“You’re not going into battle,” Vii said. “Just learning to ride.”
The Borderlander had an assortment of scarves and kerchiefs, tattered and worn, and Vii mated them up and turned them into a sort of fitted cushion that went around her neck (another suggestion of Galia’s) that trailed off into a scarf. The big leather gauntlets worked without modification once she put on a pair of thick wool gloves under them, though it made her hands look enormous. The hat was lambskin, tied down over her ears with a chin strap so the fleece warmed her and the leather cut the wind. It had a hint of the fore-and-aft-style decorations, though shorter and smaller than the Guard versions. It was her favorite part of the flying rig; the little details looked fetching and she felt a bit guilty as she admired herself a little too much in it in front of the mirror wall than was proper for a stolid Serpentine dragoneer.
One of the Captain’s old maxims was “To learn, do.” Ileth left the hard work of the leggings to Vii and learned a good deal about working with leather by going up to the tack workshop and making her belts and closures fit.
At last it was more or less done, through hours of effort put in between dancing duties.
“I don’t know how to thank you. I have a little money left from when I bought that paper. Can I give it to you?”
Vii frowned. “Ileth, just giving a friend money for a favor—it’s a bit crass. Especially in these circles. I know you’re northern, and I suppose they do things a bit different up there. If you can’t do a favor in return, get them something they like.”
“I see. What do you like, Vii?”
“A good night’s sleep, which you can’t get in the blasted alley between your wind from all that spicy food and Preen’s mumbling in her sleep.”
Ileth smiled. “I’ve stopped taking peppers. It was getting boring.”
Vii leaned back against the wall of their bedchamber alley and thought.
“I miss swirl. Have you ever had it? It’s a sort of drink, made from ground pod-beans that have been dried in the sun with cinnamon and sometimes salt added. It’s from way south. It’s bitter, but hearty in its way. Very satisfying.”
She’d never heard of it. “Do they sell it on market days?”
“Not here. No. Too expensive or hasn’t caught on, I don’t know. You don’t see it outside Sammerdam. At least I haven’t. Oh, I know what I need, a nice sheath. Something I can wear under my dress when I’m not dancing. I keep ruining my good ones because I forget to change before drill. Something in a startling color.”
The sheath seemed doable. Ileth would keep her eyes and ears open about the swirl. Maybe Amrits or one of the others would know where to get some.
11
The day of her training flight arrived. They had, as predicted, a few days of milder, storm-free weather as the winter collected itself after the solstice before truly settling in. The flight cave was a flurry of activity.
The listed boys had gone for their first flights, and there was a great to-do about it. Idlers lined up on the Long Bridge to cheer them on their way in, and the dancers whispered about some of the rude, painful, and embarrassing rituals they’d been put through by the wingmen and apprentices the night before. She found it hard to believe they had walked to their first flight across the Long Bridge with a squab’s egg clenched between their buttocks, but it was a good story. Each went up on an older, experienced dragon, a dragoneer flying with them, exercising his mount and showing them how to read arm signals.
Santeel and Ileth were to go the next day, and there was no to-do anywhere. Ottavia said that there would be no rituals, because so few of her dancers had taken flight training. Though they were free to invent one. Santeel joked that they could brush each other’s hair before the flight, but the joke hung in the air of the Dancers’ Quarter without a single laugh. Ileth’s hair had put on only another finger-width or two. Her body seemed content to wait on the hair while it built dancing muscles.
Ileth suggested, in her halting way, a ritual from up north. In the Freesand, the first time the young men go out, each buys the other their first drink of spirits. They are bought and poured in the morning and remain on the bar all day until they return. In the north, boys were allowed only small beer until they came of age and took up work.
Santeel made a face, but her republican politics perhaps got the better of her. “Well, it will warm us up after being up in the cold air.”
“I have just the thing,” Ottavia said. She returned with a bottle of clear liquid. “Lifewater. And two glasses. Vii, on the shelf there. Get them. Pour each other one, and don’t stint.”
Ileth poured first, it being her suggestion, and then Santeel poured hers. They left the glasses on Ottavia’s little table and went off to change into their flying rigs.
Santeel was scheduled first, but Ileth went up to the flight cave with her because sitting around waiting to go would just make her nervous. In the back of her mind, she was thinking that it would be amusing if Santeel lurched about when the dragon took off, as a couple of the boys did yesterday.
It was wickedly cold in the flight cave, thanks to an unusual and brisk north wind. Ileth flapped her arms, hoping the chill wouldn’t make her stupid. It was easy to get mentally dull when you were cold.
She waited in the back of the cave while Santeel reported them in, and then one of the apprentices staffed to the cave pointed Santeel to a dragon: none other than Auguriscious, the dragon who liked ale after a flight and belched into Duskirk’s face. Ileth watched her tighten her gloves, then climb up into the learner’s saddle after being corrected on the on versus off side (a learner’s saddle had an extra belt to hold you and a tight front tether—actual dragoneers often flew with just a long rear tether so they could hang off the dragon at various angles and employ their crossbows and such, or move down the dragon’s body to saw off a highpoon). Santeel had no dragoneer to fly with her. It disturbed Ileth enough to ask one of the apprentices. She knew him by sight as he was always passing the dancers but not by name. He was on the older side for an apprentice.
“Oh, she’s on Auguriscious, she’ll be fine. He’s gentle as a cloud and they’ve got the learner’s saddle on him. Nothing but the best for a Dun Troot. It’s a joyride, anyway. One is often enough for those Name girls. They get scared. Had one pee herself one time. A dragon’s not a hunting horse, after all.”
Ileth, waiting, suddenly had doubts about her bladder, and rather than worry about the what ifs went off to use the sluice. Galia hadn’t mentioned that in her little talks.
When she returned, having had to get half undressed for the operation, as she was putting her gloves back on, a different flight cave apprentice whom Ileth didn’t know but who had directed Santeel to her dragon pointed her to a waiting green. She was not a large dragon, but broad-backed and muscular. The females were supposed to be faster fliers. The males, weighed down as they were by thicker scale and heavy horn, usually couldn’t keep up.