Seraphina (9 page)

I felt my face go hot. Prickly? Was I really?

“She’s good-hearted, anyway,” added Princess Glisselda, “which makes her Viridius’s opposite. And nearly pretty, only she does have such dreadful taste in gowns and I can’t work out what she thinks she’s doing with her hair.”

“That might be easily corrected,” said the lady-in-waiting.

I’d heard enough. I stepped through the doorway, fuming but trying not to confirm my reputation. The lady-in-waiting was half Porphyrian, judging by her dark curls and warm brown skin; she put a hand to her mouth, embarrassed at being overheard. Princess Glisselda said, “Phina! We were just talking about you!”

It is a princess’s privilege to feel no social awkwardness, ever. She smiled, gloriously unashamed; the sunlight through the windows behind her made a halo of her golden hair. I curtsied and approached the harpsichord.

Princess Glisselda rose from her window seat and flounced after me. She was fifteen, a year younger than me, which made me feel odd about teaching her; she was petite for her age, which made me feel like a gawky giantess. She loved pearl-studded brocade and was possessed of more confidence than I could imagine having. “Phina,” she chirped, “meet Lady Miliphrene. She is, like you, encumbered with an unnecessarily long name, so I call her Millie.”

I nodded acknowledgment to Millie but held my tongue about the silliness of that comment, coming from someone named Glisselda.

“I have reached a decision,” the princess announced. “I shall perform at the Treaty Eve concert, that galliard and pavano. Not Viridius’s suite: the one by Tertius.”

I had been placing music upon the stand; I paused, book in hand, weighing my next words. “The arpeggios in the Tertius were a challenge to you, if you recall—”

“Do you imply my skill is insufficient?” Glisselda lifted her chin dangerously.

“No. I merely remind you that you called Tertius a ‘poxy cankered toad’ and threw the music across the room.” Here both girls burst out laughing. I added, as gingerly as one stepping onto an unstable bridge, “If you practice and take my advice about the fingerings, you ought to be able to work it up sufficiently well.”
Sufficiently well not to embarrass yourself
, I might’ve added, but it seemed imprudent to do so.

“I want to show Viridius that Tertius played badly is better than his piddling tunes played well,” she said, wagging a finger. “Can I attain that level of petty vindictiveness?”

“Undoubtedly,” I said, and then wondered whether I should have replied so quickly. Both girls were laughing again, however, so I took it that I was safe.

Glisselda seated herself on the bench, stretched her elegant fingers, and launched into the Tertius. Viridius had once proclaimed her “as musical as a boiled cabbage”—loudly and in front of the entire court—but I’d found her diligent and interested when treated respectfully. We hammered at those arpeggios for more than an hour. Her hands were small—this wouldn’t be easy—but she neither complained nor flagged.

My stomach ended the lesson by growling. Trust my very body to be rude!

“We should let your poor teacher go to lunch,” said Millie.

“Was that your stomach?” asked the princess brightly. “I’d have sworn there was a dragon in the room. St. Ogdo preserve us, lest she decide to crunch our bones!”

I ran a tongue over my teeth, delaying until I could speak without scolding. “I know deriding dragons is something of a national sport for us Goreddis, but Ardmagar Comonot is coming soon, and I do not think he would be amused by that kind of talk.”

Saints’ dogs. I
was
prickly, even when I tried not to be. She hadn’t been exaggerating.

“Dragons are never amused by anything,” said Glisselda, arching an eyebrow.

“But she’s right,” said Millie. “Rudeness is rudeness, even if unperceived.”

Glisselda rolled her eyes. “You know what Lady Corongi would say. We must show them we’re superior and put them in their place. Dominate or be dominated. Dragons know no other way.”

That sounded to me like an extremely dangerous way to interact with dragons. I hesitated, uncertain whether it would be within bounds for me to correct Lady Corongi, Glisselda’s governess, who outranked me in every possible way.

“Why do you think they finally surrendered?” Glisselda said. “It’s because they recognized our superiority—militarily, intellectually, morally.”

