A Natural History of Dragons (29 page)

“It was damned stupid of you,” Mr. Wilker said, not bothering to hide his fury. “You endangered this entire expedition! All because you could not do as you were told, and
stay here
!”

Jacob shot to his feet. “Now see here, Wilker. Isabella has been an asset to our work. It is
my
business,
not
yours, to decide whether she should be kept on any kind of leash, and I have told you already that I will not do it.”

He was ready to go on, and a part of me wished he would; I had no idea he’d been defending me to Mr. Wilker, and was childishly eager to hear what more he had to say. But as it would not serve the greater purpose, I stopped him with one hand on his arm. Addressing Mr. Wilker, I said quietly, “You’re right. It
was
stupid of me, and it
did
endanger the expedition. They want to scare us off, or provoke the village into driving us out; if they don’t succeed, they may try something more direct. I can’t do anything to change what happened. But if we can prove this is mere trickery, it may all yet be well.”

Mr. Wilker had prepared himself for an argument; my capitulation left him at a momentary loss. The resulting silence was awkward in the extreme. Jacob, drawing in a steadying breath, sought to resolve it by changing the subject. “
Could
anyone fake the events?” he asked, slipping out from under my hand to pace. “I mean—I’m certain they could. But how?”

I snapped my fingers at a sudden thought. “Dagmira. The day I seemed so uneasy, coming out of the sauna—before the first footprint appeared. Did you see anyone hanging about as you approached?”

She shook her head, but it proved nothing either way; the trickster would have wanted to stay hidden. “Some kind of device to make the sound,” Lord Hilford said, from where he slouched in his favourite chair, hands steepled before him. He’d been very quiet through my entire tale, brows drawn close, eyes staring into the middle distance as if watching a scene no one else could see. “It sounds rather like a bullroarer, perhaps. The footprints … it’s hard to be both controlled and subtle with fire.”

Mr. Wilker also snapped his fingers; I had not realized we shared that habit. “Not fire—acid! A strong acid could burn the grass like that. It would be easy to pour out in the appropriate shape. I smelled something around the print, I thought; that could be it.”

“Means and motive,” Lord Hilford said, sounding like a barrister. “Opportunity…”

“They’re sneaky bastards, smugglers,” Mr. Wilker said. “Begging Mrs. Camherst’s pardon.” This puzzle, once entered into, seemed to have distracted him from his annoyance with me.

“Sneaky enough to be in and out of the village without being seen? In broad daylight, even?” Jacob asked dubiously.

Dagmira spoke up, startling us all. “Reveka’s lover, maybe.”

No one would think anything of seeing him skulking about at night, after all. “Can you ask her if he’s been about lately?”

That earned me a frown. I had overstepped my boundaries again, meddling in village business. I raised my hands to placate her. “We must do
something
to stop it; guessing isn’t enough. If Reveka will help us, we can simply speak to the man; otherwise we must—oh, lay in wait, I suppose.”

The phrase was calculated to conjure suitably alarming images. Dagmira’s nod was grudging, but there. “I will go now.”

She suited actions to words without delay. Once she was gone, Jacob turned to me. “You say one of the boyar’s men was with the smugglers?”

“Supervising them,” I confirmed. “Lord Hilford, do you think the man was acting on his own behalf? Collaborating with the smugglers, as it were.”

“Corruption among the boyar’s guards,” Jacob said. “He might be grateful to us for informing him.”

Lord Hilford blew out his mustaches with a thoughtful sigh. “Perhaps. But think of what we know of Khirzoff: he is ambitious, and connected in Chiavora. The man might have been there to make certain the boyar got his fair share.”

“Would he
do
that?” I asked, scandalized. (Recall: I spent my youth reading scientific works, not sensational novels. Manda Lewis could have told me all about the motif of corrupt noblemen.)

The earl shrugged. “I wouldn’t be half surprised. If he stops the smugglers, he can usually confiscate everything they had—but then no others will follow them along this route. He’d kill the goose that lays the golden egg, so to speak. By letting them carry out their business, for a modest bribe, he can enjoy a continuing profit, with no effort on his part. And that’s presuming he’s not an opium-eater himself.”

