26
THE CHILL WIND in the open sledge did little to sober me up. My father drove, seated close, sharing the lap rug and foot box. My head bobbed unsteadily; he let me rest it on his shoulder. If I were to weep, surely the tears would freeze upon my cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Papa. I tried to keep to myself; I didn’t mean it to go wrong,” I muttered into his dark wool cloak. He said nothing, which I found inexplicably encouraging. I gestured grandly at the dark city, a suitable backdrop to my drunken sense of epic tragic destiny. “But they’re sending Orma away, which is my fault, and I played my flute so beautifully that I fell in love with everyone and now I want everything. And I can’t have it. And I’m ashamed to be running away.”
“You’re not running away,” said Papa, taking the reins in one gloved hand and hesitantly patting my knee with the other. “At least, you need not decide until morning.”
“You’re not going to lock me up for good?” I said, on the verge of blubbering. Some sober part of my brain seemed to observe everything I did, clucking disdainfully, informing me that I ought to be embarrassed, yet making no move to stop me.
Papa ignored that comment, which was probably wise. Snow spangled his gray lawyer’s cap; little droplets stuck to his brows and lashes. He spoke in measured tones. “Did you fall in love with anyone specific, or simply with the things you cannot have?”
“Both,” I said, “and Lucian Kiggs.”
“Ah.” For some time the only sounds were of harness bells, horses snorting in the cold, and packed snow creaking under the sledge runners. My head waxed heavy.
I jerked awake. My father was speaking: “. . . that she never trusted me. That cut more deeply than anything else. She believed I would stop loving her if I knew the truth. All the gambles she took, and she never took the one that mattered most. One in a thousand is better odds than zero, but zero is what she settled for. Because how could I love her if I couldn’t see her? Whom did I love, exactly?”
I nodded, and jerked awake again. The air was alive, bright with snowflakes.
He said: “. . . time to mull it over, and I am no longer afraid. I am sickened that you inherited her collapsing house of deceit, and that instead of tearing it down, I shored it up with more deceit. What price must be paid is mine to pay. If you are afraid on your own behalf, fair enough, but do not fear for me—”
Then he was shaking my shoulder lightly. “Seraphina. We’re home.”
I threw my arms around him. He lifted me down and led me through the lighted doorway.
The next morning, I lay a long time, staring at the ceiling of my old room, wondering whether I’d imagined most of what he’d said. That didn’t sound like a conversation I could have had with my father, even if we’d both been drunk as lords.
The sun was obnoxiously bright and my mouth tasted like death, but I didn’t feel bad otherwise. I peeked at my garden, which I’d neglected last night, but everyone was peaceful; even Fruit Bat was up a tree, not demanding my attention. I rose and dressed in an old gown I found in my wardrobe; the scarlet I’d arrived in was too fine for everyday. I descended to the kitchen. Laughter and the smell of morning bread drifted up the corridor toward me. I paused, my hand upon the kitchen door, discerning their voices one by one, dreading to step into that warm room and freeze it up.
I took a deep breath and opened the door. For the merest moment, before my presence was noticed, I drank in the cozy domestic scene: the roaring hearth, the three fine bluestone platters hung above the mantelpiece, little window altars to St. Loola and St. Yane and a new one to St. Abaster, hanging herbs and strings of onions. My stepmother, up to her elbows in the kneading trough, looked up at the sound of the door and paled. At the heavy kitchen table, Tessie and Jeanne, the twins, had been peeling apples; they froze, silent and staring, Tessie with a length of peel dangling from her mouth like a green tongue. My little half brothers, Paul and Ned, looked to their mother uncertainly.
I was a stranger in this family. I always had been.
Anne-Marie wiped her hands on her apron and tried to smile. “Seraphina. Welcome. If you’re looking for your father, he’s already left for the palace.” Her brow crumpled in confusion. “You came from there? You’d have passed him on the way.”
I could not remember anyone meeting us at the door last night, now that I thought of it. Had my father sneaked me into the house and upstairs without telling her? That sounded more like Papa than a conversation about love, lies, and fear.
