She was utterly unselfconscious about what sounded more than halfway to abusive neglect, from Callam’s more cosmopolitan perspective.
“Is that why you came here?” he asked, trying to get his social bearings again. It helped that she met his gaze easily; he could focus on her calm grey eyes, and not the hints of a disturbing past that was really none of his business. “Are you seeking aid for your community? This entry is for tributes, you see, for those who are offered to be chosen companions for dragons - ”
He wondered how much he needed to explain to someone with the background she described. He couldn’t imagine such an insular community promoting closer involvement with dragons or city folk.
But if they did send a tribute, it would probably be like this, he thought. Solitary and shabby, a grudging, backhanded gift. Maybe someone too self-willed to fit in a small authoritarian community, someone they’d be glad to send away to an ambiguous fate…
He wondered, suddenly, if Edit was willing or if she’d been misled or coerced to come. “You don’t have to come as tribute to get aid or justice,” he told her. “You can bring a message to the council, and you will be heard; you don’t have to offer your life for a hearing.”
“No, I do mean to be a tribute,” she insisted. “if it is possible, if it is permitted. I don’t know as much as I should, but - ” she took a deep breath, and went on, determined. “My kin have chosen their lot, and most of them are well enough so. But there is nothing for me there. I can work, I am strong, but it’s hand to mouth. Only family is security in Palacha. My sibs are dead of the fever that took my fertility. No one will wed a plague-barren woman but an Anavaxist with his quiver full already, and that way of life has cost me too much.
“I don’t want to labor the rest of my life to reap someone else’s grain they’ll begrudge me to eat, mother someone else’s babes whose futures I’ll have no say in, and be forgotten when my usefulness is over. I hear that the companions of dragons have a strange, maybe unnatural life but a secure one, and fill a role that’s—needed. In some places viewed with honor. Not a waste, not a burden… I want that. I want to try, at least, even if I haven’t much hope to be chosen. They say the dragons do not think as we do, so I thought maybe, to them I’d be worth keeping. And so I came here, and will try my luck if I am not forbidden. Tell me if I may be allowed, where do I go now, what do I do?”
Her grey eyes met his deep brown ones squarely, and he decided if it were up to him, she would have all the chance that anyone could. So he made her welcome and showed her all the others were being shown, all they would need to know for the next week of trials and choosing. Where to get food (and he saw that she slipped an apple from the ready basket into her pocket, but said nothing; ‘hand to mouth,’ she had said, and that was before some hundreds of miles on the road), where to bathe, where to sleep. And the great room with its where the trials would be and its viewing gallery where the dragons would observe their tributes and choose among them their companions.
And if he spoke more warmly to her, to give her hope, or shared more of his insider’s familiarity than he would have with a candidate better prepared, what harm was that? If he was already less impartial than a proctor ought to be, what did it matter? There was no favoritism he could show that would alter the dragons’ choice. As she had said, their thinking did not follow human lines. They were powerful and often inscrutable except to their closest familiars; it was part of why they had human companions at all, to be a bridge between their alien-ness and the ordinary folk whose world they shared. They could not be swayed by unexplained partiality of their merest servant, not even Callam, who had wished from boyhood and failed to be chosen himself.
So he told himself. And so he told her, at least in part, when she seemed troubled that he gave her more of his time than other tributes received.
He could not have said why he took such an interest in her of all people. Why he kept finding reasons to return when his duty shift was done and spend his free time in the Tributes’ Precinct instead of home with family or friends, as he hadn’t done in years, since he’d outgrown the worst fervor of his dragon-mad youth. Why he had such mixed feelings watching her interacting with the other tributes; alliances and friendships were already forming among the thrown-together group - even romances - but no one seemed particularly drawn to Edit.
Except me, thought Callam ruefully. He felt it was an injustice that no one else seemed to want to know her and befriend her, but there was a sort of satisfaction in it too. Their loss.
He didn’t desire her sexually; his preference was for men. In confidence he’d confessed it - with trepidation for how she’d react to what many considered vaguely shameful - to reassure her that he didn’t expect her to pay for his goodwill with her body. Never mind what anyone else had done before or led her to expect. She’d just nodded and accepted it without comment, the confession and the reassurance together. But he could see she felt relieved, as he was by her acceptance. It only increased their sense of ease with each other.
