Seraphina(94)

I put it to my lips and played a scale, smooth as water. Both my wrists twinged painfully as my fingers moved. I took the saffron strip and wound it around my scabby left wrist. It came from both my parents. Let it remind me I was not alone, and protect me from myself.

I rose renewed, and headed for the door. There was work yet to be done, and I was the only one who could do it.





Comonot was important enough that he had been given a room in the royal family’s private wing, the most luxurious and heavily guarded part of the palace. As I approached the guard station, my stomach fluttered anxiously. I had no clear plan for how to bluff this time, no lie I could tell them. I would ask to be allowed through to see the Ardmagar, and see what happened.

I nearly balked when I recognized Mikey the Fish, one of the guards from before, but I gripped my saffron-bound wrist, lifted my chin, and stepped up to him anyway. “I need to speak with the Ardmagar,” I said. “How do I go about doing that?”

Mikey the Fish actually smiled at me. “You follow me, Music Mistress,” he said, opening the heavy double doors for me and nodding to his fellows.

He escorted me into the forbidden residential area. Bright tapestries lined the corridor walls, punctuated by marble statues, portraits, and pedestals supporting fine porcelain and fragile spun glass. The Queen was known for loving art; apparently this was where she kept it. I scarcely dared breathe lest I knock something over.

“Here’s his suite,” said Mikey, turning to go. “Watch yourself—Princess Dionne claims the old saar made a pass at her.”

I found that distressingly easy to believe. I watched the guard retreat down the hall and noted that he did not turn back toward his post but went deeper into the residence. He’d been told to let me in, and was off to report that I’d arrived. Well, I would not question my good fortune. I knocked on Comonot’s door.

The Ardmagar’s servant—a human lad, assigned to him from among the castle page boys—answered the door at once, making a very peculiar face at the sight of me. Someone else had been expected, evidently.

“Is that my dinner? Bring it through,” said the Ardmagar from the other room.

“It’s some woman, Your Excellence!” cried the boy as I stepped past him into what was evidently the study. The boy yapped at my heels like a terrier: “You’re not to enter unless the Ardmagar says you may!”

Comonot had been writing at a wide desk; he rose at the sight of me and stared, speechless. I gave him full courtesy. “Forgive me, sir, but I was not finished talking to you earlier, when we were so rudely interrupted by your would-be assassin.”

He narrowed his eyes shrewdly. “Is this about that cabal theory of yours?”

“You disregarded the message out of disgust for the messenger.”

“Sit down, Seraphina,” he said, gesturing toward an upholstered chair carved with curlicues and embroidered with elegant, improbable foliage. His room was all velvet brocade and rich dark oak; the very ceiling had large carved pinecones protruding from the center of every coffer, like some giant’s scaly fingertips. This wing of the palace maintained a more elaborate standard of decor than my own.

He’d had time to sober up since our talk in the bishop’s library, and he now held me in a gaze as piercing as Orma’s. He seated himself across from me, thoughtfully running his tongue over his teeth.

“You must think me a superstitious fool,” he said, tucking his hands into the voluminous sleeves of his embroidered houppelande.

I needed more information before I could reply; it was possible I did.

“I admit,” he said, “I have been. You are something that should not be. Dragons have difficulty with counterfactuals.”

I almost laughed. “How can I be counterfactual? I’m right here.”

“If you were a ghost claiming the same, should I believe you? Should I not rather consider you a symptom of my own madness? You showed me, at the cathedral, that you have some substance. I wish to understand the nature of that substance.”

“All right,” I said, with some apprehension.

“You have a foot in both worlds: if you have maternal memories, you’ve seen what it is to be a dragon, contrasted with what it’s like to be a saarantras, contrasted yet again with what it’s like to be human—or nearly so.”

This I was prepared to handle. “I have experienced those states, yes.”

He leaned forward. “And what do you think of being a dragon?”

“I—I find it unpleasant, frankly. And confusing.”

“Do you? Maybe that’s not unexpected. It’s very different.”

“I tire of the incessant wind-vector calculations, and the stench of the entire world.”

He tented his fat fingers and studied my face. “But you have some understanding, perhaps, of how alien this shape is to us. The world around looks different; we easily get lost, both inside ourselves and out. If I as saarantras react differently than I as dragon would react, then who am I now, really?

“Do I love you?” he asked. “It occurs to me that one possible motive for defending you would be love. Only I’m not sure what that one’s like. I have no way to measure it.”

“You don’t love me,” I said flatly.

“But maybe I did for just a moment? No?”