Seraphina: A Novel Part 8

"Ah." She stared into the middle distance. "Poor fellow."

I closed the door behind her and looked at my quigutl timepiece. I could squeeze in a little sleep before morning if I got right to it. I turned restlessly and threw off my blankets for an hour, excited and unable to turn off my thoughts. How could I ever sleep again?

Fruit Bat, climbing trees in Porphyry, was just like me. My brother Loud Lad piped upon the rooftops of Samsam. Nag and Nagini raced across the sands somewhere; mighty Pandowdy lolled in his swamp. Fierce Miserere fought brigands, malevolent Jannoula plotted, and the rest of the garden denizens walked this world and were mine. Scattered and peculiar-some of us skeptical and bitter-we were a people.

And I was at the hub of this enormous wheel. I could bring us together. In a way, I already had.

Of course, I couldn't run off in search of my people. I had a job. Viridius was demanding late nights and early mornings. I barely had time to tend my garden properly; taking Fruit Bat's hands and locating him was out of the question. I promised myself I would go looking for him later, once Treaty Eve had come and gone. Fruit Bat kept his part of our agreement and gave me no trouble, although his black eyes scrutinized my face when I visited, and I suspected any rustle in the shrubbery was him, following me around the garden.

A dearth of sleep and a bruised, puffy nose made for a crabby music mistress, which made the days drag by in turn. My musicians weren't bothered; they were used to Viridius, whose crankiness knew no limits. The master himself found me amusing. The more I snarled, the jollier he got, until he was almost giggly. However, he did not insist that I attend any more soirees, or try to pin down a time for me to meet Lars, the mechanical megaharmonium genius. He tiptoed around me; I let him.

I still had to finalize the programs for General Comonot's welcoming concert and the entertainments for Treaty Eve. Comonot was to arrive five days before the anniversary of his treaty. He wanted to experience a bit of what we Goreddis call Golden Week: the cl.u.s.ter of holy days beginning with Speculus, the longest night of the year. It was the season for reconciliation and reunion; for grand acts of charity and grander feasts; for circling the Golden House and praying that St. Eustace keep his hands to himself for another year; for watching the Golden Plays and going mumming door to door; for making grandiose promises for the coming year and asking Heaven for favors. It just so happened that Queen Lavonda had made peace with Comonot during Golden Week, so the treaty was commemorated too with Treaty Eve, where we stayed up all night, and Treaty Day, where we all slept it off. That marked the beginning of the new year.

I had filled half the program with Viridius's students at his recommendation, sight unseen. His darling Lars got a prime spot, though the old man muttered, "Don't let me forget to tell him he's playing!" which was not particularly encouraging. There was a lot of time to fill, especially on Treaty Eve, and I still didn't have enough auditions lined up. I spent several days reading more pet.i.tions from prospective performers and auditioning them. Some were excellent; many were dreadful. It would be tough to fill an entire night unless I repeated some acts. I'd been hoping for more variety than that.

One pet.i.tion kept reappearing at the top of the stack: a troupe of pygegyria dancers. It had to be the same troupe I'd turned away at the funeral, unless there was some pygegyria festival in town. I had no intention of auditioning them; there was no point. Princess Dionne and Lady Corongi had a difficult enough time condoning our native Goreddi dances, which permitted young women to have far more fun than was appropriate. (I had this on the authority of Princess Glisselda, who found herself greatly inconvenienced by the bad att.i.tudes of her mother and governess.) I could only imagine what they would make of a foreign dance with a reputation for being risque.

I tore up the pet.i.tion and threw it in the fire. I remembered doing it, quite distinctly, when a pygegyria pet.i.tion appeared atop the pile again the next day.

Viridius occasionally let me take days off to keep up my studies with Orma; I decided I'd earned a break three days before Comonot and chaos descended upon us. I dressed warmly, slung my oud across my back, packed my flute in my satchel, and set off for St. Ida's Conservatory first thing. I all but skipped down the hill, feeling pleasantly unburdened. Winter had not yet found its teeth; the rooftop frost melted with the first kiss of the sun. I bought breakfast along the river quay, fish custard and a gla.s.s of tea. I detoured through St. Willibald's Market, which was covered, crowded, and warm. I let riotous Ninysh ribbons cheer my heart, laughed at the antics of a noodle-stealing dog, and admired enormous salt-crusted hams. It was good to be an anonymous face in the crowd, feasting my eyes upon the glorious mundane.

Alas, I was not as anonymous as I used to be. An apple seller called out laughingly as I pa.s.sed: "Play us a tune, sweetheart!" I a.s.sumed he'd noticed my oud, which hung in plain sight, but he mimed playing flute. The flute was bundled away where he could not have seen it. He recognized me from the funeral.

