Seraphina(71)

“I see. So Orma gave you this device and came instantly when called as if he were your lap dog, because he—how did you put it exactly?—he feels nothing for you?”

“We’re not … no. It’s not like that.”

“Then what is it like?” he cried, furious with me. “Are you his agent? Is he your thrall? There is something between you, beyond this facade of mentorship, beyond what dragons and humans should ever engage in. It is not normal, and I can’t work out what it is, and I am sick of guessing!”

“Kiggs …” I had no other words.

“Prince Lucian, if you would be so kind,” he said. “Tell them to shrink down.”

Orma approached, head lowered in a submissive stance. He had apparently told Basind to flatten himself into the snow, because Basind did a good impression of a lizard run over by a cart—a giant lizard, and an unthinkably enormous cart.

“You are all under arrest,” said Kiggs, loudly and slowly. “You two, for unauthorized transformation; Maid Dombegh, because you are clearly in cahoots with two unauthorized dragons—”

“Association with dragons is not a crime,” I said.

“Possession of a quigutl-made transmission device is. Aiding and abetting the delinquency of dragons is. I could go on.” He turned to the dragons and said, “You will shrink yourselves down now.”

Orma cried, “Seraphina, if I have transformed for nothing, I am going to be in an unquantifiable amount of trouble. Tell me why I shouldn’t bite your head off. It couldn’t make things any worse for me.”

I translated that as: “ ‘We’ll come along quietly, Prince, and will comply with your every reasonable demand, but we cannot shrink ourselves down because you don’t have clothing for us, and we would freeze.’ ”

“Are you in love with Prince Lucian?” screamed my uncle. “What were you up to when I arrived? You weren’t going to mate right here in the snow, were you?”


I gave myself a moment to get my voice under control before saying, “The dragons suggest that they walk ahead. Their sharp eyes can make out the road more easily than ours. They won’t flee.”

“I told you not to go after Imlann,” screeched my uncle. “I know he was here; I smell him. Why did you not keep him here so I could kill him?”

That was too much. I shouted back, “You can’t have it both ways, Orma!”

“Get back on your horse,” said Kiggs, who’d been able to round up the animals. They were still skittish in the continuing presence of full-sized dragons, so it took me some time to get on. Kiggs held my mare’s bridle, but he would not look at me.

The dragons kept their heads down, docilely, as they followed the road; they left slushy footprints, huge and clawed, behind them. The prince and I followed in painful silence.

It gave me a lot of time to think. How had Imlann found us? Had he tracked us from the coppice, or had he been waiting for us to come back along the same road? How could he know we would return?

“Prince Lucian,” I began, drawing my horse up alongside his.

“I would rather you not speak, Maid Dombegh,” he said, his eyes upon the saar.

That hurt, but I plowed ahead. “I suspect Imlann knew where we were going and that we were coming back. Someone at the palace may have told him—or someone at the palace is him. Who knew where we were going today?”

“My grandmother,” he said tersely. “Glisselda. Neither of them is a dragon.”

I hardly dared suggest it, but I had to. “Might Glisselda have mentioned it in passing to the Earl of Apsig?”

He turned toward me sharply. “If she had—which I deem unlikely—what are you suggesting? That he’s a traitor, or that he’s a dragon?”

“He came out of nowhere two years ago—you said so yourself. He takes no wine. He’s got fair hair and blue eyes.” He’d discerned the scent of my scales, too, but obviously I could not include that detail. “He was part of your uncle’s last hunting party,” I hazarded. That wasn’t evidence, though, so much as circumstance.

“You’re omitting a substantial amount of counterevidence,” said Prince Lucian, finally engaged, even if just to refute me. “I thought we’d concluded he was Lars’s half brother.”

“You said it was a rumor. It might be false.” I dared not suggest what now occurred to me: if Josef was a dragon, he might be Lars’s father.

“He plays viola like an angel. He professes to hate dragonkind.”

“Imlann might adopt such an attitude strategically, to deflect suspicion,” I said. I couldn’t address the accusation of angelic viola playing without bringing up my own mother, who’d played flute with an eerily human cadence, according to Orma.

The prince looked at me sarcastically, and I hastened to add, “All I ask is that you consider the possibility. Inquire whether anyone saw Josef at court today.”

“Will that be all, Maid Dombegh?”

My teeth chattered with cold and nerves. “Not quite all. I want to explain Orma.”

“I really don’t care to hear it,” he said, spurring his horse a little ahead.

“He saved my life!” I cried at his back, determined to make him hear it whether he wanted to or not. “Orma was my tutor when I was little. You recall that his family is flagged for scrutiny. Well, the Censors feared he might become too attached to his students, for he dearly loved teaching and was good at it. They sent a dragon called Zeyd to test him. She lured me up the bell tower of St. Gobnait’s with the promise of a physics lesson, then dangled me out over the plaza, as if she might drop me. If Orma rescued me, you see, that would indicate that he was compromised. He should not have cared that much.”