dragon bard (beta)
Chapter six: the congress
This is a work in progress, meant for newsletter subscribers only! Please keep the link private, and excuse any typos, etc--fully edited book to come fall 2021!
The blacksmith that strode into the mariner’s banquet house that evening bore little resemblance to Makina Stalksong. Sure, he was of a similar height, but where she had noticeable breasts, his furs indicated only the broad shoulders and muscular chest of a man accustomed to long hours of work. Gone, too, were Makina’s raven black locks, curled tightly and pinned underneath the man’s worn sealskin cap, ears unfolded to hide any stray locks.
The piece that set him off, though, that she had needed the theater company at the end of the street for, and that removed any remaining doubt from the men talking nervously at the back of the hall, was the twelve-day stubble lining his cheeks. Makina rubbed this as she pushed through, choosing a bench near the middle. This was nothing they’d taught her in training, but rather something Ruthe had picked up on one of their extended covert operations in the regional capitals—Lahibo, maybe. Spirit gum and human hair, applied in careful layers and spread thicker at the corners of the mouth and cleft of the lip. People came in all sizes, and women would occasionally have fuzz on their lip or whiskers about the chin, but no one could see this kind of unshaven growth and take her as anything other than a man. Even on Ruthe’s slender frame, it had worked every time.
Makina nodded to the grizzled man who sat down next to her, using the excuse of greetings to let her gaze wander the room. It was a large hall, as buildings went on the ice, ten spans across and twice as many long, old enough that it was still of timber construction, its barnacled crossbeams speaking of a former life as a seagoing vessel. The walls, of course, were beaten iron, as everything was on the ice, but these were decorated with acid etchings and hung with house sigils of the old world, one for each of the seventeen noble houses. Makina smiled at House Chanan’s sigil in the middle of the row, iron discolored in the shape of the Dukress sigil behind it, while that House now hung at the very front of the hall. Subtle.
There were two exits to the place, one at the side and the main at the rear, rafters to climb, and potential weak spots in the walls if she needed to force her way out. The hall was filling up, mainly men in the worn furs of the interior, some young and fiery-eyed, others with salt in their beards. Fools all, she thought, then realized she should count herself among that number. Unconsciously, she fingered the black stone at her neck. At least this fool had a few tricks, if things went wrong.
A richly-dressed man stepped through the side door on catlike feet. A bodyguard, no doubt, though he was dressed as a butler. A whole crew of bodyguards, she revised, as two women and another man pushed in around a slender form, their movements equally trained and deadly. In their midst strode a slender girl in a plush lavender gown—Alamina Dukress. A cord of muscles loosened in Makina’s chest at the sight of the girl—some part of her had still doubted, until now. Had been waiting for this whole thing to be a trap, for the rumors and the ship in the harbor to be part of some larger bait to draw in the continent’s rebels and sympathizers, and deal with them. But no, with a true noble here, perhaps this congress would be more than a footnote in the annals of history. Perhaps it would be the start of a new history.
Talk died at the sight of the entourage. The guards spread out in a protective ring around Alamina who was, as promised, a real beauty, despite a well-rouged scar on one cheek. How had she gotten that? Assassination, perhaps. The lives of the nobility were luxurious, but far from safe.
The noble threw back her ermine hood and swept piercing eyes over the crowd. “Well?” she said after a moment. “Go on, then.”
A grizzled man near the front jumped to his feet. “Your, ah, your majesty?”
Makina knew him from somewhere—Tumbaga, the smithy settlement.
Alamina arched an eyebrow at him. “Have we not met here to talk? So talk.”
“Right!” he barked, all gruffness to cover the blush in his cheeks. Terkin. Terkin was his name. She should remember that—the man had asked for her hand in marriage, when Kantalo was still a babe. “I call this congress to order! We are here—”
“We’re here to burn down the empire!” a voice called from the back, and Makina winced. The congress might not come to violence, but that didn’t mean there weren’t Ears and Hands here, marking the worst out to be dealt with later.
“We’re here,” Terkin repeated, scowling, “to discuss the new taxes levied on goods coming from the old world, and the limits they’re trying to put on how much dragon we can bring to market. We will proceed in an orderly fashion, and any who don’t will be punched in the face and thrown out in the mud. Understood?”