Then the crowd opened in front of me like a curtain, and there was Broadwick Bros. Clothiers, their stall heaped high with folded felts. Thomas Broadwick himself was just tipping his sugarloaf cap to a wide-hipped matron, the proud new owner of several yards of cloth.

He looked up and our eyes met for a long moment, as if time had stopped.

It occurred to me to approach him, to march boldly up and tell him I'd seen the light and repented my quig-coddling ways. In the same instant, though, I remembered that the lizard figurine was still in my coin purse; I had never bothered taking it out. That consideration made me hesitate too long.

His eyes narrowed, as if guilt were written plainly on my face. My window of opportunity for bluffing him had pa.s.sed.

I turned and plunged into the densest part of the crowd, pulling my oud in front of me so I could protect it from jostling. The market took up three city blocks, giving me ample scope for vanishing. I ducked around the end of a coppersmith's stall and peered back between the gleaming kettles.

He was there, moving slowly and deliberately through the crowd, as if he were wading though deep water. Thank Allsaints he was tall, and the sugarloaf hat gave him an additional three inches of bright green. It would surely be easier for me to see him than for him to see me. I started working my way up the arcade again.

I zigged and zagged as best I could, but he was always there when I looked back, a little closer each time. He'd catch up before I found the way out, unless I started running, which would have drawn the entire market's attention. No one but a thief runs in the market.

I began to sweat. Merchants' voices echoed in the vaulted ceilings, but there was another sound, something sharper, shrilling underneath the dull murmur.

It sounded like a good distraction to me.

I turned a corner and saw two Sons of St. Ogdo standing on the edge of the public fountain. One pontificated and the other stood alongside, looking tough and keeping an eye open for the Guard. I skirted the crowd and ducked behind a great fat cobbler-judging by his leather ap.r.o.n and awls-whence I might spy Thomas without his spotting me. As I'd hoped, Thomas stopped short at the sight of the black-plumed Son prancing pa.s.sionately on the fountain ledge. He listened, openmouthed, with the rest of the crowd.

"Brothers and sisters under Heaven!" cried St. Ogdo's champion, his feather bobbing, fire in his eyes. "Do you imagine that once the chief monster sets foot in Goredd, he intends to leave?"

"No!" cried scattered voices. "Drive the devils out!"

The Son raised his k.n.o.bby hands for silence. "This so-called treaty-this dishrag!-is but a ruse. They lull us to sleep with peace; they trick our Queen into banishing the knights, who were once the pride of all the Southlands; and they wait until we are utterly helpless. Whither the mighty dracomachia, our art of war? There is no dracomachia now. Why should the worms fight us? They've already sent a stinking quig vanguard, burrowing into the rotten heart of this city. Now they walk in, forty years on, invited by the Queen herself. Forty years is nothing to such long-lived beasts! These are the selfsame monsters our grandfathers died fighting-and we trust them?"

A raucous cry went up. Thomas shouted enthusiastically with the rest; I watched him through a forest of fist shaking. This was my chance to slip out. I shouldered my way through the suffocating crowd and burst out of the labyrinthine market into the feeble sunlight.

The cold air cleared my head but did not slow my racing heart. I had come out only a block from St. Ida's. I set off quickly, fearing he still followed me.

I took the steps of St. Ida's two at a time, reaching the music library within minutes. Orma's office door spanned a gap between two bookcases; it looked like it had merely been propped there, because it had. At my knock, Orma lifted the entire door to let me enter, then set it back in place.

His office wasn't properly a room. It was made of books, or more accurately, the s.p.a.ce between books, where three little windows had prevented the placement of bookcases against the wall. I had spent vast tracts of time here, reading, practicing, taking instruction, even sleeping here more than once, when home got too tense.

Orma moved a pile of books off a stool for me but seated himself directly on another stack. This habit of his never ceased to amuse me. Dragons no longer h.o.a.rded gold; Comonot's reforms had outlawed it. For Orma and his generation, knowledge was treasure. As dragons through the ages had done, he gathered it, and then he sat on it.

Just being with him in this s.p.a.ce made me feel safe again. I unpacked my instruments, my anxiety releasing in the form of chatter: "I was just chased through St. Willibald's, and you know why? Because I was kind to a quig. I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and then it turns out they don't need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with."

I didn't expect Orma to laugh, but he was even more unresponsive than usual. He stared at motes of dust dancing in the sunbeams from his tiny windows. The reflection upon his spectacles made his expression opaque to me.

"You're not listening," I said.

He did not speak; he removed his gla.s.ses and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. Was his vision bothering him? He had never gotten used to human eyes, so much weaker than their dragon counterparts. In his natural form he could spy a mouse in a field of wheat. No spectacles, however strong, could possibly bridge that gap.

