Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(135)



“It’s good to see you all,” I said, and that was the truth, but it was also terrible. I did not know how to contain such a contradiction inside myself.

Phloxia led us in prayer, and then they had a dozen questions for me at once. I fielded them as noncommittally as I could, trying to feel out which of them were not so enamored of Jannoula. No one stood out in that regard—not even Nedouard—but maybe they were being cautious. I would give them time.

For my part, I had just one question: “Where’s Jannoula?”

“She never eats dinner with us,” said Dame Okra, waving a dismissive hand.

“She sees her spiritual advisor in the evenings,” said Lars earnestly. “Even the very great need their confidants. No one can bear everything alone.”

“I see,” I said, and let the subject drop for now. I would find out who that was. I hardly dared hope it was Orma—the idea of him being anyone’s spiritual anything was laughable—and yet … I had to be sure.

As I was getting ready for bed, a dog-eared sheaf of bound pages was shoved under my door by an unseen hand. I picked it up and turned it over. Jannoula had written in blocky letters on the front: St. Yirtrudis’s testament, translation by St. Ingar. For Saints only. Read it. Understand who you are.

“At your command, Blessed,” I muttered. I wasn’t sleepy anyway. I settled in for a long night’s read.





Once upon a time, the dragons made a Great Mistake. Unintended births of a few half-humans had revealed a peculiar quality when the two species mixed. Ityasaari minds seemed to leak out into the world, to tap into some vein of influence inaccessible to others. These mental powers fascinated dragonkind, and they believed that such abilities, if harnessed, might change the course of their ceaseless war with the Southlands. They deliberately bred more than four hundred half-humans.

That was not their Mistake, although they will ever insist it was.

The Mistake was in showing no kindness to the ityasaari, no empathy or recognition. The ityasaari were tools of conquest, and nothing more.

Until the day my brother Abaster said enough.

I stayed up all night reading. When my lamp ran out of oil, I went down to the chapel, stoked the embers of the great hearth, and read by firelight until my eyes watered and my head ached. I went out to the courtyard at first light and read by the rising sun.

Those ityasaari—the generation of Saints—had turned against their dragon masters in spectacular fashion, fighting their way out of the Tanamoot, coming south and teaching humanity to fight. When dragonkind faced the dracomachia for the first time, they’d seen nothing like it. It devastated their numbers, and they retreated to lick their wounds and repopulate the Tanamoot.

The people of Goredd, Ninys, and Samsam were pagans in those days, worshiping an assortment of local nature gods. To the Southlanders, the half-dragons, even the most deformed, looked like living manifestations of these spirits. This made some ityasaari uncomfortable, but Abaster—always ready to claim the mantle of leader—gathered them together and said, “Brethren, are the humans wrong? We who have touched the World-Mind know we are more than this crumbling flesh. There is a Place beyond places, a Moment outside of time, a Realm of infinite peace. If we don’t tell humankind about it, who else can?”

So they let themselves be worshiped, and they wrote down laws and precepts and mystical epic poetry, and they spoke to the people of the light they had seen, how the world was merely shadows cast by that light, and they called the light Heaven. And everything worked out beautifully, until some acquired a taste for power and began to quarrel with the rest.



Ah, that light I couldn’t see. It was everywhere, apparently.

I stumbled back to bed for a few hours’ sleep and dreamed of the War of the Saints (something I’d never heard of before reading Yirtrudis’s testament). My stomach woke me at midday. I reluctantly donned a white gown and went downstairs, but the only person I saw was a gnarled old woman sweeping the chapel. “Where is everyone?” I asked her.

She said, “Go outside and look up. I’ll not watch today, as a penance on myself.”

Her words gave me pause. “What will I see?”

Her small black eyes, sharp as a mouse’s, gleamed as she said, “The light.”

I rushed out to the courtyard. The lawn was covered in townspeople and castle guards, all looking toward the top of the Ard Tower expectantly. If I shaded my eyes, I could make out the silhouettes of ityasaari at the top; Gianni Patto’s height made him the most visible, but I recognized Mina’s wings and the matched outlines of Gaios and Gelina. They appeared to be holding hands in a circle.

Camba couldn’t climb the tower on her own with two broken ankles; had they carried her up, or was she shut up in her room?

Around me people began to gasp. Some fell on their knees and bowed their heads; others clasped their hands to their hearts and gazed rapturously. From where I stood, nothing seemed to have changed. I whispered to the young woman beside me, who watched the sky calmly, “What is happening, exactly?”

“You’re disrupting my prayer,” she snapped, but then she seemed to take stock of my white gown. “Oh, forgive me—I didn’t know you. You’re the Counter-Saint, the one who can’t see Heaven, aren’t you? Blessed preached about you yesterday afternoon.”

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