Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(56)

“All right, then,” she gasped, staring at nothing, her face a pale green. “Travel. Good. It is well.” She limped back into the house.

I looked at Abdo. His face was ashen. One of his hair knots had come undone, as if he’d had a physical altercation; the incongruous corkscrew flopped across his forehead.

Abdo, speak to me! I cried, my heart pounding. Did Jannoula seize you?

He turned his head sideways and shook it, like a swimmer with water in his ear, or like he was trying to hear Jannoula rattling around in there. He said, No. I fought her off.

I exhaled shakily. What little training the temple had given Abdo had put him far ahead of any Southlander ityasaari, as far as I could tell. No one else could see mind-fire or speak in people’s heads; he’d worked out how to create St. Abaster’s Trap essentially on his own. If anyone could fend off Jannoula, surely it was he.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling he’d been extremely lucky just now.

His gaze had turned sheepish. I couldn’t unhook her from Dame Okra, though. I don’t see why not. The principle is sound.

Maybe you can ask this priest when we get to Porphyry, I said.

No thanks, said Abdo sourly. He’d only tell me I need more training.

“All right,” I said aloud, trying to gather myself. “It’s time we departed.”


Hanse, the old hunter, had been watching without expression, scratching his stubbly chin, waiting for us to finish messing around. Young Rodya translated my words, and the older man nodded, turned his horse west, and led us out the city gates, across country toward Samsam.



Barring another surprise like Gianni Patto, I believed there was only one ityasaari in Samsam: a middle-aged man, bald, stout, and square-spectacled. With his clothes on, he looked hunchbacked; I’d had the dubious privilege of looking in on him while he was bathing, and knew he had a pair of vestigial wings, membranous like a bat’s, carefully folded against his back. In my garden, I called him the Librarian because I’d never seen him without a book in his hand—not even in the bath. He lived in a crumbling mansion in a dismal valley where it always seemed to be raining.

“Thet is the Samsamese highlands,” Lars had said when I’d described it to him, two days before our journey began.

“The highlands are enormous,” I’d said, looking at the map spread on Viridius’s worktable. “Can you narrow it down if I give you more details? There’s a village within walking distance, and a river, and—”

Lars laughed, slapping the table with a beefy hand. “All great houses are near a village and a river. We have a proverb: ‘In highlandts, every man is earl of his own valley.’ Thet means a lot of valleys. Also, means a rude joke in Samsamese.”

“I don’t think I need that one spelled out,” I said.

“Even the valleys have valleys, Phina. You couldt be looking for months.” He jabbed a finger at the southern edge of the uplands. “Thet is why you need to come here, to Fnark, where is St. Abaster’s tomb. On St. Abaster’s Day all the earls come down for their council, the Erlmyt.”

“Just the one day?” With the vagaries of travel, it might be hard to arrive so promptly.

“It can last a week, or a few weeks, but thet is not guaranteed. On St. Abaster’s Day it begins. Then you see all the earls together, and find the one you’re looking for.”

“How are you so sure he’s an earl?”

His gray eyes twinkled. “Who else in highlandts can afford so many books?”

“What if he doesn’t come to this meeting?” I said. “He seems a solitary sort.”

Lars shrugged his bulky shoulders. “Then perheps another earl will know him. It still saves you months of looking. It is your best chance.”

I hadn’t had the nerve to ask Lars the other question that immediately came to mind: What if your half brother, Josef, Earl of Apsig, is at the meeting? Josef and I had not parted on good terms after the events of midwinter; he despised half-dragons, and I was none too fond of would-be assassins.

If Earl Josef was at the Erlmyt, if he learned that the Librarian was my fellow half-dragon … I hardly dared contemplate the trouble that might cause.



It would be an exaggeration to say that the sky clouded over the moment we crossed the Samsamese border—but not by much.

Over the next fortnight, as we hastened toward Fnark past muddy pastures and rocky fields of rye, I tried not to think about Earl Josef at all, although my experience with him surely tempered my treatment of our Samsamese guides. I didn’t trust them. The Eight, from relatively tolerant Ninys, had had enough unease about traveling with two half-dragons. There was no question in my mind that Hanse and Rodya, hailing from St. Abaster’s homeland, should be kept in the dark about us. The Regent apparently had not told them we were seeking a half-dragon; they only knew that we needed to make it to the Erlmyt on time. I wasn’t going to tell them otherwise.

I didn’t admit I spoke Samsamese, erring ruthlessly on the side of caution.

It rained each night and misted every morning; in the afternoons, it poured. We stayed at inns, when there were inns, but half the time we camped. Everything we owned grew steadily damper. The ends of our fingers were wrinkled as a matter of course; I could hardly bear to examine my toes. At least it wasn’t cold; St. Abaster’s Day falls at the point where spring has its first inklings of summer.