A Natural History of Dragons Read online

  I did not want to reflect that a Vystrani child would know more of the area and local customs than I did, let alone the language.

  For my next display of linguistic accomplishment, I asked Dagmira where my husband had gone, and received in return a second flood of words too quick to comprehend. Another attempt, this time prefaced by setkasti, setkasti—slower, slower—rewarded me with a more suitable pace, but still far too many words I did not understand. Jacob had gone out; no more could I discern.

  Frustrated by this, I gave Dagmira broken instructions to bring to that room all the trunks with mine or Jacob’s name on them, and to remove all those with Lord Hilford’s or Mr. Wilker’s, then went downstairs. The kitchen was cold and empty, the only smell a lingering one of blood from the doctoring of the driver. It drove out any thought I had for breakfast.

  Compared with the dank interior of the house, the street outside (if I could dignify the hard-packed dirt path with such a grand name) was painfully bright. I squinted and shielded my eyes until they adjusted. In the distance, I could hear voices chattering in fluent Vystrani, but none were familiar to me.

  The exterior of the house was not much more promising. Weather had faded the dark resin to more of a golden color, but it was bereft of decoration, showing just bare planks, broken here and there by narrow windows, and capped by a steeply sloping thatched roof. The bedroom had not exhibited such an angle; there must have been attic space above us. A glance around showed me there were few houses nearby, and those downslope; they appeared to be single story, apart from the presumed attics. Our lodging appeared to be the best Drustanev had to offer.

  The path led downward to the rest of the village. Descending, I saw that most of the houses, unlike our own, had low fences enclosing geese-filled yards. Women stood at the gates, spinning thread and chatting with one another, not bothering to disguise the way they watched me. I smiled pleasantly at them as I passed, but my attention was mostly on the familiar wagons drawn up around the village well, with one of our Chiavoran drivers fixing a horse into harness. “Are you leaving so soon?” I asked him, a little surprised.

  He glanced over his shoulder at one of the houses. “Soon as they bring Mingelo out. We have to go on to the boyar’s lodge.”

  I knew they still needed to deliver their cargo, but Mingelo was the injured man. “Oh, surely it would be kinder to leave him here to heal, rather than subject him to such a journey.”

  The driver spat into the dirt, unconcerned with propriety. “They say there’s a doctor at the boyar’s house. Chiavoran. Better than some Vystrani peasant any day.”

  Even allowing for partisan national pride, I had to admit his assessment was probably fair; surely the boyar’s man would be better educated than the village bonesetter. I pitied Mingelo, though, having to endure the trip.

  Jacob found me shortly after that. He, too, had apparently dug clothing out of a chest in random haste; his suit was rather finer than the situation called for. “Isabella, there you are,” he said, as if I had been the one to vanish so early this morning. “The drivers have to continue on to the boyar’s lodge, but after that, they’re going back to Chiavora. You—”

  I stopped him with a hand on his wrist, very aware of Vystrani eyes on us. “Please don’t,” I said in a soft voice, so no one could eavesdrop, even if they spoke Scirling. “Don’t ask it of me. You know I will not go, and I don’t want to argue in front of these strangers.”

  His hazel eyes searched mine. The mountain wind disarranged his hair, adding a touch of distress I would have found charming under other circumstances. Only then did it occur to me that I had left without so much as brushing my own, let alone pinning it up. What sort of image was I presenting now, argument or no argument?

  Perhaps my own distress charmed him. Jacob sighed, though the worry did not leave his eyes. “Can I at least ask you to keep close to home for now? Hilford is asking questions of the village leader—what’s going on with the dragons, and where Gritelkin is. Until we have that settled, please, behave yourself.”

  I resented the implication that I was misbehaving already, but that faded next to other concerns. I had assumed that Jindrik Gritelkin, Lord Hilford’s local contact, was one of the men rushing about last night. “He’s not here?”

  “No, he isn’t. Will you go back to the house?”

  The house, where I would have to face the incomprehensible Dagmira. “Yes, dear. Please let me know what’s going on, when you can. And what we are supposed to do for food.”

