Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman
“Of course, Ambassadress,” said Moy, bowing his head to Dame Okra and letting Dr. Belestros ride ahead. Abdo met my gaze as they rode away; I couldn’t read his expression in the darkness.
They’ll take good care of you. I’ll see you tomorrow, I said, relieved that Abdo’s wrist, at least, might find healing. Abdo made no reply.
Dame Okra, having settled the matter of Abdo’s arm, turned her donkey toward our remaining guard. Gianni Patto stood docilely behind the horses, his crooked mouth agape. Dame Okra gave an exaggerated sniff and said, “Is this the newest member of our big ugly family, then? He’s whiffier than you mentioned.”
“I couldn’t find words to describe it,” I said.
“Well, he’s not staying at my house,” said the old woman flatly.
“Technically, he’s under arrest,” said Josquin, reining his horse alongside mine.
Dame Okra wrinkled her snub nose and scowled. “I don’t know where you think the count can keep him. You!” she called to the remains of our escort. “Take this hideous beast-thing up to the palace and quarter it in the count’s third stable, the empty one. No point traumatizing Pesavolta’s racehorses on top of everything else.”
Our soldiers cheered; once Gianni was put away, they’d be free to go home. I felt a pang of homesickness myself, but the bulk of my mission was still ahead of me. I couldn’t linger here if I was to reach the Samsamese highlands by St. Abaster’s Day, and beyond that was Porphyry. Would Abdo have to stay behind while his arm healed?
It felt overwhelming just then, especially if I had to face it alone.
Josquin lingered beside me while the others rode toward the gates. I glanced at him, then looked again because he was staring back at me, his gingery eyebrows raised. “It was a good journey, Seraphina,” he said, bowing slightly in the saddle. “I feel privileged to have traveled with you.”
“I feel the same,” I said, surprised at the lump in my throat. Josquin had become a dear friend; I was going to miss him.
“Best of luck on your road ahead,” he said, winding a finger in his scraggly beard, “and the blessings of St. Nola, who watches our steps. I hope that when you’re finished, when you’ve found all of your kind and the war is over and you have leisure to do so, you will come back and visit us and tell us what adventures you have passed.”
“Saints in Heaven. Breathe, boy!” cried Dame Okra crossly. “And then get gone with your fellows. This one’s not for you, as you well know.”
Josquin stiffened, mortified; it was too dark to tell whether he turned red, but the speed with which he spurred his horse toward the city gate suggested an affirmative.
I may have blushed as well. Who can say? It was dark.
His fellows had not yet entered the city. Gianni Patto had balked before the gate, agitated for the first time since Donques. He dug in with his clawed feet and would not take another step; he roared and tore at his bindings. The guards surrounded him, sensibly dismounting so as not to be yanked off their horses.
As Josquin rode up to help, I said to Dame Okra, “Did you have to be so mean?”
She sneered. “To my weedy great-great-grand-cousin? I’m astonished you care. He was going to lean in and kiss you next.”
She was exaggerating, although my heated face didn’t seem to think so. I waved her off impatiently. “Don’t tell me you had a premonition.”
She said, “There are things one can foresee without a pre … mo …”
I squinted at her. If she hadn’t had a premonition before, she was having an enormous one now: one hand clutched her stomach, and her eyes were glassy.
“Dame Okra?” I said.
She snapped out of her trance, swaying disorientedly in the saddle, and screamed, “Josquin, hold on!”
Josquin turned toward us in confusion, as if he couldn’t make sense of her words. Gianni Patto threw his head back and roared, the loudest, most nightmarish sound I had ever heard a living creature produce. All the horses startled, but Josquin’s bucked and reared. Josquin flailed wildly, but couldn’t grasp the saddle horn in time. He was thrown, landing on the flagstones with a sickening thud.
I leaped from my horse and was running before I had time to think. Josquin’s legs lay crumpled at a gruesomely wrong angle; his face glistened, sweaty and greenish in the torchlight. I knelt beside the herald and took his hand, my throat clenched too tightly to speak.
