Seraphina(87)

Delving deeper into the truth, of course, my psalter had originally coughed up St. Yirtrudis. I had never seen her without her face blacked out or her head smashed to plaster dust, so surely she had been the most terrible Saint of all.

I kept moving, past St. Loola’s apple and St. Kathanda’s colossal merganser, past St. Ogdo slaying dragons and St. Yane getting up to his usual shenanigans, which often involved impregnating entire villages. I passed vendors of chestnuts, pasties, and pie, which made my stomach rumble. I heard music ahead: syrinx, oud, and drum, a peculiarly Porphyrian combination. Above the heads of the crowd, I made out the upper stories of a pyramid of acrobats, Porphyrians, by the look of them, and …

No, not acrobats. Pygegyria dancers. The one at the top looked like Fruit Bat.

I meant Abdo. Sweet St. Siucre. It was Abdo, in loose trousers of green sateen, his bare arms snaking sinuously against the winter sky.

He’d been here all along, trying to find me, and I’d been putting him off.

I was still staring at the dancers, openmouthed, when someone grabbed my arm. I startled and cried out.

“Hush. Walk,” muttered Orma’s voice in my ear. “I haven’t much time. I gave Basind the slip; I’m not confident I can do it again. I suspect the embassy is paying him to watch me.”


He still held my arm; I covered his hand with my own. The crowd flowed around us like a river around an island. “I learned something new about Imlann from one of my maternal memories,” I told him. “Can we find a quieter place to talk?”

He dropped my arm and ducked up an alley; I followed him through a brick-walled maze of barrels and stacked firewood and up the steps of a little shrine to St. Clare. I balked when I saw her—thinking of Kiggs, feeling her dyspeptic glare as criticism—but I kissed my knuckle respectfully and focused on my uncle.

His false beard had gone missing or he hadn’t bothered with it. He had deep creases beside his mouth, which made him look unexpectedly old. “Quickly,” he said. “If I hadn’t spotted you, I’d have disappeared by now.”

I took a shaky breath; I’d come so close to missing him. “Your sister once overheard Imlann consorting with a cabal of treasonous generals, about a dozen in all. One of them, General Akara, was instrumental in getting the Goreddi knights banished.”

“Akara is a familiar name,” said Orma. “He was caught, but the Ardmagar had his brain pruned too close to the stem; he lost most of his ability to function.”

“Does the Queen know?” I asked, shocked. “The knights were banished under false pretenses, but nothing has been done to correct this!”

My uncle shrugged. “I doubt Comonot disapproved of that consequence.”

Alas, I believed that; Comonot’s rules were applied inconsistently. I said, “If the cabal could infiltrate the knights, they really could be anywhere.”

Orma stared at St. Clare, pondering. “They couldn’t be quite anywhere, not easily. There would be a danger of law-abiding dragons sniffing them out at court. They could count on there being no other dragons present among the knights.”

It hit me then, what Imlann might have been doing. “What if your father has been observing the knights? He might have burned their barn and shown himself as a final assessment of their capabilities.”

“A final assessment?” Orma sat down impiously on the altar, deep in thought. “Meaning Akara didn’t just have the knights banished for vengeance? Meaning this cabal has been deliberately working toward the extinction of the dracomachia?”

There was one clear implication of this; we both knew what it was. My eyes asked the question, but Orma was already shaking his head in denial.

“The peace is not a ruse,” he said. “It is not some ploy to lull Goredd into false complacency until such time as dragonkind regains a clear superiority of—”

“Of course not,” I said quickly. “At least, Comonot did not intend it that way. I believe that, but is it possible that his generals only pretended to agree to it, all the while making St. Polypous’s sign behind their backs—so to speak?”

Orma fingered the coins in the offering bowl on the altar, letting the copper pieces dribble through his fingers like water. “Then they have gravely miscalculated,” he said. “While they sat around waiting for the knights to grow old, a younger generation has been raised on peaceful ideals, scholarship, and cooperation.”

“What if the Ardmagar were dead? If whoever took his place wanted war? Would this cabal need you and your agemates? Couldn’t they fight a war without you, especially if there were no dracomachia against them?”

Orma rattled coins in his hand and did not answer.

“Would the younger generation stand against the elder, if it came to it?” I pressed on, remembering the two saarantrai in the dining hall. I was being hard on him, but this was a crucial point. “Can the current batch of scholars and diplomats even fight?”

He recoiled as if he’d heard that accusation before. “Forgive me,” I said, “but if war is brewing in the hearts of the old generals, your generation may have some painful decisions to make.”

“Generation against generation? Dragon against dragon? Sounds treasonous to me,” said a grating voice behind me. I turned to see Basind mounting the steps of the shrine. “What are you doing here, Orma? Not offering devotions to St. Clare, surely?”