3
ORMA 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 passers-by, 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.
I curtsied thanks, expecting the dragon to leave. He lowered his head to my level. “Seraphina,” he screamed.
I stared, shocked that he knew my name. He stared back, smoke leaking from his nostrils, his eyes black and alien.
And yet not so alien. There was a familiarity that I could not put my finger on. My vision wavered, as if I were staring at him through water.
“Nothing?” cried the saar. “She was so sure she’d be able to leave you at least one memory.”
The world grew dark around the edges; the shouting faded to a hiss. I keeled over face-first in the snow.
I lie in bed, hugely pregnant. The sheets are clammy; I shiver and reel with nausea. Orma stands across the room in a patch of sunlight, staring out the window at nothing. He isn’t listening. I writhe with impatience; I don’t have much time left. “I want this child to know you,” I say.
“I am not interested in your spawn,” he says, examining his fingernails. “Nor shall I stay in contact with your miserable husband after you die.”
I weep, unable to stop myself but ashamed that he will see how my self-control has eroded. He swallows, his mouth puckering as if he tastes bile. I am monstrous in his eyes, I know, but I love him. This may be our last chance to speak. “I’m leaving the baby some memories,” I say.
Orma finally looks at me, his dark eyes distant. “Can you do that?”
I don’t know for certain, and I don’t have the energy to discuss it. I shift beneath the sheets to ease a stabbing pain in my pelvis. I say, “I intend to leave my child a mind-pearl.”
Orma scratches his skinny neck. “The pearl will contain memories of me, I presume. That’s why you’re telling me this. What releases it?”
“The sight of you as you really are,” I say, panting a bit because the pain is growing.
He emits a horselike snort. “Under what possible circumstances would the child see me in my natural state?”
“You decide, once you’re ready to admit that you’re an uncle.” I inhale sharply as a fierce cramping grips my abdomen. There will barely be time to make the mind-pearl. I’m not even sure I’ll have the where-withal to concentrate sufficiently. I speak to Orma as calmly as I can: “Get Claude. Now. Please.”
Forgive me, child, for including all this pain. There is no time to separate it out.
My eyes popped open, pain searing through my head. I lay in Maurizio’s arms, cradled like a baby. Old Karal, a few steps away, was dancing an odd jig in the snow. The knight had found a polearm, which he brandished at the dragon, driving it away. It retreated across the square to its brethren.
No, not its. His. That was Orma, my . . .
I couldn’t even think it.
Maurizio’s concerned face swam in and out of my vision. I managed to say, “Dombegh house, near St. Fionnuala’s,” before blacking out again. I revived only when Maurizio transferred me to my father’s arms. Papa helped me upstairs, and I collapsed into bed.
As I struggled in and out of consciousness, I heard my father yelling at someone. When I awoke, Orma was at my bedside, talking as if he had believed me awake already: “. . . an encapsulated maternal memory. I don’t know what exactly she revealed, only that she intended you to know the truth about me, and about herself.”
He was a dragon and my mother’s brother. I had not yet dared deduce what that made her, but he forced the conclusion upon me. I leaned over the side of the bed and vomited. He picked his teeth with a fingernail, staring at the mess on the floor as if it could tell him how much I knew. “I did not expect you to attend the procession. I did not intend you to learn this now—or ever. Your father and I were in agreement on that,” he said. “But I could not let you be trampled by the crowd. I’m not sure why.”
That was all I heard of his explanations, because a vision seized me.
It wasn’t another of my mother’s memories. I remained myself, though disembodied, looking down upon a lively port city nestled in the gap between coastal mountains. I did not just see it: I smelled fish and market spices, felt the ocean’s salty breath upon my incorporeal face. I soared through the pristine blue sky like a lark, circled over white domes and spires, and glided above the bustling dockyards. A lush temple garden, full of chuckling fountains and blossoming lemon trees, drew me in. There was something there I needed to see.
