Seraphina(33)

A raucous cry went up. Thomas shouted enthusiastically with the rest; I watched him through a forest of fist shaking. This was my chance to slip out. I shouldered my way through the suffocating crowd and burst out of the labyrinthine market into the feeble sunlight.

The cold air cleared my head but did not slow my racing heart. I had come out only a block from St. Ida’s. I set off quickly, fearing he still followed me.

I took the steps of St. Ida’s two at a time, reaching the music library within minutes. Orma’s office door spanned a gap between two bookcases; it looked like it had merely been propped there, because it had. At my knock, Orma lifted the entire door to let me enter, then set it back in place.

His office wasn’t properly a room. It was made of books, or more accurately, the space between books, where three little windows had prevented the placement of bookcases against the wall. I had spent vast tracts of time here, reading, practicing, taking instruction, even sleeping here more than once, when home got too tense.

Orma moved a pile of books off a stool for me but seated himself directly on another stack. This habit of his never ceased to amuse me. Dragons no longer hoarded gold; Comonot’s reforms had outlawed it. For Orma and his generation, knowledge was treasure. As dragons through the ages had done, he gathered it, and then he sat on it.

Just being with him in this space made me feel safe again. I unpacked my instruments, my anxiety releasing in the form of chatter: “I was just chased through St. Willibald’s, and you know why? Because I was kind to a quig. I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and then it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.”

I didn’t expect Orma to laugh, but he was even more unresponsive than usual. He stared at motes of dust dancing in the sunbeams from his tiny windows. The reflection upon his spectacles made his expression opaque to me.

“You’re not listening,” I said.

He did not speak; he removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. Was his vision bothering him? He had never gotten used to human eyes, so much weaker than their dragon counterparts. In his natural form he could spy a mouse in a field of wheat. No spectacles, however strong, could possibly bridge that gap.

I looked at him hard. There were things my eyes—and the human mind behind them—could discern that his never could. He looked dreadful: pale and drawn, with circles under his eyes, and … I barely dared articulate it, even to myself.

He looked upset. No dragon could have seen that.

“Are you ill?” I sprang to his side, not quite daring to touch him.

He grimaced and stretched pensively, coming to some conclusion. He removed his earrings and deposited them in a drawer of his desk; whatever he was going to tell me, he did not want the Board of Censors hearing. From the folds of his doublet, he drew an object and placed it in my hand. It was heavy and cold, and I knew without being told that this was what the beggar had given him after Prince Rufus’s funeral.

It was a gold coin, utterly antique. I recognized the obverse Queen, or her symbols anyway; Pau-Henoa, the trickster hero, pranced on the reverse. “Does this date from the reign of Belondweg?” I said. She was Goredd’s first queen, nearly a thousand years ago. “Where would one acquire such a thing? And don’t tell me the town beggars were handing them out to everyone, because I didn’t get mine.” I passed it back to him.

Orma rubbed the coin between his fingers. “The child was a random messenger. Irrelevant. The coin comes from my father.”

A chill ran up my spine. In repressing every thought of my mother—and I dared not even think of Orma as uncle very often, lest I slip up and call him that—I had made a habit of squelching all thoughts of my extended dragon family. “How do you know?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I know every coin in my father’s hoard.”

“I thought hoarding was illegal.”

“Even I am older than that law. I remember his hoard from when I was a child, every coin and cup of it.” His gaze grew distant again and he licked his lips as if gold were something he missed the taste of. He shook it off and grimaced at me. “My father was forced to give it up, of course, although he resisted for years. The Ardmagar let it pass until your mother’s disgrace stained us all.”

He rarely spoke about my mother; I found myself holding my breath. He said, “When Linn took up with Claude and refused to come home, the Censors flagged our entire family for mental health scrutiny. My mother killed herself for shame, confirming a second irrefutable case of madness in the family.”

“I remember,” I said hoarsely.

He continued: “You’ll also recall that my father was a prominent general. He didn’t always agree with Ardmagar Comonot, but his loyalty and his glorious career were beyond dispute. After Linn …” He trailed off as if he couldn’t say “fell in love”; it was too horrible to contemplate. “Suddenly our father was being watched, every action probed, every utterance dissected. Suddenly they no longer turned a blind eye to his hoard, or to his occasional resistance.”

“He fled before his trial, didn’t he?” I said.

Orma nodded, his eyes on the coin. “Comonot banished him in absentia; no one has seen him since. He’s still wanted for stirring up dissent against the Ardmagar’s reforms.”