8
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 me 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?”
“Nggblaah!” I said, not my most cogent explanation, but I was unaccustomed to speaking with my face covered in blood.
She stopped kicking me and closed the door. For a moment I feared that meant she intended something worse, but she wet a cloth at the basin and handed it to me, gesturing at my nose. She seated herself on the spinet bench while I cleaned up; her toadly mouth worked up and down, from disgust to annoyance to amusement and back. She was dressed now, of course, her figure back to its stout dignity.
How did she contrive to sit on that tail? I dabbed at the blood on my chemise, to keep myself from staring at her.
“Forgive me, lady,” I said, pressing the reddened cloth to my nose again. “I don’t even know who you are.”
Her brows shot up in surprise. “Is that so. Well, I know who you are, Maid Dombegh. I’ve met your father. He’s an excellent lawyer, a humane and gentle man.” Her expression grew stern. “I trust you take after him in discretion. Tell no one.”
“Tell no one what? That you arrived in the middle of the night to beat me up?”
She ignored that; she was scrutinizing my face. “Maybe you didn’t understand what you saw.”
“Maybe I saw nothing.”
“Liar. I followed my stomach here, and my stomach is never wrong.”
The word liar rankled; I shifted in my seat. “How did you know you were being watched? Could you see me?”
“No. I felt a presence—eyes upon me? I can’t explain—I’ve never felt such a thing before. Was it sorcery? I don’t believe in that, but then, I imagine there are people who don’t believe in the likes of me, either.” She folded her arms across her artificially portly bosom. “I am out of patience. What did you do, and how did you do it?”
I worried the bloody cloth between my hands and sniffled dismally; the inside of my nose smelled of iron. I owed her an explanation, maybe even the truth. She was a half-breed like me; she must have felt as utterly alone. I could let her know she wasn’t just by pulling up my sleeve and showing her my scales.
I had dreamed of this, but now that it came to it my voice didn’t work. The sheer weight of my intention hunkered down on my chest. I could not do it. Something would prevent me. The Heavens would cave in. I would roll up my sleeve and burst into flame. My chemise sleeve was unbound. I raised my hand high and let the loose sleeve fall away from my wrist, exposing my arm up to the elbow.
Her face fell, and for a breathless moment it felt like time had stopped.
She stared, bug-eyed, and was silent so long that I began to doubt whether I had really seen what I had seen. Maybe it had been a trick of the light, or I was so desperate for kindred that I had imagined it. I lowered my arm and covered it back up, ashamed.
“I don’t believe it,” she said at last. “There are no others. This is some sort of trick.”
“I promise you, it’s not. I am, um, what you are.” She had avoided the word half-dragon; I found myself absurdly embarrassed to say it.
“You expect me to believe you have a tail?” she said, craning her neck to get a look at my backside.
“No,” I said, embarrassed by her gaze. “Just scales on my arm and at my waist.”
Her mouth curled into a sneer. “You feel terribly sorry for yourself, I suppose.”
My face grew hot. “It may not be as dramatic as a tail, but I—”
“Yes, yes, poor you. You must have trouble sitting down, and need your clothing especially made so it looks like you have a proper human body under there. You must have lived an impossibly long time thinking you were alone in the world. Oh no, I’m sorry, that’s me.”
I felt as if she’d slapped me. Whatever I’d expected, it wasn’t hostility.
She glowered. “None of this explains how you spy on people.”
“It’s unintentional. I have visions. Typically, no one in my visions is aware of my presence.” I left it at that. She didn’t need to know I could see her at will; let her think she was special, popping into my head unbidden, uniquely able to perceive me.
I would not deliberately look in on her again. I’d learned my lesson.
Some of the bitterness in her expression dissipated; apparently my mental quirks were not as irksome as my scales. “I have something similar,” she said. “A very, very short-range predictive skill. It is essentially an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.”
“That’s what you meant by your stomach?” I hazarded.
She laid a hand on her padded belly. “It’s not magic; it’s more like indigestion. Typically, its instructions are vague or simple—turn right here, avoid the oysters—but I had quite a keen one that I could find the owner of those invisible eyes.” She leaned in toward me, the lines beside her mouth deepening with her scowl. “Don’t do it again.”
“You have my word!” I squeaked.
“I can’t have you stomping about in my head.”
I thought of Fruit Bat and Jannoula and felt some sympathy. “If it helps, I only see people from above, like a sparrow might. I can’t read thoughts—I’d know your name otherwise.”
Her expression softened slightly. “Dame Okra Carmine,” she said, inclining her head. “I am the Ninysh ambassador to Goredd.”
All the ire seemed drained out of her at last. She rose to go but paused with her hand on the door latch. “Forgive me if I was undiplomatic, Maid Dombegh. I react poorly to surprises.”
Poorly hardly covered it, but I said, “Of course,” and handed back her book, which she’d left on the spinet bench.
She fingered the leather spine absently, shaking her head. “I must admit, it boggles the mind to learn that your father, whose dearest mistress is the law, should have flouted it so egregiously in carrying on with your mother.”
“He didn’t know what she was until she died in childbirth.”
“Ah.” She stared into the middle distance. “Poor fellow.”
I closed the door behind her and looked at my quigutl timepiece. I could squeeze in a little sleep before morning if I got right to it. I turned restlessly and threw off my blankets for an hour, excited and unable to turn off my thoughts. How could I ever sleep again?
Fruit Bat, climbing trees in Porphyry, was just like me. My brother Loud Lad piped upon the rooftops of Samsam. Nag and Nagini raced across the sands somewhere; mighty Pandowdy lolled in his swamp. Fierce Miserere fought brigands, malevolent Jannoula plotted, and the rest of the garden denizens walked this world and were mine. Scattered and peculiar—some of us skeptical and bitter—we were a people.
And I was at the hub of this enormous wheel. I could bring us together. In a way, I already had.