Seraphina (37 page)

Once the girls had shooed him out, Glisselda grew grave. “How did it happen?”

The spirits seemed finally to have reached my head; between brandy and blood loss and a dearth of supper, the room began to swim before my eyes. As much as I wanted to lie—because how could I tell Glisselda that her own mother cut me?—I could come up with no plausible alternative story. I would omit Princess Dionne, at least. “You’ve heard the rumor that I am a … a saar?”

Heaven forfend that she had heard the other rumor.

“It was vicious,” said the princess, “and evidently unfounded.”

“I hadn’t been bled yet. Some zealous, uh, vigilantes decided to do it for me.”

Glisselda leaped to her feet, seething. “Isn’t this exactly what we hoped to avoid?”

“It is, Princess,” said Millie, shaking her head and putting the kettle on the hearth.

“Seraphina, I’m appalled it came to this,” said the princess. “My original idea—”

“And Lucian’s,” said Millie, apparently allowed to interrupt the second heir.

Glisselda flashed her an irritated look: “One of his Porphyrian philosophers helped too, if you’re going to be that way about it.
The
idea was that we should all be jabbed, everyone, from Grandmamma herself to the lowliest scullion, noble with common, human with dragon. It would be fair.

“But several nobles and dignitaries argued vociferously against it. ‘We should be exempt! We are people of quality!’ In the end, only courtiers of less than two years’ tenure and commoners must get tested—and you see the result, my Millie? Vigilantism, and that bastard Apsig gets off without a scratch.”

Glisselda ranted on; I couldn’t focus on it. The room swayed like the deck of a ship. I was thoroughly inebriated now; I suffered the illusion that my head might fall off, for it seemed too heavy to support. Someone spoke, but it took some minutes for the words to penetrate my consciousness: “We ought to at least change her out of that bloody gown before Dame Okra comes back.”

“No, no,” I said, or intended to. Intention and action were curiously blurred, and judgment seemed to have retired for the night entirely. Millie had a tall privacy screen, painted with weeping willows and water lilies, and I let myself be persuaded behind it. “All right, but just the top gown needs replacing,” I said, my words floating over the screen like vapid, ineffective bubbles.

“You bled fearfully,” called Millie. “Surely it soaked straight through?”

“No one can see what’s beneath …,” I began, fuzzily.

Glisselda popped her head around the edge of the lacquered screen; I gasped and nearly pitched over, even though I was still covered. “I shall know,” she chirped. “Millie! Top and bottom layers!”

Millie produced a chemise of the softest, whitest linen I had ever touched. I wanted to wear it, which addled my judgment still further. I began to undress. Across the room, the girls bickered over colors for the gown; apparently accounting for my complexion and my hair required complicated algebra. I giggled, and began explaining how to solve a quadratic complexion equation, even though I couldn’t quite remember.

I had removed all my clothing—and my good sense along with it—when Glisselda popped her head around the end of the screen behind me, saying, “Hold this scarlet up to your chin and let’s see—oh!”

Her cry snapped the world back into hard focus for a moment. I whirled to face her, holding Millie’s chemise up in front of me like a shield, but she’d gone. The room reeled. She’d seen the band of silver scales across my back. I clapped a hand to my mouth to stop myself screaming.

They whispered together urgently, Glisselda’s voice squeaky with panic, Millie’s calm and reasonable. I yanked Millie’s chemise over my head, almost tearing a shoulder seam in my rush because I couldn’t work out where all my limbs were or how to move them. I curled up on the floor, balling up my own gown, pressing it to my mouth because I was breathing too hard. I waited in agony for either of them to say something.

“Phina?” said Princess Glisselda at long last, rapping upon the screen as if it were a door. “Was that a … a Saint’s burthen?”

My foggy brain couldn’t parse her words. What was a Saint’s burthen? My reflex was to answer no, but mercifully I managed to hold that in check. She was offering me a way out, if only I could make sense of it.

I had managed to stay silent. She couldn’t hear the tears coursing down my cheeks. I took a deep breath and said shakily, “Is what a Saint’s burthen?”

“That silver girdle you wear.”

I thanked all the Saints in Heaven, and their dogs. She had not believed her own eyes. How crazy was that, to think you’d seen dragon scales sprouting out of human flesh? It must have been something, anything else. I coughed, to clear the tears out of my voice, and said as casually as I could, “Oh, that. Yes. Saint’s burthen.”

“For which Saint?”

Which Saint … which Saint …
I could not think of a single Saint. Luckily, Millie piped up, “My aunt wore an iron anklet for St. Vitt. It worked: she never doubted again.”

I closed my eyes; it was easier to produce coherent thoughts without vision distracting me. I injected some truth: “At my blessing day, my patron was St. Yirtrudis.”

“The heretic?” They both gasped. No one ever seemed to know what Yirtrudis’s heresy had consisted of, but it didn’t seem to matter. The very idea of heresy was dreadful enough.

“The priest told us Heaven intended St. Capiti,” I continued, “but from that day to this, I’ve had to wear a silver girdle to, uh, deflect heresy.”

This impressed and apparently satisfied them. They handed me a gown; scarlet had won the argument. They did my hair and exclaimed at how lovely I was when I bothered to try. “Keep the gown,” insisted Millie. “Wear it on Treaty Eve.”

“You are all generosity, my Millie!” said Glisselda, pinching Millie’s ear proudly, as if she’d invented her lady-in-waiting herself.

A rap at the door was Dame Okra, who stood on tiptoe to peer past Millie’s shoulder. “She’s all patched up? I’ve found just the person to whisk her away to safety—after which I require a word with you, Infanta.”

