2
ORMA HAD A scholar’s exemption from the bell, so few people ever realized he was a dragon. He had his quirks, certainly: he never laughed; he had little comprehension of fashion, manners, or art; he had a taste for difficult mathematics and fabrics that didn’t itch. Another saarantras would have known him by smell, but few humans had a keen enough nose to detect saar, or the knowledge to recognize what they were smelling. To the rest of Goredd, he was just a man: tall, spare, bearded, and bespectacled.
The beard was false; I pulled it off once when I was a baby. Male saarantrai could not grow beards under their own power, a peculiarity of transformation, like their silver blood. Orma didn’t need facial hair to pass; I think he just liked the way it looked.
He waved his hat at me, as if there were any chance I didn’t see him. “You still rush your glissandi, but you seem finally to have mastered that uvular flutter,” he said, dispensing with any greeting. Dragons never see the point.
“It’s nice to see you too,” I said, then regretted the sarcasm, even though he wouldn’t notice it. “I’m glad you liked it.”
He squinted and cocked his head to one side, as he did when he knew he was missing some crucial detail but couldn’t work out what. “You think I should have said hello first,” he hazarded.
I sighed. “I think I’m too tired to care that I fell short of technical perfection.”
“This is precisely what I never comprehend,” he said, shaking his felt hat at me. He seemed to have forgotten it was for wearing. “Had you played perfectly—like a saar might have—you would not have affected your listeners so. People wept, and not because you sometimes hum while you play.”
“You’re joking,” I said, mortified.
“It created an interesting effect. Most of the time it was harmonious, fourths and fifths, but every now and then you’d burst into a dissonant seventh. Why?”
“I didn’t know I was doing it!”
Orma looked down abruptly. A young urchin, her mourning tunic white in spirit if not in fact, tugged urgently at the hem of Orma’s short cloak. “I’m attracting small children,” Orma muttered, twisting his hat in his hands. “Shoo it away, will you?”
“Sir?” said the girl. “This is for you.” She wormed her small hand into his.
I caught a glint of gold. What lunacy was this, a beggar giving Orma coin?
Orma stared at the object in his hand. “Was there some message with it?” His voice caught when he spoke, and I felt a chill. That was an emotion, clear as day. I’d never heard the like from him.
“‘The token is the message,’” recited the girl.
Orma raised his head and looked all around us, sweeping his eyes from the great doors of the cathedral, down the steps, over the peopled plaza, across to Cathedral Bridge, along the river, and back. I looked too, reflexively, having no notion what we were looking for. The sinking sun blazed above the rooftops; a crowd gathered on the bridge; the garish Comonot Clock across the square pointed to Ten Days; bare trees along the river tossed in the breeze. I saw nothing else.
I looked back at Orma, who now searched the ground as if he’d dropped something. I assumed he’d lost the coin, but no. “Where did she go?” he asked.
The girl was gone.
“What did she give you?” I asked.
He did not reply, carefully tucking the object into the front of his woolen mourning doublet, flashing me a glimpse of the silk shirt beneath.
“Fine,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”
He looked puzzled. “I have no intention of telling you.”
I inhaled slowly, trying not to be cross with him. At that very moment a commotion broke out on Cathedral Bridge. I looked toward the shouting, and my stomach dropped: six thugs with black feathers in their caps—Sons of St. Ogdo—had formed a semicircle around some poor fellow to one side of the bridge.
People streamed toward the noise from all directions.
“Let’s go back inside until this blows over,” I said, grabbing for Orma’s sleeve a second too late. He’d noticed what was happening and was rapidly descending the steps toward the mob.
The fellow pinned against the bridge railings was a dragon. I’d discerned the silver glint of his bell all the way from the steps of the cathedral. Orma shouldered his way through the crowd. I tried to stay close, but someone shoved me and I stumbled out into open space at the front of the throng, where the Sons of St. Ogdo brandished truncheons at the cringing saarantras. They recited from St. Ogdo’s Malediction Against the Beast: “Cursed be thine eyes, worm! Cursed be thy hands, thy heart, thy issue unto the end of days! Allsaints curse thee, Eye of Heaven curse thee, thine every serpentine thought turn back upon thee as a curse!”
