Shadow Scale

by Rachel Hartman

  I wanted this day to be over so badly, but sleep fled, leaving me nothing but self-recrimination. I should have let Abdo go back to Segosh with Blanche. I should have skipped the monastery altogether and left Od Fredricka alone. I should never have come after Gianni Patto, who had even less language than Blanche and liked to wrestle bears. I hadn’t believed him dangerous; that seemed so foolish now. He’d snapped the monk’s neck with his bare hands. I revisited that moment as I tossed and turned, the monk flopping grotesquely off the rooftop over and over in my mind’s eye.

  I recalled Gianni speaking my name, and shuddered. That cat-like expression …

  I sat bolt upright, horrified. It was well past midnight, but I leaped out of bed, put my breeches and boots back on, and crept out of my room.

  Outside Josquin’s door, I hesitated, wanting to wake him and fearing what he would witness if I did, and what he would think of me after. He’d become a friend, I realized.

  I could not bear to lose his regard. I let him lie.

  I found my way out of the keep and crossed the moonlit courtyard to the round tower. The outer door was guarded. My Ninysh was too poor to bluff my way in, but the guardsman must have had some idea of who I was. He gestured me to wait while he went indoors; to my surprise, he came back out with Moy. “We’re guarding the wild man in shifts,” said the captain, smiling. “You want a turn? We were rude not to offer.”

  “I want to talk to him—alone,” I said. “He’s not still being violent, is he?”

  Moy shrugged. “He’s been quiet as a lamb behind that solid oak door. You can talk through the grating, though I’m not sure he talks.”

  Gianni Patto shouldn’t have had any language. When he’d said my name, that should have clued me in right away. I’d been too upset about Abdo to notice.

  Moy held the tower door open and closed it behind me. I was in a short, high-ceilinged corridor, lit by a single torch in a sconce. There was a knife and whittled stick upon a stool; Moy apparently passed his time carving. The only occupied cell was on the left at the end. The fetid stench of unwashed wild man made the air heavy.

  “Gianni?” I said, looking through the door’s grating. A barred window across the cell let in a trickle of moonlight, but not enough for me to see the prisoner. I called his name again, and suddenly his eye was at the grating, pale and rheumy and wild.

  He startled me into taking a step back; I forced myself not to look away. “You spoke my name,” I said quietly. “Someone must have taught it to you. Who was it?”

  His eye reeled, unfocused. He’d understood nothing; if he’d known any language at all—and I still believed he shouldn’t—it could only have been Ninysh. He’d clearly been living alone on the mountainside for decades, probably from a younger age than Blanche. I could picture his villager mother, once she understood what sort of creature she had borne, tearfully leading him into a winter storm to be respectably lost for good.

  I couldn’t communicate with him; it had been foolish to try. I turned to go, but heard scrabbling behind me. I looked back and saw his fingers, the nails cracked and yellow, poking through the grating.

  “Fee,” he said, his voice ragged with phlegm. He spat. “Fee. Na.”

  I had wanted and dreaded his words. I cleared my throat. “That’s right.”

  “Thisss voooice,” said Gianni slowly, exaggerating consonants, dragging out the vowels. He was speaking Goreddi. My blood froze in my veins. “Decadesss of disssuse,” he croaked. “Hard to mek the tongue dooo what I … ge-huhrrgh!” There was a splat upon the floor as he spat again. “What a terrible-tasting mouth I have!”

  My heart pounded painfully. The voice dispelled any remaining doubts. I knew its inflections, even channeled through Gianni’s disused voice box and recalcitrant mouth. How she’d accomplished this, I couldn’t imagine. I said, “What do you want, Jannoula?”

  Gianni’s eye reappeared on the other side of the grate, now focused and shrewd. “Seraphina,” he said—or she said, using his moist, breathy voice. “You’re all grown up.”

  “What do you want?” I repeated.

  Gianni’s tongue clicked, scolding. “No ‘Hello.’ No ‘How have you been, Jannoula? I hope you’re not still languishing in prison.’ I suppose that horrid uncle of yours continues to poison you against me.”

