Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman
“Of course she does,” I said. He smiled again. I felt a little guilty for cultivating those smiles; I wasn’t allowed.
“The sweetheart knot”—he held up the intricate silver tangle—“connects with the master box in Selda’s study. She wants to hear from you twice a week, whether you’re having successes or not. She was adamant that if she doesn’t hear from you, she shall fret, and her fretting has international consequences now.”
I held out my hand, smiling at how he’d unconsciously copied her inflections. He laid the thniks in my palm and closed my fingers around them. My breath caught.
He quickly released me, clearing his throat and reaching for the leather pouch under his arm. “Next order of business: documents. You’ve got the Queen’s scrip, should you need funds; a list of pyria ingredients to order on the Crown’s behalf; another of Ninysh baronets and Samsamese earls of particular interest, with letters of introduction. Finding the ityasaari is your priority, but you’ll be staying with local gentry as you travel. You may as well encourage them to commit aid.”
“I’m to guilt everyone into helping us?” I teased.
“You’re to gently remind them,” he said, “of what Count Pesavolta and the Regent already promised on their behalf. Petty nobles are more likely to help if they believe we’ll notice.”
He held out the satchel; I took it and peeked in at the sheaf of parchments. “Nice to have legitimacy.”
Kiggs laughed; I’d hoped he would. He was a bastard and had an odd sense of humor about it. His dark eyes gleamed in the firelight. “I shall miss you, Phina.”
I fidgeted with the leather bag on my lap. “I already miss you,” I said. “I’ve been missing you these last three months.”
“You too?” he said. His hands tightened on the arms of his chair. “I’m so sorry.”
I tried to smile. It felt thin on my lips.
Kiggs tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “I hadn’t appreciated how hard it would be not to see you or speak to you. We cannot control our hearts, but I thought we might at least control our actions and minimize the lying—”
“You don’t have to defend yourself to me,” I said quietly. “I agreed with you.”
“Agreed? Past tense?” he said, picking up on something I hadn’t intended to reveal.
This prince was too astute. I loved him for it.
I swiftly crossed the room to my bookcase and found the book easily amid the clutter. I waved the slim volume of Pontheus’s Love and Work that he’d given me.
“Is this a rebuke?” he said, leaning forward, his expression keen. “I know what you’re going to quote: ‘There is no pain in truth, no comfort in lies.’ And that is all very well, except when you know the truth is going to hurt someone you love, and you know, furthermore, what pain she endures already: her mother dead, her grandmother dying, she herself thrown into the deep ocean of queenship and war before she’s ready.”
He rose animatedly and declared, “I will see her through this, Seraphina. I will bear this pain, suffer anything on her behalf until she’s through this storm.”
“It sounds so noble when you put it that way,” I said, more snappishly than I meant to.
His shoulders slumped. “I’m not trying to be noble. I’m trying to be kind.”
I stepped toward him until we were face to face, the breadth of a book between us. “I know you are,” I said quietly. I tapped his chest with the volume of Pontheus. “The day will come.”
He smiled sadly, then placed his hands around mine so we were clasping the book together. “I believe that—with everything I have,” he said, holding my gaze. He kissed the edge of the book because he could not kiss me.
He released my hands—just as well, because I needed to breathe—and reached into his hidden doublet pocket again. “One last thing,” he said, pulling out another medallion, gold this time. “Not a thnik,” he said hastily, handing it over.
It was a Saint’s medal, exquisitely engraved with an image of a woman holding her head on a platter: St. Capiti, my patroness.
My public patroness, that is. When I was an infant, the psalter had chosen St. Yirtrudis, the heretic. The quick-thinking priest had substituted St. Capiti. I was glad he had; I was scary enough without St. Yirtrudis tied to me. I had never been able to learn what her heresy consisted in, but the label heretic marred everything associated with her. Her shrines had been smashed and her images excised.
I had never told anyone about her, not even Kiggs.
“May Heaven smile upon your journey,” Kiggs was saying. “I know you’re not pious. It’s for my peace of mind more than yours. And belief aside, I want to make sure you know.” He swallowed hard, his throat bobbing. “Whatever you may find upon the road, you have a home and friends to come back to.”