I pitied the dragon now that I saw his face. He was a raw newskin, scrawny and badly groomed, all awkward angles and unfocused eyes. A goose egg, puffy and gray, swelled along his sallow cheekbone.
The crowd howled at my back, a wolf ready to gnaw whatever bloody bones the Sons might throw. Two of the Sons had drawn knives, and a third had pulled a length of chain out of his leather jerkin. He twitched it menacingly behind him, like a tail; it clattered against the paving stones of the bridge.
Orma maneuvered into the saarantras’s line of sight and gestured at his earrings to remind his fellow what to do. The newskin made no move. Orma reached for one of his own and activated it.
Dragons’ earrings were wondrous devices, capable of seeing, hearing, and speaking across distances. A saarantras could call for help, or could be monitored by his superiors. Orma had once taken his earrings apart to show me; they were machines, but most humans believed them to be something far more diabolical.
“Did you bite Prince Rufus’s head off, worm?” cried one of the Sons, a muscled riverman. He grabbed the newskin’s twiggy arm as if he might break it.
The saarantras squirmed in his ill-fitting clothes, and the Sons recoiled as if wings, horns, and tail might burst out of his skin at any moment. “The treaty forbids us biting off human heads,” said the newskin, his voice like a rusty hinge. “But I won’t pretend I’ve forgotten what they taste like.”
The Sons would have been happy with any pretext for beating him up, but the one he’d handed them was so horrifying that they stood paralyzed for a heartbeat.
Then with a feral roar, the mob came alive. The Sons charged the newskin, slamming him back against the railing. I glimpsed a gash across his forehead, a wash of silver blood down the side of his face, before the crowd closed ranks around me, cutting off my view.
I pushed through, chasing Orma’s shrubby dark hair and beaky nose. All it would take for the mob to turn on him was a gashed lip and a glimpse of his silver blood. I shouted his name, screamed it, but he could not hear me above the commotion.
Shrieks arose from the direction of the cathedral; galloping hooves rang out across the plaza. The Guard had arrived at last, bagpipes brawling. The Sons of St. Ogdo flung their hats into the air and disappeared into the crowd. Two threw themselves over the bridge railing, but I only heard one splash in the river.
Orma was squatting beside the crumpled newskin; I rushed toward him against the current of fleeing townspeople. I dared not embrace him, but my relief was so great that I knelt and took his hand. “Thank Allsaints!”
Orma shook me off. “Help me raise him, Seraphina.”
I scrambled to the other side and took the newskin’s arm. He gaped at me stupidly; his head lolled onto my shoulder, smearing my cloak with his silver blood. I swallowed my revulsion. We hauled the injured saar to his feet and balanced him upright. He shrugged off our help and stood on his own, teetering in the biting breeze.
The Captain of the Guard, Prince Lucian Kiggs, stalked toward us. People parted before him like the waves before St. Fionnuala. He was still in his funeral weeds, a short white houppelande with long dagged sleeves, but all his sorrow had been replaced by a spectacular annoyance.
I tugged Orma’s sleeve. “Let’s go.”
“I can’t. The embassy will fix on my earring. I must stay close to the newskin.”
I’d glimpsed the bastard prince across crowded halls at court. He had a reputation as a shrewd and dogged investigator; he worked all the time and was not as outgoing as his uncle Rufus had been. He was also not as handsome—no beard, alas—but seeing him up close, I realized that the intelligence of his gaze more than made up for that.
I looked away. Saints’ dogs, there was dragon blood all over my shoulder.
Prince Lucian ignored Orma and me and addressed the newskin, his brows drawn in concern. “You’re bleeding!”
The newskin raised his face for inspection. “It looks worse than it is, Your Grace. These human heads contain a great many blood vessels, easily perforated by—”
“Yes, yes.” The prince winced at the newskin’s gash and signaled to one of his men, who rushed up with a cloth and a canteen of water. The newskin opened the canteen and began pouring the water straight onto his head. It trickled down his scalp in ineffectual rivulets, soaking his doublet.
