“Vithleen is impatient to go. Hurry up, apprentice! Are you ill too?”
“No, sir!” Ileth wondered at the last. If Santeel had been ill enough for it to be visible from the ground, it must have been a spectacular event.
She didn’t bother to correct him that she wasn’t an apprentice. Her thoughts were on the dragon. She hurried over to the green and clambered up on the extended leg.
The apprentice double-checked the saddle girth and some other fittings. He gave her a hard slap on the shoulder. “Enjoy!” he called, and hurried off, after one final check of the back tether for her. A lodge-girl from the north didn’t rate a learner’s saddle. There were several hooks and attachments at the front of the saddle, but she couldn’t find the short tether trainees used. All she found were bags and cases.
“At last,” Vithleen said.
Vithleen, anxious to be off and done with it, it seemed, scuttled out of the cave with an odd lizardlike scramble and jumped.
Ileth yelled “Wait!” as she hadn’t found the front tether yet. Vithleen had a wicked sense of humor, for she kept her wings partway closed and plunged through the cold down toward the bay. Once she felt she’d picked up enough speed, she opened her wings and Ileth felt the earth pull at her stomach as the dragon shot up into the sky like an arrow, riding her dive speed and the north wind, leaving Ileth’s stomach somewhere over the bay.
Once Vithleen ceased her acrobatics and fell into a steady flight, Ileth found a safety tether at the front of her saddle, neatly tied under the front horn—it would have been decent of someone to point that out to her—and hung on for her nearly fifteen years of life while she fiddled with the knot. Vithleen liked to fly fast. As soon as Vithleen leveled off, she managed to connect the tether and attached it under the vent in her riding coat to the thick bracing girdle at a metal ring.
With the short safety tether on, she felt better and looked about.
She saw Santeel on her gold doing a lazy circle above the Beehive, using the lighthouse as the circle’s center. (Did the center of a circle have a name? She felt like she should know that.) “V-Vithleen,” she called. No response. “V-Vithleen!” she shouted louder still.
“Yes?”
“Aren’t we . . . forming on . . . that gold?”
“I don’t understand you!” It was easier for Ileth to understand the dragon; the words were carried back by the wind.
“THE GOLD!” she shouted, stabbing her arm toward Auguriscious and Santeel.
“What about him? Nothing to do with us.”
Ileth was already feeling a chill from the wind. She wrapped her scarf around her face and hunkered down. If she got down low enough, like a racer on horseback, the wind wasn’t so bad; the female’s head and fringe channeled it over her.
“Thank you,” Vithleen called, picking up speed. She didn’t look like she should be fast. She was as wide as the males, who were probably twice her weight, but it seemed to Ileth they were going up the coast like an artillerist’s missile. The Serpentine was receding from view. Santeel on her gold was increasingly hard to pick out against the sky.
Still, it was flight, and it was even more glorious her second time, as the weight of the Lodger’s death and funeral wasn’t pressing her heart flat. She could take—what was the word the apprentice in the flight cave had used? She could enjoy.
After what seemed like hours of flight—but the sun didn’t shift much; Ileth was learning that dragon flight seemed to throw off your sense of time—Ileth began to wonder if they were ever turning around. Her legs were achy and the cold and fresh air blasting across had given her an appetite. Vithleen turned west. Ileth saw, looming far off, the range of mountains divided at the Cleft Pass.
“Going up the south side. Looks like there’s weather piled up north,” Vithleen said.
Ileth hardly heard the words. She was lost in the rhythmic beats of the dragon’s wings. Her mind worked over the statement, looked at the mountains, and sure enough, there were some clouds at about their—oh, what was it called—altitude, but they were on the other side of the mountain range.
“Shouldn’t we turn back now?” Ileth shouted, taking down her scarf and leather windshield. The gusting wind at this altitude smacked her face like a slap.
“Why? Weather’s great!”
Well, the dragon was eager to press on. As she’d been often told, their job was to keep the dragons happy.
It took a moment for Ileth to recognize Jamus and Elothia, the mountains on either side of the Cleft. She was used to seeing their north sides. She’d passed between them on her way south from Freesand. She’d just about kill for a big steaming mug of Freesand tea, even a muddy serving of the Captain’s all-dust, no-leaf blend he supplied to the Lodge. The sun seemed to be speeding up as it sank toward the horizon. They would miss dinner at this rate, and her legs were very, very tired. She was glad Vii had helped her make tight the fabric strips under her hose and leather leggings.
“Not fighting the wind anymore,” Vithleen said. “Going’s easier from here. I can catch it on my quarter.” Ileth was glad of it but not quite sure what she meant. A ship could be pushed along by wind from its side, every direction save dead ahead, she knew. It might be the same with dragons.
“Hungry,” Ileth shouted.
“We both are! Just a little bit longer now. I can see the Cleft. How are your eyes?”
Ileth could see the general outlines of the Pass but couldn’t make out the buildings of the way station where travelers could recover from the fatigues of the mountain road.
Vithleen began to lose altitude. Ileth felt sick to her stomach. Something must have gone dreadfully wrong. This couldn’t be a training flight, unless they were trying to break her confidence and teach her a lesson by sending her out for hours. The other possibility was that she’d gotten on the wrong dragon, but the apprentice in charge of the flight cave had directed her to this one.
No, this had to be some kind of prank. It seemed the sort of thing Dath Amrits might organize, both as a test and for the wicked fun of it. That would be just like him, though she was surprised he’d go so far as to deny her a learner’s saddle. She might have been killed. She suspected Caseen would go along with taking her down a peg. Falth was right, they were always testing you. But why her in particular? The boys, despite stories of eggs clenched in their nethers, were up and back between breakfast and the midday meal and still exchanging toasts of spiced winter wine in their honor at dinner! What had she done to deserve hours in the cold?
Despite her fatigue and unease, it was fascinating to see the Cleft from above. It was a sliver of a settled valley with a widening and narrowing river (currently frozen) that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a lake flowing out to the north. At the south end, the highest point of the Pass, there was an old fortification that was mostly just a wall.
A cluster of buildings huddled next to the wall on its north side, and her dragon set down next to the largest of the buildings save the tower, a great barnlike structure.
Some humans in cold-weather coats and heavy fur hats ran out to meet them.
Vithleen circled twice, testing the wind in the confused airs of the Pass, then glided in. She set down lightly, letting her tail absorb most of the landing. Ileth concentrated on remembering to dismount from the correct side.
Men in thick gray felt coats and soft boots came to meet her. “Vithleen! I had a bet you would come yesterday.” One of them went to work on a case tied down at the bottom of her saddle girth.
“Mail delay,” Vithleen said. “We had a courier from the Galantine border expected. They decided it would be better if I took the lot; who knows when the weather will turn foul again.”