I had not come looking for Jannoula’s childhood. Mitha’s description made me shudder, but I couldn’t turn away. I had to know. I had to understand who she was and what she was doing, and here were surely answers to the questions she had always dodged.
Mitha didn’t want to take me to her cell, but I insisted. He led me through the maze of service corridors, pausing only to tell the quigs we passed that Eskar was back and they had work to do. We crossed a full-sized corridor meant for dragons after Mitha made sure the coast was clear.
Our path took us through a surgery with an operation in progress, some poor saar with his brainpan open to the air. Three dragon doctors stood around the high metal table, employing mechanical arms for the actual cutting, like jointed insect legs ending in scalpels. I balked at the sight of the surgeons, but Mitha grabbed my arm with his twig-like dorsal hand and pulled me along behind the steel equipment racks. The doctors’ eyes were covered with cup-like eyepieces; they could only focus on their work. Mitha signaled to the nurse quigutls, who made extra noise fetching sponges and suture thread.
I cringed and hurried quietly after Mitha.
Another service corridor brought us to a row of human-sized cells, all empty. The gray predawn light filtered through the narrow barred windows. “Not every victim cooperateth,” said Mitha. “Some won’t return to their natural size. They keep such mithcreants here, and they kept her at the very end.”
I walked down the corridor, my heart in my throat, and opened the heavy door to Jannoula’s former home. The cell was familiar to me: the dirty floor, the low bed, the cold walls. The rabbit-fur suit hung on a peg beside the door.
They had experimented on her. My stomach clenched.
No wonder she’d reacted to me the way she had. I was perhaps the first humane presence she had known. I had popped in out of nowhere and been kind to her.
And then I’d cast her out of my garden and back into this life.
My throat was almost too dry to speak. “They let her go in the end. It’s too much to hope that it was an act of mercy, but … but why did they do it?”
“Let her go?” said Mitha. “As in releathe her to the wild? They didn’t.”
I frowned. “I saw her in Samsam.”
He snapped his mouth open and shut, thinking. “She taught herself strategy games, and she was very good. They started asking her opinionth on various thingth.”
“Strategy,” I said numbly.
“General Palonn took her with him to the Battle of Homand-Eynn,” said Mitha. “We made the chain for around her neck, and a better suit of musk ox hair, because they were thitting in a glacier, watching.”
I was trembling uncontrollably. I sat down on her little wooden bed and held my head in my hands. “Homand-Eynn was an early defeat for the Loyalists. Comonot told me about it. The Old Ard surprised his Loyalists by hiding in a hatchery.”
“Putting their own hatchlingth in danger,” Mitha said, his eyes swiveling. “A gamble, but it worked. General Palonn was exceedingly pleased. He boasted to the doctors: ‘You’ve finally created something useful: a general from a lady.’ ”
Mitha said lady in Goreddi, which startled me. “Did Palonn use that very word?”
“It became her nickname,” said Mitha. “And she won the Old Ard more battles.”
All this time we’d been assuming lady was a dragon name, not a word in our own language. Jannoula was the notorious General Laedi.