Seraphina(8)

Orma, bless his shriveled dragon heart, corrected her. “She.”

“Is it not infertile as a mule?”

My face grew so hot I half expected my hair to catch fire.

“She,” said Orma firmly, as if he himself had not made the same mistake the first time. “All humans take a gendered pronoun, irrespective of reproductive fitness.”

“We take offense otherwise,” I said through a brittle smile.

Eskar lost interest abruptly, releasing me from her gaze. Her underlings were returning from the other end of the bridge, leading saar Basind on a skittish horse. Undersecretary Eskar mounted her bay, wheeled it in a tight circle, and spurred it forward without so much as a backward glance at Orma and me. Her retinue followed.

As they passed, Basind’s reeling eye lit on me for a long moment; I felt a sharp shock of revulsion. Orma, Eskar, and the others may have learned to pass, but here was a stark reminder of what lay beneath. His was no human gaze.

I turned to Orma, who stared pensively at nothing. “That was thoroughly humiliating,” I said.

He startled. “Was it?”

“What were you thinking, telling her about me?” I said. “I may be out from under my father’s thumb, but the old rules still apply. We can’t just go telling everyone—”

“Ah,” he said, raising a slender hand to fend off my argument. “I didn’t tell her. Eskar has always known. She used to be with the Censors.”

My stomach turned; the Censors, a dragon agency accountable only to themselves, policed saarantrai for undragonlike behavior and routinely excised the brains of dragons they considered emotionally compromised. “Wonderful. So what have you done to attract the Censors’ attention this time?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. “Anyway, she’s not with the Censors anymore.”

“I thought maybe they were after you for exhibiting undue affection for me,” I said, then added mordantly: “You’d think I would have noticed something like that.”

“I bear you an appropriate interest, within accepted emotive parameters.”

That seemed like overstating it, alas.

To his credit, he knew this subject upset me. Not every saar would have cared. He squirmed, as usual not sure what to do with the information. “You will come for your lesson this week?” he said, making a verbal gesture toward the familiar, as close to comfort as he could contrive to give me.

I sighed. “Of course. And you’ll tell me what that child gave you.”

“You seem to think there’s something to tell,” he said, but his hand went involuntarily to his chest, where he’d stashed the bit of gold. I felt a stab of concern, but knew it was no good haranguing him. He would tell me when he decided to tell me.

He declined to tell me goodbye, as was his usual custom; he turned without a word and took off toward the cathedral. Its facade blazed red with the setting sun; Orma’s retreating figure made a dark hatch mark against it. I watched until he disappeared around the end of the north transept, and then I watched the space where he had vanished.

I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature. After today’s stresses, though, it weighed on me more than usual. Orma knew everything about me, but he was a dragon. On a good day, he was friend enough. On a bad day, running into his inadequacy was like tripping up the stairs. It hurt, but it felt like my own fault.

Still, he was all I had.

The only sounds were the river below me, the wind in the empty trees, and faint snatches of song, carried all the way downstream from the taverns near the music school. I listened with my arms wrapped around myself and watched the stars blink into being. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve—surely it was the wind making them water—and set off for home thinking of Orma, of everything I felt that must remain unsaid, and of every debt I owed him that could never be repaid.





Orma had saved my life three times.

When I was eight years old, Orma hired me a dragon tutor, a young female called Zeyd. My father had objected strenuously. He despised dragons, despite the fact that he was the Crown’s expert on the treaty and had even defended saarantrai in court.

I marveled at Zeyd’s peculiarities: her angularity, the unceasing tinkle of her bell, her ability to solve complex equations in her head. Of all my tutors—and I went through a battalion—she was my favorite, right up to the point where she tried to drop me off the bell tower of the cathedral.

She had lured me up the tower on the pretext of giving me a physics lesson, then quick as a thought snatched me up and held me at arm’s length over the parapet. The wind screamed in my ears. I looked down at my shoe falling, ricocheting off the gnarled heads of gargoyles, hitting the cobbles of the cathedral square.

“Why do objects fall downward? Do you know?” Zeyd had said, as pleasantly as if she’d been holding this tutorial in the nursery.

I was too terrified to answer. I lost my other shoe and barely kept my breakfast.

“There are unseen forces that act upon all of us, all the time, and they act in predictable ways. If I were to drop you from this tower”—here she shook me, and the city spun, a vortex ready to swallow me up—“your falling form would accelerate at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. So would my hat; so did your shoes. We are all pulled toward our doom in exactly the same way, by exactly the same force.”