Millie and the princess helped me to my feet. “I’m so sorry,” Glisselda whispered warmly in my ear. I looked down at her. Everything seemed shinier viewed through three brandy glasses, but the glittering at the corners of her eyes was real enough.

Dame Okra ushered me out the door, toward my waiting father.

T
he chill wind in the open sledge did little to sober me up. My father drove, seated close, sharing the lap rug and foot box. My head bobbed unsteadily; he let me rest it on his shoulder. If I were to weep, surely the tears would freeze upon my cheeks.

“I’m sorry, Papa. I tried to keep to myself; I didn’t mean it to go wrong,” I muttered into his dark wool cloak. He said nothing, which I found inexplicably encouraging. I gestured grandly at the dark city, a suitable backdrop to my drunken sense of epic tragic destiny. “But they’re sending Orma away, which is my fault, and I played my flute so beautifully that I fell in love with everyone and now I want everything. And I can’t have it. And I’m ashamed to be running away.”

“You’re not running away,” said Papa, taking the reins in one gloved hand and hesitantly patting my knee with the other. “At least, you need not decide until morning.”

“You’re not going to lock me up for good?” I said, on the verge of blubbering. Some sober part of my brain seemed to observe everything I did, clucking disdainfully, informing me that I ought to be embarrassed, yet making no move to stop me.

Papa ignored that comment, which was probably wise. Snow spangled his gray lawyer’s cap; little droplets stuck to his brows and lashes. He spoke in measured tones. “Did you fall in love with anyone specific, or simply with the things you cannot have?”

“Both,” I said, “and Lucian Kiggs.”

“Ah.” For some time the only sounds were of harness bells, horses snorting in the cold, and packed snow creaking under the sledge runners. My head waxed heavy.

I jerked awake. My father was speaking: “… that she never trusted me. That cut more deeply than anything else. She believed I would stop loving her if I knew the truth. All the gambles she took, and she never took the one that mattered most. One in a thousand is better odds than zero, but zero is what she settled for. Because how could I love her if I couldn’t see her? Whom did I love, exactly?”

I nodded, and jerked awake again. The air was alive, bright with snowflakes.

He said: “… time to mull it over, and I am no longer afraid. I am sickened that you inherited her collapsing house of deceit, and that instead of tearing it down, I shored it up with more deceit. What price must be paid is mine to pay. If you are afraid on your own behalf, fair enough, but do not fear for me—”

Then he was shaking my shoulder lightly. “Seraphina. We’re home.”

I threw my arms around him. He lifted me down and led me through the lighted doorway.

The next morning, I lay a long time, staring at the ceiling of my old room, wondering whether I’d imagined most of what he’d said. That didn’t sound like a conversation I could have had with my father, even if we’d both been drunk as lords.

The sun was obnoxiously bright and my mouth tasted like death, but I didn’t feel bad otherwise. I peeked at my garden, which I’d neglected last night, but everyone was peaceful; even Fruit Bat was up a tree, not demanding my attention. I rose and dressed in an old gown I found in my wardrobe; the scarlet I’d arrived in was too fine for everyday. I descended to the kitchen. Laughter and the smell of morning bread drifted toward me up the corridor. I paused, my hand upon the kitchen door, discerning their voices one by one, dreading to step into that warm room and freeze it up.

I took a deep breath and opened the door. For the merest moment, before my presence was noticed, I drank in the cozy domestic scene: the roaring hearth, the three fine bluestone platters hung above the mantelpiece, little window altars to St. Loola and St. Yane and a new one to St. Abaster, hanging herbs and strings of onions. My stepmother, up to her elbows in the kneading trough, looked up at the sound of the door and paled. At the heavy kitchen table, Tessie and Jeanne, the twins, had been peeling apples; they froze, silent and staring, Tessie with a length of peel dangling from her mouth like a green tongue. My little half brothers, Paul and Ned, looked to their mother uncertainly.

I was a stranger in this family. I always had been.

Anne-Marie wiped her hands on her apron and tried to smile. “Seraphina. Welcome. If you’re looking for your father, he’s already left for the palace.” Her brow crumpled in confusion. “You came from there? You’d have passed him on the way.”

I could not remember anyone meeting us at the door last night, now that I thought of it. Had my father sneaked me into the house and upstairs without telling her? That sounded more like Papa than a conversation about love, lies, and fear.

I tried to smile. It was an unspoken covenant with my stepmother: we both tried. “I—in fact, I’m home to retrieve something. From my, uh, room. That I forgot to take with me, and need.”

Anne-Marie nodded eagerly.
Yes, yes, good
. The awkward stepdaughter was leaving soon. “Please, go on up. This is still your house.”

I drifted back upstairs, lightly dazed, wishing I had told her the truth, because what was I going to do for breakfast now? Astonishingly, my coin purse had made the whole journey and wasn’t languishing on the floor of Millie’s room. I’d buy myself a bun somewhere, or … my heart leaped. I could see Orma! He had hoped I’d come see him today. That was a plan, at least. I would surprise Orma before he disappeared for good.

I pushed that latter thought aside.

I packed the scarlet gown carefully into a satchel and made up the bed. I could never fluff the tick like Anne-Marie; she was going to figure out that I’d slept here. Ah, well, let her. It was Papa’s to explain.

Anne-Marie required no farewells. She knew what I was, and it seemed to put her at ease when I behaved like a thoughtless saar. I opened the front door ready to head into the snowy city when there came a pattering of slippered feet behind me. I turned to see my half sisters rushing up. “Did you find what you came for?” asked Jeanne, her pale brow wrinkled in concern. “Because Papa said to give you this.”