“You are twelve,” said my stepmother sharply. “Go to your room.”
I remembered with a start: the marzipan torte with blackberries. That had been for my birthday. Such an odd thing to forget.
Sometimes I would lose control of one of my eyes, or an arm or leg, which frightened me, until Jannoula explained. I wanted to see the cathedral for myself, she said, or Just let me feel your velvet bodice. It was perfectly understandable. She lived with such deprivation, and it was but a small sacrifice to give her tremendous joy.
Then one night I was awakened by Orma sitting on the edge of my bed. I yelped in alarm. “Don’t wake the house,” he said, shushing me. “Your father is always looking for reasons to be angry with me. Last month he was accusing me of sending you home drunk.”
“Last month?” I whispered. I’d fallen in the river only … what day had that been?
His face was in shadow, but I could discern the whites of his eyes. “Is this Jannoula present and awake in your mind right now?” he whispered back. “Make no assumptions. Go to your garden and check.”
His intensity frightened me a little. I descended to my mind’s garden and found Jannoula’s avatar, sleeping among snapdragons.
Orma nodded curtly when I told him. “I assumed she sleeps when you do. Do nothing to wake her. What do you remember of our lesson today?”
I rubbed my eyes and thought. I had retained very little, it seemed. I looked at him sheepishly. “I played harpsichord and oud, and we talked about modes and intervals. We argued over a volume of Thoric’s Polyphonic Transgressions … didn’t we?”
“At the end. What happened prior to that?”
I racked my brains. I remembered one other thing, but it made no sense. “I scratched the cover of the book with my oud’s plectrum. Why did I do that?”
“You were angry with me. Or someone was.” His mouth flattened into a stern line. “Someone who didn’t like being rebuffed.”
“Rebuffed for what?” I said, a slow-burning dread in the pit of my stomach.
“You kissed me,” he said evenly. “On the mouth, to be precise. It wasn’t like you. In fact, I’m quite certain it wasn’t you.”
My throat had gone completely dry. “That’s not possible. I’d remember.”
He removed his spectacles and cleaned them with the edge of his sleeve. “How long has she been moving you around, using your body as if it were her own? Or did you not realize she could do such a thing? She apparently makes you forget afterward.”
I ran a hand over my face. “I’ll talk to her. I’m sure she didn’t mean to—”
“She meant to,” he said. “She would not have stolen your memories if it were innocent. What happens when she usurps your body and decides not to give it back?”
“She wouldn’t do that!” I whispered vehemently. “She’s my friend. My only—”
“No,” said Orma with surprising gentleness. “She is no friend to you at all. Could she make you kill your father, or hurt your little sisters?”
“She would never—” I began, then remembered hitting my father with the tea tray. It had seemed good fun at the time.
“You don’t know what she might do, or what she really wants,” said Orma. “I suspect she wants to be you. While her body is trapped in prison, you’re her chance for a better life. You have to evict her.”
“I’ve seen how she suffers,” I said, pleading with him now. “It would be cruel to kick her out. And I don’t think I could, even if—”
“You are not helpless,” said Orma.
He’d spoken those words to me before. They hit me hard, and for a moment I hated him. Some quiet, sensible part of me, though—a part I had been paying very little heed to for quite some time—knew he was right. Now that I knew how far she had gone, I could not keep letting her do what she liked with me. I buried my face in my pillow, mortified by how easily I’d handed over the reins.
He made no move to console me, but waited until I showed my face again. “We need to free you from her,” he said, “and we need to do it soon, lest she glean your intentions. Can she hear all your thoughts?”
“I think so, when the garden gates are open.” They’d been open a long time. If I closed them, she’d know something was wrong. Could I use my thoughts to fool her?
The lines by Orma’s mouth deepened. “You can’t simply release her, I suppose?”
I took a shaky breath. “I think she’s holding on to me as tightly as I’m holding on to her. If I let go, she wouldn’t return the favor.”
“Could you wall her off in some sort of prison?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said, feeling a sick, regretful pang. The irony was not lost on me.
