Within the Sanctuary of Wings

FOURTEEN

Once the last of the scattered beasts had been collected and I returned with Ruzt and Zam to Imsali, I had cause to be glad that my yak-herding vocabulary was by that point quite well developed. We no longer devoted more than the bare minimum of our attention to such chores; all our efforts were bent to a different set of topics.

Ruzt’s plan, as she explained it to me, was frighteningly simple—and I was certain it was her plan, though she always spoke of it in the plural, as something she, Kahhe, and Zam had developed together. They would keep me concealed until spring, when the hibernating Draconeans awoke… and then they would reveal my presence, using me as proof that humans were reasonable creatures with whom the Draconeans could attain peace. Between now and then, my chief task was to prepare for the discussions that would ensue.

“What if I am not ready by then?” I asked.

Zam glared at me. Kahhe laughed, though she did not sound amused, and said, “Be ready.”

It would not do to keep me hidden longer, even if I were insufficiently prepared. The sisters had been able to manage it before because everyone else in the village was making arrangements for their winter sleep; the day they left me with Zam was the day they went out and persuaded the villagers who had drawn the short straw that year to let the three of them take over the task of caring for the herds. (I doubt it took much persuasion. Remaining awake was considered an unpleasant duty, and while Imsali settled this by the democratic means of drawing lots, I later heard that other villages fobbed it off on whomever was least popular among them. Fortunately there was a law that said no one could take on that burden two years running, as winter wakefulness was considered detrimental to their health.)

But once the Draconeans awoke, I could not long remain concealed in the sisters’ house. I must sally forth, ready or not, and represent my entire species to those who dwelt within the Sanctuary of Wings.

For it was not only myself who called that place the Sanctuary. That was the Draconean name for it as well: in their tongue, Sratar Vrey, the Sanctuary of Wings. “Anevrai,” I said to Ruzt when she taught me the phrase. “That is how we have been saying the name of your people—at least, we believe that word refers to your people. But you do not call yourselves that.” The word I had learned for the Draconeans was mranin, which clearly came from a different root.

“It is a very old word,” she said. “For those who ruled in ancient days. We have not gone by that name since the Downfall.” She paused, remembering. “You said that to me once before, didn’t you? When you woke up. I was so nervous—I didn’t even recognize it. You pronounced it so strangely.”

I could not conceive of what that must have been like: rescuing a dying monster in the hope that she might prove a friend. “How did you come upon me? I have been meaning to ask for ages, only I did not know how.”

This was something of a fib. I could have managed, if I were determined—as I was managing now, for you must not imagine that my conversations were as simple and straightforward as I am presenting them here. Circumlocution and mime were still my frequent tools, along with my charcoal drawings, whenever I could not come directly at my target. I had allowed the difficulty to turn aside my curiosity because thinking about that day would remind me of too many things I did not wish to dwell on: the avalanche, and the unknown fate of my companions.

But I had a better heart for it now, and so I asked. Ruzt said, “We are watchers, the three of us—we look for signs of humans at our borders.”

“Do you cross the mountains?” I said, intrigued.

“We used to. We stopped years ago.”

The Nying had pushed almost to the limits of possible habitation, short of entering the Sanctuary itself. Patrolling outside the ring of mountains risked beginning the confrontation the Draconeans had striven so long to avoid. “But you saw me?”

“We saw two humans,” she said. “Up there.” I followed her pointing claw to the col; the day was sunny and nearly cloudless, which made it look only a short stroll away. Tom and I had ventured a little distance to the west when we first stepped out, so as to look down into the valley beyond. Likely it was the two of us whom Ruzt saw.

But a great deal of time had passed between that moment and when I stumbled half dead down the western slope, not to mention a storm. “Were you watching us dig?” Even though the sisters were now my friends—two of them, at least; I was not certain I should count Zam as such—the thought of them spying on us from concealment was unsettling.

Ruzt denied it. “Zam insisted that we collect our weapons first. And we argued. As we were climbing, the mountain came down, and she said you must all be dead. But we agreed to search before we gave up.”

“I was very lucky that you did,” I murmured. “I should certainly have died otherwise.” At no point had the sisters carried weapons in my sight. Where did they keep them? What did they arm themselves with? Not firearms, I suspected; I had observed nothing in the Sanctuary that led me to believe the Draconeans had the technology to manufacture anything so complex. Bows and arrows? Swords? I was surprised Zam had not insisted on arming herself around me, every waking and sleeping minute.

As it turned out, I was not the only one who had been sitting on her curiosity. “Zabel,” Ruzt said, “why were you there? You do not live here.”

She did not mean in the Sanctuary. My pictures and attempts at storytelling had made it clear to them that I hailed from a more distant land—and of course they had seen the Nying from a distance, and knew I was no kin of theirs. But I suspected that my rough charcoal attempts to sketch dead Draconeans in the snow had not made much of an impression when I scrawled them on the plastered wall of the yak barn.

To answer her, I made more drawings, these of a wide array of draconic creatures: everything from drakeflies to desert drakes, swamp-wyrms and tê lêng and fire lizards. “These are all dragons,” I said, giving her the Akhian word, and resuming the conversation we had abandoned that night in the cave, when I was examining the wings of a mew. “As all birds are birds, but different kinds. Does that make sense?” Ruzt nodded. “My task is to understand dragons: that is what I do for my people. I have been doing it for most of my life. We believed…” I hesitated, searching for the correct words. “There are many… places in the world, like your temple, but old and fallen down.”

“Ruined.”

“Yes, ruined. From the days of the Anevrai. There are pictures of the Anevrai in those places, but we did not understand them; we thought they showed—” Here I floundered, for I lacked the word for “gods.” Rather than fall down the pit of religion, I merely said, “We thought there were no such things, outside of the mind. We did not know you existed.”

Ruzt pulled back in startlement. “You—did not know we were here?”

“Not at all. When I woke up and saw you, I was very surprised!” I could laugh about it now, with my delirium and terror so far behind me.

This was so astonishing to Ruzt that she insisted on sharing it with Kahhe and Zam before we went any further. Zam stared at me, frankly incredulous. “It is true!” I kept insisting. Then the sisters retired for a conference—not, I think, because they wished to keep their discussion secret from me, but because they did not want to slow themselves down for my sake. It was only then that I realized their plan had been predicated on the assumption that humans knew they were in the Sanctuary (or at the very least, that they existed), and had simply not bestirred themselves to wipe the remaining Draconeans out.

It did not change anything in the immediate term, of course. We were still waiting for spring, and I must still prepare. Ruzt and I returned to our interrupted conversation the next day. I told her, “I thought the Anevrai were human, and had bred some special kind of dragon for their own use. When a man named Thu Phim-lat told me he found a strange body out there, I wanted to see for myself what kind it was.”

“A body of one of ours?” Ruzt said.

I described to her what we found in the col, how its bones had dissolved and its flesh frozen hard in the endless cold. “That was when we discovered that the Anevrai were not gods.” I laughed, this time with a wry smile. “Just before the mountain fell down.” We had not gotten around to establishing the word for “avalanche,” I think because it amused us both to go on using that phrase. I did not even know how to say it in Akhian, as the word is not often needed in the desert.

Then my perspective changed, yet again. When we dug that Draconean out of the snow, I had seen it as a specimen: the carcass of a mysterious creature, hailing from a species unknown to us. But if Ruzt had become a person to me… then the carcass was the sad remains of another person, one who froze to death in the icy heights of the mountains.

In a quiet voice, I asked, “Do you know who they were? The two we found.”

“I think so,” Ruzt said. “Years ago—when I was only a hatchling—the rains came terribly late. The land was so dry, and there were fires… worse on the other side of the mountains, I think. We could see the smoke from here. The elders decided that we should keep a closer watch on our borders for some time after that. Two of the guards were lost in a storm, not long before the sleep.”

“What were their names?”

My question clearly startled her, for her ruff twitched slightly. She said, “Seymel and Yaminet.”

Thu had found one in the valley; the five of us had uncovered the other. I did not think we would ever know which was which. “What do you ordinarily do with your dead? Do you bury them, or burn them, or…?”

Ruzt said, “They go to the sky.”

At first I took this for a euphemism, much as we might say that a late relative has gone to a better place. But while the Draconean religion is indeed very oriented toward the sky, she meant it in a somewhat more literal sense. It is their custom to leave the bodies of the deceased out in the open, where scavenging birds may consume their flesh and carry it into the heavens—with the bones, of course, falling to dust.

It was some comfort, then, to think that the Draconean who fell from the col met with something like the treatment his people would have wanted. The other, I feared, had vanished beneath the snow; he might never be found again.

My mental phrasing snagged against another thought in passing. “These guards who were lost. Were they female, or male?”

“Female,” Ruzt said, as if it were obvious. “None of our border watchers are male.”

So I still had not seen a male Draconean, even one frozen and squashed flat. They had begun to acquire a mythical status in my mind, as if they were a fiction invented by female Draconeans to explain where hatchlings came from.

Male Draconeans were real enough, naturally, and I met some in due course. But such thoughts led me to inquire about reproduction—for one cannot be a naturalist without losing a great deal of the delicacy one is expected to have in speaking of such matters.

