Seraphina (5 page)

O
rma had saved my life three times.

When I was eight years old, Orma hired me a dragon tutor, a young female called Zeyd. My father had objected strenuously. He despised dragons, despite the fact that he was the Crown’s expert on the treaty and had even defended saarantrai in court.

I marveled at Zeyd’s peculiarities: her angularity, the unceasing tinkle of her bell, her ability to solve complex equations in her head. Of all my tutors—and I went through a battalion—she was my favorite, right up to the point where she tried to drop me off the bell tower of the cathedral.

She had lured me up the tower on the pretext of giving me a physics lesson, then quick as a thought snatched me up and held me at arm’s length over the parapet. The wind screamed in my ears. I looked down at my shoe falling, ricocheting off the gnarled heads of gargoyles, hitting the cobbles of the cathedral square.

“Why do objects fall downward? Do you know?” Zeyd had said, as pleasantly as if she’d been holding this tutorial in the nursery.

I was too terrified to answer. I lost my other shoe and barely kept my breakfast.

“There are unseen forces that act upon all of us, all the time, and they act in predictable ways. If I were to drop you from this tower”—here she shook me, and the city spun, a vortex ready to swallow me up—“your falling form would accelerate at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. So would my hat; so did your shoes. We are all pulled toward our doom in exactly the same way, by exactly the same force.”

She meant gravity—dragons aren’t good at metaphor—but her words resonated with me more personally. Invisible factors in my life would inevitably lead to my downfall. I felt I had known this all along. There was no escape.

Orma had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and pulled off the impossible, rescuing me without appearing to rescue me. I didn’t understand until years later that this had been a charade put on by the Censors, intended to test Orma’s emotional stability and his attachment to me. The experience left me with a deep, unshakable horror of heights, but not a distrust of dragons, absurdly.

The fact that a dragon had saved me played no part in that latter calculation. No one had ever bothered to tell me Orma was a dragon.

When I was eleven, my father and I came to a crisis. I found my mother’s flute hidden in an upstairs room. Papa had forbidden my tutors to teach me music, but he had not explicitly stated that I was not to teach myself. I was half lawyer; I always noticed the loopholes. I played in secret when Papa was at work and my stepmother was at church, working up a small repertoire of competently played folk tunes. When Papa hosted a party on Treaty Eve, the anniversary of peace between Goredd and dragonkind, I hid the flute near the fireplace, intending to burst out in an impromptu performance for all his guests.

Papa found the flute first, guessed what I intended, and marched me up to my room. “What do you think you’re doing?” he cried. I had never seen his eyes so wild.

“I’m shaming you into letting me have lessons,” I said, my voice calmer than I felt. “When everyone hears how well I play, they’ll think you are a fool not to let—”

He cut me short with a violent motion, raising the flute as if he might strike me with it. I cringed, but the blow did not land. When I dared to raise my eyes again, he pulled the flute hard against his knee.

It broke with a sickening crack, like bone, or like my heart. I sank to my knees in shock.

Papa let the fractured instrument drop to the floor and staggered back a step. He looked as sick as I felt, as if the flute had been some piece of himself. “You never understood this, Seraphina,” he said. “I have neutralized every trace of your mother, renamed her, reframed her, given her another past—another life. Only two things of hers can still harm us: her insufferable brother—but he won’t, with my eye upon him—and her music.”

“She had a brother?” I asked, my voice dense with tears. I possessed so little of my mother, and he was taking it all away.

He shook his head. “I am trying to keep us both safe.”

The lock clicked when he closed my door behind him. It was unnecessary; I could not have returned to the Treaty Eve party. I felt sick. I lowered my forehead to the floor and wept.

I fell asleep on the floor, my fingers wrapped around the remains of the flute. My first impression upon waking was that I should sweep beneath my bed. My second was that the house was oddly quiet, considering how high the sun had risen. I washed my face at the basin, and the cold water shocked me lucid. Of course everyone was asleep: last night had been Treaty Eve, and they’d all stayed up till dawn, just like Queen Lavonda and Ardmagar Comonot thirty-five years previously, securing the future of both their peoples.

That meant I couldn’t leave my room until someone woke up and let me out.

My numb grief had had an entire night to ripen into anger, and that made me reckless, or as close as I’d ever come. I bundled up as warmly as I could, strapped my purse to my forearm, threw open the casement, and climbed down from my window.

I followed my feet through alleys, over bridges, and along the icy quays. To my surprise, I saw people up and about, street traffic, open shops. Sledges glided by, jingling, heaped with firewood or hay. Servants lugged jugs and baskets home from the shops, caring little for the mud on their wooden clogs; young wives gingerly picked their way around puddles of slush. Meat pies competed with roast chestnuts for passersby, and a mulled-wine merchant promised raw warmth in a cup.

I reached St. Loola’s Square, where an enormous crowd had gathered along both sides of the empty roadway. People chatted and watched expectantly, huddled together against the cold.

An old man beside me muttered to his neighbor, “I can’t believe the Queen lets this happen. After all our sacrifice and struggle!”

“I’m surprised that anything surprises you anymore,” said his younger companion, smiling grimly.

“She will rue this treaty, Maurizio.”

“Thirty-five years, and she hasn’t rued it yet.”

“The Queen is mad if she thinks dragons can control their thirst for blood!”

“Excuse me?” I squeaked, shy of strangers. Maurizio looked down at me, eyebrows gently raised. “Are we waiting for dragons?” I said.

