Seraphina Read online

  Orma remembered his father’s dragon shape as clearly as if it had been treasure. I felt like I was hearing him describe a heap of gold coins, which I would be expected to distinguish from other heaps by description alone. There was no point asking for more. Did dragons find descriptions of humans confusing? Did it take time and experience to tell us apart?

  “I can tell you’re not going to retain any of this,” said Orma. “You have that empty look you used to give your history tutors. You could look for Imlann—”

  “You told me not to!”

  “Let me finish. You could look for him in your own head, among your maternal memories. Surely Linn left you some image of our father.”

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. I did not care to go digging around in that box again, not if I could avoid it.

  The knights had mentioned a Sir James as their specialist dragon identifier. He was the one I needed to talk to—Kiggs needed to talk to, that is. In the meantime, I hoped Kiggs hadn’t put off talking to Eskar in hopes that I might gain good information.

  Basind, with the help of the tapmaster and his broom, had cleared off nearly all the quigs. Our time was ending.

  “Turn your back toward Basind,” Orma whispered. “I don’t want him to see me give you this.”

  It was a bit late to start pretending he was a law-abiding saar. “Give me what?”

  Never taking his eyes off the newskin, Orma pretended to scratch his head. His hand came down and pressed cold metal into mine. It was one of his earrings. I gasped and tried to hand it back. Orma said, “The Censors aren’t watching. A quig modified them for me.”

  “Won’t the Censors notice they can’t check in on you anymore?”

  “I’m sure they already have. They’ll see to it I get a new pair. It’s happened before. Switch it on if you’re in trouble, and I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  “I promised I wouldn’t go looking for Imlann.”

  “Trouble may find you,” he said. “I have an interest in this particular problem.”

  I tucked the earring into my bodice and we turned back toward the table. Basind’s tunic was covered with grubby handprints; his dinner was gone, but it wasn’t clear he’d been the one to eat it. He looked bewildered, or like his face had melted a little.

  “We must return to St. Ida’s,” said Orma, extending a hand to me to show Basind how it was done. I shook it, trying to hide my amusement. We never shook hands.

  Basind tried it next but he wouldn’t let go. When I finally pried him off, he gave me a look I didn’t dare identify. “Touch me again!” he rasped, and my stomach turned.

  “Home,” said Orma. “You have meditation and partitioning to practice.”

  Basind whined, rubbing his hand fiercely as if he could recover something of my touch, but he followed my uncle up the tavern stairs, docile as a lamb.

  I checked with the tapmaster that Orma had paid for our dinner; one could never be certain he’d remember something like that. I took one last look around this peculiar, smelly slice of interspecies coexistence, the treaty’s mad dream come to raucous life, then took myself toward the stairs.

  “Maidy?” said a hesitant voice at my back. I turned to see a fresh-faced young student with chalk dust in his hair. In one hand he grasped a very short straw; behind him an entire table of young men pretended not to be watching.

  “Are you rushing off?” He didn’t stammer with his voice but with his waving hands and his nervous blink. “Would you not join us? We’re all human over here—well, except for Jim—and we’re not bad company. We wouldn’t have to talk math. It’s just … we’ve seen no human girls in Quighole since dissection was outlawed!”

  Almost the entire table behind him burst out laughing; the saarantras looked baffled by everyone else’s reaction, saying, “But he’s not wrong, is he?”

  I couldn’t stop myself from laughing along with them; in fact, I found myself tempted far more by this offer than by Guntard’s invitation to the Sunny Monkey. These chalk-dusted fellows, arguing and scribbling trigonometry on the table, felt familiar to me, as if St. Bert’s Collegium attracted all the most saar-like humans. I patted his shoulder in a comradely fashion and said, “Honestly, I wish I could stay. For future reference: do not underestimate the seductive power of math. If I come again, I shall expect to scrawl on the tables right along with you.”

  His friends welcomed him back to the table, hooting and toasting his bravery. I smiled to myself. First those aged knights, and now this. I was evidently the sweetheart of all Goredd. That made me laugh, and laughing gave me the courage to plunge out into the night, away from the warmth of this gathering.

