Now, however—there were two eggs. And while the existence of a single Celestial would have imparted a gentle but sure degree of stability to the succession, a second one would undermine it instead.
Young Prince Miankai was the only possible companion for the second Celestial at present. He would be elevated to attention far beyond his years, and made a desirable target for every faction and official who hoped to wield influence over the next Emperor. The Emperor would be faced with the very choice he had wished to avoid: either to formally name Mianning his heir, raising him to a strength which would disappoint and inflame his political enemies, or to tacitly permit such maneuvering, even though it would weaken Mianning’s position and make Miankai vulnerable.
The Empress came a few days later, and sat with Qian for some time. She was Miankai’s mother, but she had overseen Mianning’s education as well, and she did not suffer from the lust to see her own son crowned. They listened together to some encouraging music sung for the benefit of the eggs, and sipped tea. “Many cares beset the throne,” the Empress said, and after a pause added, “The honorable Prince Yongxing has been most attentive to his young nephew of late.”
Qian understood what she was saying. Prince Yongxing could not be easily kept from his nephew. He had disqualified himself for the throne where his brother now sat, by taking Lien’s companionship upon himself when she had first hatched rather than seeing her sent away. But in so doing, he had increased his standing at the court to nearly the level of the throne. The Emperor tolerated no slights or even the suggestion of disrespect towards him. He was deeply sensible that his elder brother had removed himself from his path, and subsequently had supported his succession.
Qian paced the pavilion round her eggs in distraction the rest of the afternoon. She understood perfectly the hints and warnings she had been given. Yongxing meant to exert every effort to make Miankai a rival for the throne, and Mianning would not sit quietly while it was done. They would carry out their silent struggle over her eggs; they would not scruple to make every attempt to unhealthily attach one of the hatchlings too early, and to induce the other to reject the other candidate for their affections, feeding them on lies and whispers. The conflict might even take a more horrible form still: what if one side or another, frenzied by the circumstances, attempted harm to one or even both of the eggs? She could not think so ill of either Mianning or of Yongxing themselves, but they had many supporters less honorable than eager.
That fear kept her sleepless several nights in a row, even after she had demanded a doubling of the guards and attendants around her eggs. She could not stop pacing. Chu finally came and offered to keep watch during the night, to let her rest, and she went to the garden and sank into slumber at once, aching with deep exhaustion. In the morning, she roused and came at once to inspect them. Nothing untoward had occurred, but she curled round them at once and nosed them over with great anxiety. Chu said quietly, sitting beside her, “This cannot be healthy for either you or the eggs. The situation must be resolved swiftly.”
“In what way can it possibly be resolved?” Qian said wearily. “Save the one which drives my fears.”
Chu was silent a while beside her, and then he said finally, “It was once proposed by the illustrious Qianlong Emperor that Lien should be sent away.”
Every instinctive feeling rejected the answer at once. But Qian did not need to search long to find an answer which came from better sources. “Lien was a different case. There is no allied ruler upon whom the Emperor can bestow a true Celestial without giving rise to unhealthy and dangerous ambition.”
“No allied ruler,” Chu agreed, and paused before continuing. “The Emperor has lately received word from the barbarian nation known as France. They have chosen to raise their ruler to the rank of Emperor. He will be crowned in the winter.”
He nosed at her gently before he left her again, meant for comfort. Qian curled shivering around her eggs. No one would try to take one of them from her by force, naturally. The Emperor had not even made a suggestion, which might have placed her in the position of having to defy his will. Chu had himself only said a few words in passing. She might as easily close her ears to the hint, and keep them both safe by her.
When the eggs had hatched, the Emperor might command one of them to depart, himself.
But she was a Celestial, and not a lesser creature, who might permit her own feelings to come before the needs of the state. She had been the Companion of Heaven. Hongli had trusted her judgement, and he had gone to his rest glad to know she would remain at court, and lend her wisdom and protection to his successors. She would not now betray him with selfishness. Nor would she be so cruel to the growing hatchling. What agony would it be to find yourself exiled to a distant and barbaric land, when you had been hatched amid the glories of the Imperial court? Better never to have known what you had lost. If the egg went now, it would mature with a foreign tongue bathing its shell, and hatch to find itself the honored companion to the highest lord of its adopted land. It would not suffer the anguish of separation, nor the sting of envy.
They came for the egg three days later. She had quietly sent word to the Emperor that she would be interested in meeting the ambassadors of this Emperor-to-be, who had been so greatly favored by Heaven as to rise to so high a seat. He brought them before her in his own person, so great a mark of consideration and kindness that she could not help but feel soothed a little. The ambassadors spoke haltingly and were awkward in their courtesies, but though their manner was rough, they seemed to her sincere; and their astonishment, when the Emperor informed them that he had chosen to send a Celestial egg to their lord as a coronation gift, was satisfyingly enormous: they understood at least a little the magnitude of the honor that was being done them.