  “There should be a cook; that’s another thing Hilford’s asking about. I think.” Jacob tried to smooth his hair back down, only to have it blown astray again by the wind. “I will arrange for something.”

  I climbed the stony path back toward our borrowed house, resolutely not looking back toward the Chiavoran wagons, and my chance to depart.

  EIGHT

  An introduction to Drustanev — Mr. Gritelkin’s absence — We attempt to proceed

  I have written before about Drustanev, in A Journey to the Mountains of Vystrana. If you should happen to own a copy, though, or are intending to buy one (as I encouraged before), I beg you not to pay any attention to what I said there concerning the village, or indeed the Vystrani people as a whole.

  The words I wrote then heartily embarrass me now. I was attempting, against my inclination, to conform to the expectations of travel writing, as practiced by young ladies at the time. It is a worse piece of drivel than Mr. Condale’s Wanderings in Central Anthiope, inspired more by the theatrical convention of colorful, semiprophetic Vystrani characters than by the people I knew in Drustanev. To hear that book tell of it, Vystrana is a land of wailing fiddles, flashing-eyed women, and sweet, strong wines.

  Which is to say, a land of the most tedious cliches. I drank more tea in Vystrana than wine, heard fiddles rarely, and never once saw Dagmira’s eyes emit anything resembling a flash. You would be better served to read a history book, which will explain to you the many threads woven into the fabric of that nation. The position of their mountains, nearly straddling the neck of Anthiope, has brought most of the peoples on this continent trampling past at one time or another: Chiavorans, Eiversch, Akhians, Bulskoi, and more—those last ruling Vystrana as a client-state for sixty years before our arrival. But those influences have remained largely in the valleys and lowlands, trickling up only piecemeal to the shepherds and hunters in the mountains, where an intense Vystrani identity holds strong.

  Young ladies are also expected to wax rhapsodic about the charms of the places they visit. Men, when they write about their travels, are permitted to complain, and to assert the natural superiority of their homelands. While I am relieved that my sex forestalled me from committing to print any sins of the latter sort, I must take this opportunity to say what I could not admit then:

  I hated Drustanev.

  Not the people; though I rarely understood and often resented them, in the end I am grateful for all of their aid, and their forbearance in permitting us to come among them. And there were points at which the mountains touched my heart with their beauty. But I often detested my physical circumstances, and have never felt the slightest urge to return.

  Some of it was a simple matter of climate. The astute among you will have noticed that almost all of my expeditions have been to the warmer regions of the world: Akhia, the Broken Sea, and so forth. (The one notable exception apart from Vystrana—my flight into the Mrtyahaimas—was regrettably unavoidable.) My native companions in those places often expressed amazement at my willingness to endure the heat; in their experience, we Scirlings are a cold-adapted lot, who wither and die without regular applications of chilly fog. But I have always preferred warmth to cold, however excessive it may be, and so the mountains of Vystrana in springtime were hardly to my taste. The wondrous prospect of dragons had convinced me to overlook this impending misery, but now that I was subjected to it, I became very grumpy indeed.

  For one thing, “springtime” to the Vystrani
means something rather different than it does to us Scirlings. (Or to nearly anyone who may be reading this, be they Erigan or so on—unless I have acquired devotees in Vystrana, which I suppose is possible.) Spring, to the inhabitants of Drustanev, is the time when their lowland cousins drive the flocks of sheep up to the so-called middle pastures, near to the village. This usually happens in early Floris—not long before our arrival—and you may deduce the average local temperature from the fact that the villagers do not shear their sheep until later in the season.

  At that time of year, snow still lingers in the steep valleys, especially where spruce and fir grow too thick for the sun to easily penetrate. Fresh falls may occur through the end of Floris or beginning of Graminis; our expedition saw flurries almost into Messis. I have had gentlemen—I use the term loosely—mock me for complaining of having been cold my entire time in Vystrana; to them I say, join me next summer in the deserts of Akhia, and we will see who fares better then. I may be elderly, and I certainly detest the cold, but that does not make me delicate.

