Seraphina

by Rachel Hartman

  I heard his footfall grow faint as he climbed the tower steps. What did he do up there? It was none of my business, to be sure, but I stood for a long moment with my hand upon the oaken door.

  I stood so still, for so long, that I nearly jumped out of my skin when a voice said, “Music Mistress? Are you ill?”

  I looked behind me; there stood one of my musicians, the scrawny sackbutist whose name I never remembered, who had apparently been passing by and spotted me looking catatonic. He stepped toward me hesitantly. “Is there anything you need?”

  “No,” I croaked, my voice as rough as if I were breaking a years-long vow of silence. “Thank you,” I added. I bent my head, skirted him meekly, and headed back up the hallway toward my rooms.

  The next day was the last before Comonot arrived, and Viridius planned to rehearse us within an inch of our lives. I rose extra early; I needed to contact Orma first thing so I could let Kiggs know what he said. I played our chord upon the spinet and waited, scalding my tongue on my tea and wondering where I might find Kiggs this time of day. He had an office near the main guardroom, I knew, but he also spent a lot of time in the city.

  When the spinet kitten finally spoke, it startled me so much that I almost lost my teacup. “Can’t talk,” buzzed Orma’s voice. “I’m babysitting Basind.”

  I’d forgotten all about the newskin. “When can you talk?”

  “Dinner? The Mallet and Mullet? Six?”

  “Fine, but make it seven. Viridius intends to flog us until we bleed today.”

  “I’ll see you then. Don’t eat that!”

  I looked to my cup of tea and back. “Don’t eat what?”

  “Not you. Basind.” The kitten crackled, and he was gone.

  I sighed, pushed back from the instrument, and heard the great clock above the central courtyard chime. There was more than enough time for my morning routine and breakfast. I was running early, which was just as well. Viridius would find no fault with me today.

  I arrived at Castle Orison’s vast great hall early and alert. Carpenters were swarming all over the stage, which could not be a good sign, and I saw neither hide nor wispy hair of the gouty old man. Musicians were everywhere, like ants, but no Viridius. Finally his phlegmatic manservant, Marius, crept up with a message for me: “The master’s not here.”

  “What do you mean he’s not here? This is dress rehearsal.”

  Marius cleared his throat nervously. “To quote him precisely: ‘Tell Seraphina I leave everything in her more than capable hands. Don’t forget to rehearse smooth entrances and exits!’ ”

  I bit back the first word that occurred to me, and the second. “So where is he?”

  The man ducked his gray head; apparently my tone had been ungentle. “At the cathedral. His protégé was having some problem—”

  “Lars?” I said. Someone with keen hearing stopped in his tracks behind me. I lowered my voice. “What kind of problem, exactly?”

  Viridius’s man shrugged. “The master wouldn’t say.”

  “The usual, no doubt,” sneered Earl Josef, at my back. “Brawling, bringing his filthy radt-grauser into the cathedral, getting drunk and smashing up his own machine.”

  I understood “red-women.” “They wear black and yellow stripes here in Goredd,” I said, trying to plaster over my agitation with a joke. “But I expect you know that firsthand.”

  The earl ran his tongue over his perfect teeth and tugged his lace cuffs. “Normally I wouldn’t bother, but I like you, grausleine. Stay away from Lars. He’s a Daanite and a liar and trouble incarnate. He’s barely human.”

  “Viridius trusts him,” I said.

  “Master Viridius has taken a dangerous fancy to him,” the earl said. “Neither of you understands what he is. I pray every day that St. Ogdo destroy him.”

  I wanted so badly to say I knew exactly what Lars was and did not hold it against him, but the closest I could manage was “I don’t care what you say. He is my friend. I will hear no more of this slander.”

  He snaked an unwelcome arm around my waist; I tried to pull away, but he had a grip like a lobster. “You are the sweetest and most innocent of grausleiner,” he murmured. “But there are people in this world who commit horrifying and unnatural acts beyond anything your naive imagination could conceive. He is your worst nightmare. Heed my warning and stay away from him. I fear for you otherwise.”

