Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(137)

“We can’t keep forcing her to participate!” Nedouard cried incautiously. “The mind-threading hurts her. It’s cruel.”

Padding footsteps on the spiral staircase paused. I glanced back and saw Jannoula watching us narrowly. She turned away from Blanche’s misery and continued down the stairs without a word. In that moment I hated her.

Nedouard got Blanche untied; I helped him take her to her room. We tucked her, still weeping, into her narrow bed. I turned to go, but the doctor gripped my arm fiercely and whispered, “Don’t let the light in the sky fool you. This is Jannoula’s true handiwork. We submit, or she breaks us.”

I clasped his hand, my heart hurting. “We will find the way out of this.”

Jannoula had called me her Counter-Saint; it was time to start countering.



I quickly learned the routines of the Sainted ityasaari: they woke at dawn for prayers in the chapel, followed by morning council, St. Abaster’s Trap, and lunch. In the afternoon, they went their separate ways for various tasks—preaching, painting, performing, reaching out to the populace—and then they took their evening meal together, spent a quiet hour in the chapel, and went to bed.

Jannoula was absent every evening; I tried to follow her once, but Gianni Patto apparently had orders to keep an eye on me. He planted himself in my way, idly scratching his dagger-like claws in the dirt. I gathered my nerve and attempted to step around him, but he grabbed my arm with one enormous hand and hauled me back inside.

I attempted to find ways to speak with Glisselda. The Queen had seemed to swallow uncritically Jannoula’s explanation of her association with the Old Ard, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be reasoned with. Surely I could find a way to talk to her, to loosen Jannoula’s grip without appearing to do so.

Alas, I could never find an opportunity to speak with Glisselda alone. Jannoula was always present before and after council, and in the afternoons, when Her Blessedness went to preach at the cathedral, she assigned Dame Okra to escort me everywhere. Try as I might, I couldn’t give the old ambassadress the slip; she was on me like a tick. I succeeded exactly once in arranging a meeting in the Queen’s study. Glisselda looked up eagerly from her desk when I entered, but the moment she saw Dame Okra, her expression fell closed. We spent an awkward half hour, sipping tea and speaking of nothing. Dame Okra watched hawkishly, and a wiry, gray-haired guardsman, Glisselda’s deaf bodyguard, lurked in the corner like a statue. I hinted that Glisselda might order Dame Okra away—she was still Queen, after all—but the only person who picked up on the hint was Dame Okra herself, who was cross with me for the rest of the day.

Cross, but no less present.

I tried to sneak out to see Glisselda at night. I would surely do better at bluffing the guards this time; I’d say Jannoula required the Queen’s presence in the Ard Tower, and then I’d escort Glisselda there, giving us a chance to speak privately. Alas, I never made it out of the Ard Tower. When I opened the front door, there was Gianni Patto, curled up in the courtyard, blocking my only way out.

But then, what would Glisselda have said if I’d spoken to her? The same things Kiggs was telling me every evening over the thnik, that Goredd needed St. Abaster’s Trap and the ityasaari could wait to be freed until the war was over?

A week passed, and then another. The Samsamese army, which had been only a week’s march away, kept its distance for now. The Loyalists were to feint south in just six days. I felt like I’d accomplished nothing.

Since Jannoula was out every evening, my one consolation was that it was easier to speak with Kiggs than I’d initially feared. One evening, he had surprising news: “I see Jannoula, about a block ahead of me, on the river road. Do you want me to learn where she goes?”

“If you can follow without her seeing you,” I said, sitting up in bed, as if I might add my alertness to his.

It was some moments before his voice crackled again: “We’re turning south with the river. She’s got a following, people drifting out of taverns and alleys. They’re like gulls behind a fishing boat. And you know what? She lets them touch her and smiles at every one. For all that she’s an egotist, she seems a kindly one.”

“She’s not a kindly one,” I snapped. She had an allure even when she wasn’t speaking or glowing with mind-fire.

He chuckled infuriatingly, and for a while there was nothing but the sound of his footsteps. He reported crossing Cathedral Bridge. “She’s heading for the seminary gate,” he said. “If she enters, it may be difficult to follow her inside.”


“Don’t follow her inside. That’s all the information I needed,” I said. I would go to St. Gobnait’s Seminary and see for myself as soon as I could. I could lose an ityasaari chaperone in town; this was my city.

Kiggs stayed quiet a long time. I stared at the thnik ring, one finger over from Orma’s pearl ring, wondering whether to call his name. Suddenly he said, “That wasn’t difficult. A prince of the realm can still go wherever he needs to.”

“You followed her in?” I said, shocked.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The door monk believed I was here to guard Jannoula. Why would he ask her about me when she already knows I’m coming?”

I frowned, disliking the risk he was taking, but there was nothing I could do.