A few surly mutters came from the back of the room, but the men around Makina nodded. Good. Maybe she could have done worse than Terkin. But she’d had no time or space in her life for a man back then. Then or now. Not until Kantalo was gone, and Truths send that was a few years off yet. Then? She didn’t know what she’d do then.
“We’re also favored with a visitor from one of the empire’s own noble houses, Her Highness Alamina Dukress. A rare treat,” he said, giving her an awkward bow. The noblewoman’s lip wrinkled ever so slightly. “Did you want to share some opening remarks?”
“Time for that later,” Alamina said, tugging at a silken glove. “Go on. Though I do wonder who’s the leader of this little group.”
Of course she would want to know who was in charge. So she could address him, and ignore the rest of them. Typical nobility.
“Ain’t here,” someone toward the back said. “Better things to do, he does.”
“We don’t have a leader, your Grace,” Terkin said. The man used a different form of address every time he spoke to her. If he was like most settlers, this would be the first time he’d spoken to nobility directly. “Or a name. Just a feeling. Just a suspicion we’re not getting the fair treatment we deserve from the powers that be on the other side. From House Chanan,” he added, somewhat belatedly.
“Yes, well, Chanan has done precious little for any of us in the last decade. Consolidate power and hold it, that’s always been the way of Chanan. But what are your specific complaints?”
“It’s the tariffs, your Grace!” someone called out from the bench behind Makina. How easily these people fell back into commoners addressing nobles. That was the first thing they’d need to unlearn, or they’d just set up their own despotic houses once they got free. She’d seen it often enough. “We’re paying more than ever just to get our bones to market, and then on top of that they want to limit how many dragons we can harvest? Send wardens across the ice to try and stop a man from taking a wildling, as if they’re more precious than we are!”
“Keep us from making enough on one, and then stop us from trying to sell more! How’s a colony supposed to survive out here?” another called, standing from his place in patchy furs.
You’re not, Makina thought, remembering how little she’d gotten for her load of bones, earlier that day. You’re supposed to starve, supposed to keep needing the empire. Unless you learn to survive out here without all the leather and sugar. No other way would ever work. The empire had too much power. Not just the power to tax and regulate, but the military power to put down anything these men would ever try, before they even got started. It made her stomach twist to think about it, as the debate went on, voices getting angrier. It twisted because she felt their pain, because she’d dealt with the worsening situation alongside the rest of them, had made that trek home from Portown with too few coins in her pocket and too many questions about how she was going to survive the next season. Had passed her share of men out on the ice, harvesting the hibernating dragons though it was illegal. She didn’t blame them. How could she? Hell, she’d have done it herself, if she could avoid the questions over how she’d managed such a thing alone.
“They’re concerned,” Alamina’s voice rang out, “that if you poach too many, the dragon numbers will decline. We’ve already occupied a large swath of their breeding grounds. If we take too many, before the bones have had a chance to cure the Blackness at home—”
“Concerned for their own skins, is what they are!” someone called out. “While we starve over here, begging for basic goods! Cut off their medicine, is what I say we do. See how they like their taxes then!”
Voices roared out in agreement. A boycott would be their most powerful strategy—except that the empire had the manpower to occupy every last settlement and force them to work. And they would, to keep the flow of medicine coming. And once they occupied, Makina doubted they would ever leave.
“And your babies?” Alamina asked, again cutting through the noise. “I know you like your families large out here on the ice. Would you be fine with no more vacations to the coast, to conceive?”
“Ah, we’d still make em! Just have to try harder, right boys?”
Makina rolled her eyes. This was the other reason rebellions failed—over-brittle masculinity. Very few babies had been conceived on the ice, and no one knew why those had worked. But these idiots thought that a little trying harder would get it done. House Dukress had to send a woman. Maybe it’d been intentional. Distract the rebels with a pretty face.
“Quiet!” Terkin bellowed, holding up a calloused hand from his place at the front. “Quiet! These are the concerns, aye, but we all know a boycott won’t work, and we need the old world as much as they need us. So maybe we let the Dukress speak her piece now. Madame?” He nodded respectfully her way.
A tense silence descended, all eyes swiveling to the noble woman. Girl, really—Makina doubted she was older than Kantalo, though she had the poise all noblewomen did. Alamina pursed her lips, right hand reaching to her hip as though for a sword hilt to hold to. “Not sure I have that much to say, having heard what I have.”
