23
I’D BEEN UP all night; I staggered off to bed.
I can’t usually sleep during the day, but in truth I did not wish to be awake. Awake was a distinctly unpleasant state to be in. I hurt all over, and when I wasn’t fretting about my uncle, I could not stop thinking about Lucian Kiggs.
An indignant pounding woke me halfway through the afternoon. I had fallen asleep in my clothes, so I rolled out of bed and staggered to the door, barely opening my eyes. A shimmering being, pearly and opalescent, brushed past me imperiously: Princess Glisselda. A gentler presence, who led me to a chair, was Millie.
“What did you do to Lucian?” cried Glisselda, looming over me, hands on her hips.
I couldn’t pull myself into full wakefullness. I stared at her, uncomprehending. And what was there to say? That I had saved his life and made him hate me, all in one go? That I had felt things I should not, and I was sorry?
“The council has just adjourned,” she said, pacing toward the hearth and back. “Lucian told us all about encountering the rogue in the countryside, about your bravery in persuading the dragon not to kill you. You’re quite the pair of investigative heroes.”
“What did the council decide?” I croaked, rubbing an eye with the heel of my hand.
“We’re sending a group of dragons—a petit ard, we’re calling it—into the country, led by Eskar.” She toyed with her long string of pearls, tying it in a large knot. “They’re to stay in their saarantrai except in an emergency; they’ll start at the column of rooks as one place they know Imlann has recently been and attempt to sniff him out from there.
“But you see, here’s what perplexes me.” She scowled and shook the knotted necklace at me. “You were so helpful and knowledgeable, one would expect Lucian to be singing your praises unto Heaven’s dome. He’s not. I know he arrested you on little pretext. He’s mad at you, evidently, but he won’t say why; he’s shut himself in his beastly tower. How do I mediate if I don’t know what’s going on? I can’t have you two at odds!”
I must have reeled a bit, because Glisselda snapped, “Millie! Make this poor woman some tea!”
Tea helped, although it also seemed to moisten my eyes. “My eyes are watering,” I said, just to clarify to everyone.
“It’s all right,” said Glisselda. “I’d weep too if Lucian were that angry with me.”
I couldn’t work out what to tell her. This had never happened to me before: I always knew which things were tellable and which were not, and while I had not liked lying, it had never felt like such a burden. I tried to remember my rules: simpler was always better. I said, my voice shaky, “He’s angry because I lied to him.”
“Lucian can be touchy about that,” said Glisselda sagely. “Why did you lie?”
I gaped at her as if she’d asked why I drew breath. I couldn’t tell her that lying wasn’t so much something I did as something I was, or that I had wanted to reassure Kiggs that I was human, desperate that he not be frightened of me because I had known, there among the blowing snow and ash, that I . . .
I could not even think the word with his fiancée sitting right here, and that was itself another lie. It never ended.
“We—we were so terrified after facing Imlann,” I stammered. “I spoke without thinking, trying to reassure him. Honestly, in that moment, I forgot I even had the—”
“I see the open sincerity in your face. Say just that to him, and it will be well.”
Of course, I had already said that to him, more or less, and it had made things worse. Princess Glisselda stepped toward the door, Millie like a shadow behind her. “There will be a meeting between you, and you will make up. I shall arrange it.”
I rose and curtsied. She added, “You should know: Earl Josef was absent from the palace all day yesterday. Lucian mentioned your suspicions, and I made him ask around. Apsig claims he was in town visiting his mistress but has not been forthcoming with her name.” She looked almost apologetic. “I did mention your expedition to him at the ball. He wanted to know why Lucian would speak with you. It was ill-advised, perhaps.
“But,” she added, brightening again, “our eye is upon him now.”
The girls took their leave, but Glisselda paused in the doorway, raising a finger as if to scold me. “I can’t have you and Lucian feuding! I need you!”
I stumbled into the other room and flopped back onto my bed when she had gone, wishing I shared her optimism, wondering whether she’d be so keen to patch things up between us if she knew what I held unspoken in my heart.
I awoke at midnight in a panic because something was on fire.
I sat bolt upright, or tried to; the morass of my feather mattress pulled me back down as if the bed tick were trying to eat me. I was drenched in sweat. The bed curtains wafted gently, illuminated by the perfectly tame fire in the hearth. Had I been dreaming? I recalled no dream, and I knew the fire was . . . still burning. I could almost smell smoke; I could feel the heat of it inside my head. Was something happening to the garden of grotesques?
Saints’ dogs. I’d have believed I was going mad if things like this didn’t happen in my mind all the time.
I flopped back in the bed, closed my eyes, and entered my garden. There was smoke in the distance; I ran until I reached the edge of Pandowdy’s swamp. Mercifully, Pandowdy itself was underwater, sleeping, and I was able to pick my way past it. It was the least human of all my grotesques, a sluglike, wallowing creature. It filled me with pity and dread, but it was one of mine as surely as Lars was.
At the heart of the swamp crouched Fruit Bat, and he was on fire.
Or not exactly: the flames came from my memory box, which he clutched to him, his entire body curled around it. He whimpered again, which snapped me out of my shock. I rushed over, grabbed the thing—it seared my fingers—and hurled it into the black water. It hissed, throwing up a cloud of foul steam. I knelt before Fruit Bat—he was just a child!—and examined his bare stomach, the insides of his arms, his face. He had no visible blisters, but his skin was so dark that I wasn’t sure I would recognize the look of burns. I cried, “Are you hurt?”
“No,” he said, prodding himself with his fingertips.
St. Masha’s stone, he was talking to me now. I struggled with fear as I said, “What were you doing? Prying open my box of secrets?”
He said, “The box caught fire.”
“Because you tried to look in it!”
“Never, madamina.” He crossed his thumbs, making his hands into a bird, the Porphyrian gesture for supplication. “I know what’s yours and what’s mine. It burst into flames last night. I threw myself upon it so it would not harm you. Have I done well?”
I turned sharply toward the water; the tin box bobbed, but the fire had not gone out. I was beginning to feel the pain of the flames myself, now that Fruit Bat wasn’t smothering them with his body.
I knew, without knowing how, that it had caught fire when Imlann landed in the snowy field, just as it had flooded at the sight of Comonot. It was extremely fortunate that Fruit Bat had leaped upon it when he did; if I had been seized by a memory while Imlann bore down on us, it would have been more than just an imaginary box in flames.
I turned back to the boy. The whites of his eyes shone starkly against his dark face. “What’s your name? Your real name,” I said.
“Abdo,” he said. The name hit a light chord of déjà vu, but I could not place it.
“And where are you, Abdo?”
“I am at an inn, with my family. Holding the box gave me a headache; I was in bed all day. My grandfather is very worried, but I can sleep now and ease his heart.”
The burning box had been causing him pain, but he’d held on to it for more than a day. “How did you know to help?” I said.
“There are two sacred causes in this world,” he said, holding up his pinkie and ring finger. “Chance and necessity. By chance, I was there to help when you had need.”
He was a little philosopher. Maybe in his country they all were. I opened my mouth to question him further, but he put his hands upon my cheeks and gazed at me earnestly. “I heard you, sought you, and have found you. I have reached for you, across space and sense and the laws of nature. I do not know how.”
“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 be friend 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.