“I am not asking where your eggs are,” I said hastily, thinking of Zam’s hostility. She was not so wary of me as she had been; but she still did not entirely trust me, and I wished to avoid provoking her. “But I am curious—am I right in thinking you must be very careful of the conditions in which the eggs are kept?”

This was a thing that had perplexed me since I compared the hatching grounds on Rahuahane to those in the Labyrinth of Drakes. Given the sensitivity of draconic eggs, how could the Anevrai have bred their own species in such disparate environments?

Part of the answer went a long way toward explaining why we had long mistaken firestone for an ordinary mineral. Underground chambers enjoy far more stable temperatures than those above; though Ruzt did not say so, I felt certain the Draconeans of the Sanctuary incubated their offspring inside the mountains, insulated from the killing cold of the outside. Whether they had one hatching ground or several, and whether any of them were in that temple carved into the side of Anshakkar, I did not ask.

But however deeply one burrows into a mountain, the Mrtyahaima was not the Broken Sea. My error, I eventually realized, lay in thinking of the Draconeans as a uniform species, bereft of variation. This is not true of humans, who vary a great deal across the world; why should it be true of Ruzt’s kind? Of course she had never seen her ancient kin, and had no proof of the ways in which island Draconeans had differed from those in the desert. But she agreed with me that such variation was quite likely, for she averred that too much warmth during incubation was “bad” for the resulting offspring. While cold in too great a degree killed them in the egg, heat might produce perfectly healthy hatchlings… who would then perish in their first hibernation.

My readers may also be wondering how they had maintained their hybrid nature, after countless generations cut off from all human contact. Many gruesome stories have circulated in answer to this question, all upon the theme of Dreadful Human Sacrifice: they kidnapped Tser-zhag and Nying and others from around their borders with which to feed their ravenous eggs; or they kept a stable of human slaves bred and slaughtered for that purpose. One especially unpleasant version of that latter said the last of their slaves died off not long before I arrived, and the entire scheme to use me as their ambassador came about because they needed to replenish their stock.

It is all nonsense, of course. The creation of the Draconeans before the dawn of their civilization may have required human blood—offered by ancient humans as part of their primitive rites—but once their population was established, they bred true. They had no need for special conditions to ensure a new generation of dragon-headed bipeds; they had only to protect their offspring against factors that might cause harmful mutation.

When I said something about this to Ruzt, though, I met with an odd reaction. It took me some time to find out why. Finally I asked her, “How do you believe your kind came to be?”

“How do you think your kind came to be?” she countered. I think she meant this partly as a challenge, for my questions had nettled her; but she also meant it as a way of ensuring she understood what I was asking.

It had the effect of making me realize the question was more complicated than I had thought. “We have many different stories to answer that,” I said at last. “Religions around the world each tell their own—that the first humans were carved out of trees, that we were made from the body of a sacrificed god, that a bear became human after many long trials. The religion I was taught as a child says the first man was made from dirt, and the first woman from his rib. But people like me—scientists—” I used the Akhian word; it had no parallel in her tongue. “They have established that we descend from apes. Do you know apes? Or monkeys?”

She did not, as there were none in the Sanctuary or its surroundings. “They are very like humans,” I said, for lack of any better description. “Much as mews are somewhat like you—though the differences there are much greater.”

Ruzt accepted this, as if it were only natural. “Of course mews are like us. But your scientists are wrong. You do not descend from apes.”

I could not restrain my eyebrows from shooting upward. “Oh? Where do we come from? And how do you know such things, when you have never spoken to a human before me?”

“Like mews, you descend from us,” Ruzt said. “Draconeans were born of the sky: the sun’s heat made wind, and the wind took solid form as four sisters, and the scales they shed became the mountains. The weight of the mountains dragged the sisters down, and they wept to lose their flight, which made the waters of the world. When they bathed for the first time, new creatures were made: the water of their mouths made the first brother, the water of their fronts made humans, and the water of their backs made dragons. We usually say mews, but I think it means the other kinds of dragons as well.”

This tale astonished me enough that I was rendered temporarily mute. It had a certain poetic logic to it: the back, which featured both wings and larger, more prominent scales, was more obviously draconic, while the front, which had a more human configuration, bore a stronger resemblance to my own species. And her comment about the weight of the mountains dragging the sisters down almost sounded like a mythic explanation of gravity. As origin stories went, I quite liked it.

But not only was it scientifically inaccurate, it was not the tale I had seen depicted on the wall of an ancient Draconean temple.

“That is why you were the subjects of the Anevrai,” Ruzt said, clearly reading my hesitation and disbelief. “Because you came from us.”

One of the benefits of limited fluency is that one is forced to stop and consider one’s words before speaking them. “The Anevrai told a different tale,” I said at last. “I have been in an ancient hatching ground, one left untouched since the Downfall. It depicted a dragon egg being bathed in blood to create a Draconean. And my own research supports the notion: changes in the environment of an egg can provoke all manner of mutations, many of them detrimental, but some successful—such as a dragon-human hybrid.”

(Rendering that argument into her tongue took approximately eight times as long as it appears here.)

“But where did dragons come from, if not from us?” Ruzt was obviously skeptical.

“That is a very good question, and one I would like to answer. From some kind of reptilian relative, clearly—but when and how your unique mutability arose, I cannot say.”

We argued a great deal over this in subsequent days. I was not surprised that Ruzt might have difficulty accepting the theory of evolution; she had never dreamt of such a thing before I spoke of it, and it was not well accepted when first introduced among humans, either. (Indeed, there are some who do not accept it today, despite an ever-growing body of evidence in support.) Challenging someone’s deeply held beliefs is a difficult thing to do, for it threatens to tear away the foundations upon which they have always stood.

I think Ruzt would have dismissed my words out of hand were it not for the fact that I could cite Anevrai artwork to support my point. It was peculiar for me to realize that her forebears were almost as mythical to her as they were to me—though it should have been obvious that thousands of years, a cataclysm, and continual flight into ever more remote parts of the globe would not leave a culture unchanged. I had seen more of the remains left behind by her ancestors than she had. But however mistily they might be recalled, the Anevrai were a name to conjure with: if they had believed they came from the influence of human blood on dragon eggs, then perhaps it might be true.

(I had an unfortunate suspicion, as I debated this point with her, that my scientific query might wind up sparking a religious schism. Faiths have broken into warring camps over far less.)

You must not think, however, that we spent the remainder of the winter discussing ancient history and theology, or the finer scientific points of Draconean nature. By far the larger portion of our time was devoted to planning for what would happen when the others awoke.

Recalling with no little trepidation my past experiences in other lands, I made a point of inquiring as to the political arrangements of the Sanctuary. I discovered that each cluster of villages is led by a sister-group—by which I mean a set of female Draconeans, sometimes as few as two or as many as five, but usually three or four—hatched from the same clutch. (Daughters hatched from the same mother in other clutches are also considered sisters, but in a lesser degree; the Draconeans use a separate word for that relationship.) These leaders are joined by a single male, elected from among his brethren to advise them and govern certain aspects of society.

But when it comes to the Sanctuary as a whole, it is the opinion of the Draconeans that allowing a sister-group to rule together would be inadvisable, on account of the strength of the familial bond. They instead have a council of elder females, most of whom are advanced enough in years that their clutchmates have gone to the sky. This council likewise has a single male adviser; he is drawn from the ranks of the elected representatives, but wins his more elevated place through a strenuous competition against his peers.

This council was the governing body to which Ruzt intended to present me, for they were the only ones who could make decisions for the entire Sanctuary. When I heard this, I muttered to myself, “I hope I do not cause any of those venerable ladies to drop dead of an apoplexy.”

As I have said, it was my habit there to speak Akhian when not attempting Draconean, because of the greater odds that Ruzt might comprehend a little of what I said. “Venerable” and “apoplexy” were much too arcane for that, but the word “dead” would certainly have come through; she gave me a sharp look. I waved it away. “Tell me how to behave so I will neither scare them nor give offense.”

We had debates over that, too—or rather, Ruzt debated with Kahhe and Zam, for on that subject I was wholly uninformed. We shaped plans and discarded them, sometimes thrice a day. We more than once lamented the entire enterprise, and wished we had never embarked upon it—though in my case not seriously, as that would mean either that I had died in the snow, or that I had never come to the Mrtyahaima. I still did not know the full cost of that latter decision… but I could not, without proof of tragedy, bring myself to regret it.

But that did not mean the road ahead would be an easy one. As the days lengthened and grew imperceptibly warmer, my thoughts turned to the world outside the Sanctuary of Wings—a world that was not ready in the slightest to meet the surviving descendants of their ancient rulers.

Late at night, when the sisters were asleep, I lay in my nest of yak-wool blankets and stared at the embers of the fire, wrestling with an impossible question.

How could I keep them all from being killed?

FIFTEEN

The seasons would not slow their turning for my sake. Spring came at its own pace, heedless of my readiness or lack thereof; I counted down the days until the Draconeans awoke with far more trepidation than had attended my first wedding. After all, it was only my own future which would be secured by that day. What happened in the Sanctuary of Wings would affect a great many more people than myself.