  It was late enough when I reached Castle Orison that I wasn’t sure where I’d find Lucian Kiggs. It occurred to me that I could check the Blue Salon, where Princess Glisselda was almost certainly holding her miniature court, but I feared I smelled of tavern—or worse yet, quigutl—and surely by the time I changed clothes and cleaned up, it would be too late and everyone would have gone to bed.

  I knew better than that; I just didn’t want to go.

  I went to my suite and wrote Kiggs a note:

  Your Highness:

  I spoke with Orma, but alas, he could not identify the rogue dragon from the knights’ description. However, I forgot to mention to you that the knights claimed one of their own, Sir James Peascod, specialized in identifying dragons during the war. Sir James was there the evening of the rogue’s visit and may have recognized him. I think it would be well worth interviewing him about this matter.

  I hope you didn’t put off speaking with Eskar in hopes that I would return with useful information. My apologies for Orma’s vagueness.

  I couldn’t work out how to sign off; everything seemed too familiar or ridiculously stiff. I decided to err on the side of stiff, given how I’d begun the letter. I found a page boy in the corridor and handed it off to him. I bid all my grotesques good night and went to bed early; tomorrow was going to be the longest of long days.

  The sun rose into a dappled sky, pink and gray like the belly of a trout. The maids were pounding on my locked door before I was done washing; the breakfast hall was abuzz with anticipation. The green and purple banner of Belondweg, Goredd’s first queen, flew from every turret and hung in long drapes upon the houses in town. A line of carriages ran all the way from Stone Court to the bottom of Castle Hill: dignitaries arriving from all over the Southlands. No one dared miss this rare opportunity to meet with Ardmagar Comonot in human form.

  I watched the Ardmagar’s slow procession from atop the barbican, along with most of our musicians. Comonot had flown to Southgate before the sun was up so as to minimize alarm at his scaly presence, but everyone in town knew he was coming and a crowd had been gathered there since last night. Representatives of the Crown had been on hand to greet the Ardmagar and to provide him and his entourage with clothing once they transformed. Comonot partook of a leisurely breakfast; it was midmorning before he set out for the palace with his entourage. Comonot refused a horse and insisted on traversing the city on foot, personally greeting the people—cheering and otherwise—who lined the streets.

  Apparently he arrived at the cathedral plaza just as the Countdown Clock chimed for the last time. They say it played an eerie, mechanized hurdy-gurdy tune, and that the Queen and the dragon danced a jig together. People who saw it insisted that it was not a machine but a puppet performance. No machine could have put on such a show.

  I’d have bet a Lars-built machine could, but alas I didn’t get to see it for myself.

  Though the Ardmagar was dressed in bright blue, he was hard to spot among the milling throngs and waving flags; his saarantras was not a tall man. Those of us shivering on the barbican did not find ourselves unduly impressed. “He’s so tiny!” cooed the scrawny sackbutist. “I could squish him under my boot heel!”

  “Who’s a cockroach now, Ard-bugger?” cried one of my drummers, not quietly.

  I cringed, hoping no one w
ho mattered had heard. How did word move so quickly at court? I said: “Not one more disrespectful word—any of you!—or you will find yourself playing for your supper on street corners.” They flashed me any number of skeptical looks. “Viridius has given me full discretion in this,” I assured them. “Push me, if you imagine I don’t mean it.”

  They looked at their shoes. I thanked St. Loola, patroness of children and fools, that no one seemed inclined to call my bluff.

  Those of us responsible for the fanfare took off for the reception hall and found it packed to the rafters with the aggregate nobility of the Southlands. From my perch in the gallery, I saw that Count Pesavolta of Ninys and the Regent of Samsam had each colonized a quarter of the room, the former flamboyant and noisy, the latter dour and severe. I spotted Dame Okra among the Ninysh; she was more subdued than most, but then, she had lived a long time in Goredd.

