Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(43)
I let out a low whistle. “But why?”
“They hope he will pay a usurious ransom. But he won’t. He doesn’t love me. He’s ashamed of me.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, thinking of my own father. I wasn’t imprisoned, but … I wasn’t free, either.
“Is it not a terrible fate to be robbed of a father’s love?” she said.
“It is,” I whispered, my heart aching for her.
A cat-like smile slowly crept across her lips.
How happy we were from then on!
Having Jannoula around all the time took some adjustment, of course, for both of us. She began to find the garden confining. “I don’t like to complain, when you’ve been so generous,” she said, “but I miss being able to see and taste and feel.”
I tried to accommodate her by opening myself to sights and tastes, the way I’d done with music, but I couldn’t make it work. Maybe I didn’t have a strong enough emotional connection to my other senses, something that could permeate the garden’s boundaries and pull the experience through.
“What if you left the garden gates ajar?” she suggested one evening. “I tried opening them, but they’re locked.”
“I wish you’d asked me first,” I said, frowning. We were in her garden eating cakes, which were not as delicious as the real thing. She was right to be frustrated.
Her green eyes widened. “I didn’t realize there were places I wasn’t allowed. Since I live here now, I assumed …” She trailed off, downcast.
I left the gates open the next evening, experimentally. She reported back that some things trickled in—stray emotions, sensations, and thoughts—but it was all rather muted. Timidly, politely, she asked, “May I step out into your wider mind?”
I hesitated, feeling instinctively that this was a very big favor to ask. I said, “I don’t want you digging around. Even sisters need some privacy.”
“I would never pry that way,” she said, so warmly that I felt silly for doubting. I took her hand in my garden and guided her through the gate myself.
She was rapturous, as if she’d been freed from her real prison, out in the world. Her happiness was contagious; I’d never felt the like myself. I decided to leave the gates open all the time—at least I think I did.
She began wandering my mind at will, discreet and unobtrusive, but sometimes she had accidents. Once she knocked over whatever sluice gate held back my anger, and I raged for hours until she figured out how to close it again. We laughed about it later, how I had screamed at my half sisters and smacked my father’s balding pate with a tea tray.
“You know what’s interesting?” she told me. “Anger tastes like cabbage rolls.”
“What?” I yelped between gales of giggling. “That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s true,” she insisted. “And your laughter tastes like marzipan. But best of all is love, which smacks of blackberries.”
I’d eaten a marzipan torte with blackberries just the evening before; apparently it had made a profound impression on her. She was always making these kinds of unexpected associations, and I enjoyed them. They painted the world a different color.
What does this do? Jannoula once asked while I was walking home from my lesson, and suddenly I couldn’t remember my way. I found the river, though it flowed a strange direction. North was surely to my right, but when I turned, my inner compass reeled, too, and north was still to my right, always just out of reach. I kept turning until I grew dizzy and fell in the river. A barge woman fished me out and took me home, drenched but laughing. Anne-Marie was not subtle about sniffing my breath.
“Who would give me unwatered wine?” I laughed. “I’m only eleven!”
“You are twelve,” said my stepmother sharply. “Go to your room.”
I remembered with a start: the marzipan torte with blackberries. That had been for my birthday. Such an odd thing to forget.
Sometimes I would lose control of one of my eyes, or an arm or leg, which frightened me, until Jannoula explained. I wanted to see the cathedral for myself, she said, or Just let me feel your velvet bodice. It was perfectly understandable. She lived with such deprivation, and it was but a small sacrifice to give her tremendous joy.
Then one night I was awakened by Orma sitting on the edge of my bed. I yelped in alarm. “Don’t wake the house,” he said, shushing me. “Your father is always looking for reasons to be angry with me. Last month he was accusing me of sending you home drunk.”
“Last month?” I whispered. I’d fallen in the river only … what day had that been?
His face was in shadow, but I could discern the whites of his eyes. “Is this Jannoula present and awake in your mind right now?” he whispered back. “Make no assumptions. Go to your garden and check.”
His intensity frightened me a little. I descended to my mind’s garden and found Jannoula’s avatar, sleeping among snapdragons.
Orma nodded curtly when I told him. “I assumed she sleeps when you do. Do nothing to wake her. What do you remember of our lesson today?”
I rubbed my eyes and thought. I had retained very little, it seemed. I looked at him sheepishly. “I played harpsichord and oud, and we talked about modes and intervals. We argued over a volume of Thoric’s Polyphonic Transgressions … didn’t we?”
Rachel Hartman's Books
- Hell Followed with Us
- The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School
- Loveless (Osemanverse #10)
- I Fell in Love with Hope
- Perfectos mentirosos (Perfectos mentirosos #1)
- The Hollow Crown (Kingfountain #4)
- The Silent Shield (Kingfountain #5)
- Fallen Academy: Year Two (Fallen Academy #2)
- The Forsaken Throne (Kingfountain #6)
- Empire High Betrayal