Seraphina (34 page)

“Do you speak to others this way? Do others speak to you?” My fear melted away. He was so innocent.

He shrugged. “I only know three other ityasaari, in Porphyry. But you know them too: they are here. You named them Newt and Miserere and Pelican Man. None of them speak to me with their minds, but then, none of them called me. Only you.”

“When did I call you?”

“I heard your flute.”

Just like Lars.

“Madamina,” he said, “I must sleep. My grandfather has been worried.”

He released me and bowed. I bowed back uncertainly, and then looked toward the flaming box. Pandowdy burbled underwater and gave an irritable flop of its tail, sending the box bobbing back toward me. I felt the headache intensely now. I could not put off dealing with the box; the memory would surely engulf me against my will if I suppressed it, just as the other one had. I glanced at Abdo, but he had curled on his side, asleep under a large skunk cabbage. I guided the box toward shore with a sturdy cattail.

The box exploded at my touch in a burst of pyrotechnic hysteria. I choked on the smoke, wondering how it was possible that I could taste anger and feel the smell of green against my skin.

I burst from the mountainside and fly into the sun. My tail lash buries the exit under an avalanche. The combined mass of twelve old generals will exceed this icefall; I have merely bought myself a delay. I must not waste it. I dive east, with the wind, careening through low lenticular clouds into a glacial cirque
.

There is a cave beneath the glacier, if I can reach it. I skim the chalky meltwater too closely; the cold scalds my ventrum. I push off the moraine with a spray of stones, elevate quickly to avoid pinnacles of ice sharp enough to gut me
.

I hear a roar and a rumble behind me, high up the mountain. The generals and my father are free, but I have flown fast enough. Too fast: I slam into the edge of the cirque, send shale skittering down the cliff face, and worry that they will spot the crushed lichens. I writhe into the cave, blue ice melting at my touch, easing my passage
.

I hear them cross the sky, screaming, even over the roar of the glacial streams. I move deeper in, lest I make too much vapor and give myself away
.

The ice cools my thoughts and condenses my rationality. I saw and heard what I should not have: my father and eleven other generals speaking together upon his hoard. Words upon a hoard must be hoarded, as the ancient saying goes. They could kill me for eavesdropping
.

Worse: they spoke treason. I cannot hoard these words
.

The cave makes me claustrophobic. How do quigutl stay squeezed into crevasses without going mad? Perhaps they don’t. I distract myself by thinking: of my hatchling brother, who is studying in Ninys and safe if he will stay there; of the quickest route back to Goredd; and of Claude, whom I love. I do not feel love when I take my natural shape, but I remember it and want it back. The vast, empty space where the feeling once was makes me writhe in discomfort
.

Oh, Orma. You are not going to understand what has happened to me
.

Night comes; the gleaming blue ice dims to black. The cave is too tight to turn around in—I am not as lithe and serpentine as some—so I back out, step by step, up the slick passage. The tip of my tail emerges into the night air
.

I smell him too late. My father bites my tail on the pretext of pulling me out, then bites me again, behind the head, in chastisement
.

“General, put me back in ard,” I say, submitting to three more bites
.

“What did you hear?” he snarls
.

There is no point pretending I heard nothing. He did not raise me to be an imperceptive fool, and my scent in the passageway would have told him how long I listened. “That General Akara infiltrated the Goreddi knights, and that his actions led to their banishment.” That is the least of it; my own father is part of a treacherous cabal, plotting against our Ardmagar. I am loath to utter that aloud
.

He spits fire at the glacier, bringing the cave entrance crashing down. “I might have buried you alive in there. I did not. Do you know why?”

It is hard to play submissive all the time, but my father accepts no other stance from his children, and he outweighs me by a factor of two. The day will come when the strength of our intellects counts for more than physical power. That is Comonot’s dream and I believe in it, but for now I bow my head. Dragons are slow to change
.

“I permit you to live because I know you will not tell the Ardmagar what you heard,” he says. “You will tell no one.”

“What is the foundation of this belief?” I flatten myself further, no threat to him
.

“Your loyalty and your family honor should be basis enough,” he cries. “But you admit that you have neither.”

“And if my loyalty is to my Ardmagar?” Or to his ideas, anyway
.

My father spits fire at my toes; I leap back but smell singed talons. “Then heed this, Linn: my allies among the Censors tell me you’re in trouble.”

I have heard no official word, but I have expected this. I flare my nostrils and raise my head spines, however, as if I were startled. “Did they say why?”

“They hoard details, but it doesn’t matter what you did. You’re on the list. If you reveal what was said upon my hoard—or whom you saw, or how many—it will be your word against mine. I will number you a dangerous deviant.”

In fact I am a dangerous deviant, but until this moment I had been a dangerous deviant who was torn about returning to Goredd. I am no longer torn
.

My father climbs the glacier face so that he might launch himself more easily. The ice is weakened by summer’s heavy melt; blocks as large as my head break off beneath his claws, tumble toward me, dash to pieces. His collapse of the tunnel has put the glacier under stress; I see a deep crack in the ice
.

“Climb, hatchling,” he cries. “I shall escort you back to your mother’s. You won’t go south again; I shall see to it that the Ker cancels your visas.”

“General, you are wise,” I say, raising the pitch of my voice, imitating the chirp of the newly hatched. I do not climb; I am completing a calculation. I must stall him. “Put me back in ard. If I am not to go south again, is it not time I was mated?”

He has reached the top of the ice cliff. He arches his neck, muscles rippling along it. The moon has risen behind him, giving him a formidable gleam. He is intimidating; my cower is almost in earnest. I have a few more vectors to account for, and friction. Will friction befriend or foe? I extend a wing inconspicuously, trying to more accurately gauge the temperature
.

