Pende’s eyes were open, but he seemed not to see me. The right side of his face sagged as if it had melted. Camba held his gnarled, arthritic hand.
She smiled sadly at the sight of me. “You came. I’m sorry I can’t stand to greet you. I am not quite as you remember.” She touched her shaved head self-consciously. “I’m in mourning until we are returned to ourselves.”
I closed the door behind me, crossed the plank floor, and kissed her cheeks. “I’m relieved to see Pende lives, but so very sorry you were dragged here. What happened?”
Camba’s eyes were dark and solemn. “Poor Pende. He could not resist her long; he had the skill, but not the strength. Jannoula made a puppet of him. He lay hands on us, as he used to do to pull out her hooks, but now he was putting the hooks in. If anyone refused the touch, he threatened to harm himself.” Camba looked at the old priest with tenderness and sorrow. “In brief moments, when he was himself, he begged me not to acquiesce, to let her kill him. But he is my spiritual father. I couldn’t let it happen.”
The door opened behind me and I startled, but it was only Ingar, carrying an armload of wood and kindling. He bobbed his head at me and began with hazy cheerfulness to build a fire.
Camba watched him, her eyes distant. “Once she caught us, she sent us to the harbor by night. We stole a fishing boat and were halfway across the gulf before anyone missed us, I imagine.”
“She couldn’t possess all of you at once,” I said, as if I could change what had happened by pointing out that it couldn’t have.
“She didn’t have to,” said Camba. “Some have no defenses once she’s in. The twins, Phloxia, Mina. It’s like she turns a compass in their heads, and suddenly north is south and west is east, and they are easily led in any direction. Brasidas can partition his mind and keep her away from the vital parts, but he’s an old man. What can he do against Mina and her swords? What can I do?”
That was a bleak question. We sat silently, watching Ingar prod the nascent fire.
“When we were nearly here,” Camba began again, her voice almost inaudible, “Abdo dove out of the wagon into the Queenswood. I expected Jannoula to force him back, or to send Mina after him, but suddenly Pende was on his feet screaming, fighting her in his head. We felt it; I don’t know how. He sent his fire back at her, and it scorched us all.” She stroked the old man’s gnarled hand.
“It broke him,” I said, my voice hushed and awed. He’d given everything he had.
“But Abdo escaped,” Camba said, holding up a finger. “I draw strength from that. There are ways to fight back, and she can’t anticipate everything. Our differences work to our advantage.”
The fire crackled. Ingar stepped back from it, looking lost. Camba called his name softly; he came to her and sat on the floor at her feet, leaning his head on her knee.
“When I looked in on you yesterday, I saw … what you wanted me to see.” I didn’t like to say mind-pearl within Ingar’s hearing; he might report everything we were saying to Jannoula. “What can you tell me about that?”
Camba’s dark, solemn eyes told me she understood. “It was his idea to try it. He pulled everything important into one corner of his mind, sealed it off so she can’t get it, and let her have the rest. He knew he couldn’t keep her out altogether, that she would pour into her old pathways like molten silver into an empty ants’ nest. I’m surprised it works as well as it does, but I don’t know how long he can keep it up.”
“We will talk more about this later,” I said. In private, I wanted to add, but didn’t. Camba was sharp enough to glean what I meant. “There must be some way we can use … all the things we’ve learned.”
Nedouard would help us, too, but I didn’t dare mention him now. Mine was the only mind secure enough to hold all the pieces; alas, that meant I was going to have to puzzle them together on my own.
Camba opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment we heard footsteps across the ceiling, as if a herd of merry cattle had come prancing in. The ityasaari were back; I could not linger here. I kissed her cheeks again and went up to meet the others.
Devoted townswomen had set up a long supper table in the chapel on the second floor, and the ityasaari were busily seating themselves around it. I stood in the doorway a moment, watching my fellow half-dragons with a lump in my throat.
