Seraphina

by Rachel Hartman

  “An attack you set up shouldn’t count. You know this is atypical. People are on edge. General Comonot arrives in ten days—”

  “Precisely why you need to do a better job,” she said coolly.

  “—and Prince Rufus was just murdered in a suspiciously draconian manner.”

  “There’s no evidence that a dragon did it,” she said.

  “His head is missing!” The prince gestured vehemently toward his own head, his clenched teeth and windblown hair lending a mad ferocity to the pose.

  Eskar raised an eyebrow. “No human could have accomplished such a thing?”

  Prince Lucian turned sharply away from her and paced in a small circle, rubbing a hand down his face. It’s no good getting angry at saarantrai; the hotter your temper, the colder they get. Eskar remained infuriatingly neutral.

  His pique under wraps, the prince tried again. “Eskar, please understand: this frightens people. There’s still so much deep-seated distrust. The Sons of St. Ogdo take advantage of that, tap into people’s fears—”

  “Forty years,” interrupted Eskar. “We’ve had forty years of peace. You weren’t even born when Comonot’s Treaty was signed. Your own mother—”

  “Rest she on Heaven’s hearthstone,” I mumbled, as if it were my job to make up for the social inadequacies of dragons everywhere. The prince flashed me a grateful glance.

  “—was but a speck in the queen’s womb,” continued Eskar placidly, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Only your elders remember the war, but it is not the old who join the Sons of St. Ogdo or riot in the streets. How can there be deep-seated distrust in people who’ve never been through the fires of war? My own father fell to your knights and their insidious dracomachia. All saarantrai remember those days; all of us lost family. We’ve let that go, as we had to, for the peace. We hold no grudge.

  “Do your people pass emotions through your blood, mother to child, the way we dragons pass memories? Do you inherit your fears? I do not comprehend how this persists in the population—or why you will not crush it,” said Eskar.

  “We prefer not to crush our own. Call it one of our irrationalities,” said Prince Lucian, smiling grimly. “Maybe we can’t reason our way out of our feelings the way you can; maybe it takes several generations to calm our fears. Then again, I’m not the one judging an entire species by the actions of a few.”

  Eskar was unmoved. “Ardmagar Comonot will have my report. It remains to be seen whether he cancels his upcoming visit.”

  Prince Lucian hoisted his smile, like a flag of surrender. “It would save me a lot of difficulty if he stayed home. How kind of you to consider my well-being.”

  Eskar cocked her head, birdlike, and then shook off her perplexity. She directed her entourage to collect Basind, who had drifted to the end of the bridge and was rubbing himself against the railing like a cat.

  The dull ache behind my eyes had turned into a persistent pounding, as if someone were knocking to be let out. That was bad; my headaches were never just headaches. I didn’t want to leave without learning what the urchin had given Orma, but Eskar had taken Orma aside; they had their heads together, talking quietly.

  “He must be an excellent teacher,” said Prince Lucian, his voice so close and sudden that I startled.

  I made half courtesy in silence. I could not discuss Orma in detail with anyone, let alone the Captain of the Queen’s Guard.

  “He’d have to be,” he said. “We were amazed when Viridius chose a woman as his assistant. Not that a woman couldn’t do the job, but Viridius is old-fashioned. You’d have to be something astonishing to get his attention.”

  I made full courtesy this time, but he kept talking. “Your solo was truly moving. I’m sure everyone’s telling you this, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the cathedral.”

  Of course. I would never be comfortably anonymous again, it seemed. That’s what I got for disregarding Papa’s advice. “Thank you,” I said. “Excuse me, Highness. I need to see my teacher about my, er, trills.… ”

  I turned my back on him. It was the height of rudeness. He hovered behind me for a moment, then walked away. I glanced back. The last rays of the setting sun turned his mourning clothes almost golden. He commandeered a horse from one of his sergeants, leaped up with balletic grace, and directed the corps back into formation.

  I permitted myself one small pang for the inevitability of his disdain, then shoved that feeling aside and moved toward Orma and Eskar.

  When I reached them, Orma held out an arm without touching me. “I present: Seraphina,” he said.

  Undersecretary Eskar looked down her aquiline nose as if checking human features off a list. Two arms: check. Two legs: unconfirmed due to long houppelande. Two eyes, bovine brown: check. Hair the color of strong tea, escaping its plait: check. Breasts: not obviously. Tall, but within normal parameters. Furious or embarrassed redness upon cheeks: check.

  “Hmph,” she said. “It’s not nearly as hideous as I always pictured it.”

  Orma, bless his shriveled dragon heart, corrected her. “She.”

  “Is it not infertile as a mule?”

  My face grew so hot I half expected my hair to catch fire.

  “She,” said Orma firmly, as if he himself had not made the same mistake the first time. “All humans take a gendered pronoun, irrespective of reproductive fitness.”

  “We take offense otherwise,” I said through a brittle smile.

  Eskar lost interest abruptly, releasing me from her gaze. Her underlings were returning from the other end of the bridge, leading saar Basind on a skittish horse. Undersecretary Eskar mounted her bay, wheeled it in a tight circle, and spurred it forward without so much as a backward glance at Orma and me. Her retinue followed.

  As they passed, Basind’s reeling eye lit on me for a long moment; I felt a sharp shock of revulsion. Orma, Eskar, and the others may have learned to pass, but here was a stark reminder of what lay beneath. His was no human gaze.

  I turned to Orma, who stared pensively at nothing. “That was thoroughly humiliating,” I said.

  He startled. “Was it?”

