When I was thirteen, I almost made a friend.
In those days, after Orma became my tutor, I divided my time between St. Ida’s and my own bedchamber. Anne-Marie never tried to make me feel ill-at-ease in what was, ostensibly, my own home, though as a child I wasn’t always aware of that. Looking back with the maturity of adulthood, I can see that she tried her best and was not, as I sometimes fancied, a wicked stepmother from a fairy tale. She was a woman who had no idea what she was marrying into, raised to be pious, saturated in the millenia-old fear of dragons that a few decades of peace could hardly chip away at. Many women would have been much worse, and she was never cruel. She never tried to discipline me or banished me to my room. And yet her world seemed to fill the house and crowd me out until the only space for me was that one chamber. Meals were silent, or, as the children came and grew, silence papered over with progressive loudness, filled up with the shrieks and laughter of small children. Sometimes I found myself looking at my half-siblings as Orma looked at me: baffled by a foreign species. I felt certain I had never flung mashed peas across the table or giggled so much that I couldn’t finish my milk. Selda says everyone feels like that, unable to believe they were ever so small and open and uncontrollable, but I truly don’t believe I ever was. The one lesson I had absorbed as a child, an armor so solid that it almost completely smothered my true nature--a performer to the core--was to not draw attention to myself, to be certain always of who was watching me and what they saw. Catapulting peas had no place in my neverending endeavor to blend into the background.
I was as sensitive, at least, as any other child--I sensed that I seemed to have no place in my father’s house, but as I grew older it became my dominant reality. There was the household and there was me, who moved through it as a ghost might, touching nothing and never being touched, but chilling the air around me till it melted the warmth of domesticity. There were no articulated rules keeping me from the busy kitchen during the day or the cozy parlor after dinner. But when I was there, I felt like a child with her face pressed up against the glass of the windows of other people's’ lives, and Anne-Marie was all too aware that I was standing there staring, gauche as Orma when he watched worship in the cathedral. Anne-Marie never relaxed when I was around, and though my half-siblings should have been used to me, having shared a home with me their whole lives, they picked up on their mother’s wariness and reflected it. Children, as I said, are sensitive.
I did not enjoying Anne-Marie watching me always out of the corner of her eye as though I might sprout wings and belch fire at any moment. I couldn’t have verbalized it at the time, but it was exhausting. And so I spent most of my time at home in my chamber. I played my flute, my oud, the small spinet pushed up under the window. Anne-Marie never complained when I played the same sonata over and over, trying to master the arpeggios. I read a great deal of philosophy appropriated from my father’s study or musical theory provided by Orma, who had never acknowledged St. Ida’s rule that the texts were to stay in the library unless a scholar was given special permission to remove one. I lay on the colorful quilt on top of my bed and traced the vine-and-heart knotwork painted on the headboard with my toes and tried not to think of my mother. I polished my flute and restrung my oud and tuned and re-tuned my spinet to see what kind of sounds it could make. I took care of my scales and tended my garden. I practiced meditation. And when I left the house, I went only to St. Ida’s and spoke only with Orma.
Having seen more of the world, I know now that I had little to complain about. My life was not exciting, but neither was it deprived. Though, at that age, lack of excitement felt like deprivation. And so did lack of friendship. For a while after Annabella, I convinced myself that it wasn’t. But later, when Kiggs and Selda, Viridius and Lars and Abdo broke through, I could no longer deny that I was lying to myself. I was as hungry for friendship as I was for music.
* * *
It was late fall, leaf-scattered and frost-tinged, when a new family moved into the house behind ours. The house had stood empty since the elderly widow who had lived there for fifty years died, so long that I had forgotten that it was a potential abode for some stranger. The house backed up against ours, our back gardens separated by a faded blue gate, and from my bedchamber window, I could see clearly its garden and every window on the back side of the house. I watched with only marginal interest the bustling of moving in as I picked out idle scales on my spinet. A chill came off the glass of the window, and in the grey day, the furniture being carried inside and curtains being hung were almost vulgar in their brightness: a red cabinet lugged between two men, a yellow chair on the shoulder of another, a Porphyrian rug shaken out a window. I made note of the fashionable shade of green of the curtains in what was probably the dining room, and then I went to St. Ida’s and forgot all about the new neighbors. They didn’t have anything to do with me.
