Shadow Scale

by Rachel Hartman

  I froze, tea halfway to my lips. I’d grown so used to her that I’d forgotten she wasn’t separate from me as other people were. Her consciousness was inside my head. How entangled with mine could it become? How entangled was it already?

  “I don’t hear your every thought,” she said hastily. “Or else you think very little. But you seemed to have spoken to me intentionally when you looked at barges on the river.”

  In fact, I had been imagining how I would describe them to her. The green water between red and blue barges made a striking image.

  “I only mean to ask,” she said, blushing charmingly, “if you would describe the city again while you’re walking. I would love to hear it.”

  I relaxed a little. As spooky as it was to be reminded of our uncanny link, she didn’t mean me any harm. “Of course,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”

  As I walked to my music lesson the next day, I thought at Jannoula, describing everything I passed: the stone curlicues in the balustrade of Cathedral Bridge; the lizard-like quigutl climbing upside down along a clothesline between houses; the shouting pie vendors and their savory-smelling wares.

  I wasn’t completely sure she was hearing my descriptions until she replied: You should eat a pie for me, since I can’t taste one myself.

  It is generally inadvisable to obey voices in your head, and indeed I froze when I heard her, downright spooked that she could talk to me when I wasn’t visiting my garden. Still, it wasn’t much stranger than the fact that she’d heard me, and what a sweet request. I smiled in spite of myself and said, Well, if you really insist …

  I had hoped she could taste the pie while I did, but she couldn’t. I described the sweet apples and flaky pastry until she laughingly cried, Enough! I’m envious now.

  We started conversing during the day as I walked around, and for the first time I began to feel I truly had a friend. She wasn’t always there; her own life—her captors? I could only imagine—sometimes demanded her attention and, she explained, she couldn’t be in two places at once. When she was gone, I saved up details for her: the legless beggar singing in St. Loola’s Square; the way falling red maple leaves gavotted in the autumn breeze.

  What does gavotted mean? she asked when I shared these things later. Or singing, for that matter?

  “Have you never heard music before?” I exclaimed aloud, forgetting in my astonishment that I was eating dinner with my family. My father and stepmother stared; my little half sisters giggled. I stuffed a forkful of jellied eel into my mouth.

  Poor Jannoula, though. If she was truly deprived of music, I had to correct this.

  It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Jannoula could hear thoughts directed at her, but she could not sense through my senses. My daily music lessons with Orma could not enlighten her; she didn’t hear me playing my instruments. I tried thinking at her while I played, but that just made my playing suffer. I sang to her in the garden after I’d settled the other grotesques for the night, but I was a self-conscious and indifferent singer even in my own head. I imagined an oud and played that, but it was only a pale shadow of the real thing. She remained unfailingly polite, but I could tell she didn’t see the point.

  Then one day I was practicing flute, thinking not about Jannoula but about some beastly arpeggios that kept tripping me up. I tensed every time they approached, overthought and overshot them. Orma’s suggestion—that I play them extremely slowly until I had the technique down—was good as far as it went, but it didn’t solve the way I cringed, or how the cringe itself tightened my timbre into an excruciating shrill.

  Solving the notes was the easy part; I had to solve the dread, and I couldn’t.

  I took a break, stretched, tried again, failed, kicked over the music stand (I am not proud of that), and wondered whether I had reached the limits of my musical ability. Maybe I’d never had any. Surely someone with a modicum of talent wouldn’t have to work this hard.

  The music stand had hit my table and knocked a cascade of books and parchments onto the floor; I had my uncle’s proclivity for filing by piling, alas. I picked everything up, leafing through to see whether I couldn’t relocate this mountain to the bottom of my wardrobe and forget it. The avalanche consisted mostly of scores that I needed to study, but then my eyes lit upon Orma’s scrawled handwriting: On Emptiness. It was a short treatise he’d written for me, back when we’d hoped to quell the visions through meditation. I drifted over to my bed and read the whole thing again.

  And had an idea.

