Seraphina (18 page)

Suddenly I understood Dame Okra’s irritation with me. How easy life must be if that slender band was your only physical manifestation! And here I’d stood up in front of everybody and risked myself, when he’d barely anything to hide.

I’ll ask my true love, and I’ll hope she agrees
,

How could she not, when I’m down on my knees?

My Jill, say you will, and don’t be such a tease
.

When it’s time to eat
,

I say sweets to the sweet
,

My love, let your answer be peaches and cheese!

I finished with a flourish. Lars was decent, in mismatched riverman’s garb only slightly too small. The crowd called for more, but I was done, my rush of panicked energy spent. All that remained was to figure out how to get off my perch; looking down now, I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten up. Desperation gives you a longer leap, apparently.

A hand reached up to help me; I looked down to see the dark curls and merry eyes of Prince Lucian Kiggs.

He smiled at the sheer absurdity of me, and I could not stop myself smiling back.

I leaped down, not quite nimbly. “I was heading up to Castle Orison with the evening patrol,” said the prince. “Thought we’d stop and see what the commotion was—and the singing. That was nicely done.”

Many people had cleared out with the arrival of this small party of Guardsmen; those who remained told our tale with gusto, as if it might replace
Belondweg
, our national epic. The eponymous Brutal Earl of Apsig victimizes an innocent clod on the bridge railing! A fair maidy tries to save him, heroic townsfolk fish him out of the drink, and then—triumphal music!

Prince Lucian seemed to enjoy the tale. I was just glad I didn’t have to explain what I’d really been doing; it had seemed perfectly logical to everyone. Lars stood quietly, ignoring an officer who was attempting to question him.

The frustrated officer reported back to the prince: “He has no interest in pursuing justice for this incident, Captain Kiggs.”

“Find Earl Josef. I’ll speak to him about this. He can’t go knocking people into the river and riding off,” said Prince Lucian, waving a dismissal. His deputies departed.

The sun was beginning to set and the breeze along the river had picked up. The prince faced my shivering friend. Lars was older and a head taller, but Prince Lucian stood like he was Captain of the Queen’s Guard. Lars looked like a little boy who wanted to sink into his boots. I was amazed at how far he succeeded.

The prince spoke, his voice unexpectedly gentle: “You’re Viridius’s protégé.”

“Yes,” said Lars, mumbling as a man must who’s sunk into his footwear.

“Did you provoke the earl in some way?”

Lars shrugged and said, “I was raisedt on his estate.”

“That’s hardly a provocation, is it?” asked Prince Lucian. “Are you his serf?”

Lars hesitated. “I hev spendt more than a year and a day away from his landts. I am legally free.”

A question took root in my mind: if Lars had grown up on his estate, might Josef know Lars was half dragon? It seemed plausible, and Josef’s hostility made sense in light of his attitudes toward dragonkind. Alas, I could not ask in front of Lucian Kiggs.

Prince Lucian looked disgusted. “Maybe a man can harass his former serfs in Samsam, but that is not how we conduct ourselves here. I will speak with him.”

“I’dt rather you didt not,” said Lars. Prince Lucian opened his mouth to protest, but Lars cut him off. “I can go, yes?”

The prince waved him along. Lars returned my pencil, slightly soggy, and held my gaze for a moment before he turned to go. I wished I could have embraced him, but I felt a peculiar reluctance to do so in front of the prince. We shared a secret, Lars and I, even if Lars didn’t know it yet.

He climbed the stone steps up the Wolfstoot Bridge without a word. His broad shoulders sagged, as if under the burden of whole worlds we could not see.

“B
ut of course I might say anything, because you are quite far away just now,” said Prince Lucian, who had apparently been speaking to me for some time.

“Sorry.” I tore my eyes away from Lars and gave the prince full courtesy.

“We can dispense with some formality,” he said when I rose, his eyebrows raised in plain amusement. He put a hand to his crimson doublet, right over his heart, and said earnestly, “Right now I’m merely Captain of the Guard. Half courtesy is adequate, and you may call me Captain Kiggs—or simply Kiggs, if you will. Everyone else does.”

“Princess Glisselda calls you Lucian,” I said breezily, covering my fluster.

He gave a short laugh. “Selda’s an exception to everything, as you may have noticed. My own grandmother calls me Kiggs. Would you gainsay the Queen?”

“I wouldn’t dare,” I said, trying to echo his levity. “Not about something this important.”

“I should think not.” He gestured grandly toward the steps up the bridge. “If you’ve no objection, let us walk while we talk; I have to get back to Castle Orison.”

I followed, unsure what he wished to speak with me about, but recalling that Orma had given me a task. I put a hand to the purse at my waist, but the little lizard figurine made me anxious, as if it might pop its head out without permission.

How would this prince react if he saw it? Perhaps I could just tell him the story.

A guildsman of the town watch stood on the balustrade as Lars had done, lighting lamps in anticipation of sunset; laughing merchants dismantled their stalls. Prince—
Kiggs
strolled through the thinning market crowd, perfectly at ease among them, as if he were simply another townsman. I started up the gently sloping Royal Road, but he gestured toward a narrow street, the more direct route. The road, not wide to begin with, narrowed even further above us; the upper stories cantilevered over the street, as if the houses were leaning together to gossip. A woman on one side might have borrowed a lump of butter from her neighbor on the other without leaving home. The looming buildings squeezed the sky down to a rapidly darkening ribbon.

When the noise of the marketplace had faded and only the sound of his boots echoed up the street, Lucian Kiggs said, “I wanted to thank you for your intervention with the saarantrai the other evening.”

