Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(10)

Maybe I didn’t have to gather every one to make the invisible barricade strong enough. I hoped so, because I had no plans to find Jannoula, either. Her Wee Cottage was next, abutting the wetland; its surrounding yard, once full of herbs and flowers, was all gone to nettles and bramble. I picked my way gingerly toward the cottage door, my heart full of mixed emotions—pity, regret, some lingering bitterness. I tugged at the padlock on the door; it felt reassuringly heavy in my hand, cold iron, unrusted, immovable. Relief entered the mix.

Jannoula’s avatar had been different from the very beginning, not passive and benign like the others. She’d been actively aware of this place—of me—and had eventually moved her entire consciousness into my head in an attempt to take me over. I had freed myself only by tricking her into entering this cottage and locking her inside.

I dreaded that happening again, not least because I wasn’t sure how it had happened, why she was different. Abdo was different, too, but that active connection had grown slowly, over time, and he seemed disinclined to move in and stay.

This was my primary worry about Orma’s plan. What did this mind-threading really involve? Was it the kind of link I’d experienced with Jannoula, or something shallower? What if we couldn’t untangle our … our mind-stuff, whatever it was, afterward? What if we hurt each other? As much could go wrong as could go right.

I turned away from the Wee Cottage, preoccupied with these thoughts, and found myself face to face with an incongruous snowy mountaintop. I had one more grotesque to tend, Tiny Tom, who lived in a stony grotto under the miniature peak. He owed his name to an eleven-year-old’s unsubtle sense of irony, alas: he was eight feet tall, strong as a bear (I’d glimpsed him wrestling one in the real world), and clad in ragged blankets, sewn together to make crude clothing.

He wasn’t inside his grotto, however, but in the snow out front, leaving enormous clawed footprints as he staggered around clutching his woolly head, extremely agitated.

Once this kind of behavior had meant I had a vision coming, but I knew how to circumvent that now. Thanks to my faithful tending, visions had become rare. I’d had only one in the last three years, the vision of Abdo at midwinter, and in that case Abdo had been actively looking for me. That wasn’t the usual situation at all.

“Sweet Tom, merry Tom,” I said quietly, circling the wild man, keeping clear of his swinging elbows. He was hard to look at without pity: his filthy clothing, his sun-bleached thatch of hair, his beard cluttered with twigs, his crumbling teeth. “You’ve been living on that mountain all alone,” I said soothingly to his grotesque, drawing closer. “What has it taken to survive? What have you suffered?”

We had all suffered, from Tiny Tom to Master Smasher. By all the Saints in Heaven, and their dogs, we didn’t need to suffer alone. Not anymore.

Tiny Tom was breathing raggedly, but calming. He lowered his hands; his rheumy eyes bugged out at me. I did not turn away or flinch, but took his elbow and gently led him back into his cave, to the nest of bones he had made himself. He let himself be seated, his gigantic head beginning to nod. I ran my hand over his matted locks and stayed by him until he was asleep.

We needed this place, this garden, in the real world. I was going to make it happen. I owed it to all of them.



The Queen’s support for the project, however, depended more on whether we could get this mysterious barrier working than on my wish to find the others. I gathered the three ityasaari of my acquaintance that afternoon to see what we could do. Lars offered the use of Viridius’s suite.

Viridius was home and, because he was having a good day gout-wise, sitting up at the harpsichord in his brocade dressing gown, caressing the keys with his gnarled fingers. “Don’t mind me,” he said when I arrived, waggling his bushy red eyebrows. “Lars tells me this is half-dragon business; I won’t interfere. I just need to get the second theme of this concerto grosso down.”

Lars entered from the other room, a delicate porcelain teapot held gingerly in one large hand. He paused by Viridius and squeezed the old composer’s shoulder; Viridius leaned briefly into Lars’s arm and then turned back to his work. Lars brought the tea around and filled the five cups on the ornate table by the gout couch. Dame Okra had claimed the couch, putting up her feet and spreading her stiff green skirts around her. Abdo, swathed in a long knit tunic against the cold, bounced on his upholstered chair as if he could barely be constrained to sit, his long sleeves flapping over his hands like flippers. I took the other couch, and Lars settled his bulk carefully beside me, trading me a cup of tea for Orma’s letter, which the other two had just read.

“Have you heard of anything like this?” I said, glancing from Dame Okra’s scowl to Abdo’s wide brown eyes. “Mental connections have occurred with some of us. Abdo can speak in our heads; my mind used to reach out compulsively to other half-dragons.” Jannoula had entered my mind and seized it, but I didn’t like talking about that. “What kind of connection is this mind-threading?”

“I’ll tell you right now, I won’t participate in any mind-threading,” said Dame Okra flatly, her eyes swimming behind her thick spectacles. “It sounds horrible.”

It sounds interesting to me, said Abdo’s voice in my head.

“Do you know whether the Porphyrian ityasaari have ever joined together this way, or used their … their mind-stuff for this kind of physical manifestation?” I asked aloud so Dame Okra and Lars could hear half the conversation, anyway. Abdo’s mouth and tongue were shingled with silver dragon scales, and he could not speak aloud.