  I needed to get out of my own way, release this anxiety and relax into the arpeggios. I had gotten good at vacating my mind; the obvious jokes aside, meditation practice had enabled me to create my garden, and to visit it. I lay back on my bed and imagined myself empty, pictured doors in my heart and how I would fling them open. I was a hollow channel; I would be my own instrument, reverberating.

  I didn’t sit up or open my eyes, just put my flute to my lips and began to play.

  Oh! cried Jannoula in my mind. There was such anguish in her voice that I broke off in alarm. No, don’t stop!

  It took me a moment to understand that she had finally heard me—through my ears, or some other method? I wasn’t sure. I only knew that I had found a way to open myself to her. I laughed, long and loud, while she continued to grouse. “Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, grinning. I took a deep breath, filling and emptying myself together, and let my whole being ring with music once again.

  Orma, unexpectedly, heard a difference in my playing at our next lesson. “That rondo is much improved,” he said from his perch on his desk. “It’s nothing I taught you, though. You’ve found some way to give it greater depth. It feels—” He cut himself short.

  I waited. I had never heard him begin a sentence that way.

  “That is,” said Orma, scratching his false beard, “you’re playing as humans do at their best. Filling the music with some discernible—” He waved his hands; this was hard for him. “Emotion? Self? Someday perhaps you’ll be my teacher and explain it to me.”

  “But you did teach me,” I said eagerly. “Your meditation treatise gave me the key. I cleared out all the detritus, or something, and now she can hear me play.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. “She?” said Orma evenly.

  I had not been keeping him apprised of Jannoula’s actions, even as she’d begun to hear my thoughts and my music. Now it came out, how we talked every day, how she could hear my music and some of my thoughts. Orma listened silently, his black eyes inscrutable behind his spectacles; a defensive warmth rose in my chest against his studied neutrality. “She’s humble and kind,” I said, folding my arms. “Her life is a misery, and I’m pleased to give her some relief from it.”

  Orma licked his thin lips. “Has she told you where she is imprisoned, or why?”

  “No,” I said. “And she doesn’t need to. She’s my friend and I trust her.”

  My friend. She really was. The first I’d ever had.

  “Monitor that trust,” said Orma, cool as autumn. “Mind where it wavers.”

  “It will not waver,” I said stoutly, and packed up my instruments to go home.

  I heard not a peep from Jannoula for the rest of the afternoon and thought she had left me, recalled to her real life in her cell. She was present that evening when I put the other grotesques to bed, however, following me on my rounds and sulkily kicking flowers.

  Her table, when we returned to her cottage garden, was set for tea. Jannoula did not touch her cup, but sat with her arms crossed, staring toward the distant trees of Fruit Bat’s grove. Had she overheard my conversation with Orma somehow? I hadn’t narrated it to her, or consciously opened myself. Surely that wasn’t it. I said, “What’s the matter, friend?”

  She stuck out her lower lip. “I don’t like your music teacher. ‘Has she told you where she is imprisoned, or why?’ ” jeered Jannoula, quoting Orma exactly.

  She’d heard it all. Suddenly I felt very exposed. What else could she hear tha
t she wasn’t bothering to inform me of? Could she hear my every thought, beyond the things I intentionally told her?

  That was an alarming line of inquiry. I tried to focus instead on soothing her hurt. “You must excuse Orma,” I said, laying a hand gently on her arm. “He’s a saar; it’s his way. He can sound unkind until you get to know him.”

  “You called him Uncle,” she said, flicking my hand off.

  “I—he—that’s just what I call him,” I said, a knot tightening in my gut. I had not yet told her I was half dragon, but I’d hoped to someday. It would have been a relief to have a friend who knew. She looked utterly revolted by the thought of Orma being my uncle, though. It broke my heart a little. I changed the subject: “I thought you could only hear through my ears if I deliberately opened to you.”

  Her lip curled disdainfully. “Don’t tell me your trust is wavering.”

  “It’s not,” I said, shoving down my anxiety, bending the truth to match my words.

