Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(12)

Abdo’s. He was leaning over me, his brown eyes brimming with regret. Did I hurt you, Phina madamina?

I sat up straighter, shakily, blinking against the glare from Viridius’s windows. “I’m all right now.”

I should have listened to my instinct, he fretted, patting my cheek and then my hair. I can enter Fruit Bat, but I can’t go any further into your mind than that. I can’t see, let alone touch, your soul-light, not even from your garden. I don’t know what else to try.

I took a juddering breath. “T-try with Lars. The Queen won’t let me go looking for the others if we can’t make this work.”

Lars’s sea-gray eyes had grown enormous, watching me; he ran a nervous hand through his bristly blond hair. Abdo must have spoken reassuringly in his head, because Lars joined him on the Zibou carpet, sitting cross-legged and joining hands. He nodded at intervals, then turned to us and said, “We are tryink one idea Abdo has. He doesn’t know if it works. He asks thet Dame Okra tell him if she sees anything.”

“What kind of anything?” said Dame Okra warily.

“Soul-light. Mind-fire. Whatever you like to call it,” said Lars, smiling. “Abdo is curious whether you can see it when we weave ours together.”

I was excluded from that hope, I noted sourly. Was it because I had no visible mind-fire? Did that make me more like an ordinary human? All my life I had longed to be ordinary; how ridiculous to be disgruntled when I finally was. It was no use being envious; we were all different.

Dame Okra emitted a skeptical grunt. Viridius, who’d resumed composing, did a quarter turn on the harpsichord bench, the better to see this mind-fire for himself. He’d been excluded from Abdo’s hope as well; at least I wasn’t alone.

Abdo and Lars closed their eyes; Lars’s enormous pink hands almost engulfed Abdo’s wiry brown ones. I studied their faces and was relieved—not envious—to see no pain there. Indeed, Lars’s face went slack and sleepy. Abdo pursed his lips, concentrating.

“Blue St. Prue!” cried Dame Okra.

“Do you see it? Where is it?” said Viridius, his blue eyes darting sharply.

Dame Okra squinted at the empty space above Lars’s and Abdo’s heads, the lines beside her mouth deepening. “That wouldn’t stop a dragon,” she said. She tossed back the dregs of her tea and then threw the cup as hard as she could toward the space.

Viridius, in her line of fire, threw up his gout-swollen hands, but the cup never reached him. It stopped short, wobbling in midair as if caught in a giant spiderweb, and remained suspended for several seconds before dropping to the carpet between Abdo and Lars.

“Saints’ dogs!” Viridius swore. He’d picked up that expression from me.

Dame Okra sneered. “That’s not nothing, but is it really the best you can do?”

Abdo opened one eye, which twinkled mischievously, then closed it again. Dame Okra watched, arms folded. Suddenly she cried, “Duck!” and threw herself flat on the ground.

Viridius followed suit without questioning, flinging himself off the harpsichord stool. My pathetic reflexes, alas, were too slow off the mark. Harpsichord strings twanged and windows shattered as I was bowled over the back of the couch.



I came to on the daybed in Viridius’s solarium; its windows, still intact, had been out of range. The sun had slipped behind the mountains, but the sky was still pink. Dame Okra sat beside me, adjusting the wick of a lamp in her lap, illuminating her froggy face from below. She noticed me stirring and said, “How do you feel?”

It was an unusually tender inquiry, coming from her. My ears were ringing and my head throbbed, but for her sake I bravely said, “Not too awful.”

I’d have something good to report to the Queen, at least, whenever I could stand up again.

“Of course you’re fine,” Dame Okra snapped, setting the lamp on a side table. “Abdo has been nearly hysterical, thinking he’d hurt you.”

I tried to sit up, but my head weighed a thousand pounds. “Where is he?”

Dame Okra waved off my question. “You’ll see him soon. I want a word with you first.” Her pink tongue darted over her lips. “This is ill advised, this whole endeavor.”

I closed my eyes. “If you dislike the idea of linking minds, you don’t have to—”

“Indeed, I never shall,” she said impatiently. “But it’s not just that. It’s this plan of yours to bring the half-dragons together.” My eyes popped open again; she leered at me. “Oh yes, I know what this is really about. You think you’re going to find a family. We shall come together under one roof—a warm communing of weird ones!—and all our problems will be solved.” She grinned toothily and batted her eyes.

I bristled at her mockery. “I want to help the others,” I said. “I’ve glimpsed their sorrows. You and I have had it easy compared with some.”

It was her turn to chafe. “Easy? Oh yes, with my scaly tail and boyish figure, what could be simpler? I was never kicked out of my mother’s house at fifteen, never had to live on the streets of Segosh or steal to eat.” Her voice was rising to a teakettle shrill. “Bluffing my way into secretarial work was a snap; marrying the old ambassador was trivial, with my fabulous looks. Outliving him—well, no, that really was easy. But persuading our ruling count to let me take over as ambassador, when no female had ever held the post before, was as easy as wetting the bed.” She was shouting now. “Or falling out a window. Why, anyone could do it, because it was nothing.”