Seraphina(60)

That was easy for him to say; he was a prince. I imagined I could and would be judged. Lady Corongi would lead the chorus; being away was no impediment to her.

We circled each other in the final pas de Segosh. Kiggs said, “Your beau doesn’t seem the jealous type. We have a fair shot at failing to scandalize anyone in any way.”

Not the jealous type? Who? Alas, again my mouth failed to launch the requisite questions, and then it was too late. The pavano was finished; people were applauding.

“Dawn,” he whispered. “Meet at the Queen’s study. We’ll take the postern gate.”

He let me go. My waist felt cold where the warmth of his arm had been.





I quit the ball very soon thereafter, retreating to the sanctuary of my suite. I needed to tend my garden, and needed sleep if I was to get up early. Those were surely two very good reasons to leave.

Those weren’t my reasons. I didn’t visit the grotesques, and I didn’t sleep.

My limbs buzzed with restlessness. I undressed, folding the houppelande and gown with obsessive neatness, creasing the folds with my fists, as if pleats might calm me. I usually left my chemise on—I hated myself naked—but now I took it off, folded it, refolded it, flung it fitfully against the privacy screen, picked it up, threw it again.

I paced, rubbing the scales on my stomach, mirror-smooth one way, like a thousand sharp teeth the other. This is what I was. This here. This. I made myself look at the shingle of silver half-moons, the hideous line where they sprouted from my flesh like teeth pushing through gums.

I was monstrous. There were things in this world I could not have.

I climbed into bed, curled up, and wept, my eyes tightly shut. I saw stars behind my lids. I didn’t enter my garden; I was nowhere with a name. A door appeared unexpectedly in the undifferentiated fog of my mind. It frightened me that it could just appear, unbidden, but it startled me out of my self-pity, too.

It opened. I held my breath.

Fruit Bat peeked around the edge. I quailed. He had been so well behaved since I’d asked him to that I’d almost forgotten there’d been any trouble. Seeing him outside the garden scared me, though. I could not help but think of Jannoula, with all her peeking and prying, and how she’d practically set up housekeeping in my head.

Fruit Bat’s face lit up when he saw me. He seemed incurious about my private mind; he had merely been looking for me. To my horror, I was naked in my own head; I changed that with a thought.

“You found me,” I said, smoothing my imaginary gown, or reassuring myself that it was there. “I know, I haven’t been to the garden tonight. I—I couldn’t face it. I’m tired of having to tend it. I’m tired of—of being this.”

He held out his wiry brown hands.

I considered the offer but could not bring myself to induce a vision. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Everything feels so heavy right now, and …” I could not continue.

I was going to have to shut him out. I did not see how I could muster the strength to do it.

He hugged me; he was short, not even up to my shoulder. I held him, put my cheek against the soft, dark knots of his hair, and wept. Then somehow, and I’m not sure how, I slept.





Kiggs was woefully cheerful for a man who could not have gotten more than four hours’ sleep. I had taken my time with the morning routine, assuming we’d be off to a slow start, but he had arrived at the Queen’s study ahead of me, dressed in dull colors like a peasant. No one would have mistaken him for a peasant up close, however; the cut of his jerkin was too fine, his woolens too soft, his smile too bright.

A man hulked beside him; I realized with a start that it was Lars. “He was asking for you last night after you absconded,” said Kiggs as I drew near. “I told him he could catch you this morning before we left.”

Lars reached inside his black jerkin and pulled out a large, folded parchment. “I hev designedt it lest night, and want you to hev it, Mistress Dombegh, because I hev no other goodt way of … to thank you.” He handed it to me with a little flourish, and then, surprisingly quickly for such a large man, disappeared up the hallway.

“What is it?” said Kiggs.

The parchment fluttered as I spread it out. It looked like schematics for some sort of machine, although I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Kiggs had a more concrete notion: “A ballista?”

He was reading over my shoulder; his breath smelled of anise.

I said, “What’s a ballista?”

“Like a catapult, but it flings spears. But this one flings … what is that?”

It looked like a harpoon with a bladder full of something unspecified. “I don’t think I want to know,” I said. It looked like a giant clyster pipe, for delivering a dragon’s colonic, but I didn’t care to say that aloud before a prince of the realm, bastard or no.

“Stow it in here,” he said, handing me a saddle pack, which appeared to contain our lunch. “You’re dressed warmly enough to ride?”

I hoped so. I’d never actually ridden a horse, being a city girl, but I’d scrounged up a pair of Porphyrian trousers and wore my usual overabundance of layers.

I had Orma’s earring fastened by a cord around my neck. I could feel the cold lump of it if I put my hand to my heart.

We set off through the palace, down corridors, through a door concealed behind a tapestry, and down into a series of passages I’d never seen. Stairs took us below the level of the basements, through a rough tunnel. We passed three locked doors, which Kiggs conscientiously relocked behind us while I held the lantern. We were going roughly west, according to my internal compass. Past a pair of enormous stone doors, the tunnel broadened into a natural cave system; Kiggs avoided the smaller branches, taking the widest, flattest route each time, until we reached the mouth of a cave in the hillside below the western wall of the castle.