  Drustanev was a scattered place, houses planted in whatever spot offered enough level ground, with nothing one could particularly call a street running among them. Most appeared absurdly small beneath the tall peaks of their thatched roofs—tall because of the need to shed that abundant snow. The people were, and are, shepherds in the warmer months, and hunters in the winter; they trade fleeces, woven blankets, and hides to the lowlands.

  The slopes around their villages have been shaped over time by the centuries of human habitation. Some have been cut into small terraces, suitable for local crops, but the primary alteration is that every ten years or so the men go out and set fire to the forests. I was not privileged to see this event—though I would have enjoyed it, I think, for the heat if nothing else—but I’m told the ashes enrich the soil, creating good pastureland for some time, and afterwards the kind of young forest that attracts deer. Sheep eat the grass, wolves eat the deer, and dragons eat everything that doesn’t run away fast enough.

  I detested the cold and the isolation, the repetitive food reeking of garlic—but the true root of my suffering was that I was in a foreign land, far from everything familiar, and I adapted very badly. You may think it would be romantic to run away there, like young Thomas in Mrs. Watree’s insufferable three-volume novel, and for some of you it might be so; for me, it was not. Looking back on it now, my feelings have faded into a kind of gentle dislike that might almost be called fond, and so I will not harp too much on the misery I felt when I sat down to yet another sour-flavored soup, or looked out the (unglazed) window to see snow falling yet again. But it may help to understand a few of my subsequent actions if you bear in mind that I was going half mad in Drustanev, and dragons were the one thing that could distract me from it.

  * * *

  The house we were staying in belonged to Jindrik Gritelkin, who was of the class they call “razesh” in Vystrana—a sort of local agent to the boyar, as Lord Hilford had said. That was the definition of the term; its true meaning, particularly in this locale, took longer for us to discern. Much would have been clearer had Gritelkin been there, but he was not; and that absence was of primary concern on that first full day in Drustanev.

  By the time Lord Hilford arrived at the house, with Jacob bearing a hamper of food for our lunch, I had given up on Vystrani and was repeating myself to Dagmira in Scirling, over and over again, louder with every repetition, as if volume would succeed where vocabulary did not. Our trunks were sorted, but the furniture in which to store their contents was lacking, and Dagmira did not seem to understand this. Moreover, Lord Hilford’s beloved chair, that he hauled with him wherever he went, had been damaged when the wagon overturned, and in my frustration I was about ready to scrap the thing for kindling.

  Some of my irritation, though, came from hunger, and so I was relieved to find the earl unpacking sausages and bread rolls onto the kitchen table. “If you could acquire chairs, Mrs. Camherst,” he said, “we can sit down and talk.”

  Three chairs and one stool were scrounged from other parts of the house, and we fell like ravening wolves upon our meal, Mr. Wilker nobly taking the stool.

  “Gritelkin,” Lord Hilford said after the first round of food had vanished, “is not here. He sent a message warning me that now was not an opportune time for research. But knowing how the international post can be, he also took the precaution of traveling to Sanverio in the hopes of intercepting us. It seems that both the message and Gritelkin went astray.”

  “Do you think he is all right?” I asked. In light of what had happened to our driver, my imagination was creating a variety of unfortunate scenarios for the absent Gritelkin.

  “Likely so,” the earl said. “The villagers don’t see much cause for worry, at any rate. Odds are we missed him on our way into the highlands; it’s easy enough to do.” The optimism in his tone was only a little forced, but I wondered what he would have said, had a lady not been present.

  “What of the dragon?” Mr. Wilker asked. “It’s clear this isn’t the first time such a thing has happened, but no one will talk to me about it.”

  Lord Hilford shook his head and reached for another roll. “Nor to me, but you are correct. There have been other attacks. I was able to winkle that much out of the village mayor, Urjash Mazhustin. Not so many that we must fear for our lives every time we step out the front door, but enough that he did not wish to speak of them to a foreigner.”

  This produced a quiet moment at the table. I wondered, but did not ask, whether anyone else was questioning whether we could even do what we had come for.

