Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(20)

“D-do you speak Goreddi?” I asked.

“Must I ask you to leave in two languages?” he said, switching without apparent effort, his voice still muffled by the leather and by the real beak hidden under the mask’s. “Is the stench, the neighborhood, your good sense not warning enough?”

“I need to speak with you,” I said, putting my foot forward because he seemed about to close the door again. “Not now, clearly, but perhaps when you finish here?”

He laughed mirthlessly. “Finish, you say? When I leave this place, I have a leper colony to attend. Then I will be pulled in a dozen more directions. The poor need so much, and there are so few who care to give.”

I fished my purse out of my bodice and pressed a silver coin upon him. He stared at it, lying forlornly in the worn palm of his glove. I gave him another.

The doctor cocked his head, like a bird listening for a worm. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” he said, nodding slightly to Abdo.

I shot Abdo a glance, but Abdo was watching the doctor with imploring eyes. “I can find her house,” said Finch, “but it will be evening before I have time.” The masked doctor turned his eyes to me, gently pushed my foot aside with the grimy toe of his boot, and shut the door.

“So what did you tell Dr. Finch?” I asked Abdo as we turned to leave.

That we are of his kind, said Abdo dreamily, taking my hand. He is curious by nature; he will come. I liked his mind. It’s a humane color.



I was delighted. We’d succeeded in finding a half-dragon after only three days’ searching; he’d seemed cautiously receptive, at least. After weeks of mud, I finally had something substantive to report to Glisselda and Kiggs.

It was a most propitious start. I would enjoy telling Dame Okra as well.

We stopped briefly by Dame Okra’s, but she wasn’t home and we were too merry to stay indoors. I fetched my flute, and Abdo and I passed the afternoon performing in the cathedral plaza.

Once I could not have done this. I’d so feared exposure (and my father’s wrath) that I would never have dared to play in public. It was still nerve-racking, but I’d discovered that playing in public was also tremendously gratifying, emblematic of my new life, new freedom, new openness. Once I had feared for my life; now my greatest fear was flubbing a note, and it seemed right to celebrate that shift as often as I could.

Abdo danced and tumbled while I played, and we drew an appreciative crowd. The Ninysh are famous lovers of art, as the sculpture, fountains, and triumphal arches of Segosh will attest.

Of course, as every Goreddi knows, Ninysh public art was built on the back of Goredd: the Ninysh let us fight all those expensive, destructive dragon wars ourselves. It had rarely seemed worth Goreddi effort to create beautiful monuments or statuary, not when the dragons were going to raze it. Until Comonot’s Treaty and the forty-year peace, only music had been able to flourish in Goredd, the one art we could pursue while surviving in tunnels underground.

Abdo and I returned to Dame Okra’s near dusk in anticipation of Finch’s arrival. I’d expected to find our dinner in the kitchen, since Dame Okra had stayed late at Palasho Pesavolta the last two evenings. Tonight, though, I heard her braying in the formal dining room, over an unfamiliar basso counterpoint.

Dame Okra sat at one end of the gleaming table, taking coffee with a much younger man, who leaped to his feet upon our arrival. He was a scrawny fellow, shorter than me, with lank red hair to his shoulders, a long face, and a wispy chin beard. He wore Count Pesavolta’s orange and gold livery. I guessed he was past twenty, but not much.

“You deign to grace us with your presence at last, do you?” said Dame Okra, glaring at us. “Your armed escort is arranged. You leave tomorrow. Josquin here will prevent your getting too lost.” She flapped a hand at him obscurely; he understood it as a command to sit. “He’s my great-great-grand-cousin, or some nonsense.”

“Pleased to finally meet you both,” said Josquin, pulling out a chair for me. His voice was far deeper than his skinny build gave any hint of. “My cousin has told me—”

“Yes, shut up. My point is,” said Dame Okra, bristling, “I trust him. For years he and his mother were the only people who knew what I was, and they never told. His mother sews my dresses and helps me look properly human.” She adjusted her majestic—and false—bosom at this juncture, underscoring her point. Josquin politely found something deserving of attention in his coffee.

“He’s been riding as a herald since he was ten,” Dame Okra continued. “He knows every village and road.”

“Most of them,” said Josquin modestly. His blue eyes crinkled with amused affection for his old cousin, despite her surliness.

“The best roads,” snapped Dame Okra. “The ones worth knowing. He’ll translate. He’s already engaged his fellow heralds to ride ahead and spread word of a reward for information leading to the hermit and the muralist. That will save you time, I should think. And he knows you’ve got to get to Samsam in time for—”

Dame Okra suddenly froze and took on a dyspeptic look, her eyes unfocused.

Abdo, who’d claimed a chair and cup of coffee for himself, looked first at Okra and then toward the front of the house. I wish you could see this, Phina madamina. Dame Okra is having a premonition, her soul-light darting out like lightning. A big spiky finger from her mind to the front door. He pointed to illustrate.