Shadow Scale

by Rachel Hartman

  Cross, but no less present.

  I tried to sneak out to see Glisselda at night. I would surely do better at bluffing the guards this time; I’d say Jannoula required the Queen’s presence in the Ard Tower, and then I’d escort Glisselda there, giving us a chance to speak privately. Alas, I never made it out of the Ard Tower. When I opened the front door, there was Gianni Patto, curled up in the courtyard, blocking my only way out.

  But then, what would Glisselda have said if I’d spoken to her? The same things Kiggs was telling me every evening over the thnik, that Goredd needed St. Abaster’s Trap and the ityasaari could wait to be freed until the war was over?

  A week passed, and then another. The Samsamese army, which had been only a week’s march away, kept its distance for now. The Loyalists were to feint south in just six days. I felt like I’d accomplished nothing.

  Since Jannoula was out every evening, my one consolation was that it was easier to speak with Kiggs than I’d initially feared. One evening, he had surprising news: “I see Jannoula, about a block ahead of me, on the river road. Do you want me to learn where she goes?”

  “If you can follow without her seeing you,” I said, sitting up in bed, as if I might add my alertness to his.

  It was some moments before his voice crackled again: “We’re turning south with the river. She’s got a following, people drifting out of taverns and alleys. They’re like gulls behind a fishing boat. And you know what? She lets them touch her and smiles at every one. For all that she’s an egotist, she seems a kindly one.”

  “She’s not a kindly one,” I snapped. She had an allure even when she wasn’t speaking or glowing with mind-fire.

  He chuckled infuriatingly, and for a while there was nothing but the sound of his footsteps. He reported crossing Cathedral Bridge. “She’s heading for the seminary gate,” he said. “If she enters, it may be difficult to follow her inside.”

  “Don’t follow her inside. That’s all the information I needed,” I said. I would go to St. Gobnait’s Seminary and see for myself as soon as I could. I could lose an ityasaari chaperone in town; this was my city.

  Kiggs stayed quiet a long time. I stared at the thnik ring, one finger over from Orma’s pearl ring, wondering whether to call his name. Suddenly he said, “That wasn’t difficult. A prince of the realm can still go wherever he needs to.”

  “You followed her in?” I said, shocked.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “The door monk believed I was here to guard Jannoula. Why would he ask her about me when she already knows I’m coming?”

  I frowned, disliking the risk he was taking, but there was nothing I could do.

  “Whoops,” he said.

  “What is it?” I whispered, my heart in my throat.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I thought she went down this corridor, but it’s a dead end.…”

  He trailed off, which frightened me more than anything he could have said. I was about to call his name, but luckily I hesitated.

  “You were following me,” said Jannoula’s contralto voice. She sounded amused.

  I bit my lips shut. His thnik was still on; if I spoke, she’d hear me. Kiggs said, “You’re mistaken.” His voice was muffled, as if he’d concealed the device in his fist.

  “Am I? You’re not here to chasten me for my impiety? Don’t look so sheepish—I know skepticism when I see it, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a relief, oddly, to meet someone who doubts.” She sighed, like one who bears an impossible weight of duty. “Here, at last, is a person I can’t disappoint.”

  Kiggs laughed; my stomach turned over.

  She’d read him quickly and taken exactly the right tack: humility, doubt, and obligation. He was cautious, but she could use caution. All she needed was an angle.

  The prince’s thnik buzzed once and clicked off.

  Jannoula brought Kiggs back with her from the seminary, and he was seamlessly reintegrated into castle life, as far as I could tell. If Glisselda was angry with him for disobeying her orders and entering the city, I presume Jannoula smoothed things over between them. The details didn’t reach me; I could only observe from a distance. Kiggs attended council, made plans for the defense of the city, toured the walls, and drilled with the Queen’s Guard.

  Kiggs was easier to approach than Glisselda. Two days after Jannoula had apprehended him, I spotted him striding purposefully across Stone Court with three others of his regiment. I called after him and he waited for me, letting the others walk ahead toward the barbican gate. I was a little out of breath when I reached him, but I had to know: “Did you see her spiritual advisor? Was it Orma?”

