4
FOR THE NEXT five years Orma was my teacher and my only friend. For someone who’d never intended to declare himself my uncle, Orma took his avuncular duties seriously. He taught me not just music but everything he thought I should know about dragonkind: history, philosophy, physiology, higher mathematics (as close as they came to a religion). He answered even my most impudent questions. Yes, dragons could smell colors under the right conditions. Yes, it was a terrible idea to transform into a saarantras right after eating an aurochs. No, he did not understand the exact nature of my visions, but he believed he saw the way to help me.
Dragons found the human condition confusing and often overwhelming, and they had developed strategies over the years for keeping their heads “in ard” while they took human form. Ard was a central concept of draconic philosophy. The word itself meant roughly “order” or “correctness.” Goreddis used the word to refer to a dragon battalion—and that was one definition. But for dragons, the idea went much deeper. Ard was the way the world should be, the imposition of order upon chaos, an ethical and physical rightness.
Human emotions, messy and unpredictable, were antithetical to ard. Dragons used meditation and what Orma called cognitive architecture to partition their minds into discrete spaces. They kept their maternal memories in one room, for example, because they were disruptively intense; the one maternal memory I’d experienced had bowled me over. Emotions, which the saar found uncomfortable and overpowering, were locked away securely and never permitted to leak out.
Orma had never heard of visions like mine and did not know what caused them. But he believed a system of cognitive architecture could stop the visions from striking me unconscious. We tried variations on his maternal memory room, locking the visions (that is, an imaginary book representing them) in a chest, a tomb, and finally a prison at the bottom of the sea. It would work for a few days, until I collapsed on my way home from St. Ida’s and we had to start again.
My visions showed the same people over and over; they’d become so familiar I’d given them all nicknames. There were seventeen, a nice prime number, which interested Orma inordinately. He finally lit upon the idea of trying to contain the individuals, not the visions as such. “Try creating a representation, a mental avatar, of each person and building a space where they might want to stay,” Orma had said. “That boy, Fruit Bat, is always climbing trees, so plant a tree in your mind. See if his avatar will climb it and stay there. Maybe if you cultivate and maintain your connections to these individuals, they won’t seek your attention at inconvenient times.”
From this suggestion, an entire garden had grown. Each avatar had its place within this garden of grotesques; I tended them every night or suffered headaches and visions when I did not. As long as I kept these peculiar denizens calm and peaceful, I was not troubled by visions. Neither Orma nor I understood exactly why it worked. Orma claimed it was the most unusual mental structure he had ever heard of; he regretted not being able to write a dissertation on it, but I was a secret, even among dragons.
No unwanted vision had seized me in four years, but I could not relax my vigilance. The headache I’d developed after Prince Rufus’s funeral meant the grotesques in my garden were agitated; that was when a vision was most likely to hit me. After Orma left me on the bridge, I hurried back to Castle Orison as quickly as I could, anticipating an hour’s work attending to my mental hygiene, as Orma called it, putting my mind back in ard.
My suite at the palace had two rooms. The first was a parlor where I practiced. The spinet Orma had given me stood by the far wall; beside it was a bookcase with my own books, my flutes, my oud. I staggered into the second room, containing wardrobe, table, and bed; I’d had only two weeks’ acquaintance with the furniture, but it felt sufficiently mine that I was at home here. Palace servants had turned down the bedclothes and lit the fire.
I stripped to my linen chemise. I had scales to wash and oil, but every inch of me whimpered for the soft bed and there was still my head to deal with.
I pulled the bolster off my bed and sat on it cross-legged, as Orma had taught me. I shut my eyes, in so much pain now that it was hard to slow my breaths sufficiently. I repeated the mantra All in ard until I had calmed enough to see my sprawling, colorful garden of grotesques stretching all the way to my mind’s horizon.
I endured a moment of confusion as I got my bearings; the layout changed each time I visited. Before me squatted the border wall of ancient, flat bricks; ferns grew out of its every cranny like tufts of green hair. Beyond it I saw the Faceless Lady fountain, the poppy bank, and a lawn with bulbous, overgrown topiaries. As Orma had instructed, I always paused with my hands upon the entrance gate—wrought iron, this time—and said, “This is my mind’s garden. I tend it; I order it. I have nothing to fear.”