Words caught in my throat. I did have friends now, more than ever before in my life. I did feel at home here. What gap was I still trying to fill by gathering the ityasaari? When would that emptiness ever be filled?
Kiggs made for the door and I followed, silent as a shadow. He paused with his hand on the latch, looked at me one more time, then turned and walked away.
I closed the door behind him and drifted toward my bedroom; the bed was piled with the clothes I meant to take and the bags they weren’t quite fitting into. I held the volume of Pontheus to my heart, pressed the Saint’s medallion to my lips, and then shoved them deep into one of my bags, underneath my linen shirts.
I would carry my home with me, out into the world, as I looked for others to bring into it.
The epic journey Dame Okra, Abdo, and I made across the Goreddi countryside can be distilled to one word: miserable. It seems grossly unfair to our suffering that two weeks of mud, broken carriage wheels, and Dame Okra’s swearing should be so reducible, but there are only so many Saints to swear by, and a carriage has only four wheels.
Mud, on the other hand, is infinite.
The roads improved once we crossed into Ninys. Four smooth-rolling days later, past cattle pastures, windmills, and the first inklings of spring wheat, Dame Okra’s coachman delivered us safely to the capital, Segosh. Dame Okra had a house there, a narrow affair wedged between two others and sharing a gravel carriage yard at the back. Rusty diamond-shaped tiles shingled the roof above a jaundiced stucco facade; arched limestone cornices over shuttered windows gave the building a surprised expression, as if it couldn’t believe we’d made it here without killing each other.
Every night of our journey, in every possible grade of roadside inn, I had cleaned and oiled the scales on my arm and midriff and tended to my garden of grotesques, focusing particularly on three ityasaari: Glimmerghost, Bluey, and Finch. They seemed most likely to be Ninysh, based on their pale complexions and fair or red hair, and the occasional spoken words I overheard during induced visions. Glimmerghost lived a hermetic existence in a pine forest; Bluey seemed to be a mural painter, which may have explained the colors swirling in her garden stream. I believed Finch lived in Segosh because I’d once spied him, in full plague-doctor gear, scuttling past the Cathedral Santi Wilibaio. Even Goreddi schoolchildren knew about its golden domes.
There were two other half-dragons in the Southlands: the Librarian, who spoke Samsamese and seemed to be a highland earl, and Tiny Tom, who haunted a cave in some mountains, I couldn’t tell which. I suspected he was Goreddi, living on the borders of dragon country. I would look for him last, when I returned home.
Dame Okra had volunteered her house for the Ninysh ityasaari. Once the ityasaari were found, we would send them here, and she would put them up (“put up with them,” she’d said; I pretended to believe she’d got the Goreddi idiom wrong). Later, she would escort the three back to Goredd while Abdo and I moved on to Samsam.
We had to be in the Samsamese town of Fnark by St. Abaster’s Day, before midsummer. There was only one half-dragon in Samsam, a bald, fat fellow I called the Librarian, and our best chance of finding him was at the annual meeting of highland earls. W
Upon our arrival, a phalanx of servants ferried my things to a sickly green guest room on the third floor and mercifully prepared me a bath. When I finally felt human again—insofar as I could, with silver dragon scales around my arm and torso—I went looking for Dame Okra. I found her on the ground floor, glaring up the center of her winding staircase at Abdo, who had climbed the banister to the top of the house. He slid back down in a slow circle, grinning impishly and crying, The floor is full of sharks!
Dame Okra seems unamused, I said, glancing at her reddening face.
Because she’s a shark. Don’t let her eat me! He scampered back up the railing.
“Ah, children,” growled Dame Okra, watching him climb. “I forget what darlings they are. How I long for the opportunity to forget once more.”
“I’ll be taking him off your hands soon,” I said soothingly.
“Not soon enough,” she huffed. “Pesavolta will provide, have no fear, but—regrettably—it may be a few days before you can set out.”
“That’s fine,” I said, my patience thinning. “Finch is here in Segosh. We’ll look for him tomorrow.”
