In her feverish delirium, she hadn’t noticed them. Jeanne had gently smoothed Seraphina’s hair off her sweaty forehead. Tess had gone straight for the incipient scales sprouting through Seraphina’s arm. They were silver, surrounded by red, angry, weeping flesh.
Jeanne gasped and covered her eyes; Tessie, bolder, touched one. Seraphina cried out, making Tessie jump and Jeanne shriek. Even more frightening was the suddenly looming figure, a man who’d been sitting so still they hadn’t noticed him. He unfolded himself from his chair, grabbed each girl by an ear, and steered them into the corridor.
Mama was arriving with a tray for Seraphina, which she dropped in alarm. “Don’t touch them, you fiend!” she cried, pulling the twins out of the man’s grasp. “If I had known what you were, you should never have set foot in my house.”
“I’m the only one who can help her,” said Orma, scratching his beard as he turned back into the room. “Find a way to tolerate my presence, madam.”
Mama, quivering with rageful words unspoken, bent down to pick up the broken crockery. Jeanne fetched a towel and Tessie a pail of water. They helped her sop broth off the floor, watching helplessly as angry tears washed Mama’s cheeks.
“Don’t cry, Mama,” Jeanne had ventured at last, putting her arms around Mama’s waist, which was beginning to bulge with the baby that would be Neddie. “Seraphina’s going to be all right. Dragons make good doctors, Papa says, and—”
“He’s not her doctor,” said Mama bitterly. She glanced behind her, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand. The door to Seraphina’s room was closed. Her soft face hardened; she led the twins down the hall into the nursery and closed the door. Baby Paul was asleep in the cradle, but no matter. This was the kind of news that could only be whispered. “Saar Orma is Seraphina’s uncle, girls. Claude—” Mama’s voice broke; the twins, in panic, threw their arms around her as she started to weep again.
“You must never tell our Belgioso family,” said Mama when she had recovered enough to speak. “Promise me, girls, that you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”
“Of course not, Mama,” said Jeanne, and Tessie shook her head vehemently.
“Your father’s first wife was a dragon,” Mama whispered, clutching them tightly. “A vicious, unscrupulous saarantras who tricked him into thinking she was human.” Mama’s mouth worked spasmodically; her reddened eyes grew fierce. “Or so he claims. I have no choice but to believe him. He’s a clever man, though, your father, and I don’t understand how he couldn’t…there must be differences between dragons and real people.”
Tessie met Jeanne’s eyes, and they had one of those moments—commoner when they were young—where they shared a thought. He still loves that dragon woman, they thought together. Mama knows, and it hurts her.
Mama was kneeling now, her arms around their shoulders. “Girls, remember: this mortal, material world will let you down. Husbands, love, life—everything and everyone will disappoint you eventually. Only one thing never fails. Do you know what that is?”
The twins answered dutifully, “Heaven.”
Mama nodded, steel in her pale eyes. “Faith is the only rock in life’s tempestuous sea. Heaven is perfect and eternal, and it awaits us if we keep our troth to it.”
Jeanne piped up, “Papa doesn’t believe, does he?”
She knew the answer perfectly well, but the twins played this game to calm their mother. The question put Papa in his place and made him manageable.
“His faults are for the Saints to tally,” said Mama, her tone now pitying and superior. “Our job is only to forgive, not to judge.”
This was Tessie’s cue to judge him with everything she had. “Papa is a terrible sinner, Mama, and I hate him!”
“Oh, no, you mustn’t hate, dearest,” said Mama, in command of herself again. “He may be an unbeliever, and he may have let bodily lust blind him to his first wife’s nature—”
That was a new angle on Papa. If Tessie could have swiveled her ears like Faffy the hound, they’d have been on high alert now, pricked up and straining to hear more.
“—but your duty is to love him, warts and all, as is mine,” Mama concluded, to Tess’s disappointment, kissing each girl on the forehead and rising awkwardly to her feet. In the cradle, baby Paul began to wail. Mama picked him up, and the little girls took the opportunity to quietly escape, hand in hand, back to their own room.
Seraphina had fallen ill upon Treaty Morn in the dead of winter, and Pathka had crawled into the basement early the following summer—before Aunt Jenny’s wedding and Tess’s failed baby-making experiment—so Tess had been not quite six and a half years old.
Mama was laid up for a month before Neddie’s birth. Her old Belgioso aunties took turns skulking around the house, making enormous pots of soup, going on violent cleaning sprees, and putting the twins to work. Seraphina, back on her feet, always contrived to wriggle out of chores; her dragon uncle’s music lessons took precedence over anything else. Besides, the Belgioso side of the family, without knowing why, found Seraphina strange and spooky. Nobody dared press her into service against her will. Tessie and Jeanne, on the other hand, were fair game and big enough to send for water or bedsheets or onions, whatever the avenging aunties needed.
Cabbages were Tessie’s excuse for being in the basement that day. They were in a crate up front, by the stairs, and she needn’t have spent more than three minutes fetching one, but Aunt Mimi was there today, the most unpleasant of Mama’s aunties. She was also, fortuitously, the easiest to avoid. She had bad knees; all you had to do was contrive to get yourself sent up or down, and you were out of range of her cane and her braying voice.
Jeanne had landed the plum assignment of taking Mama her tea. Aunt Mimi liked Jeanne best, because she was sweet and compliant and blond like a proper Belgioso. Tessie didn’t begrudge this any more than one might begrudge a rose, but it meant she had to work twice as hard to get away from the old woman. As Auntie made soup, Tess kept asking about ingredients that she knew were in the basement. Unfortunately, a whole box of onions had been hauled up the night before, and Aunt Mimi had only conceded a need for cabbage after making Tess slice ten onions paper-fine.
Tess felt she had earned this basement respite, and she intended to take full advantage.
She dawdled in dark corners where there were no cabbages (as she knew perfectly well). She was Dozerius the Pirate, hero of her favorite Porphyrian adventure stories. His gender was no obstacle, although she carefully refrained from imagining herself afflicted with bodily lusts, just as Mama had always carefully refrained from reading any of the lustier passages aloud (or so the twins had discovered, now that they could read to themselves).
Tess-as-Dozerius had been sent in search of the Jeweled Cabbage of Condamaciatius (Tessie’s approximation of a Porphyrian name) but couldn’t get near it because it was guarded by the Buxom Serpent of Flittifluttius. (Buxom, she had deduced, meant “pretty,” because that was how ladies were described in the paragraphs Mama didn’t read.) The serpent was so pretty no one could bear to harm him, even though he ate every awed adventurer who came near.
“Don’t look, don’t look, he’ll dazzle your eyes,” Tessie sang to herself as she skipped among the crates, casks, and hogsheads of the cellar, bearing a little lamp and brandishing a broomstick-spear. “Come out, fell beast! Dozerius commands you!”
She swatted the side of a half-empty ale cask with her broomstick, which made a pleasant thunk. She smacked it again for good measure, then climbed a chest, treading upon the hem of her skirt and tearing it. From up here, she could cast lamplight over the clutter. She moved her arm in a great circle, making the shadows bow obeisance to valiant, stouthearted Dozerius.