My countdown was quite literal, for the day of waking was set. The temple had its own caretakers—I was fortunate in the extreme not to have encountered them—and at dawn on that day, they would go into the hibernation hall and throw open the shutters I had seen. The hall being aligned with the rising of the sun at that time of year, the great quantity of light thus admitted would act as a wake-up call, disturbing the sleep of the Draconeans enough that the ringing of an enormous gong at the back of the hall would rouse them. They would file downstairs, enjoy a great feast prepared by the other caretakers, and then return to their home villages.

“It takes forever,” Kahhe said with feeling, when I inquired about the process. “The stairs are so narrow. And if you are at the back of the crowd, all the best food is gone by the time you get downstairs.”

I appreciated her perspective, for it humanized the Draconeans for me—if that word is not inappropriate in this context. By then I was accustomed to thinking of my three hostesses in such terms, but I suspected I might lose hold of that thought when I was surrounded by a mob that was angry, frightened, or both.

At dawn on the day of waking, I went outside one last time, tipping my face up to the thin spring sun. We had agreed that it was best not to surprise a group of sleepy Draconeans with an unexpected human; rather we would allow them a few days to resume their normal lives before the sisters presented me. But that meant I would be confined to the house for the intervening time, and I was not looking forward to the wait.

In fact it was every bit as bad as I had feared. Although the weather had improved enough for the Draconeans to wake, it was still quite cold outside; one could reasonably expect that I would be glad of a reason to take refuge in the warmth of the sisters’ house. After so much time spent out-of-doors, however, my enforced seclusion was positively suffocating. I missed the fresh air, and I missed the sunlight even more, weak though it still was.

My fretfulness grew with the onset of noise outside. Each village had a local ceremony to mark the return from hibernation; I did not dare peer out the exterior door to watch Imsali’s, but the sound of drums, flutes, and singing came through regardless. Draconeans chattered as they went to and fro, asking what had happened to the yak barn, and the sounds produced both yearning and fear in me. Yearning because I had gone for such a long time with no company apart from the sisters—I was overwhelmed by a surge of loneliness and homesickness. My habit had been to keep such things at bay by focusing upon the challenges before me… but waiting in the house, listening to the community outside, I missed my own with a longing so profound it was almost a physical pain. And thinking of the challenges that remained was no help, for that only brought on the fear.

I had more than enough fears to keep me occupied. Fear that someone would come inside, looking for one of the sisters, and I would not hide myself in time. Fear that Ruzt’s optimism was misplaced, and her fellows would tear me limb from limb on sight: I have faced danger many a time, but it is always the most frightening to me when it comes from thinking, rational creatures.

Above all loomed the fear that I would fail the sisters who had saved my life. I would not win over their kin; or I would succeed there, and fail among my own kind.

I had agreed to three days’ wait, but a part of me would gladly have run out the door and flung myself before the Draconeans with no warning whatsoever, simply to end the unbearable tension.

Instead I waited. For while I may not be a patient woman, I am quite good at pigheaded determination. I had agreed to three days. And so we passed the time, myself, Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam, waiting for the world to change.

“Are you ready?” Ruzt inquired.

“That may be the most absurd question anyone has ever asked me,” I said. In Akhian, which meant she understood very little of it; but my tone was clear enough.

I was dressed in clothing we had made during the winter—for you must not imagine my mountaineering garb would have survived a whole season’s wear without suffering quite a bit, and I would need it when I left the Sanctuary. We had debated the merits of dressing me in my own clothing for this occasion, but ultimately Kahhe’s argument had prevailed, that I would be less intimidating if clad in the familiar furs and yak wool of their own people. My body was sweltering inside the layers, for it was warm inside the house, but my hands and feet were cold with apprehension.

Zam had brought the word just a little while before: the council of elders was in Imsali. Ruzt had gone to speak with the temple caretakers more than a week ago, begging the council’s presence today; the message was given to them when they woke, and it seemed they had complied. Nine elderly female Draconeans waited for me outside, all without knowing what they waited for.

Nine elderly female Draconeans—and the entire population of Imsali, who must be wondering what the sisters were up to.

I forced my thoughts into the Draconean tongue. “Waiting will not make me more ready.”

Ruzt nodded. I found myself noting her posture and body language, filing it away under “nervousness, Draconean, signs of.” Such things are soothing to me, at moments like that.

Ruzt opened the door and led me outside.

Sunlight and cold air came in from the exterior door. Through the gap I could see a crowd of Draconeans, tall and small, waiting. One of them—a juvenile, judging by size—spotted me as I passed through the darkness of the antechamber, and tapped at an adult’s thigh in an unmistakable gesture. Though I could not hear the words through the roaring in my ears, I knew what they must be: “Mama, what’s that?” Or at least the Draconean equivalent.

I stepped into view, and the world went silent.

My imagination supplied a thousand Draconeans. In truth, there were less than a hundred. But when every last eye is upon you, the number seems far greater; and then, like a blow, I heard someone hiss a recognizable Draconean word: “Human.”

Silence broke, and pandemonium reigned.

The sisters bracketed me in a triangle. They had anticipated the rush of bodies that would occur, as the more energetic and warlike of their kin leapt to defend the council from my small, winter-starved self. Zam, who had once seized me and thrown me across the temple, bodily checked another Draconean who seemed bent on doing the same. Ruzt was shouting, her wings furled and her hands raised high. Kahhe stood ready to hurl me back through the doorway if necessary, where they could more easily guard me against attack.

But it was not necessary. One of the elders snapped her wings open, then another; the rest followed suit in short order. As if that were a gavel pounded upon a judge’s bench, the crowd fell into a muttering hush, and then quiet. A crisp order from one of the elders sent the various Draconeans back to their places, restoring the empty space that had surrounded my entrance.

I judged this the right time to speak. I had no wings to wrap around my body, but I performed the human approximation, laying both my hands atop my breast in the Draconean gesture of respect. Raising my voice, I spoke the words I had painstakingly rehearsed with the sisters. Only a faint tremor marred them.

“May the sun bless you and keep you warm. My name is Isabella, and I mean you no harm. I owe my life to these three sisters, who rescued me from certain death in the mountains. If it meets with the approval of you nine, the revered elders of the Sanctuary, I would like to repay their generosity and kindness by assisting your people in any way I can.”

My listeners could not have been more astonished had one of their yaks reared up on its hind legs and begun speaking. The only sounds were the constant rush of the wind and the dripping of icicles melting off the eaves. Then one of the elders said, stammering, “H-how does she know our language?”

I was in trickier waters now. My first speech was rehearsed to be fluid and well pronounced, but from here on out I must rely on my ability to comprehend and speak at speed. Since I was still more conversant with the older, religious form of the language than the one spoken in daily life, the potential for error was quite large. But just as my growing skill had caused me to see the sisters as people rather than creatures, so must I use conversation to prove to these elders that I, too, was a person.

My reply came more slowly than my initial greeting. “I have been studying all winter to learn it. There is a human language that is a little bit the same. My knowledge of that language helps.”

“You taught that thing?” one of the elders snapped at the sisters.

“If I had not learned,” I said before Ruzt could reply, “I would not be able to thank you now.” It came out more heavily accented than I would have liked, and more than a little tinged with Akhian elements. I still defaulted to these when my attention slipped. But I made myself understood, and that was enough.

One of the elders strode forward. Ruzt let her pass, so I stood my ground. This, too, we had expected and prepared for: the elder took me by the chin and tilted my head upward, so she could study my face more closely. To maintain direct eye contact would have been a challenge; to drop my gaze entirely would have made me look weak and vulnerable. Instead I fixed my gaze upon her muzzle, making no attempt to resist.

She turned my head this way and that, pulling off my hat to finger my hair, which must have been very strange to her. I was abruptly conscious of its ragged, matted state, and the smell it must have carried. (I had washed it a handful of times during the winter, but under the circumstances, a wet head was less than wise.) When she attempted to peel back my lips, however, I pulled away. “If you want to see my teeth,” I said, politely but firmly, “then ask.”

I could see that my response amused her. This, however, did not prevent her from turning a gimlet eye on Ruzt and the other two. “You know you have broken a law.”

All three sisters brought their wings forward, around their bodies. Ruzt said, “We know. We would not do so without good reason.”

“And what is your reason?” This came from one of the other elders, the one I suspected to be the oldest of them all. Draconeans show few signs of aging compared with the grey hair and wrinkled skin of humans, but her eyes were sunken and her bone structure more pronounced, and her movements were slow and cautious.

My command of the language did not suffice to let me follow Ruzt’s reply in its entirety, but its content was familiar to me. These Draconeans knew themselves to be confined to the Sanctuary, with no place more remote and protected to which they might flee; now she told them they were likely the last of their kind. Contact with humans, she warned them, was inevitable. They could wait for it to happen on our terms—by which I mean those of my species—or take the first steps themselves, in a fashion they might hope to control. And the first step was to acquire a single human, to see whether she could be reasoned with.