“You are the daughter of Imlann!” he shrieks. “You could have any one of those generals you saw today. You could have all of them, in whatever order you wish.”

It is a challenge to keep him talking while my mouth is busy. I recoil in overstated awe, histrionic for a dragon, but my father accepts this unquestioningly as his due
.

“I will arrange it,” he says. “You are not the mightiest female, but you fly well, and your teeth are sound. They will be honored to join their lines with mine. Only promise to break any weak eggs before they hatch, as I ought to have broken Orma’s.”

Oh, Orma. You are the only one I will miss
.

I expel a swift, surgical ball of flame, targeting a slim buttress beneath the ice wall. Its destruction tips the structural balance. A crevasse yawns behind my father; the ice screams as the face of the glacier shears off. I spring back, out of the path of flying ice, and scramble down the moraine, bounding over boulders until I can push off into the air. I tack into the winds of the glacial collapse, circling upward. I should fly as fast as I can toward anywhere else, away, but I cannot bring myself to leave. I must see what I have done: it is my pain, I have earned it, and I will carry it with me the rest of my days
.

It is no less than either of us deserves
.

As per my calculation, the ice beneath his calefactive bulk was too soft and slick for his claws to get good purchase. He could not push off in time; he has tumbled backward into the crevasse. A spire of ice from higher up—from an area not figuring in my algebra—has fallen on top of him, pinning his wing. Maybe piercing it. I circle, trying to determine whether I have killed him. I smell his blood, like sulfur and roses, but he snarls and thrashes, and I conclude he is not dead. I switch on every quigutl device I have and shed them down upon his body; they twinkle in the moonlight, and I estimate someone might mistake him for treasure, from a distance. He will be found
.

I circle the sky, bidding farewell to the Tanamoot—mountains, sky, water, all dragonkind. I have broken my family, my father, my promises, everything. I am the traitor now
.

Oh, Orma. Keep yourself safe from him
.

The bed curtains danced their ghostly sarabande in the warm air currents. I stared at them for some time, seeing nothing, feeling wrung out and boneless.

Each subsequent memory filled gaps in my understanding. That first memory, so long ago, had forcefully ripped the scales from my blind eyes and destroyed my peace, I thought perhaps for good. The next had left me resenting her thoughtless selfishness; I could admit that to myself now. I envied her after the third, but now … something was different. Not her—she was dead and unchangeable—but me. I was changed. I clasped my aching left wrist tightly to my chest, understanding the nature of it.

I felt her struggle this time, felt echoes of my own. She had chosen Papa over family, country, her own kind, everything she’d grown up with. She had cared about Orma, insofar as dragons could care; that went a long way toward earning my sympathy. As for the ringing emptiness at the very heart of her, that was only too familiar. “I thought I was the only one who’d ever felt that, Mother,” I whispered to the bed curtains. “I thought I was all alone, and maybe a little bit mad.”

The feather bed had stopped trying to devour me; it seemed a cloud, rather, lifting me toward some bright epiphany: she had uncovered the existence of a cabal hostile to the Ardmagar. However personally difficult it was, however much more Kiggs despised me or the Ardmagar condemned me, I could not hoard these words.

B
ut whom could I tell?

Kiggs was mad at me. Glisselda would wonder how I knew and why I had not come forward sooner. I supposed I could lie and say Orma had only just told me, but the very thought of Orma made me sick at heart.

I should tell Orma. It struck me that he would want to know.

I rose at first light and sat at the spinet, hugging myself against the morning chill. I played Orma’s chord, having no idea whether he would answer or whether he had already departed for parts unknown.

The kitten buzzed to life. “I’m here.”

“That’s eighty-three percent of what I wanted to know.”

“What’s the other seventeen?”

“When do you leave? I need to talk to you.”

There was a silence punctuated by thumps, as if he were setting down heavy books. If he was packing up every book he owned, he’d be lucky to be gone within the week. “Do you remember that newskin I was burdened with? He’s still here.”

Saints’ dogs. “Haven’t you been deemed unfit to mentor him?”

“Either no one cares that I’m leading him toward deviancy—possible, given how useless he is—or they think he’ll be a help packing, which he is not.”

The kitten broadcast some disgruntled muttering, and then my uncle said clearly, “No, you’re not.” I smiled wan sympathy at the kitten eye. “In answer to your question,” he said at last, “I will depart for
home
and the
surgeons
in three days, upon your New Year, after I’ve
packed
up everything here. I
will
do
exactly
what is required of me by
law
. I am
caught
, and I am
chastened
, and there is no other
alternative
.”

“I need to talk to you alone. I want to say goodbye while you still know me.”

There was a very long pause, and for a moment I thought he had gone. I tapped the kitten eye in concern, but at last his voice came through, weakly: “My apologies, this body’s ridiculous larynx seized up, but it seems to be functioning again. Will you come into town tomorrow with the rest of the court, to watch the Golden Plays?”

“I can’t. Tomorrow is dress rehearsal for the Treaty Eve concert.”

“Then I don’t see how it will be possible to speak with you. Here’s where I emit a thunderous oath, I believe.”

“Do it,” I urged him, but this time he really was gone.

I puzzled over all his odd emphases while I tended my scales and dressed and drank my tea. I may have witnessed the first known incidence of a dragon attempting sarcasm. It was a pity I didn’t know how the spinet device worked because it surely could have recorded his utterance for future generations of dragons to learn from:
This, hatchlings, is a valiant effort, but not quite it
.