  “What were you thinking, telling her about me?” I said. “I may be out from under my father’s thumb, but the old rules still apply. We can’t just go telling everyone—”

  “Ah,” he said, raising a slender hand to fend off my argument. “I didn’t tell her. Eskar has always known. She used to be with the Censors.”

  My stomach turned; the Censors, a dragon agency accountable only to themselves, policed saarantrai for undragonlike behavior and routinely excised the brains of dragons they considered emotionally compromised. “Wonderful. So what have you done to attract the Censors’ attention this time?”

  “Nothing,” he said quickly. “Anyway, she’s not with the Censors anymore.”

  “I thought maybe they were after you for exhibiting undue affection for me,” I said, then added mordantly: “You’d think I would have noticed something like that.”

  “I bear you an appropriate interest, within accepted emotive parameters.”

  That seemed like overstating it, alas.

  To his credit, he knew this subject upset me. Not every saar would have cared. He squirmed, as usual not sure what to do with the information. “You will come for your lesson this week?” he said, making a verbal gesture toward the familiar, as close to comfort as he could contrive to give me.

  I sighed. “Of course. And you’ll tell me what that child gave you.”

  “You seem to think there’s something to tell,” he said, but his hand went involuntarily to his chest, where he’d stashed the bit of gold. I felt a stab of concern, but knew it was no good haranguing him. He would tell me when he decided to tell me.

  He declined to tell me goodbye, as was his usual custom; he turned without a word and took off toward the cathedral. Its facade blazed red with the setting sun; Orma’s retreating figure made a dark hatch mark against it. I watched until he disappeared around the end of the north transept, an
d then I watched the space where he had vanished.

  I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature. After today’s stresses, though, it weighed on me more than usual. Orma knew everything about me, but he was a dragon. On a good day, he was friend enough. On a bad day, running into his inadequacy was like tripping up the stairs. It hurt, but it felt like my own fault.

  Still, he was all I had.

  The only sounds were the river below me, the wind in the empty trees, and faint snatches of song, carried all the way downstream from the taverns near the music school. I listened with my arms wrapped around myself and watched the stars blink into being. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve—surely it was the wind making them water—and set off for home thinking of Orma, of everything I felt that must remain unsaid, and of every debt I owed him that could never be repaid.

  Orma had saved my life three times.

  When I was eight years old, Orma hired me a dragon tutor, a young female called Zeyd. My father had objected strenuously. He despised dragons, despite the fact that he was the Crown’s expert on the treaty and had even defended saarantrai in court.

  I marveled at Zeyd’s peculiarities: her angularity, the unceasing tinkle of her bell, her ability to solve complex equations in her head. Of all my tutors—and I went through a battalion—she was my favorite, right up to the point where she tried to drop me off the bell tower of the cathedral.

  She had lured me up the tower on the pretext of giving me a physics lesson, then quick as a thought snatched me up and held me at arm’s length over the parapet. The wind screamed in my ears. I looked down at my shoe falling, ricocheting off the gnarled heads of gargoyles, hitting the cobbles of the cathedral square.

  “Why do objects fall downward? Do you know?” Zeyd had said, as pleasantly as if she’d been holding this tutorial in the nursery.

  I was too terrified to answer. I lost my other shoe and barely kept my breakfast.

  “There are unseen forces that act upon all of us, all the time, and they act in predictable ways. If I were to drop you from this tower”—here she shook me, and the city spun, a vortex ready to swallow me up—“your falling form would accelerate at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. So would my hat; so did your shoes. We are all pulled toward our doom in exactly the same way, by exactly the same force.”

  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.”

  Half of Lavondaville had flocked to the square for the pleasure of being terrified, if so. Only the old remembered when dragons were a common sight, when a shadow across the sun was enough to shoot panic down your spine. We all knew the stories—how whole villages had burned to the ground, how you’d turn to stone if you dared
look a dragon in the eye, how valiant the knights were in the face of terrifying odds.

  The knights had been banished years after Comonot’s Treaty took effect. Without dragons to fight, they’d turned to antagonizing Goredd’s neighbors, Ninys and Samsam. The three nations engaged in festering, low-grade border wars for two decades, until our Queen put an end to it. All the knightly orders in the Southlands had been disbanded—even those of Ninys and Samsam—but rumor had it that the old fighters lived in secret enclaves in the mountains or the deep countryside.

  I found myself glancing sidelong at the old man, Karal; with all his talk of sacrifice, I wondered whether he’d ever fought dragons. He’d be the right age.

  The crowd gasped in unison. A horned monster was rounding the block of shops, his arched back as high as the second-story windows, his wings demurely folded so as not to topple nearby chimney pots. His elegant neck curved downward like a submissive dog’s, a posture intended to look nonthreatening.

  At least, I found him innocuous enough with his head spines flattened. Other people didn’t seem to be catching on to his body language; all around me horrified citizens clutched at each other, made St. Ogdo’s sign, and muttered into their hands. A nearby woman began shrieking hysterically—“His terrible teeth!”—until she was hustled away by her husband.

  I watched them disappear into the crowd, wishing that I could have reassured her: it was good to see a dragon’s teeth. A dragon with his mouth closed was far more likely to be working up a flame. That seemed completely obvious.

  And that gave me pause. All around me, the sight of those teeth was making citizens sob with terror. What was obvious to me was apparently opaque to everyone else.

  There were twelve dragons altogether; Princess Dionne and her young daughter, Glisselda, brought up the rear of the procession in a sledge. Under the white winter sky the dragons looked rusty, a disappointing color for so fabled a species, but I soon realized their shades were subtle. The right slant of sunlight brought out an iridescent sheen in their scales; they shimmered with rich underhues, from purple to gold.