Seraphina(13)

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.





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.