Ingar came upstairs behind me and said, “Excuse me.” I was in his way. I tried to back out of the room, but Dame Okra spotted me and was at my side in an instant, embracing me and crying, “Home at last, dear girl!” Winged Mina and shark-toothed Phloxia kissed my cheeks; Gaios and Gelina led me to the table. I sat by blind Brasidas, who squeezed my fingers and whispered, “Did you bring your flute?” Od Fredricka brought me a bowl of lentil soup from the townwomen’s cauldron by the fire; Nedouard, apparently anxious not to seem too glad to see me, nodded his beaked head minutely. Lars smiled with heartbreaking warmth; pale Blanche, still tied to Lars by a cord around her waist, kept her eyes on the table, picked at a scale on her cheek, and did not smile. Gianni Patto sat upon the woodpile by the hearth, a loaf in each hand, and roared, “Fee-nah!” with his mouth full of chewed-up bread.
“It’s good to see you all,” I said, and that was the truth, but it was also terrible. I did not know how to contain such a contradiction inside myself.
Phloxia led us in prayer, and then they had a dozen questions for me at once. I fielded them as noncommittally as I could, trying to feel out which of them were not so enamored of Jannoula. No one stood out in that regard—not even Nedouard—but maybe they were being cautious. I would give them time.
For my part, I had just one question: “Where’s Jannoula?”
“She never eats dinner with us,” said Dame Okra, waving a dismissive hand.
“She sees her spiritual advisor in the evenings,” said Lars earnestly. “Even the very great need their confidants. No one can bear everything alone.”
“I see,” I said, and let the subject drop for now. I would find out who that was. I hardly dared hope it was Orma—the idea of him being anyone’s spiritual anything was laughable—and yet … I had to be sure.
As I was getting ready for bed, a dog-eared sheaf of bound pages was shoved under my door by an unseen hand. I picked it up and turned it over. Jannoula had written in blocky letters on the front: St. Yirtrudis’s testament, translation by St. Ingar. For Saints only. Read it. Understand who you are.
“At your command, Blessed,” I muttered. I wasn’t sleepy anyway. I settled in for a long night’s read.
Once upon a time, the dragons made a Great Mistake. Unintended births of a few half-humans had revealed a peculiar quality when the two species mixed. Ityasaari minds seemed to leak out into the world, to tap into some vein of influence inaccessible to others. These mental powers fascinated dragonkind, and they believed that such abilities, if harnessed, might change the course of their ceaseless war with the Southlands. They deliberately bred more than four hundred half-humans.
That was not their Mistake, although they will ever insist it was.
The Mistake was in showing no kindness to the ityasaari, no empathy or recognition. The ityasaari were tools of conquest, and nothing more.
Until the day my brother Abaster said enough.
I stayed up all night reading. When my lamp ran out of oil, I went down to the chapel, stoked the embers of the great hearth, and read by firelight until my eyes watered and my head ached. I went out to the courtyard at first light and read by the rising sun.
Those ityasaari—the generation of Saints—had turned against their dragon masters in spectacular fashion, fighting their way out of the Tanamoot, coming south and teaching humanity to fight. When dragonkind faced the dracomachia for the first time, they’d seen nothing like it. It devastated their numbers, and they retreated to lick their wounds and repopulate the Tanamoot.
The people of Goredd, Ninys, and Samsam were pagans in those days, worshiping an assortment of local nature gods. To the Southlanders, the half-dra
gons, even the most deformed, looked like living manifestations of these spirits. This made some ityasaari uncomfortable, but Abaster—always ready to claim the mantle of leader—gathered them together and said, “Brethren, are the humans wrong? We who have touched the World-Mind know we are more than this crumbling flesh. There is a Place beyond places, a Moment outside of time, a Realm of infinite peace. If we don’t tell humankind about it, who else can?”
So they let themselves be worshiped, and they wrote down laws and precepts and mystical epic poetry, and they spoke to the people of the light they had seen, how the world was merely shadows cast by that light, and they called the light Heaven. And everything worked out beautifully, until some acquired a taste for power and began to quarrel with the rest.
Ah, that light I couldn’t see. It was everywhere, apparently.