Pelican Man lurked among the topiaries, his slack, expansive throat wattle dangling over the front of his tunic like a fleshy bib. It was always harder when I ran into a deformed one first, but I plastered on a smile and stepped onto the lawn. Cold dew between my toes surprised me; I hadn’t noticed I was barefoot. Pelican Man took no note of my approach but kept his eyes upon the sky, which was always starry in this part of the garden.
“Are you well, Master P?” Pelican Man rolled his eyes at me balefully; he was agitated. I tried to take his elbow—I didn’t touch the hands of a grotesque if I could help it—but he shied away from me. “Yes, it was a stressful day,” I said mildly, circling, herding him toward his stone bench. Its hollow seat was filled with soil and planted with oregano, producing a lovely smell when one sat on it. Pelican Man found it soothing. He headed for it at last and curled up among the herbs.
I watched Pelican Man a few moments longer, to make sure he was truly calmed. His dark skin and hair looked Porphyrian; his red baglike throat, expanding and contracting with every breath, looked like nothing of this world. As vivid as my visions were, it was disturbing to imagine him—and others still more deformed—out in the world somewhere. Surely the gods of Porphyry were not so cruel as to allow a Pelican Man to exist? My burden of horribleness was light compared with that.
He remained tranquil. That was one settled, and it hadn’t been difficult. The intensity of my headache seemed disproportionate, but maybe I would find others more agitated.
I rose to continue my rounds, but my bare feet encountered something cold and leathery in the grass. Stooping down, I found a large piece of orange peel, and then several more scraps scattered among the towering boxwoods.
I had given the garden permanent features peculiar to each grotesque—Fruit Bat’s trees, Pelican Man’s starry sky—but my deeper mind, the hidden current Orma called underthought, filled in everything else. New embellishments, peculiar plants or statuary, appeared without warning. Refuse on the lawn seemed wrong, however.
I tossed the peels under the hedge and wiped my hands on my skirt. There was only one orange tree that I knew of in this garden. I would put off worrying until I’d seen it.
I found Miserere pulling out her feathers by the rocking stile; I led her to her nest. Newt thrashed about under the apple trees, crushing the bluebells; I led him to his wallow and rubbed mud onto his tender head. I checked that the lock on the Wee Cottage still held and then picked my way barefoot through an unanticipated field of thistles. I could see the taller trees of Fruit Bat’s grove in the distance. I took the lime walk, ducking into leafy side gardens along the way, clucking, soothing, putting to bed, tending everyone. At the end of the walk, a yawning chasm blocked my way. Loud Lad’s ravine had shifted positions and now blocked my path to Fruit Bat’s date palms.
Loud Lad represented the Samsamese piper I’d seen. He was a favorite; I am ashamed to say I gravitated toward the more normal-looking denizens. This avatar was unusual in that it made noise (hence the name), built things, and sometimes left its designated area. This had caused me no end of panic at first. There had been one other grotesque, Jannoula, who’d been prone to wander, and she’d frightened me so badly that I’d locked her away in the Wee Cottage.
The visions were like peering into someone else’s life with a mystical spyglass. In the case of Jannoula, she had somehow been able to look back at me through her avatar. She had spoken to me, pried, prodded, stolen, and lied; she had drunk my fears like nectar, and smelled my wishes on the wind. In the end, she began trying to influence my thoughts and control my actions. In a panic, I’d told Orma and he helped me find a way to banish her to the Wee Cottage. I barely managed to trick her into entering. It was hard to fool someone who could tell what you were thinking.
With the Loud Lad avatar, however, motion just seemed to be characteristic; I had no sense that a real-world Samsamese piper was gazing back at me. Gazebos and pergolas sprouted all over the garden, gifts from His Loudness, and it pleased me to see them.
“Loud Lad!” I cried at the edge of his ravine. “I need a bridge!”
A gray-eyed, round-cheeked head popped up, followed by an oversized body clad in Samsamese black. He sat upon the lip of the cliff, took three fish and a lady’s nightdress from his bag—caterwauling all the while—and unfolded them into a bridge for me to cross.
It was very like dreaming, this garden. I tried not to question the logic of things.
“How are you? You’re not upset?” I asked, patting his bristly blond head. He hooted and disappeared into his crevasse. That was normal; he was usually calmer than the rest, maybe because he kept so busy.
