Seraphina

by Rachel Hartman

  “She’s coming round,” he said. “Phina, do you hear me?”

  “It’s stuffy up here,” said our best trumpeter. “We’ve been playing for three hours. She’s really all right?”

  “It’s that bastard Viridius’s fault. He lets her take everything on herself!” That sounded like Guntard.

  The hand on my forehead tensed at the word bastard. My eyes opened just in time to catch the irritation on Kiggs’s face; it softened upon seeing me awake.

  He helped me rise. I swayed dizzily—the ground was so far away!—until I realized I was still up in the gallery, looking down at the almost empty hall. The last few dignitaries were trickling out, trying to pretend they weren’t staring up at me.

  “What happened?” I croaked, my throat like parchment.

  “You fainted,” said Guntard. “We thought you’d overheated, but we didn’t know how to cool you down decently. We took off your shoes—your pardon, please—and we were just going to roll up your sleeves—”

  I looked away, bracing my hands against the railing so they wouldn’t shake.

  “—but Prince Lucian suggested we fan you. Your oud is undamaged.”

  “Thank you, Guntard,” I said, avoiding his eye and reaching for my shoes.

  My musicians hovered solicitously, as if uncertain what I required. I waved a dismissal; they nearly trampled each other rushing off to lunch. Kiggs had claimed a chair and was sitting on it backward, leaning his chin on his hands, watching me. He was wearing a fancier scarlet doublet today, with ropes of gold braid crisscrossing it; his plain white armband looked all the more mournful in contrast.

  “Don’t you have someplace official to be?” I said lightly as I buckled my shoes, trying to be funny but fearing he’d hear the crankiness beneath it.

  He raised his eyebrows. “In fact, I do. But I’m also in charge of security, and there was quite a commotion up here when you keeled over. Selda promised she’d guard my plate. I’ll escort you down, if you like.”

  “I don’t feel like eating.” I didn’t feel like vomiting either, thank Allsaints. I sat and rubbed my eyes; behind them, my head still ached. “Did you get my note?” I asked.

  He sat up straighter. “Yes. Thank you. Sounds like your efforts yesterday were as futile as mine. I didn’t manage to speak with Eskar; she’d left for Dewcomb’s Outpost with the rest of the embassy staff to await the Ardmagar’s arrival.”

  I said, “Does the embassy know about the knights’ story?”

  He puffed out his cheeks as he exhaled. “Grandmother met with Ambassador Fulda before he left, apprising him of the ‘rumor.’ ”

  “Rumor?” I said, astonished. “She doesn’t believe Sir Karal saw a dragon?”

  Kiggs shook his head irritably. “It pains me to say so, but she doesn’t want to believe that dragons might violate her treaty. She’s staked her entire reign upon the idea that we can trust dragons, and she refuses to consider the possibility of an unauthorized dragon loose in the countryside—to say nothing of killing Uncle Rufus—without an awful lot of unambiguous proof.”

  “Orma’s coin—” I began.

  “Convinced her of nothing,” he said, drumming his fingers on the back of his chair; his nails were short as if he bit them, an unexpected habit in a Captain of the Guard. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose your teacher described Imlann’s saarantras at all?”

  “Blue eyes, fair hair,” I said. “That describes two-thirds of the Ninysh courtiers.”

  “It describes all the Ninysh, counting the redheads, and half the Highland Samsamese,” said the prince. “But there’s no reason to think he’s at court, surely? Where does Orma think he’d be?”

  “Orma has no idea, of course. He only knows Imlann was at the funeral.”

  Kiggs wagged a finger at me. “Selda and I talked it over. We think your idea about going to see Sir James and the knights—”

  A clatter below interrupted him. A cadre of the palace guard had entered the hall; they snapped to attention at the sight of Kiggs up in the gallery. “Captain! The Queen is most displeased that you disregard the dictates of politeness to our—”

  “I’ll be there directly,” Kiggs said, rising. He turned to me apologetically. “We’re not finished. Save me the fourth dance at the ball.”

  I counted off the order of dances. “The pavano?”

