“I’m not sure anyone, even Taresscon or Ausperex, knows the full story. He made some powerful enemies in life. I suppose some of them, or their descendants, might be after him still.”
“So how, so how do I have to fix matters with flying on Taresscon? Or are you opening your Blue Book?”
“Ach, no. Riding a dragon, well, it signifies that you’ve reached a certain level of achievement. You broke with tradition, Ileth. That’s not always a bad thing. Doesn’t hurt to test a tradition now and then to see if it’s worth keeping. Usually we wait until spring before making any of the previous summer’s mob apprentices, so the first rides can be carried out in pleasant weather. But you’ve forced us to move up the schedule a bit.”
“I didn’t know . . .”
“I told you, a dragon invites you to do something, do it—as long as they aren’t telling you to murder a clumsy groom or something like that. That’s the difficulty, though. I can’t make you an apprentice. There’s a lot of talk associated with your name here. The duel. There’s that unfortunate party. The fire. Not that you are being blamed for the fire. If I made you an apprentice, every girl who keeps her sheets clean would be at my door asking why I couldn’t make her an apprentice if I did it for you. Do you understand?”
Ileth nodded.
“Now. My other difficulty, just to show I don’t just have to think about you novices, has to do with satisfying our partners on the other side of the bridge. Taresscon and her two fellow seniors who act as sort of a three-dragon jury in running the Beehive have made it known to me that the Lodger spoke to them about you shortly before the night of the Feast of Follies. It seems he persuaded her—and if there’s one thing the Lodger could do it was persuade you so you thought his ideas were yours—that you were to be put into flight training at once as a thank-you for what you did for him and also for your bit in sniffing out those thieving scale-rats in the Cellars.”
Ileth rode a surge of emotion as best as she could, keeping it off her face. The crest of the wave being that she would fly again, certainly and soon, and the trough being that nothing, not even flying, could fill the hole in her life left by the Lodger.
“It would take a braver man than me to tell Taresscon that the last request of a dragon like the Lodger would be ignored. Honestly, I’d sooner face a hooded jury. So I’m stuck between the traditions of the Serpentine, a request that might as well be an order from the dragons, and my own efforts to make sure my novices are all justly treated.
“After speaking with all concerned and the Master of Apprentices—I was a busy man while you were standing vigil over the corpse of the Lodger—here is what I have decided to do. I am promoting five novices to apprentice. You are not one of them. I am giving flight training to six of the Serpentine. You are one of them. Your second in the duel, Santeel Dun Troot, is one of the names I am promoting, I’m sure you will be happy to hear. I am explaining, should any of you lot have the temerity to question me, that we need a dancer for special duty with a dragon, and since you had experience with the Lodger you are up for the job, assuming you can handle the training. I’m not going to ask you if you think it’s fair one way or the other. This is the only way I can make all those currently bothering me about one Ileth of the Freesand quiet down and give me peace. So I hope you are looking forward to marking some time on dragonback among your other duties. I’ve already dropped a hint about what’s in the offing to Ottavia; the rest is going in this note.”
He sealed the paper with a dribble of wax and handed it to her. The Captain could probably run the Lodge for an entire year on what the Serpentine spent on paper alone, never mind ink. She laughed at herself as she thought this—northerners had a reputation for keeping their purse close and the drawstring tight, and here she was, totaling up the price of paper in her head.
“Oh, speaking of training, guess who is at the top of the roster. You won’t guess, so I’ll tell you. It’s that little curtain of a boy with the impossibly long name—Sifler. He learns fast and he’s already tutoring some of the slower apprentices in navigation. Master Saiph told me he worked out the Coverix Method on his own. He’d never heard of Coverix and still worked out how to figure latitude. Amazing. Anyway, he’s the first from your group to formally go on dragonback. Be sure to congratulate him. I think there’s some tradition about shining his boots.”
For once, she had heard of this tradition. The first novice to fly would get a brand-new pair of boots paid for by everyone in his swearing-in group and have said boots shined by all the other novices in turn. Various traditions had grown up about what he won as a bonus when getting them from the girls at the Manor. Ileth thought of his embarrassment when he walked in on her that day at Joai’s house and decided to arrange something especially embarrassing at the Dancers’ Quarter when he went there to pick his boots up from her. She could probably rely on Zusya to come up with something obscenely embarrassing to do to him.
“One more thing, Ileth. Kess, at the archives in the old temple, needs you to see him. The Lodger had some old books and scrolls there. He won’t be there now. He rises early, but he’s out like a shot when the dinner bell rings.”
That gave her another mystery to think about after she delivered Caseen’s note to Ottavia. The dancers were busy, with their numbers reduced by the brides’ departures. Ileth was scheduled to dance with the troupe the next day for some kind of debate that was to be held between two teams of males, and the dragons had requested a show.
Ottavia didn’t see any difficulty. “But since Kess is an early riser, you can rise even earlier and see him in the morning.”
In the morning, in name only, Ileth knocked on the door of the archives.
The archives were in the jumble of buildings at the up end of the Serpentine. For a temple it was a distinctly uninspiring building, squat and dug into the earth. The new Great Hall had probably been sited to obstruct it from being viewed from the gate. It was a tiny, almost lightless temple that she’d been told was of the Old Hypatian style, seeking their gods down in the cool, unchanging earth.
It took so long for the heavy-timbered, iron-reinforced door to be answered that Ileth feared she’d be in for another wait on the doorstep.
A face like a rain-worn statue, all pocks and fissures, looked down at her.
“You are that Ileth,” Kess said gravely. His Montangyan had an odd cadence to it. She vaguely remembered him from her oath ceremony. He’d been watching the novices sign on to the roster of the company.
“Yes.”
“I have a statement for you and some letters. They require your attention.”
She followed him down a short, narrow few stairs into the archives. It had a domed ceiling painted with symbols, scattered across the surface like stars. The paint was scored and badly flaked, faded mystic secrets from long ago.
Kess’s archives held shelves of papers, scrolls, and books on one side and a collection of war trophies ready for parades and such on the other: some in cases, some hanging from the ceiling, and some simply piled against the walls. She marked a wide set of stairs leading down to another level.
The archivist had a small table with a folded piece of paper the size of a medium painting canvas unrolled on it. He brought over a lamp from a far more cluttered table. Ileth realized there was not so much as a stool to sit on.
“May . . . may I have a chair?” she asked.
“Sitting too much is bad for the health,” Kess said, setting the lamp down so it illuminated the paper.
He took her through the statement. It noted that the Lodger had named her as his heir in the Vales (he had left other heirs elsewhere, it seemed, and Kess was at his wits’ end over how they would even be notified of his death) and that she was in charge of the practically nonexistent personal effects he’d left in the Cellars, in the form of his bedding and an old tool he used to ream out his ears and nose. There was also a dragon-mounting hook of the kind that riders did not use anymore (if you weren’t careful with it you could catch it under the scale and wound the dragon).