Clutching her find with the first sense of satisfaction she’d felt since arriving at the Serpentine, she washed and wrung out the scarf at the cistern and carried it back up the road, swinging it about in the sunlight to dry it and using it to stretch her shoulders behind her. The brightness of the red somehow encouraged her and she wound it about her neck. It itched but it was warm.
Refreshed, she had the confidence to go back along the cliff and bang on the door.
“Just to let you know, I’m st-still here,” she said. The call drew out a racking cough, but she felt equal to even illness in the morning sun.
The red door didn’t care either way, and no voice responded from behind it or on the wall. She felt a little let down. She was in the mood to shout defiance and argue. She did notice that the pipelike gas-light fixture had been turned off. The metal was still a little warm.
She hung up her cloak on it to dry in the wind and sun. It was a good riding cloak, sized for an unknown girl a little taller. She’d had to sell her own coat from the Captain’s. The riding cloak had been given to her by a kindly butcher’s wife who’d pitied her shivering in the mountain air as she sold her some tripe and hoof gelatin. Slimy stuff but it kept one going for next to nothing. The riding cloak was old and frayed here and there and stained and the buttons didn’t match, but it kept you warm, even when wetted.
Nothing to do but sit and wait, coughing occasionally and feeling headachy from hunger. She tried to keep her mind occupied so she wouldn’t think about her stomach. Odd that she hadn’t seen, heard, or smelled a dragon all this time. In her imagination they were always alighting and taking off from the Serpentine like birds about a pool. She set about trying to guess at the cargos of the barges and boats in Vyenn below. Fishing seemed to be the principal industry. She watched a coast-barge creep right past the town without bothering to stop; it just turned and started circumnavigating the Serpentine’s peninsula, its sails skillfully worked by what she took to be two men and a boy, until the boat passed out of sight. The day passed slowly, marked only by the progress of the sun and an occasional sounding of loud signal-whistles from inside the Serpentine. Once she heard a sharp, whip-crack-like sound that startled her from her musings.
The day grew decidedly warm and she dozed, head pillowed on her little bundle bag and the recovered red fabric wrapped about her throat.
Traffic on the steps woke her. A man in gray plainclothes beneath a short vivid red cape, an ivory sash, and a single, beautifully wrought shoulder pauldron more decorative than functional—the uniform of a dragoneer—hurried up the steps, holding his sheathed sword so as not to let the scabbard bang on the steps. He was unshaven and he had a bit of what she guessed was meat sauce on his lips. He ignored her as though she were one of the lichen-covered rocks littering the cliff. The door opened for him without his even having to knock. By the time she was fully awake and on her feet the door had closed again.
She rushed up to it and shot the timbers. “Hello?”
“You’re still here?” the gruff voice from the previous night asked. She could just make out the loom of a figure, not quite as tall as the Captain, on the other side.
“Is it possible for me to have a hear-hearing?”
The figure slowly turned away, then turned back.
“Part of the challenge, girl, is to be here on time,” the gruff voice said, in the harsh tone of a schoolmaster with a miscreant. “I don’t know what kind of education you have or haven’t had, but the phrase too late to make a difference haunts many an old battlefield. Money can be reaccumulated. Losses, even of a dragon, can be replaced. But once an hour is gone, no worldly power can restore it. Understand?”
She nodded.
“Remember that, wherever you fetch up.”
With that, he departed the door again. She wondered if he’d dropped her a hint, to see if she had the wit and determination to make use of it. Wherever certainly included the Serpentine.
She sat on the step again, feeling oddly lonely. She’d been on her own, more on her own than she’d ever been in her life, for the last twelve—no, thirteen—days, but she’d never felt so apart from everything. She was like a shipwrecked mariner with her bare few possessions. The people of the Serpentine and Vyenn were going about their lives. She haunted the edge of their routines like a ghost, able to observe but not interact.
The sun was already falling behind the mountains to the west. It would grow cool soon. She retrieved her coat, now mostly dry, with the remaining damp in the lower third where it would do the least harm. But it wouldn’t remain so for long; the clouds were thickening.
Sitting on the stones drained life and heat from her. If she was to spend another night on the doorstep, she should fashion something to get herself up off the ground. She thought about the shoreline. You could sometimes find odds and ends washed up, if you were willing to get wet and dirty in the search.
Well, if life was a test and time couldn’t be retrieved, she’d best get to it. The light was fading.
She’d marked the ravine leading down to the lakeshore on her previous trips and decided to explore it while the sky was still light. She disturbed some young grasshoppers but had no luck catching one and missed an easy snack. Though she preferred them toasted over a fire and drizzled with a little honey, she was now desperate enough to eat one raw.
She made it to the lakeshore, coughing with the exertion, and explored the spot where she’d seen some birds poking around. The birds meant there might be a consistent current bringing food in. There was some driftwood and darting tiny fish, but nothing she could sit on. Moving a little out onto the peninsula, she recovered a possibility at last, a torn-up basket that might have been used for laundry. It was made from basket-reeds and wouldn’t support her weight if she turned it over and sat on it. Still, it would be insulation of a sort. She smashed it in such a way that it folded, then folded what was left again into a square about the size of a chair cushion. On the way back out of the ravine she seized a big snail off a rock and sucked it out of its shell. Where there was one, there might be more, and Ileth hunted about and found three others, smaller but no less disgusting to extract. They were slimy and revolting and wiggled when they went down her throat.
Five minutes later she felt a little less light-headed from her hunger. Whatever good they did her was probably used up in the climb back to the door.
The broken carrier crackled under her as she sat, with her hooded cloak ready, and waited for the rain. Sure enough, it came, the same heavy drizzle as the previous evening on her last stretch of travel. Probably some working of summer sun, the mountains, and the giant lake. She drew the hood of the cloak close, picked the most substantial trickle off the wall, and refreshed herself with the rainwater. Then she marked how the water ran off the Serpentine and settled herself to be out of the worst of it.
Unlike the previous night, the rain passed after an hour or so, but she heard the ominous sound of thunder and caught a flash of light illuminating the cloud line inland. She hoped the storm was moving away.