  The Ardmagar stepped into the doorway, and the room went instantly silent. He was as stout and as jowly as Viridius. His dark hair looked like it had been wetted and combed severely straight; it was threatening to burst into unruliness as it dried. Nevertheless, his hawkish nose and piercing stare gave him a formidable presence. He radiated intensity, as if compelled by some inner fire he could barely contain; the very air around him seemed to shimmer, like the heat off city streets in summertime. He wore his bell like a medal, on a heavy gold chain around his thick neck. He raised an arm in salutation; the room held its breath. The Queen rose; Princess Dionne rose with her, looking awed. Glisselda and Kiggs, together on the left, were mere shadows playing at the periphery of history.

  We gallery rats were supposed to burst forth in fanfare at exactly this point, but we were all struck dumb. My musicians must have found Comonot a bit more impressive up close.

  I, on the other hand, had broken into a cold sweat.

  I shook all over, filled with a rancorous cacophony of emotions: fear, anger, disgust. The stew of emotions wasn’t mine, though.

  I closed my eyes and saw the tin box of memories sitting in a puddle, leaking. Fat pearls of condensation rolled down its sides. I couldn’t do my job with my mother’s feelings about Comonot leaking into my consciousness. I cast around inside my head for a … a towel. One appeared at my thought. I mopped up underneath and then wrapped the box in it.

  The mess of emotions dissipated, and I opened my eyes. Comonot had proceeded no further up the carpet toward the dais. His arm was still raised; he looked like a plaster statue of himself.

  “Wake up, you louts!” I hissed to my musicians. They startled as if they’d been entranced, hoisted their instruments into position, and burst into music on my mark.

  At the blare of his tardy fanfare, the general began the long walk toward the dais, leaving a glamour in the air behind him as he passed, waving and smiling. He seemed to wink at every single one of us individually.

  He stepped up, kissed the Queen’s jeweled hand, and addressed the crowd in a resounding basso: “Queen Lavonda. Princesses. Gathered people of quality. I come to honor forty years of peace between our peoples.”

  He waited for the clapping to subside, his expression as self-satisfied as a cat’s. “Do you know why dragons learned to take human form? We change that we might speak with you. In our natural form, our throats are so rough with smoke that we cannot make your words. You, on your side, fail to recognize our Mootya as speech. It was the dragon sage Golya, or Golymos, as they call him in Porphyry, who discovered how to effect this change almost a millennium ago. He wished to speak with the Porphyrian philosophers and found a mighty university for our people. That was the first incidence of dragons looking to humans for something good and useful, but not the last. Golya has gone down in history as one of our greats—and so shall I.”

  Applause again shook the hall. Comonot waited it out, wedging his left hand into the gap between buttons at the front of his satin doublet as if he intended to surreptitiously scratch his stomach.

  “The idea of peace came to me in a dream when I was a student at Golya’s university, the Danlo Mootseye. We dragons do not dream. I took a class on dreaming: we slept in our saarantrai and reported each day on the wonders we had seen.

  “One night I saw a hoard, gleaming like the sun. I stepped up to it, to run my fingers through it, but it wasn’t gold, it was knowledge! And I realized a wondrous truth: that knowledge could be our treasure, that there were things humankind knew that we did not, that our conquest need not comprise taking and killing, but could consist of our mutual conquest of ignorance and distrust.”

  He began pacing the dais and gesticulating at oddly precise intervals, as if he’d seen a human do this before and concluded that it was a ritual dance that he could master. He said: “I told my dream in class, and was ridiculed. ‘What does knowledge look like? What knowledge could be worth having that we cannot discover on our own?’ But I knew the truth of it, I believed it down to my smoldering core, and from that day forward, I acted only for the sake of that vision. I grew mighty for its sake. I wrought a peace of steel. I wrestled with how best to learn your arts, your diplomacy, your ability to band together, while still retaining our essential dragonness. It has not been easy.

  “Dragons are slow to change; we each want to fly our own direction. The only way to lead is to drag the rest, flapping and flaming, toward what is right. I treated with Queen Lavonda in secret, knowing it would be better to impose a treaty upon my own people than to endure a century of debating it in the Ker. I was right.

  “The treaty has been and continues to be successful, thanks to reforms on our side and continuing good faith on yours. Here’s to forty more years, or—if I may extrapolate—a hundred. My cosigner will be long dead by then, and I’ll be addressing your grandchildren, but I intend this peace to last until the end of my days, and beyond.”