I looked at him hard. There were things my eyes-and the human mind behind them-could discern that his never could. He looked dreadful: pale and drawn, with circles under his eyes, and ... I barely dared articulate it, even to myself.

He looked upset. No dragon could have seen that.

"Are you ill?" I sprang to his side, not quite daring to touch him.

He grimaced and stretched pensively, coming to some conclusion. He removed his earrings and deposited them in a drawer of his desk; whatever he was going to tell me, he did not want the Board of Censors hearing. From the folds of his doublet, he drew an object and placed it in my hand. It was heavy and cold, and I knew without being told that this was what the beggar had given him after Prince Rufus's funeral.

It was a gold coin, utterly antique. I recognized the obverse Queen, or her symbols anyway; Pau-Henoa, the trickster hero, pranced on the reverse. "Does this date from the reign of Belondweg?" I said. She was Goredd's first queen, nearly a thousand years ago. "Where would one acquire such a thing? And don't tell me the town beggars were handing them out to everyone, because I didn't get mine." I pa.s.sed it back to him.

Orma rubbed the coin between his fingers. "The child was a random messenger. Irrelevant. The coin comes from my father."

A chill ran up my spine. In repressing every thought of my mother-and I dared not even think of Orma as uncle very often, lest I slip up and call him that-I had made a habit of squelching all thoughts of my extended dragon family. "How do you know?"

He raised an eyebrow. "I know every coin in my father's h.o.a.rd."

"I thought h.o.a.rding was illegal."

"Even I am older than that law. I remember his h.o.a.rd from when I was a child, every coin and cup of it." His gaze grew distant again and he licked his lips as if gold were something he missed the taste of. He shook it off and grimaced at me. "My father was forced to give it up, of course, although he resisted for years. The Ardmagar let it pa.s.s until your mother's disgrace stained us all."

He rarely spoke about my mother; I found myself holding my breath. He said, "When Linn took up with Claude and refused to come home, the Censors flagged our entire family for mental health scrutiny. My mother killed herself for shame, confirming a second irrefutable case of madness in the family."

"I remember," I said hoa.r.s.ely.

He continued: "You'll also recall that my father was a prominent general. He didn't always agree with Ardmagar Comonot, but his loyalty and his glorious career were beyond dispute. After Linn ..." He trailed off as if he couldn't say "fell in love"; it was too horrible to contemplate. "Suddenly our father was being watched, every action probed, every utterance dissected. Suddenly they no longer turned a blind eye to his h.o.a.rd, or to his occasional resistance."

"He fled before his trial, didn't he?" I said.

Orma nodded, his eyes on the coin. "Comonot banished him in absentia; no one has seen him since. He's still wanted for stirring up dissent against the Ardmagar's reforms."

His carefully neutral expression was breaking my heart, but there was nothing human I could do to help him. "So what does the coin signify?" I asked.

Orma looked at me over his spectacles, as if it were the most unnecessary question ever uttered. "He's in Goredd. You may be certain of it."

"Didn't his h.o.a.rd get reabsorbed into the High Ker's treasury?"

He shrugged. "Who knows what the wily saar contrived to take with him."

"Could no one else have sent it? The Board of Censors, to gauge your reaction?"

Orma pursed his lips and gave a tight shake of his head. "No. This was our signal when I was a child. This very coin. It admonished me to behave at school. 'Don't shame us,' was the sense of it. 'Remember your family.' "

"What can it possibly mean in this context?"

His face looked thinner than before; his false beard fit poorly, or he hadn't bothered to put it on quite straight. He said, "I believe Imlann was at the funeral, and he suspects I may have noticed him, though in fact I did not. He's telling me to stay out of his way, to pretend I don't recognize his saarantras if I see it, and to let him do what honor demands."

I folded my arms; the room seemed suddenly colder. "Do what? And more urgently: to whom? To the man his daughter married? To their child?"

Orma's brown eyes widened behind his spectacles. "That had not occurred to me. No. Do not fear for yourself; he believes Linn died childless."

"And my father?"

"He never permitted your father's name to be spoken in his presence. Your father's very existence violates ard, and was vigorously denied by everyone."

Orma picked lint off the knee of his woolen hose; he wore a pair of silks underneath, or he'd have been scratching like a flea-bitten hound. "Who knows what Imlann has been stewing upon for the last sixteen years?" he said. "He has no incentive to obey the law or keep his human emotions under wraps. Even for myself, constantly monitored and obeying the law as best I can, this shape takes a toll. The borderlands of madness used to have much sterner signage around them than they do now."

"If you don't think he's after Papa and me, then what? Why would he be here?"

"This close to Comonot's visit?" He stared over the rims of his gla.s.ses again.

