Jacob’s own impatience settled the matter. I had not thought of him before as a restless man, but he had none of his usual hobbies to occupy him in Drustanev; and having spent the better part of a month going out nigh daily, he found himself chafing at this sudden inaction. He did not like any better than I did the thought of sitting idle when we might be learning something that could help the villagers.
“If tonight passes quietly,” he said at last, “we’ll go tomorrow.”
I spent the afternoon in preparation, so that we would not waste any time the following morning. The area was a strenuous day’s hike away; allowing a day to explore, that would be three days altogether. We would return when Mr. Wilker and Lord Hilford did, or possibly just before.
My preparations were hardly secret; it is no surprise that Dagmira guessed their general purpose. “Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded, hands on her hips.
Before, I might have fobbed her off with some vague answer, not wanting to face the possibility of argument. Ever since our conversation, though, I felt guilty about the extent to which we ignored the villagers of Drustanev. I told myself we had reason; they’d been largely sullen and unhelpful where our researches were concerned, seeing us as a disruption and possibly a threat. But if Dagmira knew of any danger, she might unbend enough to warn me. “Come with me,” I said, leaving off my packing, and led her downstairs.
Our map still lay on the workroom’s one large table. I pointed to the center of the circle and asked her, “What’s there?”
Dagmira frowned in puzzlement at the map. “On the paper?”
“No, in—” I caught myself. “Do you know how to read a map?”
I actually said “picture of the land”; although I knew the Vystrani term, it temporarily escaped me. Dagmira mouthed through my odd choice of words, even more puzzled. Then her brow cleared. “Ulyin! Mayor Mazhustin has one, and Menkem Goen keeps one of Akhia. They’re pretty—much prettier than this.”
Her casual denigration of my work, I surmised, amounted to a “no.” Why should she know how to read a map? Drustanev was so isolated, she might never have been as far as another village. The people here navigated by landmarks, not drawings of them. I described the area to her, based on what Jacob had said of it, and then Dagmira nodded. “In the middle of that area,” I said. “Is there anything there? Anything special, I mean.”
The young woman shook her head. (As I write this, it occurs to me, for the first time, that Dagmira cannot have been much younger than I was. She was not yet married—they wed surprisingly late in the Vystrani highlands; she would not seek a husband until her dowry of weavings was complete—and perhaps that was part of it; but I suspect the larger part of it was simply that I saw myself as a worldly, sophisticated woman, and her as a rural child. What an unfortunate thing to realize, long after I could possibly apologize to her for it.)
“Too rocky,” she said of the region in question. “There’s no point in cutting or burning the trees; it wouldn’t make good pasture.”
“You don’t have any legends about it? Evil spirits I should be wary of?” I could not undo my ruins trip, but I could at least try to prevent another one.
Dagmira looked at me sharply, to see if I was mocking her, but I was quite sincere. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just more mountain.”
When she heard that Jacob and I intended to go see for ourselves, she shrugged philosophically. By then she had resigned herself to the fact that I would behave neither like a sensible Vystrani peasant girl, nor like a fancy lady from foreign parts. But she laughed at the notion of me carrying a proper share of our supplies—not over the proposed terrain. “You wouldn’t even make it halfway,” she said, and was probably right. “I’ll make my brother go with you.”
“Your brother?”
She looked at me as if I were simple in the head, and soon I found out why. “Iljish?”
The lad who acted as the gentlemen’s valet—though in truth he’d become more a man-of-all-work than manservant. I had not realized he was Dagmira’s brother. They did not look much alike.
Stammering with embarrassment, I said, “Won’t your parents mind?”
Dagmira shrugged with unconcern that was, I think, partially real, and partially a scab over an old wound I had just prodded without knowing. “They’re dead.”
My face heated even further. This young woman had been my maidservant for weeks, and I had not bothered to learn the first thing about her family. I had never thought of myself as particularly arrogant, or prone to ignoring the world around me, yet I had devoted far more thought to the doings of rock-wyrms than to the people who kept our house.
