Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(128)

There was nothing to do but nod solemnly and promise I would try.





I didn’t take the dagger with me. I let it fall behind some baggage in the command tent when no one was looking. It had a distinctive enough handle that there would be no doubt whose it was; I hoped he would forgive me.

Sir Cuthberte gave Kiggs and me a set of matched thniks so we could communicate from different parts of the castle. The sun set early, even so soon after the equinox, but Kiggs insisted upon waiting until the moon’s slender sickle followed suit. I watched it and wondered who would be harvesting in this upcoming season of war.

When the darkness had deepened to the prince’s satisfaction, we set off for Lavondaville, cutting across flax fields on an ancient peasants’ right-of-way. Torches gleamed along the city walls as work crews continued building Lars’s war machines into the night.

Lars was under Jannoula’s sway, but his work carried on. An agent of the Old Ard wouldn’t have wanted Goredd so well defended, surely?

We intended to sneak into the castle through the northwest sally port, where we’d fought my grandfather, the dragon Imlann, at midwinter. I would check in with Glisselda to gauge how much influence this self-styled Saint had over her, then take my place among Jannoula’s ityasaari. Kiggs was coming to aid and support me, but until we knew why Glisselda had refused him entry to the city, he was to stay concealed and spy from the shadows.

As we walked through dark fields, I spoke to him quietly about Jannoula, trying to prepare him: “She awed Anders in only a few minutes; she’s had access to Glisselda for weeks. Don’t be surprised if your cousin has been persuaded completely.”

He shook his head stubbornly. “You don’t know Selda like I do. She acts like this wee, delicate girl-child, but she’s tough as a weed. She knew not to trust Jannoula. I won’t believe it until I see it, and maybe not even then.”

“Jannoula has Josef eating out of her hand,” I said. “She’s persuaded dragons to an extreme ideology. Don’t underestimate her.”

We’d reached the Mews River bridge; the sound of arguing farmers carried over the water. Kiggs led us upstream to a skiff and poled across without getting us too soaked. The frogs of autumn croaked grumpily and plopped off the bank as we landed.

“What is this ‘mind-fire,’ exactly, and how was Jannoula able to show Anders hers?” said Kiggs when we were safely out of earshot.

I took a deep breath and told him what little I knew: how all ityasaari seemed to have mind-fire, but only some could see it; how Jannoula could manipulate it, planting her hooks in ityasaari or revealing her light to humans; how I had taken a bit of each ityasaari into myself—Abdo could see the threads leading into me—but nobody seemed able to see my light at all.

“I presume my garden walls block my light somehow, but it’s a bit of a paradox,” I concluded. “Because where is my light, exactly? Inside the garden?” I made a circle with my hands, miming the walls. “It can’t be. Abdo said my garden looks like a cellar. Pende didn’t see my light there. My mind-fire, like most of my mind, is on the other side of the garden wall, I think. But if it’s outside the wall, why can’t anyone see it? Is there a second wall somewhere? A wall I didn’t consciously build?”

We’d arrived at the base of the scrubby hill leading up to the sally port. The Queen’s Guard kept a stable nearby; a lantern hung in the window, its light like a piercing cry. We crept around so no one would detect our presence, then climbed a ways in silence.

When we reached the shrubbery that concealed the cave entrance, Kiggs finally spoke. “You know, all this talk of walls, and of inside and outside, reminds me of the story of the inside-out house.”

“Inside the outhouse?” I asked, not trying to be funny, but sincerely having no idea what he was talking about.

He paused inside the cave, feeling around for the lanterns that would light our way. This was going to be a short trip if he couldn’t find them. “The inside-out house,” he repeated. “It’s a Pau-Henoa tale, a really obscure one, from pagan antiquity.”

“My papa wasn’t much for stories, unless they were legal precedents,” I said. “Anne-Marie is Ninysh and never cared for Goredd’s trickster rabbit.”

A soft clicking sound was Kiggs lighting the lantern with flint and steel. A yellow glow illuminated his face from below before going out. He adjusted the wick. “Well,” he said, rapping out some more sparks, “the story goes like this. Once upon a time, a greedy fellow named Dowl wanted to own everything in the world. The law in those days said that if something was in your house, you owned it.”

“So my father would have liked this story,” I said.

The lantern flame finally held; Kiggs smiled eerily. “Dowl cleverly decided to build an inside-out house. It was just an ordinary house, but he claimed that the space inside was really outside, and the entire world, including everyone else’s houses, was on the inside. He was a bit of a magician, so when he spoke the words, they bent the way he wanted and became true. The entire universe was ‘inside’ his house and belonged to him.

“Now, as you can imagine, not everyone was pleased with this arrangement, but the law was the law, and what were they to do? The only space ‘outside’ of Dowl’s house was no bigger than a one-room shack.”