With her spirit rallied by the sun and view, she tried the door again. Three successive knocks, each louder than the last, elicited no response.
She let out one stammering “Hello” up at the wall and gave up. The Guard looking out over the entrance didn’t even pause in his pacing. Perhaps the night watchman had given orders that she was to be ignored. She didn’t have night soil dumped on her head, anyway. The single call had managed to wake her appetite, too, and she was ravenous from her exertions and the cold night. With stiff, reluctant legs she tried the cliffside path again with the help of daylight and saw a treacherous ravine leading down to the lakeside. She managed it without too much difficulty. She noticed that the bottom of the cliff was strewn with broken barrels, rusted iron framing, and other odds and ends you tended to find on a lakeshore near a town, with a stave or reinforcement bar or two projecting out of the water like an accusing finger.
She followed the path back to the gate. This time there were no calls or orders from the watchers, who couldn’t have missed her as she negotiated the hand rope around the south tower. She was in front of the gate in a moment and took it in.
The gate, seen in daylight, was much more impressive than it had been at night. There was a low sort of ditch, a dry moat, before the wall bridged by the road. She’d missed that completely in the dark. The gate itself was more of a grate or a fence, made of thick woven iron sheets laced in an elaborate pattern that must have been fantastically difficult to fashion, with wooden paneling behind, grain beautifully finished and gleaming. The design probably signified something, but she had little knowledge of art and less use for it, at least up to now. She doubted it had ever had to withstand a siege. She knew from tales that there’d once been warfare in this valley, but that was in the murky past before the Republic or even the Dragon-Troth. The bridge over the ravine looked as though it could be pulled up by removing the timbers from their rests.
A bell rang out, three deep, distinct bong! signals sounding within the Serpentine. They were answered, faintly, by another one in town—the bell ringer below probably took his cue from the fortress.
Her empty stomach heard the bells and her hunger rallied and gnawed at her. She could bear hunger; one of the Captain’s favorite disciplines was deprivation of meals for a day or two. She could assuage it easily enough if she just had some water.
She waited another minute to see if the tolling of the bell might bring an opening of the grate-gate. But the entry remained closed and the road to the Serpentine deserted. It would be a warm day, she decided, judging the sun and the clouds scattering before like white dust-balls swept off by a broom. She would have to find some shade; she’d been warned that skin scorched easily up in the mountains.
Standing in the shade of the wings, she traced the meeting of the two halves of the gate with a forefinger, imagining some magic that would open them. Get me inside, fate, and I will prove myself a great dragoneer . . . dutiful and skilled and kind like Annis. All she learned was that the woven steel looked as though it parted at the center, where multiple plates of metal met like interlaced fingers. The gate edge, where it met, was fitted into some kind of channel and each side had a wheel that ran in an arced groove, but she saw no other mechanism for opening it. She liked devices and had once gotten into painful trouble for taking apart an old sun-measuring device of the Captain’s that had a broken handle and a degree-arrow that spun so freely it was useless.
Dragons and clever machinery. She longed to be inside, learning the secrets of the Serpentine. She wondered what the applicants who’d managed to make it inside the gate yesterday were doing. She heard vague sounds of activity within, shouts and calls, but it was far off and faint, like farmers singing out in the distance as they raked and stacked the hay.
A watchman pacing back and forth between the dragon wings ignored her. But another figure could just be seen around the nearer of the two arcing dragon wings. In the light, she could see he had a gleaming badge on the long fore-and-aft-rigged hat of his. Perhaps the hats symbolized dragons, thin at either end and thicker in the middle. No wings, though—unless they were hidden earflaps.
“Gate won’t open until market day,” the one standing still said. He had thick lips and was handsome in a well-fed way. He knew just how loud to make his voice clearly heard without shouting. “Four more days.”
That would be five days without food, and seven without a bed. Unless she took the advice of the man at the red door and retreated to town. No, she’d see her siege through. One fourteen-year-old against the Serpentine.
She filled her lungs. “I’m an applicant to the Academy,” she shouted.
“Then you should have been here yesterday.” His head disappeared, then reappeared. “I’m sorry,” she just caught over the wind.
“Could I take some water?” she asked. “I’m terribly thirsty.”
“There’s a cistern up the road.”
Cruel. Even the lowliest posthouse would pass a bowl of water through the door if you asked. Water wasn’t scarce anywhere in the Vales.
Damp, hungry, and tired, in roughly that order, she considered her options. Something must be happening with the applicants who’d been admitted, and the chances of her joining their ranks fell with each hour that passed. She should have pressed Falth for ideas to gain entry. Her remaining coin wouldn’t buy more than old bread and maybe a cheese rind, or she’d have dined on something other than roadside berries yesterday. If she became desperately hungry there was always the lake.
She glanced up at the green hillsides sloping up from the Serpentine. There were encampments dotting what looked like a pasture, probably family of some of the applicants, waiting for the testing to be finished. They’d have picked over everything nearby. A roadside sculpture of some kind under a wooden sheltering roof was probably the cistern the watchman had mentioned.
She wished she had a belt to tighten. Well, the next best thing to a meal was a drink and a wash, and she could manage that at the cistern. Maybe there was some secret tradition: you weren’t admitted if you couldn’t be bothered to wash your face.
She followed the puddled road—how easy it was to negotiate when you weren’t running in the dark—up to the cistern. It was a simple thing, an all-purpose cement trough fed by a small trickle. There was some slimy growth in the cistern, slick green stuff such as you could find clinging to the lee sides of river rocks. A clever sort of metal screw-plug set into a fitting would allow the trough to fill. Fascinated, she closed the plug and the flow of the water from the trickle increased.
She drank, which brought on another coughing fit; washed her face and hands and drank again; then opened the screw-drain and sure enough, the flow tapered off to the trickling flow from before. As she turned away from the cistern, she spotted a flash of red in the drainage ditch downslope of the road. She investigated and found a cast-off material that she assumed was a scarf, about a third of it soiled with mud. It was a good weave of dyed wool and smelled distinctly like horse. It had probably fallen from some mount or carriage.