Seraphina (7 page)

And that was how he saved my life the third time.

F
or the next five years Orma was my teacher and my only friend.

For someone who’d never intended to declare himself my uncle, Orma took his avuncular duties seriously. He taught me not just music but everything he thought I should know about dragonkind: history, philosophy, physiology, higher mathematics (as close as they came to a religion). He answered even my most impudent questions. Yes, dragons could smell colors under the right conditions. Yes, it was a terrible idea to transform into a saarantras right after eating an aurochs. No, he did not understand the exact nature of my visions, but he believed he saw the way to help me.

Dragons found the human condition confusing and often overwhelming, and they had developed strategies over the years for keeping their heads “in ard” while they took human form. Ard was a central concept of draconic philosophy. The word itself meant roughly “order” or “correctness.” Goreddis used the word to refer to a dragon battalion—and that was one definition. But for dragons, the idea went much deeper. Ard was the way the world should be, the imposition of order upon chaos, an ethical and physical rightness.

Human emotions, messy and unpredictable, were antithetical to ard. Dragons used meditation and what Orma called cognitive architecture to partition their minds into discrete spaces. They kept their maternal memories in one room, for example, because they were disruptively intense; the one maternal memory I’d experienced had bowled me over. Emotions, which the saar found uncomfortable and overpowering, were locked away securely and never permitted to leak out.

Orma had never heard of visions like mine and did not know what caused them. But he believed a system of cognitive architecture could stop the visions from striking me unconscious. We tried variations on his maternal memory room, locking the visions (that is, an imaginary book representing them) in a chest, a tomb, and finally a prison at the bottom of the sea. It would work for a few days, until I collapsed on my way home from St. Ida’s and we had to start again.

My visions showed the same people over and over; they’d become so familiar I’d given them all nicknames. There were seventeen, a nice prime number, which interested Orma inordinately. He finally lit upon the idea of trying to contain the individuals, not the visions as such. “Try creating a representation, a mental avatar, of each person and building a space where they might want to stay,” Orma had said. “That boy, Fruit Bat, is always climbing trees, so plant a tree in your mind. See if his avatar will climb it and stay there. Maybe if you cultivate and maintain your connections to these individuals, they won’t seek your attention at inconvenient times.”

From this suggestion, an entire garden had grown. Each avatar had its place within this garden of grotesques; I tended them every night or suffered headaches and visions when I did not. As long as I kept these peculiar denizens calm and peaceful, I was not troubled by visions. Neither Orma nor I understood exactly why it worked. Orma claimed it was the most unusual mental structure he had ever heard of; he regretted not being able to write a dissertation on it, but I was a secret, even among dragons.

No unwanted vision had seized me in four years, but I could not relax my vigilance. The headache I’d developed after Prince Rufus’s funeral meant the grotesques in my garden were agitated; that was when a vision was most likely to hit me. After Orma left me on the bridge, I hurried back to Castle Orison as quickly as I could, anticipating an hour’s work attending to my mental hygiene, as Orma called it, putting my mind back in ard.

My suite at the palace had two rooms. The first was a parlor where I practiced. The spinet Orma had given me stood by the far wall; beside it was a bookcase with my own books, my flutes, my oud. I staggered into the second room, containing wardrobe, table, and bed; I’d had only two weeks’ acquaintance with the furniture, but it felt sufficiently mine that I was at home here. Palace servants had turned down the bedclothes and lit the fire.

I stripped to my linen chemise. I had scales to wash and oil, but every inch of me whimpered for the soft bed and there was still my head to deal with.

I pulled the bolster off my bed and sat on it cross-legged, as Orma had taught me. I shut my eyes, in so much pain now that it was hard to slow my breaths sufficiently. I repeated the mantra
All in ard
until I had calmed enough to see my sprawling, colorful garden of grotesques stretching all the way to my mind’s horizon.

I endured a moment of confusion as I got my bearings; the layout changed each time I visited. Before me squatted the border wall of ancient, flat bricks; ferns grew out of its every cranny like tufts of green hair. Beyond it I saw the Faceless Lady fountain, the poppy bank, and a lawn with bulbous, overgrown topiaries. As Orma had instructed, I always paused with my hands upon the entrance gate—wrought iron, this time—and said, “This is my mind’s garden. I tend it; I order it. I have nothing to fear.”

Pelican Man lurked among the topiaries, his slack, expansive throat wattle dangling over the front of his tunic like a fleshy bib. It was always harder when I ran into a deformed one first, but I plastered on a smile and stepped onto the lawn. Cold dew between my toes surprised me; I hadn’t noticed I was barefoot. Pelican Man took no note of my approach but kept his eyes upon the sky, which was always starry in this part of the garden.

“Are you well, Master P?” Pelican Man rolled his eyes at me balefully; he was agitated. I tried to take his elbow—I didn’t touch the hands of a grotesque if I could help it—but he shied away from me. “Yes, it was a stressful day,” I said mildly, circling, herding him toward his stone bench. Its hollow seat was filled with soil and planted with oregano, producing a lovely smell when one sat on it. Pelican Man found it soothing. He headed for it at last and curled up among the herbs.

I watched Pelican Man a few moments longer, to make sure he was truly calmed. His dark skin and hair looked Porphyrian; his red baglike throat, expanding and contracting with every breath, looked like nothing of this world. As vivid as my visions were, it was disturbing to imagine him—and others still more deformed—out in the world somewhere. Surely the gods of Porphyry were not so cruel as to allow a Pelican Man to exist? My burden of horribleness was light compared with that.

He remained tranquil. That was one settled, and it hadn’t been difficult. The intensity of my headache seemed disproportionate, but maybe I would find others more agitated.

