Seraphina(9)

She meant gravity—dragons aren’t good at metaphor—but her words resonated with me more personally. Invisible factors in my life would inevitably lead to my downfall. I felt I had known this all along. There was no escape.

Orma had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and pulled off the impossible, rescuing me without appearing to rescue me. I didn’t understand until years later that this had been a charade put on by the Censors, intended to test Orma’s emotional stability and his attachment to me. The experience left me with a deep, unshakable horror of heights, but not a distrust of dragons, absurdly.

The fact that a dragon had saved me played no part in that latter calculation. No one had ever bothered to tell me Orma was a dragon.





When I was eleven, my father and I came to a crisis. I found my mother’s flute hidden in an upstairs room. Papa had forbidden my tutors to teach me music, but he had not explicitly stated that I was not to teach myself. I was half lawyer; I always noticed the loopholes. I played in secret when Papa was at work and my stepmother was at church, working up a small repertoire of competently played folk tunes. When Papa hosted a party on Treaty Eve, the anniversary of peace between Goredd and dragonkind, I hid the flute near the fireplace, intending to burst out in an impromptu performance for all his guests.

Papa found the flute first, guessed what I intended, and marched me up to my room. “What do you think you’re doing?” he cried. I had never seen his eyes so wild.

“I’m shaming you into letting me have lessons,” I said, my voice calmer than I felt. “When everyone hears how well I play, they’ll think you are a fool not to let—”

He cut me short with a violent motion, raising the flute as if he might strike me with it. I cringed, but the blow did not land. When I dared to raise my eyes again, he pulled the flute hard against his knee.

It broke with a sickening crack, like bone, or like my heart. I sank to my knees in shock.

Papa let the fractured instrument drop to the floor and staggered back a step. He looked as sick as I felt, as if the flute had been some piece of himself. “You never understood this, Seraphina,” he said. “I have neutralized every trace of your mother, renamed her, reframed her, given her another past—another life. Only two things of hers can still harm us: her insufferable brother—but he won’t, with my eye upon him—and her music.”

“She had a brother?” I asked, my voice dense with tears. I possessed so little of my mother, and he was taking it all away.

He shook his head. “I am trying to keep us both safe.”


The lock clicked when he closed my door behind him. It was unnecessary; I could not have returned to the Treaty Eve party. I felt sick. I lowered my forehead to the floor and wept.

I fell asleep on the floor, my fingers wrapped around the remains of the flute. My first impression upon waking was that I should sweep beneath my bed. My second was that the house was oddly quiet, considering how high the sun had risen. I washed my face at the basin, and the cold water shocked me lucid. Of course everyone was asleep: last night had been Treaty Eve, and they’d all stayed up till dawn, just like Queen Lavonda and Ardmagar Comonot thirty-five years previously, securing the future of both their peoples.

That meant I couldn’t leave my room until someone woke up and let me out.

My numb grief had had an entire night to ripen into anger, and that made me reckless, or as close as I’d ever come. I bundled up as warmly as I could, strapped my purse to my forearm, threw open the casement, and climbed down from my window.

I followed my feet through alleys, over bridges, and along the icy quays. To my surprise, I saw people up and about, street traffic, open shops. Sledges glided by, jingling, heaped with firewood or hay. Servants lugged jugs and baskets home from the shops, caring little for the mud on their wooden clogs; young wives gingerly picked their way around puddles of slush. Meat pies competed with roast chestnuts for passersby, and a mulled-wine merchant promised raw warmth in a cup.

I reached St. Loola’s Square, where an enormous crowd had gathered along both sides of the empty roadway. People chatted and watched expectantly, huddled together against the cold.

An old man beside me muttered to his neighbor, “I can’t believe the Queen lets this happen. After all our sacrifice and struggle!”

“I’m surprised that anything surprises you anymore,” said his younger companion, smiling grimly.

“She will rue this treaty, Maurizio.”

“Thirty-five years, and she hasn’t rued it yet.”

“The Queen is mad if she thinks dragons can control their thirst for blood!”

“Excuse me?” I squeaked, shy of strangers. Maurizio looked down at me, eyebrows gently raised. “Are we waiting for dragons?” I said.

He smiled. He was handsome, in a stubbly, unwashed sort of way. “And so we are, little maidy. It’s the five-year procession.” When I stared at him confusedly, he explained, “Every five years our noble Queen—”

“Our deranged despot!” cried the older man.

“Peace, Karal. Our gracious Queen, as I was saying, permits them to take their natural form within the city walls and march in a procession to commemorate the treaty. She has some notion that it will ease our fears to see them in all their sulfurous monstrosity at regular intervals. The opposite seems more likely true, to me.”