My tone was therefore sharp as I addressed the stranger. “What is your name?”
“Thu Phim-lat,” he said, in a heavily accented voice. “Lady Trent.”
So he would not attempt to pretend that he did not know me. Under the circumstances, none of us would have believed him anyway. “How long have you been in Scirland?”
“Three weeks.”
My heart stuttered in its beat. Perhaps you think it was a foolish reaction; I will not argue with you. But I had been on the receiving end of Yelangese trying to kill me, and could not forget that so easily. Had Thu Phim-lat been a longtime resident of Falchester, I might have persuaded myself that he was no threat. But if he had just arrived…
I decided to press the matter. “You may be here for the lecture, Mr. Thu, but I doubt that is your only purpose. Tell me what you hope to accomplish.”
His eyes darted from side to side, taking in the men watching us. They had arrayed themselves quite close, clearly ready to interpose their bodies if Mr. Thu made a single move toward me. “Oh, come now,” I said impatiently—as much to myself as to them. I did not like feeling afraid in my home city, and I liked even less feeling afraid when I had so little cause. “If he wished me any harm, there are far easier ways for him to achieve it than by walking into a public lecture hall.” He could have accosted me on the street, appearing out of the crowd before I even knew he was there. A cosh to the back of the head, a knife between the ribs… but that was foolishness. Yelang had only troubled me when I troubled them, by investigating dragons in their country or attempting to breed my own for the Royal Army. There was no reason for them to assassinate me at home, unless I had made a much more personal enemy than I knew. And doing so would only make them look dreadful in the court of public opinion.
The Scirling men looked unconvinced, but I had persuaded myself, and reassured Mr. Thu enough that he answered me. “I wished to meet you,” he said, speaking very slowly. I realized later that this was because his grasp of the Scirling language was far from perfect, and he wanted to make certain he committed no errors of grammar or word choice that might cause his point to be taken awry. “I have news of a thing I think you would like to hear.”
“News may be sent by letter,” I said. “Or you could present yourself at my townhouse—its location is hardly a secret. Why come to a public lecture?”
“If I came to your home, would I be let in the door?” he asked. “Would my letter be read?”
“Yes, or else my servants would have a great deal to answer for. I do not pay them to make such decisions on my behalf.”
“Ah,” Mr. Thu said once he had taken in these words. “But how would you know?”
I dismissed this with a wave of my hand. “Clearly you have not been rebuffed in such fashion, or you would have said as much already. Let us not waste time with hypotheticals. What tidings are you so eager to convey?”
At many points in my life I have been on Mr. Thu’s end of such a conversation, stumbling along in a language of which I have only a rudimentary command. My rapid speech and elevated diction had lost him. “Your news,” I said, when I saw he did not understand. “You have found me; say what you came to say.”
He glanced again at the men so energetically looming at him. “A dragon,” he said at last. “The body of a dragon. Not like any kind I know. I think not like any kind alive.”
My heart stuttered again, this time with excitement instead of irrational fear. Not like any kind alive. An extinct breed… I had scoured the world, corresponding with scholars from a dozen countries and more, trying to find evidence of the dragons created by the Draconeans so many thousands of years ago. Could it be this man had found what I sought?
It was unlikely. Even if he had only discovered evidence of some other extinct strain, though, he had my keen interest. “Where?”
“In the mountains,” Mr. Thu said. “You will see.”
TWO
Further discussion of extinct dragons had to wait. The lobby of Caffrey Hall was no place for such matters, especially with a phalanx of overeager bodyguards ready to pitch Mr. Thu out on his ear. And it was clear that the barrier of language would hamper any attempt on his part to explain; we would proceed much more rapidly with Suhail’s assistance.
I arranged for Mr. Thu to come by my house that evening, assuring him that my footman would certainly let him in. I also gathered the names of the gentlemen who had accosted him—ostensibly so I could thank them properly for their assistance, but also as insurance. When Mr. Thu was gone, I said to them all, “If he does not arrive safely, I will be most vexed.” Whether they would have caused trouble for him or not, I have no idea, but I felt it was best to issue a warning just in case.
By the time I made it back into the main room, Suhail’s lecture had, as expected, devolved into a public debate. This went on until the organizer ejected us from the premises; then it continued for a time in the street outside, with several opinionated fellows cornering my husband to argue some more. “Thank you,” Suhail said fervently, after I rescued him by worming my way to the center of the crowd and asserting my superior claim to my husband’s person. “I’m fairly certain they would not of their own accord have stopped before dawn tomorrow.”
“I hope you are not too tired,” I said. “I suspect that we have an interesting evening ahead of us.”
He listened with growing surprise as I told him about Thu Phim-lat. When I was done, Suhail said, “He is not the first man to claim he has evidence of some undiscovered breed, Draconean or otherwise.”
“Oh, I am skeptical,” I assured him. “But also curious. If this is some Yelangese plot against me, then whoever crafted it has done their work well. I cannot let Mr. Thu go without at least inquiring further.”
The delay also gave me time to contact Tom Wilker, so that there were three of us waiting when my visitor came calling a few hours later. Tom spent the time between his own arrival and Mr. Thu’s pestering me with questions. “What did he mean by ‘the body of a dragon’? A skeleton, or a recent carcass? Which mountains? What makes it so different from current breeds?”
“I spent all of five minutes speaking with the man, and half of that dealing with excessively zealous protectors,” I said with some asperity. “Wait until he gets here; then you may question him to your heart’s content.”
Judging by Mr. Thu’s wary posture when he arrived, he expected precisely the kind of interrogation he was going to get. I did my best to put him at ease with introductions and an offer of refreshment; he turned down both tea and brandy, and perched on the edge of his chair as if afraid it would sprout manacles around his wrists if he relaxed. I said, “My husband speaks some Yelangese, though not fluently. My hope is that between that and your own knowledge of Scirling, we will be able to piece together a proper explanation. Now. Tell us what you know.”
It has been my habit in these memoirs to smooth over my own awkard conversations in other tongues, for the sake of not taxing my readers’ patience; I will do the same for Mr. Thu here, bypassing the many halting exchanges in Yelangese which punctuated his Scirling comments, and his sporadic failures of grammar or vocabulary. (Among other things, there are multiple Yelangese languages, and the one Suhail spoke was not Mr. Thu’s mother tongue. But they were both fluent enough in it that we got by, albeit with difficulty.)