If I assumed them to be dead, and they proved to be alive, then my mourning would be to no purpose. If I assumed them to be dead and was correct, I did not think my mourning would be lessened at all; I would only feel a new wave of grief upon confirmation of their loss. Contrariwise, if I assumed them to be alive and was wrong, my grief would be dreadful; but in the meanwhile I would enjoy a greater use of my faculties, which would undoubtedly be of use in returning me to the human world. And finally, if I hoped for the best and proved to be right … that would be the best of all possible outcomes. I therefore resolved to behave in all ways as if they were alive, until I had proof to the contrary.
Did it work? Of course not; no mere resolution could hold back all fear and uncertainty. But it did help. With that vow to support me, I could address myself properly to the question at hand: how could the Draconeans be possible?
Developmental lability had to be the answer; there was no other explanation. Very well, then: under what conditions could a draconic egg develop into something half human?
It must be exposed to some kind of human factor in its environment. Not a house or the sound of literature read aloud or anything of that sort; no, the factor must be biological. And then I thought of the murals in the Watchers’ Heart: the inscriptions, their glyphs painted red, descending on an egg below. The “precious rain” referenced in the Cataract Stone—and the clause that followed after, which might be read as an elaboration of the previous, telling of the “sacred utterances of our hearts.”
Blood. Bathe a draconic egg in human blood, and perhaps a Draconean would result.
How often could that possibly occur? The more extreme the mutation, the less likely the embryo is to be viable; the experimentation carried out at the House of Dragons in Qurrat, both mine and that of my successors, had established that quite clearly. Something like this would not succeed one time in a thousand, I suspected. Or perhaps it was somehow done in more gradual steps—I had no way of knowing. My only certainty was that it had been done, for the proof of it kept bringing me porridge to eat.
Lying in my nest, slowly regaining my strength, I imagined sharing my speculations with Tom and Suhail. This was comforting, and soon I imagined myself standing in a place like Caffrey Hall, lecturing to the public on the Draconeans I had met. Unexpectedly, I found myself giggling. (The sound may have been a little hysterical; I muffled it in my blankets.) It had come to me that one way or another, I had my victory. Either this discovery would at last force the Philosophers’ Colloquium to accept me as a member, and I would have the satisfaction of having broken through that door … or they would continue to refuse me, and I could wash my hands of them entirely. I had dreamt for years of achieving status as a Fellow, to the point where I could not surrender it easily—but if this did not suffice, then they would prove themselves a pack of hidebound reactionaries not worth a moment further of my time.
Of course, that would only be true if I had a chance to tell them.
Therefore, I must survive and return to the outside world. I would not give them the satisfaction of tut-tutting and shaking their heads over the sad demise of a woman whose aspirations exceeded her worth.
I will not pretend this washed me clean of all distress. Every minute I stayed in that place was another minute my husband believed me to be dead. I remembered all too well my grief when Jacob died; the thought of Suhail enduring such a loss was wrenching. However joyous our reunion would be, I could not envision it without first thinking of his suffering, which quite countered the effect. But rubbing the Colloquium’s collective noses in my achievement? That was quite a powerful motivator, and every time my will to carry on faltered, I thought of the satisfaction that awaited me.
*
My trio of Draconeans permitted me to rise from my bed and hobble about so long as I neither shouted nor broke for the door. I did wonder what would happen if I made too much noise: would I provoke an avalanche? Attract a predator? Disturb the local peace and bring wrath down upon my captors? No one came into the house but those three; I could not even be certain there were others out there. I suspected there were, though. Had I been able to stay longer at the top of the col and survey the land on the other side, what might I have seen?
I shook aside such thoughts in favour of more immediate matters. In order to hobble about, I had to fashion a splint for my leg, to avoid doing it any further mischief. The Draconeans, when they realized what I was after, attempted to bind the splint about my knee; my insistence on placing it around my shin provoked much conversation among them. Of course: they would have little experience with broken bones, when their own were so close to indestructible. Crutches, on the other hand, they understood quite well, for they could damage their tendons and ligaments just like any other creature.
With my health thus addressed, I turned myself to the task of observation. I began with the Draconeans themselves. They were somewhat over two meters tall: enough to loom over many humans, but I had seen men as large, especially in the Keongan Islands. In the chest and shoulder they were quite broad, presumably to support the musculature of their wings—could they fly? I suspected they would have difficulty, compared with their quadrupedal cousins; their bodies were not shaped for horizontal balance. They might be able to glide, though. They also appeared stockier than their ancient cousins, perhaps as an adaptation to the cold. Their scales were darker than those of the frozen Draconean we had found in the col; whether that was a seasonal difference, a sex-based one, or merely the equivalent of the colour variation seen in horses, I could not yet tell.
I had ample opportunity to study them, however, as they wore very little clothing while indoors. Although I found the air outside my blanketed shelter quite chill, they seemed perfectly comfortable in loose, plain trousers that did not fall below their knees. I knew that was not all they wore, though. They came and went, and although I kept my distance from the door, I could see through it to some kind of room beyond—an antechamber, I thought, where they donned and doffed heavier clothing, jackets and boots and the like. It would have been wildly insufficient to keep me warm, but it was clear their tolerance for the cold far exceeded my own.
(Why had the Draconean in the col not been clothed? I will never know for certain, but I do know they can suffer the effects of hypothermia. This sometimes causes people to succumb to a kind of madness wherein they strip off their clothing, feeling themselves to be far too warm. The lost one may have done just that.)
So much for the Draconeans, at least for the moment: next I turned my attention to their environment. The outside world was presently beyond my reach, but I could and did observe their house. It was not the kind of monumental structure I associated with the Draconeans; but of course I knew from Suhail that the ruins which awe us today are only the great edifices of their civilization, comparable to the Temple in Haggad or the Hall of the Synedrion in Falchester. Ordinary people had lived in more modest buildings.