It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about. Dame Okra beating me with a book had rather eclipsed the other events of that day.

He continued: “No one else dared speak so plainly to Selda—not even I. I suffered the same paralysis she did, as if the problem might solve itself if we all refused to acknowledge it. But of course, Selda says you know a great deal about dragons. It seems she was right.”

“You’re very kind to say so,” I said evenly, giving no hint of the anxious knot his words produced in my chest. I did not like him associating me with dragons. He was too sharp.

“It raises questions, of course,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “Selda said your knowledge comes from reading the treaty with your father. Maybe some of it does, but surely not all. Your comfort with saarantrai—your ability to talk to them without breaking out in a cold sweat—that’s not something one gains from studying the treaty. I’ve read the treaty; it makes you wary of them, rather, because it’s as full of holes as a Ducanahan cheese.”

My anxious knot tightened. I reminded myself that the cheese of Ducana province was famously riddled with holes; he was making a simple analogy, not some veiled reference to Amaline Ducanahan, my fictional human mother.

Kiggs looked up toward the purpling sky, his hands clasped behind his back like one of my pedantic old tutors, and said, “My guess is that it has something to do with your dragon teacher. Orma, was it?”

I relaxed a little. “Indeed. I’ve known him forever; he’s practically family.”

“That makes sense. You’ve grown easy with him.”

“He’s taught me a lot about dragons,” I offered. “I ask him questions all the time; I am curious by nature.” It felt nice to be able to tell this prince something true.

The street was so steep here that it had steps; he hopped up ahead of me like a mountain sheep. Speculus lanterns hung along this block; broken mirrors behind the candles cast dazzling flecks of light onto the street and walls. Beside them hung Speculus chimes, which Kiggs set ringing. We murmured the customary words beneath the bright cacophony: “Scatter darkness, scatter silence!”

Now seemed a reasonable moment to bring up Orma’s concern, since we had just been talking about him. I opened my mouth but didn’t get any further.

“Who’s your psalter Saint?” asked the prince with no preamble.

I had been mentally arranging what I should say about Orma, so for a moment I could not answer him.

He looked back at me, his dark eyes shining in the fragmented lantern light. “You called yourself curious. We curious types tend to be children of one of three Saints. Look.” He reached into his doublet, extracting a silver medallion on a chain; it glinted in the light. “I belong to St. Clare, patron of perspicacity. You don’t appear obsessed with mystery, though, or social enough to be one of St. Willibald’s. I’m going to guess St. Capiti—the life of the mind!”

I blinked at him in astonishment. True, my psalter had fallen open to St. Yirtrudis, the heretic, but St. Capiti had been my substitute Saint. It was close enough. “How did you—”

“It’s in my nature to notice things,” he said. “Both Selda and I have noticed your intelligence.”

I suddenly found myself warm from the exertion of climbing and cold at this reminder that he was so observant. I needed to be careful. His friendliness notwithstanding, the prince and I could not be friends. I had so many things to hide, and it was in his nature to seek.

My right hand had wormed as far as it could under the binding of my left sleeve and was fingering my scaly wrist. That was exactly the sort of unconscious habit he would notice; I forced myself to stop.

Kiggs asked after my father; I said something noncommittal. He solicited my opinion of Lady Corongi’s pedagogy; I expressed a small amount of polite concern. He gave his own opinion of the matter, in blunt and unflattering terms; I kept my mouth shut.

The road flattened out, and soon we passed through the barbican of Castle Orison. The guards saluted; Kiggs inclined his head in return. I began to relax; we were almost home and this interview was surely over. We crunched across the gravel yard of Stone Court, not speaking. Kiggs paused at the steps and turned toward me with a smile. “Your mother must have been very musical.”

The box of maternal memories gave a sickening twitch in my head, as if it would have liked to answer him. I tried to get away without speaking, with just a curtsy. It came out poorly: my arms were gripped so tightly around my middle that I could barely bend.

“She was called Amaline Ducanahan, right?” he said, scrutinizing my face. “I looked her up when I was young, intrigued by your father’s mysterious first marriage, the one no one had heard of until you popped out like a cuckoo at his second. I was there. I heard you sing.”

Every part of me had turned to ice except my hammering heart and the memory box, which bucked like a colt in my mind.

“It was my first mystery: who was that singing girl, and why was Counselor Dombegh so very embarrassed when she appeared?” he said, his eyes distant with memory. His silent laugh manifested as a cloud of vapor in the air, and he shook his head, marveling at his youthful obsession. “I couldn’t let it go until I’d uncovered the truth. I may have been hoping you were illegitimate, like me, but no, everything was in order. Congratulations!”

Everything would have been in impeccable order, surely; my father’s paranoia had omitted no detail—marriage contract, birth and death certificates, letters, receipts.…

“Have you been back to Ducana province?” Kiggs asked out of nowhere.

“Why?” I’d lost the thread of his thought. I felt like a crossbow being drawn: everything he said wound the cranequin a little further.

“To see her stone. Your father had a nice one made. I didn’t go myself,” he added hastily. “I was nine years old. One of Uncle Rufus’s men had family at Trowebridge, so I asked him. He made a rubbing. I might still have it, if you’d like it.”

There was no answer I could give. I was so horrified to learn that he’d investigated my family history that I was afraid of what I might say. How close had he come? I was wound to full tension; I was dangerous now. I waved the last white flag I had: “I don’t wish to talk about my mother. Please excuse me.”

His brow furrowed in concern; he could tell I was upset, but not why. He guessed exactly wrong: “It’s hard that she left you so young. Mine did too. But she did not live in vain. What a wonderful legacy she left you!”