Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman
“So you’re not going to help,” I said, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice.
I already have, he said. You seem not to have noticed.
A pearlescent gray was growing in the sky behind the mountains. Another day of fighting would soon begin. I tried one last tack despairingly: “St. Yirtrudis is my psalter Saint. I’ve read her testament; I know what you were to each other. If ever you loved her, I beg you in her name—”
He thrashed in the water, emitting a rumble so low it was not a sound but an earthquake. The ground bucked, yanking my feet from under me, and I landed hard on my hip in the mud.
I told you, he roared, I am no Saint!
“You’re a monster, retired from killing,” I said waspishly. “I know.”
You do not know. You cannot begin to know, he thundered. His voice seemed to echo off the very mountains, and yet I was sure it sounded only in my head. When you have lain in mud for six hundred years, perhaps you can claim something resembling knowledge.
I pushed myself back to standing, my breath hard and ragged. I had nothing else to say to the creature. My impious father might have shrugged and knowingly asked when the Saints ever lifted a finger for anybody.
This one wouldn’t even consent to be a monster.
I had to find a way to be monster enough for both of us.
I walked away from him, despairing and out of ideas. I’d lost Abdo’s trail, the armies would be awake and at each other’s throats again soon, and I was wet and miserable. The last was the only one I could do anything about at the moment. I found a fallen log to sit on and opened the satchel Alberdt had sent with me to see if he’d thought to pack dry stockings.
He hadn’t. Instead, I found a little parcel wrapped in cloth, the birthday present Kiggs had handed me what seemed like an age ago. It must have fallen out of the sleeve of my white gown when I’d changed clothes.
It was my birthday, I realized with a start. I unwrapped the gift with trembling fingers. He’d said the thought would have to count, but at first I couldn’t tell what he’d been thinking. The prince had given me a gilt-framed round mirror the size of my palm. What was I to do with this? Check my teeth for spinach?
The frame had words engraved in it. The moon was sinking behind the western hills, stealing my light away, but I finally discerned Seraphina along the top, and I see you along the bottom.
I see you.
I laughed and then I wept. I could barely see myself in this tiny mirror, my mind-fire was shut off from the rest of the world, and Jannoula had taken everything I hoped for and twisted it to her own purposes. It was all wrong, all backward, and I couldn’t even see my way clear of it to …
An idea was beginning to form. It was all backward: Saint, Counter-Saint. Was there a way to reflect her light back at her?
I fished in my bag for the gown I’d changed out of. Its hem was filthy, but it would look sufficiently white in the morning twilight. I pulled it out hand over hand and then drew out the sword. It wasn’t a very long sword, but it was going to have to do.
I had exactly one idea, and it involved reaching the center of the battlefield before either side struck. With the sword in one hand and the damp, clingy gown in the other, I walked and then ran. I’m no runner, but months of riding and travel had increased my endurance. Once I came to the road, it was smooth going, my squelching boots notwithstanding.
It was also downhill. That helped.
I was racing the sun, which crawled relentlessly toward the door of dawn. I passed trampled farmland, burned-out barns; I prayed the farmers had reached the city and the tunnels safely. A flock of renegade sheep flowed across the road ahead of me, turned south so they blocked my way, then north so they ran right at me. I let them rush around me, a fleecy river, then kept on my way.
To my left, smoke rose from the city, and its walls were scorched and cracked in places. I saw movement on the walls as fresh soldiers replaced the night guard. I wondered if any of them saw me running.
I could see the camps now, the armies beginning to stir. To the north, in the Queenswood, the Old Ard camped. The Loyalists were south, out of sight from here, behind some low hills, so that they might strike from unexpected angles. Our knights and the ragtag infantries of Ninys and Goredd were spread across the south, and to the west were the Samsamese. The Ninysh had thrown up hasty earthworks against the Samsamese—yesterday, presumably, while I wandered the swamp. The dirt walls would shunt the Samsamese north, making it easier for them to engage with the Old Ard than with the Goreddis.
