Seraphina (2 page)

I tried to do it.

My nurse squealed as I nearly squirmed out of her arms. She gripped me by the ankle at an awkward angle. I stared dizzily at the floor; it seemed to tilt and spin.

My father took me up, long hands around my fat torso, and held me at arm’s length as if he had discovered an oversized and astonishing frog. I met his sea-gray eyes; they crinkled sadly at the corners.

The priest stormed off without blessing me. Orma watched him disappear around the end of the Golden House, then said, “Claude, explain this. Did he leave because you convinced him his religion is a sham? Or was he … what’s that one called? Offended?”

My father seemed not to hear; something about me had captured his attention. “Look at her eyes. I could swear she understands us.”

“It has a lucid gaze for an infant,” said Orma, pushing up his spectacles and leveling his own piercing stare at me. His eyes were dark brown, like my own; unlike mine, they were as distant and inscrutable as the night sky.

“I have been unequal to this task, Seraphina,” said Papa softly. “I may always be unequal, but I believe I can do better. We must find a way to be family to each other.”

He kissed my downy head. He’d never done that before. I gaped at him, awed. The monks’ liquid voices surrounded us and held us all three together. For a single, glorious moment I recovered that first feeling, the one I’d lost by being born: everything was as it should be, and I was exactly where I belonged.

And then it was gone. We passed through the bronze-bossed doors of the cathedral; the music faded behind us. Orma stalked off across the square without saying goodbye, his cloak flapping like the wings of an enormous bat. Papa handed me to my nurse, pulled his cloak tightly around himself, and hunched his shoulders against the gusting wind. I cried for him, but he did not turn around. Above us arched the sky, empty and very far away.

Superstitious fakery or not, the psalter’s message was clear:
The truth may not be told. Here is an acceptable lie
.

Not that St. Capiti—may she keep me in her heart—made a poor substitute saint. She was shockingly apropos, in fact. St. Capiti carried her own head on a plate like a roast goose; it glared out from the page, daring me to judge her. She represented the life of the mind, utterly divorced from the sordid goings-on of the body.

I appreciated that division as I grew older and was overtaken by bodily grotesqueries of my own, but even when I was very young, I always felt a visceral sympathy for St. Capiti. Who could love someone with a detached head? How could she accomplish anything meaningful in this world when her hands were occupied with that platter? Did she have people who understood her and would claim her as a friend?

Papa had permitted my nurse to glue St. Yirtrudis’s pages together; the poor lady could not rest easy in our house until it was done. I never did get a look at the heretic. If I held the page up to the light I could just discern the shapes of both saints, blended together into one terrible monster saint. St. Yirtrudis’s outstretched arms sprang out of St. Capiti’s back like a pair of ineffectual wings; her shadow-head loomed where St. Capiti’s should have been. She was a double saint for my double life.

My love of music eventually lured me from the safety of my father’s house, propelling me into the city and the royal court. I took a terrible risk, but I could not do otherwise. I did not understand that I carried loneliness before me on a plate, and that music would be the light illuminating me from behind.

A
t the center of the cathedral stood a model of Heaven called the Golden House. Its roof unfolded like a flower to reveal a human-sized hollow, in which the body of poor Prince Rufus lay shrouded in gold and white. His feet rested upon the House’s blessed threshold; his head lay cradled by a nest of gilded stars.

At least, it should have been. Prince Rufus’s killer had decapitated him. The Guard had scoured forest and marshland, looking in vain for the prince’s head; he was to be buried without it.

I stood upon the steps of the cathedral quire, facing the funeral. From the high balcony pulpit to my left, the bishop prayed over the Golden House, the royal family, and the noble mourners crowding the heart of the church. Beyond a wooden railing, common mourners filled the cavernous nave. As soon as the bishop finished his prayer, I was to play the Invocation to St. Eustace, who escorted spirits up the Heavenly Stair. I swayed dizzily, terrified, as if I had been asked to play flute upon a windy cliff.

In fact, I had not been asked to play at all. I was not on the program; I had promised Papa when I left that I wouldn’t perform in public. I had heard the Invocation once or twice, but never before played it. This wasn’t even my flute.

My chosen soloist, however, had sat upon his instrument and bent its reed; my backup soloist had drunk too many libations for Prince Rufus’s soul and was out in the cloister garden, sick with regret. There was no second backup. The funeral would be ruined without the Invocation. I was responsible for the music, so it was up to me.

The bishop’s prayer wound down; he described the glorious Heavenly Home, dwelling of All Saints, where all of us would rest someday in eternal bliss. He didn’t list exceptions; he didn’t have to. My eyes flicked involuntarily toward the dragon ambassador and the goodwill contingent from his embassy, seated behind the nobility but ahead of the common rabble. They were in their saarantrai—their human forms—but were immediately distinguishable even at this distance by the silver bells at their shoulders, the empty seats around them, and their disinclination to bow their heads during a prayer.

