Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(143)

I looked at my garden denizens, scattered across the lawn like twigs. The little Abdo twig was upright. Maybe it was a sign. I took his tiny hands and whirled out into a vision.

He was still at that roadside shrine, surviving on offerings. In fact, he seemed to have acquired a following; someone had put a knit cap on his head, and there were scraps of parchment tucked into his tunic. Those would be prayers and intercessions. Someone who could meditate as long as he had must have Heaven’s favor.

Abdo had evaded Jannoula for weeks now. If I escaped, the two of us together could figure out how to release each other and fight back.

I returned to my garden, and it occurred to me that there might be a way to walk through my wider mind along the other side of the wall. I’d never tried to see my garden from there; generally the gate just appeared, as if out of a fog. I stepped out and turned to face it. Spreading to either side were the high, crenellated battlements of a castle. This was what held me in, not the rail fence.

I wasn’t going to tumble this wall by walking around it, although I did try. It was all I could think to do.

A knock at the door yanked me out of my head abruptly. I flailed around the bed, disoriented. The room was dark; night had fallen without my noticing.

I felt my way to the door, opened it, and then stood there blinking at lamplight from the hallway. A shadowy figure loomed before me, lit from behind so I couldn’t see who it was. There were two palace guards behind him, and Gianni Patto was nowhere to be seen.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” said a familiar basso voice, and I thought my heart would break.

Now that my eyes were adjusting, I recognized the beaky nose and piercing eyes. He wasn’t wearing his false beard, and his shrubby hair had been trimmed in some kind of monk’s tonsure—in fact, he was wearing the mustard-colored habit of St. Gobnait’s Order. “Orma,” I managed to whisper.

He glanced behind him as if he were concerned the guards had heard me. They just looked bored. Orma cleared his throat. “Brother Norman,” he said. “I was sent with a message.” He held out a folded parchment letter, sealed with wax.

“W-won’t you come in for a moment?” I said. “And bring a lamp, uh, please. I have no light in here.”

Orma cocked his head to one side, considering. I could have wept at that dear, familiar quirk. The scruffy guards seemed amused. One took a lantern down from its wall niche and passed it to Orma. “Take your time in there, Brother,” he said with a wink.

“Take all night,” said the other, waggling his bushy brows.

Orma, looking perplexed by the innuendo, followed me into the room and closed the door behind us. He set the lantern upon the cedar chest at the end of the bed, and I saw, behind his right ear, the telltale excision scar. I did weep then. I turned my back to him and broke the seal on the letter, sniffling and trying to keep my breath even, wiping my eyes on my linen sleeve. I held the letter so it caught the light, and read in Jannoula’s blocky hand:

I almost forgot that I had another birthday present for you. Well, not exactly for you. Everything you love is mine. That’s how it has to be. Who has hurt me more than you? Who showed me loving kindness, let me dream of freedom, only to snatch it all away? This monster helped, of course, but he’s just an empty shell now. I can’t hollow you out the same way, but you’re going to wish I could.



I crumpled up her letter and threw it as hard as I could across the room. Orma, who had placed himself near the door, standing with hands folded, said placidly, “I take it there’s no reply?”

There was no point asking if he remembered me; he clearly did not. I said, “Are you the one Jannoula visits at the seminary? Her spiritual advisor?”

“It would be inaccurate to call me an advisor,” he said, looking mildly puzzled. “She comes to the seminary to dictate her memoirs to me. Her handwriting is terrible.”

So I’d been right about one thing. It was cold comfort. “But why are you at the seminary to begin with? You’re not a monk. I know you’re a saarantras.”

He ran his tongue over his teeth. “And how do you know that?”

“I used to know you,” I said, my heart pounding. Was it wise to talk to an excision victim about the things he couldn’t remember? I nervously twisted his ring on my pinkie, and then suddenly it hit me: What if the ring he’d sent me was the trigger for his mind-pearl? I hardly dared hope. I held out my finger and waggled the pearl ring at him.

He stared blankly at my hand, then at my face. Nothing changed in his expression.

“You may be mistaken,” he said. “The human mind produces an astonishing variety of false memories—”

“You were excised!” I cried, furious and frustrated. “You’ve got the scar. I’m one of the things they took from you.” I racked my memory for anything else Eskar or the exiles had told me about excision. “Do you take destultia?”

He recoiled a little from my vehemence. “Yes, but again, you are mistaken. I have a heart condition called pyrocardia. When I am full-sized, my heart overheats until it catches fire inside me. Human form is safer, but I still could suffer an infarction. I was prescribed destultia, and they excised my memories of catching fire, because those are traumatic.”

“You used to be a musicologist,” I said. “Do you remember none of that?”