"An a.s.sa.s.sination?" He was making great suppositional leaps, or else I was. "You think he's plotting against the Ardmagar?"

"I think it would be foolish to close our eyes and proceed as if he weren't."

"Well then, you've got to tell Prince Lucian and the Guard about this."

"Ah. That's just it." He leaned back and tapped the edge of the coin against his teeth. "I can't. I'm caught-what's your expression?-between a rock and another rock? I'm too involved. I do not trust myself to make an unemotional decision."

I studied his face again, the crease between his brows. He was unquestionably struggling with something. "You don't want to turn him in, because he's your father?"

Orma rolled his eyes toward me, the whites flashing like a frightened animal's. "Quite the contrary. I want to set the Guard on him, want to see him brought to trial, want to see him hang. And not because he is truly, logically, a danger to the Ardmagar-because you're right, he might not be-but because, in fact, I ... I hate him."

Absurdly, my first response to this was a knot of jealousy, like a fist to the stomach, that he not only felt something, but felt it intensely about someone who wasn't me. I reminded myself that it was hatred; I could not possibly prefer that to his benevolent indifference, could I? I said, "Hate is serious. You're sure?"

He nodded, finally letting everything show on his face for more than a fraction of a second. He looked terrible.

"How long have you felt this?" I asked.

He shrugged hopelessly. "Linn was not just my sister; she was my teacher."

Orma had often told me that among dragons there was no higher word of esteem than teacher; teachers were more revered than parents, spouses, even the Ardmagar himself.

"When she died and the shame fell on our family," he said, "I could not denounce her the way my father could-the way we were all supposed to, for the satisfaction of the Ardmagar. We fought; he bit me-"

"He bit you?"

"We're dragons, Phina. The one time you saw me ..." He gestured vaguely with his hand, as if he didn't want to say it aloud, as if I'd seen him naked-which I guess technically I had. "I kept my wings folded, so you probably didn't notice the damage to the left, where the bone was once broken."

I shook my head, horrified for him. "Can you still fly?"

"Oh, yes," he said absently. "But you must understand: in the end I denounced her, under duress. My mother killed herself anyway. My father was banished anyway. In the end-" His lips trembled. "I don't know what it was for."

There were tears in my eyes, if not in his. "The Board of Censors would have sent you down for excision if you hadn't."

"Yes, that's highly likely," he mused, his tone back to a studied neutral.

The Censors would have excised my mother, too, reached in and stolen every loving memory of my father. In my head, the tin box of memories gave a painful twitch.

"Denouncing her didn't even free me from the Censors' scrutiny," said Orma. "They don't know my true difficulties, but they a.s.sume I have some, given my family history. They suspect, certainly, that I care more for you than is permitted."

"That's what Zeyd was sent to test," I said, trying to keep the bitterness from my voice.

He squirmed, imperceptibly to any eye but mine. He had never shown the tiniest bit of remorse for putting me in mortal danger as a child; this fleeting discomfiture was the best I could expect.

"I don't intend to give them any inkling of my real difficulty," he said, handing me the coin. "Do with it what you think right."

"I'll turn it over to Prince Lucian Kiggs, though I don't know what he can do with your vague premonition. Any advice on recognizing Imlann's saarantras?"

"I'd recognize him, unless he's in disguise. I'd know him if I smelled him," said Orma. "My father's saarantras was lean, but he may have spent the last sixteen years exercising, or forcing custard down his gullet. I can't know. He had blue eyes, unusual in a saar but not in a Southlander. Fair hair is easily dyed."

"Could Imlann pa.s.s as easily as Linn?" I asked. "Was he practiced in courtly manners, or musical like his children? Where might he try blending in?"

"He'd do best as a soldier, I should think, or concealed somewhere at court, but he'd know I would expect that. He'll be somewhere no one would expect."

"If he was at the funeral and saw you without your seeing him, it's likely he would have been standing ..." Saints' dogs. Orma had been at the center of everything. I'd seen him from behind the quire screen; he might have been seen from any angle.

Orma stiffened. "Do not go looking for Imlann yourself. He might kill you."

"He doesn't know I exist."

"He doesn't need to know you're you to kill you," said Orma. "He needs only believe you're trying to stop him doing whatever he's here to do."

"I see," I said, half laughing. "Better Prince Lucian Kiggs than me, I suppose."

"Yes!"

The vehemence of that yes made me stagger back a step. I could not reply; some emotion had seized my throat.

Someone was rapping on the lopsided door. I moved the door to the side, expecting one of the librarian monks.

There slumped Basind, the disjointed newskin, breathing loudly through his mouth. His eyes pointed two different directions. I recoiled, holding the door before me like a shield. He pushed past, jingling like an Allsaints wreath, gaping at the room, and stumbling over a pile of books.