Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(18)

Kiggs made for the door and I followed, silent as a shadow. He paused with his hand on the latch, looked at me one more time, then turned and walked away.

I closed the door behind him and drifted toward my bedroom; the bed was piled with the clothes I meant to take and the bags they weren’t quite fitting into. I held the volume of Pontheus to my heart, pressed the Saint’s medallion to my lips, and then shoved them deep into one of my bags, underneath my linen shirts.

I would carry my home with me, out into the world, as I looked for others to bring into it.





The epic journey Dame Okra, Abdo, and I made across the Goreddi countryside can be distilled to one word: miserable. It seems grossly unfair to our suffering that two weeks of mud, broken carriage wheels, and Dame Okra’s swearing should be so reducible, but there are only so many Saints to swear by, and a carriage has only four wheels.

Mud, on the other hand, is infinite.

The roads improved once we crossed into Ninys. Four smooth-rolling days later, past cattle pastures, windmills, and the first inklings of spring wheat, Dame Okra’s coachman delivered us safely to the capital, Segosh. Dame Okra had a house there, a narrow affair wedged between two others and sharing a gravel carriage yard at the back. Rusty diamond-shaped tiles shingled the roof above a jaundiced stucco facade; arched limestone cornices over shuttered windows gave the building a surprised expression, as if it couldn’t believe we’d made it here without killing each other.

Every night of our journey, in every possible grade of roadside inn, I had cleaned and oiled the scales on my arm and midriff and tended to my garden of grotesques, focusing particularly on three ityasaari: Glimmerghost, Bluey, and Finch. They seemed most likely to be Ninysh, based on their pale complexions and fair or red hair, and the occasional spoken words I overheard during induced visions. Glimmerghost lived a hermetic existence in a pine forest; Bluey seemed to be a mural painter, which may have explained the colors swirling in her garden stream. I believed Finch lived in Segosh because I’d once spied him, in full plague-doctor gear, scuttling past the Cathedral Santi Wilibaio. Even Goreddi schoolchildren knew about its golden domes.

There were two other half-dragons in the Southlands: the Librarian, who spoke Samsamese and seemed to be a highland earl, and Tiny Tom, who haunted a cave in some mountains, I couldn’t tell which. I suspected he was Goreddi, living on the borders of dragon country. I would look for him last, when I returned home.

Dame Okra had volunteered her house for the Ninysh ityasaari. Once the ityasaari were found, we would send them here, and she would put them up (“put up with them,” she’d said; I pretended to believe she’d got the Goreddi idiom wrong). Later, she would escort the three back to Goredd while Abdo and I moved on to Samsam.

We had to be in the Samsamese town of Fnark by St. Abaster’s Day, before midsummer. There was only one half-dragon in Samsam, a bald, fat fellow I called the Librarian, and our best chance of finding him was at the annual meeting of highland earls. We did not have time to waste in Ninys.

Upon our arrival, a phalanx of servants ferried my things to a sickly green guest room on the third floor and mercifully prepared me a bath. When I finally felt human again—insofar as I could, with silver dragon scales around my arm and torso—I went looking for Dame Okra. I found her on the ground floor, glaring up the center of her winding staircase at Abdo, who had climbed the banister to the top of the house. He slid back down in a slow circle, grinning impishly and crying, The floor is full of sharks!

Dame Okra seems unamused, I said, glancing at her reddening face.

Because she’s a shark. Don’t let her eat me! He scampered back up the railing.

“Ah, children,” growled Dame Okra, watching him climb. “I forget what darlings they are. How I long for the opportunity to forget once more.”

“I’ll be taking him off your hands soon,” I said soothingly.

“Not soon enough,” she huffed. “Pesavolta will provide, have no fear, but—regrettably—it may be a few days before you can set out.”

“That’s fine,” I said, my patience thinning. “Finch is here in Segosh. We’ll look for him tomorrow.”

Dame Okra peered up at me over her spectacles; her eyes were wide-set and watery like a spaniel’s. “Finch? Is that what you call him in your head? I shudder to imagine what you once called me.”

It was clearly an invitation to tell her, but I pretended not to understand. I foresaw only two ways she might react to the name Miss Fusspots: amusement or incandescent anger. I was not so sure of the former that I cared to risk the latter.

“Does he have wings?” she continued. “Or chirp?”

“Finch?” I said, momentarily confused. “No, he’s got a … a beak.”

Dame Okra snorted sharply. “And he lives here in the city? Blue St. Prue, you’d think someone would have noticed.”



The next morning, we walked to the heart of the city, Abdo bounding along like he was full of grasshoppers. Hello, city! Hello, monuments! he chattered as we navigated the busy streets, uphill toward the Palasho Pesavolta. We admired the great plaza with the palasho on one side, the golden domes of the Cathedral Santi Wilibaio on the other.

A Saint’s day procession approached the cathedral, passing through the triumphal arch of King Moy. Abdo pranced excitedly and pestered me until I identified the Saint for him. It was St. Clare, the clear-seer, patron of truth-finding.