Seraphina(84)

“First things first, Princess,” said Millie. “Let’s see that arm.”


I needed stitches; they called the Queen’s own surgeon. He administered a glass of plum brandy, then another, until I had choked down three. I appeared immune to its dulling effects, so he finally gave up and stitched me up, tut-tutting at my tears and wishing aloud that I had been drunker. I’d expected the girls to look away, but they did not. They gasped, clutching each other, but watched every needle jab and tug of thread.

“Might one inquire how you did this to yourself, Music Mistress?” asked the surgeon, a phlegmatic old fellow without a hair on his head.

“She fell,” Glisselda offered. “On a sharp … thing.”

“In the basement,” added Millie, which I’m sure bolstered the story’s credibility immensely. The surgeon rolled his eyes but could not be bothered to inquire further.

Once the girls had shooed him out, Glisselda grew grave. “How did it happen?”

The spirits seemed finally to have reached my head; between brandy and blood loss and a dearth of supper, the room began to swim before my eyes. As much as I wanted to lie—because how could I tell Glisselda that her own mother cut me?—I could come up with no plausible alternative story. I would omit Princess Dionne, at least. “You’ve heard the rumor that I am a … a saar?”

Heaven forfend that she had heard the other rumor.

“It was vicious,” said the princess, “and evidently unfounded.”

“I hadn’t been bled yet. Some zealous, uh, vigilantes decided to do it for me.”

Glisselda leaped to her feet, seething. “Isn’t this exactly what we hoped to avoid?”

“It is, Princess,” said Millie, shaking her head and putting the kettle on the hearth.

“Seraphina, I’m appalled it came to this,” said the princess. “My original idea—”

“And Lucian’s,” said Millie, apparently allowed to interrupt the second heir.

Glisselda flashed her an irritated look: “One of his Porphyrian philosophers helped too, if you’re going to be that way about it. The idea was that we should all be jabbed, everyone, from Grandmamma herself to the lowliest scullion, noble with common, human with dragon. It would be fair.

“But several nobles and dignitaries argued vociferously against it. ‘We should be exempt! We are people of quality!’ In the end, only courtiers of less than two years’ tenure and commoners must get tested—and you see the result, my Millie? Vigilantism, and that bastard Apsig gets off without a scratch.”

Glisselda ranted on; I couldn’t focus on it. The room swayed like the deck of a ship. I was thoroughly inebriated now; I suffered the illusion that my head might fall off, for it seemed too heavy to support. Someone spoke, but it took some minutes for the words to penetrate my consciousness: “We ought to at least change her out of that bloody gown before Dame Okra comes back.”

“No, no,” I said, or intended to. Intention and action were curiously blurred, and judgment seemed to have retired for the night entirely. Millie had a tall privacy screen, painted with weeping willows and water lilies, and I let myself be persuaded behind it. “All right, but just the top gown needs replacing,” I said, my words floating over the screen like vapid, ineffective bubbles.

“You bled fearfully,” called Millie. “Surely it soaked straight through?”

“No one can see what’s beneath …,” I began, fuzzily.

Glisselda popped her head around the edge of the lacquered screen; I gasped and nearly pitched over, even though I was still covered. “I shall know,” she chirped. “Millie! Top and bottom layers!”

Millie produced a chemise of the softest, whitest linen I had ever touched. I wanted to wear it, which addled my judgment still further. I began to undress. Across the room, the girls bickered over colors for the gown; apparently accounting for my complexion and my hair required complicated algebra. I giggled, and began explaining how to solve a quadratic complexion equation, even though I couldn’t quite remember.

I had removed all my clothing—and my good sense along with it—when Glisselda popped her head around the end of the screen behind me, saying, “Hold this scarlet up to your chin and let’s see—oh!”

Her cry snapped the world back into hard focus for a moment. I whirled to face her, holding Millie’s chemise up in front of me like a shield, but she’d gone. The room reeled. She’d seen the band of silver scales across my back. I clapped a hand to my mouth to stop myself screaming.

They whispered together urgently, Glisselda’s voice squeaky with panic, Millie’s calm and reasonable. I yanked Millie’s chemise over my head, almost tearing a shoulder seam in my rush because I couldn’t work out where all my limbs were or how to move them. I curled up on the floor, balling up my own gown, pressing it to my mouth because I was breathing too hard. I waited in agony for either of them to say something.

“Phina?” said Princess Glisselda at long last, rapping upon the screen as if it were a door. “Was that a … a Saint’s burthen?”

My foggy brain couldn’t parse her words. What was a Saint’s burthen? My reflex was to answer no, but mercifully I managed to hold that in check. She was offering me a way out, if only I could make sense of it.