A Natural History of Dragons
I had, during our journeys, seen Mr. Wilker argue with other men, and often with me; but never with the earl. “You can’t be serious! Trusting these fellows—”
“Who said anything about trusting them?” Lord Hilford asked in surprise. “I intend to bring both of you with me, you and Camherst both, and you can argue about who gets to skulk in the bushes with a rifle. Not you, though, Mrs. Camherst, or your husband will have an apoplexy.”
I think that a rather unfair word for Jacob’s sentiments, but it is true that his nerves hadn’t yet recovered from the scare. A part of me sorely wished to argue that I could mark the map, but any of the others could do that as well as me; only their marks would not be as elegant. And that argumentative part drooped its ears and tucked its tail between its legs upon seeing the look in Jacob’s eyes. I am not the sort of lady for whom protectiveness sets her heart aflutter, but the incident had revealed an intensity of feeling in my husband that took me quite by surprise. I had thought us friends, and so we were; but the word fell short of describing all.
(Indeed, that same night we discovered one of the primary uses for that wakeful period between one’s first sleep and one’s second—the same use to which Reveka and her young lover had put their time.)
(Oh, for goodness’ sake. I have already spoken about my fears when facing the smugglers; why should I not address the other side of that coin? It isn’t as if the people reading this book are unlikely to be familiar with the activity. And if they are, I heartily encourage the adults among them to put the book down this instant and discover one of the simpler pleasures in life. I am a natural historian; I assure you, it is common to all species, and nothing to be ashamed of.)
So, for my husband’s peace of mind, I agreed to be left behind.
* * *
By dawn the next day, I was just as glad not to be going out to the spring. My stockingless feet had been rubbed raw by the hike down from the smugglers’ camp; I padded about our borrowed house in thick wool socks, a compromise between protecting my blisters and keeping my toes warm. I soon discovered, though, the downside to sparing my husband’s nerves: I quite destroyed my own.
“What do you know of these smugglers?” I asked Dagmira as she beat out a rug on the slope behind our house. Her various looks were gradually becoming more familiar to me; I recognized this one as exasperation that I should ask so stupid a question. I clarified. “Are they violent men?”
Dagmira did not know the gentlemen had gone out to meet the smugglers—or rather, I thought she did not know; village gossips can uncover the strangest things. At any rate, she seemed to take my question as an aftereffect of my own experience. “They didn’t hurt you, did they? They keep away from people, mostly. Unless people chase after them.”
The barb sailed right past me. My attention was on her earlier words, so reminiscent of Lord Hilford’s statement about the rock-wyrms. “Dragons have attacked people before, haven’t they? I mean, in past years.”
Clearly Dagmira had no idea why I had seemingly changed topics. “You hear stories,” she said with a shrug. “A cousin’s cousin, from the next valley over.”
“Does it happen on any kind of cycle? Generationally, perhaps—” I stopped, for the exasperated look was back. Teach a dragon to hatch eggs, as they say nowadays. If the problem was anything like so regular, these people, dwelling in the mountains for centuries, would have noticed. “But it hasn’t happened in Drustanev before, at least not for a long time. When did it start?”
She delivered a particularly vicious blow to the rug, sending dust flying. “Last autumn. Nebulis.”
Mating season, perhaps? We knew very little about dragon mating habits. (We knew very little about dragon anything; hence this expedition.) But it would have taken Gritelkin some time to be sure of the problem, and by then, the mountains would be all but impassable. So he waited for spring—which I still was not convinced had arrived; I could see snow not a hundred feet from where I stood—and then sent his message. It was not his fault that the vagaries of travel and communication prevented him from warning us off.
Pulling my notebook from my skirt pocket, I asked, “What about injuries? Or deaths?”
The thwack of Dagmira’s rug-beater punctuated her words, which came out terse with the force of it. “Two deaths. Don’t know how many hurt. Half a dozen, maybe.”
Plus Mingelo, the Chiavoran driver. Averaged across six months, it was not so bad—but of course that did not tell me how many had narrowly missed harm. Dagmira, however, had redoubled her efforts, and the noise prevented me from asking more. I tried not to calculate the odds of an attack on any given day—and refrained from asking whether a cousin’s cousin from the next valley over had ever been killed by smugglers—and went back to pacing in my thick wool socks.
I nearly melted in relief when the gentlemen returned. My eyes went to Jacob first; he looked thoughtful. Mr. Wilker looked faintly sulky, and Lord Hilford, to my secret satisfaction, looked jubilant. “Well done, Mrs. Camherst,” he said once we had all withdrawn to our workroom. “Tom, lay that map out on the table, so she can see. They do indeed know where the dragons are, and more besides.”
Jacob had marked the various locations with a lead pencil, which told me Mr. Wilker must have been the one lurking in the bushes with the rifle. “We will have to adjust them as we go looking,” he said when I clicked my tongue over the rough marks defacing my pretty map. “The smugglers knew a fair bit, but they say the dragons move around, so none of this is certain.”
“Some things are certain,” Lord Hilford said, settling into a chair. “Dragons lair in caves, and so do smugglers—or rather, their goods do. And Vystrani rock-wyrms have a fiercely territorial streak, it seems.”
