Seraphina(19)

“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.





It was, as always, a relief to retire to my rooms for the evening. I had practicing to do, a book on Zibou sinus-song I’d been dying to read, and of course a number of questions for my uncle. I seated myself at the spinet first and played a peculiar dissonant chord, my signal to Orma that I needed to talk. “Good evening, Phina,” boomed the basso kitten.

“Fruit Bat has started wandering around the garden. I’m concerned that—”

“Stop,” said Orma. “Yesterday you were offended when I didn’t greet you, but today you leap straight in. I want credit for saying ‘Good evening.’ ”

I laughed. “You’re credited. But listen: I’m having a problem.”

“I’m sure you are,” he said, “but I have a student in five minutes. Is it a five-minute problem?”

“I doubt it.” I considered. “Can I come to you at St. Ida’s? I’m not comfortable discussing this through the spinet anyway.”