I rose to continue my rounds, but my bare feet encountered something cold and leathery in the grass. Stooping down, I found a large piece of orange peel, and then several more scraps scattered among the towering boxwoods.

I had given the garden permanent features peculiar to each grotesque—Fruit Bat’s trees, Pelican Man’s starry sky—but my deeper mind, the hidden current Orma called underthought, filled in everything else. New embellishments, peculiar plants or statuary, appeared without warning. Refuse on the lawn seemed wrong, however.

I tossed the peels under the hedge and wiped my hands on my skirt. There was only one orange tree that I knew of in this garden. I would put off worrying until I’d seen it.

I found Miserere pulling out her feathers by the rocking stile; I led her to her nest. Newt thrashed about under the apple trees, crushing the bluebells; I led him to his wallow and rubbed mud onto his tender head. I checked that the lock on the Wee Cottage still held and then picked my way barefoot through an unanticipated field of thistles. I could see the taller trees of Fruit Bat’s grove in the distance. I took the lime walk, ducking into leafy side gardens along the way, clucking, soothing, putting to bed, tending everyone. At the end of the walk, a yawning chasm blocked my way. Loud Lad’s ravine had shifted positions and now blocked my path to Fruit Bat’s date palms.

Loud Lad represented the Samsamese piper I’d seen. He was a favorite; I am ashamed to say I gravitated toward the more normal-looking denizens. This avatar was unusual in that it made noise (hence the name), built things, and sometimes left its designated area. This had caused me no end of panic at first. There had been one other grotesque, Jannoula, who’d been prone to wander, and she’d frightened me so badly that I’d locked her away in the Wee Cottage.

The visions were like peering into someone else’s life with a mystical spyglass. In the case of Jannoula, she had somehow been able to look back at me through her avatar. She had spoken to me, pried, prodded, stolen, and lied; she had drunk my fears like nectar, and smelled my wishes on the wind. In the end, she began trying to influence my thoughts and control my actions. In a panic, I’d told Orma and he helped me find a way to banish her to the Wee Cottage. I barely managed to trick her into entering. It was hard to fool someone who could tell what you were thinking.

With the Loud Lad avatar, however, motion just seemed to be characteristic; I had no sense that a real-world Samsamese piper was gazing back at me. Gazebos and pergolas sprouted all over the garden, gifts from His Loudness, and it pleased me to see them.

“Loud Lad!” I cried at the edge of his ravine. “I need a bridge!”

A gray-eyed, round-cheeked head popped up, followed by an oversized body clad in Samsamese black. He sat upon the lip of the cliff, took three fish and a lady’s nightdress from his bag—caterwauling all the while—and unfolded them into a bridge for me to cross.

It was very like dreaming, this garden. I tried not to question the logic of things.

“How are you? You’re not upset?” I asked, patting his bristly blond head. He hooted and disappeared into his crevasse. That was normal; he was usually calmer than the rest, maybe because he kept so busy.

I hurried toward Fruit Bat’s grove, worry beginning to catch up with me now. Fruit Bat was my very favorite grotesque, and the only orange tree in the garden grew in his stand of figs, dates, lemons, and other Porphyrian fruits. I reached the grove and looked up, but he wasn’t among the leaves. I looked down; he’d stacked fallen fruit into tidy pyramids, but he was nowhere to be seen.

He had never left his designated space before, not once. I stood a long time, staring at the empty trees, trying to rationalize his absence.

Trying to slow my panicked heart.

If Fruit Bat was loose in the garden, that explained the orange peel on Pelican Man’s lawn, and it might very well explain the intensity of my headache. If some little Porphyrian boy had found the way to peer back up the spyglass like Jannoula … I went cold all over. It was inconceivable. There must be another explanation. It would break my heart to have to cut off my connection to one I was so inexplicably fond of.

I pushed on, settling the remaining denizens, but my heart wasn’t in it. I found more orange peel in Muttering Creek and upon Three Dunes.

The last piece of the garden tonight was the Rose Garden, prissy domain of Miss Fusspots. She was a short, stout old woman in a gabled cap and thick spectacles, homely but not overtly grotesque. I’d seen her too during that first barrage of visions, fussing about her stew. That was the origin of her name.

It took me a moment to spot her—a moment during which I had panicked palpitations—but she was merely on her hands and knees in the dirt behind an unusually large albiflora. She was pulling up weeds before they had a chance to sprout. It was efficient, if baffling. She did not seem particularly perturbed; she ignored me completely.

I looked across the sundial lawn toward the egression gate; I longed for bed and rest, but right now I didn’t dare. I had to locate Fruit Bat.

There upon the sundial’s face lay an entire orange rind, peeled off as one piece.

And there was the boy himself, up the ancient yew tree beside the border wall. He looked pleased that I had spotted him; he waved, leaped down, and skipped across the sundial lawn toward me. I gaped, alarmed by his bright eyes and smile, afraid of what they might mean.

He held out a slice of orange. It curled like a prawn on his brown hand.

I stared at it in perplexity. I could deliberately induce a vision by holding a grotesque’s hands; I had done so once for each of them, seizing control of the visions and ending their control over me. That was the only time I’d done it. It felt wrong, like I was spying on people.

Was Fruit Bat merely offering me an orange, or did he wish me to take his hand? The latter notion gave me chills. I said, “Thank you, Bat, but I’m not hungry now. Let’s go find your trees.”

He followed me like a puppy, past Pandowdy’s swamp, through the butterfly garden, all the way back to his home grove. I’d expected him to leap right back up into the trees, but he looked at me with wide black eyes and held the orange slice up again. “You need to stay here and not go wandering around,” I admonished. “It’s bad enough that Loud Lad does it. Do you understand?”

He gave no indication that he understood; he ate the piece of orange, gazing into the distance. I patted his fluffy cloud of hair and waited until he was up a tree before I left.