Seraphina Read online

  I looked over at him then, because I recognized that quote. “Pontheus?”

  “The same.” Prince Lucian nodded approvingly.

  Josef sneered. “With all due respect, the Regent of Samsam would never permit a mad Porphyrian philosopher to guide his decisions. Nor would he permit dragons to make a state visit to Samsam—no offense to your Queen, of course.”

  “Perhaps that is why the Regent of Samsam was not the architect of peace,” said the prince, voice calm, foot tapping. “Apparently he has no qualms about receiving the benefits of our mad-Porphyrian-inspired treaty without having to shoulder any of the risks himself. He’ll be here for this state visit, more’s the headache for me—and I mean that with all the love and respect in the world.”

  As fascinating as this polite, courtly aggression was, suddenly Miss Fusspots arrested my gaze from across the adjoining room. She accepted a glass of tawny port from a page boy. I could not get to her without ducking through the dancing, and they’d just started a volta, so there was a great number of flying limbs. I stayed where I was, but did not take my eye off her.

  A trumpet flare brought the exuberant dance to an inelegant halt; the band choked off abruptly, and there were several collisions on the dance floor. I did not take my eyes off Miss Fusspots to see what all the bother was, which resulted in my standing all alone in the wide path that had once again opened up.

  Prince Lucian grabbed my arm—my right—and hauled me out of the way.

  Queen Lavonda herself stood in the doorway. Her face was creased with age but her back was unbent; she had a spine of steel, they said, and her posture confirmed it. She still wore white for her son, from her silk slippers to her wimple and embroidered cap. Her sumptuous sleeves trailed the floor.

  Glisselda sprang up off her couch and curtsied deeply. “Grandmamma! You honor us!”

  “I’m not staying, Selda, and I’m not here for myself,” said the Queen. She had the same voice as her granddaughter, but aged and edged with command. “I have brought you some additional guests,” she said, ushering in a group of four saarantrai, Eskar among them. They stood stiffly, as if in military formation. They had not bothered to dress up particularly; their bells were not quite shiny enough to be proper jewelry. Eskar was in Porphyrian trousers again. Everyone stared.

  “Oh!” squeaked Glisselda. She curtsied again, trying to recover her composure; her eyes were still large when she rose. “To what do we owe this, um—”

  “To a treaty signed nearly forty years ago,” said the Queen, who seemed to grow taller as she addressed the entire room. “I believed, perhaps erroneously, that our peoples would simply grow accustomed to each other, given the cessation of warfare. Are we oil and water, that we cannot mix? Have I been remiss in expecting reason and decency to prevail, when I should have rolled up my sleeves and enforced them?”

  The humans in the room looked sheepish; the dragons, discomfited.

  “Glisselda, see to your guests!” the Queen snapped, and quit the room.

  Glisselda quailed visibly. Beside me, Prince Lucian fidgeted and muttered, “Come on, Selda.” She could not have heard him, but she lifted her chin as if she had, trying to capture her grandmother’s authoritative air. She strode toward Eskar and kissed her on both her cheeks. The little princess had to rise up on her toes to reach. Eskar submitted graciously, inclining her head, and everyone applauded.

  Then the soiree resumed, the saarantrai together on one side like a herd of spooked cattle, their bells jingling plaintively, and the other guests milling around them in a wide radius.

  I kept my distance, too. Eskar knew me, but I did not care to risk the others smelling me. I wasn’t sure what they would do. I might be taken for a scholar with a bell exemption, or Eskar might tactlessly proclaim my parentage aloud, to be overheard by the whole room.

  Surely she wouldn’t. Orma had told me that interbreeding violated ard so egregiously that no dragon would entertain the idea that I was possible, let alone utter it aloud.

  “I dare you to ask her to dance,” said a gentleman behind me, snapping me out of my preoccupations. For a moment I thought he meant me.

  “Which one?” intoned the omnipresent Earl of Apsig.

  “Your choice,” laughed his friend.

  “No, I mean which one is a ‘her’? They’re so mannish, these dragon females.”