“Can’t feel my legs,” gasped Josquin, trying awfully to smile. “I know that’s bad, but … feeling them might be … worse.”
The gatehouse guards rushed up with a field stretcher, shooing me away. Josquin smiled bravely one last time as they transferred and lifted him. They carried him away, and I stared after in a mute haze, a buzzing like wasps in my ears.
Gianni Patto had gone slack and stupid and docile again. The Eight, who had swarmed him, shouted blue murder and waved their blades in his face; Gianni didn’t flinch or defend himself. He made no squeak of protest when they knocked him down and began to kick him.
“Stop,” I said, too feebly to be effective. “Stop!” I shouted louder, rushing up to Nan and tugging on her arm. She glanced at me, and my face was enough. She pulled the woman next to her off Gianni, and then the pair put a quick halt to the kicking. The soldiers stepped back, breathing heavily; tears streaked more faces than just mine.
Gianni Patto raised his face from the paving stones; his icy eyes met mine with a gaze of such piercing lucidity that I staggered back as if struck. He smiled eerily.
For a moment I feared I might vomit.
“Fee-naaaah!” Gianni’s voice rumbled like thunder.
“Take him away,” I said, averting my eyes. “And for Heaven’s sake, be careful.”
They hobbled his ankles and strapped his arms to his sides; he rose, awkward and unresisting, and followed them into the city, his taloned feet scratching and chattering on the stones.
Dame Okra, strangely, had neither dismounted nor moved; she stared intently into the darkness, breathing hard. Her forehead glistened with sweat and her eyes bulged.
I shakily mounted my horse, trying to slow my jittering heart. It had happened so fast. “He isn’t usually like this,” I said numbly, as if that might reassure Dame Okra or myself. I knew what must have happened. Jannoula had surely been present in him again. Had she made Gianni scream? Had she hurt him? What was she up to? I couldn’t begin to think; dread clung to me like a wet blanket.
“Eh?” said Dame Okra abruptly, as if startling awake. “Did you say something?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again, out of words. Dame Okra hadn’t even reacted to Josquin’s injury; she was mean, but not usually that mean.
“Then let’s get back to the house. I have a most fearsome headache, and it’s late,” she snapped accusingly, as if I were the one keeping her out past her bedtime.
She spurred her donkey forward, not bothering to see whether I followed.
I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. I paced Dame Okra’s green guest room until the sun came up.
It had never occurred to me, not once, that in seeking out the ityasaari there might be a price to pay beyond the time, effort, and resources spent finding them. The death of the monk, even if he deserved it, was too high a price. Abdo’s wrist was too high a price. Josquin’s spine … I could barely think about that. It filled me with despair.
On top of all that, my search had attracted Jannoula’s notice. Had she provoked Gianni to kill the monk? Had Gianni been screaming for my attention when he spooked Josquin’s horse? She’d said she could help me search; I didn’t need this kind of help.
I didn’t know what to do. The thought of continuing the search made me nauseated. I wanted to give it up, go home, hide away from everyone. But then this terrible toll really would have been exacted in vain. Surely it was up to me to make these sacrifices mean something.
I flopped back on the bed, the weight of my thoughts pinning me down. The birds were singing as I fell asleep.
The creature. That was unfair. I knew it, but I couldn’t bear to think of him any other way just now.
I had accidentally neglected my garden the night before; Abdo had suggested I try such a thing. It hurt to think about Abdo. I considered tending to it now, but the grotesques weren’t riled up, clearly, or I would have had a headache.
If they didn’t need me, I didn’t feel like visiting. I’d only have been there to soothe myself, and it niggled at me that maybe that was what I’d been doing all along. Maybe the garden had always been about me.