  Jacob broke the silence. “Do we have any idea what might cause such a thing? Is there a disease akin to rabies that afflicts dragons? Or do they, like wolves, prey on human settlements when times become harsh?”

  Lord Hilford’s eyes gleamed. “That, Camherst, is an excellent set of questions to answer. I haven’t the faintest clue, but we shall address ourselves to the matter forthwith.”

  I kept silent as our luncheon continued, attending to every word, but striving not to draw attention to myself. This, I remembered firmly, was to be my role here: facilitating their research from this home base in Drustanev. Since no one had yet tried to forbid us our work, the gentlemen were making plans to ask for maps and scout the surrounding area. Gritelkin should have had that information for us—for them, I reminded myself—but in his absence, the gentlemen were prepared to fend for themselves.

  If you doubt the restraint of my intentions, please remember: I was only nineteen, and not yet Lady Trent, with all the associations that name conjures up. I did not yet even know that dragons were to be my lifelong career. I thought this Vystrani expedition was all I would ever have, and I was determined to do my best in the role allotted to me, as an efficient and effective helpmeet.

  Which is a lofty way of saying that I spent the following week butting heads incessantly with Dagmira. My command of Vystrani improved rapidly, through sheer necessity and use, and while I will not claim my grammar was good, at least I acquired the words I needed. It did not help that Dagmira had a way of seizing my hands and kissing them both whenever I produced a new piece of vocabulary. In Vystrana this is a courtesy shown to those of higher rank, but the sardonic manner in which she did it was more like a Chiavoran woman throwing her hands into the air to praise the Lord for a miracle.

  Some of the words I searched for, even Dagmira did not seem to know. It soon became apparent that what I considered to be a minimal amount of furniture, just barely enough for us to scrape by, was extravagant by the standards of rural Drustanev, and some of the pieces I wanted (such as a wardrobe, for hanging my dresses) existed nowhere in the village, or even in Dagmira’s understanding. To obtain them would require that we have them brought up from Sanverio, which was not worth the time and expense. We would, I supposed with the long-suffering martyrdom of a gentlewoman in rough circumstances, have to make do.

  We were equally short of servants, thou
gh that, at least, I had expected. A shockingly pale boy named Iljish served the gentlemen, or rather Jacob and Mr. Wilker (with Mr. Wilker himself playing servant to the earl), and after the first day we had a placid cook whom nothing seemed to disturb, but Dagmira was the one I dealt with most, and I began to suspect that no facility with her language would aid me in breaking through the barrier of her manner. She was not imperturbable—far from it, with her hand-kissing and frequent diatribes too rapid for me to understand—but whether calm or distraught, she seemed utterly unaffected by anything I said to her. It is fortunate that I had not expected or hoped for my maid to be a source of companionship while in Vystrana; I would have been gravely disappointed.

  I did not tell Jacob or the others how much of the work around our house I took on personally. The tedious work of cleaning and other such domestic tasks I left to Dagmira, of course, but anything relating to dragons I kept jealously to myself. In the absence of proper shelving, I acquired a number of crates which sufficed for the purpose, and arranged those volumes we had brought with as much care as if I were organizing a grand library. Mr. Wilker had brought a large map of Vystrana and a smaller one of the mountains around Drustanev, which I tacked up onto the walls, bringing a spot of relative brightness into the otherwise grim house.

  The sitting room became our working room, as we lacked any place more suitable. I confess I did not mind this, as it meant any conversations we had as a group were liable to be held in there, giving me more time in the one place I felt anything like at home.

  As the days passed without sign of the absent Mr. Gritelkin, Jacob and Mr. Wilker began the task of mapping the surrounding countryside. They had not brought surveyor’s tools, so their work was imprecise, but Mr. Wilker’s childhood collecting fossils on Niddey meant he was more than accustomed to tramping about the countryside (albeit a flatter one) and mapping the area in his mind. A third sheet went up onto the walls, and was taken down each evening for me to add their findings to it, in my best draftswoman’s hand. During the day, Lord Hilford paced in front of it, muttering often to himself.