  The mention of Orma hurt, but I kept my face implacable. “The uncle who saved me, you mean? As I recall, it was you who poisoned things.”

  Gianni’s pale brow came down; his crusty eye narrowed. “It has come to my attention that you are gathering our kind together.”

  “How could you possibly have learned that?” I said.

  Laughter gurgled from the cell. “A mutual friend told me. I could help you, you know. My mind reaches out to our kind, just like yours does.”

  Or like it used to, said Jannoula/Gianni in my head, the way Abdo might have.

  I had been backing away without realizing it; now I hit the dank stone wall opposite the cell door.

  She could not have broken free of her cottage; she could not be loose in my mind!

  I squeezed my eyes shut, searching wildly in my own head for the entrance to the garden of grotesques. This was not the way to find my garden; I needed to relax. I could still hear the voice echoing somewhere in my head, Gianni’s gruff fundamental with overtones of Jannoula: Is this where you keep the others now? This narrow trough? It used to be a garden, open to your wider mind.

  In an angry rush, I was there: Tiny Tom in front of me, the garden indeed looking strangely shrunken, but there was no time to consider that. Jannoula’s mind filled Gianni’s shape like a hand inside a puppet, but she had not broken through him to enter my mind herself. She was trying, pushing and clawing inside him; I could see her glowing at his core. Tiny Tom glowed, too, with a light of his own, a different color. I had never noticed until his fire was pitted against an alien light from within.

  “Tiny Tom” was a piece of Gianni Patto’s mind-fire. Abdo had told me that, but I’d never been able to see it until this moment, under duress.

  Jannoula stretched and strained, distorting Tiny Tom’s appearance, and I feared she would burst through. I saw how to release Gianni’s mind-fire: it would be like undoing a button. I hesitated—would the uncontrollable visions return if I severed this connection?—but Jannoula writhed inside him again, and I panicked. With a thought, I unfastened Gianni Patto from my mind. The buttonhole sealed up at once behind him, as if it had never been.

  I felt the release not as relief but as bereavement. A stab of grief. My eyes popped open in the real world and I stared into Gianni’s eye through the grating in his cell door.

  “What an appalling overreaction,” said Giann-oula. “A great brute of a baby tossed out in half a bowl of bathwater. What could I possibly have done, locked in that cluttered broom closet with the others?”

  I did not answer; my jaw was trembling. How had she found him? How had she entered his mind, what did she want from me, and why was I still not free of her after all these years?

  I fled the room. She called after me. My only consolation was that her voice could not come with me in my head.

  When I was eleven years old, before the creation of my garden, I had a vision while walking through the fish market with my stepmother, Anne-Marie. I collapsed face-first into a table, knocking over baskets, sending cascades of river eels writhing onto the flagstones. I came to drenched and stinking, redarmed fishwives cursing at my stepmother and me. Anne-Marie had said nothing, but paid for the fish and cooked them all week. I still dread eel pie.

  The vision I’d had was of a woman curled upon the rough stone floor of a cell. Iron bars crisscrossed a tiny window; the bed was boards and straw. She was a prisoner, or maybe an anchorite—a holy sister in solitary confinement—but her clothing resembled no habit I had ever seen: a fitted one-piece suit, with a trapdoor between the legs, stitched together from a motley assortment of animal skins, fur side out. Except for her shaved head and bare fee
t, she resembled a large, mangy otter. I could not guess her age beyond that she was an adult, older than me.

  My vision-eye hovered silently by the ceiling. The people in my visions never saw me; only one had ever seemed to hear me speak, and I wasn’t certain of that. But this woman startled, stared, and reached up, feeling around for me; she had long, dirty nails. I couldn’t quit an involuntary vision, no matter how it frightened me. I had to wait it out.

  The vision began to fade. As if she sensed that, too, the woman cried out. I did not understand her words, but I glimpsed a keen intelligence in her eyes.

  The fur-suited prisoner was the seventeenth and final peculiar person I had seen in my visions. I nicknamed her Otter.