My road led into the middle of everything. I was practically falling over my feet by this point. I let myself walk the last half mile, past torn-up fields and pasture churned to mud, tying the gown’s long sleeves to the sword as I went.
The gown and sword, a makeshift flag, caught the breeze when I raised it above my head. It flapped behind me, and the first rays of sun, cutting underneath a heavy brow of cloud, shone on the fabric and made the white linen glow. It was my flag of surrender.
There was movement in the camps, a stirring that I hoped was a question: Which side had sent me out, and why?
One by one, the camps sent representatives to parley. Sir Maurizio did not immediately recognize me; he paused when he realized whom he was walking toward, but then put his head down and picked his way doggedly across the blackened field. Not far behind him, a familiar blond beard bobbed: it belonged to Captain Moy, who’d escorted me through Ninys. The Old Ard sent a general, shrunk into his saarantras, who introduced himself as General Palonn; I knew him as Jannoula’s uncle, the one who’d put her at the mercies of the Censors. The Loyalists sent General Zira, whose saarantras was a thickset, energetic woman. Neither Palonn nor Zira had bothered lightening their skin for the likes of me. The Regent of Samsam, Josef erstwhile Earl of Apsig, sauntered up last with apparent unconcern, his helmet under his arm and his fair hair tossing in the breeze.
“Whose envoy are you, then?” he sneered. “Blessed Jannoula would not have sent you. She warned me that you were not to be trusted.”
“She was right: I am absolutely not to be trusted,” I said, barely glancing at him. No one had yet appeared upon the city walls.
Josef puffed up indignantly, but it was hard to quarrel when I’d agreed with him.
If I was to reflect Jannoula’s fire, I had to attract her attention, but I still saw no sign of her atop the Ard Tower. I stalled. “My friends, I am here to discuss the treachery of a certain half-dragon called Jannoula—”
“A half-dragon like yourself?” said General Zira, as abrupt and intimidating in her saarantras as in her natural form. “Like the half-dragons who have been indiscriminately knocking my Loyalists out of the sky?”
“A corrupt, unnatural being,” purred General Palonn. “We know her. We intend to kill her when this is all over, you may be sure of that. She fooled us for a time, but it has become clear that she’s playing both sides.”
“Yes,” I said. “She has lied to all sides, bent this war to her own purposes with her formidable powers of persuasion—”
“The person who persuaded Ninys to help Goredd was you,” said Captain Moy, looking at me sidelong and tugging on his long blond beard. “We know nothing of this Jannoula.”
“And who was supposed to kill her if there was no other way to stop her?” said Sir Maurizio, holding up an antler-handled dagger. “I think we’re owed an explanation for this.”
“I have your explanation,” said Josef snidely. “Seraphina is a deceitful snake.”
I had completely lost control of this parley, but I couldn’t let myself get upset, not even at Josef. Persuading them wasn’t the point—although it was galling that there seemed to be so many good reasons to blame me for everything. I said, “Jannoula doesn’t care who wins, only that we lose as many good people and dragons as possible.”
“The only good dragon—” Josef cut off sharply and clutched at his heart, eyes wide. I followed his gaze toward the city and saw her, our
All eyes turned toward her. She took the hand of the half-dragon next to her to make the chain, and they raised hands together as if in victory. Josef fell to his knees. “Santi Merdi!” cried Moy, and Maurizio gasped, and even the two dragon generals looked stunned. “Can you identify the source of that light?” Zira asked, almost inaudibly.
So dragons could see it, too. I really was alone in my incapacity.
Here was my chance, though. She’d come out to show everyone the light—or Heaven, or whatever dragons took her mind-fire to be. I willed myself to reflect it back at her. Nothing seemed to happen. Nedouard and Ingar had been able to reflect by willing it, but then they’d been threaded directly to her mind. I would find the way. I had tucked the little mirror into my sleeve; I gripped it now to give me strength, and threw everything I had at Jannoula.
