Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(38)

Or like it used to, said Jannoula/Gianni in my head, the way Abdo might have.

I had been backing away without realizing it; now I hit the dank stone wall opposite the cell door.

She could not have broken free of her cottage; she could not be loose in my mind!

I squeezed my eyes shut, searching wildly in my own head for the entrance to the garden of grotesques. This was not the way to find my garden; I needed to relax. I could still hear the voice echoing somewhere in my head, Gianni’s gruff fundamental with overtones of Jannoula: Is this where you keep the others now? This narrow trough? It used to be a garden, open to your wider mind.

In an angry rush, I was there: Tiny Tom in front of me, the garden indeed looking strangely shrunken, but there was no time to consider that. Jannoula’s mind filled Gianni’s shape like a hand inside a puppet, but she had not broken through him to enter my mind herself. She was trying, pushing and clawing inside him; I could see her glowing at his core. Tiny Tom glowed, too, with a light of his own, a different color. I had never noticed until his fire was pitted against an alien light from within.

“Tiny Tom” was a piece of Gianni Patto’s mind-fire. Abdo had told me that, but I’d never been able to see it until this moment, under duress.

Jannoula stretched and strained, distorting Tiny Tom’s appearance, and I feared she would burst through. I saw how to release Gianni’s mind-fire: it would be like undoing a button. I hesitated—would the uncontrollable visions return if I severed this connection?—but Jannoula writhed inside him again, and I panicked. With a thought, I unfastened Gianni Patto from my mind. The buttonhole sealed up at once behind him, as if it had never been.

I felt the release not as relief but as bereavement. A stab of grief. My eyes popped open in the real world and I stared into Gianni’s eye through the grating in his cell door.

“What an appalling overreaction,” said Giann-oula. “A great brute of a baby tossed out in half a bowl of bathwater. What could I possibly have done, locked in that cluttered broom closet with the others?”

I did not answer; my jaw was trembling. How had she found him? How had she entered his mind, what did she want from me, and why was I still not free of her after all these years?

I fled the room. She called after me. My only consolation was that her voice could not come with me in my head.





When I was eleven years old, before the creation of my garden, I had a vision while walking through the fish market with my stepmother, Anne-Marie. I collapsed face-first into a table, knocking over baskets, sending cascades of river eels writhing onto the flagstones. I came to drenched and stinking, redarmed fishwives cursing at my stepmother and me. Anne-Marie had said nothing, but paid for the fish and cooked them all week. I still dread eel pie.

The vision I’d had was of a woman curled upon the rough stone floor of a cell. Iron bars crisscrossed a tiny window; the bed was boards and straw. She was a prisoner, or maybe an anchorite—a holy sister in solitary confinement—but her clothing resembled no habit I had ever seen: a fitted one-piece suit, with a trapdoor between the legs, stitched together from a motley assortment of animal skins, fur side out. Except for her shaved head and bare feet, she resembled a large, mangy otter. I could not guess her age beyond that she was an adult, older than me.

My vision-eye hovered silently by the ceiling. The people in my visions never saw me; only one had ever seemed to hear me speak, and I wasn’t certain of that. But this woman startled, stared, and reached up, feeling around for me; she had long, dirty nails. I couldn’t quit an involuntary vision, no matter how it frightened me. I had to wait it out.

The vision began to fade. As if she sensed that, too, the woman cried out. I did not understand her words, but I glimpsed a keen intelligence in her eyes.

The fur-suited prisoner was the seventeenth and final peculiar person I had seen in my visions. I nicknamed her Otter.



I would blame my uncle Orma, and his barren, draconic imagination, for failing to guess that the people in my visions were half-dragons, but in truth we were both at fault. So strong was the taboo among both our peoples, and so complete my self-revulsion, that neither of us could countenance the idea that my parents’ awful experiment had been replicated multiple times. Besides, none of them looked like me. Some, like Master Smasher, Nag, and Nagini, were quite good-looking; I had no reason to believe they weren’t ordinary humans. Tiny Tom and the great slug, Pandowdy, on the other hand, were far more monstrous than I. I didn’t recognize myself in any of these beings and had no idea why I was doomed to see them again and again.

Orma had intended to teach me music, but in the months after my scales came in, we spent most of our time trying to keep my visions at bay. I meditated; I visualized; I vomited a lot because the visions wreaked havoc on my equilibrium.

The garden of grotesques was the strategy that finally worked. Under Orma’s instruction, I deliberately reached out to each of the seventeen beings I had seen, fixing permanent connections to them with the grotesques as anchors so my mind would stop lunging out at them. I did not quite understand what I was doing, only that it worked. I named the grotesque avatars and placed them in their particular parts of the garden—Fruit Bat in his grove, Pelican Man on the topiary lawn, Master Smasher in the statuary meadow.

I saved the creation of Otter’s cottage garden for last. Her plight had sparked such pity in me that I wanted her space to be special, a peaceful, bucolic scene of herbs and flowers around an ornamental thatched cottage, which was not a functional residence; the other grotesques lived outdoors, and it seemed important to be consistent. I gave her a birdbath, a bench, and a little table where she might have tea.