  Within days I had reframed her new ability as an asset and forgotten why I’d found it alarming. Whenever my father scolded me—a constant of my life, what with his ceaseless worrying that my half-dragon heritage would be found out—Jannoula heard him and would retort sharply in my head: So why don’t you lock us up, then, you monster? Whenever Anne-Marie gave me chores to do, Jannoula groaned, Oh, making up the beds is exactly like torture!

  Each time I had to bite my lip, partly to keep from laughing, partly to make sure that I had not uttered those very words myself.

  She said everything I wished I could say, and I loved her for it. We were sisters again, a stronger team than ever, our moment of Orma-induced friction forgotten.

  But Orma had planted a seed in my mind.

  One morning, after chores, I looked for her in the garden, but she wasn’t there. That is, her grotesque sat primly under a giant chrysanthemum (a fancy of hers I’d indulged), with no light in its eyes. Jannoula’s attention was elsewhere.

  I hesitated. What was she going through in the real world? Every time I’d asked, she’d changed the subject; she wouldn’t let me watch her in her cell. I believed she suffered, and I wanted to understand what was happening. I wanted to help. Could I reverse our strange connection and see for myself without alerting her to my presence? This grotesque was merely a metaphor, after all, a way to make sense of the truth, not the truth itself.

  If I took Otter’s hands, I’d have my usual floating vision; she’d sense me right away and be angry. Could I enter her mind the way she entered mine?

  I had a harebrained notion that if I could enter her avatar, I might enter Jannoula herself. How, though? I thought of splitting her down the middle, but rejected that as disgusting. What if I were immaterial, like a ghost? I imagined myself so. I pressed my immaterial palms together like a river diver and pushed them into her grotesque’s face. They passed through her nose like it was mist. I was up to my elbows; my hands didn’t reappear out the back of her head. I bent my head and pressed on until—

  I landed hard on the floor of a dim, narrow corridor lined with featureless gray doors. Rising shakily to my feet, I looked both directions; there was no obvious way back to myself.

  Without warning, the air seemed to compress around me, a terrible pressure that nearly brought me to my knees. The pain eased up momentarily before rushing over me again in an agonizing undulation. I prayed it would recede before it broke me.

  It did. I panted like a dog and trembled all over.

  Voices echoed down the corridor. I pressed forward, walking when I could, waiting out more waves of pain. I could make no sound when the crush was upon me, only lean against the wall, panicked and paralyzed. Cries built up in me, unuttered.

  I tried doors, which all opened into a darkness I dared not enter. One lightless room emitted a blast of icy wind; one smelled of acrid alchemical fumes; one was stuffed full of screams. I closed that one quickly, but the hallway’s strange acoustics wouldn’t let the sound die. It echoed on, a second wave amplifying the roll of pain. I plowed ahead, buffeted about, not daring to open any more doors.

  Was this the inside of Jannoula’s mind? Did she live with these constant waves of pain?

  The corridor grew darker; I couldn’t see. I felt my way, a hand on each wall, until the walls abruptly ended. I could no longer feel a floor under my feet. I looked back for the hallway I’d just come down, but I couldn’t see it. There was nothing. Nothingness. My saved-up screams burst forth inaudibly, swallowed by the dense, anechoic emptiness. This void could not be filled.

  A violent force bowled into me, shoving me back. The corridor reappeared, doors whizzing by on either side as I was pushed backward, faster and faster—

  I landed flat on the ground, all the air knocked out of me, in the dirt of my own garden. Jannoula stood over me, gasping, her hair disordered, her fists clenched as if she had punched me in the stomach. Maybe she had. Pain—my own—radiated from my core.

  “What did you see?” she shouted, her face contorting.

  “I’m so sorry.” I coughed. My head lolled back onto the ground.

  “Don’t you … ever …” Her breath came as raggedly as my own. “That’s none of your business.…”

  I wrapped my arms around my head. She sat down beside me with a rustle and thump. “That was your mind,” I said bleakly. “All that pain. Those were your screams.”