  I bristled at that, but why? They weren’t talking about me—except that, in some oblique way, they were.

  “The real difficulty with these worm-women,” said Josef, “is their extremely inconvenient dentition.”

  “Dentition?” asked his friend, who was apparently slow on the uptake.

  I felt my face grow hot.

  “Teeth,” said Josef, spelling it out. “In all the wrong places, if you follow me.”

  “Teeth in … Oh! Ow!”

  “ ‘Ow’ is understating it, friend. Their males are no better. Picture a harpoon! And they’d like nothing better than to impale our women and rip out their—”

  I could take no more; I rushed away, skirting the dance floor, until I found a window. I unlatched it with trembling hands, desperate for air. Eyes closed, I pictured the tranquility of my garden, until my embarrassment had been replaced by sorrow.

  It was just a joke between gentlemen, but I heard in it all the jokes they would tell about me if they knew.

  Damn Viridius. I couldn’t stay. I would tell him tomorrow that I had been here; there were witnesses. As the patron Saints of comedy would have it, however, I met the old man in the doorway on my way out. He blocked my path with his cane. “You can’t be leaving already, Seraphina!” he cried. “It’s not even ten!”

  “I’m sorry sir, I—” My voice choked up; I gestured hopelessly at the gathering, hoping he would not perceive the tears in my eyes.

  “Lars wouldn’t come either. He’s as shy as you are,” said Viridius, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Have you paid your respects to the princess and prince? No? Well, you must do that at least.” He took my right arm with his bandaged hand, leaning on his cane with the other.

  He guided me toward Princess Glisselda’s couch. She glittered like a star upon the blue upholstery; courtiers orbited her like planets. We waited our turn, and then Viridius pulled me forward.

  “Infanta,” he said, bowing. “This charming young person has a great deal of work to do—for me—but I let her know, in no uncertain terms, how inexcusably rude it would be to leave without paying her respects.”

  Glisselda beamed at me. “You came! Millie and I had a wager on whether you ever would. I owe her an extra day off now, but I’m glad of it. Have you met cousin Lucian?”

  I opened my mouth to assure her I had, but she was already calling the prince to her side. “Lucian! You were wondering how it was that I suddenly held such interesting opinions on dragons—well, here she is, my advisor on dragon affairs!”

  The prince looked tense. My first assumption was that he was offended, that I’d been rude without even noticing, but then I saw him glancing over at Eskar and her little group, standing uselessly in a nearby corner. Perhaps he felt uneasy about the princess discussing “dragon affairs” so loudly within earshot of the real, live dragons she pretended not to see.

  Princess Glisselda looked puzzled by the awkwardness in the air, as if it were a smell she had never encountered before. I looked to Prince Lucian, but he stared fixedly elsewhere. Did I dare to point out what he did not?

  It was fear that permitted the Thomas Broadwicks of the world to flourish: fear of speaking up, fear of the dragons themselves. The latter didn’t apply to me, and surely conscience must trump the former.

  I could speak for Orma’s sake.

  I said, “Your Highness, please pardon my forwardness.” I gestured toward the saarantrai with my eyes. “It would suit your kindly nature to invite the saarantrai to sit by you, or even if you danced a measure with one.”

  Glisselda froze. Theoretical discussion about dragonkind was one
thing; interacting with them was something else entirely. She cast her cousin a panicked look.

  “She’s right, Selda,” he said. “The court follows our lead.”

  “I know!” fretted the princess. “But what am I … how am I to … I can’t just—”

  “You must,” said Prince Lucian firmly. “Ardmagar Comonot arrives in eight days, and what then? We can’t shame Grandmother.” He tugged the ends of his doublet sleeves, straightening them. “I’ll go first, if it’s easier.”

  “Oh yes, thank you, Lucian, of course it’s easier,” she gushed, relieved. “He’s so much better at these kinds of things than I am, Phina. This is why marrying him will be so useful; he understands practical things and common people. He’s a bastard, after all.”

  I was awed, at first, that she could call her own fiancé a bastard so casually without him minding, but then I saw his eyes. He minded. He minded a great deal, but maybe felt he had no right to say so.