A few mornings later, I emerged from the garderobe and into the morning cold. My breath hung like fog in front of my face, and I wrapped the shawl I’d grabbed off a hook by the back door more tightly around me, hurrying towards the house.
The voice that stopped me was silver as the frost, but without the chill. “Hello there.”
I turned to see a girl looking at me over the top of the blue gate. She was about my age--probably a year or two older--with curls so light they were almost white. She wasn’t pretty, exactly, but she had a daintiness and the kind of dress that would fool men into thinking she was, and a face that was open and pleasant. That openness bit like a knife. Looking at her, I saw all I could never be. “Hello,” I said, and ducked my head and turned back to the house.
“Are you Seraphina? I’m Annabella.”
I was so surprised that she knew my name that I turned back around. Though I usually kept my expression as bland as possible, it was early, my mind still groggy, and my surprise must have shown on my face because she said, “The twins told me. The funniest twins I’ve ever seen--they don’t look anything alike. There were two old men--cheesemakers--who lived around the corner from our house in Munnville, and they were twins. They looked so alike that no one could ever tell them apart and everyone called them Georg-or-Pietr and oh, it made them so mad! But they looked even more alike when they were angry.” She laughed, an incongruous sound in the stillness of the morning.
I hesitated, unsure of either how to answer or excuse myself without being unpardonably rude. I had to be rude so often that I tried to be polite whenever I could, though I often felt as alien as Orma did, following the rules of politeness. They sometimes seemed like a role I had memorized, not something that came naturally like they seemed to for other people.
“Tessie says you’re thirteen. I’m fourteen--I’ll be fifteen in the spring. My brother Luka is thirteen, but you wouldn’t like him. He still teases girls and pulls their hair--your braid would be an irresistible temptation for him. Jeanne says it’s you that plays the music--I hear it sometimes when someone opens the door. You’re very good. I didn’t know anyone could study at St. Ida’s so young.”
My shoulders jerked up towards my ears, and not from the cold. This girl seemed to know all about my life. “I’m gifted,” I snapped. It was true, and I might have said it matter-of-factly to Orma without giving offense. Dragons were known for their cool-headed assessment of their own talents. But it sounded hopelessly arrogant in human conversation, and my cheeks burned both with embarrassment and resentment. If she hadn’t tried to talk to me, I wouldn’t have to be rude. I curled my cold toes up inside the pair of Father’s old shoes I’d slipped on.
But she didn’t take offense. “You are! I wonder what it must be like, to be so talented. I have nothing in particular that I am good at. I’m competent at everything--painting and embroidery and making cheese tarts and singing and dancing--and excel at nothing. You should hear me play my harpsichord. My music master used to say that I was so competent that it was a bore to listen to me. It must be so exciting to go to school. My mother says that sending girls to university is unthinkable--proper young ladies need only a strict governess and a talented dance master. But I think it would be delicious to sit in lectures with knowledgeable teachers and then go for an ale and talk about what I’ve learned with the other students.”
The academic world she described was as foreign to me as it was to her. But I couldn’t tell her that I spent every moment at St. Ida’s either in the library or a practice room, that I had only one tutor and didn’t even know the names of the other students. And yet the picture she painted was so appealing that I found myself asking, “What would you study, if you could?” without even realizing I had opened my mouth. I chastised myself; I couldn’t be friends with this girl; I shouldn’t encourage her.
Her eyes were bright despite the early hour. “My cousin Timothy says that there’s an instructor in history who specializes in the development of human garments. Can you imagine--reading a whole book on the history of the flounce or attending a lecture on how rationing during the Dragon Wars affected the development of the columnar silhouette of the last century? Could anything be more delightful?”