I make my will a mirror, I chanted to myself. I make my wall a silver sphere.
I glanced up; nothing had changed, except that Jannoula was looking at me. I don’t know what I must have looked like to her. Nothing reflected or gleamed.
I had been a fool to think this could work. On the battlements, Jannoula crashed her fists together like she’d done during our talk on the tower. She was out of her mind, and I’d been out of my mind to imagine I could counter her.
I froze. Out of my mind.
Go into the cottage, go out of my mind. Those had been my ritual words when I fortified the Wee Cottage and banished her from my garden. Might I have inadvertently created yet another inside-out house? What if that door led out of my self-constructed fortress and into the world? The egress might have been right in front of me all along.
I closed my eyes and found my shriveled garden at once. I filled it like I filled my own skin. The cottage door loomed before me; its padlock crumbled to dust in my fist. I took a terrified breath, opened the door, and stepped through.
I was a thousand feet tall, a towering blaze, a column of fire extending to the sky. I saw everything: the limp, slender river; the trampled plains and rusty mountains; the war camps, full of beings who shone like stars; the city ablaze with humans and my kind. Even the dragons were lit up like bonfires. I saw cows and dogs and every squirrel in the forest. Did life glow like that? Had it always?
It was profoundly, unsettlingly right. I’d been dealing in shadows before.
Surfaces were no obstacle. I could discern Glisselda in the city, could see right to the heart of her. I saw Josquin in Segosh and Rodya and Hanse with the Samsamese, saw Orma in the seminary and Camba in the tower. Comonot, Eskar, and Mitha gleamed in the Tanamoot—how was it possible? Kiggs was with the city garrison, and I felt a pang for him, but not only for him. For the whole shining world.
Jannoula on the walls shone differently. She did not blaze forth from a single incandescent core; at her center was a deep, hollow emptiness, like a hole in the world.
I remembered that emptiness. I’d seen it firsthand.
Humans and dragons—everyone she had touched with word or deed—were linked to Jannoula with shining filaments. Some threads stretched to the Tanamoot. To my new eyes, she was a spider in a vast web; Abdo had described Blanche’s mind-fire filaments that way, yet this network was vaster, and the connections seemed to draw light toward Jannoula. The half-dragons, lined up beside her on the city wall, were more than simply hooked. They were grappled to her with bright bands as strong as iron.
It was in service of the void at her heart, this light being drawn from all directions. What she gave was nothing compared to what she took. That dread, sad emptiness drew me; if I looked too long, I feared, I might fall in.
She saw me, knew me, reached for me with tentacles of fire. I was already fire, but still they seared and burned and tore. She struck again, but I could not bear to strike back, not when she had such a hole at her heart.
Not when I suspected I’d helped create it.
She lashed and flailed; I bore her agony, took the pain into myself and diffused it. However much I absorbed, she had more for me. I began to weaken under her onslaught.
I see you, Phina! cried a familiar voice, and then another mind unfurled in the Queenswood: Abdo. He’d been invisible to me; now his mind bloomed and cavorted.
I’ve been trying to do this! he cried. That old grump under the swamp would not advise me, but I see what you’ve done.
I could have wept with relief, I was so glad to see him. But how could I hear him? I let you go, I said.
His entire being smiled fire. You did. But I did not let go of you.
He reached toward me, across miles, with a jet of flame; I reached and felt my strength renewed. Can we free everyone? he asked.
We began, tentatively, with the spider filaments closest to us; it was hard to direct our fire to such a fine task. The threads severed easily, glowing ends floating away in the bright air, but they were myriad, a dense netting all around us. The more lines we broke, the more we saw.
We should free the ityasaari, said Abdo. Some might be able to help us.
Jannoula heard us. Were our very minds open to the air now? “Keep back!” she shouted. “I will walk them off this wall!”