  He leaned in and kissed my ear as if sealing my compliance, but he drew back abruptly. “What is that odd perfume you wear?”

  “Let go of me,” I said through clenched teeth.

  Josef gave a haughty sniff and released me, stalking off without a backward glance.

  I beat back a wave of panic. He’d smelled me. Had he recognized the smell as saar?

  I gathered what dignity I could muster after being so unpleasantly manhandled, and approached the gathered herd of performers, prepared to go full Viridius on them. They expected nothing better, after all.

  The stage was beautiful but turned out to be unsound over the trapdoor in the center, as we learned to our dismay when five bassos disappeared at once. I yelled at the carpenters and drilled the choir on the other side of the hall while they made modifications. Then the curtain mechanism didn’t work, the stilt walker’s costume fell off mid-jig—funny, under other circumstances—and Josef’s viola solo kept drifting flat.

  I took no satisfaction in the last; in fact, I suspected it was a ploy to make me look at him. I grimly kept my gaze elsewhere.

  That was very little gone wrong for a dress rehearsal, but it was more than my mood would support. I growled bearishly at everyone, deservedly or not. The itinerant performers seemed alarmed, but my palace musicians found me amusing; I made an unconvincing Viridius, even at my crankiest. Snatches of my praise song drifted in my wake as I stormed past, making it difficult to keep scowling.

  Evening came at last, and my musicians decided it was high time they refused to work. This, of course, meant they set up a massive session in the great hall playing reels and jigs for fun. Music is only work if someone else makes you do it. I’d have liked to join in—I’d more than earned it, I felt—but Orma was waiting. I bundled up and headed downhill into town.

  The warmth of the Mallet and Mullet was welcome, although I never felt quite comfortable in the presence of strangers and smoke, chatter and clatter. The fire and lamps provided too little light. It took me some time scanning the tables to realize Orma had not yet arrived. I claimed a place near the hearth, ordered myself some barley water, to the barmaid’s scornful amusement, and sat down to wait.

  It wasn’t like Orma to be late. I sipped my beverage, keeping my eyes to myself, until a commotion by the door grew too loud to ignore.

  “You can’t bring his kind in here,” snarled the tapmaster, who had come out from behind his bar, dragging a muscular cook with him as backup. I turned around to look; Orma stood in the foyer, unfastening his cloak clasp. Basind lurked behind him, his bell tinkling plaintively. Patrons near the door made St. Ogdo’s sign or pressed fragrant sachets to their noses as if warding off disease.

  The tapmaster folded his arms over his dingy apron. “This is a respectable establishment. We’ve served the likes of Baronet Meadowburn and the Countess du Paraday.”

  “Recently?” said Orma, widening his eyes mildly. The tapmaster took that for disrespect and puffed out his chest; the cook fingered the edge of his cleaver.

  I was already on my feet, slapping a coin onto the table. “Go back outside!”

  The open night air, when I reached it, came as a relief even if Basind’s slouching silhouette did not.

  “Why did you bring him along?” I said crossly as we stepped into the empty street. “You should have known they wouldn’t serve him.”

  Orma opened his mouth, but Basind spoke first: “Where my teacher goes, I go.”

  Orma shrugged. “There are places we can eat.”

  Places, maybe, but only in one part of town.

  Quighole
was closed after sunset, technically. Only two streets led into what had once been St. Jobertus’s Close; each had been fitted with a tall wrought-iron gate that the Queen’s Guard, with great ceremony, padlocked every evening. Of course, the buildings facing the square had back doors, so one had simply to walk through a shop, a tavern, or a house full of quigs to get in and out—and there were always the tunnels below. Disgruntled saarantrai characterized Quighole as a prison; it was a porous prison, if so.

  Old St. Jobertus’s had once been a church; when the parish outgrew the building, New St. Jobertus’s had been built across the river, where there was more room. After Comonot’s Treaty, some dragons had aspired to run a little collegium to help fulfill Comonot’s proposed interspecies knowledge exchange. Old St. Jobertus’s was the largest unused building they could find. While bell-exempt dragon students such as Orma sneaked around studying our mysterious ways, other scholars, fully belled and graduated, came to St. Bert’s (as it was now called) to teach their sciences to backward humans.

