Marie Brennan - A Natural History of Dragons

Mr. Wilker’s gaze sharpened. “What do you mean?”

I did not want to draw attention. Nodding to Jacob, I prodded my horse forward, and let him give Mr. Wilker a précis of our suspicions—even more abbreviated than the one I had given Jacob, by the rapidity with which it concluded. Mr. Wilker’s horse, choosing its path, detoured to the side of me, and the gentleman and I met each other’s gazes.

That wordless moment ended the minor war between us that had waged since I was added to the expedition back in Scirland. If I was right—if the boyar had killed his own razesh for uncovering something he should not, and it had anything to do with our own work—then the points of friction between us were trivialities, not worth so much as another second of our time. Mr. Wilker was not certain I was right, and neither was I; but the possibility was too grave to dismiss for lack of certainty.

The three of us were in accord, then. It only remained to inform Lord Hilford, and to devise some response. I left the former to the gentlemen, while all three of us considered the latter. Soon, however, Khirzoff and the others began hunting, bringing down several pheasants for our feast that night, and the crack of the rifles only added to my tension. How easy would it be for someone to suffer an “accident” out here? I flinched when Lord Hilford fired without success at a fleeing bird, and found myself wishing the pheasant success in escaping.

Behind the pheasant’s line of flight, a little distance above us, a stony promontory stirred.

With menacing and predatory slowness, it expanded to either side; and because I had been thinking of the pheasant and its madly flapping wings, my first reaction was—hard though it may be to believe—to think anatomically, watching how the outer “fingers” of the wing spread first, before the upper structure stretched out to catch the air.

Then, belatedly, the rest of my mind pointed out that a dragon was about to stoop upon us.

I cried out a warning, all the more frantic for being delayed. Two of Khirzoff’s men brought their guns to bear on the looming figure, but held their shots until it came into closer range. My gelding shied: he might not have been born to the mountains, but he recognized the approach of this predator just the same. I swiftly weighed the likely outcome if I were on his back, and flung myself from the saddle, diving for cover in a thick stand of trees.

Because of that action, I failed to see what ensued; I could only hear and feel. Several shots rang out. By the cursing that followed, they had done no good. A shriek from above then heralded the dragon’s attack; branches snapped like kindling as it tried to seize its prey, but I heard no cries to suggest that it had met with any better luck. Khirzoff bellowed orders in Bulskoi, probably for his men to keep shooting—and then a gust of wind raked through my pitiful cover, bringing with it a shower of needle-sharp ice fragments.

If you must be the victim of a dragon’s extraordinary breath, I recommend the rock-wyrm. Its ice shards are capable of cutting the skin, but not deeply; the chief danger lies in the body’s instinct to curl up tight against the sudden, bone-aching cold. This renders one more vulnerable to the dragon’s subsequent dive.

Further gunshots told me that at least some of the men were still in a position to defend us. I forced my reluctant body to uncurl and peered out above a fallen branch. Jacob was alive—I sucked in a great gasp of relief—and there were Mr. Wilker and Lord Hilford; after them I spotted Khirzoff and his two men. All seemed intact, and one final volley of shots brought a cry from above that might have been either frustration or pain. Whichever it was, it seemed to persuade the dragon to seek easier prey, for after a few tense moments, we emerged from cover.

All our horses had scattered, with the exception of the boyar’s stallion; for a wonder, none had broken their legs or necks, though Jacob’s mount had gone lame. My idiot gelding surprised me by being perfectly fine, and I patted his neck soothingly. He might not have been pleasant to ride, but I was glad he had not been killed.

Khirzoff was spitting words in Bulskoi that I doubted were fit for a lady’s ears. Lord Hilford asked him a question in the same tongue, and got a curt answer. Translating for us, the earl said, “This isn’t the first attack they’ve seen, of course. He’s quite vexed they failed to bring the beast down, though for my own part, I feel it’s just as well. We haven’t any of our equipment with us; such observations as we could make would hardly be worth the effort.”

One of the Bulskoi men gave Jacob his horse, and led the lamed one on foot; it seemed we were going back to the lodge. Though I dreaded the place, I would be glad to have a roof over my head, concealing me from a dragon’s gaze.

The beast had done me the service, though, of breaking my thoughts away from fears of conspiracy, toward other matters of equal—or perhaps greater—importance. Sotto voce to my husband, and in Scirling so the foreigners would not understand, I said, “Could it be the gunshots roused the dragon to such fury? It did not stir until after Lord Hilford had fired.”

“As an immediate cause, perhaps,” Jacob mused, glancing back at the place where the rock-wyrm had been napping. “But if you mean an ultimate cause for the attacks, I doubt it. The locals shoot game all the time. If that upset the dragons, these incidents would be a constant thing, all over Vystrana.”

True—and yet, one of our drivers had shot at a wolf not long before the attack on the road. Iljish had been shooting rabbits. Even the boy who brought me the sample of skin had said he and his father were hunting deer. It was not enough to constitute proof; as Jacob said, there were many other shots fired in this region, and not all of them brought down draconic wrath. It was, however, the closest thing to a common factor we had observed, and might be significant.

Back at the lodge, we had little opportunity to speak privately. Mr. Wilker must have managed to say something to Lord Hilford, though, because shortly before supper, Jacob conveyed a message to me. “We’ll look for an excuse to leave. If there is a danger, though, that may provoke him. For now, we stay.”

My first instinct was to protest. I had spent the entire afternoon dwelling more and more obsessively on my desire to escape this place; to have that prospect drawn back felt cruelly unfair. And if there were danger, should we not leave sooner ? Yet I immediately saw Jacob’s point about provocation. So far, Khirzoff had offered no violence to us. The violence I suspected him of, moreover, was purely theoretical.

I am—and was, even then—a scientist. When I find myself with an uncertain theory, my impulse is to gather evidence that will prove or disprove it.

Jacob is capable of sleeping under any circumstances; I am not. I lay awake quite late that night, and finally could endure the uncertainty no longer. Moving quietly, I rose and stuffed myself into the most easily donned of my dresses, tucking my notebook into my pocket. Working by touch alone, I located the candle and matches at the bedside, which I would light once I was safely away. Then I lifted the latch on the bedroom door and stepped out into the corridor.

Where I promptly fell over something on the floor. It was a soft-but-bony something, and it swore as I kneed it in the stomach; the voice was Dagmira’s. Extricating myself from the girl and her blankets, and wondering if my heart was going to pound its way right out of my rib cage, I hissed, “What in Heaven are you doing there?”

“Sleeping—or trying to,” Dagmira hissed back. I scrambled to my feet and dragged the bedroom door shut before we could wake Jacob. By the time that was done, I understood. For all my airs about needing “Dagmara,” I had not asked where she and Iljish were being housed. It seemed that Khirzoff had no room for them, or else was fond of the old ways, where a servant slept outside his master’s door, or at the foot of his bed. This gave me entirely new reasons to detest the man.