Shadow Scale

by Rachel Hartman

  I turned away from the Wee Cottage, preoccupied with these thoughts, and found myself face to face with an incongruous snowy mountaintop. I had one more grotesque to tend, Tiny Tom, who lived in a stony grotto under the miniature peak. He owed his name to an eleven-year-old’s unsubtle sense of irony, alas: he was eight feet tall, strong as a bear (I’d glimpsed him wrestling one in the real world), and clad in ragged blankets, sewn together to make crude clothing.

  He wasn’t inside his grotto, however, but in the snow out front, leaving enormous clawed footprints as he staggered around clutching his woolly head, extremely agitated.

  Once this kind of behavior had meant I had a vision coming, but I knew how to circumvent that now. Thanks to my faithful tending, visions had become rare. I’d had only one in the last three years, the vision of Abdo at midwinter, and in that case Abdo had been actively looking for me. That wasn’t the usual situation at all.

  “Sweet Tom, merry Tom,” I said quietly, circling the wild man, keeping clear of his swinging elbows. He was hard to look at without pity: his filthy clothing, his sun-bleached thatch of hair, his beard cluttered with twigs, his crumbling teeth. “You’ve been living on that mountain all alone,” I said soothingly to his grotesque, drawing closer. “What has it taken to survive? What have you suffered?”

  We had all suffered, from Tiny Tom to Master Smasher. By all the Saints in Heaven, and their dogs, we didn’t need to suffer alone. Not anymore.

  Tiny Tom was breathing raggedly, but calming. He lowered his hands; his rheumy eyes bugged out at me. I did not turn away or flinch, but took his elbow and gently led him back into his cave, to the nest of bones he had made himself. He let himself be seated, his gigantic head beginning to nod. I ran my hand over his matted locks and stayed by him until he was asleep.

  We needed this place, this garden, in the real world. I was going to make it happen. I owed it to all of them.

  The Queen’s support for the project, however, depended more on whether we could get this mysterious barrier working than on my wish to find the others. I gathered the three ityasaari of my acquaintance that afternoon to see what we could do. Lars offered the use of Viridius’s suite.

  Viridius was home and, because he was having a good day gout-wise, sitting up at the harpsichord in his brocade dressing gown, caressing the keys with his gnarled fingers. “Don’t mind me,” he said when I arrived, waggling his bushy red eyebrows. “Lars tells me this is half-dragon business; I won’t interfere. I just need to get the second theme of this concerto grosso down.”

  Lars entered from the other room, a delicate porcelain teapot held gingerly in one large hand. He paused by Viridius and squeezed the old composer’s shoulder; Viridius leaned briefly into Lars’s arm and then turned back to his work. Lars brought the tea around and filled the five cups on the ornate table by the gout couch. Dame Okra had claimed the couch, putting up her feet and spreading her stiff green skirts around her. Abdo, swathed in a long knit tunic against the cold, bounced on his upholstered chair as if he could barely be constrained to sit, his long sleeves flapping over his hands like flippers. I took the other couch, and Lars settled his bulk carefully beside me, trading me a cup of tea for Orma’s letter, which the other two had just read.

  “Have you heard of anything like this?” I said, glancing from Dame Okra’s scowl to Abdo’s wide brown eyes. “Mental connections have occurred with some of us. Abdo can speak in our heads; my mind used to reach out compulsively to other half-dragons.” Jannoula had entered my mind and seized it, but I didn’t like talking about that. “What kind of connection is this mind-threading?”

  “I’ll tell you right now, I won’t participate in any mind-threading,” said Dame Okra flatly, her eyes swimming behind her thick spectacles. “It sounds horrible.”

  It sounds interesting to me, said Abdo’s voice in my head.

  “Do you know whether the Porphyrian ityasaari have ever joined together this way, or used their … their mind-stuff for this kind of physical manifestation?” I asked aloud so Dame Okra and Lars could hear half the conversation, anyway. Abdo’s mouth and tongue were shingled with silver dragon scales, and he could not speak aloud.

  No. But we do know about mind-stuff. We call it soul-light. With practice, some of us can learn to see it around other ityasaari, like a second self made of sunlight. I can reach out with mine a little; that’s how I talk to them. I send out a finger of fire, said Abdo, sending his real finger in a slow, dramatic arc to poke Lars in the stomach.