It sounded dreadfully dull to me. Clothes were a necessity, but I hated worrying whether the ones I’d chosen were appropriate for the occasion. I thought it would be much better if all I had to think about was whether they were warm enough for the weather. I realized with a start that I had heard Orma say exactly that on more than one occasion. Sometimes my own dragonness took me by surprise.
I couldn’t think of anything encouraging to say, but I also didn’t want to be rude. Annabella was so friendly--so artlessly, unthinkingly friendly--that it felt like kicking a puppy to be rude to her.
“I have to get to St. Ida’s now,” I said. This wasn’t true; it was too early for my normal lessons and the practice rooms wouldn’t even be unlocked yet. But Orma was probably already in his office and he never minded when I dropped in--never seemed even to notice whether I was early or late.
But Annabella’s face lit up. “Of course! I’m sorry for keeping you. I know I do ramble on. Would you like to go and get a fried pie sometime? I am determined to try every stand until I discover the best pie fryer in Lavondaville.”
I had never in my life been invited to do something with another girl. I had never in my life given another girl the opportunity. I felt a sharp ache under my ribs, one I tried to ignore. “Maybe sometime,” I said, strangely reluctant to refuse outright.
Annabella, I would learn, took anything that wasn’t a straight denial as agreement. Her smile as she turned away, hand waving and curls bobbing, made the ache sharpen.
* * *
Later, I would reflect that Annabella was a lot like Glisselda. But when I pointed this out, Kiggs shook his head. “Only on the surface. They’re both bright, easy in company. Like to chatter sometimes. Curls and lacy flounces. But Selda has steel underneath. It doesn’t sound like your Annabella did.”
She didn’t. Annabella really was as warm as she appeared to be; underneath her gilding was a softness like a cream puff. But she did have a touch of Glisselda’s tenacity. She kept trying to be my friend, even though I gave her no reason to. Her insistence sent me into such a tailspin of emotions that I couldn’t manage to find my way to flattered.
Even though the winter cold came early that year, whenever I went to the garderobe, Annabella would be just on the other side of the garden gate when I emerged. She would chatter about the sort of things I’d never really talked to anyone about--the weather, the latest fashions, gossip about the rich widower down the street who was casting his eye toward a duke’s daughter far out of his reach. They weren’t things I was interested in or knew anything about, but for some reason, I sometimes lingered to listen to them. When she remembered to ask me questions, I answered monosyllabically and never, I thought, very insightfully. I never stayed long, always making excuses to hurry away. Annabella was undaunted.
And she kept asking me to do things--to go to the dressmaker’s with her to see the new fashion plates, to walk along the river and feed the ducks that hadn’t flown away for the winter.
“Maybe sometime,” I would say. She didn’t seem to recognize my evasions for what they were, and I wondered whether she was thick or just that desperate. Either way, I despised her for it, just a little. It was an ugly reaction, and not one that was deserved, but I couldn’t rid myself of it.
I was accustomed to feeling many feelings at once and having no outlet for them but music. I couldn’t talk about them to anyone; Orma would have been fascinated by the troubles of a thirteen-year-old human girl, but he would have treated them like a treatise to study, and I had no interest in baring them to his analytic gaze. So I stewed in them. Annoyance, at Annabella’s persistence. Resentful jealousy, at how hopelessly normal she was. Anger, at my situation and my father and at Annabella, who kept taunting me with what I couldn’t have. And longing. The loneliness and the longing were the same thing, and I could not tell them apart.
More than once my conflicting emotions made me lash out. Mostly I just snapped at her, but once I demanded, “Don’t you have anything to do besides wait by your window for me to go to the garderobe?”
For a moment, hurt hovered on her face, but then she smoothed it away and laughed her silver laugh. “Not really. I’m as good at all the feminine arts as I’m ever going to be, but I can’t get married for another few years. I’m in between, I suppose, and I haven’t met any other girls my age in Lavondaville yet.”