I tried to smile. It was an unspoken covenant with my stepmother: we both tried. “I—in fact, I’m home to retrieve something. From my, uh, room. That I forgot to take with me, and need.”
Anne-Marie nodded eagerly. Yes, yes, good. The awkward step-daughter was leaving soon. “Please, go on up. This is still your house.”
I drifted back upstairs, lightly dazed, wishing I had told her the truth, because what was I going to do for breakfast now? Astonishingly, my coin purse had made the whole journey and wasn’t languishing on the floor of Millie’s room. I’d buy myself a bun somewhere, or . . . my heart leaped. I could see Orma! He had hoped I’d come see him today. That was a plan, at least. I would surprise Orma before he disappeared for good.
I pushed that latter thought aside.
I packed the scarlet gown carefully into a satchel and made up the bed. I could never fluff the tick like Anne-Marie; she was going to figure out that I’d slept here. Ah, well, let her. It was Papa’s to explain.
Anne-Marie required no farewells. She knew what I was, and it seemed to put her at ease when I behaved like a thoughtless saar. I opened the front door ready to head into the snowy city when there came a pattering of slippered feet behind me. I turned to see my half sisters rushing up. “Did you find what you came for?” asked Jeanne, her pale brow wrinkled in concern. “Because Papa said to give you this.”
Tessie brandished a long, slender box in one hand, a folded letter in the other.
“Thanks.” I put both in my satchel, suspecting I should view them in privacy.
They bit their lips in exactly the same way, even though they weren’t identical. Jeanne’s hair was the color of clover honey; Tessie had Papa’s dark locks, like me. I said, “You turn eleven in a few months, do you not? Would you—would you like to come see the palace for your birthday? If it’s all right with your mother, I mean.”
They nodded, shy of me.
“All right then. I’ll arrange it. You could meet the princesses.” They didn’t answer, and I could think of nothing more to say. I’d tried. I waved a feeble farewell and fled through the snowy streets to my uncle’s.
Orma’s apartment was a single room above a mapmaker’s, nearer to my father’s house than St. Ida’s, so I checked there first. Basind answered the door but had no idea where my uncle had gone. “If I knew, I’d be there with him,” he explained, his voice like sand in my stockings. He gazed into space, tugging a hangnail with his teeth, while I left a message. I had no confidence it would be delivered.
Anxiety hastened my feet toward St. Ida’s.
The streets were jammed full of people out for the Golden Plays. I considered walking down by the river, which was less crowded, but I hadn’t dressed warmly enough. The crush in the streets stopped the wind, at least. There were large charcoal braziers set every block or so to keep playgoers from freezing; I took advantage of these when I could wedge myself close enough.
I had not intended to watch the plays, but it was hard not to pause at the sight of a giant, fire-belching head of St. Vitt outside the Guild of Glassblowers’ warehouse. A blazing tongue ten yards long roared forth; everyone shrieked. St. Vitt caught his own eyebrows on fire—unintentionally, but Heavens, was he fierce with his brow aflame!
“St. Vitt, snort and spit!” chanted the crowd.
St. Vitt had not been possessed of such draconian talents in life, of course. It was a metaphor for his fiery temper or for his judgment upon unbelievers. Or, as likely as not, somebody at the Guild of Glassblowers had awakened in the middle of the night with the most fantastic idea ever, never mind that it was theologically questionable.
The Golden Plays stretched the hagiographies all round because the fact was, no one really knew. The Lives of the Saints contained many contradictions; the psalter’s poems made things no clearer, and then there was the statuary. St. Polypous in the Lives had three legs, for example, but country shrines showed as many as twenty. At our cathedral, St. Gobnait had a hive of blessed bees; at South Forkey, she was famously depicted as a bee, big as a cow, with a stinger as long as your forearm. My substitute patroness, St. Capiti, usually carried her severed head on a plate, but in some tales her head had tiny legs of its own and skittered around independently, scolding people.
Delving deeper into the truth, of course, my psalter had originally coughed up St. Yirtrudis. I had never seen her without her face blacked out or her head smashed to plaster dust, so surely she had been the most terrible Saint of all.
