Seraphina (11 page)

“I’m the assistant music mistress,” I said, giving small courtesy. I was still unsteady on my feet.

“Maid Dombegh? You played at the funeral,” cried Silas. “Thomas and I were moved to tears!”

I inclined my head graciously, but as I did so I felt a snap in my mind, like a loosed bowstring, and the headache started up again behind my eyes. My evening’s excitement was not yet over, apparently. I turned to go inside.

A powerful hand on my arm stopped me. It was Thomas. Behind him, Silas and Louisa chatted at the guards, asking them to mention the Broadwick brothers, purveyors of sturdy woolens, to the Queen. Thomas drew me a little aside and whispered in my ear: “Silas left me to watch you while he fetched Louisa. I saw the quig idol in your purse.”

My face burned. I was ashamed against all reason, as if I were the guilty party and not the person who’d been pawing through an unconscious woman’s belongings.

His fingers dug into my arm. “I’ve met women like you. Worm-riding quig lovers. You don’t know how close you came to hitting your head during your fit.”

He couldn’t mean what I thought he meant. I met his eye; his gaze was a shock of cold.

“Women like you disappear in this town,” he snarled. “Tied in sacks, thrown in the river. No one calls for justice because they get what they deserve. But my brother-in-law can’t kill a filthy quig in his own home without—”

“Thomas! We’re going,” called Louisa behind us.

“St. Ogdo calls you to repent, Maid Dombegh.” He released me roughly. “Pray for virtue, and pray we don’t meet again.” He stalked off toward his siblings.

I swayed, barely able to keep my feet.

I had thought them kind, despite their prejudices, but Thomas had been tempted to dash my head against the cobblestones, just for carrying a quigutl figurine. That specific statuette didn’t carry some deeper meaning, did it? Had I inadvertently chosen the one that indicated I indulged in some particular perversion? Maybe Orma would know.

I staggered through the gatehouse, making for the palace as best I could with my knees trembling so violently. The guards asked whether I needed help—I must have looked terrible—but I waved them off. I thanked every Saint I could think of and prayed that the glow upon the castle’s turrets came from torchlight and the moon and not from another imminent collapse.

S
ick and exhausted though I was, I could not put off dealing with Fruit Bat. I hauled my bolster onto the floor, threw myself down, and tried to enter the garden. It took several minutes before my teeth unclenched and I relaxed enough to envision the place.

Fruit Bat was up a tree in his grove. I prowled around the trunk, picking my way over gnarled roots. He appeared to be asleep; he also looked about ten or eleven years old and had his hair in knots, just as he had in the vision. My mind had apparently updated his grotesque to conform to new information.

I gazed up at his face and felt a pang of sadness. I didn’t want to lock him away, but I saw no alternative. Visions were dangerous; I could hit my head, suffocate, give myself away. I had to defend myself however I could.

One of his eyes opened, then squeezed quickly shut. He wasn’t sleeping, the rascal; he wanted me to think he was. “Fruit Bat,” I said, trying to sound stern and not afraid. “Come down, please.”

He climbed down, his eyes averted sheepishly. He stooped, picked up a handful of dates from one of his tidy piles, and offered me the fruit. I accepted his gift this time, taking care not to touch his hand. “I don’t know what you did,” I said slowly. “I’m not sure if it was deliberate, but you … I think you pulled me into a vision.”

He met my gaze then. The keenness of his black eyes frightened me, but there was no malice there. I gathered my courage and said, “Whatever you did, please stop. When a vision comes upon me against my will, I collapse. It puts me in danger. Please don’t do it again, or I will have to shut you out.”

His eyes widened and he shook his head vigorously. I hoped he was protesting the possibility of being ejected from the garden and not refusing to comply.

He climbed back into the fig tree. “Good night,” I said, hoping he knew I wasn’t angry. He wrapped his arms around himself and went straight to sleep.

I had an entire garden that needed tending. I stared toward the other end, feeling weary in my very soul and reluctant to get started. Surely I could skip the rest this once? Everything else looked peaceful; the deep green foliage was so pretty with colorful snow falling all around it.

Colorful snow?

I scrutinized the sky. Clouds clustered thickly above me, and from them fluttered thousands of peculiar flakes, rose, green, yellow, more like confetti than snow. I reached out my hands to touch them; they lit upon me, shimmering and ethereal. I twirled in a slow circle, stirring up eddies at my feet.

I caught one on my tongue. It crackled in my mouth like a tiny lightning storm, and for a single heartbeat I was screaming through the sky, diving after an aurochs.

The flake dissolved completely, and I was back to myself in the garden, my heart pounding. In that brief, intense instant I’d been someone else. I had seen the entire world spread below me in unfathomable detail: every blade of grass on the plain and bristle on the aurochs’s snout, the temperature of the ground beneath its hooves, the moving currents of the very air.

I tasted another flake, and for the span of a wink I lay upon a mountaintop in full sun. My scales shimmered; my mouth tasted of ash. I raised my serpentine neck.

And then I was back at Fruit Bat’s grove, blinking and stammering and shocked. These were memories from my mother, like the one I’d experienced when I first saw Orma in his natural form. I knew from that memory that my mother had tried to leave me others. She had apparently succeeded.