I felt guilty at my brusqueness, but I also felt resentful. Was I supposed to feel sorry for her that she had nothing to do until she could get married? At least she could get married, even if she had to wait and be bored in the meantime. I’d never really questioned whether I wanted to marry because I had known since I was a child that it was impossible. It was likely, I admitted to myself now, that marriage wouldn’t even suit me, even if I could ever find someone who would want to marry me--and I knew I couldn’t. But marriage was still the expected course for Goreddi young women, and she was allowed to take that course. Allowed to be everything she was raised to be, everything everyone who saw her expected her to be. She had no monstrous heritage hidden under layers of fabric and lies. So she had nothing to do, while I at least had my music. So what? My music could never come to anything--I would spend the rest of my life playing only in practice rooms and in my father’s house, never for an audience. The music would curdle inside me, longing to reach others and never allowed to do so. Annabella might grow old and stale the narrow confines of female domestic life, but she would be who she was born to be. So who was better off in the long run?
* * *
“...like Annabella,” Tessie was saying. The name caught my attention as I was coming down the back stairs that led from just outside my bedchamber to the hall behind the kitchen. I was on my way to St. Ida’s, oud under my arm. I paused on the last step, just of sight of the kitchen. “She’s nice.”
“She has pretty dresses,” Jeanne added.
“She’s a good girl,” Anne-Marie said. I could hear the thumping of her kneading bread, the whistle of the teapot. “Lonely, I think. Her family was at the center of the social scene in Munnville,” she said, naming the second largest town in Goredd, down near the mountains that separated us from Samsam. It was a long way. “They know no one here at all. Poor thing, it must be hard to leave all of her friends behind.”
The little girls didn’t know--or care--what any of that meant. Tessie whined for some of the dried cranberries her mother was working into the dough. Jeanne was going on about the ribbons on Annabella’s dress. I headed out the door and plunged into the cold evening air.
She’s a good girl.
No one had ever said such a thing about me. Not ever.
The first snow had fallen overnight, and it was just enough to crunch under my feet as I walked down the cobblestone streets. I didn’t resent Annabella for being a good girl when I could never be. But I did, perhaps, resent her for having friends to leave behind.
And Anne-Marie, for feeling sorry for Annabella losing her friends when she had never found sympathy for her own step-daughter, who had never had any to begin with.
* * *
“You could come here for Maiden Night.”
The suggestion, offered in a more hesitant voice than I had heard from her, froze me to my heartbeat. I’d been ready to keep my head down and avoid Annabella tonight. The snow was falling, as it had fallen all day, and was past my ankles already. It wouldn’t have been rude not to linger tonight. This was the kind of snow that wouldn’t melt with a slight rise in temperature in the next few days but would stay till spring, each fall growing dingy with mud and ash, until fresh snow fell again. That snow in turn would lose its pristine whiteness until the next snowfall when the ugly layers would be covered again.
Maiden Night was the celebration of St. Branche, the patron saint of maidens and the innocent. Traditionally, it was observed by unmarried girls gathering together at each others’ houses, eating sour cherry pastries made from compote the girls had canned earlier in the year and covered in powdered sugar, then looking in the bottom of their mugs for what the cider dregs would tell them about their future husbands. The girls then spent the night together--sometimes as many as four or five crammed into one bed--whispering and giggling and making each other blush about what the dregs had revealed.
I had never thought to celebrate Maiden Night. I didn’t make sour cherry compote, and I knew the bottom of my cider mug would be empty. I’d never shared a bed even with my little sisters, much less with a friend.
The offer hung between us, fragile as a blown-glass Speculus ornament, as easily melted as the first-fallen snowflake. The night was silent in that way that only came with a real snowfall.
I snuck a glance at Annabella. I normally avoided looking at her, but now I couldn’t resist. In the moonlight, she looked made of silver. Even her eyelashes, feathered with snow, shone silver around her gray eyes. I jerked my gaze away.
