Seraphina

Seraphina Read Free

Book: Seraphina Read Free
Author: Rachel Hartman
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or run away. I took a deep breath to calm myself. “Thank you, but I can’t,” I said, peeling his hand off me, hoping he wouldn’t be offended.
    His expression said he was, a little.
    It wasn’t his fault; he assumed I was a normal person, whose arm might be touched with impunity. I wanted so much to make friends at this job, but a reminder always followed, like night after day: I could never let my guard down completely.
    I turned toward the quire to fetch my cloak; Guntard shuffled off to do my bidding. Behind me, the old man cried, “Lady, wait! Abdo has to coming all this way, just for meeting you!”
    I kept my eyes straight ahead, ducking up the steps and out of his line of sight.
    The monks had finished singing the Departure and begun it again, but the nave was still half full; no one seemed to want to leave. Prince Rufus had been popular. I had barely known him, but he had spoken kindly, a sparkle in his eyes, when Viridius introduced me. He’d sparkled at half the city, to gauge by the loitering citizens, speaking in hushed voices and shaking their heads in disbelief.
    Rufus had been murdered while hunting, and the Queen’s Guard had found no clues as to who’d done it. The missing head would suggest dragons, to some. I imagined the saarantrai who attended the funeral were only too aware of this. We had only ten days before the Ardmagar arrived, and fourteen days until the anniversary of the treaty. If a dragon had killed Prince Rufus, that was some spectacularly unfortunate timing. Our citizens were jumpy enough about dragonkind already.
    I started down the south aisle, but the southern door was blocked by construction. A jumble of wooden and metal pipes took up half the floor. I continued down the nave toward the great doors, keeping an eye out lest my father ambush me from behind a column.
    “Thank you!” cried an elderly lady-in-waiting as I passed. She put her hands to her heart. “I have never been so moved.”
    I gave half courtesy as I walked past, but her enthusiasm attracted other nearby courtiers. “Transcendent!” I heard, and “Sublime!” I nodded graciously and tried to smile as I dodged the hands that reached for mine. I edged my way out of the crowd, my smile feeling as stiff and hollow as a saarantras’s.
    I put up the hood of my cloak as I passed a cluster of citizens in homespun white tunics. “I’ve buried more people than I can count—sit they all at Heaven’s table,” declaimed a large guildsman with a white felt hat jammed onto his head, “but I never seen the Heavenly Stair until today.”
    “I never heard nobody play like that. It weren’t quite womanly, do you think?”
    “She’s a foreigner, maybe.” They laughed.
    I wrapped my arms tightly around myself and quickened my pace toward the great doors, kissing my knuckle toward Heaven because that is what one does when exiting the cathedral, even when one is … me.
    I burst out into the wan afternoon light, filling my lungs with cold, clean air, feeling my tension dissipate. The winter sky was a blinding blue; departing mourners skittered around like leaves in the bitter wind.
    Only then did I notice the dragon waiting for me on the cathedral steps, flashing me his best facsimile of a proper human smile. No one in the world could have found Orma’s strained expression heartwarming but me.

O rma had a scholar’s exemption from the bell, so few people ever realized he was a dragon. He had his quirks, certainly: he never laughed; he had little comprehension of fashion, manners, or art; he had a taste for difficult mathematics and fabrics that didn’t itch. Another saarantras would have known him by smell, but few humans had a keen enough nose to detect saar, or the knowledge to recognize what they were smelling. To the rest of Goredd, he was just a man: tall, spare, bearded, and bespectacled.
    The beard was false; I pulled it off once when I was a baby. Male saarantrai could not grow beards under their own power,

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