Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(138)

“Whoops,” he said.

“What is it?” I whispered, my heart in my throat.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I thought she went down this corridor, but it’s a dead end.…”

He trailed off, which frightened me more than anything he could have said. I was about to call his name, but luckily I hesitated.

“You were following me,” said Jannoula’s contralto voice. She sounded amused.

I bit my lips shut. His thnik was still on; if I spoke, she’d hear me. Kiggs said, “You’re mistaken.” His voice was muffled, as if he’d concealed the device in his fist.

“Am I? You’re not here to chasten me for my impiety? Don’t look so sheepish—I know skepticism when I see it, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a relief, oddly, to meet someone who doubts.” She sighed, like one who bears an impossible weight of duty. “Here, at last, is a person I can’t disappoint.”

Kiggs laughed; my stomach turned over.

She’d read him quickly and taken exactly the right tack: humility, doubt, and obligation. He was cautious, but she could use caution. All she needed was an angle.

The prince’s thnik buzzed once and clicked off.





Jannoula brought Kiggs back with her from the seminary, and he was seamlessly reintegrated into castle life, as far as I could tell. If Glisselda was angry with him for disobeying her orders and entering the city, I presume Jannoula smoothed things over between them. The details didn’t reach me; I could only observe from a distance. Kiggs attended council, made plans for the defense of the city, toured the walls, and drilled with the Queen’s Guard.

Kiggs was easier to approach than Glisselda. Two days after Jannoula had apprehended him, I spotted him striding purposefully across Stone Court with three others of his regiment. I called after him and he waited for me, letting the others walk ahead toward the barbican gate. I was a little out of breath when I reached him, but I had to know: “Did you see her spiritual advisor? Was it Orma?”

He shrugged, turning the helmet he carried in his hands. “I didn’t see him, Phina. But you know, even if it is Orma, she may have a very good reason for keeping you from him. She’s not quite the madwoman you always made her out to be. She’s got a remarkable mind, and if she has some rough edges, well, she can be reasoned with—”

I turned away, unwilling to hear more. Jannoula’s glamour had clearly affected him; I could no longer feel safe speaking to him openly. That was one more ally gone.

Jannoula did not gloat about Kiggs, which of course raised my suspicions. She would not have forgotten seeing him, through Abdo’s eyes, coming out of my room in Porphyry. She knew Queen Glisselda had ordered him to stay away. I had wondered whether the two things were connected, whether Jannoula had told Glisselda what she’d seen in Porphyry, and Glisselda hadn’t wanted to see Kiggs as a result.

That didn’t add up, though. Glisselda was not herself, but she should have been furious with me as well as Kiggs, if she’d really found out the truth. I felt certain Jannoula was saving it for a special occasion.

Time passed relentlessly. My anxiety grew. I wanted to stop her before the war came south so that we’d have time to determine whether the other ityasaari could make St. Abaster’s Trap without her. Kiggs had said we needed this trap, and I agreed; it would not do to hobble Goredd’s defenses, but that meant incapacitating Jannoula in some way that was reversible, in case we found the other ityasaari couldn’t make the trap without her. That ruled out killing or poisoning Jannoula. Camba, Nedouard, and I, conferring in hasty whispers when we could, had come up with no better way to stop her.

Astonishingly, the solution came to me from St. Yirtrudis’s testament. I’d read it three times through by now and had grown quite fond of my secret patroness and her lover, the Counter-Saint, monstrous Pandowdy. The first time through, I had pictured him as a big, horrible swamp slug—I couldn’t help it—and had found their romance off-putting. The second time through, however, I paid attention to Yirtrudis’s descriptions of him. Pandowdy was no slug. He was tall and fearsome (I pictured him as a younger, handsomer Gianni Patto, with nicer teeth). He was a mighty fighter, a berserker who’d killed dragons with his bare hands. After the dragons were defeated, he’d been lost and out of place, prone to rages. Only Yirtrudis seemed to see a man and not a monster. Under her tutelage, he learned to control himself; together they’d founded a school of meditation.

Yirtrudis’s envious brother, Abaster, who had already murdered three other Saints for daring to contradict his doctrines, had had Pandowdy buried alive. My brother has undone the best of our generation, Yirtrudis wrote, because Pandowdy would not call the World-Light “Heaven.” When Abaster is through with us, there will be no more room for interpretation. He will have pruned our myriad beautiful visions down to one.

Mention of the World-Light gave me chills. I suspected I couldn’t have called it Heaven, either. I rather liked this Pandowdy.

Only on my third read-through did I realize that Pandowdy had once wrecked St. Abaster’s Trap. There was a single sentence about it, easy to gloss over: Pandowdy became a mirror, reflecting the fire back at Abaster until he was so burned we could not rouse him for three days.

It was the last night before the Loyalists’ retreat; we had only one day left to try something before the barrier would be in active use against enemy dragons. I met with Camba and showed her the passage. She was sitting up in bed, Ingar curled at the other end like a big, dreamy cat. “What does that mean,” I asked, “and is it something we can do?”