Seraphina(62)

Kiggs shook his head in wonderment, and I felt immediately guilty. “They’re supposing that my uncle took off after his prize hound, Una, because he got separated from the group and nobody saw where he went. But he had no reason to do that. She knows what she’s doing.”

“Then why did he leave the group?”

“We may never know,” said Kiggs, spurring his horse a little further along. “Here’s where they found him—with Una’s help—the next morning, beside this rivulet.”

There was little to see, no blood, no sign of struggle. Even the hoofprints of the Guard had been obscured by rain and filled in with seeping fen water. There was a rather deep water-filled crater, and I wondered whether that was where the prince had lain. It was not dramatically Rufus-shaped.

Kiggs dismounted and reached into the pouch at his belt, drawing out a Saint’s medallion, tarnished with use and age. Disregarding the mud, he knelt by the water and held the medallion reverently to his lips, muttering as if to fill it with prayers. He squeezed his eyes shut, praying fervently but also trying to stave off tears. I felt for him; I loved my uncle too. What would I do if he were gone? I was a poor excuse for pious, but I cast a prayer up anyway, to any Saint who might catch it: Hold Rufus in your arms. Watch over all uncles. Bless this prince.

Kiggs rose, surreptitiously wiping his eyes, and cast the medallion into the pool. The cold wind tossed his hair the wrong way across his head; the medallion’s ripples disappeared among choppy little waves.

It suddenly occurred to me to think like a dragon. Could a dragon have sat right here in broad daylight, killing someone without being seen? Absolutely not. I could see the road and the city in the distance. Nothing obscured that view at all.

I turned to Kiggs, who was already looking at me, and said, “If a dragon did it, your uncle must have been killed somewhere else and moved here.”

“That’s exactly what I think.” He glanced up at the sky, which was beginning to spit drizzle at us. “We need to get moving, or we’re going to get drenched.”

He mounted his horse and led us out of the fen, back to the high, dry road. He took the north fork, toward the rolling hills of the Queenswood; we passed through just the southern corner of that vast forest. It had a reputation for being dark, but we saw daylight the entire time, black branches dividing the gray sky into panes, like the lead cames of a cathedral window. It began to drizzle harder and colder.

Over the third ridge, the forest turned into coppice, the rolling hills into sinkholes and ravines. Kiggs slowed his horse. “This seems a more likely area for a dragon to kill someone. Coppice is thinner than forest, so it could maneuver adequately, if not well. It’d be concealed down one of the hollows, unseen until one was right on top of it.”

“You think Prince Rufus stumbled upon the rogue dragon by accident?”

Kiggs shrugged. “If a dragon really killed him, that seems likely. Any dragon intending to assassinate Prince Rufus could find a hundred easier ways to do it without raising suspicions against dragons. If it were me, I’d infiltrate the court, gain the prince’s trust, lure him into the forest, and put an arrow through the back of his skull. Call it a hunting accident—or disappear. None of this messy biting off of heads.”

Kiggs sighed. “I was convinced it was the Sons of St. Ogdo before the knights came to us. Now I don’t know what to think.”


A noise had been growing at the edge of my perception, a chittering like locusts in summer. It grew loud enough now that I noticed it. “What’s that sound?”

Kiggs paused to listen. “That would be the column of rooks, I assume. There’s an immense rookery in a ravine north of here. The birds are so numerous there’s always a flight of them above the place, visible from miles away. Here, I’ll show you.”

He steered his horse off the path, through the coppice, up the ridge; I followed. From the top we saw, half a mile off, a lazy cloud of black birds, hovering, swooping all together. There must have been thousands for us to hear their cries this far away.

“Why do they gather right there?”

“Why do birds do anything? I don’t think anyone has ever bothered to find out.”

I chewed my lip, knowing something he didn’t and trying to work out how best to tell him. “What if the dragon was there? Maybe it left some, uh, carrion,” I said, wincing at my own feebleness. Sure, rooks liked carrion; that wasn’t the only thing a dragon ever left behind.

“Phina, that rookery has been there for years,” he said.

“Imlann has been banished for sixteen.”

Kiggs looked skeptical. “You can’t believe he would camp out in the exact same spot for sixteen years! It’s coppice. Woodcutters tend it. Someone would have noticed.”

Bah. I had to try a different tack. “Have you read Belondweg?”

“I couldn’t call myself much of a scholar if I hadn’t,” he said.

He was adorable and he made me smile, but I couldn’t let him see. “Do you remember how the Mad Bun, Pau-Henoa, tricked the Mordondey into thinking Belondweg’s army was mightier than it really was?”

“He made a fake battlefield. The Mordondey believed they’d stumbled across the site of a terrible slaughter.”

Why did I have to spell everything out for everyone? Honestly. He was as bad as my uncle. “And how did Pau-Henoa counterfeit that kind of carnage?”