I stumbled back to bed for a few hours’ sleep and dreamed of the War of the Saints (something I’d never heard of before reading Yirtrudis’s testament). My stomach woke me at midday. I reluctantly donned a white gown and went downstairs, but the only person I saw was a gnarled old woman sweeping the chapel. “Where is everyone?” I asked her.
She said, “Go outside and look up. I’ll not watch today, as a penance on myself.”
Her words gave me pause. “What will I see?”
Her small black eyes, sharp as a mouse’s, gleamed as she said, “The light.”
I rushed out to the courtyard. The lawn was covered in townspeople and castle guards, all looking toward the top of the Ard Tower expectantly. If I shaded my eyes, I could make out the silhouettes of ityasaari at the top; Gianni Patto’s height made him the most visible, but I recognized Mina’s wings and the matched outlines of Gaios and Gelina. They appeared to be holding hands in a circle.
Camba couldn’t climb the tower on her own with two broken ankles; had they carried her up, or was she shut up in her room?
Around me people began to gasp. Some fell on their knees and bowed their heads; others clasped their hands to their hearts and gazed rapturously. From where I stood, nothing seemed to have changed. I whispered to the young woman beside me, who watched the sky calmly, “What is happening, exactly?”
“You’re disrupting my prayer,” she snapped, but then she seemed to take stock of my white gown. “Oh, forgive me—I didn’t know you. You’re the Counter-Saint, the one who can’t see Heaven, aren’t you? Blessed preached about you yesterday afternoon.”
Heat flared in my chest. While I’d supervised the moving of my things, Jannoula had apparently been spinning myths about me. I’d read the testament; the original “Counter-Saint” was Pandowdy, leader of the insurrection against Abaster, buried alive for his trouble. What could Jannoula possibly mean, calling me that? Nothing good.
“She said you’re a necessary piece of Heaven’s plan,” said the young woman hastily, as if all my mortification were visible in my face. “Everything contains its opposite. That keeps the world in balance.”
I swallowed my irritation and said, “So what do you see up there?”
“A golden light.” She turned her brown eyes skyward again. “They can concentrate it into a fiery orb, like a second sun, or spread it across the sky like a magnificent dome, enclosing our whole city in glory and keeping the dragons out.”
St. Yirtrudis claimed that Abaster had had this power, strong enough to defend a city on his own. Of course, cities were smaller in those days. Now that I knew what the people around me saw, it was less mysterious that Jannoula could have struck belief into so many hearts so quickly. It was hard to deny your own eyes.
It occurred to me that now, while Jannoula and the ityasaari were occupied, I might check in on Kiggs without fear of being overheard. I rushed to my room, leaving the door open a crack so I could hear the others coming back down, and settled on the bed with the thnik Sir Cuthberte had given me. It chirped several times before I heard Kiggs whisper loudly, “Hold on. I’m in a crowd.”
I waited, wondering how he could be in a crowd. I’d assumed he was still in the castle, hiding. At last his voice crackled, “All right, I’ve ducked into the cathedral.”
“You’re in the city?”
“I felt stymied in the castle,” he said. “Out here, I’m checking on the readiness of the garrisons, supplies, wall defenses. Whatever she’s up to, Jannoula seems not to have disrupted our war preparations. That’s good news.”
“How are you checking these things without being seen?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m being seen. I make sure it’s only by officers loyal to me. I told them that business about my not being allowed into the city is a strategic ruse so I can check on certain individuals secretly.” There was a pause, and I could almost hear him grinning. “You’re not the only one who can bluff her way out of trouble, you know.”
I bluffed my way into trouble just as often, but I didn’t argue. “Are you seeing this, uh, improved St. Abaster’s Trap?”
“Isn’t it astonishing?” he cried. “Back when it was just Lars and Abdo, with Dame Okra tossing teacups, I never would have guessed how powerful and beautiful it would eventually become. Selda and I had hoped it might be one defense among many, but I think this could keep the city safe, and everyone in it.”
“Yes,” I said miserably. “Perhaps it could.”
“Can they make it without Jannoula?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Because we need this,” said Kiggs. “Unless you find evidence that she’s sabotaging the war effort or betraying us to the Old Ard, I hate to say it, but her Saint act can wait to be debunked. There will be time to free the other ityasaari from her grasp after all Goredd is free from war.”
