Seraphina(23)

I staggered through the gatehouse, making for the palace as best I could with my knees trembling so violently. The guards asked whether I needed help—I must have looked terrible—but I waved them off. I thanked every Saint I could think of and prayed that the glow upon the castle’s turrets came from torchlight and the moon and not from another imminent collapse.





Sick and exhausted though I was, I could not put off dealing with Fruit Bat. I hauled my bolster onto the floor, threw myself down, and tried to enter the garden. It took several minutes before my teeth unclenched and I relaxed enough to envision the place.

Fruit Bat was up a tree in his grove. I prowled around the trunk, picking my way over gnarled roots. He appeared to be asleep; he also looked about ten or eleven years old and had his hair in knots, just as he had in the vision. My mind had apparently updated his grotesque to conform to new information.

I gazed up at his face and felt a pang of sadness. I didn’t want to lock him away, but I saw no alternative. Visions were dangerous; I could hit my head, suffocate, give myself away. I had to defend myself however I could.

One of his eyes opened, then squeezed quickly shut. He wasn’t sleeping, the rascal; he wanted me to think he was. “Fruit Bat,” I said, trying to sound stern and not afraid. “Come down, please.”

He climbed down, his eyes averted sheepishly. He stooped, picked up a handful of dates from one of his tidy piles, and offered me the fruit. I accepted his gift this time, taking care not to touch his hand. “I don’t know what you did,” I said slowly. “I’m not sure if it was deliberate, but you … I think you pulled me into a vision.”

He met my gaze then. The keenness of his black eyes frightened me, but there was no malice there. I gathered my courage and said, “Whatever you did, please stop. When a vision comes upon me against my will, I collapse. It puts me in danger. Please don’t do it again, or I will have to shut you out.”

His eyes widened and he shook his head vigorously. I hoped he was protesting the possibility of being ejected from the garden and not refusing to comply.

He climbed back into the fig tree. “Good night,” I said, hoping he knew I wasn’t angry. He wrapped his arms around himself and went straight to sleep.

I had an entire garden that needed tending. I stared toward the other end, feeling weary in my very soul and reluctant to get started. Surely I could skip the rest this once? Everything else looked peaceful; the deep green foliage was so pretty with colorful snow falling all around it.

Colorful snow?

I scrutinized the sky. Clouds clustered thickly above me, and from them fluttered thousands of peculiar flakes, rose, green, yellow, more like confetti than snow. I reached out my hands to touch them; they lit upon me, shimmering and ethereal. I twirled in a slow circle, stirring up eddies at my feet.

I caught one on my tongue. It crackled in my mouth like a tiny lightning storm, and for a single heartbeat I was screaming through the sky, diving after an aurochs.

The flake dissolved completely, and I was back to myself in the garden, my heart pounding. In that brief, intense instant I’d been someone else. I had seen the entire world spread below me in unfathomable detail: every blade of grass on the plain and bristle on the aurochs’s snout, the temperature of the ground beneath its hooves, the moving currents of the very air.

I tasted another flake, and for the span of a wink I lay upon a mountaintop in full sun. My scales shimmered; my mouth tasted of ash. I raised my serpentine neck.

And then I was back at Fruit Bat’s grove, blinking and stammering and shocked. These were memories from my mother, like the one I’d experienced when I first saw Orma in his natural form. I knew from that memory that my mother had tried to leave me others. She had apparently succeeded.

Why was this happening now? Had the stresses of the last two days triggered another round of changes? Could Fruit Bat have dislodged them somehow?

The precipitation slowed. On the ground, individual flakes flowed toward each other and fused together, like scattered droplets of quicksilver. They flattened out into scraps of parchment and blew around.

I could not have my mother’s memories scattered all over my head: if I had learned anything from experience, it was that my peculiarities tended to spring out at me unannounced. I gathered up the slips of parchment, stamping on them as they skittered past, chasing them through Pandowdy’s swamp and across the Three Dunes.

I needed something to keep them in; a tin box appeared. I opened it, and the parchments—without any prompting on my part—flew up out of my hand, like a trick shuffle of cards, and filed themselves in the box. The lid clanged shut after them.

That had been suspiciously easy. I peeked in the box; the memories stood like note cards, each labeled across the top in an odd, angular hand I took to be my mother’s. I leafed through them; they appeared to have ordered themselves chronologically. I pulled one out. It read Orma gets toasted on his 59th hatch-day across the top, but the rest of the page was blank. The title intrigued me, but I put it back.

Some cards toward the back were brightly colored. I pulled up a pink one and was dumbfounded to see it wasn’t blank; it had one of my mother’s songs, in her spidery notation. I knew the song already—I knew all her songs—but it was bittersweet to see it in her own hand.

The title was “My Faith Should Not Come Easily.” I could not resist; surely this was her memory of writing that song. The flakes had dissolved upon my tongue; I guessed the same principle applied. The page crackled and sparked in my mouth, like a wool blanket on a winter night. It tasted, absurdly, of strawberries.