Seraphina: Chapters 24–37

I will do exactly what is required of me by law. I am caught, and I am chastened, and there is no other alternative.

I sat there, stunned, trying to work out who could have said all these things. Kiggs might have, but I was unwilling to believe him so spiteful. No, unwilling was too tepid: it was unthinkable.

There were only two this morning, a pasty male and short-haired female, lowly amanuenses who had not gone hunting Imlann, but were left behind to run the embassy offices.

“I just had a day of rest. Two, if being beset by dragons counts as rest.”

Here were flying buttresses and rose windows of music; here columns and vaulting, more prosaic structural elements; and all of it in service to a unified purpose, to clarifying and perfecting the majestic space inside, a soaring expanse as awe-inspiring as the architecture that bounded it.

She glanced toward the grimy troglodytes behind me and wrinkled her powdered nose in distaste.

My foggy brain couldn’t parse her words.

Astonishingly, my coin purse had made the whole journey and wasn’t languishing on the floor of Millie’s room.

The Golden Plays stretched the hagiographies all round because the fact was, no one really knew. The Lives of the Saints contained many contradictions; the psalter’s poems made things no clearer, and then there was the statuary.

It was Abdo, in loose trousers of green sateen, his bare arms snaking sinuously against the winter sky.

I balked when I saw her—thinking of Kiggs, feeling her dyspeptic glare as criticism—but I kissed my knuckle respectfully and focused on my uncle.

“The peace is not a ruse,” he said. “It is not some ploy to lull Goredd into false complacency until such time as dragonkind regains a clear superiority of—”

“You’re having trysts in roadside shrines.”

I bawled like a colicky baby.

There must have been a crypt under the shrine, as sometimes happened; the crypt would surely connect with the great warren of tunnels under the city.

Her eyes shone a brilliant unearthly blue, the whites a glaring contrast to her burnished face.

I heard voices and the scuffle of feet rushing up the apse toward us; the din of our brief battle had not gone unnoted.

Kiggs put his hands on his hips and wandered across the room, pretending to examine the framed calligraphic rendering of St. Gobnait’s benedictio hung between the bookcases.

He had duties and obligations and an overweening need to do the right thing.

Glisselda placed herself firmly between us, giving an arm to each, chattering away as was her wont.

“All right,” I said, with some apprehension.

“I spent that many years thinking I was alone. Then you prance into my life, nearly giving me a paroxysm, and now you deign to tell me there are more. How many are there?”

The circles opened, dancers spinning off tangentially, revealing Abdo in the center, in a bright green tunic and trousers, his feet bare, his arms undulating.

He finally convinced the old man to go, which I found astonishing. He was ten, maybe eleven years old, but the old man was deferential.

There Dame Okra Carmine pulled on Comonot’s arm, preventing him from going anywhere, while bemused guards hesitated nearby, unsure whose side to take.

“Ardmagar,” I said, deeply disturbed that he had mentioned my maternal memory so cavalierly, “please just humor us in this matter.”

“I did until his name popped up just now!” he cried, the stress of the evening overriding his usual circumspection.

I called and waved; he darted straight across the dance floor toward us, scattering and confounding the dancers.

I turned; she stood on a stony outcrop, looking surprisingly regal as the sky turned pink and gold behind her.

Kiggs did as he was told without complaint. I was astonished by his alacrity until I saw with my own eyes what he had remembered: it was Lady Corongi’s gown.

Failure to comply will be tantamount to an act of war.

Every one of my grotesques engaged in idiosyncratic behaviors.

They’d have learned of the half-dragons eventually and accused us of duplicity.

“What are you?” said the Ardmagar, an unexpected roughness in his voice. “Not a depraved maniac. You are known in the north as a dispassionate interpreter of the treaty—you realize that? You’ve defended dragons in court when no one else would do it; don’t imagine we haven’t noticed. And yet it was you who lured our daughter away.”

I’m pardoning Orma—not that the Censors will obey the edicts of an exiled Ardmagar.

“Let this signify my submission to your tutelage, since I doubt you would agree to bite the back of my neck. You are my teacher. I will listen, and I will try to learn.”

I looked askance at him. “What were you two—”

She handed a folded letter to a herald, a particularly vociferous fellow, whose voice rang out clearly over the hushed crowd.

...it was full of books, pens, palimpsests, geodes and lenses, antique caskets, drawings.

“I always saw the truth in you, however much you prevaricated, even as you lied right to my face. I glimpsed the very heart of you, clear as sunlight, and it was something extraordinary.”