Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(30)

These are machines, he said.

“What, like Lars builds?” I asked, disbelieving. I understood the mechanics of Lars’s machines. They didn’t look like creatures.

Not exactly. She’s fixed her soul-light to them somehow. They’re animated by clockwork and her mind, together. He shook his head, marveling. This is her garden, Phina, but it’s made of things, not people. Her mind reaches out to objects.

He clambered to his feet and stepped toward the nearest spider, extending a hand to it as if it were a friendly dog.

“Don’t!” I cried, on my feet again in a trice. I took a single step, heard an ominous click, and threw myself backward. A gout of flame burst from the ground where I’d been standing.

Stay still, Abdo scolded me. He was petting the spider now. It hadn’t attacked.

Behind him, the hut’s lichen-crusted door opened silently, and a pale, petite woman stepped into the sunlight.

I’d called her Glimmerghost for a reason. She seemed to float behind Abdo, ethereal and bone-thin, as if she had sought to become transparent in fact. She didn’t seem old, but her hair was white, long, and so fine that it caught the slightest breeze and drifted around her head. Peeling blemishes—individual dragon scales—scarred her skin all over. From a distance they looked like graypox scars. Her dress was stained and mossy.

Her violet eyes gleamed with curiosity. She stepped toward Abdo with her slender hand outstretched, the way he’d approached the spider.

He turned to face her, and they stood a moment in silence, drenched in liquid sunlight. Abdo offered the loaf of bread, and she took it, the shade of a smile flickering across her face. She extended her other hand, and together they entered her earthy home.



This is going to take some time, Abdo told me after a quarter of an hour had passed. If I speak too much to her, it gives her a headache. Her soul-light is strong and fragile all at once, like cobwebs.

I rescued Josquin while we waited, although he insisted later—when I reported the incident to Captain Moy—that it was not so much rescuing as giving him a hand up.

An hour passed, and then two. I paced the edge of the clearing, where there seemed to be no filaments. Josquin went to update the Eight and returned.

Abdo said at last, She’d like to come with us—she’s curious—but she’s also timid. She doesn’t go among people. I don’t want to bring her out before she’s ready. I should stay here overnight.

I began to protest, but he said, I’m perfectly safe. Anyway, you can’t reach me to protect me or bring me out. Go back to Meshi and call in at the palasho. I’ll still be here in the morning, I promise.

I didn’t like it; the Eight, when Josquin and I returned to the main road and told them, liked it even less. After much discussion, we left a contingent of four—led by Nan—encamped at the edge of the clearing, out of range of Glimmerghost’s defenses. The rest of us went back to town and called on Baronet Meshi as per our original intention. I checked in on Abdo so often that he began to get irritated with me, and I was so distracted that I failed to answer a direct question from the baronet about our old Queen’s failing health. Josquin, with his usual aplomb, smoothed over my inadequacies and kicked me under the table.

Abdo interrupted my sleep early the next morning, saying, Would you bring more bread with you when you come back? Blanche loves it, but she never got the hang of baking it herself.

She had a name. That didn’t quite soothe my crankiness at being awakened so early.

We brought bread that day—and the next. Baronet Meshi gave us a tour of his sulfur mines; I twitched with impatience all the way through. Finally, on the third morning, Abdo informed me that Blanche was willing and ready to travel, if we could find some way to transport her. She was frightened of horses.

Horses and humans. I stopped myself from suggesting that she ride one of her giant spiders back to Segosh.

Josquin visited his brother heralds at an inn west of Meshi, and returned to the palasho in an hour with a post carriage and an elderly herald named Folla, who would escort Blanche to Dame Okra’s. I must have looked skeptical, because the old man took my hand between his palsied ones and said in heavily accented Goreddi, “I care for her like my own granddaughter. One week, fast coach, she is safe in Segosh. My promise.”

We followed the coach on horseback and met Nan’s party and Abdo at the point on the forest road where Abdo had gone in search of the mossy hut. I saw no sign of our hermit until Abdo sidled up to a pine and pointed. She was sitting on a branch, higher than I would have thought she could climb, watching us all carefully.

Don’t worry, she’ll come down, said Abdo. She wanted to look everyone over first.

She didn’t look to me like she had any intention of descending, the way she clutched at the trunk with one arm, her other hand pressed to her mouth. Abdo, at the base of the tree, looked up at her and smiled, holding out a hand. Her face relaxed as she gazed at him, and she began to nod quaveringly. She took a deep breath, as if bracing herself, and climbed down the tree trunk like a squirrel.

Blanche carried a filthy leather satchel on a strap slung over her bony shoulder. You should see the machines she’s leaving behind, madamina, said Abdo, his eyes following her admiringly. She’s brought only one of her spiders, bundled up in her bag.

Only one spider. Dame Okra was going to be so pleased.