  The gathered nobility hesitated, put off perhaps by such a casual reference to our shorter life spans, but in the end they all applauded. The Queen directed Comonot to the chair that had been placed for him between herself and Princess Dionne, and the long, tedious ritual of paying respects began. Everyone in that hall, from the Regent of Samsam to Little Lord Nobody of Pisky-on-the-Pigpond, expected an opportunity to meet Ardmagar Comonot and kiss the rings upon his thick fingers. I noted the Earl of Apsig lining up with everyone else, and felt a certain grim satisfaction.

  The endless reception line required musical accompaniment, of course. I was on oud, but I’d forgotten my plectrum; I had blisters on my fingers by lunchtime.

  I also had a headache. It had started with the leaking memory box and grown by the hour. “Are you all right, Music Mistress?” asked a voice from … I could not pinpoint it. I looked across at my musicians, who seemed bizarrely far away. Their faces wobbled. I blinked. “She’s gone so pale!” said a very slow voice indeed, a sound like dark honey through a sieve.

  I wondered whether I’d miss lunch, and then my mother’s memory ambushed me.

  One hundred sixty-one dragons perched atop High Nest. Below us: mountains. Above us: nimbus clouds moving south-southeast at 0.0034 terminus.

  The Ardmagar lectures the students and faculty of the Danlo Mootseye as the new term unfurls. His lecture’s title: “The Insidious Sickness.”

  I know what that refers to. I cannot sleep, thinking about it. I am likely infected.

  I bring out my note block and turn it on. It was made by one of my father’s quigutl. It helps me remember, but nothing helps me forget.

  “Humanity can be our teacher,” cries the Ardmagar. “The point of peace is the exchange of knowledge. My reforms—the bans on vendetta and on hoarding, for two—are buoyed by human philosophies. Where such philosophies are logical, ethical, and quantifiable, we can make them our own.

  “But let me warn you, all of you, from the newskin on his first trip south to the venerable teacher who has flown into the macrocloud of unvigilance: there is danger in humanity. Do not lose yourself to the wet brain. Tempted by the chemical intoxication of emotion
, dragons forget what they are.”

  The Ardmagar is wrong about that. I have never forgotten, to three significant digits, even when I wished to. And here I perch, not forgetting Claude.

  “Emotions are addictive!” cries the Ardmagar. “They have no meaning: they are antithetical to reason. They fly toward illogical, non-draconian moralities.”

  “They fly toward art,” I mutter.

  He hears the echo of my voice; the acoustics of High Nest have been perfected over a millennium, that everyone may be heard. “Who spoke out of ard?”

  I raise my head to an angle of 40 degrees, breaking the submissive stance. Everyone stares. “I said, Ardmagar, that emotions fly humans toward art.”

  “Art.” He fixes me with a hunter’s gaze, gauging my speed and defenses. “Art gleams before us all, a hoard ungathered. I understand that, hatchling. But we study art. We fly over it from every direction, from a sane, safe distance. Someday we will comprehend its power. We will put it in ard. We will learn to hatch it, and why it’s worth hatching. But do not be tempted into the human flight path. Is a breath’s span of art worth a life span enslaved by the fetid backwash of the meaty brain?”

  I lower my head, biting down on my instinct. This would be anger, for a human; I’ve felt that. In the dragon brain, it manifests as “flame or flee.” Why did I speak? He will measure my words and calculate that I am miasmic. The Censors will come at night; I will be sent down for excision. They will cut the unquantifiable right out of me.

  It would put my neurons back in ard. I have wished to forget; it’s why I came home. I want it, and don’t want it.

  One cannot fly in two directions at once. I cannot perch among those who think that I am broken.

  I scan the text recorded on my note block. To it I add: Love is not a disease.

  I opened my eyes, closing them again immediately when I saw Kiggs leaning over me, looking concerned, his hand on my forehead. Saints’ dogs, I’d collapsed under that memory. Why couldn’t I have plunged headfirst over the parapet and saved myself the mortification of waking up with everyone staring at me?