Seraphina(53)

“The idea of peace came to me in a dream when I was a student at Golya’s university, the Danlo Mootseye. We dragons do not dream. I took a class on dreaming: we slept in our saarantrai and reported each day on the wonders we had seen.

“One night I saw a hoard, gleaming like the sun. I stepped up to it, to run my fingers through it, but it wasn’t gold, it was knowledge! And I realized a wondrous truth: that knowledge could be our treasure, that there were things humankind knew that we did not, that our conquest need not comprise taking and killing, but could consist of our mutual conquest of ignorance and distrust.”


He began pacing the dais and gesticulating at oddly precise intervals, as if he’d seen a human do this before and concluded that it was a ritual dance that he could master. He said: “I told my dream in class, and was ridiculed. ‘What does knowledge look like? What knowledge could be worth having that we cannot discover on our own?’ But I knew the truth of it, I believed it down to my smoldering core, and from that day forward, I acted only for the sake of that vision. I grew mighty for its sake. I wrought a peace of steel. I wrestled with how best to learn your arts, your diplomacy, your ability to band together, while still retaining our essential dragonness. It has not been easy.

“Dragons are slow to change; we each want to fly our own direction. The only way to lead is to drag the rest, flapping and flaming, toward what is right. I treated with Queen Lavonda in secret, knowing it would be better to impose a treaty upon my own people than to endure a century of debating it in the Ker. I was right.

“The treaty has been and continues to be successful, thanks to reforms on our side and continuing good faith on yours. Here’s to forty more years, or—if I may extrapolate—a hundred. My cosigner will be long dead by then, and I’ll be addressing your grandchildren, but I intend this peace to last until the end of my days, and beyond.”

The gathered nobility hesitated, put off perhaps by such a casual reference to our shorter life spans, but in the end they all applauded. The Queen directed Comonot to the chair that had been placed for him between herself and Princess Dionne, and the long, tedious ritual of paying respects began. Everyone in that hall, from the Regent of Samsam to Little Lord Nobody of Pisky-on-the-Pigpond, expected an opportunity to meet Ardmagar Comonot and kiss the rings upon his thick fingers. I noted the Earl of Apsig lining up with everyone else, and felt a certain grim satisfaction.

The endless reception line required musical accompaniment, of course. I was on oud, but I’d forgotten my plectrum; I had blisters on my fingers by lunchtime.

I also had a headache. It had started with the leaking memory box and grown by the hour. “Are you all right, Music Mistress?” asked a voice from … I could not pinpoint it. I looked across at my musicians, who seemed bizarrely far away. Their faces wobbled. I blinked. “She’s gone so pale!” said a very slow voice indeed, a sound like dark honey through a sieve.

I wondered whether I’d miss lunch, and then my mother’s memory ambushed me.


One hundred sixty-one dragons perched atop High Nest. Below us: mountains. Above us: nimbus clouds moving south-southeast at 0.0034 terminus.

The Ardmagar lectures the students and faculty of the Danlo Mootseye as the new term unfurls. His lecture’s title: “The Insidious Sickness.”

I know what that refers to. I cannot sleep, thinking about it. I am likely infected.

I bring out my note block and turn it on. It was made by one of my father’s quigutl. It helps me remember, but nothing helps me forget.

“Humanity can be our teacher,” cries the Ardmagar. “The point of peace is the exchange of knowledge. My reforms—the bans on vendetta and on hoarding, for two—are buoyed by human philosophies. Where such philosophies are logical, ethical, and quantifiable, we can make them our own.

“But let me warn you, all of you, from the newskin on his first trip south to the venerable teacher who has flown into the macrocloud of unvigilance: there is danger in humanity. Do not lose yourself to the wet brain. Tempted by the chemical intoxication of emotion, dragons forget what they are.”

The Ardmagar is wrong about that. I have never forgotten, to three significant digits, even when I wished to. And here I perch, not forgetting Claude.

“Emotions are addictive!” cries the Ardmagar. “They have no meaning: they are antithetical to reason. They fly toward illogical, non-draconian moralities.”

“They fly toward art,” I mutter.

He hears the echo of my voice; the acoustics of High Nest have been perfected over a millennium, that everyone may be heard. “Who spoke out of ard?”

I raise my head to an angle of 40 degrees, breaking the submissive stance. Everyone stares. “I said, Ardmagar, that emotions fly humans toward art.”

“Art.” He fixes me with a hunter’s gaze, gauging my speed and defenses. “Art gleams before us all, a hoard ungathered. I understand that, hatchling. But we study art. We fly over it from every direction, from a sane, safe distance. Someday we will comprehend its power. We will put it in ard. We will learn to hatch it, and why it’s worth hatching. But do not be tempted into the human flight path. Is a breath’s span of art worth a life span enslaved by the fetid backwash of the meaty brain?”

I lower my head, biting down on my instinct. This would be anger, for a human; I’ve felt that. In the dragon brain, it manifests as “flame or flee.” Why did I speak? He will measure my words and calculate that I am miasmic. The Censors will come at night; I will be sent down for excision. They will cut the unquantifiable right out of me.