  They got few students, and fewer who would admit to being students. St. Bert’s trained the best physicians, but few humans wanted a doctor practicing spooky saar medicine on them. A recent scandal over the dissection of human cadavers hadn’t helped matters. Riots all over town had nearly turned into a bloodbath; people demanded vengeance against the saarantrai—and their students—who dared paw through human remains. There had been a trial, with my father right in the middle of things as usual. Dissection was forbidden and several dragons were sent back to the Tanamoot, but physicians continued to train in secret.

  I had only been to Quighole once, when Orma took me with him to fetch my itch ointment. It was not a place respectable young girls should be seen, and my father had been adamant that I should avoid the neighborhood. As many of his objections as I had overturned or disregarded, I’d willingly abided by this one.

  Orma took us up an alley, reached over top of a gate to unlock it, and led us into someone’s muddy kitchen garden. Dead marrow vines squished underfoot. A pig grunted in one enclosure; another was full of rotting vegetables. I feared the house’s owner would come after us with a pitchfork at any minute, but Orma walked straight up to the door and knocked three times. No one answered. He knocked three more times and then scratched the flaking paint with his nails.

  A little hatch window opened. “Who is it?” asked a scratchy voice.

  “It’s the polecat,” said Orma. “I’ve come to nix the mink.”

  An old woman with a wide toothless grin opened the door to us. I followed Orma down the stairs into a fetid semidarkness. We arrived in a humid, stenchy cellar lit by a wide hearth, small lamps, and a hanging light fixture in the shape of a mermaid with antlers, her bosom bared to all the world, brandishing two candles like swords. Her eyes bugged out at me as if she were astonished to see a sister monster.

  My eyes adjusted. We were in some sort of underground public house. There were rickety tables and a variety of patrons—human, saarantrai, and quigutl. Humans and saarantrai sat at the same tables here, students engaged in deep discussions with teachers. Here was a saar demonstrating principles of surface tension—just as Zeyd had taught me before her special tutorial in gravitation—by holding a glass of water upside down with only a slip of parchment between his rapt students and a drenching. In another corner I saw an impromptu dissection of a small mammal, or dinner, or both.

  No one came to Quighole who didn’t have to; I had more personal dealings with saarantrai than most people, and I’d only been the once. I had never seen both my … my peoples together like this. I found myself a little overcome.

  The human students did not interact much with the quigutl, but it was still remarkable how little fussed they were at the presence of the creatures. Nobody sent back food that had been touched by quigs—there were quig servers!—and nobody shrieked upon discovering one under the table. Quigutl had affixed themselves to the rafters and the walls; some clustered around tables with saarantrai. The global stench undoubtedly came from quig breath, but the nose falls asleep quickly. By the time we found a table, I barely smelled anything at all.

  Orma went to order us dinner, leaving me with Basind. Our table was covered in chalk equations. I pretended to look at them while studying the newskin sidelong. He gaped vapidly at a nearby table full of quigs.

  I couldn’t talk to Orma in front of Basind, but I didn’t see how to get around it.

  I followed Basind’s gaze to the next table and gasped. The quigs there had their tongues out and sparks were flying. It was hard to see through the gloom, but they appeared to be altering the shape of a bottle, melting the glass with focused heat from their tongues and pulling it like taffy. The long fingers of their dorsal arms—the twiglike, dexterous limbs they had in place of wings—seemed impervious to heat. They pulled glass as thin as thread, heated it again, and looped it around into lacy structures.

  Orma returned and set down our drinks. He followed my gaze to the glass-spinning quigutl. They’d made a hollow, basket-sized egg of green glass threads. “Why don’t glassblowers hire them?” I asked.

  “Why don’t goldsmiths hire them?” said Orma, passing Basind a cup of barley water. “They don’t follow instructions willingly, for one thing.”

  “How is it that you saar don’t understand art?” I said, marveling at their gleaming creation. “Quigs make art.”

  “That’s not art,” said Orma flatly.