  “Perfect. We’ll talk more then.” He raised a hand as if to give me a soldierly slap on the shoulder, but then deftly turned it into a polite bow. He departed for his luncheon with the Ardmagar.

  I sat for some moments, my thoughts in a tangle. I’d accepted an invitation to dance. I couldn’t dance, by anyone’s definition. Beyond that, I had no business dancing with a prince of any kind, even one who appeared to forget the differences in our social standing and who seemed, inexplicably, to find me a plausible person to confide in.

  I leaned my forehead upon the cool stone balustrade. He thought I was normal, and that made me feel normal, and that was just cruel. I could have dispelled his illusions in an instant by pulling up my sleeve. Why live in fear that he might find me disgusting someday, when I could make it happen right now? I worked my right hand under the bindings of my left sleeve, feeling the cold plates, the sharp scalloped edges, my bodily horrors, and hating it.

  Why had that memory sprung out at me so unexpectedly? Was it another “mind-pearl,” like the one Orma had triggered by revealing his natural form? Were there more? Was my head full of tinder, just waiting for a spark?

  I stood up shakily, and my mother’s words came back to me: I cannot perch among those who think that I am broken. I chafed at her arrogance, and her good fortune. “The thing is, Mother, you weren’t broken,” I muttered, as if she were standing right next to me. “I am. And it was you who made me this way.”

  Inside my head, the box twitched like a thing alive.

  I returned to my room for a nap, making sure to wake in plenty of time to change into my formal houppelande. It was maroon, embroidered with black; I added a respectful white sash for Prince Rufus. I attempted to do my hair nicely, because Glisselda’s comments had made me insecure; I redid it multiple times to no satisfactory result. I finally left it loose in sheer frustration and put on nice earrings as an apology to anyone who cared. I didn’t own much other jewelry except the earring Orma had given me. I considered hooking it into my hair—it would make an interesting ornament, and no human would recognize it—but a saarantras might discern that it was quigutl-made. I left it in my room.

  We’d been preparing this welcoming concert for more than a month, but the sheer scale of the spectacle still astonished me. Maybe everything looks more impressive in the light of hundreds of candles, or an appreciative audience lends a performance a certain glamour, I don’t know, but some magic in the air made everything go well. No one was late or out of order; no one fell off the stage; if anyone played a wrong note, they played with such conviction that it sounded right.

  That’s the secret to performance: conviction. The right note played tentatively still misses its mark, but play boldly and no one will question you. If one believes there is truth in art—and I do—then it’s troubling how similar the skill of performing is to lying. Maybe lying is itself a kind of art. I think about that more than I should.

  The Ardmagar sat front and center for the stage performances, bright-eyed and keen. I watched him from behind the curtain during Guntard’s shawm solo, trying to reconcile the look on Comonot’s face with his lecture at High Nest. For someone so convinced of the toxicity of human emotion, he certainly appeared to enjoy himself.

  Glisselda sat by Comonot playing the ornament; her mother sat on his other side. I saw the Queen, Dame Okra, and Viridius, but no Kiggs until I looked further afield. He stalked the back of the hall checking in with the guards, one eye on the performance and one on security. It was a stressful job, to gauge by his expression.

  I had not put myself on the program. I divided my time between reminding th
e next performers to ready themselves and listening from the wings of the stage.

  During the sackbut quartet, I noticed nobody was waiting to come on. I glanced at my schedule: Lars was up next. He was to play the binou, a smaller, milder type of bagpipe. My heart sank; I hadn’t so much as glimpsed Lars today. I marched up the hallway, poking my nose behind the curtains of the closets we had commandeered for dressing rooms.

  Honestly, I had anticipated the rooms being used for warming up and not for the actual changing of clothes. I made one of my lute players scream as if he’d found a quig in his bed.

  Further down the hall, I heard tense voices from behind the last curtain. I approached cautiously, not caring to walk in on anyone again, and recognized one voice as Lars’s. I raised a hand toward the curtain, but hesitated. Lars sounded angry, and he was speaking Samsamese. I drew closer, listening hard and letting my ear adjust. My Samsamese was rusty, and it had never been completely fluent.