“But why did you hide her?” another elder asked. The one who had examined me was among her peers once more, watching this all with a thoughtful eye. “Why not inform us at once?”

“We thought she was going to die,” Zam said. The bluntness of it shook me, even though the danger was by then long past—the danger of dying from my ordeal in the mountains, at least. My current peril was still an open question. Ruzt had promised to do her best to help me escape if the situation turned against me, but her best was likely to amount to a temporary stay of execution at most.

Kahhe intervened before anyone could think too much about the merits of following through on the notion of my death. “Also, it was almost time for hibernation. We could not ask the revered elders to stay awake, and so nothing could happen before spring at the earliest anyway. We thought we could use the winter as a test—to see whether we could learn to speak with her, and how she would react to us.”

I thought of my screams and weeping. My first impression could not have been a good one. But no one here needed to hear of that, and so I offered up, “I helped with the yaks.”

The elder who had examined me laughed at that. Her reaction pleased me, for laughter is a great reducer of tension. A number of Draconeans glared at her, elders and villagers alike, but I had one person here besides the sisters who did not view me as an imminent threat.

I would need to convince a great many more, though, before we could make anything like progress. “If you please,” I said, “I would like to tell you about the places outside the Sanctuary. Whatever you decide to do, there are things you should know. But it will take me a long time to tell you, because my speech is not as good as I would like.” With a nod toward Ruzt, I said, “This honoured sister’s help would make it easier.”

That last was my own addition, and it made Ruzt start with surprise. She was not the only one conversant with the religious form of the language; most of the elders spoke it quite well. With that as a bridge, I could manage with them almost as well as I did with her. But she was the one who had started this all, persuading Kahhe and Zam to take the risk of contacting the human world. If it ended in disaster, she was already condemned, and I could do nothing to save her. I wanted to make certain, though, that if it ended in success, she received the credit she deserved. And for that to happen, she must remain a part of what followed.

As it turned out, however, my comment was based on a foolish optimism. The eldest Draconean said, “All three of them will be coming with us. They must face—”

Her last word was one I did not know, but I could fill in its meaning for myself: judgment.

I do not know whether it failed to occur to the council of elders that they should take steps to ensure word of my presence in the Sanctuary did not spread, or whether they gave it up as a lost cause from the start. If it was the former, they were foolish; if the latter, quite pragmatically wise.

To say that the entire Sanctuary knew before the day was out would be an exaggeration, but not much of one. I had not realized that mews, in addition to acting as aerial yak-dogs, could also be trained in the manner of carrier pigeons; they are not used for this during the winter, on account of the cold and the limited need for communication. But now the weather had warmed, and news of a human in Imsali quite literally flew from one settlement to another. In my ignorance of Draconean ways, I had argued for Ruzt’s continued presence without realizing the whole sister-group would be called to accompany us; but all three proved necessary, for my journey from Imsali to the place of the elders was anything but quiet.

The mountain basin was quite transformed from its appearance earlier that winter, when we chased the yaks of Imsali hither and yon and I trespassed in the temple. Although snow still lay deep in many places, particularly on northern slopes or where trees provided shade, the thaw had begun; the sound of snowmelt streams was as constant as the wind. Six months previously I would never have dreamt of calling the temperature balmy, but after what I had endured, I almost felt I could survive with only three layers on.

By far the greatest transformation, however, was one of movement. All winter long the Sanctuary had lain quiet, with only the occasional yak herd or accompanying caretaker with mews to disturb its stillness. Now there were Draconeans everywhere: chivvying their livestock along, travelling between villages, assessing the state of their fields and fences, chopping wood to make repairs. Their total numbers were not so large; even the most densely settled parts of the Sanctuary, west of Anshakkar, were still almost uninhabited compared to the Scirling countryside, which is much flatter and more arable. But after months of near-total solitude, I felt as if I were on the busiest street in Falchester—and all the more so because it seemed like every Draconean within five kilometers of our path diverted to see me with their own eyes.

Our party was not one that could pass in stealth. The nine elders made quite a crowd on their own; and of course they could not be expected to travel in rough fashion, given their advanced age and great status. Compared with an Anthiopean potentate, their entourages were not worth the name; but each had at least one attendant, in many cases two, whose duty was to ease their way. To this we added myself, Ruzt, Kahhe, Zam, and a sister-group of four from Imsali who had volunteered to come as supplemental guards. The dominant one among them, a tall Draconean named Esdarr, made no secret of the fact that they did not trust me in the slightest: along the way I learned that they were the ones who ought to have had winter duty that year, and their relief at being spared the task had soured greatly when they discovered the reason.

Altogether it made for a cavalcade of thirty—a draconicade, one might more accurately call it, except that is not a proper word. (The Draconeans made no use of ponies, and for good reason. The poor equines come near to dying of fright at the sight or scent of a Draconean.) I travelled in the center of it, insulated from the gawping locals by the ring of the elders and their attendants, and insulated from the elders by the Draconeans of Imsali.

None of this arrangement did any good when we passed through a narrow defile scarcely ten meters wide.

I had, on that journey, attempted to rein in my natural curiosity, lest it look like spying. Although I longed to see as much as I could of the Sanctuary—male Draconeans most particularly, as I had been too distracted during the revelation in Imsali to look for them—I kept my eyes fixed on the path ahead of me, gazing no farther than the limits of our group. But when a scrabbling sound came from overhead, I could not stop myself from looking up. I have too often been in wilderness where that sound might herald a predator or a dangerous rockfall to let it pass without suspicion.

Even as I looked up, wings blotted out the sun.

They descended upon us with bone-chilling battle cries, leaping from concealment down into our midst. I ducked—the instinctive reaction of a creature faced with an airborne threat—and claws swiped above, close enough to tear my hat from my head. For an instant I was nineteen again and on my way to Drustanev, having my first encounter with a wild dragon.

Then the present day reasserted itself. My attacker was no rock-wyrm; it was a Draconean, one of several who had launched themselves into our midst. The other sister-group from Imsali had come to protect people against me, and so they were slow to react to this new threat. But Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam did not hesitate: they instantly formed up around me, correctly guessing that I was the target of this assault.

I could do no more than crouch in their midst, trying to watch in every direction at once lest an enemy slip through. The attackers wielded curved knives whose blades flashed viciously in the sun. Beyond the mêlée I could hear the elders calling for a halt, but no one was paying them any heed. A scream cut through the snarls: someone fell, and in the chaos I could not see whether it was a friend or a foe. Then the flow shifted, surging away from me, and a Draconean leapt into the air, rowing hard with her wings in an attempt to gain enough altitude to escape our crowd. But someone else leapt after—Zam—and dragged the fleeing one down to earth once more.

The final tally was three dead out of eight; two sister-groups had banded together for the ambush. Five of ours were wounded to one degree or another, including both Ruzt and Zam. But none on our side had perished, and the sheer relief of that turned my knees to water. I knew very well that if someone had died defending me, the loss would have poisoned minds against my cause, perhaps beyond repair. As it was, the death of three attackers was bad enough, for it was my presence that had provoked them to this extreme.

One of the elders confronted me after order had been restored. Her name was Tarshi, I thought; I was working hard to familiarize myself with them all. Without preamble, she said, “You did not fight.”

“I do not know how,” I said. It was more or less true: my brother Andrew had made good on his offer to teach me a few things I might use to defend myself, but they would have been of limited use against Draconeans, who had a tremendous advantage in both height and mass, and claws and knives besides. Honesty prompted me to add, “And if I fought, what would you think of me then?”

She made no reply to that, simply turning away and rejoining her peers. It was not my most glorious moment; but at that particular moment, glory would have served me ill. The dreadful human, heir to a legacy of murder and rebellion, cowered in the face of Draconean fury. Under the circumstances, it amounted to a diplomatic master stroke—albeit a wholly inadvertent one.

SIXTEEN

The ambush shook everyone in the party, I think, for we travelled with a great deal more care after that. The elders were not accustomed to thinking of themselves as the targets of a threat—and they had not been even in this instance, as the attack was directed primarily at me and secondarily toward the three sisters who had brought me there. But their society is agrarian and scattered enough that they rarely if ever face the kinds of conflicts that are familiar to the rulers of more populous and concentrated states, and the realization that my presence might spark an actual rebellion was an unpleasant surprise.

For my own part, I did not like the feeling that every step I took shook the ground, that simply by existing within the Sanctuary I was spreading fear and discord. But how much worse, I reasoned, would it have been had this first contact happened under different circumstances? Everything that made me vulnerable—my lack of companions, my lack of martial capability—also made me less of a threat. In a sense, I traded my safety for theirs… albeit not by my own choice. This was the decision of Ruzt and Kahhe and Zam, who leapt on the opportunity presented by a lone human, bereft of support.

It was with a great deal of trepidation that I came to the place of the elders. This was the phrase used to describe it, and so generic were the words that I had no idea what to expect. Not the temple, that much I knew; we had rounded the base of Anshakkar, leaving those sacred chambers far behind. A palace, perhaps?