“You met him,” Mr. Wilker said. “Did he seem like one?”

It earned him a snort. “How many opium-eaters are there in my acquaintance, that I should know the signs? That companion of his might be an addict—Gaetano Rossi. But they go hunting a great deal, from what Astimir said, which sounds rather more active than I’d expect from an opium-eater.”

Dagmira returned before long. We knew by her frown that it hadn’t gone as we’d hoped. “Reveka hasn’t seen him since this one went chasing after them,” she said with a jerk of her hand at me.

Hadn’t I once been determined to teach her the proper manners of a lady’s maid? Well, too late for that now, and not much use. “That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been here,” Mr. Wilker said.

Lord Hilford snorted. “You’re a young man yet, Tom. If you were skulking about the village, on orders to scare the visitors away, would
you
pass up a chance to visit your pretty young widow?”

Mr. Wilker flushed, gaze darting at me as if trying to decide how to use my presence to make the earl stop speaking so coarsely. He neither received nor needed a chance; Lord Hilford continued on as if unaware he’d said anything inappropriate. “Right, then. We need to catch our culprit in the act. It’s better that way, regardless. Will he—or they; can’t discard the possibility of there being more than one—will they wait until after we’ve attended this damned Sabbath, to show it’s done no good? Or will they try to force us out faster?”

Privately I suspected there was only one; it would explain why Jacob and I had that period of quiet after our purification in the river. The fellow had to chase off after Lord Hilford instead. And it would be harder to keep multiple men out of sight. But I agreed with Jacob when he said, “It doesn’t much matter either way. The obvious thing to do is keep watch, every night until we catch somebody. But how shall we do it?”

I let the gentlemen discuss the logistics of it; they were far better at planning such things than I. The difficulty, of course, was that we could not look to the villagers for help: they were convinced Zhagrit Mat haunted the night, and the only way we could persuade them otherwise was to bring proof of fakery.

My gaze fell upon Dagmira. Rising and going to her side, I murmured, “Do you believe us? That it isn’t a monster?”

She shrugged and answered in a pragmatic tone. “If it
is
a monster, you’ll see it soon enough. If it isn’t … either way, I want this to end.”

For once, she and I were in complete accord.

We were none of us spies, nor detectives either. The final plan—if I may call it that without laughing, which I confess is rather difficult to do—depended primarily upon the use of strong coffee: one gentleman would stay up each night, keeping watch for miscreants, and would rouse the others as soon as he heard anything. Mr. Wilker would take the first night, and Jacob the second. Judging by the way I saw them whispering to each other, they were already plotting how to divide all the nights between their two selves, and spare Lord Hilford the duty of standing watch.

(I, of course, had already been exempted, on account of my sex. Though I suspect Jacob feared I would go charging after the perpetrator myself, without first calling for aid. Privately, I calculated the odds of Mr. Wilker doing just that as roughly eighty per cent.)

Whether this would have succeeded in time, we never had the chance to discover.

Have you ever awoken in the morning with a thought in your head that seems to spring full-grown from nowhere? I am told this comes about because the mind ruminates upon a topic while asleep, and presents its conclusions when you wake, without any of the intervening steps. As such, it almost feels as if the thought comes from a source outside yourself—an enlightening or unnerving sensation.

Either the mind is capable of exercising the same process while the body is awake, or mine is a terrible sluggard, quite tardy in the presentation of its overnight conclusions.

When I awoke the next morning, a bleary-eyed Mr. Wilker reported hearing nothing in the night; but Dagmira, coming in a moment later, told us there were footprints all around the village, as if the creature had been pacing a circuit of the place. This, of course, did not endear us to the locals. I feared the smugglers might achieve their aim and drive us out before we even had a chance to make good on our Sabbath promise.

The gentlemen went out—even the exhausted Mr. Wilker—with guns in hand, to at least give a show of trying to address this supernatural threat. I gathered my things and went to use the sauna, for it was bathing-day (or rather steaming-day), and Dagmira had promised to keep watch while I was inside, in case someone tried to haunt me again.

But when I opened the sauna door, I found three withered old Drustanev aunties already occupying the place.