“That’s what Lady Corongi says?” I said, alarmed but struggling not to show it.

“That’s what everybody says,” sniffed Glisselda. “It’s obvious. Dragons envy us; that’s why they take our shape whenever they can.”

I gaped at her. Blue St. Prue, Glisselda was going to be queen someday! She needed to understand the truth of things. “We didn’t defeat them, whatever you may have been told. Our dracomachia gave us approximate parity; they couldn’t win without taking unacceptable losses. It’s not a surrender so much as a truce.”

Glisselda wrinkled her nose. “You imply that we haven’t dominated them at all.”

“We haven’t—fortunately!” I said, rising and trying to cover my agitation by rearranging the music on the stand. “They wouldn’t stand for it; they’d bide their time until we let our guard down.”

Glisselda looked profoundly disturbed. “But if we’re weaker than they are …”

I leaned against the harpsichord. “It’s not about strength or weakness, Princess. Why do you imagine our peoples fought for so long?”

Glisselda put her hands together, as if delivering a little sermon. “Dragons hate us because we are just and favored by the Saints. Evil always seeks to destroy the good that stands against it.”

“No.” I nearly smacked the harpsichord lid but recalled myself in time, slowing my hand and tapping twice. Nevertheless, the girls stared at me round-eyed in anticipation of my astonishing opinions. I tried to moderate that with a gentle tone. “The dragons wanted these lands back. Goredd, Ninys, and Samsam used to be their hunting ground. Big game ran here—elk, aurochs, felldeer—in herds stretching to the horizon, before our kind moved in and plowed it under.”

“That was a very long time ago. Surely they can’t still miss it,” said Glisselda shrewdly. It would be unwise to make assumptions about her intelligence based on her cherubic face, I noted. Her gaze was as sharp as her cousin Lucian’s.

“Our people migrated here two thousand years ago,” I said. “That’s ten dragon generations. The herds have been extinct for about a thousand, but the dragons do indeed still feel the loss. They are confined to the mountains, where their population dwindles.”

“They can’t hunt the northern plains?” asked the princess.

“They can and do, but the northern plains are only a third the size of the united Southlands, and they’re not empty, either. The dragons compete with barbarian tribes for diminishing herds.”

“They can’t just eat barbarians?” said Glisselda.

I disliked her supercilious tone but could not say so. I traced the decorative inlay on the instrument lid, channeling my irritation into curlicues, and said: “We humans aren’t good eating—too stringy—and we’re no fun to hunt because we band together and fight back. My teacher once heard a dragon compare us to cockroaches.”

Millie wrinkled her nose, but Glisselda looked at me quizzically. Apparently she’d never even seen a cockroach. I let Millie explain; her description elicited a shriek from the princess, who demanded: “In what manner do we resemble these vermin?”

“Take it from a dragon’s perspective: we’re everywhere, we can hide easily, we reproduce comparatively quickly, we spoil their hunting, and we smell bad.”

The girls scowled. “We do not either smell bad!” said Millie.

“To them we do.” This analogy was proving particularly apt, so I took it to its logical conclusion. “Imagine you’ve got a terrible infestation. What do you do?”

“Kill them!” cried both girls together.

“But what if the roaches were intelligent and worked together, using a roachly dracomachia against us? What if they had a real chance of winning?”

Glisselda squirmed with horror, but Millie said, “Make a truce with them. Let them have certain houses to themselves if they leave the ones we’re living in alone.”

“We wouldn’t mean it, though,” said the princess grimly, drumming her fingers on top of the harpsichord. “We’d pretend to make peace, then set their houses on fire.”

I laughed; she’d surprised me. “Remind me not to earn your enmity, Princess. But if the cockroaches were dominating us, we wouldn’t give in? We’d trick them?”

“Absolutely.”

“All right. Can you think of anything—anything at all—that the cockroaches could do to persuade us that we should let them live?”

