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seized me.
    It wasn’t another of my mother’s memories. I remained myself, though disembodied, looking down upon a lively port city nestled in the gap between coastal mountains. I did not just see it: I smelled fish and market spices, felt the ocean’s salty breath upon my incorporeal face. I soared through the pristine blue sky like a lark, circled over white domes and spires, and glided above the bustling dockyards. A lush temple garden, full of chuckling fountains and blossoming lemon trees, drew me in. There was something there I needed to see.
    No, some one . A little boy, perhaps six years old, hung upside down like a fruit bat in a spindly fig tree. His skin was as brown as a plowed field, his hair like a fluffy dark cloud, his eyes lively and bright. He ate an orange segment by segment, looking thoroughly satisfied with himself. His gaze was intelligent, but he looked right through me as if I were invisible.
    I returned to myself just long enough to catch my breath before two more visions hit me in short succession. I saw a muscular Samsamese highlander playing bagpipes on the roof of a church and then a fussy old woman with thick spectacles excoriating her cook for putting too much coriander in the stew. Each fresh vision compounded my headache; my wrung-out stomach had nothing more to give.
    For a week I was bedridden; the visions came so thick and fast that if I tried to stand I collapsed under their weight. I saw grotesque and deformed people: men with wattles and claws; women with vestigial wings; and a great sluglike beast churning up mud in a swamp. I screamed myself hoarse at the sight of them, flailing against my sweaty bedclothes and frightening my stepmother.
    My left forearm and midriff itched, burned, and erupted in weeping, crusty patches. I tore at them savagely, which only made them worse.
    I was feverish; I couldn’t keep down food. Orma stayed by me the entire time, and I suffered the illusion that behind his skin—behind everyone’s—was a hollow nothingness, an inky black void. He rolled up my sleeve to look at my arm, and I shrieked, believing he would peel back my skin and see the emptiness beneath it.
    By the end of the week, the angry mange on my skin had hardened and begun to flake off, revealing a band of pale rounded scales, still soft as a baby snake’s, running from the inside of my wrist to the outside of my elbow. A broader band encircled my waist, like a girdle. At the sight of them, I sobbed until I was sick. Orma sat very still beside the bed, his dark eyes unblinking, thinking his inscrutable dragon thoughts.

    “What am I to do with you, Seraphina?” asked my father. He sat behind his desk, nervously rifling through documents. I sat across from him on a backless stool; it was the first day I’d been well enough to leave my room. Orma occupied the carven oak chair in front of the window, the gray morning light haloing his uncombed hair. Anne-Marie had brought us tea and fled, but I was the only one who’d taken any. It grew cold in my cup.
    “What did you ever intend to do with me?” I said with some bitterness, rubbing the rim of my cup with my thumb.
    Papa shrugged his narrow shoulders, a distant look in his sea-gray eyes. “I had some hope of marrying you off until these gruesome manifestations appeared on your arm and your—” He gestured at my body, up and down.
    I tried to shrink into myself. I felt disgusting to my very soul—if I even had a soul. My mother was a dragon. Nothing was certain anymore.
    “I understand why you didn’t want me to know,” I muttered into my teacup, my voice rough with shame. “Before this … this outbreak, I might not have felt the urgency of secrecy; I might have unburdened myself to one of the maids, or …” I’d never had many friends. “Believe me, I see the point now.”
    “Oh, you do, do you?” said Papa, his gaze grown sharp. “Your knowledge of the treaty and the law would not have kept you silent, but being