I hurried toward Fruit Bat’s grove, worry beginning to catch up with me now. Fruit Bat was my very favorite grotesque, and the only orange tree in the garden grew in his stand of figs, dates, lemons, and other Porphyrian fruits. I reached the grove and looked up, but he wasn’t among the leaves. I looked down; he’d stacked fallen fruit into tidy pyramids, but he was nowhere to be seen.
He had never left his designated space before, not once. I stood a long time, staring at the empty trees, trying to rationalize his absence.
Trying to slow my panicked heart.
If Fruit Bat was loose in the garden, that explained the orange peel on Pelican Man’s lawn, and it might very well explain the intensity of my headache. If some little Porphyrian boy had found the way to peer back up the spyglass like Jannoula . . . I went cold all over. It was inconceivable. There must be another explanation. It would break my heart to have to cut off my connection to one I was so inexplicably fond of.
I pushed on, settling the remaining denizens, but my heart wasn’t in it. I found more orange peel in Muttering Creek and upon Three Dunes.
The last piece of the garden tonight was the Rose Garden, prissy domain of Miss Fusspots. She was a short, stout old woman in a gabled cap and thick spectacles, homely but not overtly grotesque. I’d seen her too during that first barrage of visions, fussing about her stew. That was the origin of her name.
It took me a moment to spot her—a moment during which I had panicked palpitations—but she was merely on her hands and knees in the dirt behind an unusually large albiflora. She was pulling up weeds before they had a chance to sprout. It was efficient, if baffling. She did not seem particularly perturbed; she ignored me completely.
I looked across the sundial lawn toward the egression gate; I longed for bed and rest, but right now I didn’t dare. I had to locate Fruit Bat.
There upon the sundial’s face lay an entire orange rind, peeled off as one piece.
And there was the boy himself, up the ancient yew tree beside the border wall. He looked pleased that I had spotted him; he waved, leaped down, and skipped across the sundial lawn toward me. I gaped, alarmed by his bright eyes and smile, afraid of what they might mean.
He held out a slice of orange. It curled like a prawn on his brown hand.
I stared at it in perplexity. I could deliberately induce a vision by holding a grotesque’s hands; I had done so once for each of them, seizing control of the visions and ending their control over me. That was the only time I’d done it. It felt wrong, like I was spying on people.
Was Fruit Bat merely offering me an orange, or did he wish me to take his hand? The latter notion gave me chills. I said, “Thank you, Bat, but I’m not hungry now. Let’s go find your trees.”
He followed me like a puppy, past Pandowdy’s swamp, through the butterfly garden, all the way back to his home grove. I’d expected him to leap right back up into the trees, but he looked at me with wide black eyes and held the orange slice up again. “You need to stay here and not go wandering around,” I admonished. “It’s bad enough that Loud Lad does it. Do you understand?”
He gave no indication that he understood; he ate the piece of orange, gazing into the distance. I patted his fluffy cloud of hair and waited until he was up a tree before I left.
I made my way to the gate, bowed to the sundial lawn, and said the designated words of parting: “This is my garden, all in ard. I tend it faithfully; let it keep faith with me.”
I opened my eyes in my own room and stretched my stiff limbs. I poured myself some water from the ewer on the table and tossed the bolster back onto the bed. My headache had evaporated; apparently I’d solved the problem, even if I hadn’t understood it.
Orma would have some idea about this. I determined to ask him tomorrow, and that prospect soothed my worry into sleep.
My morning routine was elaborate and time-consuming, so Orma had given me a timepiece that emitted blasphemy-inducing chirps at whatever early hour I specified. I kept it on top of the bookcase in the parlor, in a basket with a few other trinkets, so that I was forced to trudge all the way in there and dig around to switch it off.
It was a good system, except when I was too exhausted to remember to set the alarm. I awoke in a blaze of panic half an hour before I was due to lead choir practice.
I yanked my arms out of the sleeves of my chemise and shoved them up through the neck hole, lowering the linen garment until it rested around my hips like a skirt. I emptied the ewer into the basin and added the contents of the kettle, which were only slightly warmed from sitting on the hearth all night. I scrubbed the scales on my arm and around my middle with a soft cloth. The scales themselves registered no temperature; the trickle-down was far too cold to be comfortable today.
Everyone else washed once a week, if that, but no one else was susceptible to scale mites or burrowing chibbets. I dried myself and rushed to the bookcase for my pot of salve. Only certain herbs emulsified in goose grease stopped my scales from itching; Orma had found a good supplier in the one dragon-friendly part of town, the neighbourhood called Quighole.