Sweat beaded on Terkin’s brow. “But, surely, you’ve come here to do more than observe! Why, with your House as a champion to our cause—”
“Cause?” Alamina snorted. “What cause?”
Her retort held all the scorn for commoner riffraff that a noble’s should, but there was something off about it. Something just a touch too scornful. And in that moment, as Terkin searched for words and the air in the room swirled like a river confluence in a spring melt, three or four observations locked together in Makina’s mind, painting a new picture.
The scar on Alamina’s cheek—well-rouged, yes, but the empire had ways of healing such things, for those able to afford them. House Dukress certainly could.
Every one of the Dukress servants walked with the a killer’s grace. One or two bodyguards, she could understand. But a real noble would want a real servant, too, alongside the plants.
Alamina’s hand, still twitching unconsciously at her hip, looking for a sword hilt.
Worst of all, the black stone that had slipped free of her manservant’s lace, a mirror-image to the one Makina wore on her own neck.
Hands were trained in infiltration, and in deception, but not in outright acting. These had done a decent job, but if that wasn’t Alamina Dukress—and Makina was surer by the second it was not—then the whole premise of safety that had brought her here was gone. And this congress was about to become something much bloodier than a shouting match.
She stood, heart thumping, grateful to the shouts rising around her again, praying they would distract eyes long enough for her to get out the door. The side door was out—too visible, too close to the cluster of Hands—but the back door might still work, surrounded as it was with men standing and shouting. She pushed her way back there, hands checking the weapons strapped to her body, smiling apologetically as she pushed toward the back. She forced her breath into the cadence of calm, battling down the snakes in her gut. Control. Focus. This was not a bloodbath yet. She had time.
She pushed through the last of them into a sudden gap around the door, where a young man in ill-fitting furs stood with too much assurance, hands on the hilts of his blades. Another Hand, from Alamina’s entourage. The door was barred behind him.
Biting back a curse, Makina melted back into the crowd. Too early to try to force it. The mood in here was already fragile as false ice. Fight that man for the door and this meeting would shatter into a thousand pieces. Which looked inevitable at this point anyway—that or outright execution—she just wanted to be gone when it started. The side door? Alamina still stood in front of it, and all eyes were on her. Makina might knock one of the rustier wall panels off, given time, but it would draw too much attention. The rafters? Same problem.
Deep in, deep out, deep pause. No escape without pulling the place down with her. What to do, then? The training was clear. If your escapes were worse than your danger, you stay put. Wait for the right time.
Makina put one hand to the black stone at her throat. And if the right time didn’t come, she would make it.
The piece that set him off, though, that she had needed the theater company at the end of the street for, and that removed any remaining doubt from the men talking nervously at the back of the hall, was the twelve-day stubble lining his cheeks. Makina rubbed this as she pushed through, choosing a bench near the middle. This was nothing they’d taught her in training, but rather something Ruthe had picked up on one of their extended covert operations in the regional capitals—Lahibo, maybe. Spirit gum and human hair, applied in careful layers and spread thicker at the corners of the mouth and cleft of the lip. People came in all sizes, and women would occasionally have fuzz on their lip or whiskers about the chin, but no one could see this kind of unshaven growth and take her as anything other than a man. Even on Ruthe’s slender frame, it had worked every time.
Makina nodded to the grizzled man who sat down next to her, using the excuse of greetings to let her gaze wander the room. It was a large hall, as buildings went on the ice, ten spans across and twice as many long, old enough that it was still of timber construction, its barnacled crossbeams speaking of a former life as a seagoing vessel. The walls, of course, were beaten iron, as everything was on the ice, but these were decorated with acid etchings and hung with house sigils of the old world, one for each of the seventeen noble houses. Makina smiled at House Chanan’s sigil in the middle of the row, iron discolored in the shape of the Dukress sigil behind it, while that House now hung at the very front of the hall. Subtle.
There were two exits to the place, one at the side and the main at the rear, rafters to climb, and potential weak spots in the walls if she needed to force her way out. The hall was filling up, mainly men in the worn furs of the interior, some young and fiery-eyed, others with salt in their beards. Fools all, she thought, then realized she should count herself among that number. Unconsciously, she fingered the black stone at her neck. At least this fool had a few tricks, if things went wrong.