No, someone. A little boy, perhaps six years old, hung upside down like a fruit bat in a spindly fig tree. His skin was as brown as a plowed field, his hair like a fluffy dark cloud, his eyes lively and bright. He ate an orange, segment by segment, looking thoroughly satisfied with himself. His gaze was intelligent, but he looked right through me as if I were invisible.
I returned to myself just long enough to catch my breath before two more visions hit me in short succession. I saw a muscular Samsamese highlander playing bagpipes on the roof of a church and then a fussy old woman with thick spectacles excoriating her cook for putting too much coriander in the stew. Each fresh vision compounded my headache; my wrung-out stomach had nothing more to give.
For a week I was bedridden; the visions came so thick and fast that if I tried to stand I collapsed under their weight. I saw grotesque and deformed people: men with wattles and claws; women with vestigial wings; and a great sluglike beast churning up mud in a swamp. I screamed myself hoarse at the sight of them, flailing against my sweaty bedclothes and frightening my stepmother.
My left forearm and midriff itched, burned, and erupted in weeping, crusty patches. I tore at them savagely, which only made them worse.
I was feverish; I couldn’t keep down food. Orma stayed by me the entire time, and I suffered the illusion that behind his skin—behind everyone’s—was a hollow nothingness, an inky black void. He rolled up my sleeve to look at my arm, and I shrieked, believing he would peel back my skin and see the emptiness beneath it.
By the end of the week, the angry mange on my skin had hardened and begun to flake off, revealing a band of pale rounded scales, still soft as a baby snake’s, running from the inside of my wrist to the outside of my elbow. A broader band encircled my waist, like a girdle. At the sight of them, I sobbed until I was sick. Orma sat very still beside the bed, his dark eyes unblinking, thinking his inscrutable dragon thoughts.
* * *
“What am I to do with you, Seraphina?” asked my father. He sat behind his desk, nervously rifling through documents. I sat across from him on a backless stool; it was the first day I’d been well enough to leave my room. Orma occupied the carven oak chair in front of the window, the gray morning light haloing his uncombed hair. Anne-Marie had brought us tea and fled, but I was the only one who’d taken any. It grew cold in my cup.
“What did you ever intend to do with me?” I said with some bitterness, rubbing the rim of my cup with my thumb.
Papa shrugged his narrow shoulders, a distant look in his sea-gray eyes. “I had some hope of marrying you off until these gruesome manifestations appeared on your arm and your—” He gestured at my body, up and down.
I tried to shrink into myself. I felt disgusting to my very soul—if I even had a soul. My mother was a dragon. Nothing was certain anymore.
“I understand why you didn’t want me to know,” I muttered into my teacup, my voice rough with shame. “Before this . . . this outbreak, I might not have felt the urgency of secrecy; I might have unburdened myself to one of the maids, or . . .” I’d never had many friends. “Believe me, I see the point now.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” said Papa, his gaze grown sharp. “Your knowledge of the treaty and the law would not have kept you silent, but being ugly makes it all clear to you?”
“The time to consider the treaty and the law was before you married her,” I said.
“I didn’t know!” he cried. He shook his head and said in a gentler tone, “She never told me. She died giving birth to you, bleeding silver all over the bed, and I was thrown into the deep end of the sea, without even the woman I loved best to help me.”
Papa ran a hand through his thinning hair. “I could be exiled or executed, depending on our Queen’s humor, but it may not be up to her, ultimately. Few cases of cohabiting with dragons have ever come all the way to trial; the accused have usually been torn to bits by mobs, been burned alive in their houses, or simply disappeared before it came to that.”
My throat was too dry to speak; I swallowed a mouthful of cold tea. It was bitter. “W-what happened to their children?”
“There are no records of any of them having children,” said Papa. “But do not imagine for one moment that the citizenry wouldn’t know what to do with you if they found out. They need only turn to scripture for that!”