“Maybe,” I said, even though I knew my answer had to be no. I hurried inside, stomped upstairs, and pounded on my spinet until my heartbeat slowed.
* * *
I didn’t ask Father. I knew what he would say, and I knew what his eyes would look like when he said it. That mixture of anger, fear, and sorrow was something I avoided whenever possible. I wouldn’t stir it on purpose.
But I thought about it. I thought about what it would be like to laugh through the sour bite of pastries and a puff of powdered sugar. What it would be like to have cider dregs to analyze and friends to tease. What it would be like to shed my dress and pull on a nightgown without worrying about my scales. To pile into bed with gossip and giggles instead of meditation and tending my garden.
And I knew that even if I didn’t have to worry about my scales, I would still be awkward and stiff. I could no more imagine myself giggling over cider, at ease with a bevy of girls, than I could flying. But oh, I wanted it. I wanted for one night to be a normal girl doing the things normal girls did. And maybe I wanted to know what it was like to huddle under a fluffy pile of goose down quilts warmed by the warming pan, my feet pressed against Annabella’s as we whispered in the dark. Yes. I wanted it.
And I was angry with myself for wanting things I could never have.
* * *
In the days leading up to Maiden Night, I was so growly and out of sorts that even Orma noticed. He peered at me over his glasses, with those eyes that seemed to see nothing and everything all at once. Maybe he’d noticed my mood or maybe he was just trying to figure out why I’d snapped a new oud string when I never had before. Either way, I fumed under his gaze.
“I have read,” he said as I sucked on my stung fingers, “that the female human undergoes a great many hormonal changes upon reaching adolescence, many of which affect mood in striking ways.”
The thought of Orma reading books about human puberty was so horrifying to me that I almost felt sick. I jerked my fingers out of my mouth and bent over to my oud case to search for a replacement string.
“I had wondered when these changes would start affecting you.”
Oh, blue St. Prue, this was worse. I could just about stand the mental image of my uncle stroking his beard over a human anatomy book. But having him applying his learning to me? I shoved my oud back into its case and slapped the clasps shut.
“Well, now you don’t have to wonder anymore,” I said before I stormed to the door. “And you don’t have to think about it ever again.”
* * *
I wouldn’t have actually done it. Oh, I thought it all through, made a plan. Simple, clear steps. Say I was going to be late at St. Ida’s. Go to Annabella’s instead. Enjoy the meal and the treats and the cider. Tell Annabella I’d forgotten something and hurry home. Say goodnight to Father and go up to my bed. Sneak back down after a few minutes--no one ever checked to make sure that I was in bed when I was supposed to be because I always was. Back to Annabella’s. Tell her I had gotten held up because Anne-Marie needed help with the babies. Spend the night with Annabella and sneak back to my own bed before the household was awake.
It wouldn’t be difficult. I knew I could pull it off, the way I knew I could play a new piece of music when it was put in front of me and I ran my eyes over the notes for the first time. But I also knew I wouldn’t go through with it. I told myself, again and again, why I couldn’t. And I wouldn’t have.
But Annabella had taken maybe as a yes. Later I traced it to her cook, who had told our maid Lise, who had mentioned offhand to Anne-Marie about Maid Dombegh spending Maiden Night with the Hardt girl. Anne-Marie, of course, told my father, and I can only imagine how that conversation went. In the last day or two leading up to Maiden Night, I had spent as much time as possible at St. Ida’s, sitting in an empty practice room playing dreary pieces by Tertius or reading philosophy until the sexton came to kick me out and lock the door behind me. So I wasn’t there to see Anne-Marie’s icy fury. I had no idea of the turmoil my one-word non-affirmative answer had stirred up in my home.