I usually practiced smiling while I slathered my scales with goo, figuring that if I could smile through that, I could smile through anything. Today I really didn’t have the time.
I pulled up my chemise and wrapped a cord around the left forearm so the sleeve couldn’t fall open. I put on a kirtle, gown, and surcoat; I wore three layers at minimum, even in summer. I threw on a respectful white sash for Prince Rufus, hastily brushed my hair, and dashed into the corridor feeling less than ready to face the world.
Viridius, sprawled on his gout couch, had already started conducting the castle choir by the time I arrived, breathless, breakfast rolls in hand. He glared at me; his beetling brows were still mostly red, though the fringe of hair around his head was a shocking white. The bass line stumbled, and he barked, “Glo-ri-a, you gaggle of laggards! Why have your mouths stopped? Did my hand stop? Indeed, it did not!”
“Sorry I’m late,” I mumbled, but he did not deign to look at me again until the final chord had resolved.
“Better,” he told the choir before turning his baleful eye on me. “Well?”
I pretended I thought he wanted to know about yesterday’s performances. “The funeral went well, as you’ve probably already heard. Guntard accidentally broke the reed of his shawm by sit—”
“I did have an extra reed,” piped up Guntard, who did double duty with the choir.
“Which you didn’t find until later, at the tavern,” quipped someone else.
Viridius silenced them all with a scowl. “The choir of idiots will desist from idiocy! Maid Dombegh, I was referring to your excuse for being late. It had better be a good one!”
I swallowed hard, repeating This is the job I wanted! to myself. I’d been a fan of Viridius’s music from the moment I laid eyes on his Fantasias, but it was hard to reconcile the composer of the transcendent Suite Infanta with the bullying old man on the couch.
The choristers eyed me with interest. Many had auditioned for my position; whenever Viridius scolded me, they appreciated how narrowly they had escaped this fate.
I curtsied stiffly. “I overslept. It won’t happen again.”
Viridius shook his head so fiercely his jowls waggled. “Need I underscore to any of you amateur squawkers that our Queen’s hospitality—nay, our entire nation’s worth—will be judged by the quality of our performances when Ardmagar Comonot is here?”
Several musicians laughed; Viridius quashed all merriment with a scowl. “Think that’s funny, you tone-deaf miscreants? Music is one thing dragons can’t do better than us. They wish they could; they’re fascinated; they’ve tried and tried again. They achieve technical perfection, perhaps, but there’s always something missing. You know why?”
I recited along with the rest of the chorus, though it turned my insides cold: “Dragons have no souls!”
“Exactly!” said Viridius, waving his gout-mangled fist in the air. “They cannot do this one thing—glorious, Heaven-sent, coming naturally to us—and it is up to us to rub their faces in it!”
The choristers gave a little “Hurrah!” before disbanding. I let them flow out around me; Viridius would expect me to stay and speak with him. Of course, seven or eight singers had pressing questions. They stood around his gout couch, fondling his ego as if he were the Pashega of Ziziba. Viridius accepted their praise as matter-of-factly as if they were handing back their choir robes.
“Seraphina!” boomed the master, turning his attention to me at last. “I heard complimentary words about your Invocation. I wish I could have been there. This infernal illness makes a prison of my very body.”
I fingered the cuff of my left sleeve, understanding him better than he imagined.
“Get the ink, maidy,” he said. “I want to cross things off the list.”
I fetched writing implements and the roster of tasks he had dictated to me when I first began working for him. There were only nine days left until General Comonot, Ardmagar of All Dragonkind, arrived; there was to be a welcoming concert and ball the first evening, followed a few days later by the Treaty Eve festivities, which had to last all night. I’d been working for two weeks, but there was plenty left to do.
I read the list aloud, item by item; he interrupted me at will. He cried, “The stage is finished! Cross it off!” and then later, “Why haven’t you spoken with the wine steward yet? Easiest job on the list! Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!”
We arrived at the item I’d been dreading: auditions. Viridius narrowed his watery eyes and said, “Yes, how are those going, Maid Dombegh?”
He knew perfectly well how they were going; apparently he wanted to watch me sweat. I kept my voice steady: “I had to cancel most of them due to Prince Rufus’s inconveniently timed demise—dine he with the Saints at Heaven’s table. I’ve rescheduled several for—”
“Auditions should never have been put off until the last minute!” he shouted. “I wanted the performers confirmed a month ago!”