The girls exchanged a skeptical look. “Cockroaches can only scuttle horridly and spoil your food,” said Millie, hugging herself. She’d had experience, I gathered.

Glisselda, however, was thinking hard, the tip of her tongue protruding from her mouth. “What if they held court or built cathedrals or wrote poetry?”

“Would you let them live?”

“I might. How ugly are they, though, really?”

I grinned. “Too late: you’ve noticed they’re interesting. You understand them when they talk. What if you could become one, for short periods of time?”

They writhed with laughter. I felt they’d understood, but I underscored my point: “Our survival depends not on being superior but on being sufficiently interesting.”

“Tell me,” said Glisselda, borrowing Millie’s embroidered handkerchief to wipe her eyes, “how does a mere assistant music mistress know so much about dragons?”

I met her gaze, clamping down on the tremor in my voice. “My father is the Crown’s legal expert on Comonot’s Treaty. He used to read it to me as a bedtime story.”

That didn’t adequately explain my knowledge, I realized, but the girls found the idea so hilarious that they questioned me no further. I smiled along with them, but felt a pang for my poor, sad papa. He’d been so desperate to understand where he stood, legally, for unwittingly marrying a saarantras.

As the saying went, he was neck deep in St. Vitt’s spit. We both were. I curtsied and took my leave quickly, lest this Heavenly saliva somehow become apparent to the girls. My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.

I
t was, as always, a relief to retire to my rooms for the evening. I had practicing to do, a book on Zibou sinus-song I’d been dying to read, and of course a number of questions for my uncle. I seated myself at the spinet first and played a peculiar dissonant chord, my signal to Orma that I needed to talk. “Good evening, Phina,” boomed the basso kitten.

“Fruit Bat has started wandering around the garden. I’m concerned that—”

“Stop,” said Orma. “Yesterday you were offended when I didn’t greet you, but today you leap straight in. I want credit for saying ‘Good evening.’ ”

I laughed. “You’re credited. But listen: I’m having a problem.”

“I’m sure you are,” he said, “but I have a student in five minutes. Is it a five-minute problem?”

“I doubt it.” I considered. “Can I come to you at St. Ida’s? I’m not comfortable discussing this through the spinet anyway.”

“As you wish,” he said. “Give me at least an hour, though. This student is particularly incapable.”

As I was bundling up, I realized I had done nothing about Basind’s blood on my cloak. The dragon’s blood had long since dried but was still shiny as ever. I slapped at it, causing a blizzard of little silver flakes. I beat as much of the stain out as I could and swept the gleaming detritus into the fireplace.

I took the Royal Road, which descended in wide, graceful curves. The streets were dark and silent, lit only by a quarter moon, lighted windows, and occasional Speculus lanterns that had been set out early. Down near the river, the air was sweet with woodsmoke and rich with someone’s garlicky dinner, then dense with the reek of a backyard cesspit. Or maybe offal—was I near a butcher’s?

A figure stepped out of the shadows and into the open street ahead of me. I froze, my heart pounding. It shambled toward me, and the choking odor grew stronger. I coughed at the stench and reached for the little knife I kept sheathed in the hem of my cloak.

The dark figure raised its left hand toward me, palm up as if to beg. It raised a second left hand and said, “Thlu-thlu-thluuu?” A wisp of blue flame played about its beaky mouth as it spoke, illuminating its features for a moment: slick scaly skin, spiky crest like a Zibou iguana, bulging conical eyeholes that swiveled independently of each other.

I exhaled. It was nothing but a panhandling quigutl.

The quigutl were a second species of dragon, much smaller than the saar. This one was about my height, tall for a quig. The quigutl could not change shape. They lived alongside saar in the mountains, squeezing into the cracks and crevasses of the larger dragons’ dens, living on garbage and using their four hands to build intricate, minuscule devices, such as the earrings the saarantrai all wore. Quigs had been included in Comonot’s Treaty out of politeness; no one had anticipated that so many would come south, or that they’d find the nooks and crannies—and garbage—of the city so much to their liking.