That term will do as well as any, though it implies a much grander structure than the reality. The place of the elders was the set of buildings where those nine Draconeans dwelt, along with their male counterpart. Although the greatest of these was smaller than the yak barn of Imsali, it was far larger than any ordinary house, and much more finely made, with carved decoration outside and painted inside. In the summer months the terrain around the compound was a kind of garden, consisting mostly of sculpted rocks, in which they would plant flowers and other beauteous greenery; when I arrived, however, it was of course still mired in winter’s leavings.

The three sisters and I were given a chamber to sleep in, while the four who had come as our guards were dispatched back to Imsali. This was by decree, not the sister-group’s voluntary choice; the elders had security enough there, and I suspect they did not want the disruption our self-appointed watchdogs might bring. I took the decision as an encouraging sign, for it also sent away several Draconeans who were hostile to me, leaving us greater peace and quiet in which to speak. Of course this did not last; nearly every village in the Sanctuary sent representatives to the place of the elders, to examine me or render their opinions on what ought to be done. But we had a little breathing space before those began arriving.

Our meetings I expected to take place in the central chamber of the largest building, which was an audience hall. We did indeed spend a great deal of time in there—enough so that the place became nearly as suffocating to me as the sisters’ house, though that was due as much to my desire to leave the Sanctuary as to the amount of time I spent inside. But we were also outdoors a great deal, weather permitting, for the Draconean religion as it was practiced in the Sanctuary revolved around the contrast between two extremes: the secrecy and protection of a cave, and the vitality of the sun in the open sky.

This I learned from the first male Draconean of my acquaintance, a fellow named Habarz who was the counterpart of the ruling council of elders. I tried not to show my excitement upon being introduced to him, but I fear I did not succeed very well.

Physically Habarz was not much different from the females: sexual dimorphism among their species is much less apparent than in humans, consisting primarily of a larger and more interestingly patterned ruff, which is considered their most attractively masculine feature. His was far from the most impressive, though at the time I had no real basis for comparison. Unlike some males of his kind, who earn their keep through what I can only term stud service, Habarz was a scholar.

His work bore little resemblance to mine, of course: scholarship in the Sanctuary was far more theological in nature than scientific. Male Draconeans, as I have said, are in the minority of their species; they constitute no more than twenty percent of the population, with any given clutch ordinarily containing several sisters and a single brother. Although no one admitted it openly to me, by reading between the lines, I came to understand that their eggs were kept communally—likely somewhere in or near the temple; I was not about to ask—where a cadre of elder males watched over them. Once hatched and old enough to travel, the juveniles were sent back to their home villages, where again they were in the custody of the oldest male age group. They do pay attention to which eggs came from which female, and not only that Draconean but all of her immediate sisters are considered the mothers of that clutch; but the care and education of the young is the responsibility of the males en masse.

In light of this, it is unsurprising that those same males should predominantly occupy the intellectual roles of Draconean society. Much to my amusement, I had once again marked myself as peculiarly masculine—but not for quite the same reasons as usual. My tendency to wander about and put myself into danger is a quality associated with female Draconeans (who, being more numerous, are more easily risked); my drawing skills, on the other hand, acquired in childhood as part of my feminine accomplishments, are more commonly seen as masculine. The sisters frequently whittle geometric patterns, but it is their brothers who paint figurative art.

Figurative—and religious, for the two go hand in hand. Males form not only the majority of the artistic class I mentioned before, but the majority of the spiritual leadership; or rather I should say it in reverse sequence, for it is the latter which leads to the former. Their religious role also leads to the greater rate of literacy among males, as a modernized version of the ancient script is used primarily for religious texts and important historical documents. After all, there is little need for reading or writing when one spends the majority of one’s summer either farming or herding yaks, and the majority of the long and idle winter asleep.

(My readers now may be wondering about Ruzt. I had indeed found a kindred soul, in the sense of one who did not quite fit her society’s usual mold: her knowledge of the archaic tongue and small skill at reading were both quite unusual for her gender.)

So: these were the male Draconeans, and Habarz was their chief representative. He and I spoke quite a lot during my time at the place of the elders, for reasons he presented quite frankly. “Regardless of what happens with you,” he said, “we should have a record of it for future generations to consider.”

I decided to risk a little levity. “Then I hope what you record is not, ‘on such-and-such a day we cut off the human’s head.’”

He laughed, and from then on I was more at ease with him. But he did not tell me that my fears were unfounded… for we both knew they were not.

Establishing new diplomatic relations is a difficult enough task under any circumstances. Now imagine, if you will, that this difficulty is compounded both by a lack of fluent communication, and by the diplomatic ineptitude of the ambassador. The proceedings seemed as if they would drag on until the following century.

The question that so vexed us was, what to do next? It was all fine and well to make contact with a lone human, but that was only the first step along a very long and treacherous path. I laid the groundwork by explaining to them the situation of the world outside—a subject that could have filled a year on its own, even without the interference of linguistic obstacles, but I confined myself to the most basic elements only. All of it was in the service of making a fundamental point: that whatever they chose to do with me, further contact was inevitable. With armies sharpening their bayonets on both sides of the Mrtyahaima, sooner or later someone would come tramping through the Sanctuary, and that someone would probably be armed. When that happened…

I had long feared for the safety of dragons, once we knew the secret of preserving and using their bones. My new fear was to that one as the Great Cataract was to the melting icicles outside. So few in number were the Draconeans, it would take very little to exterminate them.

And as much as I wished to pretend otherwise, I knew that extermination was a distinct possibility. My extraordinary circumstances had induced me to see the sisters as people rather than as monstrous beasts, but how many others would pause long enough to look beyond their initial impressions?

Any plan that did not end in my imprisonment or death also required the elders to see me as a person, rather than as a monstrous beast. We spent long hours on historical debates over the Downfall, with me citing our own body of evidence, the picture it presented of merciless tyrants overthrown for their cruelty. The basic facts of the Downfall were not particularly in question, though my poor knowledge of Scripture hobbled me on more than one occasion; what we argued about was motivation, until my head ached. Finally I said, in utter weariness, “Oh, what does it matter? I have no doubt there were good Draconeans and bad humans. But they are all thousands of years dead and gone, and what anyone thought or did then is of less import than what they will think and do now.”

“The human has a point,” Tarshi said to her fellow elders. “And if we do not let go of that question for now, another thousand years may pass before we get anywhere.” Habarz grumbled—his scholarly soul longed to establish the truth—but to my relief, the council accepted Tarshi’s point, and we moved on.

One aspect of being at the place of the elders was an unmitigated benefit: I ate better there than I had since leaving Vidwatha. The elders received taxes in kind from villages all over the Sanctuary, and although it was all dried, smoked, or otherwise preserved (as fresh food was still quite some ways off), the variety was much greater. I confess that I ate them out of their entire stock of a certain dried berry, which I craved from the moment I tasted it; this berry has properties similar to those of citrus fruit, and made a dramatic change in my health. And I cannot help but think that also benefited my diplomatic efforts, as an ambassador weak from malnutrition makes a very unimpressive show.

I made a point of taking walks in the garden with each of the elders, starting with Sejeat, the one who had tried to examine my teeth in Imsali. (I was glad I had prevented her. Devouring those berries meant I ultimately lost only one tooth to scurvy, but at the time the interior of my mouth was not a pretty sight.) Sejeat was by far the most curious and accepting of me; Urrte the least so—and to my surprise, Urrte was also the youngest of the lot. But although it is often true that the elderly are the most set in their ways, the least receptive to new ideas and change, it is not by any means universally true. My suspicion was that Urrte, being not only the youngest but the newest to the council, felt the need to establish her devotion to Draconean tradition.

“Are your sisters all dead?” Sejeat asked me one day.

“I never had any,” I said, and laughed a little. “I am more like the opposite of a Draconean; all my siblings are brothers. But my mother, sun be praised, birthed us all singly, rather than in a group.” Having endured childbirth once, I shuddered to imagine even twins, let alone anything more.

Speaking of my brothers was safe enough, but she continued to question me about my family, which led inevitably to those closer to my heart: Suhail, my son, all those who had found a place in my life by routes either personal or professional. I struggled to maintain a stiff upper lip—and then, upon reflection, wondered if that was truly the best course of action. Would it not help for the Draconeans to see that a human was capable of feeling?

Enough time had passed since the avalanche that I was able to speak of my loved ones without collapsing into tears as I had before. Indeed, such conversations gave both me and my purpose strength: as the Sanctuary warmed, the day when I might attempt the col drew nearer. My passionate determination to be reunited with them interwove itself with my passionate determination to aid the Draconeans, and both blazed higher with every passing day.

I worked half the night with Ruzt to prepare my words to the council, so that I could present my vision for a path forward without confusion. The next morning, I requested permission for us to meet outside; this was, I said, a matter for sunlight, not a cave. The latter was the place for inaction, careful contemplation before any decision might be made. My aim that day was to spur them to action.

The servants at the place of the elders had tidied the garden for spring planting, though it was still winter-barren. I tipped my head back, turning my face to the sun—a gesture natural to me, but also one with significance to the Draconeans, having the effect of a silent prayer. Then, drawing in a deep breath, I began.

