Seraphina(49)

Old St. Jobertus’s had once been a church; when the parish outgrew the building, New St. Jobertus’s had been built across the river, where there was more room. After Comonot’s Treaty, some dragons had aspired to run a little collegium to help fulfill Comonot’s proposed interspecies knowledge exchange. Old St. Jobertus’s was the largest unused building they could find. While bell-exempt dragon students such as Orma sneaked around studying our mysterious ways, other scholars, fully belled and graduated, came to St. Bert’s (as it was now called) to teach their sciences to backward humans.

They got few students, and fewer who would admit to being students. St. Bert’s trained the best physicians, but few humans wanted a doctor practicing spooky saar medicine on them. A recent scandal over the dissection of human cadavers hadn’t helped matters. Riots all over town had nearly turned into a bloodbath; people demanded vengeance against the saarantrai—and their students—who dared paw through human remains. There had been a trial, with my father right in the middle of things as usual. Dissection was forbidden and several dragons were sent back to the Tanamoot, but physicians continued to train in secret.

I had only been to Quighole once, when Orma took me with him to fetch my itch ointment. It was not a place respectable young girls should be seen, and my father had been adamant that I should avoid the neighborhood. As many of his objections as I had overturned or disregarded, I’d willingly abided by this one.

Orma took us up an alley, reached over top of a gate to unlock it, and led us into someone’s muddy kitchen garden. Dead marrow vines squished underfoot. A pig grunted in one enclosure; another was full of rotting vegetables. I feared the house’s owner would come after us with a pitchfork at any minute, but Orma walked straight up to the door and knocked three times. No one answered. He knocked three more times and then scratched the flaking paint with his nails.

A little hatch window opened. “Who is it?” asked a scratchy voice.

“It’s the polecat,” said Orma. “I’ve come to nix the mink.”

An old woman with a wide toothless grin opened the door to us. I followed Orma down the stairs into a fetid semidarkness. We arrived in a humid, stenchy cellar lit by a wide hearth, small lamps, and a hanging light fixture in the shape of a mermaid with antlers, her bosom bared to all the world, brandishing two candles like swords. Her eyes bugged out at me as if she were astonished to see a sister monster.

My eyes adjusted. We were in some sort of underground public house. There were rickety tables and a variety of patrons—human, saarantrai, and quigutl. Humans and saarantrai sat at the same tables here, students engaged in deep discussions with teachers. Here was a saar demonstrating principles of surface tension—just as Zeyd had taught me before her special tutorial in gravitation—by holding a glass of water upside down with only a slip of parchment between his rapt students and a drenching. In another corner I saw an impromptu dissection of a small mammal, or dinner, or both.

No one came to Quighole who didn’t have to; I had more personal dealings with saarantrai than most people, and I’d only been the once. I had never seen both my … my peoples together like this. I found myself a little overcome.

The human students did not interact much with the quigutl, but it was still remarkable how little fussed they were at the presence of the creatures. Nobody sent back food that had been touched by quigs—there were quig servers!—and nobody shrieked upon discovering one under the table. Quigutl had affixed themselves to the rafters and the walls; some clustered around tables with saarantrai. The global stench undoubtedly came from quig breath, but the nose falls asleep quickly. By the time we found a table, I barely smelled anything at all.

Orma went to order us dinner, leaving me with Basind. Our table was covered in chalk equations. I pretended to look at them while studying the newskin sidelong. He gaped vapidly at a nearby table full of quigs.

I couldn’t talk to Orma in front of Basind, but I didn’t see how to get around it.

I followed Basind’s gaze to the next table and gasped. The quigs there had their tongues out and sparks were flying. It was hard to see through the gloom, but they appeared to be altering the shape of a bottle, melting the glass with focused heat from their tongues and pulling it like taffy. The long fingers of their dorsal arms—the twiglike, dexterous limbs they had in place of wings—seemed impervious to heat. They pulled glass as thin as thread, heated it again, and looped it around into lacy structures.

Orma returned and set down our drinks. He followed my gaze to the glass-spinning quigutl. They’d made a hollow, basket-sized egg of green glass threads. “Why don’t glassblowers hire them?” I asked.

“Why don’t goldsmiths hire them?” said Orma, passing Basind a cup of barley water. “They don’t follow instructions willingly, for one thing.”

“How is it that you saar don’t understand art?” I said, marveling at their gleaming creation. “Quigs make art.”

“That’s not art,” said Orma flatly.

“How would you even know?”


His eyebrows drew together. “They don’t value it the way a human would. There’s no meaning to it.” One of the quigs had climbed onto the table and was attempting to sit on the glass egg. It shattered into a thousand shards. “See?” said Orma.

I thought about the human-faced lizard in my purse; I wasn’t sure he was right. That figurine spoke to me somehow.