  I would blame my uncle Orma, and his barren, draconic imagination, for failing to guess that the people in my visions were half-dragons, but in truth we were both at fault. So strong was the taboo among both our peoples, and so complete my self-revulsion, that neither of us could countenance the idea that my parents’ awful experiment had been replicated multiple times. Besides, none of them looked like me. Some, like Master Smasher, Nag, and Nagini, were quite good-looking; I had no reason to believe they weren’t ordinary humans. Tiny Tom and the great slug, Pandowdy, on the other hand, were far more monstrous than I. I didn’t recognize myself in any of these beings and had no idea why I was doomed to see them again and again.

  Orma had intended to teach me music, but in the months after my scales came in, we spent most of our time trying to keep my visions at bay. I meditated; I visualized; I vomited a lot because the visions wreaked havoc on my equilibrium.

  The garden of grotesques was the strategy that finally worked. Under Orma’s instruction, I deliberately reached out to each of the seventeen beings I had seen, fixing permanent connections to them with the grotesques as anchors so my mind would stop lunging out at them. I did not quite understand what I was doing, only that it worked. I named the grotesque avatars and placed them in their particular parts of the garden—Fruit Bat in his grove, Pelican Man on the topiary lawn, Master Smasher in the statuary meadow.

  I saved the creation of Otter’s cottage garden for last. Her plight had sparked such pity in me that I wanted her space to be special, a peaceful, bucolic scene of herbs and flowers around an ornamental thatched cottage, which was not a functional residence; the other grotesques lived outdoors, and it seemed important to be consistent. I gave her a birdbath, a bench, and a little table where she might have tea.

  I visualized Otter as I had done with each of the others. Her image materialized before me in the garden. I looked it over to see that I’d gotten the details right, but her strange clothing bothered me. That fur suit could not be of her choosing, surely. I changed it, envisioning her in a sturdy green gown, like a young wife from a good house in town, and with blond hair, like my stepmother’s. I hoped real-world Otter would have approved, but of course she would never know. These grotesques in my head were symbols; they were not self-aware. I spoke ritual words, preparing the ground of my mind, and took Otter’s hands in mine.

  I whirled out into a vision, and again saw the fur-suited woman on the low bed of her cell, hugging her knees. My presence caught her attention; she leaped to her feet. This time, however, the vision was under my control. I pulled back to my mind’s garden—taking something with me, but I could not have said what—and affixed this last connection so that unruly visions would ambush me no more.

  “All in ard,” I said to Otter, and released her hands. Or tried to.

  She gripped me tightly. “All in ard,” she repeated, her vocal inflections strangely flat but her sharp face alert. “Who are you? What is this place?”

  “Saints’ bones!” I cried. What was this? How was she able to talk to me?

  She released my hands and stared at me with eyes as green as her gown. “How did you bring me here?” she asked. “Why did you?”

  “I—I didn’t,” I stammered stupidly. She was mentally present. None of the others were. “I mean, I didn’t try to … it shouldn’t have worked this way—”

  “You tried something,” she said, her eyes narrowing. She glanced around at the hollyhocks and foxgloves, the bench and table. Her expression softened; she reached out to touch a flower. “It’s beautiful here,” she said, her voice hushed and awed. She took a few tentative steps up the flagstone path, noticed the unaccustomed hang of clothing on her body, and twirled, watching her skirt flare. “You gave me an elegant gown!” She looked back at me, almost in tears. “What have I done to deserve your kindness?”

  “You seemed miserable where you were,” I said, still trying to understand. Her consciousness had followed me back into my mind somehow. “I wanted to make things a little easier for you.”

  She looked about ten years my senior, but she didn’t act it. She tiptoed up the path like a child, sniffing flowers, fingering the serrated edges of leaves, exclaiming at the shadows under plants. “I love it here!” she announced. “I want to stay here forever. But where are we?”

  She’d already asked once; I was being a bad host. I said, “I’m Seraphina, and this is my … my garden. Um, what’s your name?”

  “My name?” She spread her hand upon her heart, looking deeply moved that I had asked. “That’s so important. Everyone should have a name, and mine is, of course …” She bunched her lips, thinking. “Jannoula. Is that a poetic name?”

  I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. “It’s beautiful,” I assured her.

