Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(69)

Abdo dried his eyes and held up his left hand. He did not, in fact, need bandages anymore—the wound had healed—but he still kept it wrapped. Aunt Naia’s brow creased and she began speaking too rapidly for me to follow. Abdo tried to answer with hand signs—I’d seen him sign to his grandfather—but his injured hand hindered him.

Aunt Naia signed back. I wondered how long it would take Ingar, who watched intently, to work out this finger language.

“Forgive me,” said Naia suddenly, addressing Ingar and myself in simpler Porphyrian. “You are Abdo’s friends. Please come in. Guests are from the gods.”

Ingar, at least, knew how to answer: “A generous heart is the truest temple.”

Aunt Naia ushered us into the apartment’s main room, modestly furnished with a backless couch, a low table piled with ledger books, a charcoal brazier, and a number of small carpets and cushions. A square window with a view of the harbor let in the lingering evening light; curtains closed off the entrances to three other rooms.

Abdo plopped himself on the couch and extended his bandaged hand. Help me take this off, Phina madamina, he urged. And tell her what happened. I’m having trouble.

I sat beside him, unwrapping the bandages, and told Aunt Naia—with Ingar’s translation assistance—of our travels through the Southlands, how helpful Abdo had been, and of the attack that had led to this injury.

His hand lay inertly in my lap. “Show me, fig,” said Aunt Naia, kneeling.

Abdo swallowed hard and wiggled his thumb. He wiggled it again. His other fingers splayed rigidly, as immobile as sticks.



The next morning Abdo pleaded illness and stayed in bed; he slept on a folding mat in an alcove full of ledger books, a curtain pulled across the doorway. Naia, Ingar, and I tiptoed around, quietly breakfasting on fish and eggplant fritters brought up from a restaurant downstairs. Naia checked in to see if Abdo would eat, then came out of the alcove shaking her head sadly.

“He mourns his hand,” she said, rubbing her forehead with her thumb. “Let’s give him some time.”

I suspected it wasn’t just his hand. He’d also been depressed about Jannoula invading his mind, but he’d had to keep moving or he never would’ve gotten home. Now that he was home, the full weight of it had landed on him.

After breakfast, Naia was adamant that Ingar and I attend the public baths. “I know you Southlanders are afraid of your souls being sucked down the drain,” she said firmly, “but that’s a myth. It is good to be clean.”

Ingar seemed interested, which astonished me, considering that the hunch under his shirt was a pair of vestigial wings. My heart shrank from the prospect of revealing the scales on my arm and midriff to dozens—hundreds?—of strangers. I pleaded shyness fervently enough that I was off the hook for the morning, anyway. “I will take you this afternoon, at Old-Timers’ Hour,” said Naia decisively as she gathered her basket of bath things. She left Abdo a note and prodded Ingar out the door with one finger.

I left when they did, heading the opposite way per Naia’s directions—west through handcart traffic along the cobbled seawall road—in search of the Goreddi embassy and a thnik with which to contact Queen Glisselda. The sky arched overhead, outrageously clear and blue; the sun on the back of my woolen doublet grew hot. Everyone I passed—from the lowliest gull-baiting harbor urchin to the bearded, perfumed merchant checking his inventory off a list—was dressed sensibly for this weather in light, drapey fabrics. I removed my outer layer, but the linen shirt beneath was already drenched with sweat.

Naia was right that I needed a bath. I needed some lighter clothing as well.

Such was my exaggerated sense of Goreddi importance that I’d expected to find the embassy among the monumental marble-faced buildings around the city’s central square, the Zokalaa. After staring stupidly at the columned temples, the Vasilikon (a domed hall where the Assembly of Agogoi met), and the Grand Emporio (a busy covered market), I was forced to inflict my questionable Porphyrian on passersby. First I tried one of the couriers darting across the square like bees, but he wouldn’t stop for the likes of me. Then I tried a young mother with two trailing servants, one with an enormous shopping basket, the other carrying the baby. She smiled indulgently and directed me up a side street so steep it had steps and so narrow I could touch the whitewashed walls to either side. There was no traffic here except a man driving a donkey laden with copperware. I had to duck into a doorway to let him pass.

At last, upon a plain wooden door in a shadowy alcove, I saw the bronze plaque that read Embassy in both Porphyrian and Goreddi. The knocker was shaped like a rabbit, Pau-Henoa, the Goreddi trickster hero.

A Porphyrian doorman opened a tiny peephole at eye level, took my name, and shut the portal again. I waited, shading my eyes against the strengthening sun. He popped out at last, like the cuckoo of this particular clock, handed me a folded parchment envelope, and disappeared again.

I hesitated, considering whether I should knock again and ask to see the ambassador, but surely if he’d wanted to see me, I’d have been asked inside. Maybe he wasn’t even here, but petitioning for Goreddi interests at the Assembly of Agogoi.

I presumed that was how it worked. They had no royalty here in Porphyry.

I opened the envelope, and a thnik fell into my palm, gleaming dully, another sweetheart knot. I wouldn’t have to share with the ambassador after all; apparently Glisselda had sent word that I was to have my own. I walked downhill, back toward the harbor, looking for a private place where I could talk to my Queen, since I couldn’t just go back to Naia’s. Jannoula might listen in through Abdo.