I staggered downstairs. Nedouard and Blanche sat in Dame Okra’s formal dining room, side by side in comradely silence. Surgical tools, metal scraps, and dirty dishes were spread before them across the pristine white tablecloth between two incongruous bouquets of lilacs. Blanche, who had been coiling copper wire around an iron rod, smiled enormously when she saw me and leaped to her feet. She looked healthier; there was some pink in her cheeks, and her scales looked shinier and less like scabs. She’d acquired a pale green gown, and even it seemed more solid than what she’d worn before. “Hey hey you wanting it breakfast I can to make it at you,” she said in an astonishing deluge of Goreddi. “Kitchen is all food.”
I was overwhelmed by her sweetness and joy, and had to swallow hard before I could answer. Maybe we’d done a few things worth doing after all. “I’m not hungry, thank you,” I managed to say. Blanche looked dumbfounded by the notion of “not hungry,” but she plopped back down and resumed winding wire.
“She’s remembering her words,” said Nedouard. Even he seemed happier without his mask or leather apron; he wore a sensible wool doublet and linen shirt, like any other man of modest means. His eyes smiled, even if his beak could not, and he was polishing a wicked-looking saw. “Welcome back,” he added, testing the blade by paring a delicate curl off the edge of his thumbnail.
“Is Dame Okra here?” I asked, wanting to talk about Gianni and get it over with.
“She’s in the library,” said Nedouard, setting aside the saw and absently reaching for a tiny silver bowl, a saltcellar. He stirred the salt with the tiny spoon.
“She is to talk on herself with ghosts!” cried Blanche, her violet eyes wide.
The old plague doctor laid a hand upon Blanche’s arm and spoke in low tones. She nodded, whimpering, and refocused on her wires. “Dame Okra was up all night,” said Nedouard. “Talking, apparently. It kept Blanche awake.”
“Talking to whom?” I said, watching him empty the salt into a vase of flowers.
He raised his gentle blue eyes to my face. “Herself, I believe. It’s not an unusual trait in someone so old, although I haven’t observed her doing it before. I find it much more disturbing that she’s so cheerful this morning.”
“That is rather alarming,” I said, and couldn’t help smiling. “I’ll need to see for myself before I believe it, but I promise to get to the bottom of things.”
As I spoke, Nedouard matter-of-factly tucked the tiny silver salt bowl into the front of his shirt. I stared at him pointedly; it took him a moment to grasp why, and then he shamefacedly extracted the dish and set it back on the table. “Many of my patients are too poor to pay,” he said. “I fear I have developed rather a habit of taking payment where I find it, from those who won’t miss it. It’s a difficult custom to break.”
I suspected that wasn’t the entire truth, and that the saltcellar would disappear back down his shirt the moment I left the room. I did him the honor of nodding, however, before I went looking for Dame Okra, who was rumored to be cheerful.
It was generally easy to find Dame Okra in her own house; her brassy voice was like a premonition itself, preceding her wherever she went. I could hear her talking as I approached the library. I pressed my ear against the door, and her voice carried clearly: “… more than a hundred years, thinking I was unique in all the world. You can imagine how alone I felt. Well, no, you wouldn’t need to imagine, would you. You know.”
That was quite an elaborate conversation for her to be having aloud with herself. I opened the door cautiously. Dame Okra sat behind an ornate mahogany desk at the far end of the library, papers spread around her, quill in hand. She looked up at the sound of the door opening and smiled gloriously.
I may have staggered back a step from shock. It was not just the smile: there was no one else in the room.
“Seraphina, come in! I’m so pleased you’re finally awake,” she said, gesturing toward a seat facing the desk. I darted my gaze across her desk, noting parchment, ink, books, pen, sealing wax. No thnik that I could see. Whom had she been speaking to?
“I’m making a full accounting of your journey and expenses for Count Pesavolta,” said Dame Okra, seeming not to register my perplexity. “Don’t worry, you needn’t deal with him. You could sign this thank-you note, though.” She waved me nearer so she might hand over a letter and pen.
I sat in a leather chair facing her desk and scanned the page. She’d written effusively about all the good he’d done, letting me travel through Ninys; it said Goredd was in his debt, but didn’t make any specific promises. It seemed safe enough to sign.
