Except I don’t want to fight with him about anything. I’ve read over what he translated in my absence, and I see why he’s troubled. Worms—ugh. I mean, yes, I can see how, from a certain perspective (say, a scaled one), a human being might look like a worm, all pinkish-brown and fleshy. We still don’t have proof that’s what the āmu are, but it’s getting harder and harder to imagine they could be anything else.
And that means the three sisters and their people are headed toward conflict with my species.
I shouldn’t be surprised. (I’m not surprised.) Kudshayn said it himself this evening, while I sat and shivered in that icebox Cora bought for him: “The tale of the Anevrai and their empire was, in the end, a tale of human subjugation. These tablets have already told the story of how many things began, from the three species to agriculture to the existence of night and the moon; it seems it may also be the story of how that empire began.”
He said it very calmly. I have no doubt he’s spent days thinking about this while I was gallivanting around Falchester being an idiot, and figured out how to at least pretend it doesn’t bother him very deeply. “We don’t know that,” I began, but he held up one hand to stop me.
“It is my fault,” he said. For a moment I thought he meant the ancient empire was his fault, which made no sense, but no. “I allowed myself to imagine that this tale would be what I hoped.”
I have not forgotten the conversation he and I had back in Seminis. “Your people’s story.”
It still is—or it could be. As near as I can tell, the requirements for calling something a national epic are that it be 1) old, 2) long, and 3) accepted as important. This isn’t nearly so long as The Great Song, but I’d say it’s at least as long as Selethryth, and it’s unquestionably old. Whether it’s important . . . that’s for other people to decide, the Draconeans above all. Will they want to claim this tale as the emblem of their people, the text that captures the essence of the Draconean soul?
The whole idea is nonsense. No single story can capture the essence of a whole nation, let alone a species. But that doesn’t mean people won’t read it that way regardless—and if the epic causes them to look bad, Gleinleigh and Mrs. Kefford and all their ilk will make certain the Draconeans wear it.
I told Kudshayn everything that happened in Falchester. Even the bits that make me want to crawl out of my skin with shame, because they’re part and parcel of my evidence: Mornett and Kefford at the auction, Mornett and Hallman corresponding, Mrs. Kefford talking to Gleinleigh again at Chiston, looking like she wanted to flay him with her words. She was buttering up various members of the Synedrion, too, the ones who aren’t already in her husband’s camp where Draconeans are concerned, but could perhaps be persuaded over to that side. “Maybe they’re planning on using this against you,” I said. “They set things up to make Gleinleigh look innocent and friendly so that you and I would come to work for him, and then . . .”
My inspiration ran out, because how could they plan in advance for what we’re finding now? Even if Mornett is working from casts of the tablets, he can’t have gotten through them any faster than we have. Gleinleigh and his cronies might be so convinced of Draconean inferiority that they assumed any important story from their civilization must necessarily make Kudshayn’s people look stupid, evil, or both, but that seems like a lot to gamble on.
But Kudshayn has long experience of human nastiness. He said quietly, “They could arrange to make sure that what we publish is damning.”
“How?” I said. And then the bottom of my stomach dropped out, and I said: “Oh.”
We can write up whatever we like . . . but unless we go to the printer’s and watch them cast the type for the pages and then stand over the presses, we can’t ensure that what we write will be what gets published. Gleinleigh could put our names on any kind of libel.
“It would come out,” I said. “Can you imagine the headlines? ‘Lady Trent’s Granddaughter Disavows Translation, Says Earl Lied.’ I can’t think of anything more likely to drum up sympathy for your people then a high-profile scandal over a clumsy attempt to defame your ancestors. They’d have to destroy the tablets so no one could ever check the source—and destroy our copies, too—and do us in for good measure, because otherwise we’d talk.”
The silence that fell then was nasty. “That would be a bit much,” Kudshayn said at last.
More than a bit, I should hope, but there are times when his tendency for understatement is soothing.
I don’t really think our lives are in danger. I may not believe what Mrs. Kefford said about Mornett having feelings for me, but I also don’t believe he would stand by and let me be killed. His outrage over the riot seemed genuine, and that only left me with a broken nose. And Gleinleigh seems an unlikely murderer. All the same, I am going to make sure we smuggle duplicates of our work out of here before we go, and insist on seeing page proofs of the book before it goes to press. Even if I’m guarding against shadows, I’ll feel better for having done it.
I’m worried about what the last two tablets have in store for us, though. Kudshayn reminded me that we don’t know for sure the mu are meant to be humans; we don’t know for sure that Samšin is going to make war on them. We didn’t know the sun was going to vanish from the sky in the sixth tablet, and it’s entirely possible something equally unexpected will happen between now and the end. The invocation wasn’t what you’d call clear.
But I don’t think the chill I felt was entirely due to sitting in an enormous icebox. I feel like I’m sailing into a fog bank, without even a chart to let me know what rocks lie in our path. I’m just sure the rocks are there.
From: Annabelle Himpton, Lady Plimmer
To: Simeon Cavall
6 Caloris
Priorfield, Greffen
Dear Dr. Cavall,
I hope you can assist me with a small matter, as I understand you are a good friend of Miss Audrey Camherst, whom I had the pleasure of hosting as a dinner guest this past Floris. She was kind enough to advise me about the purchasing of Draconean antiquities, and on her recommendation, I sent a man to acquire something for me from the auction at Emmerson’s on the nineteenth. He brought back a little clay winged disc with rather faded paint, which was not precisely what I had in mind, but then he cannot be blamed, as I had given him rather vague instructions, specifying only that the item should not cost more than five hundred guineas and should not have been obtained from any private collectors in Gillae.
Regardless, I was pleased to have the artifact and promptly hung it in my drawing room, then invited some guests for dinner so they could admire it. Imagine my surprise, then, when one of those guests, Mr. Eddleston, told me he had seen it before! He claimed it was previously the property of Mr. Lawrence Ryland in Falchester, who kept it in a glass display case in his billiards room. I told him that surely he must be mistaken, because the provenance I had from Emmerson’s mentions Mr. Ryland nowhere in it. But Mr. Eddleston insisted I take it down off the wall so he could look at the little inscription on the back, which he had taken a rubbing of when the disc was in Mr. Ryland’s keeping. He positively identified it as the same one, and has sent me a copy of his rubbing as proof, which I enclose, along with a rubbing taken from my new decoration.