Seraphina(11)

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 wherewithal 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.