So very naturally they fell into conversation with each other more and more.
“Maybe it’s because I understand what it’s like to want so badly to be Chosen,” he offered, wanting to give her - and himself - some explanation for his surprising sympathy and interest.
“You were a tribute once too?” she wondered.
“I wanted to be. I’ve been fascinated with dragons since I can remember, and when I was a boy I used to sneak away from my chores and hang about hoping to be called in, Chosen right off the street, or asked to stand as a tribute or even just to meet a dragon or be allowed to see them up close. Of course none of that was going to happen, but I was just a dumb kid, stuffed full of myths.” He laughed a little, ruefully, and tried to change the subject. He didn’t want to tell her about realizing he’d never be chosen, and settling for being a proctor as the next best thing: a great privilege, or a poor second place to his childhood dream.
Edit gave him a knowing look, as if she saw that there was more to the story than he was ready to speak of. But all she said was, “Maybe you should try. If I can, why not you?”
When Callam shook his head and looked away, she let it go.
They told each other about themselves, some. But mostly they spoke of the subject at the center of both their attention - dragons.
Edit told Callam what was known of dragons in the small and distant hardscrabble precincts where dragons themselves—or even people who had much to do with them—seldom came. It was a patchwork of fable and superstition, riddled with gaps and contradictions. That dragons had always been a part of the world, and once had been mastered by humankind in in a past age of righteousness and driven into hiding, only to rise up in turn when humankind was undone by its own folly and corruption.
Or that they were wholly alien, from another world and a different sun, who came
to Earth just when humans were beginning to reach past their own world in rocket ships that now seemed fantastical. That dragons looked on humans as humans looked on livestock, and kept companions as pets or servants. That they could change their own shape and take on the appearance of a human body, or that dragon-like people were in fact humans tainted by too-close association with the unnatural.
That they were immortal, and wise, could perform miraculous healings, restore ruined land to fertility, see hidden truths—if paid in precious stones and metals, and human tributes. Or that black magic dwelled in them and no one dared risk their displeasure, for without both arcane precautions and the dragon’s forbearance, anyone who encountered one was cursed to madness and death.
And Callam told Edit what he knew. That there was truth in the stories of healing—and madness too. That the dragons, being aliens in truth, were of a different nature than humans and all the other creatures native to Earth, and it was their alien nature that allowed both healing and ruin, changing their own shape and affecting those around them. They had come at a time when humanity struggled under wars and famines and disease, the Earth itself groaned with earthquakes and storms, and there was little hope that humankind could survive many generations more. Every nation despaired that the end time had come—and dragons, it seemed, must be its terrible heralds.
But so the history told, when the dragons had made it known that they came not as conquerors but sojourners, and could mend as well as destroy, hope had rekindled. They had been allowed to settle in return for restoring what humans had despoiled.
To stay in the world that was not their own, they needed to become of the world, and form a particular kind of bond with beings who were wholly of their adopted world: humans. (Callam tried to explain it by analogy with immunity—allergens, antibodies, vaccination - but these ideas were as foreign to Edit as space-traveling rocket ships, so he gave it up for the time being.) But it was not easy on humans to become companions of dragons, to live cheek by cheek with alien creatures of disturbing power, to handle uncommon duties and privileges under incomprehensible duress. The first humans to keep company with dragons, before they learned to tame their power through the bond, had suffered for it, and many had died raving.
The dragons grieved it as one of the greatest wrongs of their race. Which was why they took pains ever since that their companions be carefully selected, tested and prepared for their dangerous, essential role. Hence the Trials.
The trials started easily enough, not unlike games schoolchildren played, simple tests of fitness and intelligence, coordination and reasoning. As tasks increased in difficulty, demanding determination and creativity, some of the tributes began to help each other. None reached out to Edit or accepted her offers. But she held her own. At least until late in one day when Callam and his fellow proctors brought in a printed test.
Callam watched as Edit held the paper at arms’ length, then closer, then placed it down and began to laboriously move her finger below the words. All around her pages were being turned and others were taking their styluses in hand and beginning to mark. Callam saw her look up from the page and blink rapidly, then clench her jaw and bend to it again. A burning anger rose up in him. It wasn’t right. He took a deep slow breath to calm his indignation, then approached her.