  “How would you even know?”

  His eyebrows drew together. “They don’t value it the way a human would. There’s no meaning to it.” One of the quigs had climbed onto the table and was attempting to sit on the glass egg. It shattered into a thousand shards. “See?” said Orma.

  I thought about the human-faced lizard in my purse; I wasn’t sure he was right. That figurine spoke to me somehow.

  The tapmaster came rushing toward the quigs, brandishing a broom and shouting. The quigs scattered, some under the table, some up the walls. “Clean this up!” the man cried. “You can’t come in here if you’re going to jump around like apes!”

  The quigs all lisped insults at him, but they crept back and cleaned the table, using the sticky fingers of their ventral hands to pick up splintered glass. They collected it in their mouths, masticated it, and spit molten globs, hissing, into a glass of beer.

  There was a glass of beer at our table, too, belonging to Orma. Basind had homed in on it and was leaning over the cup, sniffing. He rose with a drip on the end of his nose. “That’s an intoxicant. I should report you.”

  “Recall clause nine of the exemption papers,” said Orma coolly.

  “ ‘A scholar working incognito may bend Standard Protocols 22 and 27, or such other Protocols as he deems necessary for the successful maintenance of his disguise’?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Basind continued: “ ‘Clause 9a: Said scholar will file Form 89XQ for each of his deviations, and may be required to undergo a psychological audit and/or defend the necessity of his actions before the Board of Censors.’ ”

  “Enough, Basind,” said Orma. As the patron Saints of comedy would have it, however, a quigutl brought our dinner at that very moment: lamb olio for me, leek and turnip soup for Basind, and for my uncle, a fat boiled sausage.

  “Tell me, must you file a separate form for each item individually, or can you lump together sausage and beer consumed at the same meal?” asked Basind with surprising acuity.

  “Separate forms when I’m overdue for an audit,” said Orma. He took a drink. “You can help me fill them out later.”

  “Eskar says rules have reasons,” rasped Basind. “I must wear clothing so as not to frighten people. I mustn’t spread butter on my itchy skin, because it offends my landlady. Similarly, we may not eat the flesh of animals because it makes us hunger for the abundant flesh around the table.” Basind flashed his horrid buggy eyes toward me.

  “That’s the idea, yes,” said Orma. “But I’ve never found it to be
the case—particularly with sausages, where the meat barely resembles meat at all.”

  Basind looked around the dim basement at the other saarantrai and muttered, “I should report this whole room.”

  Orma ignored this. He drew a small handful of coins out of the hidden recesses of his doublet, lowered his hand to his lap, and jingled the coins. Suddenly there were quigs on the floor all around us, crawling under the table, winding around our ankles like snakes. This was a bit much, even for me.

  Orma broadcast the coins into the tangle on the floor, as if he were feeding chickens; the quigs scrambled for coins, went still a moment, and then swarmed Basind.

  “No I don’t,” said Basind confusedly. “Leave me alone.”

  I gaped at Basind, not recognizing the opportunity Orma had created until my uncle grabbed my arm, pulled me away from the table, and whispered, “I know quig hand signals; I told them Basind has a hoard at home. If you have news, out with it now.”

  “I showed Kiggs the coin and told him your concerns.”

  “And?”

  “A rogue dragon has been spotted in the countryside. Two knights came to report it. I interviewed them. They say the dragon had a distinctive perforation in its left wing, in the shape of a rat. Did your father have any such—”

  “His wing was once injured by ice, but it was repaired. Sixteen years is ample time to acquire additional perforations, however.”

  “In other words, it may or may not be Imlann.” I sighed, frustrated. “So what can you tell me about his natural shape? How might Kiggs recognize him?”

  Orma had described his father’s saarantras so vaguely that I did not expect the wealth of detail he gave me now: the sheen of Imlann’s skin (different in moonlight), how sharp he habitually kept his talons, the precise shape and color of his eyes (different when he pulled his third eyelid across), the curl of horn and fold of wings (delineated with mathematical precision), the spiciness of his brimstone breath, his tendency to feint left and strike right, the width of the sinews at his heels.