“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.
*