Dragons have no souls. No one expected piety from them.

“Be it ever so!” intoned the bishop. That was my signal to play, but at that exact moment I noticed my father in the crowded nave, beyond the barrier. His face was pale and drawn. I could hear in my head the words he’d said the day I left for court a mere two weeks ago:
Under no circumstances are you to draw attention to yourself. If you won’t think of your own safety, at least remember all I have to lose!

The bishop cleared his throat, but my insides were ice and I could barely breathe.

I cast about desperately for some better focus.

My eyes lit upon the royal family, three generations seated together before the Golden House, a tableau of grief. Queen Lavonda had left her gray locks loose around her shoulders; her watery blue eyes were red with weeping for her son. Princess Dionne sat tall and glared fiercely, as if plotting revenge upon her younger brother’s killers, or upon Rufus himself for failing to reach his fortieth birthday. Princess Glisselda, Dionne’s daughter, laid her golden head upon her grandmother’s shoulder to comfort her. Prince Lucian Kiggs, Glisselda’s cousin and fiancé, sat a little apart from the family and stared without seeing. He was not Prince Rufus’s son, but he looked as shocked and stricken as if he’d lost his own father.

They needed Heaven’s peace. I knew little of Saints, but I knew about sorrow and about music as sorrow’s surest balm. That was comfort I could give. I raised the flute to my lips and my eyes toward the vaulted ceiling, and began to play.

I began too quietly, unsure of the melody, but the notes seemed to find me and my confidence grew. The music flew from me like a dove released into the vastness of the nave; the cathedral itself lent it new richness and gave something back, as if this glorious edifice, too, were my instrument.

There are melodies that speak as eloquently as words, that flow logically and inevitably from a single, pure emotion. The Invocation is of this kind, as if its composer had sought to distill the purest essence of mourning, to say,
Here is what it is to lose someone
.

I repeated the Invocation twice, reluctant to let it go, anticipating the end of the music as another palpable loss. I set the last note free, strained my ears for the final dying echo, and felt myself crumple inside, exhausted. There would be no applause, as befit the dignity of the occasion, but the silence was itself deafening. I looked across the plain of faces, across the assembled nobility and other guests of quality, to the crushing mob of common folk beyond the barrier. There was no movement but for the dragons shifting uneasily in their seats and Orma, pressed up against the railing, absurdly flapping his hat at me.

I was too drained to find him embarrassing. I bowed my head and retreated from view.

I was the new assistant to the court composer and had beaten out twenty-seven other musicians for the job, from itinerant troubadours to acclaimed masters. I was a surprise; no one at the conservatory had paid me any heed as Orma’s protégée. Orma was a lowly music theory teacher, not a real musician. He played harpsichord competently, but then the instrument played itself if he hit the right keys. He lacked passion and musicality. Nobody expected a full-time student of his to amount to anything.

My anonymity was by design. Papa had forbidden me to fraternize with the other students and teachers; I saw the sense in that, however lonely I was. He had not explicitly forbidden me to audition for jobs, but I knew perfectly well he wouldn’t like it. This was our usual progression: he set narrow limits and I complied until I couldn’t anymore. It was always music that pushed me beyond what he considered safe. Still, I hadn’t foreseen the depth and breadth of his rage when he learned I was leaving home. I knew his anger was really fear for me, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear.

Now I worked for Viridius, the court composer, who was in poor health and desperately needed an assistant. The fortieth anniversary of the treaty between Goredd and dragonkind was rapidly approaching, and Ardmagar Comonot himself, the great dragon general, would be here for the celebrations in just ten days. Concerts, balls, and other musical entertainments were Viridius’s responsibility. I was to help audition performers and organize programs, and to give Princess Glisselda her harpsichord lesson, which Viridius found tedious.

That had kept me busy for my first two weeks, but the unexpected interruption of this funeral had piled on additional work. Viridius’s gout had put him out of commission, so the entire musical program had been left up to me.

Prince Rufus’s body was removed to the crypt, accompanied only by the royal family, the clergy, and the most important guests. The cathedral choir sang the Departure, and the crowd began to dissipate. I staggered back into the apse. I had never performed for an audience of more than one or two; I had not anticipated the anxiety beforehand and the exhaustion afterward.

Saints in Heaven, it was like standing up naked in front of the entire world.

I stumbled about, congratulating my musicians and supervising their removal. Guntard, my self-appointed assistant, trotted up behind me and clapped an unwelcome hand upon my shoulder. “Music Mistress! That was beyond beautiful!”

I nodded weary thanks, twisting out of his reach.

“There’s an old man here to see you,” Guntard continued. “He showed up during your solo, but we put him off.” He gestured up the apse toward a chapel, where an elderly man loitered. His dark complexion meant he’d come from distant Porphyry. His graying hair was done in tidy plaits; his face crinkled in a smile.