Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(40)

“Inside my mind,” I said, sitting down at the tea table with her. “I built a garden here because …” I was suddenly unsure what to tell her. I didn’t like to say I was half dragon and my mind did peculiar things; I was too ashamed, I did not know how she would react, and surely Orma would consider it incautious. “I was lonely,” I said at last. It was true. Papa had kept me on such a short lead that I’d never had friends. My uncle didn’t count.

Jannoula nodded eagerly. “Me too. I’m a prisoner. I see no one but my captors.”

“Why are you imprisoned?” I asked.

She just smiled sadly and poured me some tea.

Once, when she wasn’t present, I took her avatar’s hands and induced a vision. I was trying to be a friend; I wanted to understand what her life was really like, because I worried about her. Jannoula was in her dingy cell, as ever. Her shaved head and mangy fur suit were jarring enough, but then I saw something even worse. The sleeves of her suit had been pulled up, exposing her forearms. The skin was blistered, cracked, blackened, and burned from wrist to elbow. It looked freshly done to me, and her face … she seemed stunned. She wasn’t even weeping.

She looked up at my vision-eye, and then her face filled with rage.

I pulled out of the vision in alarm. Jannoula followed me back to my garden, and for a moment I thought she might hit me. She raised her arms and then dropped them futilely, pacing back and forth before me. “Don’t look at me without asking!” she cried.

She looked like her usual self in my garden, green gown and fair hair, but I couldn’t get the image of her burned arms out of my mind. “Who’s done this to you?” I asked. “And why?”

She looked away. “Please don’t ask. I am ashamed that you saw me like that. You are my only shelter, Seraphina. My only escape. Don’t poison it with your pity.”

But I did pity her. I looked for ways to make her life more bearable, for things to interest and distract her. I observed Lavondaville closely as I walked to and from my music lesson, the limit of my circumscribed existence. At night I described things I’d seen, to her great delight. I left gifts in her garden—a puzzle, a tortoise, roses—and she exclaimed happily over every one. It took so little to please her.

One evening, as we sat sipping tea and watching a glorious sunset I’d dreamed up, she said, “Please don’t be angry, but I heard you thinking today.”

I froze, tea halfway to my lips. I’d grown so used to her that I’d forgotten she wasn’t separate from me as other people were. Her consciousness was inside my head. How entangled with mine could it become? How entangled was it already?

“I don’t hear your every thought,” she said hastily. “Or else you think very little. But you seemed to have spoken to me intentionally when you looked at barges on the river.”

In fact, I had been imagining how I would describe them to her. The green water between red and blue barges made a striking image.

“I only mean to ask,” she said, blushing charmingly, “if you would describe the city again while you’re walking. I would love to hear it.”

I relaxed a little. As spooky as it was to be reminded of our uncanny link, she didn’t mean me any harm. “Of course,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”

As I walked to my music lesson the next day, I thought at Jannoula, describing everything I passed: the stone curlicues in the balustrade of Cathedral Bridge; the lizard-like quigutl climbing upside down along a clothesline between houses; the shouting pie vendors and their savory-smelling wares.

I wasn’t completely sure she was hearing my descriptions until she replied: You should eat a pie for me, since I can’t taste one myself.

It is generally inadvisable to obey voices in your head, and indeed I froze when I heard her, downright spooked that she could talk to me when I wasn’t visiting my garden. Still, it wasn’t much stranger than the fact that she’d heard me, and what a sweet request. I smiled in spite of myself and said, Well, if you really insist …

I had hoped she could taste the pie while I did, but she couldn’t. I described the sweet apples and flaky pastry until she laughingly cried, Enough! I’m envious now.

We started conversing during the day as I walked around, and for the first time I began to feel I truly had a friend. She wasn’t always there; her own life—her captors? I could only imagine—sometimes demanded her attention and, she explained, she couldn’t be in two places at once. When she was gone, I saved up details for her: the legless beggar singing in St. Loola’s Square; the way falling red maple leaves gavotted in the autumn breeze.

What does gavotted mean? she asked when I shared these things later. Or singing, for that matter?

“Have you never heard music before?” I exclaimed aloud, forgetting in my astonishment that I was eating dinner with my family. My father and stepmother stared; my little half sisters giggled. I stuffed a forkful of jellied eel into my mouth.

Poor Jannoula, though. If she was truly deprived of music, I had to correct this.

It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Jannoula could hear thoughts directed at her, but she could not sense through my senses. My daily music lessons with Orma could not enlighten her; she didn’t hear me playing my instruments. I tried thinking at her while I played, but that just made my playing suffer. I sang to her in the garden after I’d settled the other grotesques for the night, but I was a self-conscious and indifferent singer even in my own head. I imagined an oud and played that, but it was only a pale shadow of the real thing. She remained unfailingly polite, but I could tell she didn’t see the point.