  Lars, his lips moving as he read, swatted Abdo’s hand away.

  Abdo gestured at Dame Okra with his head. Her light is spiny, like a hedgehog, but Lars’s is gentle and friendly.

  I saw nothing around either of them, but I noted an omission. What about mine?

  Abdo studied the air around my head, toying with one of his many hair knots. I see strands of light sticking out of your head like snakes, or umbilical cords, where we three—and others—are connected to you. Cords of our light. I don’t see your light, and I don’t know why.

  Heat rose in my cheeks. My light was missing? What did that mean? Was I deficient? An anomaly even among anomalies?

  Dame Okra interjected in a voice like a braying mule: “Might we all participate in this conversation? That requires it to be audible.” She paused, her scowl deepening. “No, don’t talk to me silently, you villain. I won’t tolerate it.” She glared at Abdo and waved a hand around her head as if fending off gnats.

  “He says we’ve all got—” The word soul-light didn’t sit well with me; it smacked of religion, which brought me quickly to judgmental Saints. “Mind-fire. He can see it.”

  Lars carefully folded Orma’s letter and placed it on the couch between us, shrugging his bulky shoulders. “I can’t do anythink special with my mindt, as far as I know, but I am heppy to be a bead if someone else is the string.”

  “I’m sure that will be fine, Lars,” I said, nodding encouragingly. “Abdo or I will discover the way to thread through you.”

  I don’t think you can reach out like that, Phina madamina, said Abdo.

  “I’ve reached out with my mind before,” I said, more waspishly than I meant to. I had reached back into Jannoula’s mind; I suppressed that memory at once.

  Recently? he said, pulling the neck of his tunic up over his mouth.

  “Give me a minute to relax into it. I’ll show you,” I said, glaring at the little skeptic. I nestled into a corner of the couch, closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing. It took time, because Dame Okra snorted like a horse, and then Viridius kept tinkling away on the harpsichord until Lars stepped over and gently asked him to stop.

  I finally found my garden, and then Loud Lad’s ravine in the middle of it. Loud Lad sat upon the lip of the chasm, as if waiting for me, a beatific smile on his round face. I prodded him to standing, and then concentrated on myself. I always imagined myself bodily present in the garden; I liked feeling the dewy grass between my toes. When I had tried this before—with Jannoula—I had needed to imagine that the grotesque and I were immaterial.

  With effort, Loud Lad began to blur around the edges, then turn translucent in the middle. I could make out shapes through him. My own hands grew transparent, and when I was insubstantial enough, I stepped into Loud Lad to join my mind-stuff with his.

  I passed through him as if he were fog. A second try gave the same result.

  “It’s like trying to travel through a spyglass,” said a voice behind me in the garden. “If we could do that, I’d step through and visit the moon.”

  I turned around to see Fruit Bat—Abdo’s double—animated by Abdo’s consciousness. He could speak in my garden, unhindered by his scaly throat; this was how he spoke in my mind.

  “I’ve done this before,” I said.

  “Yes, but your mind may have changed since then,” he said, his dark eyes solemn. “It has changed in the time I’ve known you. I walked out of this garden and into your wider mind once—do you remember?�
�

  I did. I had been depressed, and then a door had appeared in the undifferentiated fog of … of the rest of my mind. He had stepped through to comfort me, but I’d taken him for a second Jannoula. “I made you promise to stay in the garden after that,” I said.

  He nodded. “That’s not all you did. You took precautions. There used to be an Abdo-sized hole in the wall, but you bricked it up.”

  Not intentionally, if so. The garden’s edge was in sight; I pointed crossly. “Bricked? It’s a woven willow fence.”

  “Ah, madamina. I know you call this place a garden, but it doesn’t look like one to me. I see us confined to a narrow gatehouse, with no admittance to the castle of your larger mind.”

  I looked around at the lush vegetation, the soaring blue sky, Loud Lad’s deep ravine. “That’s absurd,” I said, trying to laugh, but deeply confused. This place had been created by my imagination, of course, but was its appearance so subjective?

  This wasn’t solving our mind-threading problem. “Even if I can’t reach out to Lars,” I said, “can you reach out and thread your mind-fire to mine? Make me a bead on the string?”

