Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(108)

“I can’t speak quietly in that shape,” she whispered. “I have things to tell you.”

I straightened up and nodded, expecting her to delineate the plan for tonight, but instead she said, “Your uncle and I were mated.”

“Indeed!” I said, embarrassed by her wording. I did not require more details along those lines. “Does that make you my aunt?” I asked, trying to joke.

She considered the question in all seriousness, staring out the cave entrance toward the glacier, and finally said, “You may call me that without inaccuracy.” She was silent for several beats more, then added, with unaccustomed softness in her tone, “I never thought much of him as a dragon. He’s small. A tenacious fighter, granted. A decent flier, considering his wing was once broken, but he could never have kept up with me. I’d have bitten the back of his neck and sent him on his way.

“But as a saarantras …” She paused, a finger to her lips. “He’s something extraordinary.”

I pictured my uncle’s shrubby hair and beaky nose, his spectacles and false beard and angular limbs, every detail absurd and dear to me. My chin trembled.

“These human eyes seemed weak at first,” said Eskar, still staring away from me, scratching her short black hair. “They detect fewer colors and have terrible resolution, but they see things dragon eyes cannot. They can see beyond surfaces. I don’t understand how that’s possible, but it happened incrementally as I traveled with Orma: I began to see the inside of him. His questioning and gentle nature. His conviction. I’d glimpse it in something as incongruous as his hand holding a teacup, or his eyes when he spoke of you.”

She turned her needle-sharp gaze on me. “What is that inner being? That person within a person? Is that what you call the soul?”

According to Southlander theology, dragons don’t have souls; she knew that. I hesitated, but surely there was no danger saying this to her now, not after what had already happened to Orma. “He had a mighty soul, my uncle. The greatest I ever knew.”

“You speak as if he is dead,” she said sternly.

The tears finally came; I could not reply.

She observed me closely, her dark eyes dry, her arms wrapped around her knees. “The Censors took a risk, entering Porphyry clandestinely. They were supposed to have petitioned the Assembly, and I have determined they did not. In my day, we would have run such a risk only if someone very important wanted Orma quickly. It gives me hope that this isn’t the usual capture of a deviant, that they may have brought him in not for excision but for some other purpose.”

The word excision chilled me. “What if the deed is done?” I said, drying my eyes. “Will he still be himself?”

“It depends what they take. Usually they only remove memories. Those neural pathways are largely the same whether we are in dragon or human form.” She spoke as neutrally as if she were describing her breakfast. “The emotion centers of the human brain overlap with dragon flight centers; it would cripple him to remove those. They wouldn’t permanently deprive him of flight, not the first time. They would remove his memories, put him on an emotional suppressant—a tincture of destultia—and give him a second chance.

“Plenty of us undergo excision at some point. Look.” She bent her head forward and parted the hair behind her left ear, revealing a white stripe of scar tissue. “When I quit the Censors, they removed my memories of working there so I couldn’t reveal their secrets. But I am still myself. I was not irreparably damaged.”

I recoiled, horrified. “But—but you remember working for the Censors!”

Her mouth flattened. “They informed me afterward that I had been in their employ so I wouldn’t reapply. But I also made myself a mind-pearl so I could remember why I quit. That was important to me.”

“Why did you quit?” I asked.

“Several reasons,” she said. “They would not reprimand Zeyd, the agent I authorized to test your uncle, for threatening you with harm in the course of that test.”

I put a hand to my heart, touched. “You didn’t even know me!”

“I didn’t have to know you.” Her black eyes flicked toward me. “Entrapment is an unacceptable testing practice.”

So the wrong had been in attempting to trap Orma into an emotional reveal, not in dangling me over the edge of the cathedral tower. I sighed and changed the subject. “My mother left me mind-pearls. Are they difficult to make?”

Eskar shrugged. “Mothers make simple ones for their children. To encapsulate a lot of memories, and hide them well, requires outside help. There are saarantrai who specialize in clandestine meditation, but it’s illegal and expensive.” Her eyes unfocused. “You’re wondering whether Orma did such a thing.”

I held out my hand and wiggled my pinkie, showing her my pearl ring. “He sent me this in Ninys, along with the words The thing itself plus nothing equals everything. I think he was trying to tell me he’d done it.”

Eskar took my hand and brushed the pearl lightly with her thumb; the spark of hope in her eyes was almost unbearable. “Perhaps he was,” she half whispered, “but I don’t know when he could have had it done. Not while I was with him. He might have made a simple pearl on his own with a few bare facts, brief images, your name.”

I took my hand back and twisted the ring on my finger.