Abdo ignored her and reached toward the city with a fist of fire.
An ityasaari pitched off the battlements, screaming as he fell. Abdo and I reached convulsively to catch him, but he fell through our immaterial hands and shattered on the ground.
It was Nedouard. His light went out.
The loss reverberated through my being. All the light was my light.
Even the eerie glow in the north.
It was enormous.
I see you! I cried, addressing that glow. The earth shook, the tremor lasting seconds, then minutes. Pieces broke off the walls; trebuchets tumbled end over end; cauldrons of pyria burst into geysers of flame. My body fell down, and my mind reached out, despairing, for the people of my city and the ityasaari on the wall.
Jannoula held the ityasaari back from the edge; the tremor wasn’t her doing.
Behind the city something rose, its life so unbearably bright that I narrowed my mind’s eye and used my human eyes. It was a walking mountain covered in dirt and scrubby trees, black ooze pouring off it. As it walked around the city, pieces of swampland starting to cake off, it began to look like a monstrous man. The city walls came up to his waist; he moved like he’d forgotten how, or had rusted during his years underground. He seemed to be made of metal.
No, not metal. Silver scales.
He steadied himself with one great hand against the city wall. He had told me he’d never stopped growing. He’d meant it literally. What had I been addressing all these years? His finger?
Pandowdy was vast; his mind-fire was vaster. “You let yourself out, Seraphina,” he roared in a voice like the world breaking. I was dimly aware of people around me covering their ears and buckling under the weight of sound; he wasn’t just speaking in my mind anymore.
“You too,” I said. “You’re not what I thought you were.”
His eyes, rimmed in mud, blinked slowly, and the lower half of his face split horizontally, revealing a gaping maw, a terrifying smile. “Neither are you. That’s why I’ve come. I observe that you are stuck,” said Pandowdy, leaning against the buckling wall. “You’ve worked out the mind, but sometimes what you need is matter.”
Jannoula ran back and forth on the battlements, crying to the bombardiers to fire on Pandowdy. Some did. Pandowdy shook pyria off himself; the trebuchet stones bounced away harmlessly.
He reached a gargantuan hand across and plucked Jannoula off the battlements. She screamed. Someone lunged after her, jabbing Pandowdy’s hand with a spear. It glanced off the giant’s scaly finger; the spearman tumbled over the edge of the wall.
It was Lars.
“Pandowdy!” I cried.
“Do not be afraid, little sister,” he said. The ground vibrated with his voice.
He brought his hand across and broke the shining filaments, like a gardener pinching off buds. He released the ityasaari, the soldiers on the wall, the councilors at court, the Regent of Samsam, the generals of the Old Ard both here and in the Tanamoot. He moved to break Abdo’s tether, but Abdo gestured for him to wait, then reached inside and unhooked himself. Pandowdy nodded respectfully.
The Saint—for I was convinced he was a Saint, indeed, whatever the rest of us might have been—now had a fistful of dangling mind-fire threads. “She is broken, this one, in her mind and heart,” he said, carefully scooping up the blazing filaments and packing them back into Jannoula. “You must learn to fill yourself with yourself, Blessed.”
“D-don’t break her any further,” I pleaded, feeling responsible.
He gave me a sidelong look, and for a moment I thought he was angry. But he said, “Would you break a mirror, Seraphina, because you fear to look into it?”
“What will you do with her?”
He held her up in the sunlight, as if examining her for cracks. “She’s interested in the Saint trade,” he rumbled. “After nearly seven hundred years, I may finally have worked out how to be one. I have the next millennium free. I’ll see what can be done.”
He moved as if to walk away, but an outcry rose all around, from the Samsamese behind me, the Goreddi and Ninysh soldiers to the south, the entire city: “St. Pandowdy!” They’d heard me call his name, I imagined, but how were they concluding he was a Saint? What did they see, what did they make of all this mind-fire?