“Fierce enough to cause these attacks?” I asked, glancing up from the map.
Jacob shook his head. “If it were, incidents like this would be much more common, and the smugglers would know the cause.”
“But,” the earl said, holding up one finger, “the territorial response is not always the same. Rock-wyrms wishing to chase off an interloper most often breathe particles of ice. Sometimes, however, they attack more closely. And the accepted theory among smugglers is that this happens when the dragon is sick.”
I immediately saw possibilities in this. “Illness might interfere with the operation of their extraordinary breath. Could it be the dragons are sick? But no—they aren’t defending their territory, not unless one was lairing near the road by which we came.”
“It depends on the size of the territory,” Jacob said. “But from what the smugglers told us, the range for such attacks is fairly small.”
I sat to take the weight off my complaining feet, and propped my elbows on my knees to think. “How many dragons have been attacking people, anyway? If it’s only one or two, it might be something exceptional—some kind of degeneration, perhaps, that causes them to run mad. If it seems widespread, though …”
“Then the entire local population might be diseased,” Lord Hilford said.
This grim possibility put us all into silence for a few moments. My experience thus far with dragons in the wild had given me no reason to feel kindly toward them, but I did not like the notion of so many falling victim to contagion.
Of course, we had no proof of the theory; only the speculation of smugglers. We did, however, have information that might let us proceed. “Now that we have the map,” I asked, “what next?”
Lord Hilford levered himself out of his chair and went to study the map. “We confirm these reports—carefully, mind you—and then get on with the work we should have been doing a fortnight ago, if Gritelkin hadn’t gone haring off. I think, under the circumstances, that we might turn our attention first to anatomical study.”
Mr. Wilker frowned at him. “Observation? Or do you mean to hunt one of them?”
The earl tapped the map, frowning as he weighed one location against another. “Hunting, I should think; we can catch two wolves with one snare. We?
??ve brought an artist with us; well, she needs a specimen to draw, at closer range than on the wing. And if there is some kind of disease among them, we may find signs of it.”
I was sadly slow to catch his meaning about the artist. “You mean—I am to help you?”
He gave me a conspiratorial smile. “It’s why we brought you, isn’t it? That and to file papers—but we don’t yet have any, so there you have it.”
Is it any wonder I developed such reckless habits later in life? Chase after smugglers in the middle of the night; achieve information and a chance to further my dreams. With rewards such as those, I naturally concluded that such behaviour was a splendid idea.
Blisters and scrapes forgotten, I stood, unable to contain my grin. “I should gather my materials, then.”
ELEVEN
The dragon hunt — The application of my skills — Conversations with a skull — An unexpected loss — Carrion-eaters
Yes, we shot a dragon.
I find it fascinating that so many people take exception to this. Not simply in light of my later attitudes on the matter; no, the objections began long before then, as soon as the book detailing our research in Vystrana was published. People exclaimed over our “monstrous” actions, destroying a dragon simply so that we might understand how it worked.
These same people do not seem to care in the least that at the height of the Great Sparkling Inquiry, I had no less than six hundred and fourteen specimens in my shed—very few of them dead from natural causes. Entomologists trap insects in their killing jars and then pin their corpses to cards, and no one utters a single squeak of protest. For that matter, let a gentleman hunt a tiger for its skin, and everyone applauds his courage. But to shoot a dragon for science? That, for some reason, is cruel.
Mind you, these objections come exclusively from men and women in Scirland and similar countries, most of them (I imagine) extolling the sanctity of dragons from the comfort of their homes, far from any actual beast of the breed. Indeed, few of those letter-writers seem to have seen a single dragon in their lives. They certainly have not spent days among Vystrani shepherds, for whom dragons are neither sacred nor even likable, but rather troublesome predators who all too often make off with the shepherds’ livelihood in their jaws. The men of Drustanev did not hesitate to shoot dragons, I assure you. We might even have waited for one of them to do the deed, at which point my letter-writers might have been better satisfied with our virtue. But Vystrani shepherds try very hard to avoid dragons when possible, and we were impatient to get on with our work. So the gentlemen of our party studied the map, shouldered their guns, and went out to find their prey.
And I went with them. It was not at all like my first journey out from Drustanev; this time I was fully dressed and properly shod, and the piercing mountain sun illuminated our path. This second expedition did much to improve my feelings toward the region: by my standards the air was still bitterly cold for the season, but the brilliance and life of my surroundings could not be denied. We saw eagles and thrushes, rabbits and deer, and even one bear lumbering down the far side of the valley. When I stepped apart from the men to take care of a certain biological matter, I startled a lynx, which stared at me with flat, unfriendly eyes before melting away into the trees.
We had chosen for our destination the nearest and most isolated of the dragon lairs the smugglers had identified, in the hopes of disturbing only one beast. (While we might have gotten a great deal of observational data from having three or four wyrms descend upon us at once, I feared it would all be lost to science ten minutes later.) With us came the servant lad Iljish and another, Relesku, to act as our porters; they carried food and tents, for this expedition was expected to keep us out for several days. The gentlemen carried their guns and other tools, and I had my artistic materials, which I insisted upon carrying myself.