The Emperor permitted them their ecstasies of gratitude, and then abruptly summoned the party of attendants who would go with the egg: they had brought a crate lined with silk and wool, all made ready.
They gave her no time to worry or think. Qian managed to open her coils long enough to let them come to the eggs, and one of the attendants asked her quietly, “Honored one, may I inquire which egg is the younger?”
Qian hesitated, struggling, and then abruptly she lowered her nose and gestured instead to the first egg, the one that had come forth a few scant minutes earlier; the elder brother, the lucky one. No one would ever know, she told herself, around the thrumming sensation deep in the lower chambers of her throat, as they carefully lifted the egg from its cart and into the safe place waiting to receive it. That tiny measure of good fortune was all the advantage either egg possessed. She could give it nothing more.
They closed the lid upon the crate and carried it out of her sight. Others took away the egg’s empty cart at the same time. In moments, there was no trace that a second egg had ever been present. All had been accomplished with enormous speed and deftness. The ambassadors were escorted away, and only the Emperor remained; even her attendants and his own left, sent away, and when they were gone, he bowed to her as he had in the days when she had been his father’s companion. “I honor your wisdom, Lady Qian,” he said formally.
“I am honored by your kindness, Son of Heaven,” she whispered. But she was grateful when he left her alone with her remaining egg. She coiled around the lonely cart and spread her wings sheltering around it and over her head.
Dragons and Decorum
(art by Laurie Damme Gonneville)
Author’s Note: As soon as I saw Laurie Damme Gonneville’s illustration, this
story leapt into my head almost entirely complete.
“WELL, MR. BENNET, such dreadful news,” his lady said to him one day. “The Seventh Wing is come to Meryton. Whatever is to be done?”
“I do not see that anything can be done,” Mr. Bennet said. “The Admiralty are most unreasonable, to be sure, but I believe they insist on safeguarding the nation. We will have to endure not being bombarded by the French in the night.”
“Oh! Pray do not joke about such a thing, and you must know I am speaking of Elizabeth: what is to be done?”
Miss Elizabeth Bennet did not ordinarily occasion any great maternal anxiety. Indeed, Mrs. Bennet contrived tolerably well not to think of her second daughter at all, save to pronounce her “comfortably settled, with her uncle,” and very occasionally to write the girl a long, badly-spelt letter detailing the most recent of her woes and nervous maladies. The object of these missives responded with brief and encouraging notes which a more careful reader than her mother might suspect were written without any reference to the original.
Mrs. Bennet was of a family less respectable than her husband’s. Her elder brother was indeed an officer in the notorious Aerial Corps, though himself gentlemanlike in his manners and respectably married. Having achieved the rank of first lieutenant, the elder Gardiner did not look further, and as officer to one of the Chequered Nettles stationed in London, enjoyed there a settled family life. They naturally did not move among the better circles of society, and displayed a distressing lack of concern for it.
Meanwhile, with her husband’s estate entailed upon a distant cousin, and having produced five daughters dowered with little more than an inclination to be handsome, Mrs. Bennet early began to consider herself justified in indulging an anxiety for their future. Her fretful concerns occasionally found in her brother an audience, and drew him at last to bring forward a hesitant offer couched in vague terms, of a form of support which he might perhaps be able to offer one of his nieces.
Her answering raptures made him cautious. “Pray do not be so enthusiastic, my dear sister,” he said with high alarm. “I must speak with my brother, first,” and insisted on closeting himself at length with Mr.
Bennet without any further intelligence.
“I am sure you have the best uncle in the world,” Mrs. Bennet informed her eldest daughters, Jane and Elizabeth then being thirteen and ten years of age respectively, and considered old enough to bear their mother company in the sitting room of a morning when no more entertaining visitors had presented themselves. Her good opinion was a little shaken, shortly thereafter, when Mr. Bennet disclosed to her the full nature of her brother’s proposal. But she was possessed of that happy sort of character which was very soon able to discard such considerations as danger and hard use and loss of respectability, when these were weighed against the certain and immediate satisfaction of having one of her beloved children taken off her hands. After only a brief hesitation she renewed her approbation, and pressed her husband to accept.
This was no less than to sacrifice one of her daughters to the Aerial Corps, to be trained as a captain for some peculiar and recalcitrant breed of dragon which refused male handlers. “I would not suggest it for a moment, my dear sister,” Lieutenant Gardiner said that evening to his sister and brother-in-law, as they sat together in the drawing-room after dinner, “save that there are two Longwing breeding pairs currently at work and a third to come shortly. We confidently expect to have a new beast to harness every other year for the next decade, and there is a sad lack of coming candidates. My niece is quite certain to make captain, if she have any aptitude for the work.”
