Seraphina(29)

He bowed graciously. “Madam Undersecretary,” he said, perfectly audible across the hushed room, “would you join me in a galliard?”

Eskar scanned the crowd as if seeking out the author of this prank but said, “I believe I shall.” She took his arm; her Zibou caftan was a riotous fuchsia next to his scarlet. Everyone exhaled.

I stayed a few minutes longer to watch them dance, smiling to myself. It could be done, this peace. It just took a willingness to do it. I silently thanked Prince Lucian for his determination. I caught Viridius’s eye across the room; he seemed to understand and waved a dismissal. I turned to quit the salon, happy that I’d helped effect some positive good, but mostly relieved to be leaving the crowd and chatter behind. Anxiety—or the prospect of being free of it—propelled me toward the door like a bubble toward the surface of a lake. The hallway promised me room to breathe.

I rushed into the corridor with such haste that I all but ran into Lady Corongi, Princess Glisselda’s governess.





Lady Corongi was a petite woman, old and old-fashioned. Her wimple was severely starched and her butterfly veil—a decade out of favor among the fashionable—was wired so rigidly that she might have put out someone’s eye with it. Her sleeves covered her hands completely, which made eating or writing a challenge, but she was of an antique school that equated fine manners with elaborate rituals. Clothing that impeded basic functioning presumably gave her more opportunities for fastidious fussing.

She stared at me in shock, her eyes goggling behind her veil, her painted lips drawn up into a prim and disapproving rosebud. She said not a word; it was up to me to apologize since I was clearly the one with no manners.

I curtsied so low I nearly lost my balance. She rolled her eyes at my wobbling. “I humbly beg your pardon, milady,” I said.

“It astonishes me that a bungling monkey such as yourself is permitted to careen so freely up the corridors,” she sniffed. “Have you no keeper? No leash?”

I had hoped to speak with her about the princess’s education. Seeing Glisselda so cowed by real, live saarantrai had only increased my impetus to speak, but now I felt cowed myself.

Lady Corongi curled her lip into a sneer and brushed past me, bumping me out of the way with a sharp elbow to the ribs. She only went two steps further before turning abruptly. “What did you say your name was, maidy?”

I dove into a hasty curtsy. “Seraphina, milady. I teach Princess Glisselda—”

“Harpsichord. Yes, she’s mentioned you. She said you were smart.” She stepped back in front of me, lifted her veil so she could see me more clearly, and scrutinized my face with sharp blue eyes. “Is that why you fill her head with nonsense about dragons? Because you’re so very smart?”

Here was the thing I had wanted to discuss, without my having to steer the conversation at all. I tried to reassure her: “It’s not a question of being smart, milady. It’s a question of exposure. My father, as you may know, is the Crown’s expert on Comonot’s Treaty. I myself had a dragon tutor for many years. I have some insight—”

“That dragons consider us mere insects? That’s an insight?” She stood close enough that I could see her makeup condensing in the creases of her face and smell her cloying Ninysh perfume. “I am trying to give the second heir confidence, to make her proud of her people and their victory over dragonkind.”

“It’s not confidence; it’s contempt,” I said, warming to my argument. “You should have seen her alarm earlier at merely speaking with saarantrai. She’s disgusted and frightened. She’s going to be Queen someday; she can afford to be neither.”

Lady Corongi made a ring of her thumb and forefinger and pressed it to her heart: St. Ogdo’s sign. “When she is Queen, Heaven willing, we will finish this conflict the way we should have finished it, instead of treating like cowards.”

She turned on her heel and stalked into the Blue Salon.





My encounter with Lady Corongi left me agitated in the extreme. I returned to my rooms, practiced spinet and oud to calm myself, and crawled into bed many hours later, still not tired.

I needed to tend my garden, of course, but I could do that lying down. Half the grotesques were already asleep when I reached them. Even Fruit Bat was lolling about dreamily. I tiptoed past and let him be.

When I reached the Rose Garden, I stared a long time at Miss Fusspots shooting aphids off the leaves with a very small crossbow. I had forgotten all about seeing her at the soiree, but some deeper part of my mind had not. Her dress was changed to the green velvet she had worn this evening. In fact, her entire person seemed sharper and more present, stouter and more solid. Was that proof that I’d really seen her, or merely that I believed I had?

If I took her hands right now, what would I see? If she was still at the Blue Salon, I would recognize it instantly. I felt a twinge of guilt about deliberately spying on her, but curiosity overruled it. I had to know.

Miss Fusspots gave me her hands without any fuss. Entering the vision felt like being sucked down a drain and spit out into the world.

The dimly lit room below my vision-eye was not the Blue Salon, which perplexed me only for a moment. It had been hours; she might have gone home. I was peering down into a tidy boudoir: heavy carven furniture in an older style, curtained bed (empty), bookshelves, peculiar bit of statuary, all of it lit only by the hearth. It didn’t look like a palace room, but perhaps she had a house in town.