“I suppose,” I said, my voice weak.
“Goredd must come first,” he said. “I have to say, though, this is the most astonishing thing I have ever seen.” He spoke as if he’d positioned himself at a door or window of the cathedral in order to keep watching the sky.
“I can’t actually see it,” I said, irritation creeping into my voice.
“Can dragons see it, or not? I should ask the garrison here. You know what it reminds me of? The words of St. Eustace: ‘Heaven is a Golden House—’ ”
I didn’t want to hear it. I said, “As you check on war preparations, would you keep an ear out for news of Uncle Orma? Comonot’s garrison or the scholars in Quighole might have seen or smelled him.”
“Of course, of course,” said Kiggs distractedly, and I felt that he had ceased to listen, all his attention transfixed by the golden sky.
I returned to the chapel. When the ityasaari finished practicing St. Abaster’s Trap, they came down from the tower, laughing and chattering. It seemed Camba had not participated, but it took me a few minutes to notice that Lars and Blanche were missing.
On the stairs, Lars began shouting for help.
“Blue St. Prue!” said Dame Okra, pushing past me. Lars staggered through the doorway, Blanche over his shoulder. Dame Okra helped him carry Blanche into the chapel and lay her down before the hearth. Blanche was not unconscious, as I’d supposed, but weeping silently. She wrapped her arms around her head and curled into a ball.
A rope still connected her to Lars.
“Not again!” cried Nedouard. He was at Blanche’s side in an instant, taking one of her slender hands and feeling her pulse. Single scales dotted her skin like scabs; bruises purpled her throat.
“Sorry,” sobbed Blanche. “S-sorry.”
“She waited until you’d gone downstairs,” said Lars miserably, his gray eyes rimmed in red. “Wrappedt the rope around her neck and jumpedt. She almost took me with her this time.”
“We can’t keep forcing her to participate!” Nedouard cried incautiously. “The mind-threading hurts her. It’s cruel.”
Padding footsteps on the spiral staircase paused. I glanced back and saw Jannoula watching us narrowly. She turned away from Blanche’s misery and continued down the stairs without a word. In that moment I hated her.
I clasped his hand, my heart hurting. “We will find the way out of this.”
Jannoula had called me her Counter-Saint; it was time to start countering.
I quickly learned the routines of the Sainted ityasaari: they woke at dawn for prayers in the chapel, followed by morning council, St. Abaster’s Trap, and lunch. In the afternoon, they went their separate ways for various tasks—preaching, painting, performing, reaching out to the populace—and then they took their evening meal together, spent a quiet hour in the chapel, and went to bed.
Jannoula was absent every evening; I tried to follow her once, but Gianni Patto apparently had orders to keep an eye on me. He planted himself in my way, idly scratching his dagger-like claws in the dirt. I gathered my nerve and attempted to step around him, but he grabbed my arm with one enormous hand and hauled me back inside.
I attempted to find ways to speak with Glisselda. The Queen had seemed to swallow uncritically Jannoula’s explanation of her association with the Old Ard, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be reasoned with. Surely I could find a way to talk to her, to loosen Jannoula’s grip without appearing to do so.
Alas, I could never find an opportunity to speak with Glisselda alone. Jannoula was always present before and after council, and in the afternoons, when Her Blessedness went to preach at the cathedral, she assigned Dame Okra to escort me everywhere. Try as I might, I couldn’t give the old ambassadress the slip; she was on me like a tick. I succeeded exactly once in arranging a meeting in the Queen’s study. Glisselda looked up eagerly from her desk when I entered, but the moment she saw Dame Okra, her expression fell closed. We spent an awkward half hour, sipping tea and speaking of nothing. Dame Okra watched hawkishly, and a wiry, gray-haired guardsman, Glisselda’s deaf bodyguard, lurked in the corner like a statue. I hinted that Glisselda might order Dame Okra away—she was still Queen, after all—but the only person who picked up on the hint was Dame Okra herself, who was cross with me for the rest of the day.
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