Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(37)

I don’t know, I said. I could hardly grasp it myself. Could Od Fredricka have sent him after us? The abbot? If it was the abbot, was Od Fredricka in danger, too? Had she given up our secret to save herself? Alas, the monk was dead and we couldn’t ask.

Thank the gods for Gianni Patto, said Abdo blearily, and then he was out.

I continued to hold his hand while the midwife stitched him up, slathered his arm with ointments, and bandaged the wound. I would have stayed by him all night if Nan had not hauled me to my feet and made me go to supper.



I wanted this day to be over so badly, but sleep fled, leaving me nothing but self-recrimination. I should have let Abdo go back to Segosh with Blanche. I should have skipped the monastery altogether and left Od Fredricka alone. I should never have come after Gianni Patto, who had even less language than Blanche and liked to wrestle bears. I hadn’t believed him dangerous; that seemed so foolish now. He’d snapped the monk’s neck with his bare hands. I revisited that moment as I tossed and turned, the monk flopping grotesquely off the rooftop over and over in my mind’s eye.

I recalled Gianni speaking my name, and shuddered. That cat-like expression …

I sat bolt upright, horrified. It was well past midnight, but I leaped out of bed, put my breeches and boots back on, and crept out of my room.

Outside Josquin’s door, I hesitated, wanting to wake him and fearing what he would witness if I did, and what he would think of me after. He’d become a friend, I realized.

I could not bear to lose his regard. I let him lie.

I found my way out of the keep and crossed the moonlit courtyard to the round tower. The outer door was guarded. My Ninysh was too poor to bluff my way in, but the guardsman must have had some idea of who I was. He gestured me to wait while he went indoors; to my surprise, he came back out with Moy. “We’re guarding the wild man in shifts,” said the captain, smiling. “You want a turn? We were rude not to offer.”

“I want to talk to him—alone,” I said. “He’s not still being violent, is he?”

Moy shrugged. “He’s been quiet as a lamb behind that solid oak door. You can talk through the grating, though I’m not sure he talks.”

Gianni Patto shouldn’t have had any language. When he’d said my name, that should have clued me in right away. I’d been too upset about Abdo to notice.

Moy held the tower door open and closed it behind me. I was in a short, high-ceilinged corridor, lit by a single torch in a sconce. There was a knife and whittled stick upon a stool; Moy apparently passed his time carving. The only occupied cell was on the left at the end. The fetid stench of unwashed wild man made the air heavy.

“Gianni?” I said, looking through the door’s grating. A barred window across the cell let in a trickle of moonlight, but not enough for me to see the prisoner. I called his name again, and suddenly his eye was at the grating, pale and rheumy and wild.

He startled me into taking a step back; I forced myself not to look away. “You spoke my name,” I said quietly. “Someone must have taught it to you. Who was it?”

His eye reeled, unfocused. He’d understood nothing; if he’d known any language at all—and I still believed he shouldn’t—it could only have been Ninysh. He’d clearly been living alone on the mountainside for decades, probably from a younger age than Blanche. I could picture his villager mother, once she understood what sort of creature she had borne, tearfully leading him into a winter storm to be respectably lost for good.

I couldn’t communicate with him; it had been foolish to try. I turned to go, but heard scrabbling behind me. I looked back and saw his fingers, the nails cracked and yellow, poking through the grating.

“Fee,” he said, his voice ragged with phlegm. He spat. “Fee. Na.”

I had wanted and dreaded his words. I cleared my throat. “That’s right.”

“Thisss voooice,” said Gianni slowly, exaggerating consonants, dragging out the vowels. He was speaking Goreddi. My blood froze in my veins. “Decadesss of disssuse,” he croaked. “Hard to mek the tongue dooo what I … ge-huhrrgh!” There was a splat upon the floor as he spat again. “What a terrible-tasting mouth I have!”

My heart pounded painfully. The voice dispelled any remaining doubts. I knew its inflections, even channeled through Gianni’s disused voice box and recalcitrant mouth. How she’d accomplished this, I couldn’t imagine. I said, “What do you want, Jannoula?”

Gianni’s eye reappeared on the other side of the grate, now focused and shrewd. “Seraphina,” he said—or she said, using his moist, breathy voice. “You’re all grown up.”

“What do you want?” I repeated.

Gianni’s tongue clicked, scolding. “No ‘Hello.’ No ‘How have you been, Jannoula? I hope you’re not still languishing in prison.’ I suppose that horrid uncle of yours continues to poison you against me.”

The mention of Orma hurt, but I kept my face implacable. “The uncle who saved me, you mean? As I recall, it was you who poisoned things.”

Gianni’s pale brow came down; his crusty eye narrowed. “It has come to my attention that you are gathering our kind together.”

“How could you possibly have learned that?” I said.

Laughter gurgled from the cell. “A mutual friend told me. I could help you, you know. My mind reaches out to our kind, just like yours does.”