“My people,” I said, “must become accustomed to the notion of your people as real creatures—before they see one in the living flesh. It is likely that this has already begun: unless my companions all perished in the avalanche, they will by now have spread the word of our discovery in the mountains. If you permit me to return to the outside world, I can fan the flames of enthusiasm for all things Draconean, which have been burning since we discovered the lost hatching ground.” I had told them of this—not omitting the fact that I wept to see the tracks of those ancient Draconean hatchlings, who perished waiting for caretakers who would never come. The memory shook me even more now than it had then, when I thought the creatures only dumb beasts, but I went on.

“I can declare my intent to find a living population. Both my fame and my connections in the scholarly community will draw support to my cause; I can begin a movement for the preservation of the Sanctuary even before it is ‘found.’ When your existence is revealed to the world, there will be humans standing ready to support you, and together they will act as a defense for your well-being.”

The elders did not like this plan, and I cannot blame them one bit. It would be a gamble on a scale so large, no word in any of our languages could encompass it—though they certainly made a thorough hunt for one, ranging through vocabulary far beyond my ken. Sejeat was on my side, and Tarshi seemed willing to consider it, but the remainder…

“Only a few should know of us,” Kuvrey said. She was the eldest of the lot, and tended to assert her seniority. “If you carry a message from the council to some human government—”

“Then that government will take the situation out of both my hands and your own,” I said, before this suggestion could garner much support. “They can slaughter you all in secret, and the general human public will never know the truth. I could tell them—but that would do you little good once you are dead. Or perhaps they will simply come in here and—” I did not know the Draconean word for “subjugate,” having foolishly not thought to obtain it for this conversation. I made a gesture with my hand instead, clenching my fist tight. “They will keep you in pens, as you keep yaks. And it does not matter which government I tell; the risk will be the same.” As much as I liked Queen Miriam and generally thought well of her, there was the Synedrion to consider. And my influence would be less than nothing at the court of the Vidwathi or Tser-zhag kings—much less that of the Yelangese emperor.

These hazards did not vanish under my plan, of course. But popular sentiment at least stood a chance of acting as a check on such actions—a better chance than any other possibility I saw.

“What if we sent our own representative out?” Sejeat asked. “Someone you can take in secret to negotiate.”

“Where would I take that person?” It came out more curtly than I would have liked, but my body was stiff with tension. “I could not even get them to Thokha before someone saw us, much less to my own homeland. And they would be in even more danger than I am here, with less protection. Your—” I paused, looking at Ruzt, who supplied the word that had already slipped through the gaps in my increasingly leaky mind. “Your representative would be killed. I wish it were not so, but it would happen.” I did not know the Draconean word for “suicide,” and could not muster the will to ask for it, but I believe my meaning came through.

When all was said and done, only one thing carried us through that morass of difficulty: the fact that contact with the outside world was a matter that had troubled the council of elders for a generation or more. That it was inevitable and necessary, they agreed, but no further had they gotten; they had, in the manner of councils everywhere, dithered without reaching any conclusion. But much of their dithering had hinged on the lack of information to guide their actions, and now that lack was resolved. Furthermore, my presence forced their hands. As Tarshi said bluntly, “We cannot simply disregard the problem. We have three choices: keep her here, send her out again, or kill her.”

It took all my will not to flinch when she said that last. By then I was fairly certain Tarshi was on my side; she only mentioned that possibility out of scrupulous fairness. Other elements on the council, however, were not nearly so sympathetic, Urrte chief among them. And every day messengers came from various parts of the Sanctuary—Draconean messengers; this was far too important for mews—urging them to that final course. Fortunately for me, the remainder knew that such action would solve nothing, and only squander an opportunity that might not come again. (How often does a dragon-friendly wanderer fall into one’s lap, under conditions that dispose her to be grateful to one’s people?)

Indeed, the hostility served my purpose in a peculiar fashion, for it also weighted the scale against keeping me in the Sanctuary. While in theory my continued presence would give the Draconeans a chance to acclimate themselves to humanity, in practice we all knew it would only inflame sentiment still further. My murder, I told Sejeat quite bluntly, would bring all the ills of my execution and more, as it would only deepen the rift between the progressive, outward-looking faction and the reactionaries who wished to remain isolated. Furthermore, if it were ever to be discovered by humans, it would poison public opinion against the residents of the Sanctuary.

Even when there is no good choice, a choice must be made: lacking anything better, we chose what appeared to be the least of the available evils. By a narrow margin, and by means of a great deal of acrimonious wrangling, we finally arrived at a decision.

Kuvrey spoke for the council, in the sunlight, where decisions are made. “You will leave the Sanctuary,” she said. “Go forth to your people, and tell them of us; then come find us again when they are ready.”

I did not say to her, they will never be ready. I had not been ready to meet the elders, but had gone ahead regardless, for there was no other choice. We had already fallen from the cliff face: we must find a way to fly before we reached the ground.

SEVENTEEN

I was not alone as I travelled toward the edge of the Sanctuary, to the col between Gyaptse and Cheja. For the return to Imsali, I had not only my three hostesses but an honour guard from the place of the elders—the latter partly for my own protection, and partly for the protection of the dignitaries who travelled with me. Urrte had campaigned to be one of my escorts, making no secret of the fact that she looked forward to wishing me good riddance; fortunately for the pleasantness of my journey, she was voted down. Instead I had Sejeat and Kuvrey to represent the council, and Habarz to bless my departure. We went by less-trammeled paths, and arrived in Imsali without difficulty.

Even had I been the most beloved figure in the Sanctuary, I would not have tarried long in Imsali. Over the long months of winter I had mostly succeeded in turning my thoughts away from the circumstances under which I vanished: the avalanche, the unknown fate of my companions, and the certainty that the world believed me dead. But now that my departure was under way, the weight of those concerns returned in force, and I chafed at every delay.

I will not pretend that I felt no trepidation at all. So long as I remained where I was, everything outside the Sanctuary was like a hand of cards dealt but not yet examined. They might be good or they might be bad; once I lifted them from the table, all possibilities but one would vanish. I might lose the dread of tragedy… or I might lose the buoyancy of hope. Until I looked at my cards, I suffered the one, but also clung to the other.

But it is not in my nature to hide from such things when I have the option of moving forward. So far as I am concerned, uncertainty and inaction are among the worst forms of torture: it was much easier to head for the col than to hide in the Sanctuary, ignorant of what lay beyond.

And so I dressed myself once more in my mountaineering clothes—now rather baggier than before, owing to the weight I had lost over the winter. I was a far cry from the trim, fit woman who had approached the col from the east, though trekking to the place of the elders and back had done a small amount to put me back in condition. My hair was ragged, my skin weathered by sun and cold wind, my limbs pale as rawhide and every bit as stringy. Alone, I stood little chance of crossing the border of the Sanctuary; the western slope might be forgiving enough to spare a hypothermic, concussed woman staggering along on a cracked fibula, but the eastern side would put an end to me in short order. I doubted I could even make it down the Cursed Crack on my own, by any means other than falling.

Fortunately, I would have Draconean aid in the first part of my travels. The sisters did not dare help me much outside the Sanctuary, but their limited capacity for flight was sufficient to at least carry me over the worst parts of the descent along Cheja’s slopes. After that… the impending mental and physical challenges of crossing the Cheja Glacier solo gave me something to think about besides more personal fears.

First the col; then the journey to Hlamtse Rong; then I intended to get myself deported by the Tser-zhag. (What I had once spoken as a jest had in truth become the most practical method of leaving the country.) Once in Vidwatha, my true undertaking would begin.

Even for a woman who has faced as many trials as I have, it was a daunting prospect.

Habarz’s blessing was a simple one. He marked a yellow spot on my forehead with some kind of pollen—the symbol of the sun—and recited a prayer comparing my journey to that of the sun, which vanishes into an abyssal cave each night only to reappear the following day. There were butter lamps, whose flame and fuel are both reminiscent of the sun; there was a bell, to drive away any ill fortune that might follow me. I wished the ritual were known to me, for then I might have taken comfort in its familiar shape. As matters stood, it did nothing to calm my nerves, and I fear I was more brusque in my farewells to Kuvrey and Sejeat than I should have been.

But they did not take offense. “May we see you again soon,” Kuvrey said. With an awkward curtsey, I departed.

Four of us set out from Imsali: myself, Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam. The bright air and singing birds made it feel like a springtime ramble, but the sisters were irritable, for they were in the process of shedding their scales. These had indeed bleached pale during the winter, and I was pleased to see my theory confirmed, with the new layer much darker than the old. They also collected their shed scales, as I had surmised, and saved them for later use as insulation.

The moulting process likely did not explain all of their irritability; nerves also accounted for a great deal. But we were all happy to blame the situation on biology, rather than speak of our impending lunacy. Conversation fell away as we approached the col, until we marched in almost complete silence.

I was just as glad not to be speaking. Even a small gain in elevation can have a shocking effect on the body, and my reduced condition meant I was breathing hard long before we neared the top. I skidded often on the rocky slopes, making errors I would never have committed a year before, and could ill afford if I were to make it to Hlamtse Rong alive. Each slip motivated me to sharpen my focus, until we reached the snow line, above which the mountains never thawed.