  Abdo bit his lip and darted his gaze about. “Maybe,” he said slowly.

  “Go ahead and try it,” I said.

  There was a pause and then a blinding flash of pain, as if my head would split in two. I screamed—in my head? in the real world?—and scrabbled around the garden, looking for the egression gate. I found it and returned to myself, my throbbing head cradled in someone’s hands.

  Abdo’s. He was leaning over me, his brown eyes brimming with regret. Did I hurt you, Phina madamina?

  I sat up straighter, shakily, blinking against the glare from Viridius’s windows. “I’m all right now.”

  I should have listened to my instinct, he fretted, patting my cheek and then my hair. I can enter Fruit Bat, but I can’t go any further into your mind than that. I can’t see, let alone touch, your soul-light, not even from your garden. I don’t know what else to try.

  I took a juddering breath. “T-try with Lars. The Queen won’t let me go looking for the others if we can’t make this work.”

  Lars’s sea-gray eyes had grown enormous, watching me; he ran a nervous hand through his bristly blond hair. Abdo must have spoken reassuringly in his head, because Lars joined him on the Zibou carpet, sitting cross-legged and joining hands. He nodded at intervals, then turned to us and said, “We are tryink one idea Abdo has. He doesn’t know if it works. He asks thet Dame Okra tell him if she sees anything.”

  “What kind of anything?” said Dame Okra warily.

  “Soul-light. Mind-fire. Whatever you like to call it,” said Lars, smiling. “Abdo is curious whether you can see it when we weave ours together.”

  I was excluded from that hope, I noted sourly. Was it because I had no visible mind-fire? Did that make me more like an ordinary human? All my life I had longed to be ordinary; how ridiculous to be disgruntled when I finally was. It was no use being envious; we were all different.

  Dame Okra emitted a skeptical grunt. Viridius, who’d resumed composing, did a quarter turn on the harpsichord bench, the better to see this mind-fire for himself. He’d been excluded from Abdo’s hope as well; at least I wasn’t alone.

  Abdo and Lars closed their eyes; Lars’s enormous pink hands almost engulfed Abdo’s wiry brown ones. I studied their faces and was relieved—not envious—to see no pain there. Indeed, Lars’s face went slack and sleepy. Abdo pursed his lips, concentrating.

  “Blue St. Prue!” cried Dame Okra.

  “Do you see it? Where is it?” said Viridius, his blue eyes darting sharply.

  Dame Okra squinted at the empty space above Lars’s and Abdo’s heads, the lines beside her mouth deepening. “That wouldn’t stop a dragon,” she said. She tossed back the dregs of her tea and then threw the cup as hard as she could toward the space.

  Viridius, in her line of fire, threw up his gout-swollen hands, but the cup never reached him. It stopped short, wobbling in midair as if caught in a giant spiderweb, and remained suspended for several seconds before dropping to the carpet between Abdo and Lars.

  “Saints’ dogs!” Viridius swore. He’d picked up that expression from me.

  Dame Okra sneered. “That’s not nothing, but is it really the best you can do?”

  Abdo opened one eye, which twinkled mischievously, then closed it again. Dame Okra watched, arms folded. Suddenly she cried, “Duck!” and threw herself flat on the ground.

  Viridius followed suit without questioning, flinging himself off the harpsichord stool. My pathetic reflexes, alas, were too slow off the mark. Harpsichord strings twanged and windows shattered as I was bowled over the back of the couch.

  I came to on the daybed in Viridius’s solarium; its windows, still intact, had been out of range. The sun had slipped behind the mountains, but the sky was still pink. Dame Okra sat beside me, adjusting the wick of a lamp in her lap, illuminating her froggy face from below. She noticed me stirring and said, “How do you feel?”

  It was an unusually tender inquiry, coming from her. My ears were ringing and my head throbbed, but for her sake I bravely said, “Not too awful.”

  I’d have something good to report to the Queen, at least, whenever I could stand up again.

  “Of course you’re fine,” Dame Okra snapped, setting the lamp on a side table. “Abdo has been nearly hysterical, thinking he’d hurt you.”

  I tried to sit up, but my head weighed a thousand pounds. “Where is he?”

  Dame Okra waved off my question. “You’ll see him soon. I want a word with you first.” Her pink tongue darted over her lips. “This is ill advised, this whole endeavor.”