Saints in Heaven. He was going to freeze himself, and here were Goredd’s finest just letting him do it. I snatched the cloth and canteen from his unresisting hands, wet the cloth, and demonstrated how he was to dab at his face. He took over the dabbing and I backed away. Prince Lucian nodded cordially in thanks.
“You’re rather transparently new, saar,” said the prince. “What’s your name?”
“Basind.”
It sounded more like a belch than a name. I caught the inevitable look of pity and disgust in the prince’s dark eyes. “How did this begin?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Basind. “I was walking home from the fish market—”
“Someone as new as yourself should not be walking around on your own,” snapped the prince. “Surely the embassy has made that abundantly clear to you?”
I looked at Basind, finally taking stock of his clothing: doublet, trunk hose, and the telltale insignia.
“Were you lost?” probed Prince Lucian. Basind shrugged. The prince spoke more gently: “They followed you?”
“I do not know. I was cogitating upon preparations for river plaice.” He flapped a soggy parcel in the prince’s face. “They surrounded me.”
Prince Lucian dodged the fishy packet, undeterred from questioning. “How many were there?”
“Two hundred nineteen, although there may have been some I couldn’t see.”
The prince’s mouth fell open. He was unused to interrogating dragons, evidently. I decided to bail him out. “How many with black feathers in their caps, saar Basind?”
“Six,” said Basind, blinking like someone unused to having only two eyelids.
“Did you get a look at them, Seraphina?” asked the prince, clearly relieved that I’d stepped in.
I nodded dumbly, a light panic seizing me at the prince’s speaking my name. I was a palace nobody; why would he know it?
He continued addressing me: “I’ll have my boys bring round whomever they’ve nabbed. You, the newskin, and your friend there”—he indicated Orma—“should look them over and see if you can describe the ones we’ve missed.”
The prince signaled his men to bring forth their captives, then leaned in and answered the question I hadn’t asked. “Cousin Glisselda has been talking about you nonstop. She was ready to give up music. It’s fortunate you came to us when you did.”
“Viridius was too hard on her,” I muttered, embarrassed.
He flicked his dark eyes toward Orma, who had turned away and was scanning the distance for embassy saarantrai. “What’s your tall friend’s name? He’s a dragon, isn’t he?”
This prince was too sharp for my comfort. “What makes you think so?”
“Just a hunch. I’m right, then?”
I’d gone sweaty, despite the cold. “His name is Orma. He’s my teacher.”
Lucian Kiggs scrutinized my face. “Fair enough. I’ll want to see his exemption papers. I’ve only just inherited the list; I don’t know all our stealth scholars, as Uncle Rufus used to call them.” His dark eyes grew distant, but he recovered himself. “Orma has hailed the embassy, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“Bah. Then we’d best get this over with before I have to go on the defensive.”
One of his men paraded the captives in front of us; they’d only caught two. I’d have thought the ones who jumped into the river would have been easily identified when they came out soaking wet and shivering, but maybe the Guard hadn’t realized . . .
“Two of them leaped the bridge railing, but I only heard one splash,” I began.
Prince Lucian apprehended my meaning immediately. With four swift hand gestures, he directed his soldiers to both sides of the bridge. On a silent count of three, they swung themselves underneath the bridge, and sure enough, one of the Sons was still there, clinging to the beams. They flushed him out like a partridge; unlike a partridge, he couldn’t fly even a little. He splashed down in the river, two of the Guard leaping in after him.
The prince cast me an appraising look. “You’re observant.”
“Sometimes,” I said, avoiding his eye.
“Captain Kiggs,” intoned a low female voice behind me.
“Here we go,” he muttered, stepping around me. I turned to see a saarantras with short black hair leap down from a horse. She rode like a man in trousers and a split caftan, a silver bell as large as an apple fastened ostentatiously to her cloak clasp. The three saarantrai behind her did not dismount, but kept their eager steeds at the ready; their bells jingled a disconcertingly merry cadence on the wind.
“Undersecretary Eskar.” The prince approached her with an outstretched hand. She did not deign to take it, but strode purposefully toward Basind.
“Report,” she said.