We spent more than an hour planning; after he finally left, I stayed awake a few hours more, preparing. I knew I had to act now, while my resolve held and before she figured out what I was doing. I crept through my own mind, into Jannoula’s part of the garden, and opened the door of the ornamental cottage, which I now named the Wee Cottage, because my garden’s functional places must be named. I created a space inside it, then reinforced the walls and door, imagining them impenetrable, incorruptible. I circled the cottage seven times, chanting ritual words of my own invention. All the while, her avatar slept nearby.
Jannoula would surely wake soon. I hastily tidied up my mind and put a big padlock on the cottage door.
She was certain to notice it; I was counting on that.
I gazed down at her sleeping form among the flowers, curled up the way she’d been when I’d first met her, and my heart brimmed with pity. With a thought, I caused a toadstool the size of a table to grow beside her head and give her shade. She awoke, stretching sleepily, and smiled to see me there. “Good morning, sister,” she said, sitting up. “You don’t usually visit this time of day.”
“Look,” I said, pointing at the distraction I’d created. “I made you a toadstool.”
“It’s our favorite color!” She beamed with a childish innocence that reminded me painfully of early days. “I’d like a whole garden of them.”
“Why not?” I said, a purposeful note of desperation beneath my cheer. Speckled toadstools began popping up all over.
She picked up on my anxious undertone at once; her green eyes darted, quick as minnows, to my face. “You’re misdirecting me. What’s going on?” She flicked her tongue out quickly, like a snake. I wondered what guilt tasted like.
“Don’t be silly,” I protested too vehemently. My nerves sang with tension.
She stepped closer, her brow furrowed, cocking an ear as if listening to my rapidly knocking pulse. “What have you done?”
The padlock on the Wee Cottage popped into my thoughts, as if by accident. I struggled to suppress the thought, and the struggle itself drew her attention. She was at the cottage door in five strides, her gown swirling around her ankles. I hurried after.
“I can’t see what’s in here. What are you hiding from me?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re lying.” She whirled on me. “Why would you do this? We are sisters: we share everything.” She brought her face so close that I could see fine wrinkles around her eyes, like hairline cracks in an antique vase. Her hard life was written in those lines, along with an unexpected fragility. I steeled my heart against it.
Her eyes shone, bright and dangerous. “Do you know what else I perceive? You’ve been talking with your uncle.”
“What?” I had not anticipated this. She perceived more than I’d realized she could in so short a time. My heartbeat quickened like a panicked rabbit. “You’re mistaken.”
“Never. No one else leaves such a blackberry residue in the air.” She stuck out her tongue as if she were tasting it. “All I have ever wanted,” she said, her voice strained, “is for you to love me exactly as you love him, and you won’t. Am I not your dearest sister? Am I not more deserving than some wicked, heartless dragon, uncle or not?”
I had lost control of this conversation;
the wind blew cold over the garden.
She tasted my fear and smiled ruthlessly. “You’re half dragon. Were you going to tell me that? I had to learn it from your memories as I walked through your larger mind. You have not been honest with me at all, and now you’re hiding something in that cottage. Open the door.”
“No,” I said.
She raised her arms over her head and slowly splayed her fingers. Her hands elongated grotesquely, like spindly tree branches or scalpel-sharp claws. They became forked lightning hurled at the sky, and their terrible touch raked the inside of my skull, scraping and shocking and shattering. I collapsed, screaming, clutching wildly at my head in the real world, and in my mind, and in my mind’s mind, there was an infinite regression to the very center of myself.
Then the pain stopped, and for a high, shining moment, I saw Heaven.
Jannoula bent over my prone form. She held out her hand, now humanly proportioned, and I grasped it gratefully. She pulled me to my feet; I threw my arms around her, weeping.
She was my dearest sister. I loved her more than anything. I was overflowing with love. Words could not. I had never felt.
“There we go,” she said, her voice a melody. She smiled like the fond sun and patted my head like the kiss of springtime. “All I need now,” she said, “is for you to unlock that door.”
