Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(86)

Ingar led me toward the house, under a shady portico. Two iron-framed chairs stood like sentinels beside a pile of books. Ingar picked a slim volume off the top of the heap. I recognized it immediately.

“I deciphered this,” said Ingar, gesturing me to a seat. “It’s Goreddi transliterated into the Porphyrian alphabet and written in mirror-hand, with gaps inserted at intervals to make it look like a cipher. Not so difficult, honestly, and I’m not the first to have read it. Look here.” He flipped to the last page, where someone had written in Goreddi:

To the librarians:

This is a tome of some historical value, I believe. It cannot remain in Goredd, but neither can I destroy it. Please file it wherever you file apocryphal religious writings. Heaven keep you.

Father Reynard of St. Vitt’s, Bowstugh Wallow



Lower down the page, Father Reynard had added one more faint line: St. Yirtrudis, if you are a Saint—if anyone is—forgive me for what I must do.

“Is this book about Yirtrudis? She’s a strange Saint to address otherwise,” I said, an unexpected hope rising in my chest. I’d always felt a visceral kinship with the hidden patroness of my hidden heritage.

Suddenly the possibility that Orma’s thesis might be true nearly overwhelmed me. My patroness, at least, might be truly, properly mine.

Ingar waggled his eyebrows. “It’s the only known copy of St. Yirtrudis’s testament. Perhaps even the original. How’s your ecclesiastical history?”

“Utterly worthless,” I said.

Ingar was relishing this. “Just two generations ago, this Father Reynard became Bishop Reynard of Blystane. From that seat of power, backed by my people, the aggressively devout Samsamese, he denounced St. Yirtrudis as a heretic.”

“Because of something in this testament?” I asked, clamping my hands between my knees to still them.

“Because of everything in it!” cried Ingar. “Yirtrudis throws everything we think we know about the Saints into confusion.”

I lowered my voice, as if the Porphyrians were going to care. “Does it say the Saints were half-dragons?”

Ingar leaned back to observe me with more distance. “That’s one of many remarkable claims. But how did you guess?”

I explained about Orma’s theories. “I found the book with his notes. He claimed to have read it, but he didn’t leave his translation at the library.”

“I’ll write one out for you,” said Ingar, nodding firmly. “I can read the text easily, of course, having cracked the cipher. You should hear the story in her own words. Everything is clear to me now.”

I opened my mouth to ask what he meant, but something over my shoulder had caught his eye. I followed his gaze and saw Camba approaching, her sandals clacking on the flagstones.

“We’ve heard about Abdo,” Camba said solemnly. “I’m sorry he’s suffering. It’s cold consolation, but Jannoula’s struggle with Abdo may be preventing her from bringing other evils to fruition. Here.” She handed me a bundle wrapped in a napkin. “Some cakes for Abdo and his family. Please take them our love and prayers.” This was clearly my cue to go. I rose and glanced down at Ingar.

His eyes shone like hopeful stars as he looked at Camba. In that instant one thing became clear to me: Ingar wasn’t coming to Goredd, either. I couldn’t blame him, but my melancholy returned and followed me back to Naia’s.



That night I entered my garden of grotesques with a new sense of purpose. I was not there merely to soothe the grotesques—or myself—but to change something that had been niggling at me. I’d been finding myself more and more embarrassed by the silly names I’d given these people I was connected to. Master Smasher was the wrong gender, even in Goreddi; Newt (for his stunted limbs) and Gargoyella (for her enormous mouth) were outright insulting.

It was bad enough that I had affixed everyone’s mind-fire to myself without asking. The least I could do was call them by their right names.

I walked the winding paths, through meadows, over streams, among lush foliage, touching each upon the head and renaming them: Brasidas, Phloxia, Mina, Gaios, Gelina, Ingar, Camba, Blanche, Nedouard, Od Fredricka, Dame Okra, Lars, Abdo.

I’d expected to feel everyone’s presence more keenly if I named them; maybe it wasn’t just shame that drove me, but some hope of renewal (the Milestones were now but twenty-three paces apart). If my garden could never exist in the real world as I had imagined it, so be it, but I would shore it up here. I felt Pende’s and Gianni’s absence constantly, as if I’d lost two teeth and couldn’t stop prodding my gums with my tongue.

Only when I reached Pandowdy, the single ityasaari I had not yet met in the real world, did I begin to realize my mistake. He rose out of the swamp, an enormous scaly slug, caked with grime, as big as ever. He loomed over me and touched the sky.

Literally.

His nose—or whatever you call the pointy tip of a featureless worm—jabbed the limpid blue as if it were the ceiling of a canvas tent. I gaped, disbelieving, whirled to face the rest of the garden, and bumped my head on another dollop of drooping sky.

I fell to my knees in a patch of moss—or not moss, but a tiny rose garden, with a tiny sundial in the center, and a tiny Dame Okra beside it, the size of a skittle-pin. I picked her up and stared at her. Beside the minuscule rose garden ran a narrow ditch, once an imposing ravine; jammed in this cranny was a skittle-pin Lars.