  I closed my eyes. “If you dislike the idea of linking minds, you don’t have to—”

  “Indeed, I never shall,” she said impatiently. “But it’s not just that. It’s this plan of yours to bring the half-dragons together.” My eyes popped open again; she leered at me. “Oh yes, I know what this is really about. You think you’re going to find a family. We shall come together under one roof—a warm communing of weird ones!—and all our problems will be solved.” She grinned toothily and batted her eyes.

  I bristled at her mockery. “I want to help the others,” I said. “I’ve glimpsed their sorrows. You and I have had it easy compared with some.”

  It was her turn to chafe. “Easy? Oh yes, with my scaly tail and boyish figure, what could be simpler? I was never kicked out of my mother’s house at fifteen, never had to live on the streets of Segosh or steal to eat.” Her voice was rising to a teakettle shrill. “Bluffing my way into secretarial work was a snap; marrying the old ambassador was trivial, with my fabulous looks. Outliving him—well, no, that really was easy. But persuading our ruling count to let me take over as ambassador, when no female had ever held the post before, was as easy as wetting the bed.” She was shouting now. “Or falling out a window. Why, anyone could do it, because it was nothing.”

  She glared at me, her eyes bulging fiercely.

  “Peace, Dame Okra,” I said. “You thought you were alone in all the world. Surely it has been a relief to discover others like yourself?”

  “Abdo and Lars are good enough,” she conceded. “And you’re not so terrible.”

  “Thank you,” I said, trying to mean it. “But would you begrudge the others? Some never got past your streets-of-Segosh stage and are still stealing to eat.” She opened her mouth, but I anticipated her: “And not because they’re stupid or less deserving than you.”

  She puffed air through her lips. “Maybe,” she said. “But do not make the mistake, Seraphina, of supposing that suffering ennobles anyone. Some may be lovely, but most will be hurt beyond your skill to heal.” She stood up, adjusting her false bosom. “You’re going to bring back some genuinely unpleasant people. You know my gift involves prognostication, and I’m telling you, this will end unhappily. I have foreseen it.”

  “Noted,” I said, a chill creeping up my spine. Could s
he see that far into the future?

  She turned to go, but looked back superciliously. “When it all goes to the devil—and it will—at least I shall have the pleasure of saying I told you so.”

  On that optimistic note, she left me to my headache.

  By the next morning, the headache had dissipated and my enthusiasm restored itself. Maybe it didn’t matter whether my mind-fire was hidden away, or if I could participate in the invisible wall; I was connected to our far-flung brethren in a way that Abdo, Dame Okra, and Lars were not. It would be my job—my honor, truly—to find them and bring them home.

  Before bed, I had written to Glisselda about Abdo and Lars’s success. A page boy interrupted my breakfast with an invitation to the Queen’s suite. I put on a nicer gown than I would have otherwise and went to the royal family’s wing of the palace. The guard, who was expecting me, let me into an airy sitting room with high ceilings, salon couches around a tiled hearth, and draperies of gold and white and blue. At the back of the room before the tall windows stood a round table set for breakfast, and behind it sat Glisselda’s grandmother, Queen Lavonda, in a wheeled chair. Her spine was bent; her skin looked pale and fragile, like crumpled paper. Her grandchildren sat on either side, chatting encouragingly at her. Glisselda spooned porridge into her grandmother’s mouth, open like a baby bird’s, and then Kiggs tenderly wiped her chin.

  The old Queen had never recovered from the events of midwinter. Imlann’s poison had been neutralized, according to the best dragon physicians Comonot could procure. They saw no other cause for her continued illness, though one had hypothesized a series of small strokes, deep in her brain. Being dragons, they had rejected outright the notion that grief might be a cause, but the human population of Goredd believed otherwise. Queen Lavonda had lost all her children—Kiggs’s mother, Princess Laurel, had died years before, but Prince Rufus and Princess Dionne had been murdered in short succession at midwinter, the latter killed by the same poison the Queen had survived.

  The old Queen had nurses and servants in abundance, but I’d heard that Kiggs and Glisselda insisted upon feeding their grandmother breakfast each day. This was the first I’d seen of it, and I was filled with sorrow for them and awe at how much they loved and honored the old woman, even when she was no longer fully herself.