I kept moving, past St. Loola’s apple and St. Kathanda’s colossal merganser, past St. Ogdo slaying dragons and St. Yane getting up to his usual shenanigans, which often involved impregnating entire villages. I passed vendors of chestnuts, pasties, and pie, which made my stomach rumble. I heard music ahead: syrinx, oud, and drum, a peculiarly Porphyrian combination. Above the heads of the crowd, I made out the upper stories of a pyramid of acrobats, Porphyrians, by the look of them, and . . .
No, not acrobats. Pygegyria dancers. The one at the top looked like Fruit Bat.
I meant Abdo. Sweet St. Siucre. It was Abdo, in loose trousers of green sateen, his bare arms snaking sinuously against the winter sky.
He’d been here all along, trying to find me, and I’d been putting him off.
I was still staring at the dancers, openmouthed, when someone grabbed my arm. I startled and cried out.
“Hush. Walk,” muttered Orma’s voice in my ear. “I haven’t much time. I gave Basind the slip; I’m not confident I can do it again. I suspect the embassy is paying him to watch me.”
He still held my arm; I covered his hand with my own. The crowd flowed around us like a river around an island. “I learned something new about Imlann from one of my maternal memories,” I told him. “Can we find a quieter place to talk?”
He dropped my arm and ducked up an alley; I followed him through a brick-walled maze of barrels and stacked firewood and up the steps of a little shrine to St. Clare. I balked when I saw her—thinking of Kiggs, feeling her dyspeptic glare as criticism—but I kissed my knuckle respectfully and focused on my uncle.
His false beard had gone missing or he hadn’t bothered with it. He had deep creases beside his mouth, which made him look unexpectedly old. “Quickly,” he said. “If I hadn’t spotted you, I’d have disappeared by now.”
I took a shaky breath; I’d come so close to missing him. “Your sister once overheard Imlann consorting with a cabal of treasonous generals, about a dozen in all. One of them, General Akara, was instrumental in getting the Goreddi knights banished.”
“Akara is a familiar name,” said Orma. “He was caught, but the Ardmagar had his brain pruned too close to the stem; he lost most of his ability to function.”
“Does the Queen know?” I asked, shocked. “The knights were banished under false pretenses, but nothing has been done to correct this!”
My uncle shrugged. “I doubt Comonot disapproved of that consequence.”
Alas, I believed that; Comonot’s rules were applied inconsistently. I said, “If the cabal could infiltrate the knights, they really could be anywhere.”
Orma stared at St. Clare, pondering. “They couldn’t be quite anywhere, not easily. There would be a danger of law-abiding dragons sniffing them out at court. They could count on there being no other dragons present among the knights.”
It hit me then, what Imlann might have been doing. “What if your father has been observing the knights? He might have burned their barn and shown himself as a final assessment of their capabilities.”
“A final assessment?” Orma sat down impiously on the altar, deep in thought. “Meaning Akara didn’t just have the knights banished for vengeance? Meaning this cabal has been deliberately working toward the extinction of the dracomachia?”
There was one clear implication of this; we both knew what it was. My eyes asked the question, but Orma was already shaking his head in denial.
“The peace is not a ruse,” he said. “It is not some ploy to lull Goredd into false complacency until such time as dragonkind regains a clear superiority of—”
“Of course not,” I said quickly. “At least, Comonot did not intend it that way. I believe that, but is it possible that his generals only pretended to agree to it, all the while making St. Polypous’s sign behind their backs—so to speak?”
Orma fingered the coins in the offering bowl on the altar, letting the copper pieces dribble through his fingers like water. “Then they have gravely miscalculated,” he said. “While they sat around waiting for the knights to grow old, a younger generation has been raised on peaceful ideals, scholarship, and cooperation.”
“What if the Ardmagar were dead? If whoever took his place wanted war? Would this cabal need you and your agemates? Couldn’t they fight a war without you, especially if there were no dracomachia against them?”
Orma rattled coins in his hand and did not answer.