Orma, who had been staring into space, snapped his focus back to us. “St. Ogdo had some specific recommendations, if memory serves,” he said, tugging at his beard. “‘If soe’er the worms defile your women, producing misshapen, miscegenated abominations, suffer not such ghastly issue to live. Cleave the infant’s skull with a thrice-blessed axe, ere its fontanelles harden like unto steel. Sever its scaly limbs and burn them in separate fires, lest they return in the night, crawling like worms, to kill righteous folk. Tear open the monster child’s belly, piss upon its entrails, and set ablaze. Half-breeds are born gravid: if you bury the abdomen intact, twenty more will spring up from the ground—’”
“Enough, saar,” said Papa. His eyes, the color of stormy water, scanned my face. I stared back in horror, my mouth clamped shut to keep myself from crying. Did he eschew religion because the Saints themselves extolled the killing of his child? Did Goreddis still hate dragons after thirty-five years of peace because Heaven demanded it?
Orma had not registered my distress at all. “I wonder whether Ogdo and those who express similar revulsion—St. Vitt, St. Munn, many others—had experience with half-breeds. Not because Seraphina resembles the description, obviously, but because they acknowledge the possibility at all. There is no recorded case of crossbreeding at the great library of the Tanamoot, which is astonishing in itself. You’d think, in almost a millennium, someone would have tried it on purpose.”
“No,” said Papa, “I wouldn’t think it. Only an amoral dragon would think it.”
“Exactly,” said Orma, unoffended. “An amoral dragon would think it, try it—”
“What, by force?” Papa’s mouth puckered as if the idea brought bile to his throat.
The implication didn’t bother Orma. “—and record the experiment’s results. Perhaps we are not as amoral a species as is commonly supposed in the Southlands.”
I could hold back tears no longer. I felt dizzy, empty; a cold draft under the door set me swaying unsteadily. Everything had been stripped away: my human mother, my own humanity, and any hope I had of leaving my father’s house.
I saw the void beneath the surface of the world; it threatened to pull me under.
Even Orma couldn’t help noticing my distress. He cocked his head, perplexed. “Give her education over to me, Claude,” he said, leaning back and gathering condensation off the diamond panes of the little window with a fingertip. He tasted it.
“To you,” sneered my father. “And what will you do with her? She can’t go two hours without these infernal visions giving her seizures.”
“We could work on that, to start. We saar have techniques for taming a rebellious brain.” Orma tapped his own forehead, and then tapped it again as if the sensation intrigued him.
Why had it never struck me how deeply peculiar he was?
“You’ll teach her music,” said my father, his golden voice pitched an octave too high. I could see the struggle beneath his face as clearly as if his skin were glass. He had never been merely protecting me; he had been protecting his broken heart.
“Papa, please.” I held out my open hands like a supplicant before the Saints. “I have nothing else left.”
My father wilted in his chair, blinking away tears. “Do not let me hear you.”
Two days later, a spinet was delivered to our house. My father instructed them to set it up in a storeroom at the very back of the house, far from his study. There was no room for the stool; I ended up sitting on a trunk. Orma had also sent a book of fantasias by a composer called Viridius. I had never seen musical notation before, but it was instantly familiar to me, as the speech of dragons had been. I sat until the light at the window began to fade, reading that music as if it were literature.
I knew nothing of spinets, but I assumed one opened the lid. The inside of mine was painted with a bucolic scene: kittens frolicking upon a patio, peasants making hay in the fields behind them. One of the kittens—the one aggressively assaulting a ball of blue wool—had a peculiar glassy eye. I squinted at it in the semidarkness and then tapped it with my finger.
“Ah, there you are,” crackled a deep voice. It seemed to come, incongruously, from the throat of the painted kitten.
“Orma?” How was he speaking to me? Was this some draconian device?
“If you’re ready,” he said, “let us begin. There is much to be done.”
And that was how he saved my life the third time.