Seraphina(4)

I started down the south aisle, but the southern door was blocked by construction. A jumble of wooden and metal pipes took up half the floor. I continued down the nave toward the great doors, keeping an eye out lest my father ambush me from behind a column.

“Thank you!” cried an elderly lady-in-waiting as I passed. She put her hands to her heart. “I have never been so moved.”


I gave half courtesy as I walked past, but her enthusiasm attracted other nearby courtiers. “Transcendent!” I heard, and “Sublime!” I nodded graciously and tried to smile as I dodged the hands that reached for mine. I edged my way out of the crowd, my smile feeling as stiff and hollow as a saarantras’s.

I put up the hood of my cloak as I passed a cluster of citizens in homespun white tunics. “I’ve buried more people than I can count—sit they all at Heaven’s table,” declaimed a large guildsman with a white felt hat jammed onto his head, “but I never seen the Heavenly Stair until today.”

“I never heard nobody play like that. It weren’t quite womanly, do you think?”

“She’s a foreigner, maybe.” They laughed.

I wrapped my arms tightly around myself and quickened my pace toward the great doors, kissing my knuckle toward Heaven because that is what one does when exiting the cathedral, even when one is … me.

I burst out into the wan afternoon light, filling my lungs with cold, clean air, feeling my tension dissipate. The winter sky was a blinding blue; departing mourners skittered around like leaves in the bitter wind.

Only then did I notice the dragon waiting for me on the cathedral steps, flashing me his best facsimile of a proper human smile. No one in the world could have found Orma’s strained expression heartwarming but me.





Orma had a scholar’s exemption from the bell, so few people ever realized he was a dragon. He had his quirks, certainly: he never laughed; he had little comprehension of fashion, manners, or art; he had a taste for difficult mathematics and fabrics that didn’t itch. Another saarantras would have known him by smell, but few humans had a keen enough nose to detect saar, or the knowledge to recognize what they were smelling. To the rest of Goredd, he was just a man: tall, spare, bearded, and bespectacled.

The beard was false; I pulled it off once when I was a baby. Male saarantrai could not grow beards under their own power, a peculiarity of transformation, like their silver blood. Orma didn’t need facial hair to pass; I think he just liked the way it looked.

He waved his hat at me, as if there were any chance I didn’t see him. “You still rush your glissandi, but you seem finally to have mastered that uvular flutter,” he said, dispensing with any greeting. Dragons never see the point.

“It’s nice to see you too,” I said, then regretted the sarcasm, even though he wouldn’t notice it. “I’m glad you liked it.”

He squinted and cocked his head to one side, as he did when he knew he was missing some crucial detail but couldn’t work out what. “You think I should have said hello first,” he hazarded.

I sighed. “I think I’m too tired to care that I fell short of technical perfection.”

“This is precisely what I never comprehend,” he said, shaking his felt hat at me. He seemed to have forgotten it was for wearing. “Had you played perfectly—like a saar might have—you would not have affected your listeners so. People wept, and not because you sometimes hum while you play.”

“You’re joking,” I said, mortified.

“It created an interesting effect. Most of the time it was harmonious, fourths and fifths, but every now and then you’d burst into a dissonant seventh. Why?”

“I didn’t know I was doing it!”

Orma looked down abruptly. A young urchin, her mourning tunic white in spirit if not in fact, tugged urgently at the hem of Orma’s short cloak. “I’m attracting small children,” Orma muttered, twisting his hat in his hands. “Shoo it away, will you?”

“Sir?” said the girl. “This is for you.” She wormed her small hand into his.

I caught a glint of gold. What lunacy was this, a beggar giving Orma coin?

Orma stared at the object in his hand. “Was there some message with it?” His voice caught when he spoke, and I felt a chill. That was an emotion, clear as day. I’d never heard the like from him.

“ ‘The token is the message,’ ” recited the girl.

Orma raised his head and looked all around us, sweeping his eyes from the great doors of the cathedral, down the steps, over the peopled plaza, across to Cathedral Bridge, along the river, and back. I looked too, reflexively, having no notion what we were looking for. The sinking sun blazed above the rooftops; a crowd gathered on the bridge; the garish Comonot Clock across the square pointed to Ten Days; bare trees along the river tossed in the breeze. I saw nothing else.

I looked back at Orma, who now searched the ground as if he’d dropped something. I assumed he’d lost the coin, but no. “Where did she go?” he asked.

The girl was gone.

“What did she give you?” I asked.

He did not reply, carefully tucking the object into the front of his woolen mourning doublet, flashing me a glimpse of the silk shirt beneath.

“Fine,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”