How could I not? She was my sister. The key was already in my hand; if I trembled, it was because I could barely contain my joy at being useful.
I had the padlock off in a trice; I held it up to show her. She smiled as the Saints smile on all of us from Heaven, full of goodness and light, overawing me. “Come,” she said, taking my hand. “Let’s see what this silly fuss was all about.”
She opened the door upon darkness. “I don’t see anything,” she said, elegantly confused. “What’s in here?”
“Nothing,” I said, which was all I was sure of anymore.
“It can’t be nothing,” she said. Even her irritation carried a rich resonance, like a deeply peeved viola.
I stopped short at the threshold. I remembered being inside earlier; I’d circled the cottage and said ritual words. My own voice came to me, that very chant, telling myself, Go into the cottage, go out of my mind.
What had that meant? Would I go mad—out of my mind—if I entered?
Jannoula still held my hand. No matter how much I loved her, I dared not enter the cottage. It was probably bad for her to go into that eerie, dense darkness. I said, “Sister, neither of us should go in there. Please.”
“Fie!” she cried, violently yanking my hand. “There’s something that you don’t want me to find, but I am going to find it!”
“Sister, please don’t. I built this place to trick you. I see how wrong that was now. I can build anything, a palace worthy of you, just please don’t—”
She let go of my hand, crossed the threshold, and slammed the door in my face.
My feeling for her went out like a candle in a puff of wind.
I quickly locked the padlock and sank to my knees, shaking uncontrollably. I was myself again—surely nothing could mean more than that—and yet I felt more bereaved than relieved. I had lost my friend forever.
I wept. I had loved her, in fact, before she forced me to.
I had seen sweetness in her, and fragility. It could not all have been a lie. She was in pain every day. What was it doing to her?
My head rang hollow without her presence, an aching emptiness like the void I’d seen at Jannoula’s core—and yet not like. I used to fill this entire space myself. I would relearn the trick of it, or fill it with music. I would find the way.
Exhausted, I slept, waking in time to rush to St. Ida’s Conservatory for my lesson. Orma listened to my breathless explanation: I’d tricked her; she was gone.
He said, “I’m astonished at this mantra you devised. When you were yourself, you knew it as a command for Jannoula: Go into the cottage, go out of my mind. But when she seized control—as you anticipated she might—you took it as a warning against following her into the cottage yourself. And it worked.”
In truth, it had come far too close to failure. I didn’t care to dwell on that. “What will happen to her?” I asked, a weight of guilt still on my heart.
He considered. “I presume she can enter your mind no further than the cottage door. Unless she likes sitting alone in darkness, she’ll lose interest and keep herself to herself.”
Herself seemed a terrible place to be; I still wished I could have saved her from it. This guilt was going to rankle a long time.
I tapped my flute thoughtfully against my chin, grateful to Orma for helping me. I wished I might have embraced him, or told him I really did love him, but that was not his way. Not our way. I contented myself with saying, “If you hadn’t noticed—and cared enough to warn me when you did—I don’t know what would have happened.”
He snorted, pushed up his spectacles, and said, “Give yourself some credit. You heeded my warning; I wasn’t sure you would. Now let’s start with the suite by Tertius.”
Jannoula’s voice from Gianni’s mouth brought everything back. I fled Gianni’s cell, pushing past a confused Moy, and rushed up to my room at Palasho Donques. I buried myself under blankets and spent the whole night reliving it all: the violation, the horror, the guilt, the sorrow.
At first light, I pounded on Josquin’s door. It took him some minutes to answer, bleary-eyed and tucking his shirt into breeches he’d evidently just put on. “I’ve been thinking,” I said, my words pouring out in a miserable rush. “We shouldn’t take the wild man back to Segosh.”
“What are you proposing?” said Josquin hoarsely. I really had awakened him, it seemed. “Release him back into the wild?”
If Jannoula could make him talk, she could propel his taloned feet after us, the way she’d walked me through the world. Whatever she was after, I wanted her nowhere near me. “Shouldn’t Lord Donques incarcerate him here, where the murder happened?”
