Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(65)

Ingar hefted his bulky frame onto the bureau-top bed and beamed. “She sees me the way she sees us all: through the Eye of Heaven, with the helpink of the Saints.”

That was uninformative. I tried to refine the question. “But what did she do once the Saints helped her find you? Did she just show up in your mind one day?”

He blinked. “I heared her voice. She saidt, ‘My friendt, you are not alone. Let me to come in. I am of your kindt, and we are blessed.’ ” He kissed a knuckle toward Heaven.

He’d heard her voice, then, and answered her. Could he have ignored it? If he’d said, No, don’t come in, would the reply itself have been enough to give her an opening? She’d implied that Dame Okra had been keeping her out successfully.

I said, “She said a mutual friend informed her of my travels. Who might that be?”

“One of the other helf-dragons? She holdts spiritual hands with six of us.”

I did some quick addition and couldn’t make it work. “Who?”

He counted off on his fingers. “Abdo, me—of course—eh, Gianni, Okra, Od Fredricka, and my countryman Lars.”

I clapped a hand to my mouth. The room was suddenly too small. I couldn’t breathe. “Excuse me,” I muttered, pushing past Ingar’s knees, heading for the cabin door.

“The ship is rocking too much,” he said cheerfully, miming it. “I understand.”

But he didn’t. I slammed the door in his face.



I had to ask Abdo, even if it meant Jannoula would learn that I had asked. “Was she in Lars’s head before we left Goredd?”

No, said Abdo definitively. I never saw her mind hooked into anyone’s until we met Gianni Patto. But it’s been almost three months since we’ve seen Lars.

We stood by the prow, gritting our teeth into the briny wind. Sailors bustled around us, nautically occupied, knotting and climbing and swabbing and unfurling. We tried to keep out of their way.

“Well, if Ingar is to be believed, she hasn’t taken Blanche or Nedouard yet,” I said, trying to feel encouraged. Abdo leaned over the railing and got a faceful of spray, presumably on purpose.

She will, said Abdo matter-of-factly.

I looked at him sidelong and saw his unguarded expression of bleak resignation and despair. It broke my heart. I laid a hand on his arm. “We’ll go to this Paulos Pende and have him unhook her from your mind the minute we land in Porphyry,” I said firmly.

Abdo pulled away from me and said nothing.

All our talk about Lars had given me an idea. I could speak with my mind to the ityasaari I’d met in person; I had only to induce a vision. “Lars could get word of Josef’s ascension to the Queen. I should contact him before it occurs to Jannoula that I can.”

How do you know Jannoula won’t be present in Lars’s head while you’re talking to him? said Abdo, hopping down from the railing to follow me belowdecks. Or that she isn’t listening through my ears this very instant? She could stop Lars from reporting to the Queen easily enough.

“I don’t,” I said as we descended the narrow stairs, “but I have to try. Besides, my more immediate concern is Ingar. If he gleans that I’m contacting Lars, he’ll surely bring Jannoula into it. I need you to distract him.”

Ingar was still on the bureau-bed, now reading a book the size of his hand. His rucksack was open beside him, and it appeared, from this angle, to contain nothing but books. I wondered how many he had brought with him, and whether books were an angle one might take toward … what? Manipulating his loyalty? Buying his cooperation?

Abdo, at Ingar’s knee, widened his eyes endearingly and smiled up at the turnip-headed older man. Abdo must have silently spoken, because Ingar looked up from his page and replied in Porphyrian: “What kind of fish? I’d love to see it.”

His Porphyrian’s better than yours, said Abdo. He slipped out of the room ahead of the old bookhound.

I flopped back onto the scratchy coverlet and tried to focus my mind. The ceaseless rocking of the ship bothered me, but I finally calmed myself enough to locate the garden of grotesques. After my unintentional experiments with neglecting it, I’d gone back to tending it religiously, even though there had been no unfortunate repercussions, as far as I could tell. It calmed me, even if the garden denizens didn’t require quite such rigorous supervision.

But a parent who spends every day with a child can’t see the child growing. Similarly, my constant presence had blinded me to my garden’s incremental changes. When I went in looking for Loud Lad, I immediately found myself teetering on the lip of his ravine. It lay unusually, perilously close to the entrance today; there was barely space to stand between the gate and the chasm. I threw myself backward and avoided falling in; as I lay there in the dirt, I saw Loud Lad on the other edge. I waved at him, expecting he would build a peculiar bridge and cross over to me.

He didn’t; he leaped across. It was a much longer leap than I could have attempted, and his black boots barely got any purchase when he landed. He had to grasp at the clinging shrubbery to keep from falling back, which was alarming. However, I was far more alarmed that he could jump the ravine at all.

It used to be wider than this, I was certain. It had shrunk. When? How?

Had the whole garden been shrinking? I glanced at the cloudless sky, the distant dunes and fruit trees. Everything looked the same as yesterday, but that was inconclusive. Was there some way to measure? I would consider how to do it.