“We need to talk about Gianni Patto,” I said as I handed back the letter and quill.
“Not to worry,” she said. “I went this morning and secured his release.”
I goggled at her. “I—I’m sorry, you … what?”
Dame Okra nodded eagerly. “As soon as he’s all cleaned up, he’s coming here.”
“Here, as in here?” I said, pointing at the floor beside my chair.
“I have room, and the count would keep him in the stables, not bring him indoors and start the long road to civilizing him,” she said. She sounded so reasonable.
“You shouldn’t bring him into your house,” I said, shaking off my shock and recovering my purpose. “It was a mistake to bring him down from the mountains. He’s violent, unpredictable, and not entirely in control of himself.” He was also full to the brim with Jannoula; I had intended to say as much, but something made me hesitate.
Who had she been talking to? The back of my neck prickled.
“You shouldn’t mind if he’s here or not,” said Dame Okra, her protuberant eyes narrowing. “You’re to leave for Samsam tomorrow at dawn. Your guides have been at the palasho a week, waiting for you, and Pesavolta wants them off.”
So soon. Of course there was no time to waste. “Will Abdo be well enough to come with me?” I’d said I’d visit him this morning, I recalled with a pang, but I’d slept straight through.
“Absolutely not,” said Dame Okra, looking scandalized at the suggestion. “Abdo needs to rest for a few weeks. I’ll take him to Goredd with Gianni, Blanche, and Ned.”
“Can I see him before I go?”
“He’s in surgery now to reconnect the tendons of his hand,” she said. “Don’t worry, Dr. Belestros is the best dragon physician the count could buy.”
I wouldn’t even get to say goodbye. “What about Josquin?” I said.
“Belestros has him sedated. He was in terrible pain all night,” said Dame Okra mournfully. It was the first inkling of sadness she’d shown for her distant cousin, but it didn’t last. Her smile reasserted itself. “You can’t see him, either, but you could write him a letter. I know he’s your friend.”
She’d delivered a terrible amount of difficult news at once, but underneath my shock and sorrow, something else bothered
That didn’t sound like Dame Okra at all.
The cheerfulness. The turnaround on Gianni. The conversation she’d been having with herself …
I had been so preoccupied with Josquin’s injury last night that I hadn’t seen what had happened right in front of me. Before Gianni had screamed or Josquin had fallen off his horse, Dame Okra had had a premonition.
Her mind had reached out to Gianni and found Jannoula.
I studied Dame Okra’s froggy face. The blissful expression wasn’t Jannoula’s; Dame Okra didn’t look the way Gianni did when Jannoula spoke through him. Blanche had said Dame Okra hadn’t slept; might Jannoula have spent all night talking to her? Persuading, manipulating … even changing?
If Dame Okra had been contacted by Jannoula, how did that work? Was it like hearing Abdo’s voice, or could Jannoula have wormed into her more deeply, as she’d done to Gianni and to me? I remembered how she’d altered my thoughts and emotions, but also how they had snapped back into place when she was completely gone.
I remembered how she could linger in my head and listen to my conversations.
I said, “Show yourself, Jannoula.”
Dame Okra’s expression sharpened at once, her bulgy eyes narrowing to feline cunning. “Hello, Seraphina,” she said with Jannoula’s flat inflection. “I don’t suppose this really counts as a surprise, but it is pleasant nonetheless.”
Surprise or not, I felt sickened. “Release Dame Okra. Leave her at once.”
Jann-Okra shook her head, tsking. “And you immediately turn things unpleasant. Why, Seraphina? Dear Okra’s mind reached out to me. I’d tried knocking—it worked with Gianni, and other unsuspecting innocents—but she wouldn’t answer. She was very closed off; I couldn’t reach her any other way.”
Dame Okra had been so adamant about not letting anyone into her mind. She must have heard Jannoula’s “knock,” but her suspicious nature kept her from answering. Gianni would not have had the wit, but who were these others? Someone had told her about my search.