  I looked up; she was absently ripping a marigold, picking its orange petals apart. “Promise me you won’t go back,” she said, her lower lip trembling. “It’s hard enough that I must go.”

  I studied her profile, the decisive nose, the subtle chin. “What would happen to your body in the real world if you stayed here?”

  Jannoula looked at me sidelong. “I’m no good to them dead; they’d force-feed me, I suppose. Perhaps my catatonia would amuse them.” She dug out the heart of the flower with her nails.

  “Then stay,” I said firmly, impulsively. “Don’t go back to that pain, or go as little as you can.” Orma would disapprove of this scheme, but Orma didn’t have to know.

  “Oh, Seraphina!” Jannoula grabbed my hand and kissed it. Her lashes were bright with tears. “If we are to live as sisters, then let us have no more secrets. You asked who imprisoned me. It was my father’s enemies.”

  I let out a low whistle. “But why?”

  “They hope he will pay a usurious ransom. But he won’t. He doesn’t love me. He’s ashamed of me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, thinking of my own father. I wasn’t imprisoned, but … I wasn’t free, either.

  “Is it not a terrible fate to be robbed of a father’s love?” she said.

  “It is,” I whispered, my heart aching for her.

  A cat-like smile slowly crept across her lips.

  How happy we were from then on!

  Having Jannoula around all the time took some adjustment, of course, for both of us. She began to find the garden confining. “I don’t like to complain, when you’ve been so generous,” she said, “but I miss being able to see and taste and feel.”

  I tried to accommodate her by opening myself to sights and tastes, the way I’d done with music, but I couldn’t make it work. Maybe I didn’t have a strong enough emotional connection to my other senses, something that could permeate the garden’s boundaries and pull the experience through.

  “What if you left the garden gates ajar?” she suggested one evening. “I tried opening them, but they’re locked.”

  “I wish you’d asked me first,” I said, frowning. We were in her garden eating cakes, which were not as delicious as the real thing. She was right to be frustrated.

  Her green eyes widened. “I didn’t realize there were places I wasn’t allowed. Since I live here now, I assumed …” She trailed off, downcast.

  I left the gates open the next evening, experimentally. She reported back that some things trickled in—stray emotions, sensations, and thoughts—but it was all rather muted. Timidly, politely, she asked, “May I
step out into your wider mind?”

  I hesitated, feeling instinctively that this was a very big favor to ask. I said, “I don’t want you digging around. Even sisters need some privacy.”

  “I would never pry that way,” she said, so warmly that I felt silly for doubting. I took her hand in my garden and guided her through the gate myself.

  She was rapturous, as if she’d been freed from her real prison, out in the world. Her happiness was contagious; I’d never felt the like myself. I decided to leave the gates open all the time—at least I think I did.

  She began wandering my mind at will, discreet and unobtrusive, but sometimes she had accidents. Once she knocked over whatever sluice gate held back my anger, and I raged for hours until she figured out how to close it again. We laughed about it later, how I had screamed at my half sisters and smacked my father’s balding pate with a tea tray.

  “You know what’s interesting?” she told me. “Anger tastes like cabbage rolls.”

  “What?” I yelped between gales of giggling. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s true,” she insisted. “And your laughter tastes like marzipan. But best of all is love, which smacks of blackberries.”

  I’d eaten a marzipan torte with blackberries just the evening before; apparently it had made a profound impression on her. She was always making these kinds of unexpected associations, and I enjoyed them. They painted the world a different color.

  What does this do? Jannoula once asked while I was walking home from my lesson, and suddenly I couldn’t remember my way. I found the river, though it flowed a strange direction. North was surely to my right, but when I turned, my inner compass reeled, too, and north was still to my right, always just out of reach. I kept turning until I grew dizzy and fell in the river. A barge woman fished me out and took me home, drenched but laughing. Anne-Marie was not subtle about sniffing my breath.

  “Who would give me unwatered wine?” I laughed. “I’m only eleven!”