  The second voice was, unsurprisingly, the Earl of Apsig’s. I understood “You’re following me!” but not the rest.

  Lars denied it vehemently: “Never!” Then “I am here …,” something unintelligible, “for the machine and the flute music.” Ah, right. He’d heard me from afar.

  Josef swore a lot, followed by “the flute of madness,” which struck me as an amusing phrase. Josef’s boots clomped as he paced; his voice turned pleading. “No one must learn what you are!”

  “And you?” said Lars. “What will you do if they learn what you are?”

  Josef barked something I didn’t understand, and then came a thud and a crash. I whipped the curtain aside. The earl stood with his back to me; Lars was sprawled on the floor among the instrument cases. At the sound of the curtain opening, Earl Josef spun and slammed me into the wall. We stood frozen that way for a moment: Josef pinning me to the wall, breathing hard; me struggling to regain the breath he’d knocked out of me.

  He released me abruptly and started tugging his lacy cuffs, making excuses: “I told you not to associate with him! What will it take to make you understand that he is dangerous?”

  “You’re the one who’s dangerous.”

  His face fell. “Music Mistress, I was just—”

  “Punching my piper? Flinging me into the wall?” I shook my head. “You are off the program. Take your viola and go.”

  He ran a shaking hand through his pale hair. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I will fetch Lucian Kiggs if you’d prefer, and you can explain yourself to him.”

  Earl Josef brushed past me, jabbing me in the stomach with his elbow and yanking the door curtain violently shut. He’d left his viola behind; I wasn’t about to call him back for it.

  I turned to Lars, who was just getting to his feet. He avoided looking at me, surely as frightened as Josef that I had heard what I should not. I was ready to tell him everything when I heard Guntard in the hallway. “Mistress Seraphina! Your concert is falling apart!”

  I threw back the curtain. “What?”

  “Well, not yet,” said Guntard defensively, fidgeting with a button on his doublet, “but the sackbuts are almost done, there’s no one waiting to take their place, and no sign of you anywhere.”

  Lars grabbed his instrument and rushed past me, up the stairs, into the wing of the stage.

  Guntard was smirking. “That’s put you in a better mood, I hope!” he said, batting his eyes at me. He thought we’d been up to something back here, with the curtains drawn. Tuning each other’s lutes, as they say. Practicing our polyphony. Playing the crumhorn.

  “Do you flirt with Viridius like this?” I said. “Get out of here!”

  He took off down the corridor, laughing. He turned back to say one last thing, but at that very moment there was an explosion. The force of it pushed me back a step.

  It was Lars. He wasn’t playing binou pipes.

  For a moment I half fancied he’d somehow brought the megaharmonium with him, but in fact he was playing the Samsamese war pipes, the largest, fiercest member of the bagpipe family. Samsamese highlanders had invented the instrument as a means of threatening each other’s mountain enclaves; it made a sound like a mountain shaking its fist at those bastards across the way. The pipes were not intended for indoor use. Sound filled every cranny of the hall. I glanced up, cringing, expecting to see plaster flake off the ceiling.

  It felt like someone was driving a nail into my ear.

  I rushed into the wing of the stage, annoyed. Without thinking—without even closing my eyes or entering the garden—I reached inward for Loud Lad’s imaginary hand. You were to play binou pipes! This is too loud!

  Lars stopped abruptly. The silence hit hard, a shock wave of relief, but he wasn’t finished playing. He had merely paused to shout: “I like it loudt!”

  The brawling pipes sprang back to cacophonous life, but there was a smattering of laughter and applause, as if his statement had lent the performance some humor or at least some sense. The big fellow likes it loud, ha ha! He sure does! I couldn’t stay where I was, however, and not because the nail pierced my eardrum again. I rushed out, down the passage, and back into the dressing room whence I’d come.

  Mercifully, there was no one there. I sank to the floor, my hand clapped to my mouth.

  Lars had answered me. I had spoken to him just by thinking—no garden, no meditation, no avatar. Meeting my grotesques in person was spooky enough; this was something far spookier.