The day before Maiden Night, I found Orma waiting in my favorite practice room. This wasn’t surprising; he sometimes watched me practice and gave me instruction even though his speciality was musical theory and I was far past the point of having anything he could actually teach me about performance. I also wasn’t surprised to see a booklet in his hand, and I held out my own for it, assuming it was some rare piece of music he’d found in a corner of the library--the score of a Ninyish opera, perhaps. We’d been talking about the exoticism of Ninyish opera a few days earlier. If it had the vocal parts, maybe I could even convince him to sing it with me. I could use some cheering up. My uncle had an unpleasant voice, but it always made me laugh, and the practice rooms, built a decade earlier with the use of dragon technology, were soundproof. Not that Orma would be embarrassed if anyone heard him croaking along to a duet. Embarrassment was not something a dragon could feel.
The cover was blank, but that didn’t give me pause. There were a lot of handwritten texts and sheet music in the library. I opened to the first page and hesitated at the sight of handwriting as familiar as my own.
If soe’er the worms defile your women, producing misshapen, miscegenated abominations, suffer not such ghastly issue to live. Cleave the infant’s skull with a thrice-blessed axe, ere its fontanelles harden like unto steel. Sever its scaly limbs and burn them in separate fires… The words blurred before my eyes.
“What is this?” I was trembling, though the room was warm.
He blinked owlishly. “I thought it quite obvious. It’s a collection of all the writings of the Saints that mention relations between humans and dragons.”
“Orma,” I said, trying my best to keep my voice steady. “What is this?” Most of the time his literalness didn’t bother me, but at just this moment it was like a spark to a fuse.
“A reminder. I thought it would be useful, consolidating all the texts in one place. Most convenient, yes?”
“Why? Why are you giving this to me, and why are you giving it to me now?”
“Ah.” He didn’t look abashed, just pleased that he understood the question I was asking. “Your Father came to visit me yesterday. He--”
My voice went shrill. “My father?” My father avoided Orma as much as was possible since I had started to study music. And much was possible. I was quite certain they hadn’t been in the same room in years.
Orma blinked at me for a long moment. Then he said, “Have you completed your outburst? If you have, I will finish my sentence now.” I gritted my teeth, crumpling the booklet in my trembling hand as he nodded and started again. “Your father mentioned that you might be losing your sense of urgency regarding keeping your identity secret. We discussed at length his theory hypothesizing that, since you live in a household that accepts your half-dragon nature--” He ignored my scoff, “--you might think that it is safe to become close to humans who seem friendly towards you. He was most insistent that you not lose sight of the fact that your safety is not guaranteed, and that, should anyone find out that your mother was a dragon, your life would be in peril.”
I knew then what it was about. It was about Annabella, and Maiden Night, and me thinking, even in the solitude of my own mind, that I could have a friend.
“And the book?” I kept my voice low because I wanted to yell. “That was his idea?”
“Oh, no.” I was the only one who could have seen the hint of pride shining in Orma’s eyes. “That was my idea. It can serve as a permanent reminder that Goreddi culture has soaked in the brine of eight centuries’ worth of the religion of the Saints--” He looked even more proud of his metaphor, a thoroughly human one, for dragons consumed their food whole and raw. “--and that anti-dragon sentiment is not easily overcome. Its tangible form in addition to its exhaustive nature will be a--what is the human word? A token--to remind you of the necessity of being on your guard at all times.”
I dropped the crumpled booklet on the ground. “Orma,” I said, trying to be fair to him. It wasn’t his fault, none of it, but I was thirteen and hurt and angry and ashamed and it was hard to remind myself of that. “This thing is sick.”
Anyone else would have barely noticed the twitch of his face, but to me it was obvious that he was gobsmacked.
“I do not understand.” He cocked his head in that way of his, and at this moment it made me want to scream. “It is your own scriptures. I know you are not particularly pious, but you have never betrayed such adverse feelings towards the scriptures before. I remind you--”
I would never be able to explain this to him, not when I wanted to scream and weep and was barely stopping myself from doing both. “If my father,” I said, between gritted teeth, “was worried that I was being too...free, he should have told me himself.”
