Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(41)

Then one day I was practicing flute, thinking not about Jannoula but about some beastly arpeggios that kept tripping me up. I tensed every time they approached, overthought and overshot them. Orma’s suggestion—that I play them extremely slowly until I had the technique down—was good as far as it went, but it didn’t solve the way I cringed, or how the cringe itself tightened my timbre into an excruciating shrill.

Solving the notes was the easy part; I had to solve the dread, and I couldn’t.

I took a break, stretched, tried again, failed, kicked over the music stand (I am not proud of that), and wondered whether I had reached the limits of my musical ability. Maybe I’d never had any. Surely someone with a modicum of talent wouldn’t have to work this hard.

The music stand had hit my table and knocked a cascade of books and parchments onto the floor; I had my uncle’s proclivity for filing by piling, alas. I picked everything up, leafing through to see whether I couldn’t relocate this mountain to the bottom of my wardrobe and forget it. The avalanche consisted mostly of scores that I needed to study, but then my eyes lit upon Orma’s scrawled handwriting: On Emptiness. It was a short treatise he’d written for me, back when we’d hoped to quell the visions through meditation. I drifted over to my bed and read the whole thing again.

And had an idea.

I needed to get out of my own way, release this anxiety and relax into the arpeggios. I had gotten good at vacating my mind; the obvious jokes aside, meditation practice had enabled me to create my garden, and to visit it. I lay back on my bed and imagined myself empty, pictured doors in my heart and how I would fling them open. I was a hollow channel; I would be my own instrument, reverberating.

I didn’t sit up or open my eyes, just put my flute to my lips and began to play.

Oh! cried Jannoula in my mind. There was such anguish in her voice that I broke off in alarm. No, don’t stop!

It took me a moment to understand that she had finally heard me—through my ears, or some other method? I wasn’t sure. I only knew that I had found a way to open myself to her. I laughed, long and loud, while she continued to grouse. “Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, grinning. I took a deep breath, filling and emptying myself together, and let my whole being ring with music once again.



Orma, unexpectedly, heard a difference in my playing at our next lesson. “That rondo is much improved,” he said from his perch on his desk. “It’s nothing I taught you, though. You’ve found some way to give it greater depth. It feels—” He cut himself short.

I waited. I had never heard him begin a sentence that way.

“That is,” said Orma, scratching his false beard, “you’re playing as humans do at their best. Filling the music with some discernible—” He waved his hands; this was hard for him. “Emotion? Self? Someday perhaps you’ll be my teacher and explain it to me.”

“But you did teach me,” I said eagerly. “Your meditation treatise gave me the key. I cleared out all the detritus, or something, and now she can hear me play.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. “She?” said Orma evenly.

I had not been keeping him apprised of Jannoula’s actions, even as she’d begun to hear my thoughts and my music. Now it came out, how we talked every day, how she could hear my music and some of my thoughts. Orma listened silently, his black eyes inscrutable behind his spectacles; a defensive warmth rose in my chest against his studied neutrality. “She’s humble and kind,” I said, folding my arms. “Her life is a misery, and I’m pleased to give her some relief from it.”

Orma licked his thin lips. “Has she told you where she is imprisoned, or why?”

“No,” I said. “And she doesn’t need to. She’s my friend and I trust her.”

My friend. She really was. The first I’d ever had.

“Monitor that trust,” said Orma, cool as autumn. “Mind where it wavers.”

“It will not waver,” I said stoutly, and packed up my instruments to go home.

I heard not a peep from Jannoula for the rest of the afternoon and thought she had left me, recalled to her real life in her cell. She was present that evening when I put the other grotesques to bed, however, following me on my rounds and sulkily kicking flowers.

Her table, when we returned to her cottage garden, was set for tea. Jannoula did not touch her cup, but sat with her arms crossed, staring toward the distant trees of Fruit Bat’s grove. Had she overheard my conversation with Orma somehow? I hadn’t narrated it to her, or consciously opened myself. Surely that wasn’t it. I said, “What’s the matter, friend?”

She stuck out her lower lip. “I don’t like your music teacher. ‘Has she told you where she is imprisoned, or why?’ ” jeered Jannoula, quoting Orma exactly.

She’d heard it all. Suddenly I felt very exposed. What else could she hear that she wasn’t bothering to inform me of? Could she hear my every thought, beyond the things I intentionally told her?

That was an alarming line of inquiry. I tried to focus instead on soothing her hurt. “You must excuse Orma,” I said, laying a hand gently on her arm. “He’s a saar; it’s his way. He can sound unkind until you get to know him.”

“You called him Uncle,” she said, flicking my hand off.

“I—he—that’s just what I call him,” I said, a knot tightening in my gut. I had not yet told her I was half dragon, but I’d hoped to someday. It would have been a relief to have a friend who knew. She looked utterly revolted by the thought of Orma being my uncle, though. It broke my heart a little. I changed the subject: “I thought you could only hear through my ears if I deliberately opened to you.”