  Or more exciting. I couldn’t work out which.

  He sounded good from this distance; my appreciation increased with the square of the distance separating us—that is, in proportion to the volume decreasing. I leaned my head against the wall and listened until he’d finished, tapping my fingers along to “The Clumsy Lover” and “The Halfhearted Maidy.” The applause was muted, as if his audience was reluctant to spoil the sweet silence by clapping.

  The next solo began. There were only three left before the big finale, the castle choir singing Viridius’s passionate arrangement of the Mirror Hymn. I was to conduct. I forced myself to my feet. Those ne’er-do-well choristers needed as much advance warning as I could give them. I threw aside the door curtain and ran into a solid wall.

  The wall was Lars.

  “It is one thing to hear music in my headt,” he said, a tremor in his voice. He stepped forward, driving me back into the little room. “But thet … thet was your voice!”

  “I know,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Why does this heppen?”

  His short hair stood up on his head like a boar-bristle brush; his nostrils flared. He folded his arms, as if he had no intention of moving until I had sufficiently explained myself. I said, “I have something to—to show you.” The room was not too dark, I hoped, for him to discern the gleam of my grotesquery.

  I balked. Showing Dame Okra hadn’t turned out like I expected; I had no idea how Lars would react. And this room didn’t even have a proper door. Guntard might pop his head through the curtain. Anyone might.

  Lars glowered defensively, as if he anticipated a scolding or a profession of love. Yes, that was it: he thought I meant to proposition him. He wore a closed expression, as if rehearsing a speech in his head, a way to let me down gently after I stripped off all my clothes. Sorry, Seraphina, I dondt like grausleiner thet can put their voices in my headt.

  Or maybe: I dondt like girls at all. I like Viridius.

  It wasn’t that funny, but it gave me enough momentum to untie my sleeve and pull it up.

  He froze for three heartbeats and then reached for my forearm gently, almost reverently, cradling it in his large hands, running a finger down the curving band of scales. “Ah.” He sighed. “Now thet all makes sense.”

  I wished I could have shared that sentiment, wished it so hard that tears leaked down my cheeks. His expression closed again. I thought he was angry, but I revised that to “protective” when he wrapped me in a crushing embrace. We stood that way a long time. Thank Heaven no on
e came in; we’d have fueled palace gossip for months.

  A passerby would not have heard the enormous black-clad man whisper in my ear: “Sesterleine!”

  Little sister.

  The Mirror Hymn went smoothly. Behind me the audience rose, and some sang along. I managed to keep reasonable time, although I was not as present as I should have been. I kept replaying those moments with Lars: the one where he’d called me sister, and then the conversation after.

  “What is Josef to you?” I had asked him. “What’s going on, and is there any way I can help?”

  “I dondt know what you mean,” he’d said, his eyes suddenly cold. “I hev said nothink against Josef.”

  “Well, no, not to me,” I pressed on. “But you can’t deny—”

  “I ken. And I do. Dondt speak to me of him again, grausleine.”

  With that, he had stormed off.

  Music surrounded me as I conducted, lifting my heart and bringing me back to myself. The choir belted out the last two lines: Undeserving, we are granted grace / We are a mirror raised to Heaven’s face. I smiled warmly at my singers, and they returned the favor fiftyfold from all around me.

  The choir cleared the stage and the symphonia moved in. My work was finished now, and I could dance as much as I liked, meaning exactly once. It was kind of Kiggs to choose a pavano, which consisted of walking in a stately circle. I could manage that.

  Servants scurried around, pulling chairs and benches toward the walls, redistributing candelabra, bringing people drinks. I was parched myself; being onstage dries you right up. I made for the drinks table in the far corner and found myself behind the Ardmagar. He spoke grandiloquently to a server: “True, our scholars and diplomats drink no intoxicants, but it’s less a rule and more of a guideline, a concession to your people, who tend toward paranoia at the idea of a dragon losing control. Dragons, like you, have different tolerances. A bit of wine may be taken by one as conscientious as myself, and no harm done.”