I managed to accept Dagmira’s offer with something like grace, but the shame of my blindness stayed with me. How difficult was it for her, orphaned in this village, having to be both mother and sister to Iljish? No wonder she had taken this position, serving the strange foreigners. I was very quiet through supper that night, wondering if our placid cook had some sorrow in her own past I was ignorant of. She did not dress in a widow’s weeds, at least, but beyond that I could not muster the nerve to ask. I did not know her well enough, and that was not the way to start.
But I could not dwell on that matter forever. At the crack of dawn the next morning, Jacob, Iljish, and I departed, on what surely must be accounted one of the more momentous hikes of even my adventure-filled life.
SEVENTEEN
The usefulness of Iljish — Adventures in abseiling — An enormous cavern — What we found there — Its implications
Talking to Dagmira about our journey was one of the better decisions I made in Vystrana, for she was absolutely right: I would not have made it even two hours into that hike if she had not sent Iljish along.
He had inherited none of his sister’s robust build. But he was a wiry thing, far more capable of scrambling over the rough terrain than I, even with a pack on his back. Iljish scampered across the stones and hacked through the brambles with the boundless energy of a squirrel. I came second, and Jacob brought up the rear. In theory he held his gun at the ready, prepared to shoot at any dragons that might think to trouble us, but in practice he had to sling it across his back as often as not, needing his hands for balance on the broken terrain.
We set out in the direction the smugglers had taken me, but soon diverged from that course, into terrain where we need not fear running into them, or indeed anyone except the occasional hunter. The limestone bones of the mountains came to the surface in jagged blocks there, where the walls of steep valleys had collapsed downward in the not-too-distant past. The forest across much of this had reached the stage where it supported a dense undergrowth of flowering brambles, making our progress far more laborious than under the venerable fir.
We went up, and up, and up. Lowlanders that we were—I had never lived more than a thousand feet above sea level—Jacob and I made heavy going of it, though nothing like so bad as we would have done on our arrival, before we had a chance to adapt. During one of our rare breaks, Jacob admitted that he and Mr. Wilker had been thoroughly blown by their first few explorations. “I thought myself fit enough,” he said, “but this air is so much thinner; I had no idea it would make exertion so hard.” He spoke in Vystrani, but Iljish still looked mystified. Having lived his entire life in the mountains, he found nothing odd at all in the quality of the air.
When I could spare the energy to think, I made up my mind to speak to Iljish about his family. He was, I judged, a bit younger than his sister, and I had no awkward history with him (though Dagmira might have shared her side of our own); these combined to make him seem more approachable, to my embarrassed mind. But by then he had begun ranging outward from our progress, snapping off shots at anything whose fur he might sell. The rifle was ours, and better than any in Drustanev; the use of it was as much a payment to him as whatever Jacob had offered.
Iljish came back at last with a pair of rabbits slung over his shoulder. Jacob and I had paused for breath in a co
ngenial spot, where sunlight broke through the trees to warm the air, and an edge of limestone formed a handy bench. Nerving myself, I began, “I was talking with your sister, Iljish, and—”
“Hush!” Jacob hissed, in a low, urgent voice.
My husband had never once spoken so peremptorily to me. I hushed, more out of surprise than obedience; and then I heard what he had.
A single flap of wings. And then, just when I thought I might have imagined it, another.
We recoiled back from the sunlight, so inviting a moment before, so dangerous now. A shadow passed overhead. Through the trees, I caught a glimpse of the dragon, banking on a warm updraft of air to continue its exploration of the area. Had the beast spotted some animal prey? No, it wasn’t nearly close enough to sunset; no rock-wyrm should be hunting at this hour.
I dared not pull out my notebook to jot the line aggression linked to disturbance in sleep patterns? But I thought it, and even while I crouched at the base of a tree, trying not to feel too much like one of the rabbits over Iljish’s shoulder, I wondered if there was any way to test the theory.