He smiled. He was handsome, in a stubbly, unwashed sort of way. “And so we are, little maidy. It’s the five-year procession.” When I stared at him confusedly, he explained, “Every five years our noble Queen—”

“Our deranged despot!” cried the older man.

“Peace, Karal. Our gracious Queen, as I was saying, permits them to take their natural form within the city walls and march in a procession to commemorate the treaty. She has some notion that it will ease our fears to see them in all their sulfurous monstrosity at regular intervals. The opposite seems more likely true, to me.”

Half of Lavondaville had flocked to the square for the pleasure of being terrified, if so. Only the old remembered when dragons were a common sight, when a shadow across the sun was enough to shoot panic down your spine. We all knew the stories—how whole villages had burned to the ground, how you’d turn to stone if you dared look a dragon in the eye, how valiant the knights were in the face of terrifying odds.

The knights had been banished years after Comonot’s Treaty took effect. Without dragons to fight, they’d turned to antagonizing Goredd’s neighbors, Ninys and Samsam. The three nations engaged in festering, low-grade border wars for two decades, until our Queen put an end to it. All the knightly orders in the Southlands had been disbanded—even those of Ninys and Samsam—but rumor had it that the old fighters lived in secret enclaves in the mountains or the deep countryside.

I found myself glancing sidelong at the old man, Karal; with all his talk of sacrifice, I wondered whether he’d ever fought dragons. He’d be the right age.

The crowd gasped in unison. A horned monster was rounding the block of shops, his arched back as high as the second-story windows, his wings demurely folded so as not to topple nearby chimney pots. His elegant neck curved downward like a submissive dog’s, a posture intended to look nonthreatening.

At least, I found him innocuous enough with his head spines flattened. Other people didn’t seem to be catching on to his body language; all around me horrified citizens clutched at each other, made St. Ogdo’s sign, and muttered into their hands. A nearby woman began shrieking hysterically—“His terrible teeth!”—until she was hustled away by her husband.

I watched them disappear into the crowd, wishing that I could have reassured her: it was good to see a dragon’s teeth. A dragon with his mouth closed was far more likely to be working up a flame. That seemed completely obvious.

And that gave me pause. All around me, the sight of those teeth was making citizens sob with terror. What was obvious to me was apparently opaque to everyone else.

There were twelve dragons altogether; Princess Dionne and her young daughter, Glisselda, brought up the rear of the procession in a sledge. Under the white winter sky the dragons looked rusty, a disappointing color for so fabled a species, but I soon realized their shades were subtle. The right slant of sunlight brought out an iridescent sheen in their scales; they shimmered with rich underhues, from purple to gold.

Karal had brought along a flask of hot tea, which he doled out stingily to Maurizio. “It’s got to last till evening,” grumped Karal, sniffling up a drip at the end of his nose. “If we must celebrate Comonot’s Treaty, you’d think Ard-braggart Comonot could be bothered to show. He scorns to come south, or take human form.”

“I heard he fears you, sir,” said Maurizio blandly. “I think that shows sense.”

I wasn’t sure, afterward, how it all turned ugly. The old knight—I felt the “sir” confirmed it—called out insults: “Worms! Gasbags! Hell-beasts!” Several solid citizens around us joined in. Some of them began throwing snowballs.

A dragon near the center got spooked. Maybe the crowd drew too close, or a snowball hit him. He raised his head and body to full height, as tall as the three-story inn across the square. The spectators closest to him panicked and ran.

There was nowhere to run. They were surrounded by hundreds of half-frozen fellow Goreddis. Collisions ensued. Collisions led to screaming. Screaming made more dragons raise their heads in alarm.

The lead dragon screamed, a blood-chilling bestial cry. To my shock, I understood him: “Heads down!”

One of the dragons opened his wings. The crowd reeled and churned like a storm-tossed sea.

Their leader shrieked again: “Fikri, wings folded! If you take off, you will be in violation of section seven, article five, and I will have your tail before a tribunal so fast—”

To the crowd, however, the dragon’s exhortation sounded like feral screams, and their hearts were stricken with terror. They stampeded toward the side streets.

The thundering herd swept me away. An elbow banged my jaw; a kick to the knee toppled me. Someone trod on my calf; someone else tripped over my head. I saw stars, and the sound of shouting faded.

Then suddenly there was air again, and space.

And hot breath on my neck. I opened my eyes.

A dragon stood over me, his legs four pillars of sanctuary. I nearly fainted again, but his sulfurous breath jolted me conscious. He nudged me with his nose and gestured toward an alley.

“I’ll escort you over there,” he cried, in the same horrible scream as the other dragon.

I rose, putting a shaky hand against his leg to steady myself; it was rough and immovable as a tree, and unexpectedly warm. The snow beneath him was melting to slush. “Thank you, saar,” I said.

“Did you understand what I said, or are you responding to my perceived intent?”

I froze. I did understand, but how? I’d never studied Mootya; few humans had. It seemed safer not to reply, so I started toward the alley without a word. He walked behind me; people scrambled out of our way.

The alley led nowhere and was full of barrels, so the crowds were not frantically squeezing through it. He planted himself at the entrance nonetheless. The Queen’s Guard arrived, trotting in formation across the square, plumes waving and bagpipes brawling. Most of the dragons had organized themselves in a circle around Princess Dionne’s carriage, shielding her from the mob; they exchanged this duty with the Guard. The remnants of the crowd cheered, and confidence, if not order, was restored.