I pulled the paper loose from my sleeve and tried to smooth it out into a more respectable-looking packet. “Here. This is for you.” When Suhail eyed it warily, I said, “It is nothing inappropriate. You could post it in the town square and no one would think anything of it.” Indeed, most of them would have no idea what it was.
He took the paper and unfolded it the rest of the way. This took a fair bit of unfolding; it was thin tissue, and quite a large piece when stretched to its full extent. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mahira watching in curiosity, and not bothering to hide it.
Suhail saw what I had given him, and his hands trembled. “It is the stone.”
The Cataract Stone, as it is known these days, though it had not yet been given that name anywhere outside of my own head. I found the engraved slab during my exploration of the Great Cataract of Mouleen, but had not known its significance at the time. The stone, as most of my readers no doubt know, contains a bilingual inscription: the same text, rendered in both Draconean and Ngaru. The former was at the time unintelligible to us, but the latter could be translated; the Cataract Stone therefore served as a key to the code, a way to decipher the Draconean language and unlock its secrets at last.
“Someone went back to the waterfall,” I said, forgetting that I had not told Suhail where the stone lay. “He took a rubbing for me. I wanted you to have it.”
He looked at me, startled, and then studied the paper more closely. “This is an original. Isabella—” He caught himself. “Umm Yaqub. Even now, I would have heard if this had been published. How long have you been sitting on this?”
My cheeks heated. I almost dug my toe into the ground, as if I were a child caught out in a prank. “A little while.” Suhail waited. “All right, I’ve had it for more than a year.”
He made an inarticulate noise: half laugh, half horrified roar. “For the love of—you know better than that! To keep private something this important—”
“I haven’t been a complete fool,” I said tartly, well aware that I had been at least a partial fool. “There are several copies of that, and my will contains instructions that they should be released to the scholarly community if I die. I would never let such important data be lost! But…” My face was still hot. I looked away, and found myself meeting Mahira’s eyes, which did not help at all. She was staring at us both with open curiosity. “You are the one who made me see the importance of the inscription. Without that, I would never have known to ask someone to go back and take a rubbing. And I cannot translate it; I can barely learn languages spoken today. There are other scholars of my acquaintance who have worked on the problem of Draconean, but none with your dedication, and none with any connection to the discovery of this stone. I thought it only right that you should be the first to work on the text.”
He stood silent through my explanation. I finally dragged my gaze back to his, and lost my breath when I did. Yes, these had been grey years for him—and I had just poured a torrent of colour into them. He looked fully alive, as he had not since he strode into the courtyard that first day.
I might have cast my professionalism to the wind when I kept the rubbing secret, hoping someday to give it to him… but I did not regret the decision at all.
Suhail folded the paper carefully along the original lines, cautious lest he smear anything. It had been painted with a fixative, but care was still warranted. “I cannot bring myself to complain any further,” he admitted. “This is a gift beyond price—thank you. But promise me you will make the text public now.”
“I will.” (A promise, I should note, that I fully intended to keep. But having given Suhail the original, I could do nothing without one of the copies I had left in Scirland. My duties to the Royal Army meant I would not have much leisure to prepare it for publication, and my employers would not be pleased with me if I spent my time on something so irrelevant to the task at hand. All of which sounds like a justification, I know—but upon my honour, the delay in ultimately publishing the text was not intentional.)
At that point Suhail noticed Mahira staring at us, and spoke in Akhian rapid enough that I caught barely one word in four. I could at least make out that it was an explanation of the paper, and his reaction to it. Rather than try to follow the words, I watched Mahira. She looked pensive, giving little away; but I thought she might be pleased. If she was as fond of Suhail as I suspected, she must be glad to see him receive a gift of such personal value. And she did not seem to disapprove of me giving it.
Suhail tucked the paper into a pocket of his embroidered caftan and laid his right hand over his heart. “I will not forget your generosity,” he said. “But… I should go.”
“Of course,” I said—and then, without thinking, I extended my hand to him.
He retreated a step, smiling regretfully. “You are not ke’anaka’i here.”
It was a reference to our time stranded together in Keonga. There I had been considered neither male nor female, but something else entirely: dragon-spirited, the soul of an ancient creature reborn in a human body. Neither Suhail nor I believed in the metaphysical truth of the concept, but the social aspect had been real enough, and it had given us an excuse to bypass many of the constraints of propriety.
But only for a time, and that time was now ended. “Yes, of course—forgive me.” I folded my hands against my stomach and gave him an awkward little curtsey. “I do hope I will see you again. Tom and I will need to go out into the desert, I think, if we are to improve matters here; it would be very valuable to have your assistance with that.”
“All things may be possible, God willing,” Suhail said. It was a ritual phrase, and for all his sincerity, I did not think he was optimistic.
Then he was gone, leaving me with Mahira, who laid her book aside and rejoined me. With surprising candour, she said, “He wanted very much to speak with you.”
And I with him. “Thank you for arranging this,” I said, and was surprised to hear my own words come out melancholy. It was that as much as any sense of duty which made me say, “I should return to my work now. Please do let me know how the honeyseekers fare.”
PART TWO
SEVEN
“If we are to go into the desert,” Tom said, “we will need a flawless case for doing so. Not just what good it might do here, but an actual plan for how we are to conduct our research.
Such plans are more common nowadays, but at the time it was a startling change from our usual mode of operation, which involved wandering out into the field and seeing what we might discover. (That mode worked far better when the body of existing knowledge was small enough that all one had to do was hold out a hand for new data to fall into it.) Tom and I worked long hours for a full week constructing our plan, for we knew any failed request would only make the next one more difficult: if we wanted to succeed, our best chance would be on our first try.
We might also have stood a better chance if only one of us tried to go. The truth was, however, that the House of Dragons did not require much attention from us on a daily basis. Lord Tavenor had done a good job setting up the procedures there; Tom and I were needed only when crises arose (which they did not often do), or when we altered the standard arrangements. We were reluctant to do much with the latter until we had data to guide our alterations, and so I saw little reason why we both should not go to the desert—except that Colonel Pensyth would not approve. “We shall tell him the truth,” I said. “You know anatomy far better than I, but I am the one who can record it best, with my drawings.”