Why was this happening now? Had the stresses of the last two days triggered another round of changes? Could Fruit Bat have dislodged them somehow?

The precipitation slowed. On the ground, individual flakes flowed toward each other and fused together, like scattered droplets of quicksilver. They flattened out into scraps of parchment and blew around.

I could not have my mother’s memories scattered all over my head: if I had learned anything from experience, it was that my peculiarities tended to spring out at me unannounced. I gathered up the slips of parchment, stamping on them as they skittered past, chasing them through Pandowdy’s swamp and across the Three Dunes.

I needed something to keep them in; a tin box appeared. I opened it, and the parchments—without any prompting on my part—flew up out of my hand, like a trick shuffle of cards, and filed themselves in the box. The lid clanged shut after them.

That had been suspiciously easy. I peeked in the box; the memories stood like note cards, each labeled across the top in an odd, angular hand I took to be my mother’s. I leafed through them; they appeared to have ordered themselves chronologically. I pulled one out. It read
Orma gets toasted on his 59th hatch-day
across the top, but the rest of the page was blank. The title intrigued me, but I put it back.

Some cards toward the back were brightly colored. I pulled up a pink one and was dumbfounded to see it wasn’t blank; it had one of my mother’s songs, in her spidery notation. I knew the song already—I knew all her songs—but it was bittersweet to see it in her own hand.

The title was “My Faith Should Not Come Easily.” I could not resist; surely this was her memory of writing that song. The flakes had dissolved upon my tongue; I guessed the same principle applied. The page crackled and sparked in my mouth, like a wool blanket on a winter night. It tasted, absurdly, of strawberries.

My hands dart over the page, a slender brush in each, one for the dots, one for the strokes and arcs, winding in and around each other as if I were making bobbin lace, not writing music. The effect is calligraphic, and highly satisfying. Outside my open window a lark sings, and my left hand—always the more mischievous of the two—takes a moment to jot down the notes in counterpoint to the main melody (with but a little alteration of the rhythm). That is serendipitous. So many things are, when we bother to look
.

I know his tread, know it like my own pulse—better, perhaps, because my pulse has been doing unaccountable things recently in response to that footfall. Right now it beats seven against his three. That is too fast. Dr. Caramus was unconcerned when I told him; he did not believe me when I said I did not understand it
.

I am on my feet, not knowing how, almost before the knock sounds at my door. My hands are inky, and my voice unreliable as I cry, “Come in!”

Claude lets himself in, his face that shade of sulky that it turns when he is trying not to get his hopes up. I snatch up a rag to wipe my hands and cover my confusion. Is this funny or frightening? I had no idea the two could be so close
.

“I heard you wanted to see me,” he mumbles
.

“Yes. I’m sorry, I … I should have answered your letters. I have had to think very carefully on this.”

“On whether you would help me write these songs?” he says, and there is something childish in his voice. Petulant. Which is irritating, on the one hand, and endearing on the other. He is transparently simple, this one, and unexpectedly complicated. And radiantly beautiful
.

I hand him the page and watch his face soften into wonder. My hands go straight to my chest, as if they could squeeze my heart and slow it. He hands the song back to me and his voice quavers: “Would you sing it?”

I would rather play it for him on flute, but he clearly wishes to hear the words and tune together:

“My faith should not come easily;

There is no Heaven without pain
.

My days should never flutter past

Unnoted, nor my past remain

Beyond its span of usefulness;

Let me not hold to grief
.

My hope, my light, my Saint is love;

In love my one belief.”

He stares at me during the last lines and I fear my voice will falter. As it is, I have barely enough breath left in me for “belief.” I inhale, but the air seems to catch on its way in, like the shudder of breath after tears
.

This emotion is maddening in its complexity. It’s like spotting difficult prey on the ground after a long day of fruitless hunting—there’s the exhilaration of an exciting chase mixed with the fear that it may all end in nothing, but there is never any question that you will try, for your very existence hangs on it. I am reminded also of the first time I dove from a sea cliff, keeping my wings folded until the last possible second, then scudding over the cresting waves, just out of reach of their foamy fingers, laughing at the danger, terrified by how close I had come
.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” I say. “I understand now that I made you very sad. That was never my intention.”

Claude rubs the back of his neck and wrinkles his nose, about to tell me he was never sad. I believe this is called bravado and is not limited to lawyers, or even men, although that combination makes it almost unavoidable. Normally I could shrug at this, but today I need him to be truthful. Today is the beginning and the end. I reach across and take his hand
.

That jolt we both feel—for I see it hit him too—is like electricity, but that is a metaphor I will never be able to give him, a concept that cannot be introduced. One of far too many, alas, but I am hoping—no, gambling, betting my very life—that in the end it will not matter, that this, this thing between us, this mystery, will be enough
.

“Linn,” he says hoarsely, his jaw quivering just a little. He is frightened, too. Why should this be frightening? What purpose does that serve? “Linn,” he begins again, “when I believed you never wanted to see me again, I felt I’d stepped off a ledge and onto empty air: the ground was hurtling toward me at an alarming rate.”

Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach. I have not adequately mastered the art, but his comparisons always move me with their precision. I want to cry
Eureka!,
but I settle for “I felt that too! That’s it exactly!”