Then I stood, gazing at the col. It is rare that profound changes in one’s life are marked by so sharp a geographic boundary: the woman I had been on the eastern side of that ridge was not the woman who now stood on the west. Crossing over would not transform me back into my former self—and I would not accept such a reversion if it were offered. I only hoped that my return journey would not bring a second transformation, one into a life of disaster and sorrow.

It seemed that exhaustion and nerves had the power to turn me maudlin. I shook off those sentiments, turning to the sisters and saying, “Should we attempt our crossing today?”

After some conference, we agreed that we should camp below the snow line and wait until the following day. Apart from strong winds, we had relatively little to fear from the weather in this season—this was the time of year my companions and I had originally aimed for in our own plans—and as much as I wished to move forward, I knew the respite would do me good.

That night I sat outside our tent, looking at the stars and thinking of the night before my human companions and I began our assault on the col, when I had sat around the fire with Suhail and Tom, discussing the biology of an unknown draconic species. The prospect that either of them could be dead—or both—gripped my heart so painfully, I honestly thought for a moment that I might be suffering a heart attack. Such things have been known to strike people who exert themselves too much at high elevations. But it was only fear; and the only cure was to rejoin the human world—where, I told myself firmly, I was certain to find them alive. I would accept no other prospect.

And to find them, I myself must survive what lay before me.

Dawn on this side of the range was a cold, grey affair, though Anshakkar burned like a torch to light our way. Despite fierce winds that would make crossing the col difficult, we set out early, not wanting to be caught cold and tired on the descent, where we would rapidly lose our light.

I am grateful to the sisters, who formed a team as effective as any cordée of mountaineers. Their irritability notwithstanding, they worked together in a harmony that was almost supernatural, anticipating each others’ moves without a word being said. In skill they were not comparable to the humans who challenge themselves on the slopes and peaks of the world; but the structure of their society, which treats the sister-group as the highest bond, fosters an enviable degree of cooperation. (In its best form: I will not pretend all groups achieve or maintain such cordiality.) Although I was not included in that harmony or familiarity, I benefited from it all the same, and by the time we neared the crest of the col an upwelling of confidence buoyed my tired limbs. The sun had risen high enough to light our slope; to reduce the risk of another avalanche, we were making our way along a stony little rise at the margin of the snow slope I had wandered down months before.

Then Zam’s powerful arm reached out and slammed me sideways, flattening me against the rock.

She did not mean me harm. It was the instinct of a Draconean who has long guarded the borders of her land: she saw movement, and acted swiftly to hide us.

I had blithely assumed we left the risk of ambush behind in Imsali. But if someone wished us to vanish quietly, without causing a fuss… what better place to do it than here, on the edge of the Sanctuary, where no one was present to see?

My smoked-glass goggles were long gone, having vanished along with my spare alpenstock during the avalanche, but I had contrived a slitted eye mask to protect my vision against the glare of snow. Now I pulled it off, the better to see what lay ahead.

The movement was at the top of the col, near the flank of Cheja. A figure—no, two of them, moving back and forth along the snow. I recall thinking, with the cold-blooded calculation of fear, that it was peculiar behaviour for ambushers, who surely must wish not to be observed before they struck.

Then I measured the figures against the surrounding terrain.

Zam was too slow to stop me. I charged forward, scrambling up the slope at a pace much faster than was wise, shouting as I went. The wind tore my words away. I kept losing sight of the pair, for I had to look where I put my hands and feet lest I fall to my death; and to go through the snow would be no faster, as then I would only flounder along as if through mud. But I glanced up as often as I could—and then my next glance showed me one of the figures sliding down toward me at a pace even more unsafe, dislodging stones that could easily have rewarded us with another avalanche.

But the mountains, ever my perverse ally, held their peace. And then the figure skidded to a halt and remained where it was, as if all strength had fled. The task of crossing the remaining ground fell to me. I staggered upward, a name already on my lips, even though the man in front of me was so heavily bundled in clothing that to claim recognition was sheer hubris. I knew him; I would know him anywhere. “Suhail.”

His hands were shaking as he dragged his goggles loose. They disclosed a face as weathered as my own, and eyes spilling over with disbelieving tears. Though the wind tore the sound away, his lips shaped the words, “All praise to God.”

Nothing in my life has ever felt more like a miracle. I collapsed to my knees at his side; and we were still locked in embrace when Thu, descending with a great deal more care, arrived to witness our reunion.

The story came out in pieces, for neither of us was coherent enough to make it through more than half a sentence at a time.

Although my career has been built on a foundation of careful observation, I doubted the evidence of my own eyes. How could those two men be there? It was far too early in the spring for them to have returned to Tser-nga; for me to chance the heights at this date was ambitious, and possible only because I began from so nearby. Had I let myself dream of my companions’ return, I would have calculated it for a month hence.

The answer, of course, was that their departure point was equally close. Suhail and Thu had spent the winter in Hlamtse Rong—not because they were snowed in, as I had been, but because they refused to leave.

They had no expectation of my survival. But Suhail would not hear of leaving my body in the mountains; he was determined to wait until spring, and then comb the path of the avalanche until he found my remains and gave them a proper burial. To his mind, the only question was who would stay with him, and who would go to inform the Scirling army of my death and the results of our expedition.

All of my companions had survived. I went as limp as Suhail at that news; I could not have stood up for all the iron in the world. They had escaped the worst of the avalanche, faring much better than I did; but their attempts to find me in the aftermath had comprehensively failed, though they risked their lives in the search. Only the certainty that all four of them would die if they remained at the col had finally driven them down—and even at that, the other three had dragged Suhail away by main force. By the time the storm passed, there was no hope of finding me alive; and indeed, by then I would have been dead were it not for my Draconean rescuers. They returned to Hlamtse Rong in grief, and there agreed that Chendley and Tom would leave, while Suhail and Thu would stay.

Why that division? I did not ask immediately, though I did wonder. Chendley’s duties called him east, of course; and Suhail, as I have said, insisted on waiting for spring. To send Chendley off on his own would have been much too hazardous, and so he needed a companion. But why was it Tom who had gone, and not Thu?

The answer to that came later. In the meanwhile, they had a question of their own, to wit: how in God’s name had I survived?

I finally broke from my daze enough to look around. The sisters had not followed me in my uphill charge; that was hardly surprising. But what on earth could I possibly say to explain my presence here, if I could not point to a Draconean as the answer?

They must have conducted a rapid argument amongst themselves, while I was lost to the world in my own reunion. When I looked up, Ruzt was concealed among the rocks not far away, watching me with a steady eye. I met her gaze, and something passed between us. We were not sisters, to read one another’s minds through long familiarity; but we had built a rapport over the winter months, in which we learned to communicate by means both verbal and otherwise, and I knew what she was saying now.

With my heart beating so strongly I could taste my pulse upon my tongue, I nodded my agreement.

She stepped out from behind the rocks, standing tall in the sun. “There,” I said, my voice pleasingly steady. “There is the Draconean who saved my life.”

The side of a mountain above the snow line is not the best place to conduct an extended conversation. At some point during what followed, we agreed to retire to a more comfortable spot—still on the western side of the col.

Suhail and Thu had known for months that such organisms existed: humanoid bodies with draconic heads. And Suhail, of course, had both his archaeological knowledge and his familiarity with my draconic expertise to draw on in forming conclusions based on that fact; moreover, he had the entirety of a long Mrtyahaiman winter in which to contemplate the possibilities. But as I myself had discovered, it is one thing to find a frozen specimen, and quite another to meet the living cousin face to face. (Or rather three of them, as Kahhe and Zam had, with palpable reluctance, joined Ruzt in view.)

I could scarcely tear my gaze away from my husband. Winter had left its marks upon him, as it had upon me. For many years his family had pressured him to become a prayer-leader; the colloquial phrase for this is “to grow one’s beard,” as Amaneen prayer-leaders do not shave their faces. I assumed Suhail was no more inclined to the religious life now than he had been, but he had at least grown his beard: a useful addition to the face in a Mrtyahaiman winter, though one I hoped he did not intend to keep. This, I eventually realized, was a source of some hilarity to Zam, who had found my own hair astonishing enough; she had not realized that the males of my species could grow it upon their chins as well.

But there was little hilarity in those initial moments, as we were all too busy reeling from our various shocks. Suhail’s own gaze kept alternating between me and the Draconeans, pulled this way and that by his dumbfounded relief on the one hand, and his astonished curiosity on the other. When I explained the situation to my caretakers, his expression took on the abstracted cast I knew so well; it was the look he bore when the greater part of his mind was devoted to efforts linguistic. “You were right,” I said to him, breaking off my explanation. “Their language is related to Lashon and Akhian. No doubt you’ll be more fluent than I am in a week.”

The complex tangle of languages caused no little difficulty. My Draconean companions were accustomed to hearing me mutter to myself in Akhian, but Scirling was wholly unfamiliar to them, and it made them nervous: to them it had the sound of a code, used so they could not hope to guess at what I was saying. But it was the only language Thu and I had in common; and he and Suhail still resorted to Yelangese on occasion, which they had used a great deal during their own winter sojourn. Together with Draconean, there were four languages tumbling around in our conversation, and matters often ground to halt while a concept was carried through the necessary chain of translations.

