Free Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

said, rising and trying to cover my agitation by rearranging the music on the stand. “They wouldn’t stand for it; they’d bide their time until we let our guard down.”
    Glisselda looked profoundly disturbed. “But if we’re weaker than they are …”
    I leaned against the harpsichord. “It’s not about strength or weakness, Princess. Why do you imagine our peoples fought for so long?”
    Glisselda put her hands together, as if delivering a little sermon. “Dragons hate us because we are just and favored by the Saints. Evil always seeks to destroy the good that stands against it.”
    “No.” I nearly smacked the harpsichord lid but recalled myself in time, slowing my hand and tapping twice. Nevertheless, the girls stared at me round-eyed in anticipation of my astonishing opinions. I tried to moderate that with a gentle tone. “The dragons wanted these lands back. Goredd, Ninys, and Samsam used to be their hunting ground. Big game ran here—elk, aurochs, felldeer—in herds stretching to the horizon, before our kind moved in and plowed it under.”
    “That was a very long time ago. Surely they can’t still miss it,” said Glisselda shrewdly. It would be unwise to make assumptions about her intelligence based on her cherubic face, I noted. Her gaze was as sharp as her cousin Lucian’s.
    “Our people migrated here two thousand years ago,” I said. “That’s ten dragon generations. The herds have been extinct for about a thousand, but the dragons do indeed still feel the loss. They are confined to the mountains, where their population dwindles.”
    “They can’t hunt the northern plains?” asked the princess.
    “They can and do, but the northern plains are only a third the size of the united Southlands, and they’re not empty, either. The dragons compete with barbarian tribes for diminishing herds.”
    “They can’t just eat barbarians?” said Glisselda.
    I disliked her supercilious tone but could not say so. I traced the decorative inlay on the instrument lid, channeling my irritation into curlicues, and said: “We humans aren’t good eating—too stringy—and we’re no fun to hunt because we band together and fight back. My teacher once heard a dragon compare us to cockroaches.”
    Millie wrinkled her nose, but Glisselda looked at me quizzically. Apparently she’d never even seen a cockroach. I let Millie explain; her description elicited a shriek from the princess, who demanded: “In what manner do we resemble these vermin?”
    “Take it from a dragon’s perspective: we’re everywhere, we can hide easily, we reproduce comparatively quickly, we spoil their hunting, and we smell bad.”
    The girls scowled. “We do not either smell bad!” said Millie.
    “To them we do.” This analogy was proving particularly apt, so I took it to its logical conclusion. “Imagine you’ve got a terrible infestation. What do you do?”
    “Kill them!” cried both girls together.
    “But what if the roaches were intelligent and worked together, using a roachly dracomachia against us? What if they had a real chance of winning?”
    Glisselda squirmed with horror, but Millie said, “Make a truce with them. Let them have certain houses to themselves if they leave the ones we’re living in alone.”
    “We wouldn’t mean it, though,” said the princess grimly, drumming her fingers on top of the harpsichord. “We’d pretend to make peace, then set their houses on fire.”
    I laughed; she’d surprised me. “Remind me not to earn your enmity, Princess. But if the cockroaches were dominating us, we wouldn’t give in? We’d trick them?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “All right. Can you think of anything—anything at all—that the cockroaches could do to persuade us that we should let them live?”
    The girls exchanged a skeptical look. “Cockroaches can only scuttle horridly and spoil your food,” said Millie, hugging herself. She’d had experience, I gathered.
    Glisselda, however, was thinking hard, the