Seraphina(78)

“I permit you to live because I know you will not tell the Ardmagar what you heard,” he says. “You will tell no one.”

“What is the foundation of this belief?” I flatten myself further, no threat to him.

“Your loyalty and your family honor should be basis enough,” he cries. “But you admit that you have neither.”

“And if my loyalty is to my Ardmagar?” Or to his ideas, anyway.

My father spits fire at my toes; I leap back but smell singed talons. “Then heed this, Linn: my allies among the Censors tell me you’re in trouble.”

I have heard no official word, but I have expected this. I flare my nostrils and raise my head spines, however, as if I were startled. “Did they say why?”

“They hoard details, but it doesn’t matter what you did. You’re on the list. If you reveal what was said upon my hoard—or whom you saw, or how many—it will be your word against mine. I will number you a dangerous deviant.”

In fact I am a dangerous deviant, but until this moment I had been a dangerous deviant who was torn about returning to Goredd. I am no longer torn.

My father climbs the glacier face so that he might launch himself more easily. The ice is weakened by summer’s heavy melt; blocks as large as my head break off beneath his claws, tumble toward me, dash to pieces. His collapse of the tunnel has put the glacier under stress; I see a deep crack in the ice.

“Climb, hatchling,” he cries. “I shall escort you back to your mother’s. You won’t go south again; I shall see to it that the Ker cancels your visas.”

“General, you are wise,” I say, raising the pitch of my voice, imitating the chirp of the newly hatched. I do not climb; I am completing a calculation. I must stall him. “Put me back in ard. If I am not to go south again, is it not time I was mated?”

He has reached the top of the ice cliff. He arches his neck, muscles rippling along it. The moon has risen behind him, giving him a formidable gleam. He is intimidating; my cower is almost in earnest. I have a few more vectors to account for, and friction. Will friction befriend or foe? I extend a wing inconspicuously, trying to more accurately gauge the temperature.

“You are the daughter of Imlann!” he shrieks. “You could have any one of those generals you saw today. You could have all of them, in whatever order you wish.”

It is a challenge to keep him talking while my mouth is busy. I recoil in overstated awe, histrionic for a dragon, but my father accepts this unquestioningly as his due.

“I will arrange it,” he says. “You are not the mightiest female, but you fly well, and your teeth are sound. They will be honored to join their lines with mine. Only promise to break any weak eggs before they hatch, as I ought to have broken Orma’s.”

Oh, Orma. You are the only one I will miss.

I expel a swift, surgical ball of flame, targeting a slim buttress beneath the ice wall. Its destruction tips the structural balance. A crevasse yawns behind my father; the ice screams as the face of the glacier shears off. I spring back, out of the path of flying ice, and scramble down the moraine, bounding over boulders until I can push off into the air. I tack into the winds of the glacial collapse, circling upward. I should fly as fast as I can toward anywhere else, away, but I cannot bring myself to leave. I must see what I have done: it is my pain, I have earned it, and I will carry it with me the rest of my days.

It is no less than either of us deserves.

As per my calculation, the ice beneath his calefactive bulk was too soft and slick for his claws to get good purchase. He could not push off in time; he has tumbled backward into the crevasse. A spire of ice from higher up—from an area not figuring in my algebra—has fallen on top of him, pinning his wing. Maybe piercing it. I circle, trying to determine whether I have killed him. I smell his blood, like sulfur and roses, but he snarls and thrashes, and I conclude he is not dead. I switch on every quigutl device I have and shed them down upon his body; they twinkle in the moonlight, and I estimate someone might mistake him for treasure, from a distance. He will be found.

I circle the sky, bidding farewell to the Tanamoot—mountains, sky, water, all dragonkind. I have broken my family, my father, my promises, everything. I am the traitor now.

Oh, Orma. Keep yourself safe from him.


The bed curtains danced their ghostly sarabande in the warm air currents. I stared at them for some time, seeing nothing, feeling wrung out and boneless.

Each subsequent memory filled gaps in my understanding. That first memory, so long ago, had forcefully ripped the scales from my blind eyes and destroyed my peace, I thought perhaps for good. The next had left me resenting her thoughtless selfishness; I could admit that to myself now. I envied her after the third, but now … something was different. Not her—she was dead and unchangeable—but me. I was changed. I clasped my aching left wrist tightly to my chest, understanding the nature of it.

I felt her struggle this time, felt echoes of my own. She had chosen Papa over family, country, her own kind, everything she’d grown up with. She had cared about Orma, insofar as dragons could care; that went a long way toward earning my sympathy. As for the ringing emptiness at the very heart of her, that was only too familiar. “I thought I was the only one who’d ever felt that, Mother,” I whispered to the bed curtains. “I thought I was all alone, and maybe a little bit mad.”