I had studied the map a great deal before we left, and formed a private theory as to where the smugglers’ camp was, based on my recollection of the climb down. Our hunt took us westward of that place, over a sharp ridge and into another valley, bisected by a snowmelt stream. Pausing for breath at the top of the ridge, I thought I saw something in the lower distance: a shape too far and too shrouded in trees to be made out clearly, but also too blocky to be mistaken for an ordinary mountain. I squinted, to very little effect; the field glass was in Lord Hilford’s keeping. And the others had gotten ahead of me, so that there was no one nearby to ask about it. By the time I puffed my way down to them, I had grown too embarrassed by my slowness to ask any questions; but as it turned out, the answers came to me a few days later, and so I will return to the mysterious shape in time.
We were not going tremendously far—only seven miles or so. Lord Hilford stopped us mid-afternoon, in a steep little defile too narrow and overhung with trees for a rock-wyrm to stoop on us from above. “You will stay here, Mrs. Camherst, with Iljish and the tents,” he said. “I trust we can leave the arrangement of the camp in your capable hands? Many thanks. We’ll scout out the place before the light fades, and pick a location for our blind; then, with any luck, we’ll nail the beast tomorrow morning.”
Being no kind of hunter myself, I accepted this with grace. The men departed; Iljish began erecting the tents, and I set about making the camp, if not comfortable, then at least an efficient place from which to work.
Lord Hilford, Jacob, and Relesku returned shortly before sunset, with the news that they had found both the lair and sufficient sign as to persuade them it was in current use. Mr. Wilker had stayed behind to wait for the dragon’s return, so as to forestall the possibility of the men watching an empty hole come morning.
The food—garlic-laden sausages, bread, and a spicy bean paste I was growing tolerant of—required little in the way of preparation, so I tugged Jacob’s sleeve until he bent to listen. “Could we not see the dragon from here?”
“In the sky, perhaps—but there’s more than one cave nearby, and we didn’t have time to check them all,” Jacob said, frowning. “That’s why it was necessary to leave Wilker keeping watch.”
I waved this away with an impatient hand. “No, I meant—I wish to see the dragon, Jacob. Before you’ve shot it and laid it out for me to draw. See that boulder up there?” I directed his attention to a rock I’d had my eye on since we arrived at the gully. “If we cut a few branches to hide ourselves, and sat very still …”
I expected him to protest. But Jacob gave me an amused look and kissed the top of my head. “I knew the moment I saw that rock that you would not rest until you could perch atop it and watch for dragons. Yes, as long as we take precautions, it should be safe. They say dragons see movement better than shapes, and pine boughs should hide our scent.”
So it was that, when sunset came, I was seated on a lofty boulder, with the sharp bite of pine sap in my nose and my husband’s arms encircling my shoulders. The fading light flamed across the tops of the ridges, sending the valleys into deep shadow, and the stark contrast was breathtaking.
And then the dragon came.
It flew in from the west, so that all I truly saw at first was a black silhouette against the fiery sky. Then it caught an updraft and skimmed up the mountain’s slope, barely above the trees, and that gave me a better view: the blocky plates of the hide; the close-tucked legs and trailing tail; the enormous expanse of wings dwarfing the body they bore.
I did not realize I had stopped breathing until the dragon backwinged to land in some clearing hidden from my view, and Jacob kissed the top of my head once more. Then I let out my stale air in a wavering breath, drew in fresh, and leaned back to return my husband’s kiss.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank you,” he murmured. “Were it not for your prodding, I likely would not be here.”
Atop this boulder? Or in Vystrana at all? I didn’t ask, because in the end it didn’t matter. He had come—both of us had—and I felt a surge of emotion I can only describe as terrified joy at the thought of having missed this. Had we
not met Lord Hilford—had Jacob refused to let me join the expedition—
I might have missed my chance at the life I was always meant to live.
I must have spoken that thought aloud, for Jacob’s hands stilled on my shoulders, and then he said, “You truly mean that, don’t you.”
My mouth opened silently, as if hoping the right words would alight on my tongue, and give me some way of explaining the fierce, indescribable thing that swelled in my heart. No such happy incident occurred, but I tried anyway. “Ever since I was a girl. I want to understand things, Jacob; and we understand dragons so very little. We can’t breed them, we can barely keep them in captivity—” I stopped, for my tongue was leading me down intellectual paths, when it was passion I needed to explain. “This will sound very silly.”
He squeezed my shoulders, as if supporting me. “I promise not to laugh.”
“It’s—it’s as if there is a dragon inside me. I don’t know how big she is; she may still be growing. But she has wings, and strength, and—and I can’t keep her in a cage. She’ll die. I’ll die. I know it isn’t modest to say these things, but I know I’m capable of more than life in Scirland will allow. It’s all right for women to study theology, or literature, but nothing so rough and ready as this. And yet this is what I want. Even if it’s hard, even if it’s dangerous. I don’t care. I need to see where my wings can carry me.”
I had reason to be glad that I was leaning back against Jacob; it meant I did not have to look in his face as I said these things, which sounded like pure foolishness to my own prosaic ears.