Basind saluted saar fashion, gesturing at the sky. “All in ard. The Guard arrived with tolerable haste, Undersecretary. Captain Kiggs has come directly from his uncle’s graveside.”
“The cathedral is a two-minute walk from here,” said Eskar. “The time differential between your signal and the second one is almost thirteen minutes. If the Guard had been here at that point, the second would not have been necessary at all.”
Prince Lucian drew himself up slowly, his face a mask of calm. “So this was some sort of test?”
“It was,” she said dispassionately. “We find your security inadequate, Captain Kiggs. This is the third attack in three weeks, and the second where a saar was injured.”
“An attack you set up shouldn’t count. You know this is atypical. People are on edge. General Comonot arrives in ten days—”
“Precisely why you need to do a better job,” she said coolly.
“—and Prince Rufus was just murdered in a suspiciously draconian manner.”
“There’s no evidence that a dragon did it,” she said.
“His head is missing!” The prince gestured vehemently toward his own head, his clenched teeth and windblown hair lending a mad ferocity to the pose.
Eskar raised an eyebrow. “No human could have accomplished such a thing?”
Prince Lucian turned sharply away from her and paced in a small circle, rubbing a hand down his face. It’s no good getting angry at saarantrai; the hotter your temper, the colder they get. Eskar remained infuriatingly neutral.
His pique under wraps, the prince tried again. “Eskar, please understand: this frightens people. There’s still so much deep-seated distrust. The Sons of St. Ogdo take advantage of that, tap into people’s fears—”
“Forty years,” interrupted Eskar. “We’ve had forty years of peace. You weren’t even born when Comonot’s Treaty was signed. Your own mother—”
“Rest she on Heaven’s hearthstone,” I mumbled, as if it were my job to make up for the social inadequacies of dragons everywhere. The prince flashed me a grateful glance.
“—was but a speck in the queen’s womb,” continued Eskar placidly, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Only your elders remember the war, but it is not the old who join the Sons of St. Ogdo or riot in the streets. How can there be deep-seated distrust in people who’ve never been through the fires of war? My own father fell to your knights and their insidious dracomachia. All saarantrai remember those days; all of us lost family. We’ve let that go, as we had to, for the peace. We hold no grudge.
“Do your people pass emotions through your blood, mother to child, the way we dragons pass memories? Do you inherit your fears? I do not comprehend how this persists in the population—or why you will not crush it,” said Eskar.
“We prefer not to crush our own. Call it one of our irrationalities,” said Prince Lucian, smiling grimly. “Maybe we can’t reason our way out of our feelings the way you can; maybe it takes several generations to calm our fears. Then again, I’m not the one judging an entire species by the actions of a few.”
Eskar was unmoved. “Ardmagar Comonot will have my report. It remains to be seen whether he cancels his upcoming visit.”
Prince Lucian hoisted his smile, like a flag of surrender. “It would save me a lot of difficulty if he stayed home. How kind of you to consider my well-being.”
Eskar cocked her head, birdlike, and then shook off her perplexity. She directed her entourage to collect Basind, who had drifted to the end of the bridge and was rubbing himself against the railing like a cat.
The dull ache behind my eyes had turned into a persistent pounding, as if someone were knocking to be let out. That was bad; my headaches were never just headaches. I didn’t want to leave without learning what the urchin had given Orma, but Eskar had taken Orma aside; they had their heads together, talking quietly.
“He must be an excellent teacher,” said Prince Lucian, his voice so close and sudden that I startled.
I made half courtesy in silence. I could not discuss Orma in detail with anyone, let alone the Captain of the Queen’s Guard.
“He’d have to be,” he said. “We were amazed when Viridius chose a woman as his assistant. Not that a woman couldn’t do the job, but Viridius is old-fashioned. You’d have to be something astonishing to get his attention.”
I made full courtesy this time, but he kept talking. “Your solo was truly moving. I’m sure everyone’s telling you this, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the cathedral.”
Of course. I would never be comfortably anonymous again, it seemed. That’s what I got for disregarding Papa’s advice. “Thank you,” I said. “Excuse me, Highness. I need to see my teacher about my, er, trills . . .”
