Seraphina(65)

Kiggs smiled grimly. “As grotesque as that sounds, yes. But you see where I’m going with this. Your boy is under scrutiny. If he loved you—I’m not saying he does—he would be taken home and forcibly excised. They would remove all his memories of you and—”

“I know what excision means!” I snapped. “Saints’ bones! He feels nothing for me. You needn’t concern yourself.”

“Ah,” he said, gazing off into the middle distance. “Well. He’s an idiot.”

I stared at him, trying to gauge his meaning. He smiled, and tried to clarify. “Because he’s hurt you, clearly.”

No, that wasn’t clear, but I played along. “Maybe I’m the idiot, for loving him.”

He had no answer for that, although I couldn’t quite take his silence for agreement, the way he looked off into the distance and frowned.





We turned south onto something more sheep track than road. I began to fret about how long this journey was taking. Today was Speculus, the shortest day of the year; by the time we reached the knights, we’d have to leave almost at once to make it back in daylight. Surely Kiggs did not intend us to ride home in the dark? Maybe that was of no concern to an experienced horseman, but I felt I was barely holding on as it was.

We reached a grim old barn that had caught fire recently; the rear of the roof sagged, the back wall was charred and blistered, and the whole area reeked of smoke. Someone had put it out, or it had been too damp to burn. Kiggs stared at it hard, then abruptly turned off the road toward a thicket. We skirted the thicket, which turned out to be a small patch of forest; what looked like shrubs from the rise above were revealed to be trees once we’d reached the low end of the hollow. Entering from the far side, we rode up the middle of the shallow creek until we reached its source, the mouth of a cave under the hill.

Kiggs leaped from his horse, grabbed his pack, and approached the cave on foot. I was not so adept at the dismount. I had substantial difficulty convincing the horse to stand still. Happily, Kiggs wasn’t looking at me. He stood near the mouth of the cave, his hands on his head in a gesture of surrender, crying, “By Belondweg and Orison, we come in peace!”

“Don’t pretend you’re scared of me.” An unshorn, bony-wristed, no-longer-exactly-young man emerged from the shadows with a crossbow over his shoulder. He wore a peasant’s work smock, incongruously embroidered with fruit, and wooden clogs over his boots.

“Maurizio!” said Kiggs, laughing. “I took you for Sir Henri.”

The fellow grinned like a lunatic and said, “Henri would have been ready and willing to menace you a bit. I couldn’t have shot you. Bow’s not even loaded.”

He and Kiggs clasped hands; clearly they knew each other. I stared at my hands, overtaken by a sudden shyness, wondering whether Maurizio would recognize me as the girl he’d carried home five years ago. I had a nagging feeling that I’d vomited at some point during that journey; I really hoped it hadn’t been on him.

“What’d you bring me?” asked Maurizio, lifting his pointy chin and looking not at the pack but at me, half on, half off my horse.

“Er. Woolies,” said Kiggs, following Maurizio’s gaze and looking at me in surprise. I waved casually. He picked his way back downstream toward me.

“Have you eaten?” asked Maurizio, joining Kiggs in holding my horse’s bridle. He turned lively blue eyes on me. “The oatmeal is fine today. Not even moldy.”

My feet landed on solid ground just as an old man in a threadbare tabard emerged from the cave blinking. He had liver spots on his scalp and used a nasty-looking polearm for a walking stick. “Boy! Who’s this?”

“I just turned thirty,” said Maurizio quietly, so the old knight would not hear, “but I’m still called boy. Time has stopped out here.”

“You’re free to leave,” said Kiggs. “You were just a squire when they were banished; technically, you weren’t banished at all.”

Maurizio shook his shaggy head sadly and offered me his skinny arm. “Sir James!” he said loudly, as to one hard of hearing. “Look what the dragon dragged in!”





There were sixteen knights in all, plus two squires, holed up in that cave. They’d been there twenty years and had civilized the place, carving out new rooms for themselves that were cleaner and drier than the main body of the cave. They had scavenged and built sturdy furniture; at one end of the main hall stood twenty-five suits of fireproof dracomachia armor, black and quilted. I did not know the proper names of the weapons displayed on the wall—hooks and harpoons and what appeared to be a flat spatula on a pole—but assumed they had some specialized purpose in dracomachia.

They invited us to sit by the fire and gave us warm cider in heavy ceramic mugs. “You oughtn’t’ve come out today,” cried Sir James, who was deaf in one ear, at least. “It’s like to snow.”


“We had no choice,” said Kiggs. “We need to identify this dragon you saw. He may be a danger to the Ardmagar. Sir Karal and Sir Cuthberte told us you were the man who knew his generals, back in the day.”

Sir James straightened up and raised his grizzled chin. “I could tell General Gann from General Gonn, in my prime.”

“All in the midst of general mayhem,” chirped Maurizio into his mug.