It was no accident; they knew, for we had arranged it, that I always used the sauna first—and alone—before the air cleared to the point where it was pleasant to breathe. Their glares dared me to protest, or to join them.

Even had I been accustomed to using the sauna communally, the atmosphere of hostile defiance would have dissuaded me. I took refuge in the manners of a Scirling gentlewoman: I murmured the politest Vystrani apology I knew and closed the door, for all the world as if it had been a simple misunderstanding. Then, fuming, I put my clothes back on, and went back out into the bright air.

At least I didn’t have to explain to Dagmira. She had already found the aunties’ clothing in the baskets outside. Seeing me emerge so quickly, she scowled and muttered something under her breath that was not, I think, a polite apology. Together we began the trek back to the house.

Partway there, my brain offered up its conclusion, quite without warning.

I stopped dead on the path. The thought that had just occurred to me, seemingly out of nowhere, did not fit the chain of causality we were taking for granted. But that did not mean it was wrong. Carefully, step by step, I reviewed what I knew, half hoping to find something that would prove me wrong, almost entirely certain I would not.

“Are you
sick
?” Dagmira hissed, stepping in front of me and stooping to peer into my blank face.

I came back to myself with a jerk. “Dagmira. You know where everyone in the village lives, don’t you?”

Suspicion drew her brows together. “Why?”

The girl was clever; I ignored her question and gave her the name, and it was enough. Her eyes narrowed. “What do you think you’re going to find?”

“Let’s keep walking,” I muttered, suiting action to words. The weather was developing quite fine—by Vystrani standards, anyway—and many of the village women were in their yards, tending the chickens and geese or spinning wool into thread, or gossiping at their front gates. They were already staring at me because of Zhagrit Mat, but I didn’t want to give them additional reason.

Dagmira followed me. “That many tracks would take quite a bit of acid,” I said quietly to her. I used the Scirling word, not knowing how to say it in Vystrani, but my meaning was clear enough. “And where it came from is a good question—but there must be bottles of it on hand. If I can find those, it will be proof enough.”

“I’ll look for you,” she offered.

It was kindly meant, and I appreciated it, but— “With two, one can keep watch,” I said. I judged that less likely to put Dagmira’s back up than the suggestion that she would not recognize acid if she saw it. There was not much call for such things up here (as they tanned their furs by vegetable means), and though I was no chemist, I knew enough to be worried about her safety. Any acid strong enough to burn the grass could badly damage skin.

One bit of luck, at least, was in our favor: my target’s mother was bedridden, and according to Dagmira spent most of her time asleep. So long as we were quiet, we could slip in and out with relative secrecy.

We opted for disguise over skulking. Returning to the house, I collected my art supplies, and Dagmira and I sallied forth again in quite the wrong direction, as if looking for something suitable to draw. I sketched a view of Drustanev—something I should have done long since, regardless—then wandered toward the edge of the village, pausing for a flower, a rock, an interesting tree. I started to sketch a house, but got no more than three lines in before the woman charged up to her gate and sent me on my way with a harangue. Bit by bit, looking as if we were headed everywhere but our destination, Dagmira and I worked our way over to the right house. Once she had darted a quick glance inside to make certain it was clear, she kept watch at the door, and I slipped in.

For this to be properly mysterious, I should tell you about a secret panel hidden in the wall, or a trapdoor concealed beneath a rug, discovered only after an arduous search. But the truth is that I found the box shoved under a bench, and it took me no more than two minutes.

Bottles of sulfuric acid, labeled in Chiavoran. Several of them empty, and surrounded by charred straw where dribbles had tracked down the sides.

The noise was faint—no more than a tap of foot upon floor. My nerves were so tightly wound, though, that I shot upright … and found Astimir standing in the door to the inner room.

It is hard to say who was more horrified, him or me.

He certainly broke the paralysis first. Astimir flung himself at the outer door before I could even think to shout, racing past a startled Dagmira and vaulting the low fence in one long-legged hurdle, scattering chickens everywhere. “Catch him!” I bellowed, but it was too late; by the time I reached the door myself, he was off down the slope, drawing plenty of perplexed stares, but no attempts to halt his flight.