“Would the younger generation stand against the elder, if it came to it?” I pressed on, remembering the two saarantrai in the dining hall. I was being hard on him, but this was a crucial point. “Can the current batch of scholars and diplomats even fight?”
He recoiled as if he’d heard that accusation before. “Forgive me,” I said, “but if war is brewing in the hearts of the old generals, your generation may have some painful decisions to make.”
“Generation against generation? Dragon against dragon? Sounds treasonous to me,” said a grating voice behind me. I turned to see Basind mounting the steps of the shrine. “What are you doing here, Orma? Not offering devotions to St. Clare, surely?”
“Waiting for you,” said Orma lightly. “I only wonder that it took you so long.”
“Your wench led me here,” said Basind greasily. If he was hoping to get a reaction from Orma, he was disappointed. Orma’s face remained completely empty. “I could report you,” said the newskin. “You’re having trysts in roadside shrines.”
“Do,” said Orma, waving a dismissive hand. “Be off. Scamper and report.”
Basind looked uncertain how to respond to this bravado. He pushed his limp hair out of his eyes and sniffed. “I’m charged with seeing you report to the surgeons in time.”
“I gathered that,” said Orma. “But you will recall that my niece—yes, my niece, daughter of my nameless sister—wished to bid me farewell, and wished to do so in private. She is half human, after all, and it pains her that I will not recognize her when I see her again. If you would but give us a few more minutes—”
“I do not intend to take my eyes off you again.” Basind bugged his eyes to underscore the point.
Orma shrugged, looking resigned. “If you can endure human blubbering, you have a stronger stomach than most.”
My uncle shot me a sharp look, and for once we were in perfect understanding. I began to wail noisily, giving it everything I had. I howled like a banshee, like a gale down the mountainside. I bawled like a colicky baby. I expected Basind to stubbornly stand his ground—this seemed a very silly way to drive him off—but he recoiled in revulsion, saying, “I will stand guard just outside.”
“As you wish,” said my uncle. He watched until Basind had turned his back to us, then closed in, speaking directly into my ear: “Continue to wail, as long as you can.”
I looked at him, sorrowing in earnest, unable to say any words of parting because I had to expend all my breath on loud crying. Without a backward glance, Orma ducked behind the altar and out of sight. There must have been a crypt under the shrine, as sometimes happened; the crypt would surely connect with the great warren of tunnels under the city.
I wailed, for real and for true, staring down St. Clare, beating on the hem of her robe with my fist until I was hoarse and coughing. Basind glanced back, then looked again, startled. I could not let him work out where Orma had gone. I looked past Basind, over his shoulder, pretending to see my uncle’s face in the shuttered alley windows behind him, and I cried, “Orma! Run!”
Basind whirled, perplexed at how Orma could have reached the alley without his seeing. I rushed him, shoving him into a pile of firewood, causing a little avalanche of logs. I took off running as fast as I could. He recovered far more quickly than anticipated, his flat-footed gait echoing behind me, his silver bell ringing out a warning.
I wasn’t much of a runner; each step seemed to drive a spike into my knees, and the hem of my gown, sodden with dirty snow, clung to my ankles, nearly tripping me. I ducked left and jogged right, sliding on bloody ice behind a butcher’s. I climbed a ladder onto someone’s work shed, hoisted it up after myself, and used it to climb down the other side. That struck me as clever until I saw Basind’s hands grip the far edge of the roof. He was strong enough to pull himself up; that was unexpected. I jumped off the ladder and crash-landed, causing a ruckus among the chickens in someone’s little yard. I sprinted through the gate into yet another alley. I turned north, then north again, making for the crowded river road. Surely the crowd would stop Basind—not just slow him down, but restrain him. No Goreddi could stand idly by while a saarantras chased one of their own.
Basind’s breath rasped close by my neck; his hand hit my swinging satchel but couldn’t quite get a grip on it. I burst out of the alley into bright sunlight. People scattered before me, crying out in surprise. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but what I saw then stopped me short. I heard Basind stop running at almost the same moment, arrested by exactly the same sight—we’d emerged in the middle of a cluster of men in black-feathered caps; the Sons of St. Ogdo.