Jacob had slid his rifle free, and now knelt with the barrel pointed at the ground. I met his gaze, and saw the hesitation there. Should he shoot to defend us, and risk failure, which would almost certainly bring the full threat upon us?
I shook my head, a tiny gesture, as if the dragon would hear my face moving through the air. Under cover, Jacob would be shooting half blind. And he dared not go into the open for a better angle.
The dragon coughed out a noise that sounded, to my excitable ear, like annoyance. A moment later we heard the renewed flapping of its wings fading into the distance; nevertheless, it was several long minutes before any of us could move.
“That,” I said at last, “was not Zhagrit Mat.”
Jacob let out the breath he had been holding. “No. An ordinary dragon—perhaps.” He ran his left hand through sweat-damp hair, then said, “I know why we argue so rarely. I can predict enough of what you will say that there isn’t much point in starting it. We’re far enough along that it hardly makes sense to turn back.”
The point was debatable. But I was hardly going to argue Jacob’s side for him, if he would not. “Let us continue on, then, and get out of that dragon’s range before sunset.”
We did not make it quite so far after that as any of us had hoped, but Jacob, in consultation with Iljish, decided it was best to stop where we found a defensible campsite, and cover the last bit the following day. I forced myself through my share of the work in setting up that camp, but fell on my nose as soon as I could, and slept so deeply a dragon could have eaten my legs for a snack and I would not have discovered it until morning.
The next day, we began our exploration.
No more the headlong marching of the previous day; now we picked our way carefully, one eye on the sky above, one on the ground ahead. Approaching from Drustanev sent us through one of the gaps in the circle I had noted; there were, so far as we knew, no lairs in the immediate vicinity. But once inside the circle, who knew what we might find?
It was wildly beautiful terrain, if you have the spirit within you to appreciate true wilderness, rather than the groomed version that appears in romantic paintings. I have never liked Vystrana so much as I did on that journey, though how much of that was the scenery and how much my circumstances—stretching my wings, with my husband at my side—I cannot say. The stone here was quite porous, so that we heard a steady soft rushing from snowmelt flowing along below the ground, and here and there found a small waterfall cascading from the broken rock. (For once my exertions were strenuous enough that I was actually glad for its icy touch upon my face, though it still left me gasping.)
“I expect there are caves,” Jacob said, peering up one of the cracks from which water issued forth, “but they may not be large enough for lairing.”
I retied the laces of my boots and shoved errant strands of hair back beneath the Vystrani kerchief with which I had restrained their fellows. “Whatever accounts for the circle—if indeed there is any such thing—will be found at the center.” We forged onward.
Until we found our way blocked by another ravine, even more forbidding than the one we had traversed on our way here. This one looked like the mountain had been split open by a giant’s axe: a steep crevasse, too wide to be bridged by a fallen tree, too long to be conveniently circled. “Have you ever been here before?” I asked Iljish.
He shook his head, peering over the edge in a way that made my muscles twitch with the desire to pull him back. “What do you think is at the bottom?”
More brambles, in all likelihood, but I did not say it; I heard in his voice the buoyant energy of a young man who cannot see a challenge like that ravine slope without wanting to conquer it. I shared his impulse, in more feminine form. This was not precisely the center of the circle I had marked, but perhaps the secret lay here. Our map was not exact, after all, and dragons might be less than entirely precise themselves.
Jacob had caught the same enthusiasm. He grinned at me and said, “I once climbed Matherly Crag, without ropes, on a dare. But I think we will use ropes here.”
I was glad of that, as I had never climbed anything more challenging than a tree, and that in skirts. Fortunately, this slope was not quite vertical—at least not on our side. The far wall was a different matter, overhanging the base of the ravine and casting it into shadow. If we had to go up that side to continue our search, I suspected our exploration would end here.
We tied our first rope around a sturdy tree, and then Jacob used it to steady himself as he descended. Once he found a suitable place to stop and attach another, I began to follow him. The disadvantage to this method, I discovered, was that I must face the cliff; not all portions of the slope required me to cling to the line, but if I turned to see where I was placing my feet, it put me in a bad position for those times when I did require it.
