Seraphina Read Free Page A

a peculiarity of transformation, like their silver blood. Orma didn’t need facial hair to pass; I think he just liked the way it looked.
    He waved his hat at me, as if there were any chance I didn’t see him. “You still rush your glissandi, but you seem finally to have mastered that uvular flutter,” he said, dispensing with any greeting. Dragons never see the point.
    “It’s nice to see you too,” I said, then regretted the sarcasm, even though he wouldn’t notice it. “I’m glad you liked it.”
    He squinted and cocked his head to one side, as he did when he knew he was missing some crucial detail but couldn’t work out what. “You think I should have said hello first,” he hazarded.
    I sighed. “I think I’m too tired to care that I fell short of technical perfection.”
    “This is precisely what I never comprehend,” he said, shaking his felt hat at me. He seemed to have forgotten it was for wearing. “Had you played perfectly—like a saar might have—you would not have affected your listeners so. People wept, and not because you sometimes hum while you play.”
    “You’re joking,” I said, mortified.
    “It created an interesting effect. Most of the time it was harmonious, fourths and fifths, but every now and then you’d burst into a dissonant seventh. Why?”
    “I didn’t know I was doing it!”
    Orma looked down abruptly. A young urchin, her mourning tunic white in spirit if not in fact, tugged urgently at the hem of Orma’s short cloak. “I’m attracting small children,” Orma muttered, twisting his hat in his hands. “Shoo it away, will you?”
    “Sir?” said the girl. “This is for you.” She wormed her small hand into his.
    I caught a glint of gold. What lunacy was this, a beggar giving Orma coin?
    Orma stared at the object in his hand. “Was there some message with it?” His voice caught when he spoke, and I felt a chill. That was an emotion, clear as day. I’d never heard the like from him.
    “ ‘The token is the message,’ ” recited the girl.
    Orma raised his head and looked all around us, sweeping his eyes from the great doors of the cathedral, down the steps, over the peopled plaza, across to Cathedral Bridge, along the river, and back. I looked too, reflexively, having no notion what we were looking for. The sinking sun blazed above the rooftops; a crowd gathered on the bridge; the garish Comonot Clock across the square pointed to Ten Days; bare trees along the river tossed in the breeze. I saw nothing else.
    I looked back at Orma, who now searched the ground as if he’d dropped something. I assumed he’d lost the coin, but no. “Where did she go?” he asked.
    The girl was gone.
    “What did she give you?” I asked.
    He did not reply, carefully tucking the object into the front of his woolen mourning doublet, flashing me a glimpse of the silk shirt beneath.
    “Fine,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”
    He looked puzzled. “I have no intention of telling you.”
    I inhaled slowly, trying not to be cross with him. At that very moment a commotion broke out on Cathedral Bridge. I looked toward the shouting, and my stomach dropped: six thugs with black feathers in their caps—Sons of St. Ogdo—had formed a semicircle around some poor fellow to one side of the bridge. People streamed toward the noise from all directions.
    “Let’s go back inside until this blows over,” I said, grabbing for Orma’s sleeve a second too late. He’d noticed what was happening and was rapidly descending the steps toward the mob.
    The fellow pinned against the bridge railings was a dragon. I’d discerned the silver glint of his bell all the way from the steps of the cathedral. Orma shouldered his way through the crowd. I tried to stay close, but someone shoved me and I stumbled into open space at the front of the throng, where the Sons of St. Ogdo brandished truncheons at the cringing saarantras. They recited from St. Ogdo’s Malediction Against the Beast: “ ‘Cursed be thine