Dame Okra peered up at me over her spectacles; her eyes were wide-set and watery like a spaniel’s. “Finch? Is that what you call him in your head? I shudder to imagine what you once called me.”
It was clearly an invitation to tell her, but I pretended not to understand. I foresaw only two ways she might react to the name Miss Fusspots: amusement or incandescent anger. I was not so sure of the former that I cared to risk the latter.
“Does he have wings?” she continued. “Or chirp?”
“Finch?” I said, momentarily confused. “No, he’s got a … a beak.”
Dame Okra snorted sharply. “And he lives here in the city? Blue St. Prue, you’d think someone would have noticed.”
The next morning, we walked to the heart of the city, Abdo bounding along like he was full of grasshoppers. Hello, city! Hello, monuments! he chattered as we navigated the busy streets, uphill toward the Palasho Pesavolta. We admired the great plaza with the palasho on one side, the golden domes of the Cathedral Santi Wilibaio on the other.
A Saint’s day procession approached the cathedral, passing through the triumphal arch of King Moy. Abdo pranced excitedly and pestered me until I identified the Saint for him. It was St. Clare, the clear-seer, patron of truth-finding.
I decided to take it as a propitious sign.
Still, Finch was a needle in a city-sized haystack. From his mask and leather apron, I knew him for a plague doctor; in visions I usually glimpsed him in sickrooms or down alleys, trapping rats. My vision-eye couldn’t stray far from the ityasaari I was observing; it was hard to know where those sickrooms were.
And it would be hard for me to ask. I didn’t speak Ninysh, due to a peculiarity of my upbringing. My stepmother, Anne-Marie, came from the notorious Belgioso family, exiled from Ninys for a variety of crimes. My dragon mother had not been public knowledge, and Papa was anxious to keep it that way; his dastardly in-laws surely would have blackmailed him had they but known. My tutors were to teach me Samsamese and Porphyrian, but no Ninysh. I’m not sure what Papa thought—perhaps that a wily old Belgioso auntie could trick me more easily in her own tongue? My stepmother’s generation were all native Goreddi speakers. Whatever Papa’s motives, I had no Ninysh. I was not so enamored of grammar that I’d gone looking for it.
I hoped Abdo’s ability to see mind-fire might make up for my language deficit—maybe he might spot Finch across a crowded plaza or down an alley. We skipped the shiny parts of town in favor of more workaday neighborhoods, where brewers’ vats gusted hops-scented steam, wood turners swept sawdust into mounds, mules brayed, tanners scraped hair off stretched cowhides, and butchers washed blood off the abattoir floors, pushing it into the gutter with flat brooms. Neither Abdo nor I saw the first sign of Finch.
I did manage—through drawings and gestures—to find a hospital, but it was a facility for the well-to-do. An attendant nun who spoke some Goreddi turned up her nose when I asked about plague houses. “Not in the city,” she said, looking scandalized.
It wasn’t until the third morning that Abdo caught my arm and pointed out a space between two half-timbered shop fronts, a dark slit from which emanated a sigh of decay. I saw a glimmer, very faint. Through the buildings. It’s gone now, but we should follow it, he said, his eyes bright, almost as excited as he’d been to see the cathedral. I stuck my head into the darkness, where a stair curled down into shadow. Hand in hand, we descended the slick steps and passed through a dank culvert, into the streets behind the streets, the grim warrens of the very poor.
The alley was narrow, unpaved, and dark. Chamber pots might be emptied onto streets all over town—that was part of city life in the Southlands—but the city didn’t hire anyone to wash the streets in this neighborhood. Everything clumped together in an open sewer down the middle. I hesitated, worried about bringing Abdo here, but he seemed not frightened in the least. He walked ahead of me, prudently skirting puddles and piles of rags. The piles bestirred themselves and stretched gnarled hands toward him, palms up, wordlessly begging.
Abdo dug a hand into his shirt, where he kept his purse on a cord around his neck. Does Goreddi coin spend here? he asked. That’s all I’ve got.
