I was delighted. We’d succeeded in finding a half-dragon after only three days’ searching; he’d seemed cautiously receptive, at least. After weeks of mud, I finally had something substantive to report to Glisselda and Kiggs.
It was a most propitious start. I would enjoy telling Dame Okra as well.
We stopped briefly by Dame Okra’s, but she wasn’t home and we were too merry to stay indoors. I fetched my flute, and Abdo and I passed the afternoon performing in the cathedral plaza.
Once I could not have done this. I’d so feared exposure (and my father’s wrath) that I would never have dared to play in public. It was still nerve-racking, but I’d discovered that playing in public was also tremendously gratifying, emblematic of my new life, new freedom, new openness. Once I had feared for my life; now my greatest fear was flubbing a note, and it seemed right to celebrate that shift as often as I could.
Abdo danced and tumbled while I played, and we drew an appreciative crowd. The Ninysh are famous lovers of art, as the sculpture, fountains, and triumphal arches of Segosh will attest.
Of course, as every Goreddi knows, Ninysh public art was built on the back of Goredd: the Ninysh let us fight all those expensive, destructive dragon wars ourselves. It had rarely seemed worth Goreddi effort to create beautiful monuments or statuary, not when the dragons were going to raze it. Until Comonot’s Treaty and the forty-year peace, only music had been able to flourish in Goredd, the one art we could pursue while surviving in tunnels underground.
Abdo and I returned to Dame Okra’s near dusk in anticipation of Finch’s arrival. I’d expected to find our dinner in the kitchen, since Dame Okra had stayed late at Palasho Pesavolta the last two evenings. Tonight, though, I heard her braying in the formal dining room, over an unfamiliar basso counterpoint.
Dame Okra sat at one end of the gleaming table, taking coffee with a much younger man, who leaped to his feet upon our arrival. He was a scrawny fellow, shorter than me, with lank red hair to his shoulders, a long face, and a wispy chin beard. He wore Count Pesavolta’s orange and gold livery. I guessed he was past twenty, but not much.
“You deign to grace us with your presence at last, do you?” said Dame Okra, glaring at us. “Your armed escort is arranged. You leave tomorrow. Josquin here will prevent your getting too lost.” She flapped a hand at him obscurely; he understood it as a command to sit. “He’s my great-great-grand-cousin, or some nonsense.”
“Pleased to finally meet you both,” said Josquin, pulling out a chair for me. His voice was far deeper than his skinny build gave any hint of. “My cousin has told me—”
“Yes, shut up. My point is,” said Dame Okra, bristling, “I trust him. For years he and his mother were the only people who knew what I was, and they never told. His mother sews my dresses and helps me look properly human.” She adjusted her majestic—and false—bosom at this juncture, underscoring her point. Josquin politely found something deserving of attention in his coffee.
“He’s been riding as a herald since he was ten,” Dame Okra continued. “He knows every village and road.”
“Most of them,” said Josquin modestly. His blue eyes crinkled with amused affection for his old cousin, despite her surliness.
“The best roads,” snapped Dame Okra. “The ones worth knowing. He’ll translate. He’s already engaged his fellow heralds to ride ahead and spread word of a reward for information leading to the hermit and the muralist. That will save you time, I should think. And he knows you’ve got to get to Samsam in time for—”
Dame Okra suddenly froze and took on a dyspeptic look, her eyes unfocused.
Abdo, who’d claimed a chair and cup of coffee for himself, looked first at Okra and then toward the front of the house. I wish you could see this, Phina madamina. Dame Okra is having a premonition, her soul-light darting out like lightning. A big spiky finger from her mind to the front door. He pointed to illustrate.
She reaches out with her mind, too? I asked. She claims it’s her stomach.
Maybe she can’t tell them apart, said Abdo cheekily.
Dame Okra jerked grotesquely, recovering herself. “Saints in Heaven!” she cried. “Who’s this creature at the front door, then?” She leaped to her feet and rushed up the hall just as someone knocked.
I hurried after her. I had not yet had a chance to mention Finch. “Before you answer that—” I began, but it was too late.
“Augh!” she cried, her voice dripping disgust. “Seraphina, did you invite this person here, all plaguey and pestilent? No, sir, you may not track contagion into my house. Go around to the carriage yard and strip down.”
The doctor had removed his grimy apron and gloves and changed his robes; he still wore the ominous beaked mask, and his boots were indeed too muddy for her fine floors. I squeezed by Dame Okra, who puffed up indignantly.
