Seraphina(63)

“He scattered dragon dung all over a field, attracting millions of carrion crows, and … oh!” He looked back toward the column. “You don’t think—”

“That might be a dragon’s cesspit over there, yes. They don’t leave it scattered about; they’re fastidious. In the mountains, there are ‘vulture valleys.’ Same thing.”

I glanced at him, embarrassed to be having this discussion, embarrassed still more that Orma had told me these kinds of things—in response to my inquiries, of course. I tried to gauge how mortified the prince was. He looked at me wide-eyed, not disgusted, not laughing, but genuinely intrigued. “All right,” he said. “Let’s have a look.”

“That’s way out of our way, Kiggs. It’s just a hunch—”

“And I have a hunch about your hunches,” he said, kicking his horse gently in the ribs. “This won’t take long.”

The raucous cawing grew louder at our approach. When we’d crossed half the distance, Kiggs raised a gloved hand and motioned me to stop. “I don’t want to stumble across this fellow by accident. If that’s what happened to Uncle Rufus—”

“The dragon isn’t here,” I said. “Surely the rooks would be alarmed, or silent. These look unconcerned to me.”

His face brightened as an idea hit him. “Maybe that drew Uncle Rufus here: the birds were acting strangely.”

We rode closer, slowly, through the coppice. Ahead of us yawned a wide sinkhole; we stopped our horses at the edge and looked in. The bottom was rocky where an underground cavern had collapsed. The few existing trees were tall, spindly, and black with quarrelling birds. There was ample room here for a dragon to maneuver, and unambiguous evidence that one had.

“Are dragons sulfuric through and through?” muttered Kiggs, pulling the edge of his cloak up over his face. I followed suit. We could handle the stench of sewage—we were city dwellers, after all—but this reek of rotten eggs turned the stomach.

“All right,” he said. “Light a fire under that keen brain of yours, please. That looks fairly fresh, there, would you agree?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the only one I see.”

“He wouldn’t have to come here more than once a month. Dragons digest slowly, and if he were becoming a saarantras regularly, I understand that makes them …” No. No, I was not going into more detail than that. “The rooks would have finished off anything older, perhaps,” I offered limply.

Only his eyes were visible above his cloak, but they’d crinkled into a smile at my discomfiture. “Or the rain would have dissolved it, I suppose. Fair enough. But we can’t confirm that the rooks live here because a dragon habitually uses this space.”

“We don’t have to confirm that. A dragon was here recently, without question.”

Kiggs narrowed his eyes, thinking. “Say the rooks were acting strangely. My uncle came to see what was happening. He stumbled upon a dragon. It killed him and carried his headless body back to the fen under cover of night.”

“Why move the body?” I mused aloud. “Why not eat all the evidence?”

“The Guard would have kept scouring the wood for Uncle Rufus’s body. That would lead us here, eventually, to unambiguous proof of a dragon.” Kiggs darted his gaze back toward me. “But then, why did it eat his head?”

“It’s hard for a dragon to make it look like something else killed you. Biting off the head is fairly ambiguous. And maybe it knew people would blame the Sons of St. Ogdo,” I said. “You did, didn’t you?”

He shook his head, not exactly conceding the point. “So why did it reveal itself to the knights? Surely it knew we would connect the two!”


“Maybe it didn’t expect the knights to risk imprisonment by reporting to the Queen. Or maybe it assumed the Queen would never believe their story—which also happened, didn’t it?” I hesitated, because it felt like giving away something personal, but finally added: “Sometimes the truth has difficulty breaching the city walls of our beliefs. A lie, dressed in the correct livery, passes through more easily.”

He wasn’t listening, however; he stared at a second object of intense rookish interest on the floor of the hollow. “What’s that?”

“A dead cow?” I said, wincing.

“Hold my horse.” He handed me his reins, dismounted, and was scrambling down into the stony sinkhole before I could express surprise. The rooks startled, exploding noisily into the air, obscuring my view of him. If he’d been in uniform, I could have made out the scarlet through all that black, but he might have been a mossy rock for all that I could see.

The rooks swirled and dove in unison, screaming, then scattered into the trees. Kiggs, his arms wrapped protectively around his head, had nearly reached the bottom.

My horse shifted uneasily. Kiggs’s horse pulled at the reins and whickered. The rooks had all but disappeared, leaving the coppice and hollow eerily silent. I didn’t like this one bit. I considered shouting down to Kiggs, but his horse gave a violent tug, and I had to focus all my attention on not falling off my own mare.

The cold drizzle had continued to fall, and I now saw, to the north of us, a cloud of vapor rising out of the coppice. Maybe it was fog; the mountains further north were nicknamed Mother of Mists. But this seemed too localized to me. This seemed like what you might see if cold drizzle were falling on something warm.