  I knew what that was like. I permitted myself the smallest of small feelings. Sympathy. Yes. That’s what it was.

  He gathered his dignity, which was considerable; as a military man, he knew how to carry himself. He approached Eskar as one might sensibly approach a flaming, hissing hell-beast: with a wary calmness and extreme self-possession. All around the room conversations trailed off or were suspended as heads turned toward the prince. I found myself holding my breath; I surely wasn’t the only one.

  He bowed graciously. “Madam Undersecretary,” he said, perfectly audible across the hushed room, “would you join me in a galliard?”

  Eskar scanned the crowd as if seeking out the author of this prank but said, “I believe I shall.” She took his arm; her Zibou caftan was a riotous fuchsia next to his scarlet. Everyone exhaled.

  I stayed a few minutes longer to watch them dance, smiling to myself. It could be done, this peace. It just took a willingness to do it. I silently thanked Prince Lucian for his determination. I caught Viridius’s eye across the room; he seemed to understand and waved a dismissal. I turned to quit the salon, happy that I’d helped effect some positive good, but mostly relieved to be leaving the crowd and chatter behind. Anxiety—or the prospect of being free of it—propelled me toward the door like a bubble toward the surface of a lake. The hallway promised me room to breathe.

  I rushed into the corridor with such haste that I all but ran into Lady Corongi, Princess Glisselda’s governess.

  Lady Corongi was a petite woman, old and old-fashioned. Her wimple was severely starched and her butterfly veil—a decade out of favor among the fashionable—was wired so rigidly that she might have put out someone’s eye with it. Her sleeves covered her hands completely, which made eating or writing a challenge, but she was of an antique school that equated fine manners with elaborate rituals. Clothing that impeded basic functioning presumably gave her more opportunities for fastidious fussing.

  She stared at me in shock, her eyes goggling behind her veil, her painted lips drawn up into a prim and disapproving rosebud. She said not a word; it was up to me to apologize since I was clearly the one with no manners.

  I curtsied so low I nearly lost my balance. She rolled her eyes at my wobbling. “I humbly beg your pardon, milady,” I said.

  “It astonishes me that a bungling monkey such as yourself is permitted to careen so freely up the corridors,” she sniffed. “Have you no keeper? No leash?”

  I had hoped to speak with her about the princess’s education. Seeing Glisselda so cowed by real, live saarantrai had only increased my impetus to speak, but now I felt cowed myself.

  Lady Corongi curled her lip into a sneer and brushed past me, bumping me out of the way with a sharp elbow to the ribs. She only went two steps further before turning abruptly. “What did you say your name was, maidy?”

  I dove into a hasty curtsy. “Seraphina, milady. I teach Princess Glisselda—”

  “Harpsichord. Yes, she’s mentioned you. She said you were smart.” She stepped back in front of me, lifted her veil so she could see me more clearly, and scrutinized my face with sharp blue eyes. “Is that why you fill her head with nonsense about dragons? Because you’re so very smart?”

  Here was the thing I had wanted to discuss, without my having to steer the conversation at all. I tried to reassure her: “It’s not a question of being smart, milady. It’s a question of exposure. My father, as you may know, is the Crown’s expert on Comonot’s Treaty. I myself had a dragon tutor for many years. I have some insight—”

  “That dragons consider us mere insects? That’s an insight?” She stood close enough that I could see her makeup condensing in the creases of her face and smell her cloying Ninysh perfume. “I am trying to give the second heir confidence, to make her proud of her people and their victory over dragonkind.”

  “It’s not confidence; it’s contempt,” I said, warming to my argument. “You should have seen her alarm earlier at merely speaking with saarantrai. She’s disgusted and frightened. She’s going to be Queen someday; she can afford to be neither.”

  Lady Corongi made a ring of her thumb and forefinger and pressed it to her heart: St. Ogdo’s sign. “When she is Queen, Heaven willing, we will finish this conflict the way we should have finished it, instead of treating like cowards.”

  She turned on her heel and stalked into the Blue Salon.

