Seraphina (31 page)

That broke the spell. Smugness crept over him. I only knew it for smugness from my maternal memories; all my human eyes saw were the spines at the base of his head shift their angle. He said: “If you don’t know that, you know nothing worth knowing. I shall leave you to your disgusting infatuation. Plans are unfurling, all in their proper time; I shall let them. We shall meet again, and sooner than you expect.”

He turned with a serpentine ripple, swiping at us with his spiky tail, ran forward, and launched himself into the air. He made a wide, low circle in the sky, presumably scanning for embassy dragons, then flew swiftly south, disappearing in the clouds.

My knees trembled and my head throbbed, but I was elated. I could barely believe that had worked. I turned toward Kiggs; I must have been wild-eyed with relief.

He backed away, his expression closed, saying, “What are you?”

St. Masha and St. Daan. I’d saved us, but now I had to pay for it. I raised my hands as if in surrender. “I am what I ever was.”

“You’re a dragon.”

“I’m not. By Heaven’s hearthstone, I’m not.”

“You speak Mootya.”

“I understand it.”

“How is that possible?”

“I am very, very smart.”

He didn’t question that; I would have. He said, “You’ve got a draconian device. It is illegal for humans to be in possession of quigutl-built communication machinery—”

“No! I’ve got nothing! It was a bluff.”

He was breathing heavily now, delayed-onset panic finally catching up with him. “You bluffed him? A Porphyrian double ton of fire and brimstone, fangs like swords, claws like … like swords! And you just … bluffed him?”

He was yelling. I tried not to take it personally. I folded my arms. “Yes. I did.”

He ran his hands roughly through his hair. He bent double as if he might vomit, scooped up some snow, rubbed it over his face. “Sweet Heavenly Home, Seraphina! Did you think about what might have happened to us if that hadn’t worked?”

“No better plan presented itself.” Heavens, I sounded as cold as any dragon.

He had dropped his sword at some point; he picked it out of the snow, wiped it on his cloak, and resheathed it, his eyes still wide and shocked. “You can’t just … I mean, brave is one thing. This was madness.”

“He was going to kill you,” I said, my chin quivering. “I had to do something.”

Damn propriety. Forgive me, St. Clare
.

I stepped forward and took him in my arms. He was exactly my height, which surprised me; my awe of him had made him seem taller. He emitted a whimper of protest, or maybe surprise, but wrapped his arms around me and buried his face in my hair, half weeping, half scolding me.

“Life is so short,” I said, not sure why I was saying it, not even sure if that was really true for someone like me.

We were still standing there, clinging to each other, our feet ice-cold in the snow, when Orma landed on the next hilltop, followed closely by Basind. Kiggs lifted his head and stared at them, big-eyed. My heart fell.

I’d told him I had no devices. I’d lied right to the prince’s face, and here was the proof: the dragon I’d called, and his dim-witted sidekick.

S
peculus, for us Goreddis, should be spent in contemplation of one’s sins and shortcomings. It’s the longest night of the year, representing the long darkness of death for the soul who rejects the light of Heaven.

It was certainly the longest night I have ever lived through.

Kiggs, of course, had drawn his sword again, but it hung from his hand in a desultory manner. It had been useless against one dragon; it was merely token resistance against two.

“We’re not in danger,” I said, trying to reassure him but fearing my good intention was as futile as his sword. “It’s Orma, and behind him is Basind. I didn’t call Basind.”

“But you did call Orma? With that device you don’t have?”

“I don’t have the one I told Imlann about—I invented that on the spur of the moment—and I was trying to reassure you, and I … I forgot.”

“I see. So Orma gave you this device and came instantly when called as if he were your lap dog, because he—how did you put it exactly?—he feels nothing for you?”

“We’re not … no. It’s not like that.”

“Then what is it like?” he cried, furious with me. “Are you his agent? Is he your thrall? There is something between you, beyond this facade of mentorship, beyond what dragons and humans should ever engage in. It is not normal, and I can’t work out what it is, and I am sick of guessing!”

“Kiggs …” I had no other words.

“Prince Lucian, if you would be so kind,” he said. “Tell them to shrink down.”

Orma approached, head lowered in a submissive stance. He had apparently told Basind to flatten himself into the snow, because Basind did a good impression of a lizard run over by a cart—a giant lizard, and an unthinkably enormous cart.

“You are all under arrest,” said Kiggs, loudly and slowly. “You two, for unauthorized transformation; Maid Dombegh, because you are clearly in cahoots with two unauthorized dragons—”

“Association with dragons is not a crime,” I said.

“Possession of a quigutl-made transmission device is. Aiding and abetting the delinquency of dragons is. I could go on.” He turned to the dragons and said, “You will shrink yourselves down now.”

Orma cried, “Seraphina, if I have transformed for nothing, I am going to be in an unquantifiable amount of trouble. Tell me why I shouldn’t bite your head off. It couldn’t make things any worse for me.”

I translated that as: “ ‘We’ll come along quietly, Prince, and will comply with your every reasonable demand, but we cannot shrink ourselves down because you don’t have clothing for us, and we would freeze.’ ”

“Are you in love with Prince Lucian?” screamed my uncle. “What were you up to when I arrived? You weren’t going to mate right here in the snow, were you?”

I gave myself a moment to get my voice under control before saying, “The dragons suggest that they walk ahead. Their sharp eyes can make out the road more easily than ours. They won’t flee.”

