Seraphina(12)

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. “Wh-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.