“With respect, master, I wasn’t even hired a month ago.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” His mouth worked up and down; he stared at his bandaged hands. “Forgive me,” he said at last, his voice rough. “It is a bitter thing not to be able to do everything you are accustomed to. Die while you’re young, Seraphina. Tertius had the right idea.”
I did not know how to respond to that. I said, “It’s not as dire as it seems. Each of your many protégés will attend; the program is half filled already.”
He nodded thoughtfully at the mention of his students; the man had more protégés than most people have friends. It was nearly time for Princess Glisselda’s lesson, so I corked the ink and began hastily cleaning my pen with a rag. Viridius said, “When can you meet with my megaharmonium fellow?”
“Who?” I said, placing the pen in a box with the others.
He rolled his red-rimmed eyes. “Explain why I write you notes if you don’t read them. The designer of the megaharmonium wants to meet you.” Apparently I continued to look blank, because he spoke loudly and slowly, as if I were stupid: “The enormous instrument we’re building in the south transept of St. Gobnait’s? The me-ga-har-mo-ni-um?”
I recalled the construction I’d seen in the cathedral, but not the note, which I must have overlooked. “It’s a musical instrument? It looks like a machine.”
“It’s both!” he cried, his eyes alight with glee. “And it’s nearly finished. I funded half of it myself. It’s a fitting project for an old man on his way out of this life. A legacy. It will make a sound like nothing this world has ever heard before!”
I gaped at him; I’d glimpsed an excitable young man inside the irascible old one.
“You must meet him, my other protégé. Lars,” he proclaimed as if he were the Bishop of Gout Couch, speaking ex cathedra. “He built the Comonot Countdown Clock in the cathedral plaza, too; he’s a veritable prodigy. You would get along famously. He only comes by late, but I shall persuade him to visit at some reasonable hour. I’ll tell you when I see you this evening at the Blue Salon.”
“Not tonight, forgive me,” I said, rising and pulling my harpsichord books off one of Viridius’s cluttered shelves.
Princess Glisselda held a soiree almost every evening in the Blue Salon. I had a standing invitation to attend but had never gone, despite Viridius’s pestering and snarling at me. Being guarded and cautious all day left me exhausted by evening, and I couldn’t stay out late because I had a garden to tend and a scale-care regimen I couldn’t skip. I could tell Viridius none of that; I had pled shyness repeatedly, but still he pushed.
The old man cocked a bushy eyebrow and scratched his jowls. “You will get nowhere at court by isolating yourself, Seraphina.”
“I am exactly where I wish to be,” I said, thumbing through parchment sheets.
“You risk offending Princess Glisselda by snubbing her invitation.” He squinted at me shrewdly and added: “It’s not quite normal to be so antisocial, now is it?”
My insides tensed. I shrugged, determined to give no hint that I was susceptible to the word normal.
“You will come tonight,” said the old man.
“I already have plans tonight,” I said, smiling; this was why I practiced.
“Then you will come tomorrow night!” he cried, bursting with anger at me now. “The Blue Salon, nine o’clock! You will be there, or you will find yourself abruptly out of employment!”
I could not tell whether he was bluffing; I didn’t know him well enough yet. I took a shaky breath. It wouldn’t kill me to go once, for half an hour. “Forgive me, sir,” I said, inclining my head. “Of course I’ll come. I had not understood how important it was to you.”
Keeping my smile raised like a shield between us, I curtsied and quit the room.
I heard them giggling from out in the corridor, Princess Glisselda and whichever lady-in-waiting she’d dragged along with her this time. It sounded like an agemate, from the pitch of the giggle. I wondered, briefly, what a giggle concerto might sound like. We would need a chorus of—
“Is she very, very cranky?” asked the lady-in-waiting.
I froze. That question couldn’t pertain to me, surely?
“Behave!” cried the princess, her laugh like water. “I said prickly, not cranky!”
I felt my face go hot. Prickly? Was I really?
“She’s good-hearted, anyway,” added Princess Glisselda, “which makes her Viridius’s opposite. And nearly pretty, only she does have such dreadful taste in gowns and I can’t work out what she thinks she’s doing with her hair.”
“That might be easily corrected,” said the lady-in-waiting.