“That is what I told him,” Orma agreed. Sometimes when he agreed with me, it made me angrier than when he contradicted me. “But he presented a compelling argument that you needed--”
“What I need,” I shouted, “is some sympathy!”
Orma just looked at me. I knew he understood the concept; he’d expressed his bafflement at it before and I had explained at length. But at this moment, his blank gaze felt cold to me in a way it rarely did. Cold and inhuman.
“What I need is for someone--just one person--to tell me that it’s all right to want friends. To want a life! I know I can’t have them. I know it isn’t possible for someone like me. But I can’t stop wanting it, and I need someone to tell me that that’s all right! I know I can’t be human, but can’t I just want to be? Isn’t that all right?”
“If it it’s all right, you already know it is,” Orma said slowly. “And do not need to be told. And if it is not right, then telling you so would be a lie.”
“I know that!”
“Then why do you need someone to say these words?”
There was no way to explain this to him. I was very good at metaphors that helped him get at least to the edges of understanding of human ways. But this, whether because of the situation or my own emotional reaction to it, was beyond me.
“I just do!”
The room was silent for a long moment, my ragged breathing the only sound. “Seraphina,” he said, sounding confounded. “Sometimes you are very human.”
With a sob, I ran out of the room
* * *
I didn’t go to Annabella’s for Maiden Night. Just like every other night, I slept in my own bed in my own room, no taste of sour cherries lingering on my tongue. I had noticed the cut of Anne-Marie’s eyes when I came in, and I did not join the family downstairs for dinner. I meditated till I floated in nothingness, then I stepped into my garden. I didn’t linger. The misfits, the strange creatures my mind had dreamed up who may or may not be real, seemed even more pathetic tonight. And if they were real, as I suspected, they were a reminder that others were even more alone than I was. I didn’t need that reminder, not when I was swollen with my own misery.
I don’t cry often, but that night I cried myself to sleep.
* * *
I didn’t leave the house for nearly two weeks. I ignored Orma’s imperturbable note asking if I intended to come back to St. Ida’s anytime soon. At the few meals I joined the family for, I stared steadily at my father and watched him squirm even as he avoided my eyes. I wrote some very angry capriccios in minor keys and experimented with an atonal overture, then crumpled up all the notes I’d taken and threw them into the fire. At one point, I grew so bored that I tried to teach myself to knit, but I grew so frustrated with the tangles I made that I threw Anne-Marie’s old knitting needles in the bottom of my cupboard and forgot all about them.
I pulled the curtains closed so that I didn’t have to see Annabella’s house.
When I saw Annabella waiting on the other side of the gate, I ignored her, keeping my head down and rushing inside without acknowledging her. She tried to speak to me, even calling my name a few times, but I didn’t even look her way and my footsteps never hesitated.
A few days before Treaty Eve, Annabella gave up.
* * *
I suffered through Treaty Eve, stayed inside on Treaty Day, ignored the festivities of Golden Week. But by the time Speculus came, something inside me had snapped. Speculus was a quiet time for family: everyone stayed in and ate a massive meal, drinking hot spiced cider and singing carols. It was a time of warmth and merriment, and I could neither stand to join it nor to listen to it from my bedchamber. As I slipped downstairs, I could hear my family--my father’s family--in the parlor singing, the children’s high voices piping over Father’s baritone and Anne-Marie’s pleasant contralto. Tessie had knocked on my door earlier and invited me down, then wandered away when I did not reply.
The streets were empty when I emerged from the house. After the weeks spent in my chamber, the cold bite of the air stung my lungs. The snow had fallen with a vengeance and was now piled up waist-deep at the edges of the streets. It was snowing again, sugaring the world, and the Speculus lanterns glowed golden behind the flakes, the cracked mirrors behind the flame tossing out shards of light that mingled with the snowflakes. It was still enough that the Speculus chimes hung voiceless, and the silence wrapped around me as close as my cloak. I strode through the cold, avoiding places that had iced over or particularly deep snowbanks, not looking at the windows full of warm light that I passed, now and then catching the sound of carols from a nearby home rendered haunting by distance and the snow silence around me.