“I told you not to go after Imlann,” screeched my uncle. “I know he was here; I smell him. Why did you not keep him here so I could kill him?”

That was too much. I shouted back, “You can’t have it both ways, Orma!”

“Get back on your horse,” said Kiggs, who’d been able to round up the animals. They were still skittish in the continuing presence of full-sized dragons, so it took me some time to get on. Kiggs held my mare’s bridle, but he would not look at me.

The dragons kept their heads down, docilely, as they followed the road; they left slushy footprints, huge and clawed, behind them. The prince and I followed in painful silence.

It gave me a lot of time to think. How had Imlann found us? Had he tracked us from the coppice, or had he been waiting for us to come back along the same road? How could he know we would return?

“Prince Lucian,” I began, drawing my horse up alongside his.

“I would rather you not speak, Maid Dombegh,” he said, his eyes upon the saar.

That hurt, but I plowed ahead. “I suspect Imlann knew where we were going and that we were coming back. Someone at the palace may have told him—or someone at the palace
is
him. Who knew where we were going today?”

“My grandmother,” he said tersely. “Glisselda. Neither of them is a dragon.”

I hardly dared suggest it, but I had to. “Might Glisselda have mentioned it in passing to the Earl of Apsig?”

He turned toward me sharply. “If she had—which I deem unlikely—what are you suggesting? That he’s a traitor, or that he’s a dragon?”

“He came out of nowhere two years ago—you said so yourself. He takes no wine. He’s got fair hair and blue eyes.” He’d discerned the scent of my scales, too, but obviously I could not include that detail. “He was part of your uncle’s last hunting party,” I hazarded. That wasn’t evidence, though, so much as circumstance.

“You’re omitting a substantial amount of counterevidence,” said Prince Lucian, finally engaged, even if just to refute me. “I thought we’d concluded he was Lars’s half brother.”

“You said it was a rumor. It might be false.” I dared not suggest what now occurred to me: if Josef was a dragon, he might be Lars’s father.

“He plays viola like an angel. He professes to hate dragonkind.”

“Imlann might adopt such an attitude strategically, to deflect suspicion,” I said. I couldn’t address the accusation of angelic viola playing without bringing up my own mother, who’d played flute with an eerily human cadence, according to Orma.

The prince looked at me sarcastically, and I hastened to add, “All I ask is that you consider the possibility. Inquire whether anyone saw Josef at court today.”

“Will that be all, Maid Dombegh?”

My teeth chattered with cold and nerves. “Not quite all. I want to explain Orma.”

“I really don’t care to hear it,” he said, spurring his horse a little ahead.

“He saved my life!” I cried at his back, determined to make him hear it whether he wanted to or not. “Orma was my tutor when I was little. You recall that his family is flagged for scrutiny. Well, the Censors feared he might become too attached to his students, for he dearly loved teaching and was good at it. They sent a dragon called Zeyd to test him. She lured me up the bell tower of St. Gobnait’s with the promise of a physics lesson, then dangled me out over the plaza, as if she might drop me. If Orma rescued me, you see, that would indicate that he was compromised. He should not have cared that much.”

I swallowed. My mouth still went dry, recalling the terror of my shoes falling, the wind roaring in my ears, the tilting world.

Kiggs was listening in spite of himself; my horse pulled up even with his. “Orma arrived,” I said, “and my first thought was,
Hurrah, he’s rescued me!
But he leaned against the balustrade, utterly unconcerned with my welfare, and began trying to convince Zeyd that it would be the end of her career—to say nothing of the peace—if she dropped me. She shook me around, let me slip a bit in her grasp, but he never flinched. He didn’t care about me at all; he was just helping out his fellow saar.”

That part still hurt, frankly. “She finally set me down on the walkway. Orma took her arm and they walked away together, leaving me alone, weeping and barefoot. I crawled down the stairs, all four hundred twenty of them, and when I finally made it home, Orma scolded me for trusting a dragon and called me an idiot savant.”

“But he’s a dragon,” said Kiggs sensibly, fiddling with his horse’s reins.

Cack
. I supposed it couldn’t matter if I told him. “I didn’t know back then.”

He studied me now, but I couldn’t meet his eye. “Why are you telling me this?”

Because I want to tell you something true, and this is as close as I can manage. Because I think, at some level, you will understand this story. Because I need you to understand it
.

I said, “I want you to understand why I have to help him.”

“Because he was so cold to you?” Kiggs said. “Because he left you to walk home alone and called you an idiot?”

“Because he—he saved my life,” I stammered over my rising confusion.

“You’d think, as Captain of the Queen’s Guard, I’d have heard this story before. A dragon almost killing someone is no small matter, and yet your father didn’t jump right in to see her prosecuted?”

My stomach knotted. “No.”

Kiggs’s expression hardened. “I wish I knew how much of your story was true.”

He spurred his horse forward, leaving me alone.

We approached the city at a crawl; dragons are not as fast as horses on foot, and these two seemed in no hurry. It was long after midnight by the time we reached the stable at the foot of the hill.

The dragons transformed in sight of the stable, cooling and condensing and folding themselves into a pair of naked men. They followed me in with the horses while Kiggs went to see what spare clothing John Ostler might have for them. Orma no longer had his false beard; I hoped he’d at least stowed his spectacles somewhere safe before transforming. “I’m astonished you’re not hurt,” he said through chattering teeth, a bit more sympathetic as a human. “How did you contrive not to get yourself killed?”