“Leave your boots here,” I told the doctor. He hurriedly pried them off. I took his arm and said, “You are welcome. I failed to warn her you were coming.”
I led our new guest to the dining room, Dame Okra squawking behind us. Josquin stood again, with a cry of “Buonarrive, Dotoro Basimo!” and offered the older man his seat.
Finch shuffled over in his stocking feet, shoulders hunched anxiously, and sat. Josquin took the seat beside him.
“You know this ghoul?” demanded Dame Okra, switching the conversation back to Goreddi. She lingered behind in the doorway with her arms folded skeptically.
“Dr. Basimo keeps Count Pesavolta apprised of plague cases,” said Josquin brightly. “They’re trying to prevent another epidemic year. It’s a noble endeavor.”
The doctor perched on the very edge of a chair, his hands clasped between his knees, eyeing us through his glass lenses with trepidation.
“He’s one of us,” I said to Dame Okra. “We found him this morning.”
“Take your mask off, then. You’re among friends, by St. Prue,” Dame Okra called, coming no closer and sounding not the least bit friendly.
“You don’t have to, if you’re not comfortable,” I said, belaying her demand.
Dr. Basimo considered a moment, then pulled off his bag-like mask. I knew what we would see. I’d warned Dame Okra, but still she gasped. Josquin averted his eyes and took a quick sip of coffee.
Under the mask’s leather beak was a real one, thick and strong like a finch’s. Unlike a finch’s, it had serrated edges, reminiscent of a dragon’s teeth. He had no separate nose, just avian nostrils atop the beak. His bald, liver-spotted head and scrawny old-man’s neck made him look like a buzzard, but no buzzard ever gazed so intelligently through mournful eyes the color of a summer sky.
“Please call me Nedouard,” said the doctor, taking pains to speak clearly. It was hard for him; I could see his black tongue laboring to make up for the stiffness of his beak, and he couldn’t help the curious snapping sound where language required the lips he didn’t have. “The little fellow said you were all half-dragons. I had believed there were none but me.”
I sat down across from him and rolled up my left sleeve to show the silver dragon scales spiraling up my forearm. Nedouard hesitantly reached across and touched them. “I have a few of those as well,” he said softly. “You are fortunate to have escaped this.” He gestured toward his beak.
“It seems to manifest differently in everyone,” I said. Abdo obligingly stuck out his scaly tongue.
Nedouard nodded thoughtfully. “That doesn’t surprise me. The surprise is that humans and dragons can intermix at all. But what about—” He nodded at Josquin.
“Oh, not me,” said the herald. He’d gone pale, but he tried valiantly to smile.
Dame Okra said grudgingly, “I have a tail. And no, I won’t show you.”
Nedouard accepted a cup of coffee from Abdo with an almost inaudible “Thank you,” and then there was an awkward silence.
“Did you grow up in Segosh, Nedouard?” I asked gently.
“No, I was born in the village of Basimo,” he said, stirring his coffee, though he’d put nothing in it. “My mother took refuge there, at the Convent of St. Loola. She’d fled her home; she told the nuns my father was a dragon, but they didn’t believe it until they saw my face.”
“You were born with …?” I mimed the beak. “My scales didn’t come in until I was eleven. Abdo’s came in when he was … six?” I looked for confirmation; Abdo nodded.
“Oh, the scales came later,” he said. “The face, alas, was always as you see it. My mother died in childbirth, but there was never any question of the sisters caring for me, however malformed—St. Loola is patroness to children and fools. They raised, educated, and loved me like a son. I wore a mask outside the convent. The villagers were fearful at first, but I was steady and peaceable. They came to accept me.
“Basimo was ravaged by plague when I was seventeen. The convent took in the sick, of course, and I learned to care for the victims, but …” He picked up a spoon and set it down again, drummed agitated fingers. “In the end, there were only five of us left. There is no village of Basimo, not anymore. Only the name I brought with me.”
“How do you manage here?” I asked, careful not to add, With a face like that.
He heard the omission, though, and looked up cannily. “I keep my mask on. Who would dare touch me to remove it?”
“Your patients don’t find the mask ominous during years without plague?”
“My patients are so grateful that they don’t mind what I look like.” He cleared his throat and added, “And there are no years without plague. Some years it doesn’t reach the rich, but it always lurks among the poor.”