  My encounter with Lady Corongi left me agitated in the extreme. I returned to my rooms, practiced spinet and oud to calm myself, and crawled into bed many hours later, still not tired.

  I needed to tend my garden, of course, but I could do that lying down. Half the grotesques were already asleep when I reached them. Even Fruit Bat was lolling about dreamily. I tiptoed past and let him be.

  When I reached the Rose Garden, I stared a long time at Miss Fusspots shooting aphids off the leaves with a very small crossbow. I had forgotten all about seeing her at the soiree, but some deeper part of my mind had not. Her dress was changed to the green velvet she had worn this evening. In fact, her entire person seemed sharper and more present, stouter and more solid. Was that proof that I’d really seen her, or merely that I believed I had?

  If I took her hands right now, what would I see? If she was still at the Blue Salon, I would recognize it instantly. I felt a twinge of guilt about deliberately spying on her, but curiosity overruled it. I had to know.

  Miss Fusspots gave me her hands without any fuss. Entering the vision felt like being sucked down a drain and spit out into the world.

  The dimly lit room below my vision-eye was not the Blue Salon, which perplexed me only for a moment. It had been hours; she might have gone home. I was peering down into a tidy boudoir: heavy carven furniture in an older style, curtained bed (empty), bookshelves, peculiar bit of statuary, all of it lit only by the hearth. It didn’t look like a palace room, but perhaps she had a house in town.

  Where was she, though?

  “Who’s there?” she said abruptly, nearly startling me out of the vision altogether.

  The shape I had mistaken for statuary moved, was moving, slowly, one arm raised, feeling around in the empty air as if she were blind, or as if she were looking for something invisible.

  “I don’t know who you are,” snarled the old woman below me, “but you have two choices: identify yourself, or wait for me to find you. You don’t want the latter. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night. I will come straight to you, and I will make you sorry.”

  I was still having trouble recognizing her. I blamed the firelight, but it wasn’t just the poor illumination. She looked different.

  She was unclothed and far skinnier than she appeared with her gown on. In fact, she looked almost boyish. Was her portly bosom all made up of padding? I’d caught her in the middle of getting ready for bed, clearly, and while I was utterly embarrassed, I couldn’t seem to blink or turn away. One would think such a high lady, even one with fictitious breasts, would have servants to undress her.

  Then I saw why not, and the shock of it threw m
e straight out of the vision and back to myself.

  I felt like I’d fallen into my own bed from a considerable height; I was dizzy and disoriented and agog with what I’d seen.

  She had a tail, a stubby one, shingled over entirely with silver scales.

  Scales just like mine.

  I pulled the covers over my head and lay there shivering, horrified by what I had seen, doubly horrified at my own horror, and absurdly excited by the implications.

  She was a half-dragon. Surely there was no other way to interpret those scales.

  I was not the only one of my kind! If Miss Fusspots was half dragon, could that mean that the rest of my grotesques were as well? Suddenly all the horns and wattles and vestigial wings in my garden made sense. I’d gotten off lightly with nothing but visions, scales, and the occasional blizzard of maternal memory.

  I was still awake an hour later when there came a pounding at my door.

  “Open this door at once, or I shall fetch the steward to open it for me!”

  Miss Fusspots’s voice was perfectly recognizable through the door. I rose and crossed through my parlor, preparing an explanation. Fruit Bat had sensed my presence, but no one else in a vision ever had. What had changed? Seeing her in the real world? Being so near? If I had known she would detect me, I never would have looked in on her like that.

  There was nothing to do but apologize. I opened the door, prepared to do just that.

  She hit me right in the face, with a bloom of stars and a burst of pain.

  I staggered back, dimly aware that my nose was gushing. Miss Fusspots stood in the doorway, brandishing an enormous book—her weapon of choice—breathing hard, a maniacal glint in her eye.

  She paled when she saw me bleeding, which I mistook for a sign of impending mercy. “How did you do that?” she snarled through clenched teeth, stepping up and kicking me in the shin. She swatted at my head again, but I managed to duck; her arm left an incongruous waft of lilac perfume in its wake. “Why are you spying on me?”