I’d heard enough. I stepped through the doorway, fuming but trying not to confirm my reputation. The lady-in-waiting was half Porphyrian, judging by her dark curls and warm brown skin; she put a hand to her mouth, embarrassed at being overheard. Princess Glisselda said, “Phina! We were just talking about you!”
It is a princess’s privilege to feel no social awkwardness, ever. She smiled, gloriously unashamed; the sunlight through the windows behind her made a halo of her golden hair. I curtsied and approached the harpsichord.
Princess Glisselda rose from her window seat and flounced after me. She was fifteen, a year younger than me, which made me feel odd about teaching her; she was petite for her age, which made me feel like a gawky giantess. She loved pearl-studded brocade and was possessed of more confidence than I could imagine having. “Phina,” she chirped, “meet Lady Miliphrene. She is, like you, encumbered with an unnecessarily long name, so I call her Millie.”
I nodded acknowledgment to Millie but held my tongue about the silliness of that comment, coming from someone named Glisselda.
“I have reached a decision,” the princess announced. “I shall perform at the Treaty Eve concert, that galliard and pavano. Not Viridius’s suite: the one by Tertius.”
I had been placing music upon the stand; I paused, book in hand, weighing my next words. “The arpeggios in the Tertius were a challenge to you, if you recall—”
“Do you imply my skill is insufficient?” Glisselda lifted her chin dangerously.
“No. I merely remind you that you called Tertius a ‘poxy cankered toad’ and threw the music across the room.” Here both girls burst out laughing. I added, as gingerly as one stepping onto an unstable bridge, “If you practice and take my advice about the fingerings, you ought to be able to work it up sufficiently well.” Sufficiently well not to embarrass yourself, I might’ve added, but it seemed imprudent to do so.
“I want to show Viridius that Tertius played badly is better than his piddling tunes played well,” she said, wagging a finger. “Can I attain that level of petty vindictiveness?”
“Undoubtedly,” I said, and then wondered whether I should have replied so quickly. Both girls were laughing again, however, so I took it that I was safe.
Glisselda seated herself on the bench, stretched her elegant fingers, and launched into the Tertius. Viridius had once proclaimed her “as musical as a boiled cabbage”—loudly and in front of the entire court—but I’d found her diligent and interested when treated respectfully. We hammered at those arpeggios for more than an hour. Her hands were small—this wouldn’t be easy—but she neither complained nor flagged.
My stomach ended the lesson by growling. Trust my very body to be rude!
“We should let your poor teacher go to lunch,” said Millie.
“Was that your stomach?” asked the princess brightly. “I’d have sworn there was a dragon in the room. St. Ogdo preserve us, lest she decide to crunch our bones!”
I ran a tongue over my teeth, delaying until I could speak without scolding. “I know deriding dragons is something of a national sport for us Goreddis, but Ardmagar Comonot is coming soon, and I do not think he would be amused by that kind of talk.”
Saints’ dogs. I was prickly, even when I tried not to be. She hadn’t been exaggerating.
“Dragons are never amused by anything,” said Glisselda, arching an eyebrow.
“But she’s right,” said Millie. “Rudeness is rudeness, even if unperceived.”
Glisselda rolled her eyes. “You know what Lady Corongi would say. We must show them we’re superior and put them in their place. Dominate or be dominated. Dragons know no other way.”
That sounded to me like an extremely dangerous way to interact with dragons. I hesitated, uncertain whether it would be within bounds for me to correct Lady Corongi, Glisselda’s governess, who outranked me in every possible way.
“Why do you think they finally surrendered?” Glisselda said. “It’s because they recognized our superiority—militarily, intellectually, morally.”
“That’s what Lady Corongi says?” I said, alarmed but struggling not to show it.
“That’s what everybody says,” sniffed Glisselda. “It’s obvious. Dragons envy us; that’s why they take our shape whenever they can.”
I gaped at her. Blue St. Prue, Glisselda was going to be queen someday! She needed to understand the truth of things. “We didn’t defeat them, whatever you may have been told. Our dracomachia gave us approximate parity; they couldn’t win without taking unacceptable losses. It’s not a surrender so much as a truce.”
Glisselda wrinkled her nose. “You imply that we haven’t dominated them at all.”
“We haven’t—fortunately!” I said, rising and trying to cover my agitation by rearranging the music on the stand. “They wouldn’t stand for it; they’d bide their time until we let our guard down.”
Glisselda looked profoundly disturbed. “But if we’re weaker than they are . . .”
