Seraphina: Chapters 8–13

Seeing Glisselda so cowed by real, live saarantrai had only increased my impetus to speak, but now I felt cowed myself.

She stood close enough that I could see her makeup condensing in the creases of her face and smell her cloying Ninysh perfume.

“Why are you spying on me?”
“Nggblaah!” I said, not my most cogent explanation, but I was unaccustomed to speaking with my face covered in blood.

“I trust you take after him in discretion. Tell no one.”

“A very, very short-range predictive skill. It is essentially an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.”

A dearth of sleep and a bruised, puffy nose made for a crabby music mistress, which made the days drag by in turn.

It was good to be an anonymous face in the crowd, feasting my eyes upon the glorious mundane.

This so-called treaty—this dishrag!—is but a ruse. They lull us to sleep with peace; they trick our Queen into banishing the knights, who were once the pride of all the Southlands; and they wait until we are utterly helpless.

Why should the worms fight us? They’ve already sent a stinking quig vanguard, burrowing into the rotten heart of this city. Now they walk in, forty years on, invited by the Queen herself.

I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and then it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons.

My paltry flute had made the building ring, but that thin sound had risen like candle smoke; this was a conflagration.

Above, around, and behind it, pipes had been fitted in neat rows, making a palisade fortress of chanters; it looked like the unnatural offspring of a bagpipe and a...a dragon.

The surrounding bombast was all a bluff.

He released the last chord like a boulder off a trebuchet.

A bevy of monks who’d been hiding in nearby chapels like timid mice scurried out and accosted the performer in whispers: “Very nice. Glad it works. That’s enough testing; we’re about to have service.”

Would all my grotesques, the entire freakish diaspora of half-dragons, walk into my life one by one?

Would I spot Gargoyella busking on a street corner and Finch in the palace kitchens, turning the spits?

His Goreddi was better than my Samsamese, but vilishparaiah sounded like a cognate. The “paraiah” part did, anyway.

Everyone took off running then—some for the river’s edge, some to put as much distance between themselves and this fracas as possible.

The vagabond sun winks down through the trees,
While lilacs, like memories, waft on the breeze

The eponymous Brutal Earl of Apsig victimizes an innocent clod on the bridge railing!

“I wouldn’t dare,” I said, trying to echo his levity.

“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!”

He solicited my opinion of Lady Corongi's pedagogy; I expressed a small amount of polite concern.

Everyone would think I was giving the princess mad ideas. I'd made the cockroach analogy, yes, but the house of burning bugs—to say nothing of the peace being a ruse!—was her own extrapolation.

If even a few of them refused to accept it anymore, what recourse had we but the help of other dragons?

“Twenty years underground—are the old codgers even sane?” said Guntard around a mouthful of blancmange.

They ate bread and root vegetables and drank only barley water, like abstemious monks or certain austere Samsamese.

I referred everyone to the schedule posted on the rehearsal room door, handed my trencher to the little dogs under the table, and rose to take my leave.

Seraphina Dombegh, daughter of the eminent lawyer Claude Dombegh, the Crown’s expert on Comonot’s Treaty.

He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me.

“Have some respect!” he blustered through his mustache.

He was dressed like a peasant, tunic, clogs, grubbiness, and all, but his mien was that of a well-bred man.

Sir Karal attempted to preempt my next question: “We’ll never tell you where our brothers are hiding!”

“Don’t shrug off intuition so blithely! I advise my men to notice gut reactions. Of course, they were wrong about you.”

He did not know the truth of me, yet he had perceived something true about me that no one else had ever noticed. And in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—he believed me good, believed me worth taking seriously, and his belief, for one vertiginous moment, made me want to be better than I was.

“There’s more to you than meets the eye. I’ve observed that more than once. Which of the Porphyrian philosophers do you favor?” It was such a non sequitur that I nearly laughed, but he kept talking, finally at ease with me again.

“That morose old twig!” cried Kiggs, slapping his leg.

“He takes it too far. If he had his way, we’d all be nothing but disembodied minds, floating and ephemeral, completely disconnected from the matter of this world.”

I looked behind me; there stood one of my musicians, the scrawny sackbutist whose name I never remembered, who had apparently been passing by and spotted me looking catatonic.