St. Ida’s was dark, all the students and tutors having gone home to their families, but the small side door by the chapel that Orma favored was unlocked. I never could persuade him to tell me the story of how he convinced the head librarian to give him a key, but I imagined it involved Orma knocking at apartment doors in the middle of the night requesting the door be unlocked and a sexton grown frustrated to the point of giving a dragon a key.
The lamps were not lit in the library, and neither were the fires. It was cold and still but enough moonlight reflected off the snow outside and through the tall windows that I could find my way between shelves and past carrels easily. I set down my satchel to move the door to Orma’s office and found him blinking up at me in the candlelight, a large volume open on his lap. He didn’t look surprised to see me, but then I couldn’t remember a time he ever had.
“The collected works of Boretti of Ninys arrived yesterday.”
One thing about Orma that I only appreciated in my worst moods was that with him, I wasn’t required to offer greetings or segues either. “You’re shivering.”
He looked down at himself. “So I am.”
I sighed, then stomped to the nearest study room. The fireplace was cold, but there was wood stacked beside it and a box of matches on the mantelpiece. I built up the fire, lit the candles in their stands, and marched back to Orma.
“Come on.”
He didn’t argue, closing his book and tucking it under his arm. He followed me back to the study room where the fire was already taking the edge off of the cold. Before long, it would be as cozy in here as in any of the cheerful holiday homes I’d passed on my way. Orma sat down at the desk nearest the fire and I threw myself down in the only armchair.
The silence was different than the silence that had echoed in my chamber the past few weeks, different than the silence of the streets in the snow. My hazy brain wondered what Orma would posit about qualities of silence, but I didn’t ask him.
When he spoke some time later, I jumped. I hadn’t expected to hear from him again till he was through reading the book, and he was only halfway through its pages.
“When I first learned of your existence, I developed a hypothesis. With a human father and a dragon mother, you would be a mixture of both worlds. I was not so ignorant as to think that you would be exactly fifty percent dragon and fifty percent human--heredity does not work like that. It can be capricious. But I did believe that you would, in most ways, display a blending of human and draconic tendencies.”
This wasn’t really something I wanted to talk about right now--actually I had been quite content with the silence and didn’t want to talk about anything--but I was too emotionally wrung out to ask him to stop.
“I was wrong. In some ways, you are totally human. And that is no bad thing.”
The tears that filled my eyes were hot, but they didn’t sting. They felt different than the tears I’d cried in the weeks past. They slid down my cheeks easily, and I didn’t bother wiping them away.
“Humans have evolved to highly value friendship. While communal projects ensure mutual survival, humanity has taken dependance much further. The emotional aspects of friendship are perplexing, but I cannot deny that they have a great power over all humans. It is no surprise that even one whose heritage is not entirely human would instinctively reach out for friendship.”
I let out a sound that was a mixture of a laugh and a sob. Orma looked like he wanted to take notes on the sound, the humanness of it, but to his credit, he didn’t. My heart swelled with affection; no one else would ever have believed it, but sometimes Orma was so dear. I wanted to go over to him and throw my arms around him or at least to say thank you. But he didn’t need either gesture, and they would only make him uncomfortable. Instead, I reached into my satchel and pulled out the flask I had brought with me. I poured the cider into two mugs, relishing the spiced steam that twisted up from the liquid. The porcelain of the mug was warm in my hand as I carried it over to Orma.
“Happy Speculus, Uncle.”
I rarely called him that. I watched his mouth twitch as I retook my seat and picked up my own mug. The orange and spice, apple and cinnamon were as warm on my tongue as the heat from the fire was on my cheeks.
When he answered, so totally against his own draconic nature, I couldn’t help but break out into a smile despite the tear stains on my cheeks. “Scatter darkness, scatter silence.”