  He shrugged, turning the helmet he carried in his hands. “I didn’t see him, Phina. But you know, even if it is Orma, she may have a very good reason for keeping you from him. She’s not quite the madwoman you always made her out to be. She’s got a remarkable mind, and if she has some rough edges, well, she can be reasoned with—”

  I turned away, unwilling to hear more. Jannoula’s glamour had clearly affected him; I could no longer feel safe speaking to him openly. That was one more ally gone.

  Jannoula did not gloat about Kiggs, which of course raised my suspicions. She would not have forgotten seeing him, through Abdo’s eyes, coming out of my room in Porphyry. She knew Queen Glisselda had ordered him to stay away. I had wondered whether the two things were connected, whether Jannoula had told Glisselda what she’d seen in Porphyry, and Glisselda hadn’t wanted to see Kiggs as a result.

  That didn’t add up, though. Glisselda was not herself, but she should have been furious with me as well as Kiggs, if she’d really found out the truth. I felt certain Jannoula was saving it for a special occasion.

  Time passed relentlessly. My anxiety grew. I wanted to stop her before the war came south so that we’d have time to determine whether the other ityasaari could make St. Abaster’s Trap without her. Kiggs had said we needed this trap, and I agreed; it would not do to hobble Goredd’s defenses, but that meant incapacitating Jannoula in some way that was reversible, in case we found the other ityasaari couldn’t make the trap without her. That ruled out killing or poisoning Jannoula. Camba, Nedouard, and I, conferring in hasty whispers when we could, had come up with no better way to stop her.

  Astonishingly, the solution came to me from St. Yirtrudis’s testament. I’d read it three times through by now and had grown quite fond of my secret patroness and her lover, the Counter-Saint, monstrous Pandowdy. The first time through, I had pictured him as a big, horrible swamp slug—I couldn’t help it—and had found their romance off-putting. The second time through, however, I paid attention to Yirtrudis’s descriptions of him. Pandowdy was no slug. He was tall and fearsome (I pictured him as a younger, handsomer Gianni Patto, with nicer teeth). He was a mighty fighter, a berserker who’d killed dragons with his bare hands. After the dragons were defeated, he’d been lost and out of place, prone to rages. Only Yirtrudis seemed to see a man and not a monster. Under her tutelage, he learned to control himself; together they’d founded a school of meditation.

  Yirtrudis’s envious brother, Abaster, who had already murdered three other Saints for daring to contradict his doctrines, had had Pandowdy buried alive. My brother has undone the best of our generation, Yirtrudis wrote, because Pandowdy would not call the World-Light “Heaven.” When Abaster is through with us, there will be no more room for interpretation. He will have pruned our myriad beautiful visions down to one.

  Mention of the World-Light gave me chills. I suspected I couldn’t have called it Heaven, either. I rather liked this Pandowdy.

  Only on my third read-through did I realize that Pandowdy had once wrecked St. Abaster’s Trap. There was a single sentence about it, easy to gloss over: Pandowdy became a mirror, reflecting the fire back at Abaster until he was so burned we could not rouse him for three days.

  It was the last night before the Loyalists’ retreat; we had only one day left to try something before the barrier would be in active us
e against enemy dragons. I met with Camba and showed her the passage. She was sitting up in bed, Ingar curled at the other end like a big, dreamy cat. “What does that mean,” I asked, “and is it something we can do?”

  “It’s possible to reflect her mind-fire,” said Camba thoughtfully, sitting up straighter. “I tried something like that once, on an intuition. I stood at the end of the line during St. Abaster’s Trap and pushed the fire back at her with all my will. It stung her like a bee.” Camba rubbed her leg absently. “She was furious. That’s when she made Gianni throw me down the stairs.”

  I winced. “It didn’t incapacitate her, though?”

  Camba shook her head. “It hurt enough that she doesn’t let me participate in the trap anymore. I can’t even climb the tower. Also, she takes a precaution: she stands in the middle of the line instead of at the end. If anyone reflects fire back at her, it will roll past and carry on down the line. If both ends reflected it at the same time, though, perhaps she would be caught between two waves.”