My first task was to explain to the sisters who these two men were. This went with relative ease, for they recalled my story of how I came to be in the Sanctuary—and I think that Ruzt and Kahhe at least were very glad to see my fears laid to rest, though Zam may not have cared overmuch. After that, however, I was peppered with questions from both sides: Why had Suhail and Thu come back? How many Draconeans were there? Were other humans coming over the col? Where had I lived all winter? Could the men be trusted not to speak of what they had found? Could they be permitted to see a Draconean city?

“Enough!” I exclaimed at last. I honestly cannot recall which language the word emerged in, but the meaning was clear to everyone. I pressed my hands to my aching head and tried to marshal my thoughts into order. Then I turned to the Draconeans and said, “You are safe for now; there are only two of them, though we should discuss what will happen next. But will you let me explain matters to them first? I think they are much more confused than you.”

Permission thus obtained, I began to direct the traffic of the conversation in a fashion that even I will admit was imperious and high-handed. It was the only way to retain my sanity, for individuals on both sides kept breaking in with new questions. By the time I had satisfied everyone’s initial curiosity to an acceptable degree, it was almost midday, and my throat was so dry I felt I could have swallowed all the snow on Gyaptse.

Silence fell after I stopped talking. Suhail finally released my hand—he had not parted contact with me since we were reunited, save when the practicalities of moving to a more sheltered spot required it—and climbed to his feet. Kahhe was the nearest of the sisters; he approached her with his hands extended. “May I?” he said, doing her the courtesy of addressing her even though she could not understand the words.

I translated his query, expanding upon his meaning, and Kahhe nodded. Suhail walked a circuit around her, studying her with open fascination. As he came again to his starting point, he began a process familiar to me from my earliest days in their house: pointing to objects and suggesting words for them, based on his attempts to reconstruct the Draconean language. When I tried to answer him, he waved me off with a fond smile. “You have talked yourself hoarse already,” he said. “And I cannot pass up the chance to learn from them.”

He would learn from them regardless—assuming that we could form a plan for what should happen next. No one had yet broached that subject. I accepted a skin of water from Ruzt and went to sit next to Thu, who had been watching with quiet intensity for most of this time, turning a pebble over and over in his fingers.

“Thank you for coming to look for me,” I said. “Even though you thought I was dead.”

He bent his attention to the pebble. “My reasons were not noble.”

I was uncertain how to answer that, and words came reluctantly from my throat after so much talking. But Thu took my silence for a query, and went on. “I am the reason you came here. If I left the mountains with the news that you were dead—conveniently lost in an avalanche…”

His use of the word “convenient” called to mind all the suspicion that had greeted his initial appearance in Falchester. How many people had cautioned me that surely the Yelangese meant to lure me to my death? And lo, I died—or so he thought. “Tom and Suhail would have vouched for you,” I said. (Chendley as well, no doubt; I do not mean to slander him. But he was not at the forefront of my thoughts the way the others were.)

“Of course. But if Wilker had stayed, and I had gone with Chendley, neither of them would have been there to vouch.” He lost his grip on the pebble; it rattled away, and he bent to pick up another. “I knew it would look more honest if I helped to retrieve your body. I am sorry.”

“What do you have to apologize for?” I said in astonishment. “Had I been dead in truth, the last thing I would have wanted was for you to be blamed. It is only sensible that you should do everything you could to protect yourself; if I am upset, it is because such caution was necessary. And,” I said as an afterthought, “because you were forced to endure such a winter.”

This induced him to smile, as I had hoped. Then we sat in a more companionable silence, with me emptying the waterskin as fast as my stomach could accept it, while everyone girded themselves for the next peak to climb.

I do not mean Gyaptse or Cheja, of course. I mean the question of what we should do now.

With my voice somewhat restored, I explained to Suhail and Thu the plan I had agreed upon with the Draconeans, which had sent me toward the col that day. I did not go into a great deal of detail, such as explaining the council of elders; that was neither pertinent to the immediate question, nor a thing I felt I should share until we had decided whether the men would continue on into the Sanctuary or not. But they grasped the problem quite rapidly; and while they considered it, I turned once more to the Draconeans.

“What do you want me to do now?” I asked. “I can carry on more or less as we agreed; it will be easier now, with these two to help me out of the mountains. But they would be of much more help to me if they came to know your people, even if only briefly, before we departed.”

Suhail and Thu were talking quietly; Zam watched them with an untrusting eye. “You, we know. These two, we do not know.”

“They will not speak,” I assured her. “That is—I believe they will help me do what I planned.” Suhail certainly would. Thu might choose not to assist, but I was confident he would not work against me. “You trust me, and I trust them.”

Zam and Kahhe both looked unconvinced. Even Ruzt was dubious; she said, “You lived with us for months before you met the others. And then it was one human, not three.”

And three humans in the Sanctuary would cause more than three times the disturbance. At least I could be reasonably confident they would not attempt to hold the men hostage for my own good behaviour while I proceeded with my mission: that would be the worst of both worlds, introducing all the chaos of a human presence while also letting word of the Draconeans go into the outside world.

“Then we can continue on as planned,” I said. “Well—not immediately. It is far too late in the day to try and cross the col; we would be caught on the far side without sufficient light to descend safely. But we can camp for the night, and make our crossing tomorrow.”

I expected this to please Zam, who surely must be eager to see the back of us all. To my surprise, however, her scowl did not abate. Ruzt noticed this as well, and questioned her as to the reason.

“You want us to lie again,” she said.

Again? Understanding came, only a little tardy: as they had lied when they concealed me in their house. The elders had deferred judgment on the sisters’ transgression—if my mission turned out well, they could hardly punish those who made it possible—but they might not be so lenient if the sisters failed to report the arrival and departure of two more humans.

I spread my hands. “I will do whatever you decide. Take the time you require; this need not be something we settle in—” How did the Draconeans measure the hours of the day? It was not a thing I had learned yet, so I could not say “five minutes” or its equivalent. I paused, trying to think of a way to convey the concept; then I gave it up as not worth the effort, given the exhausted state of my brain. They seemed to understand me regardless, for Ruzt nodded, and the sisters began to converse amongst themselves once more.

When I turned back to my human companions, I found that Suhail had very quietly lost his composure. The novelty of the Draconeans could only hold back the tide for so long; now the impact of it struck him with full force, that I was not dead as he had believed. I sat wordlessly at his side and we gripped one another’s gloved hands hard, while Thu pretended he was very occupied in studying the springtime landscape of the Sanctuary.

There was no sound to warn me, for the wind was still blowing ferociously from the west—a profound blessing, as it turned out. I did not know what was happening until I saw Zam staring past me, up the slope toward the col, and I twisted to look.

A caeliger hovered in the air of the pass. Its position wavered from side to side, and I could not fathom what it was doing; why did it not advance? Was it searching for Suhail and Thu?

Then it suddenly veered off, almost into the upper slope of Cheja, and I understood.

Its pilot was trying to fly the craft through into the Sanctuary, but the winds were holding it back. The caeliger vanished behind Cheja, then reappeared; he was repeating his approach, once more pitting his engine against the headwind. I realized I was holding my breath. Then I realized I was holding it not because I hoped the pilot would make it safely through, but because I hoped he would not.

Everything came crashing down on me at once. The caeligers that had flown us into Tser-nga the previous year—they had not come this way, but the gorge they used as their passage through the walls of the Sanctuary must be the same river gorge I had glimpsed in my own treks. Assuming they had not crashed, their flight path would have taken them directly over this hidden basin.

Would they have been able to make out the houses and farmland below? Perhaps; perhaps not. Certainly they would not have known the inhabitants were Draconean—not without landing in the Sanctuary, and people surely would have said something if they had. The caeliger was not here to rescue me, for everyone believed me dead; nor was it here to investigate the mysteries of this place. It was here because its pilots had seen a relatively hospitable-looking region, beyond the edges of the Tser-zhag king’s control. Of course they wanted to investigate further.

Behind me, Zam snarled. In a voice so guttural I could barely make out the words, she growled, “What is that?”

“It is a—” My sentence died on my tongue. Of course there was no word for “caeliger” in their language. And what explanation could I give that would not simply describe what Zam already saw with her own eyes? The Draconeans did not even use carts, on account of the ruggedness of the terrain. I could hardly call it a flying yak. “It is like a basket,” I said, my voice faltering so much I am not even certain she heard me. “A basket carried by… the air.”

Ruzt’s reply was thick with tension. “Humans?”

“Yes.”

The caeliger veered off again. We all waited, every one of us on our feet, watching the col with fists clenched. The seconds ticked by with agonizing slowness; the caeliger did not reappear.

“They’ve given up,” Suhail said.

“For today,” I replied. “But when the winds are more favourable, they will try again.” Which could be as soon as tomorrow.

I pivoted to face the sisters. “When they bring that basket to earth, I must be there to greet it. If I am not…”

If I were not, then all the horrors I had envisioned might come to pass even sooner than expected.