“Oh! A captain in the Corps!” Mrs. Bennet said. “I am sure it would be a splendid thing for any of the girls.”
“And which of the girls would you propose?” Mr. Bennet said, in his dry way, having been silent for most of the evening. Mrs. Bennet was not so unnatural a mother as to be equal to the question.
The next afternoon, the two elder Miss Bennets had the questionable pleasure of accompanying their father and uncle to the covert at Meryton, where a courier-dragon had brought him on his visit, and of seeing the beast themselves. Jane shrank away in alarm from the inquisitive Winchester, which had thrust its head forward to inspect the ribbons on her gown, but Elizabeth, already independent-minded and bidding fair, in her mother’s opinion, to be a difficult girl, after only a few shrinking moments asked if she might safely pet the creature.
“I do not mind at all,” the dragon answered her, “—you might scratch my cheek right there beneath the harness; there is an itch I cannot get at conveniently.”
Too young to be much surprised at being addressed by a dragon, she industriously squirmed a small hand beneath the leather harness and scratched away heedless of the inch-long fangs near-by, to the dragon’s loud appreciation. Her uncle directed a significant glance at her father over her head. Three weeks later she willingly departed under his aegis for the training grounds in Scotland, and so was lost to her parents and to respectable society.
But she had done well in her new profession, and her uncle’s promise had lately been fulfilled: since the spring, she had been Captain E. Bennet, of the somewhat scandalously named Wollstonecraft, and her last letter to her parents had announced her assignment, with her newly trained dragon, to the Seventh Wing.
“I am surprised, my dear,” Mr. Bennet now answered Mrs. Bennet. “I have heard you lament the distance between you and your daughter any time these past nine years. Surely this must be an occasion for rejoicing.”
“Of course I am excessively glad to see dear Elizabeth again,” Mrs. Bennet said. “But if she is to be in Meryton, she cannot fail to meet the rest of the village in the street from time to time. Whatever will they think? It cannot do the other girls any good.”
“You are quite right. We must make our sentiments on the matter perfectly plain. We will give a ball for her in two weeks, and invite the neighborhood.”
Mrs. Bennet objected in horror and at length. Mr. Bennet was unmoved. He was of a capricious and sardonic nature, which delighted in human folly. Elizabeth had been his favorite for her quick wit, even as an unformed child, and he had really regretted her loss. His consent to her departure for the Corps had only been obtained, though he had never avowed it, from a peculiar fear of the sorrow which might be her lot if she did marry to secure her future, unlike his wife’s concern for the reverse.
That same peculiarity in his character now induced him to insist upon an occasion which promised to give pleasure to no-one directly concerned, as Captain Bennet’s reaction on receiving the brief note which informed her of the honor to be done her more nearly resembled her mother’s than anything else.
“Whatever am I to do?” she demanded of her interested dragon, who was peering over her shoulder at the letter.
Wollstonecraft offered no assistance, merely advising her with great enthusiasm to purchase a dress and jewels. “You are sure to meet a tall and handsome stranger,” she added, “who will fall madly in love with you.” The dragon had in her first year already developed a great taste for gothic literature, which led her to view an eligible lover as a desirable sort of prize; and had given her a highly inaccurate notion of the usual course of a ball.
“What a strange creature you are,” Captain Bennet said, although with a caress of the long and deadly snout beside her which belied her words. “Nothing could be more inconvenient, if it were in the least likely to happen.”
“I do not see why not. You are very pretty, all the aviators say so.”
Wollstonecraft spoke with immense satisfaction, much to Captain Bennet’s mingled mirth and dismay. “They are not thrown much in the way of pretty girls, you know,” she answered her dragon, laugh
ing. “I am afraid we cannot consider them reliable authorities.”
She could not easily excuse herself from the pleasure of the occasion, not even on the grounds of duty, for the station at Meryton was, she knew very well, a mere way-station where little action was to be expected. She was young, and her dragon even younger, and only necessity had made her a captain and formation-commander with so little experience to her credit. In her rear-officer, Captain Winslow of the Parnassian Vindicatus, she had a twenty-year veteran who was entirely competent to answer any small French incursion without her. The prospects for any larger action were so insignificant as to bar consideration. She could not say it was impossible for her to leave her post for a single night.
Having resigned herself to suffering a ball in her honor, Captain Bennet was not so without vanity that she did not wish to appear to advantage. She was a little better equipped for this task than most young women of the Corps, having been received home at Christmastime, and having besides spent a good deal of time in the society of her uncle’s family: one of his own daughters had also gone to the Corps, but the other had preferred to remain in the domestic sphere, and had just lately married a promising young officer. And to provide a more immediate advantage, her sister Jane braved the terrors of the covert to escort her to the town seamstress.