The final stage of our descent was even steeper; in the end, Jacob had to teach me how to abseil, which I was not very good at. I cracked my knees repeatedly against the stony wall, and my ribs were quite bruised from the constriction of the rope by the time I reached the comparatively level floor of the ravine. Once Jacob had extricated me, I staggered off a few steps to lean against a boulder and nurse my pains in private while he guided Iljish through the process.
The sheer quiet of the place struck me. The curve of the ravine was such that it blocked the wind rather than channeling it; I had not realized just how ever-present that sound was here until it faded. The verdant undergrowth rose around me like some kind of enchanted jungle, until I almost expected a talking fox to walk out of it, like in one of my old nurse’s tales. I did not fancy the notion of climbing that rock face again, even with the ropes—but it was worth it, and so were my bruises and scrapes, for the sheer pleasure of this place.
And for the sight that greeted my eyes, when I looked around the curve to what lay beyond.
The overhanging wall on the far side of the ravine concealed an enormous black opening, easily fifty feet across, and deep enough that I could see nothing of what lay inside. A cave, most definitely, and far larger than any we had seen used as a lair … but I remembered my half-serious comment about a queen dragon, and my mouth went very dry.
“Isabella!” Jacob called out. I nearly jumped from my skin. Swiftly I turned to wave at him, both to show him where I’d gone, and to silence him.
He frowned in puzzlement at my urgent gesture, but did not argue; moving as quietly as he could across the rough ground, he joined me, while Iljish unwrapped himself from the rope. “What is—” Jacob began.
He never finished the question. His gaze fell upon the cave opening, just as mine had, and I suspect I had gaped in much the same way. “I haven’t seen anything moving,” I said in a murmur that went no farther than us.
Jacob shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t … they are crepuscular hunters, after all. At this time of day, any rock-wyrm would be sleeping
in the sun. Any healthy one, at least. But they prefer their lairs far smaller.”
To be precise, they preferred their lairs a bit bigger than themselves. “You haven’t seen anything that large in the sky, have you?”
Of course not; he and Mr. Wilker would have fallen over their own feet to come tell us. Jacob frowned. “I don’t see how anything that large could fly. Granted, we don’t understand very well how it works even with the dragons we’ve seen; we don’t know enough about their anatomy yet. But surely there must be a limit.”
“A limit to what?”
I took some comfort from the fact that Jacob, too, leapt a foot in the air at Iljish’s question. The boy was far quieter across the ground than either of us, but spoke far more loudly. He looked taken aback when I frantically hushed him.
“Nobody’s ever seen a dragon that large,” he said, in a lower tone, once we had explained. “Not outside of stories.”
Stories like those about Zhagrit Mat? I was not going to calculate what that creature’s wingspan might supposedly have been. He was associated with the ruins, anyway, not with this cave. Assuming Dagmira was correct.
Jacob straightened, looking back to where he’d dropped the supplies we brought down with us. “Well. Now would be the safest time to explore; we gain nothing by delaying.”
Thinking back, I suspect him of a degree of bravado, not wanting to show fear in front of his wife. It had the salutary effect of inducing a similar bravado in me, though, which may not have been what he intended. “I couldn’t agree more. Do we have torches of any kind in that pack?”
Bravado or no, we approached the cave carefully, skulking along the base of the overhanging wall until we reached the mouth. There we paused, all three of us listening mightily for any sound within.
The only things we heard were the steady drip of water, and the echoing silence of empty space.
Jacob went first, followed by Iljish, both of them gripping rifles tight. I remained outside for the moment, unlit torch in hand. They kept close to the wall, not wanting to silhouette themselves against the brightness outside. The ground sloped down before them, and I realized what had seemed like a low ceiling—serrated with stalactites like a dragon’s maw; an image I could not shake—was nothing of the sort; the cavern broke through to open air near its top, and the men were now descending toward the depths.