A richly-dressed man stepped through the side door on catlike feet. A bodyguard, no doubt, though he was dressed as a butler. A whole crew of bodyguards, she revised, as two women and another man pushed in around a slender form, their movements equally trained and deadly. In their midst strode a slender girl in a plush lavender gown—Alamina Dukress. A cord of muscles loosened in Makina’s chest at the sight of the girl—some part of her had still doubted, until now. Had been waiting for this whole thing to be a trap, for the rumors and the ship in the harbor to be part of some larger bait to draw in the continent’s rebels and sympathizers, and deal with them. But no, with a true noble here, perhaps this congress would be more than a footnote in the annals of history. Perhaps it would be the start of a new history.
Talk died at the sight of the entourage. The guards spread out in a protective ring around Alamina who was, as promised, a real beauty, despite a well-rouged scar on one cheek. How had she gotten that? Assassination, perhaps. The lives of the nobility were luxurious, but far from safe.
The noble threw back her ermine hood and swept piercing eyes over the crowd. “Well?” she said after a moment. “Go on, then.”
A grizzled man near the front jumped to his feet. “Your, ah, your majesty?”
Makina knew him from somewhere—Tumbaga, the smithy settlement.
Alamina arched an eyebrow at him. “Have we not met here to talk? So talk.”
“Right!” he barked, all gruffness to cover the blush in his cheeks. Terkin. Terkin was his name. She should remember that—the man had asked for her hand in marriage, when Kantalo was still a babe. “I call this congress to order! We are here—”
“We’re here to burn down the empire!” a voice called from the back, and Makina winced. The congress might not come to violence, but that didn’t mean there weren’t Ears and Hands here, marking the worst out to be dealt with later.
“We’re here,” Terkin repeated, scowling, “to discuss the new taxes levied on goods coming from the old world, and the limits they’re trying to put on how much dragon we can bring to market. We will proceed in an orderly fashion, and any who don’t will be punched in the face and thrown out in the mud. Understood?”
A few surly mutters came from the back of the room, but the men around Makina nodded. Good. Maybe she could have done worse than Terkin. But she’d had no time or space in her life for a man back then. Then or now. Not until Kantalo was gone, and Truths send that was a few years off yet. Then? She didn’t know what she’d do then.
“We’re also favored with a visitor from one of the empire’s own noble houses, Her Highness Alamina Dukress. A rare treat,” he said, giving her an awkward bow. The noblewoman’s lip wrinkled ever so slightly. “Did you want to share some opening remarks?”
“Time for that later,” Alamina said, tugging at a silken glove. “Go on. Though I do wonder who’s the leader of this little group.”
Of course she would want to know who was in charge. So she could address him, and ignore the rest of them. Typical nobility.
“Ain’t here,” someone toward the back said. “Better things to do, he does.”
“We don’t have a leader, your Grace,” Terkin said. The man used a different form of address every time he spoke to her. If he was like most settlers, this would be the first time he’d spoken to nobility directly. “Or a name. Just a feeling. Just a suspicion we’re not getting the fair treatment we deserve from the powers that be on the other side. From House Chanan,” he added, somewhat belatedly.
“Yes, well, Chanan has done precious little for any of us in the last decade. Consolidate power and hold it, that’s always been the way of Chanan. But what are your specific complaints?”
“It’s the tariffs, your Grace!” someone called out from the bench behind Makina. How easily these people fell back into commoners addressing nobles. That was the first thing they’d need to unlearn, or they’d just set up their own despotic houses once they got free. She’d seen it often enough. “We’re paying more than ever just to get our bones to market, and then on top of that they want to limit how many dragons we can harvest? Send wardens across the ice to try and stop a man from taking a wildling, as if they’re more precious than we are!”
“Keep us from making enough on one, and then stop us from trying to sell more! How’s a colony supposed to survive out here?” another called, standing from his place in patchy furs.
You’re not, Makina thought, remembering how little she’d gotten for her load of bones, earlier that day. You’re supposed to starve, supposed to keep needing the empire. Unless you learn to survive out here without all the leather and sugar. No other way would ever work. The empire had too much power. Not just the power to tax and regulate, but the military power to put down anything these men would ever try, before they even got started. It made her stomach twist to think about it, as the debate went on, voices getting angrier. It twisted because she felt their pain, because she’d dealt with the worsening situation alongside the rest of them, had made that trek home from Portown with too few coins in her pocket and too many questions about how she was going to survive the next season. Had passed her share of men out on the ice, harvesting the hibernating dragons though it was illegal. She didn’t blame them. How could she? Hell, she’d have done it herself, if she could avoid the questions over how she’d managed such a thing alone.