“He would have preferred that, yes,” said Josquin, folding his arms. “I burned through rather a lot of his goodwill yesterday, convincing him to let us take the creature back to Segosh.”
“Then he’ll be happy you’ve changed your mind.”
“And the next time I have to negotiate with him or anyone else?” said Josquin sharply. I recoiled at the rebuke; I had never seen him cross before. “I speak on Count Pesavolta’s authority,” he said, “but I have to be circumspect with it. He’s no hereditary monarch, ordained by Heaven, whose caprices none may question. He rules by the goodwill of his baronets. I’ve spent enough of Count Pesavolta’s capital here to make myself uncomfortable. If I throw it back in Lord Donques’s face, suddenly my credibility—and the count’s—would be in question. It would unbalance the whole economy of rule.”
I could see no argument to make; he understood the peculiar politics of Ninys, and I did not. I acquiesced with a little bow and set off toward the infirmary to see Abdo. Josquin, perhaps sensing that he’d been hard on me, called after: “If you’re worried about our safety, Seraphina, we’ll have him bound. The Eight know what they’re doing.”
I turned to face him, walking backward a few steps while I bowed again, smiling to cover the unnameable dread in my heart. The Eight might bind Gianni’s limbs, but it was the person who’d bound his mind who scared me.
We reached the capital in half the time it had taken us to reach the mountains, thanks to good Ninysh roads, a guide who knew them all, and the fact that we were no longer actively searching for anyone. Josquin knew where to change horses and where it was safe to ride after dark. Gianni Patto, his hands bound and a lead line tied securely around his torso like a harness, kept up with the horses easily. He made no aggressive move toward anyone, and his ice-blue eyes remained benignly unfocused.
I watched him like a hawk, but Jannoula did not speak through him again. At night, in my garden of grotesques, there was an ache where Tiny Tom had been.
Abdo was in p
ain and barely spoke. The monk’s blade seemed to have severed more than just the tendons of his wrist; it had pierced his buoyant spirit somehow. How would the injury affect his dancing? Being robbed of music would have been a mortal blow to me; dancing surely meant as much to him. The Eight took turns riding with him, even the ones who’d made St. Ogdo’s sign. He was a child, first and foremost, and that brought out their empathy. He sat curled on the saddle horn, resting his head upon a gleaming breastplate.
Darkness had fallen and mist was rising over the lowland farms when the torches of Segosh finally winked into sight ahead of us. The two youngest of our guards gave cries of joy and spurred their tired horses onward, racing for the city gates.
“Youth is wasted on the young,” laughed Moy, who was carrying Abdo.
Shouts of alarm rang out from the gatehouse ahead; our bravos replied with something vaguely obscene. Seven weeks’ travel, and my Ninysh had increased by only the rudest words. The gatehouse guard returned the compliment, and there was laughter all round.
The city gates opened, iron hinges complaining shrilly. Upon a tiny pale donkey, swearing heartily herself, Dame Okra Carmine rode out, followed by a man in dark robes. Reflected torchlight danced upon her spectacles; a smirk played on her lips. “Don’t look so astonished,” she called, spurring her wee steed forward. “My premonitions of you, Seraphina, give me a very particular stomachache, like eating bad beets.”
“I think of myself as more of a turnip,” I said, parrying insult with absurdity.
She emitted a short laugh, then shouted something in Ninysh to the severe-looking man who’d ridden out behind her. “This is Dr. Belestros, Count Pesavolta’s physician,” Dame Okra explained. “If you want to keep doing handsprings, Abdo, you’d better let this fellow take you to the palace.”
I don’t like her premonitions, fretted Abdo. She prods without permission.
I’m not sure she can help it, I said.
She’s just had one about Moy, said Abdo.
“Moy,” called Dame Okra, “don’t hand the child across; you’ll drop him. Follow Dr. Belestros to Palasho Pesavolta.”
Shadow Scale Page 14
