“There,” Ileth said.
The apprentice scattered some drying sand on the document. “We have other papers for you, in your role as that late dragon’s assignee,” Kess said.
As far as the Academy was concerned, she was formally enrolled as an apprentice. But she had other business in the archives. There were some documents to sign, more legalese, relating to the death of the elderly dragon, who apparently had books or scrolls on loan to different regions of the Republic. “The Lodger”—as she’d known him—had turned over management of these oddly named volumes to her as one of the executors of the estate. Her signatures authorized the locals to maintain the collections. She only glanced at the documents, thick with Hypatian phrases she didn’t understand, but they had piled up while she had been on her enforced residence in Galantine lands.
All the while Kess’s apprentice kept glancing at her eye.
“It doesn’t hurt m-much, if you’re wonder-wondering,” Ileth said.
“You’re that girl who is always getting into fights,” he said.
“J-just one. A duel,” Ileth said. “I l-lost.”
“Did you start swordsmanship or—”
“It looks like it’s healing,” Kess said. “She doesn’t want to talk about it. This is an important day for her, Gowan. Stop spoiling things.”
Ileth forced a smile. “It was a silly accident. Joai pinned the wound closed.”
Every time I see that scar, Ileth thought, I’ll remember the day I became an apprentice.
“You’re the tailer of sixty-six, right?” Gowan grimaced and lifted his white apprentice belt. It had a faint brown stain that had survived many washings. “I was first of my draft. Sixty-one. They just threw wine on me. Said it was supposed to be blood, but they were too drunk to catch a chicken. Well, first or tail end, we’re equal now.”
“Congratulations, apprentice,” Kess said. “Fate see you standing before a dragon one day, chosen as a dragoneer.” Something in the practiced tone made Ileth believe the archivist thought it unlikely.
She bobbed. The cool, quiet archives seemed an odd place for such a ritual, with a couple of novices eyeing her jealously as they dusted, but the Vale Republic ran on contracts, stamps, and seals.
“Ileth, do you have your own affairs in order, just in case your service requires that greatest of sacrifices?” Kess asked. “I tell all my apprentices they should have a testament as to burial and property.”
Ileth stared at her Galantine boots. The laces had broken in several places and been retied. The bootmaker made good boots but supplied her with poor lacing. “I—I expect to be buried with all my property.”
Kess’s face twitched. Ileth wondered if she’d seen the briefest smile in the history of the Serpentine or if it was just a nervous tic. “Well. That always kills the mood, but you’d be surprised how few even consider such things. You’ll find we lose one or two a year, even without war. More in a plague. You should go along now to Master Sel—Master Traskeer, I should say—and report that you’ve been signed into the rolls. I wish you well in the next six years and then a rewarding assignment as wingman.”
Ileth steeled herself. Traskeer was the new Master of Apprentices. Selgernon had resigned as a matter of honor after the affair with the egg theft and the flight of the dragon Fespanarax, as one of his apprentices had taken part in it. She’d heard from Quith that there was some back-and-forth about his resignation not being accepted but Selgernon forced the issue. The general opinion from those who’d met Master Traskeer seemed to be that the change was for the worse.
She nodded.
“If at any time you are doubtful about a point in your contract, you may examine it here,” Kess said. His apprentice had shifted his furtive stares to her overdress. It was a shapeless, ill-fitting thing and she didn’t have much of a build to fill it, so she wondered what he was looking at.
She checked the hooks and loops holding it closed. “Am I . . . am I mis-misaligned?” Her little white dragon-scale novice pin was on. Some apprentices and wingmen still wore them; some didn’t. Ileth liked hers, and it drew attention away from the worn overdress and lately helped keep it closed where a button was missing.
“No,” Gowan said. “Your sash. Traskeer will rake you for it, if you’re not in uniform.” His hand mechanically checked the knot on his own white sash as if worried it had loosened.
“Don’t . . . don’t have one y-yet. I don’t suppose you have a spare?”
He shook his head.
She’d already found out sashes were hard to come by. Former apprentices dyed theirs to match the “colors” of their dragoneer when they were promoted to wingman. The wealthier even ceremonially burned theirs at a feast, or laid them into storage with camphor to keep moths away in the hope that one day a family member would follow in their footsteps. A few gave them away to close friends for good luck. Ileth had only been close to one apprentice who made wingman. She’d married a rich Galantine and vanished.
She nodded, thanked them for their help in her halting fashion, and left the pair in their catacombs-without-temple.
The Captain who owned the Lodge where she’d grown up had once told her that in the Republic, legal contracts protected more hides than shields and parrying blades. Now she was protected by that fence of words printed with those sharp angles and razor-edged lettering, and ensnared by it at the same time. She’d joined the Serpentine because she loved dragons, but it was also an escape from the life laid out for her, where the best she could hope to be was some lady’s maid or cook or maybe a wife to a fisherman—a lodge-girl probably wouldn’t even get one who owned his own boat.
She’d kept herself alive and hopeful in the Lodge by collecting every scrap of information, every story she could of the Vale Dragons and their Dragoneers—which wasn’t much, as they rarely visited the Freesand. She’d indulged in youthful fantasies about taking part in great deeds, righting wrongs, flying medicine on dragonback to snow-choked villages, or carrying a message that saves the day, making bandits and pirates fear the wrath of the people of the Vales . . . vague thoughts ripened into whole processions of elaborate fantasies. Silly, perhaps. But they’d kept her dream alive until she was old enough to act to bring the dream to life.
But she’d passed through that creaky little red door at the side entrance and discovered that the Serpentine wasn’t about making her dreams come true. The Serpentine, like a great dragon uncoiling itself, revealed itself to her in all its power as a complex machine built for the purpose of keeping its dragons well fed and healthy and its dragoneers trained and ready to be of service. The Captain had once told her that it was sailors who worked to keep a ship alive, not the reverse as most landsmen thought, and the Serpentine turned out to be sort of a ship in that way. Through endless toil, people kept the dragons alive and the dragons kept the Republic alive.