I turned my back on him. It was the height of rudeness. He hovered behind me for a moment, then walked away. I glanced back. The last rays of the setting sun turned his mourning clothes almost golden. He commandeered a horse from one of his sergeants, leaped up with balletic grace, and directed the corps back into formation.
I permitted myself one small pang for the inevitability of his disdain, then shoved that feeling aside and moved toward Orma and Eskar.
When I reached them, Orma held out an arm without touching me. “I present: Seraphina,” he said.
Undersecretary Eskar looked down her aquiline nose as if checking human features off a list. Two arms: check. Two legs: unconfirmed due to long houppelande. Two eyes, bovine-brown: check. Hair the color of strong tea, escaping its plait: check. Breasts: not obviously. Tall, but within normal parameters. Furious or embarrassed redness upon cheeks: check.
“Hmph,” she said. “It’s not nearly as hideous as I always pictured it.”
Orma, bless his shriveled dragon heart, corrected her. “She.”
“Is it not infertile as a mule?”
My face grew so hot I half expected my hair to catch fire.
“She,” said Orma firmly, as if he himself had not made the same mistake the first time. “All humans take a gendered pronoun, irrespective of reproductive fitness.”
“We take offense otherwise,” I said through a brittle smile.
Eskar lost interest abruptly, releasing me from her gaze. Her underlings were returning from the other end of the bridge, leading saar Basind on a skittish horse. Undersecretary Eskar mounted her bay, wheeled it in a tight circle, and spurred it forward without so much as a backward glance at Orma and me. Her retinue followed.
As they passed, Basind’s reeling eye lit on me for a long moment; I felt a sharp shock of revulsion. Orma, Eskar, and the others may have learned to pass, but here was a stark reminder of what lay beneath. His was no human gaze.
I turned to Orma, who stared pensively at nothing. “That was thoroughly humiliating,” I said.
He startled. “Was it?”
“What were you thinking, telling her about me?” I said. “I may be out from under my father’s thumb, but the old rules still apply. We can’t just go telling everyone—”
“Ah,” he said, raising a slender hand to fend off my argument. “I didn’t tell her. Eskar has always known. She used to be with the Censors.”
My stomach turned, the Censors, a dragon agency accountable only to themselves, policed saarantrai for undragon like behavior and routinely excised the brains of dragons they considered emotionally compromised. “Wonderful. So what have you done to attract the Censors’ attention this time?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly. “Anyway, she’s not with the Censors anymore.”
“I thought maybe they were after you for exhibiting undue affection for me,” I said, then added mordantly: “You’d think I would have noticed something like that.”
“I bear you an appropriate interest, within accepted emotive parameters.”
That seemed like overstating it, alas.
To his credit, he knew this subject upset me. Not every saar would have cared. He squirmed, as usual not sure what to do with the information. “You will come for your lesson this week?” he said, making a verbal gesture toward the familiar, as close to comfort as he could contrive to give me.
I sighed. “Of course. And you’ll tell me what that child gave you.”
“You seem to think there’s something to tell,” he said, but his hand went involuntarily to his chest, where he’d stashed the bit of gold. I felt a stab of concern, but knew it was no good haranguing him. He would tell me when he decided to tell me.
He declined to tell me goodbye, as was his usual custom; he turned without a word and took off toward the cathedral. Its facade blazed red with the setting sun; Orma’s retreating figure made a dark hatch mark against it. I watched until he disappeared around the end of the north transept, and then I watched the space where he had vanished.
I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature. After today’s stresses, though, it weighed on me more than usual. Orma knew everything about me, but he was a dragon. On a good day, he was friend enough. On a bad day, running into his inadequacy was like tripping up the stairs. It hurt, but it felt like my own fault.
Still, he was all I had.
The only sounds were the river below me, the wind in the empty trees, and faint snatches of song, carried all the way downstream from the taverns near the music school. I listened with my arms wrapped around myself and watched the stars blink into being. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve—surely it was the wind making them water—and set off for home thinking of Orma, of everything I felt that must remain unsaid, and of every debt I owed him that could never be repaid.