Seraphina(77)

I knew, without knowing how, that it had caught fire when Imlann landed in the snowy field, just as it had flooded at the sight of Comonot. It was extremely fortunate that Fruit Bat had leaped upon it when he did; if I had been seized by a memory while Imlann bore down on us, it would have been more than just an imaginary box in flames.

I turned back to the boy. The whites of his eyes shone starkly against his dark face. “What’s your name? Your real name,” I said.

“Abdo,” he said. The name hit a light chord of déjà vu, but I could not place it.

“And where are you, Abdo?”

“I am at an inn, with my family. Holding the box gave me a headache; I was in bed all day. My grandfather is very worried, but I can sleep now and ease his heart.”

The burning box had been causing him pain, but he’d held on to it for more than a day. “How did you know to help?” I said.

“There are two sacred causes in this world,” he said, holding up his pinkie and ring finger. “Chance and necessity. By chance, I was there to help when you had need.”

He was a little philosopher. Maybe in his country they all were. I opened my mouth to question him further, but he put his hands upon my cheeks and gazed at me earnestly. “I heard you, sought you, and have found you. I have reached for you, across space and sense and the laws of nature. I do not know how.”

“Do you speak to others this way? Do others speak to you?” My fear melted away. He was so innocent.

He shrugged. “I only know three other ityasaari, in Porphyry. But you know them too: they are here. You named them Newt and Miserere and Pelican Man. None of them speak to me with their minds, but then, none of them called me. Only you.”

“When did I call you?”

“I heard your flute.”

Just like Lars.

“Madamina,” he said, “I must sleep. My grandfather has been worried.”

He released me and bowed. I bowed back uncertainly, and then looked toward the flaming box. Pandowdy burbled underwater and gave an irritable flop of its tail, sending the box bobbing back toward me. I felt the headache intensely now. I could not put off dealing with the box; the memory would surely engulf me against my will if I suppressed it, just as the other one had. I glanced at Abdo, but he had curled on his side, asleep under a large skunk cabbage. I guided the box toward shore with a sturdy cattail.

The box exploded at my touch in a burst of pyrotechnic hysteria. I choked on the smoke, wondering how it was possible that I could taste anger and feel the smell of green against my skin.


I burst from the mountainside and fly into the sun. My tail lash buries the exit under an avalanche. The combined mass of twelve old generals will exceed this icefall; I have merely bought myself a delay. I must not waste it. I dive east, with the wind, careening through low lenticular clouds into a glacial cirque.

There is a cave beneath the glacier, if I can reach it. I skim the chalky meltwater too closely; the cold scalds my ventrum. I push off the moraine with a spray of stones, elevate quickly to avoid pinnacles of ice sharp enough to gut me.

I hear a roar and a rumble behind me, high up the mountain. The generals and my father are free, but I have flown fast enough. Too fast: I slam into the edge of the cirque, send shale skittering down the cliff face, and worry that they will spot the crushed lichens. I writhe into the cave, blue ice melting at my touch, easing my passage.

I hear them cross the sky, screaming, even over the roar of the glacial streams. I move deeper in, lest I make too much vapor and give myself away.

The ice cools my thoughts and condenses my rationality. I saw and heard what I should not have: my father and eleven other generals speaking together upon his hoard. Words upon a hoard must be hoarded, as the ancient saying goes. They could kill me for eavesdropping.

Worse: they spoke treason. I cannot hoard these words.

The cave makes me claustrophobic. How do quigutl stay squeezed into crevasses without going mad? Perhaps they don’t. I distract myself by thinking: of my hatchling brother, who is studying in Ninys and safe if he will stay there; of the quickest route back to Goredd; and of Claude, whom I love. I do not feel love when I take my natural shape, but I remember it and want it back. The vast, empty space where the feeling once was makes me writhe in discomfort.

Oh, Orma. You are not going to understand what has happened to me.

Night comes; the gleaming blue ice dims to black. The cave is too tight to turn around in—I am not as lithe and serpentine as some—so I back out, step by step, up the slick passage. The tip of my tail emerges into the night air.

I smell him too late. My father bites my tail on the pretext of pulling me out, then bites me again, behind the head, in chastisement.

“General, put me back in ard,” I say, submitting to three more bites.

“What did you hear?” he snarls.

There is no point pretending I heard nothing. He did not raise me to be an imperceptive fool, and my scent in the passageway would have told him how long I listened. “That General Akara infiltrated the Goreddi knights, and that his actions led to their banishment.” That is the least of it; my own father is part of a treacherous cabal, plotting against our Ardmagar. I am loath to utter that aloud.

He spits fire at the glacier, bringing the cave entrance crashing down. “I might have buried you alive in there. I did not. Do you know why?”

It is hard to play submissive all the time, but my father accepts no other stance from his children, and he outweighs me by a factor of two. The day will come when the strength of our intellects counts for more than physical power. That is Comonot’s dream and I believe in it, but for now I bow my head. Dragons are slow to change.