  “Was it hard to reflect the fire?”

  “You must be consciously present,” said Camba, making a bowl of her hands, as if that were where awareness might be centered. “You have to time it so that just as it reaches you, you harden against it.”

  “I can’t participate in St. Abaster’s Trap because I’ve bound myself up. You can’t participate. There’s only one of us who might be able to help,” I said, thinking of Nedouard, “and I don’t know if his mind is strong enough.”

  “Ingar would help,” said Camba. Ingar lolled at the end of the bed, humming tunelessly. “We would need to explain the plan when he’s lucid, so he understands. You could trigger his mind-pearl at the last moment.”

  That would require me to go to the top of the tower while they practiced, and Jannoula had never yet let me do that. Surely I could bluff her; to my surprise, I rather looked forward to trying.

  “Won’t Jannoula learn the triggering word if I say it aloud?” I asked.

  Camba scoffed. “It’s subtly pronounced, and he only wakes if you speak it exactly right. Ingar has a finely tuned ear for language, even in this state.”

  The word was guaiong, antique Zibou for “oyster”—Ingar’s little play on the idea of mind-pearls, I supposed. I practiced saying it, under Camba’s patient tutelage; there were entirely too many vowels. It took a quarter of an hour, but I finally resurrected Ingar’s will consistently. He understood the plan and approved. I practiced a few times more, until a dire headache overtook him and we had to quit. He lay with his head on Camba’s lap, and she rubbed his forehead.

  Camba’s eyes held a cautious hope. “If this succeeds, I will try to unhook Jannoula from the others,” she said softly. “I can’t reach out to them without opening the door that would let her fully into my mind. I’ve tried it; even when she was sleeping, she noticed immediately. I can’t help anyone else when I’m fighting for sovereignty of my own mind. If she were incapacitated, though, I could surely free the others.”

  “What about yourself?”

  Camba shook her head. “I don’t know. Pende always said it’s impossible to free yourself, but perhaps it depends on how inert she is.”

  I nodded slowly, wondering if there was a way to keep Jannoula incapacitated. Nedouard might have some drug that would do the trick. I would talk to him next.

  I left Camba’s and crept through the sleeping tower to Nedouard’s room on the fifth floor. He was awake. I entered silently, closed the door behind me, and whispered in the old doctor’s ear, “I have a plan for tomorrow.”

  “Don’t tell me too much.” His beak made his whisper a challenge to understand. “I’ve evaded her interest so far, but she could pry anything out of me if she wished.”

  I told him what he was to do, and no more. He scratched his ear uncertainly. “I’m not sure I can do what you ask,” he said. “Is that really all it takes to reflect the fire? I simply will myself to be a mirror?”

  “Yes,” I said firmly, hoping it was true, trying not to let him see my doubts.

  “Pray it works,” said Nedouard. I kissed his cheek in parting, trying to reassure him, though I no longer had any notion whom or what to pray to.

  Goredd’s last peaceful morning dawned drizzly and gray. I stumbled down to breakfast, having barely slept, but before I could sit, Jannoula was at my elbow. “Today’s the day,” she said breathily in my ear. “You’re coming with me.”

  “Coming where?” I said, instantly wary, but she only smiled in answer and steered me out of the tower, across the puddle-flecked courtyard, and into the palace proper. Down some corridors, up some stairs, and into the royal family’s wing of the palace we went, stopping before a familiar door. The guards grunted and nodded, barely looking at us.

  I entered the airy gold-and-blue sitting room. The table still stood before the tall windows, where once they’d fed Queen Lavonda her breakfast, and seated there were two of my dearest friends. Kiggs was on his feet at once, his face disconcertingly clean-shaven and his dark eyes twinkling; Glisselda, dressed for council in her stiffest brocades, smiled radiantly and cried, “Surprise!”

  Her expression took me aback more than the word; she hadn’t looked so merry in nine months. I smiled back, momentarily forgetting the Saint at my elbow.