“They’re concerned,” Alamina’s voice rang out, “that if you poach too many, the dragon numbers will decline. We’ve already occupied a large swath of their breeding grounds. If we take too many, before the bones have had a chance to cure the Blackness at home—”
“Concerned for their own skins, is what they are!” someone called out. “While we starve over here, begging for basic goods! Cut off their medicine, is what I say we do. See how they like their taxes then!”
Voices roared out in agreement. A boycott would be their most powerful strategy—except that the empire had the manpower to occupy every last settlement and force them to work. And they would, to keep the flow of medicine coming. And once they occupied, Makina doubted they would ever leave.
“And your babies?” Alamina asked, again cutting through the noise. “I know you like your families large out here on the ice. Would you be fine with no more vacations to the coast, to conceive?”
“Ah, we’d still make em! Just have to try harder, right boys?”
Makina rolled her eyes. This was the other reason rebellions failed—over-brittle masculinity. Very few babies had been conceived on the ice, and no one knew why those had worked. But these idiots thought that a little trying harder would get it done. House Dukress had to send a woman. Maybe it’d been intentional. Distract the rebels with a pretty face.
“Quiet!” Terkin bellowed, holding up a calloused hand from his place at the front. “Quiet! These are the concerns, aye, but we all know a boycott won’t work, and we need the old world as much as they need us. So maybe we let the Dukress speak her piece now. Madame?” He nodded respectfully her way.
A tense silence descended, all eyes swiveling to the noble woman. Girl, really—Makina doubted she was older than Kantalo, though she had the poise all noblewomen did. Alamina pursed her lips, right hand reaching to her hip as though for a sword hilt to hold to. “Not sure I have that much to say, having heard what I have.”
Sweat beaded on Terkin’s brow. “But, surely, you’ve come here to do more than observe! Why, with your House as a champion to our cause—”
“Cause?” Alamina snorted. “What cause?”
Her retort held all the scorn for commoner riffraff that a noble’s should, but there was something off about it. Something just a touch too scornful. And in that moment, as Terkin searched for words and the air in the room swirled like a river confluence in a spring melt, three or four observations locked together in Makina’s mind, painting a new picture.
The scar on Alamina’s cheek—well-rouged, yes, but the empire had ways of healing such things, for those able to afford them. House Dukress certainly could.
Every one of the Dukress servants walked with the a killer’s grace. One or two bodyguards, she could understand. But a real noble would want a real servant, too, alongside the plants.
Alamina’s hand, still twitching unconsciously at her hip, looking for a sword hilt.
Worst of all, the black stone that had slipped free of her manservant’s lace, a mirror-image to the one Makina wore on her own neck.
Hands were trained in infiltration, and in deception, but not in outright acting. These had done a decent job, but if that wasn’t Alamina Dukress—and Makina was surer by the second it was not—then the whole premise of safety that had brought her here was gone. And this congress was about to become something much bloodier than a shouting match.
She stood, heart thumping, grateful to the shouts rising around her again, praying they would distract eyes long enough for her to get out the door. The side door was out—too visible, too close to the cluster of Hands—but the back door might still work, surrounded as it was with men standing and shouting. She pushed her way back there, hands checking the weapons strapped to her body, smiling apologetically as she pushed toward the back. She forced her breath into the cadence of calm, battling down the snakes in her gut. Control. Focus. This was not a bloodbath yet. She had time.
She pushed through the last of them into a sudden gap around the door, where a young man in ill-fitting furs stood with too much assurance, hands on the hilts of his blades. Another Hand, from Alamina’s entourage. The door was barred behind him.
Biting back a curse, Makina melted back into the crowd. Too early to try to force it. The mood in here was already fragile as false ice. Fight that man for the door and this meeting would shatter into a thousand pieces. Which looked inevitable at this point anyway—that or outright execution—she just wanted to be gone when it started. The side door? Alamina still stood in front of it, and all eyes were on her. Makina might knock one of the rustier wall panels off, given time, but it would draw too much attention. The rafters? Same problem.
Deep in, deep out, deep pause. No escape without pulling the place down with her. What to do, then? The training was clear. If your escapes were worse than your danger, you stay put. Wait for the right time.
Makina put one hand to the black stone at her throat. And if the right time didn’t come, she would make it.