Seraphina(34)

His carefully neutral expression was breaking my heart, but there was nothing human I could do to help him. “So what does the coin signify?” I asked.

Orma looked at me over his spectacles, as if it were the most unnecessary question ever uttered. “He’s in Goredd. You may be certain of it.”

“Didn’t his hoard get reabsorbed into the High Ker’s treasury?”

He shrugged. “Who knows what the wily saar contrived to take with him.”

“Could no one else have sent it? The Board of Censors, to gauge your reaction?”

Orma pursed his lips and gave a tight shake of his head. “No. This was our signal when I was a child. This very coin. It admonished me to behave at school. ‘Don’t shame us,’ was the sense of it. ‘Remember your family.’ ”

“What can it possibly mean in this context?”

His face looked thinner than before; his false beard fit poorly, or he hadn’t bothered to put it on quite straight. He said, “I believe Imlann was at the funeral, and he suspects I may have noticed him, though in fact I did not. He’s telling me to stay out of his way, to pretend I don’t recognize his saarantras if I see it, and to let him do what honor demands.”

I folded my arms; the room seemed suddenly colder. “Do what? And more urgently: to whom? To the man his daughter married? To their child?”

Orma’s brown eyes widened behind his spectacles. “That had not occurred to me. No. Do not fear for yourself; he believes Linn died childless.”

“And my father?”

“He never permitted your father’s name to be spoken in his presence. Your father’s very existence violates ard, and was vigorously denied by everyone.”

Orma picked lint off the knee of his woolen hose; he wore a pair of silks underneath, or he’d have been scratching like a flea-bitten hound. “Who knows what Imlann has been stewing upon for the last sixteen years?” he said. “He has no incentive to obey the law or keep his human emotions under wraps. Even for myself, constantly monitored and obeying the law as best I can, this shape takes a toll. The borderlands of madness used to have much sterner signage around them than they do now.”

“If you don’t think he’s after Papa and me, then what? Why would he be here?”

“This close to Comonot’s visit?” He stared over the rims of his glasses again.

“An assassination?” He was making great suppositional leaps, or else I was. “You think he’s plotting against the Ardmagar?”

“I think it would be foolish to close our eyes and proceed as if he weren’t.”

“Well then, you’ve got to tell Prince Lucian and the Guard about this.”

“Ah. That’s just it.” He leaned back and tapped the edge of the coin against his teeth. “I can’t. I’m caught—what’s your expression?—between a rock and another rock? I’m too involved. I do not trust myself to make an unemotional decision.”

I studied his face again, the crease between his brows. He was unquestionably struggling with something. “You don’t want to turn him in, because he’s your father?”

Orma rolled his eyes toward me, the whites flashing like a frightened animal’s. “Quite the contrary. I want to set the Guard on him, want to see him brought to trial, want to see him hang. And not because he is truly, logically, a danger to the Ardmagar—because you’re right, he might not be—but because, in fact, I … I hate him.”


Absurdly, my first response to this was a knot of jealousy, like a fist to the stomach, that he not only felt something, but felt it intensely about someone who wasn’t me. I reminded myself that it was hatred; I could not possibly prefer that to his benevolent indifference, could I? I said, “Hate is serious. You’re sure?”

He nodded, finally letting everything show on his face for more than a fraction of a second. He looked terrible.

“How long have you felt this?” I asked.

He shrugged hopelessly. “Linn was not just my sister; she was my teacher.”

Orma had often told me that among dragons there was no higher word of esteem than teacher; teachers were more revered than parents, spouses, even the Ardmagar himself.

“When she died and the shame fell on our family,” he said, “I could not denounce her the way my father could—the way we were all supposed to, for the satisfaction of the Ardmagar. We fought; he bit me—”

“He bit you?”

“We’re dragons, Phina. The one time you saw me …” He gestured vaguely with his hand, as if he didn’t want to say it aloud, as if I’d seen him naked—which I guess technically I had. “I kept my wings folded, so you probably didn’t notice the damage to the left, where the bone was once broken.”

I shook my head, horrified for him. “Can you still fly?”

“Oh, yes,” he said absently. “But you must understand: in the end I denounced her, under duress. My mother killed herself anyway. My father was banished anyway. In the end—” His lips trembled. “I don’t know what it was for.”

There were tears in my eyes, if not in his. “The Board of Censors would have sent you down for excision if you hadn’t.”

“Yes, that’s highly likely,” he mused, his tone back to a studied neutral.