reachable to their hooked beaks. Were the dragons not bothered by birds trying to eat their kin?
Two dragons were always with her, but they changed at dawn and dusk. They neither ate nor drank nor spoke when they were on duty. Now and then a few of the humans of the Serpentine visited. They threw braided brambles or green lake plants in place of flowers since it was not the season for them. Ottavia came, said she was sorry.
“You’re only flesh, you know,” Dath Amrits said, when he and his dragon visited. Dath left an old scroll-tube filled with some blank paper and a full ink bottle by the corpse. “Come up and have a meal and a night in a bed. They won’t send him on until tomorrow night anyway. We have to fly out by sundown. Use my bed. Had the bedding washed for you. I know that drafty ruin that passes for the dragoneers’ hall is like getting the warmest room in an icehouse, but it has to be better than the shoreline.”
“No, sir. Thank you, sir,” she said.
The third night turned cold, dreadfully cold, and she shivered under her blanket. She would fall asleep for a few minutes, but discomfort would soon wake her.
As the night wore on and snow began to fall, a dozen or more dragons gathered. Their scales seemed dull and colorless. She touched one of the larger dragons as it passed. Ash came off on her hand. They’d rolled in ashes. She wondered with torpid curiosity where one found a clearing full of ashes deep enough to roll in, but then realized they were dragons and could make one out of any pile or stand of timber.
An old dragon shoved Ileth’s overturned skiff aside as the dragons stood in the center of a horseshoe shape around the corpse.
“Would it be . . . ap-appropriate for me to-to-to put on ash as well?”
“Normally, I’d say no,” the dragon said. Emotion gave his dragon-tongued Montangyan an extra layer of difficulty. “But I—forgive me—I heard of his last words. In your case I believe it entirely appropriate. He called you his daughter. Feel free to take some off one of my saa for your own.”
She did so.
It didn’t last long. Several of the dragons spoke. It was all in Drakine. She picked up a few words; they seemed to be talking about wars and a dragon king and humans. She had come in at the end of a famous life, it seemed. They sang in their own tongue, some cawing out words, others sort of droning in a chorus, and the rest thumping their tails and cracking their wings and using their long throats as organic trumpets.
There were a few humans attending, discreetly, from a distance.
“Say something if you like, girl,” the dragon at the center said, startling her.