“I’m sure it will,” I said, hastening after him. Needy hands plucked at my skirts. It surely wasn’t safe to flash coins, even Goreddi copper, in a place like this. I let Abdo pass out a handful, and then shepherded him along. “Do you see the mind-fire down here?”
Abdo started forward again, craning his neck and squinting. At last he cried, I do! He pointed at a rickety timber structure. Through that building.
“He’s inside the building?” I asked, incredulous. I’d had no idea this light, invisible to me, could shine so brightly.
Abdo shrugged. Moving behind it, more like.
We circled the building to the east, then Abdo said, No, this way. He’s moving west. I followed him down a cluttered alley that reeked of old onions; it began westwardly but soon veered south.
This is wrong, he said. I can see his light through walls, but not what road he’s on. It’s like a maze, and we’re in the wrong part.
Several dead ends later, we emerged into a broader dirt lane and saw, far ahead, a figure in a long leather apron and broad-brimmed hat, walking away from us. Abdo grabbed at my hand excitedly and pointed. That’s him! We hurried, our feet splashing in the drainage ditch, skidding on filth. This was the very edge of the city, where the country began creeping in; we dodged a pig in the road and navigated a flock of complaining chickens. A mule, piled high with bundled twigs, obscured my view, but I cleared it in time to see our man duck down a stairwell and into the basement of a crumbling church.
Of course. No one would waste hospital beds on plague victims.
I reached the peeling door just as the latchstring was being pulled back through the hole. I grabbed at it, getting only a knot burn for my trouble.
His shimmer is directly behind the door, said Abdo, tracing an outline on the splintery wood.
I knocked, but there was no answer. I put my eye to the latch hole and peered into a dim crypt. Straw pallets littered the floor between the blocky priests’ tombs and the thick support columns. Upon each pallet lay a wrecked being, neck and eyes swollen, fingers curled into gangrenous fists. Nuns—Sisters of St. Loola, by their yellow habits—picked their way gingerly among the dying, administering water or poppy tears.
Only now did the groans reach me, and the cadaverous stench.
Finch yanked open the door, and I nearly fell inside. A terrible beaked face glared at me with big glassy eyes; it was a sackcloth plague mask, the eyeholes set with lenses, the bulging leather beak stuffed with medicinal herbs to filter bad vapors. His leather apron was spattered and his gloves stained; his eyes, behind the glass lenses, were startlingly blue—and kind. He spoke in muffled Ninysh.
&n
“Must I ask you to leave in two languages?” he said, switching without apparent effort, his voice still muffled by the leather and by the real beak hidden under the mask’s. “Is the stench, the neighborhood, your good sense not warning enough?”
“I need to speak with you,” I said, putting my foot forward because he seemed about to close the door again. “Not now, clearly, but perhaps when you finish here?”
He laughed mirthlessly. “Finish, you say? When I leave this place, I have a leper colony to attend. Then I will be pulled in a dozen more directions. The poor need so much, and there are so few who care to give.”
I fished my purse out of my bodice and pressed a silver coin upon him. He stared at it, lying forlornly in the worn palm of his glove. I gave him another.
The doctor cocked his head, like a bird listening for a worm. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” he said, nodding slightly to Abdo.
I shot Abdo a glance, but Abdo was watching the doctor with imploring eyes. “I can find her house,” said Finch, “but it will be evening before I have time.” The masked doctor turned his eyes to me, gently pushed my foot aside with the grimy toe of his boot, and shut the door.
“So what did you tell Dr. Finch?” I asked Abdo as we turned to leave.
That we are of his kind, said Abdo dreamily, taking my hand. He is curious by nature; he will come. I liked his mind. It’s a humane color.
I was delighted. We’d succeeded in finding a half-dragon after only three days’ searching; he’d seemed cautiously receptive, at least. After weeks of mud, I finally had something substantive to report to Glisselda and Kiggs.
It was a most propitious start. I would enjoy telling Dame Okra as well.
We stopped briefly by Dame Okra’s, but she wasn’t home and we were too merry to stay indoors. I fetched my flute, and Abdo and I passed the afternoon performing in the cathedral plaza.