  “We’ve got council in half an hour, but we hoped you’d take breakfast with us,” said Kiggs solemnly, tugging at the hem of his scarlet doublet. “Blessed Jannoula said it’s your birthday in two days, but we’ll be too preoccupied to celebrate properly then.”

  My smile hardened. Truth from Jannoula made me just as suspicious as lies. Kiggs stepped up to lead me to the table; I let him take my arm, but kept one eye on Jannoula. She grinned like a fiend. She was up to something, but I did not discern what until I had a chance to really look at our breakfast. Amid a surprisingly simple spread of tea, rolls, and cheese sat a marzipan torte covered with plump blackberries.

  That torte was the only thing I remembered about my twelfth birthday; I’d shared the taste with Jannoula. The sight of it brought a flood of memories: how she’d run rampant in my head; how she’d stolen, twisted, and lied; how Orma had saved me.

  I glared at Jannoula; she smirked back.

  “Blessed Jannoula told us you love blackberries,” said Glisselda.

  “She’s too kind,” I managed to say.

  Kiggs, to my right, handed me a flat parcel wrapped in linen, no bigger than the palm of my hand. “The thought is going to have to count for rather a lot, I fear,” he said. I tucked the gift into my sleeve; if Jannoula had picked it out, too, I didn’t want the royal cousins to see my expression when I opened it.

  This was all her doing, some game she was playing with me, I was sure. The worst part, almost, was that Kiggs and Glisselda seemed perfectly themselves. I couldn’t see how far Jannoula had influenced them. No doubt it would be a nasty surprise when it surfaced, like finding a spider in your slipper. I couldn’t relax; that was when she’d hit me hardest.

  Here I was with my two dearest friends, and I felt completely alone. To my left, Jannoula’s smile turned feline.

  “I am grateful that there was time for this before the war comes to us,” she said, taking a knife to the torte at once, not bothering with the breakfast foods. “It is such a privilege to have gotten to know Your Majesties over these few weeks. We have much in common, and not merely that we all love Seraphina.” Jannoula patted my wrist with one hand, licking marzipan off her other thumb. “Although of course we do. Seraphina is very dear. She’s why we’re here this morning.”

  Jannoula transferred a large piece of torte to her plate. “I feel especially blessed to have spent time with you this week, Prince Lucian,” she said, waving the tines of her fork at Kiggs. “What a joy it was to discuss theology and ethics with you, to learn that you value truth above all else. I admire that deeply.”

  Kiggs, gazing at her rapturously from across the table, actually blushed. Was she glowing at him, too, or was flat
tery enough?

  “Honesty is the cornerstone of friendship, don’t you think?” said Jannoula, looking at me and licking her blackberry-stained lips. “These two, of course, go well beyond friends. They’re cousins, raised together like siblings, and they’ll soon be married. It was their grandmother’s dearest wish.”

  Kiggs became very busy slicing more cheese; Glisselda examined the bottom of her teacup. I watched Jannoula narrowly, still not gleaning her purpose.

  “I think we four friends should strive to have no secrets from each other,” Jannoula said, and suddenly I understood the point of this charade.

  In Porphyry, she’d seen Kiggs coming out of my room. She was going to extort some concession from me. I kicked her under the table. “We’re done,” I said through clenched teeth. “We can discuss what you—”

  “You see,” said Jannoula, ignoring my kicks, “an awkward indiscretion has come to my attention. It would be best to clear the air so we can trust each other as we should.”

  “Stop,” I snarled. “You win, but let’s talk about it in—”

  “Someone has fallen in love with Seraphina,” she said, smiling awfully. “Confess—it’s good for the soul—and then we can all discuss it, openly and honestly.”

  Kiggs clapped a hand to his mouth; he looked green. Glisselda, across the table from me, looked worse. She’d gone deathly white, and she swayed dizzily, as if she might fall out of her chair.

  We had hurt her. She shouldn’t have had to learn the truth this way.

  She pushed back from the table and fled deeper into her suite. Kiggs exchanged a glance with me, then rushed after her.