  “We shall be sisters,” she declared. “Oh, how I have longed for a place like this!”

  She hugged me. I stood stiffly at first, the way Orma might have, but then she said, “You’ve saved me from despair. Thank you, Seraphina,” and I pitied her again. Strange as this was, maybe it wasn’t so terrible. I really seemed to have helped her. Cautiously I hugged her back.

  I left her twirling her new skirt among the flowers while I circled the greater garden’s perimeter, chanting, This is my garden, complete and contained, and establishing the final boundary. At last, I returned to myself on the floor of Orma’s office. Night had fallen; it had taken six hours to create the whole thing.

  “The connections all feel stable and secure?” Orma asked as he walked me home through rain-slick streets. “Nothing’s chafing you, or likely to jar you into a vision? You’re still going to have to tend them every night to make sure nothing’s come loose.”

  He had given me so much time and support that I didn’t like to voice any doubts, but he had to know: “One of them was different. She spoke to me.”

  He stopped walking. “Tell me all,” he demanded, folding his arms and looming so ominously that I feared I’d done something wrong. I reminded myself it was his way to be serious. When I had finished, he shook his head and said, “I never know enough to help you, Seraphina. I don’t know how Jannoula talks to you, if the others don’t. Be cautious. Watch her. If she frightens or harms you, tell me at once. Promise you will.”

  “Of course,” I said, my alarm rising again. I didn’t know what he could do if something went wrong, but his vehemence was a measure of his caring. That meant a lot.

  Over the next days and weeks, I paid particular attention to Jannoula’s part of the garden, but in fact she wasn’t always mentally present when I put my grotesques to bed. Sometimes her avatar sat quietly among the poppies, as vacant as the rest. When she was present, she chased butterflies or sipped tea at her little table. I would stop and ask, “How are you?”

  Usually she smiled and nodded and went back to what she was doing, but one day she sighed and said, “My real life is all sorrow. I feel so lucky to have a respite from it. I only wish I understood where we are.”

  “Inside my mind,” I said, sitting down at the tea table with her. “I built a garden here because …” I was suddenly unsure what to tell her. I didn’t like to say I was half dragon and my mind did peculiar things; I was too ashamed, I did not know how she would react, and surely Orma would consider it incautious. �
��I was lonely,” I said at last. It was true. Papa had kept me on such a short lead that I’d never had friends. My uncle didn’t count.

  Jannoula nodded eagerly. “Me too. I’m a prisoner. I see no one but my captors.”

  “Why are you imprisoned?” I asked.

  She just smiled sadly and poured me some tea.

  Once, when she wasn’t present, I took her avatar’s hands and induced a vision. I was trying to be a friend; I wanted to understand what her life was really like, because I worried about her. Jannoula was in her dingy cell, as ever. Her shaved head and mangy fur suit were jarring enough, but then I saw something even worse. The sleeves of her suit had been pulled up, exposing her forearms. The skin was blistered, cracked, blackened, and burned from wrist to elbow. It looked freshly done to me, and her face … she seemed stunned. She wasn’t even weeping.

  She looked up at my vision-eye, and then her face filled with rage.

  I pulled out of the vision in alarm. Jannoula followed me back to my garden, and for a moment I thought she might hit me. She raised her arms and then dropped them futilely, pacing back and forth before me. “Don’t look at me without asking!” she cried.

  She looked like her usual self in my garden, green gown and fair hair, but I couldn’t get the image of her burned arms out of my mind. “Who’s done this to you?” I asked. “And why?”

  She looked away. “Please don’t ask. I am ashamed that you saw me like that. You are my only shelter, Seraphina. My only escape. Don’t poison it with your pity.”

  But I did pity her. I looked for ways to make her life more bearable, for things to interest and distract her. I observed Lavondaville closely as I walked to and from my music lesson, the limit of my circumscribed existence. At night I described things I’d seen, to her great delight. I left gifts in her garden—a puzzle, a tortoise, roses—and she exclaimed happily over every one. It took so little to please her.

  One evening, as we sat sipping tea and watching a glorious sunset I’d dreamed up, she said, “Please don’t be angry, but I heard you thinking today.”