“Oh. We didn’t know,” Quith said. Santeel sighed heavily.
“Just as well,” the former tailer said. “You need that closed up.”
“Cer-ceremony over?” Ileth asked.
“Ileth ran bravely. I’m proud to be in her company, tailer or no,” Vareen Dun Klaff said. Rapoto Vor Claymass left off studying the ground around Ileth’s fall and looked at him sharply. Ileth realized she was still holding her skirt up, as though ready for another run. She let it drop. “If you find difficulty in one subject or another, send for me. I was in charge of the tailer party—you being hurt is my responsibility.”
The Serpentine was a fortress the size and population of a small town, and as a dancer she didn’t mix with the others. It would be good to know a few wingmen. “Thank you, sir.”
“I’m glad to know you, Ileth,” he said, a rather elaborate and old-fashioned way of affirming a new acquaintance. He gave a short bow, which Ileth retuned with the usual feminine bob. “Get that cut looked at right now. Have you signed your apprenticeship contract yet?”
In that matter, at least, Ileth was prepared. “Not yet, but I was told I should visit the archives.”
“Good. Well, all the luck in the skies to you.”
Dun Klaff nodded and moved away, halted, turned, and handed the wet blanket back to Ileth. He and his two companions fell into step as they walked away.
“Congratulations, apprentice,” Rapoto Vor Claymass said. He gave her wound a careful look and departed.
Santeel approached her again.
“Sorry about your handkerchief,” Ileth said, folding it so a fresh side could absorb blood.
“My mother always made me carry one,” Santeel said. “She hates the ‘girl without a hankerchief’ trick.”
“That Vareen is nice,” Quith said. She and Santeel had been oathed in as novices with Ileth. “Nice manners. Best of his draft, I’ve heard.”
“Don’t give him another thought,” Santeel said. Quith fairly danced lest her one and only sash become soiled. “He fancies himself a poet. If he promises to write grand verse with you as the subject, don’t take it too seriously.”
Ileth, who wasn’t educated enough to know grand verse from chalked alley scrawls about copulation, shrugged as Quith took off the borrowed sash and inspected it for bloodstains.
“Never knew Dun Klaff was interested in you, Santeel,” Quith said as she knotted her sash. “You and Vor Claymass seem certain—”
“Could we perhaps keep Ileth from bleeding to death?” Santeel said tightly.
Quith pursed her lips. They started back across the bridge toward Joai’s little house tucked in the corner where the fortress wall met the Pillar Rocks. Joai served as sort of an emergency nurse, cook, and mother all tied up in one heavy-pocketed apron.
Quith glanced around the bridge. “You know, if it wasn’t the bracers on that oaf Terlich, what did cut you? There’s nothing sharp about the ground, plain pave-stones, no cracks or buckles.”
“Some idiot probably put a rock in their sack of rotten eggs,” Santeel said.
“Still, we should report it to Master Traskeer.”
Santeel stiffened. “Report it? It was an accident.”
“I think someone tried to hurt Ileth,” Quith said. “Blind her, even.”
“Why?” Santeel asked sharply.
“So she has to leave the Serpentine. You know. Traskeer and his talk of odds. One less competitor for a dragon saddle.”
Santeel adjusted Ileth’s head gently so the wound would have to fight gravity. “First comedies, now dramas. You go ahead, report your suspicions. See what it gets you.”
“‘Suspicions,’ she says! With Ileth bleeding all over like a stuck pig.”
Santeel wiped the drizzle from her face. “You’re probably half right. Whoever did it is worried about a bad note in Traskeer’s index. There are only so many wingman slots. If I were one of those boys, I wouldn’t want to admit I’d hurt a fellow apprentice. Especially in a ragging stunt.”
Traskeer. The new Master of Apprentices. Ileth hadn’t met him yet, but she’d already heard he was just as much a dragon in spirit as any living in the Beehive.
2
The gash, washed out with stinging vinegar and then duly and painfully closed by a set of three silver pinch-pins just above, on, and below her eyebrow, throbbed painfully the first day, burned the second, and became an annoying itch on the third. It was a jagged sort of wound, something that looked more like a fishing accident—Ileth had seen plenty of those growing up on the Freesand Coast. It reminded her of a red sliver of moon, bisecting her eyebrow. The silver pins holding it shut gave her a bizarre appearance (“the silver helps keep the scar small,” said Joai, as she inserted them with the same fast, deft skill that she used to dress a chicken). The pins going in hurt more than her receiving the wound in the first place, but of course anticipation of pain made everything worse.
Ileth had been sworn to return the solid silver pins and then released to her rope bed.
Examining Joai’s work in Santeel’s very fine mirror, Ileth decided she’d make a good sorceress on a stage with that metal in her face. It made her look fearsome and even a bit mad. She would play the sort of exotic, damaged beauty who would briefly tempt the hero from his righteous path. She’d seen two plays since coming to the Serpentine, sponsored by the Masters and dragoneers and put on by the novices and apprentices of the Academy. The stories weren’t much, men engaging in heroics or villainy, women presented briefly as rewards or hazards, with the odd motherly figure giving out good advice that was ignored or a curse that came to full, horrid effect by the play’s end. Ileth reckoned she now had a face fit for hazards and curses.
Ottavia, the Charge of the Dancers, excused her from dancing duty and practice fatigues for five days, as she’d been cautioned against activity that might reopen the wound. She soon felt well enough to visit the archives to be signed and sealed in, as the Serpentine phrase had it. She was tired of lying in her rope bed reading borrowed novels chronicling the tragedies sunk into the hearts of young aristocrats.
She rose early for the long walk to the other end of the Serpentine.
The archives were housed in a basement catacomb with an old temple above. Even the stonework in the walls, great blocks that must have been an enormous problem to move about and lay, struck her as strange and unlike anything else in the Serpentine. But it was dry, immaculate, and lit about as well as human design and an ample supply of fat lamps in polished reflectors could make it.