Seraphina(91)

“But it wasn’t me, you understand?” he cried, the wine already making him histrionic. “It was this infernal body. It fills with a great surge of feeling before one has a chance to think. It’s a species preservation instinct, maybe, to defend the young and helpless, but I care nothing for you. This body wants things I could never want.”

It was, of course, at that very moment that Captain Kiggs opened the door.

He looked embarrassed. I don’t imagine I looked much different. The last time we’d spoken I’d been under arrest. “Ardmagar. Maid Dombegh,” he said, nodding. “You’ve left a bit of a mess up by the Skep. Care to tell me what happened?”

Comonot did the talking; we’d gone up the apse to speak privately, in his version. I held my breath, but Comonot let nothing slip about my background or my maternal memory. He simply claimed I’d had confidential information for him.

“Pertaining to what?” asked Kiggs.

“Pertaining to none of your business,” grumped the Ardmagar. He’d had enough wine that he could no longer find the door to the mental room where he was supposed to stow his emotions. If he even had such a room.

Kiggs shrugged, and Comonot continued, detailing the swift and bloody fight. Kiggs pulled Thomas’s dagger out of his belt, turning it in his fingers. The tip had crumpled grotesquely. “Any idea how this happened?”

Comonot frowned. “Could it have hit the floor in such a way as to—”

“Not likely, unless he threw it straight at the stones,” said Kiggs, looking full at me for the first time. “Seraphina?”

That old, inconvenient feeling bubbled up in response to his using my first name. “He stabbed me,” I said, staring at my hands.

“What? No one told me this! Where?” He sounded so alarmed that I looked up. I wished I hadn’t; it hurt to see him concerned about me.

I felt around near my right kidney. The hole went through my cloak and through all my layers of gown, unsurprisingly. Could I refasten my belt to cover it? I glanced at Kiggs again; his mouth had fallen open. He had a point: I should be dead.

“Did Glisselda not tell you? I’ve got a … a Saint’s burthen. A silver girdle that protects me from heresy. It saved me.”

Kiggs shook his head in wonder. “It’s always something unexpected with you, isn’t it. A word to the wise: a blow hard enough to do this”—he held up the bent dagger—“is going to leave a painful bruise, or even a laceration. I’d let the palace physicians have a look at it.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” I said. My back was sore; I wondered what bruised scales looked like.

“Ardmagar, the city is secured,” said Kiggs. “A contingent of Guardsmen is here to escort you back to Castle Orison. I expect you to stay there for the rest of your visit.”

Comonot nodded hastily; if he had once doubted the sense of remaining under guard, he did no longer.

“What were you doing here alone?” asked Kiggs. Comonot gave him almost the same answer he’d given me, his voice now soggy with melodrama. Kiggs’s brow creased. “I’m going to let you reconsider that answer. Someone knew you’d be here. You are withholding information material to this case. We have laws about that; I’m sure my grandmother would be happy to summarize them for you at dinner this evening.”

The Ardmagar puffed up like an angry hedgehog, but Kiggs opened the door, signaled his men, and had the old saar packed off in a matter of minutes. He closed the door again and looked at me.

I stared down at the bishop’s ornate Porphyrian rug, agitated and anxious.

“You didn’t help the Ardmagar escape his guard, I suppose?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Why were you up at the Skep with him?”

I shook my head, not daring to look at him.

Kiggs put his hands on his hips and wandered across the room, pretending to examine the framed calligraphic rendering of St. Gobnait’s benedictio hung between the bookcases. “Well,” he said, “at least we know who the would-be assassin was.”

“Yes,” I said.

He slowly turned to face me, and I realized “we” hadn’t meant him and me. It meant him and the Guard. “So you knew him,” he said lightly. “That rather changes the color of things. Do you know why he might have tried to kill you?”

With shaking hands, I rifled through my satchel, underneath the crimson gown and the gift from my father, until I found my coin purse. I emptied it onto the seat of the bishop’s lectern, the nearest horizontal surface; a shadow across my hands was Kiggs stepping into the window light, drawing near to see. I picked the lizard out of the heap of coins and handed it to the prince without a word.

“That’s a little grotesque,” he said, turning it right side up in his hand and studying its face. He smiled, though, so at least he hadn’t instantly assumed it was another illegal device. “There’s a story here, I presume?”

“I gave coin to a quigutl panhandler, and it gave me this in exchange.”

The prince nodded sagely. “Now the quig will think it’s found a particularly fruitful street corner, the neighbors will get upset, and we’ll be called in twice a week to escort him back to Quighole. But what’s the connection to the dead clothier?”