Dagmira … I will not say she was reluctant to see me go. But she and I had achieved a kind of equilibrium, and I realized, to my surprise, that I would miss it. “Thank you,” I told her, and if I could not quite put into words what exactly I was thanking her for, she understood me regardless.
“I hope you at least got us a better boyar,” she said with the straightforwardness I had come to expect. “He’ll probably be just as bad, though—another damned Bulskoi stranger. And Iljish, the idiot, wants to go to school.”
There was a stone for Jindrik Gritelkin, in the same field where Jacob and the others were buried, even though his body had never been found. By now it would be anonymous bones, I supposed, stripped of the one item—his ring—that might have identified it. Although I had never met the man, I found myself in sympathy with him. “It isn’t necessarily a bad idea,” I said. “Having someone educated to speak on behalf of Drustanev, whether as razesh or not—there could be a great benefit in that.” What I did not say was that she and Iljish were already on the fringes of village life; schooling would not mark him out much more, and it could give him something of value to bargain with.
Dagmira only shrugged, kissed both my hands with perfunctory Vystrani courtesy, and walked off.
And then, by slow stages, we made our journey back to Scirland.
I did not suspect a certain change until we were on the ship, and was not sure of it until after we arrived back at home. The symptoms might, after all, have been a simple consequence of the stress of mourning and travel.
But they were not. I gave birth to a son in late Ventis of the next year, and named him Jacob, after his father.
Of him, I will say much more in future volumes. For now, I will limit myself to this unlovely admission: that there were times, both during my pregnancy and after his birth, when he was less a source of joy and more a painful reminder of what I had lost. I risked falling once more into the depression that had gripped me after my miscarriage, and took comfort in intellectual work. I corresponded often with Mr. Wilker, making arrangements to find someone to study our samples of dragonbone, and I spent long hours transcribing our notes, finishing my sketches, and otherwise preparing the results of our expedition for public consumption. My marriage contract provided for me generously enough to live on, but not enough to pay for the book’s publication; Lord Hilford kindly undertook a subscription on its behalf. One afternoon, some four or five months after my son was born, the earl paid me a visit in Pasterway and presented me with a finished copy.
My fingers trembled as I brushed them over the green leather cover, then opened it to the title page. Concerning the Rock-Wyrms of Vystrana, it read, and in smaller letters, Their Anatomy, Biology, and Activity, with Particular Attention to Their Relation with Humans, and the Revelation of Mourning Behavior. And then, a short distance below the title, by Jacob Camherst and others.
“It ought to have your name on it,” Lord Hilford said bluntly. “Alongside his, at the very least.”
I shook my head. I had not taken much care in dressing that morning; my hair was only hastily pinned up, and a hank of it fell forward at the motion, half obscuring Jacob’s name. “This is all the scholarship that will ever be credited to him; I have no desire to claim it as my own.”
“Claim it or not, it’s still yours, at least in part.” Lord Hilford dropped into a chair without first asking permission, but I did not begrudge it. If I was going to receive him in a shabby old gown with my hair falling down everywhere, I could hardly stand on formality. He said, “If we’re ever going to get those old sticks at the Colloquium to let you present to them, we must start laying the groundwork now.”
“Me? Present?” I stared at the earl. “Whyever would I do that?”
He snorted through his mustache. “Come now, Mrs. Camherst. Books are all well and good, but if you intend to be a scholar, you must have the acquaintance of your peers.”
With careful hands, I closed the book and laid it aside, then tucked my hair behind my ear. “Who said I intend to be a scholar?”
“I did,” he said bluntly. “You aren’t going to give this up. Right now you’re grieving; I understand that. I’m not here to chide you out of it. But you have a shed full of sparklings out back, and a book you wrote even if your name isn’t on it; any woman who puts in that kind of effort is not a woman who could simply turn her back on intellectual inquiry. You’re dragon-mad, Mrs. Camherst, and sooner or later you’ll be keen to have another chance at it. When that day comes, let me know.”
Having pronounced those odd words, he levered himself up out of the chair, nodded a polite farewell, and headed for the sitting room door.
It was swinging shut behind him when I found my tongue. “What do you mean? What ‘other chance’?”
Lord Hilford caught the edge of the door and peered around it, his whiskered face all studied innocence. “Oh, didn’t I mention? It so happens that— But no, if you intend to give all this up, then it’s of no interest to you.”
I had risen from my chair without realizing it. “Lord Hilford. I will thank you not to play games with me. If you have something to say—as you so obviously do—then stop hanging about in the doorway, come back in here, and tell me.”
He complied, a smile beginning to break his casual facade. “A little matter concerning the Scirling colony in Nsebu. His Majesty’s government is sufficiently pleased with the progress there that, as of next year, they will grant visas for citizens to travel there.”
Nsebu. I knew of it only from the papers, and not much even then; something about establishing a colony to protect Scirling interests in Erigan iron, and to oppose Ikwunde aggression. “Are there dragons there?”
“Are there dragons! Mrs. Camherst, I must remedy your lack of cartographical knowledge at once. Nsebu lies scarcely across the border from Mouleen.”
Moulish swamp-wyrms. Ugly beasts, with an extraordinary breath of foul gas—but two hundred years before, the great traveler Yves de Maucheret had written of peoples in the swamp who worshipped dragons as the ancient Draconeans had. His claims had never been verified, or even investigated.
“Some identify three major breeds of dragon within the region,” Lord Hilford added. “Others say there are no fewer than seven. It wants a proper study, truly.”
For one glorious moment, the bleakness of grief lifted from my spirit. To go to Eriga, and to see the dragons there … but then practicality reasserted itself. Mr. Wilker could not pay for chemical experimentation himself; between that and my son, I had scarcely enough money left to run my household. An expedition was out of the question, even if I had the first notion how to organize one.
I said as much to Lord Hilford, then added politely, “But I would be grateful to hear of what your expedition learns.”
“My expedition! My dear Mrs. Camherst, I cannot go to Nsebu. The heat, the humid air—my health would never permit it. Let me phrase this in a way you cannot misinterpret: I intend to fund an expedition, and if you wish to join it, all you need do is say so.”
Fortunately, my blindly groping hand found my chair again before I attempted to sit where it was not. Once I was securely planted, with no risk of falling, I said, “But—”
Lord Hilford put up one hand. “You needn’t say anything now, one way or another. The expedition won’t happen tomorrow. But I wanted you to be aware of it. You can make your decision later.”
“Thank you,” I said faintly, and so he departed.
After what seemed an eternity of staring blankly at the wall, I picked up the green-bound volume of Jacob’s and my work and went to set it on my desk. There I paused, staring at the slim spine of Sir Richard Edgeworth’s A Natural History of Dragons—the volume I had read so many times as a child, the one my father had given to me upon my marriage to Jacob.
Life without dragons was grey and empty. Sparklings had led me out of the grief that followed the loss of my first, unborn child; might not their larger cousins do the same for the loss of my
husband?
The mere prospect of it was already lifting my spirits. To define myself first and foremost not as a widow, but as a scholar …
The dragon within my heart stirred, shifting her wings, as if remembering they could be used to fly.
Tucking errant strands of hair behind my ears, I took A Natural History of Dragons off the shelf and curled up in the window seat to read.
Table of Contents
Title Page
By Marie Brennan
Copyright
Preface
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Three
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Part Four
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent
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