I leaned against the harpsichord. “It’s not about strength or weakness, Princess. Why do you imagine our peoples fought for so long?”
Glisselda put her hands together, as if delivering a little sermon. “Dragons hate us because we are just and favored by the Saints. Evil always seeks to destroy the good that stands against it.”
“No.” I nearly smacked the harpsichord lid but recalled myself in time, slowing my hand and tapping twice. Nevertheless, the girls stared at me round-eyed in anticipation of my astonishing opinions. I tried to moderate that with a gentle tone. “The dragons wanted these lands back. Goredd, Ninys, and Samsam used to be their hunting ground. Big game ran here—elk, aurochs, felldeer—in herds stretching to the horizon, before our kind moved in and plowed it under.”
“That was a very long time ago. Surely they can’t still miss it,” said Glisselda shrewdly. It would be unwise to make assumptions about her intelligence based on her cherubic face, I noted. Her gaze was as sharp as her cousin Lucian’s.
“Our people migrated here two thousand years ago,” I said. “That’s ten dragon generations. The herds have been extinct for about a thousand, but the dragons do indeed still feel the loss. They are confined to the mountains, where their population dwindles.”
“They can’t hunt the northern plains?” asked the princess.
“They can and do, but the northern plains are only a third the size of the united Southlands, and they’re not empty, either. The dragons compete with barbarian tribes for diminishing herds.”
“They can’t just eat barbarians?” said Glisselda.
I disliked her supercilious tone but could not say so. I traced the decorative inlay on the instrument lid, channeling my irritation into curlicues, and said: “We humans aren’t good eating—too stringy—and we’re no fun to hunt because we band together and fight back. My teacher once heard a dragon compare us to cockroaches.”
Millie wrinkled her nose, but Glisselda looked at me quizzically. Apparently she’d never even seen a cockroach. I let Millie explain; her description elicited a shriek from the princess, who demanded: “In what manner do we resemble these vermin?”
“Take it from a dragon’s perspective: we’re everywhere, we can hide easily, we reproduce comparatively quickly, we spoil their hunting, and we smell bad.”
The girls scowled. “We do not either smell bad!” said Millie.
“To them we do.” This analogy was proving particularly apt, so I took it to its logical conclusion. “Imagine you’ve got a terrible infestation. What do you do?”
“Kill them!” cried both girls together.
“But what if the roaches were intelligent and worked together, using a roachly dracomachia against us? What if they had a real chance of winning?”
Glisselda squirmed with horror, but Millie said, “Make a truce with them. Let them have certain houses to themselves if they leave the ones we’re living in alone.”
“We wouldn’t mean it, though,” said the princess grimly, drumming her fingers on top of the harpsichord. “We’d pretend to make peace, then set their houses on fire.”
I laughed; she’d surprised me. “Remind me not to earn your enmity, Princess. But if the cockroaches were dominating us, we wouldn’t give in? We’d trick them?”
“Absolutely.”
“All right. Can you think of anything—anything at all—that the cockroaches could do to persuade us that we should let them live?”
The girls exchanged a skeptical look. “Cockroaches can only scuttle horridly and spoil your food,” said Millie, hugging herself. She’d had experience, I gathered.
Glisselda, however, was thinking hard, the tip of her tongue protruding from her mouth. “What if they held court or built cathedrals or wrote poetry?”
“Would you let them live?”
“I might. How ugly are they, though, really?”
I grinned. “Too late: you’ve noticed they’re interesting. You understand them when they talk. What if you could become one, for short periods of time?”
They writhed with laughter. I felt they’d understood, but I underscored my point: “Our survival depends not on being superior but on being sufficiently interesting.”
“Tell me,” said Glisselda, borrowing Millie’s embroidered handkerchief to wipe her eyes, “how does a mere assistant music mistress know so much about dragons?”
I met her gaze, clamping down on the tremor in my voice. “My father is the Crown’s legal expert on Comonot’s Treaty. He used to read it to me as a bedtime story.”
That didn’t adequately explain my knowledge, I realized, but the girls found the idea so hilarious that they questioned me no further. I smiled along with them, but felt a pang for my poor, sad papa. He’d been so desperate to understand where he stood, legally, for unwittingly marrying a saarantras.
As the saying went, he was neck deep in St. Vitt’s spit. We both were. I curtsied and took my leave quickly, lest this Heavenly saliva somehow become apparent to the girls. My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.