“Too late, girl, and I’m sorry for you. All the applicants are inside. We shut the gate at sundown.”
Suddenly overcome by emotion, she stuttered out something about having traveled for days alone. It wasn’t persuasive.
The raspy voice cut her off. “Don’t take it hard, we’ll kick a good quarter of them out again in a few days. You’re lucky, you’ll have a jump on them at the Auxiliary house in town. Vyenn has all sorts of drum-beaters looking for apprentices. If I were you, I’d join the Auxiliaries, if you want dragons. They have a few.”
She had excuses to fill a book, but too much pride to be a beggar at a door rattling off a list of misfortunes.
“By the calendar it’s still Mid-Midsummer’s Eve.” Her stammer always grew worse when she was overwrought.
“Have you a letter of introduction? An acceptance?”
The Serpentine had its routines, it seemed. The same catechism as the gate-watch.
“No,” she managed to say, after a brief struggle to get the word out, knowing what the reply would be. “One of your placards. A dragoneer named Annis . . . met me years ago. She encouraged me to—”
“I am sorry. Annis Heem Strath and Agrath fell in the Galantine War. Just before the armistice. Go get under a roof. This is no night to wait on the steps.”
In a way, the news of the death of the dragon and dragoneer was worse than being denied entry. She’d thought of them constantly these seven years, imagining a reunion: I remember you, Ileth, and all grown up into a young woman, Annis would say, smiling, the dragon above cocking its head, birdlike, for a better look. Oh, that girl from the well, hullo there, he’d say, then she’d tell him she’d made a silly little bracelet out of the cording that had come loose from his wing. She felt sick and tightened her stomach muscles again. The old trick to steady herself worked. She felt more than she heard the presence at the other side of the door start to depart. She pounded again, setting the boards a-clatter.
“Could I j-just get out of this wet? I’m very tired. I’ll sleep in a stable. A pen.”
“Go back to town. There’s a poor lodge if you have no money for the inn. If you were my daughter, I wouldn’t want you to try it, but the boatmen’s dormitory is cheap and clean. I’ve heard they give a bed and a dinner for a song well sung.”
“Please,” she said, reaching up and pulling at the gap in the planking so it squeaked and rattled. She’d gone a bit mad.
A sharp rap on her fingers stopped her from trying to pull the door off its hinges. “Don’t try that again or we’ll empty night soil on you. Understand?”
She nodded. The personage on the other side of the door departed.
She turned a circle and blinked away frustrated tears. At least they wouldn’t show on her wet face. She hated to be caught crying. Dragoneers in the songs and poems didn’t cry—unless their dragon died.
Finally, she sat down on the steps, head in hands, failure sitting next to her on one side and misery on the other pressing close, no doubt winking at each other behind her back.
The cold stone leeched heat from her flesh and she realized she should have put down her bundle and sat on it, but she’d sunk to a place below such cares.
She wasn’t sure what she had expected out of a reunion with Annis, Dragoneer of the Serpentine, but the silver dragon and his rider had occupied so much of her thoughts over better than half her life that the loss felt momentarily unbearable. Tears blended with the drizzle on her cheeks. What had she wanted? Certainly not a substitute mother. Her life had been a series of I’m not your mother, dears from everyone from laundrywomen to shepherds’ wives. Annis had just been one more not-mother, more poetic than the rest with her talk about being of the air spirit. All she knew was that she was counting on a reunion, imagining kind words about how much she’d grown or that she took good care of her teeth or a long welcoming hug and a job polishing boots and saddle.
A few deep breaths and a wiping of her eyes that was more habitual than effective left her able to consider.
Bone tired, with nothing but roadside berries in her since yesterday, she reviewed her options. Her flight from the Captain’s Lodge had been such that she’d left without much other than her small necessities bag. She wanted to confuse matters on her disappearance, leaving behind even the brush and comb the Captain had bestowed on her when she turned twelve. She hadn’t left a note when she slipped ship, as the Captain was probably styling it even now with a disgusted shake of his head. She had nothing to make camp, no barn loft where she might sleep dry, as she’d found the previous night. She could use the gas-pipe for a light, but she had no fuel for a campfire and she doubted there was any to be found on this rocky peninsula.
She coughed again. It came from an ominously deep inner pocket of her chest. The phlegm it brought up was real enough that her fancies about just lying down to die on this doorstep became an awful possibility of illness teaming up with exposure to take her young life. Perhaps she should go down to Vyenn and throw herself on the mercy of the poorhouse, as the doorman suggested.
Maybe the priests were right. You did get punished for your sins in this life as well as the next if you didn’t immediately offer up an atonement. She’d defied the Captain, lied, even stolen from farmers’ fields on her journey. It had all come so easily to her in her zeal to arrive at the Serpentine. Even worse, she’d proved good at it. She hadn’t confessed or offered atonement for any of it yet. Perhaps she was naturally bad, after all. She’d been told often enough that she’d been conceived in sin. That old witch the Captain employed to keep night-watch over his charges had told her that the disgraceful circumstances of her birth were revealed by her stutter. Sure sign that a child’s been conceived with coin for payment clasped tight in the whore’s hand . . . Then there was that gaunt teacher with the badly fitted false teeth who told the children of the Lodge that evil nature could be inherited, like her freckles, and that she would have to pay for her mother’s grievous faults, as her mother had died before setting the balance right. He’d taken the Lodge children to the altar-house, lining them up along a bench on the back wall where they wouldn’t be mistaken for belonging to the respectable town families, and made disagreeable droning noises through his nose whenever the priests talked of faults being passed about like contagion.
She coughed again. This one was worse. It hurt. Then she retreated into herself and fell into a half sleep, a talent she’d learned on nights outdoors with the Lodge’s chickens after they lost one to a fox or on long winter nights when she was punished by keeping the fires up. The great central fireplace towered over her early years even more than the Captain. Sitting before it, she’d developed a knack for dreaming without actually sleeping. The Captain would beat you for sleeping on duty, and he liked to sneak up and terrify you by choking you awake. He’d then tell you a ghastly tale, his breath reeking over his black-traced teeth, of entire crews who’d been gutted and strung up in their rigging by pirates because the watch fell asleep.