Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(97)

I didn’t want to learn that name from Jannoula. “You mean Camba,” I said coldly.

Don’t tell me what I mean, she said, narrowing Abdo’s dark eyes. I mean for you to quit wasting time. Abdo heard last night that you’ve finally realized your noxious uncle is gone, and good riddance. The Censors are brutally pulling his mind apart right now, fiber by sticky fiber, and grinding his memories of you to dust.

I felt like she’d knocked all the breath out of me, but I held myself together enough to notice something in her voice, an undertone of contempt, and not just for Orma. For his captors? Why would she despise the Censors? Had they stolen someone she loved, too?

That’s one distraction out of the way, she was saying, but what about this other? I’d not have pegged you as the type to take a paramour. Someone Abdo knows, too. She eyed me shrewdly. I’ll find his name in here, don’t worry.

Abdo’s face suddenly contorted in pain. He grabbed at his hair knots and pitched sideways off the couch. I caught him, preventing him from hitting his head, but he thrashed in my arms. In my mind I heard Jannoula’s scream of rage.

Naia was beside us in an instant, wrapping her strong arms around him like an anchor tethering him to the earth. He struggled another moment and then went still. “Abdo!” she cried, anguished, but he raised his good hand and patted her hair.

I—I ambushed her, he said in my mind, in his own voice.

My eyes prickled with tears. Did she seize control in your sleep again?

I hid and lured her out, and then I struck, he said. I’m still fighting, Phina, but I’m so tired.…

He burst into tears, weeping silently into Naia’s shoulder. She rocked him and whispered into his hair. Abdo’s head pushed her gold-rimmed spectacles crooked, but she didn’t straighten them.

He was silent several minutes. I said in a tremulous voice, “Are you still there?”

Abdo did not reply. The dark sea of struggle had closed over his head again.



Three of Abdo’s aunties arrived with breakfast soon thereafter; I couldn’t bring myself to eat. Naia told them Abdo had surfaced for a moment, and that raised the mood in the apartment significantly. If they couldn’t bring him to Pende yet, surely it was just a matter of time.

I was not so sanguine, but I couldn’t bear to dash their hopes. I went for a walk along the harbor, trying to lose myself among the milling sailors and the nets full of flopping silver fish. The sky was insultingly, offensively blue; it had no right to smile on anyone right now.

How could I travel home without knowing how Abdo’s struggle had ended? I felt tempted to stay here among the Jannoula-resistant ityasaari—but that was impossible. It would mean shirking my responsibilities, and for what? I couldn’t help Abdo.

I couldn’t help my Jannoula-addled friends in Goredd, either. I felt singularly useless.

I walked for a couple of hours, just trying to wrestle my despair back into its box. I must have stared at the trail of inky smoke for a long time before I really saw it, bisecting the southern sky, as if something were burning at sea. The strand and docks were crowded with people trying to make out what was on fire. I picked my way through the gapers along the western breakwater and saw two ships rounding the island of Laika, one pursuing the other. It was the pursuer that burned.

Both ships flew the Samsamese tricolor flag. The world snapped into sharp focus.

The lead ship sailed at full speed toward the harbor; its pursuer slowed as the fire on its hull spread to its sails. Behind the pursuing ship, two swift Porphyrian naval sloops glided out of Laika’s harbor; they flanked the burning, drifting ship easily and began rescuing sailors who had leaped into the sea to avoid the flames.

The people around me began to shout and then scream as the lead vessel neared Porphyry’s harbor: it was going too fast. There wouldn’t be room for it to stop once it passed the lighthouses. The crew, clearly inexperienced, lowered all sails so the ship caught no more wind; the vessel slowed, but not quickly enough. It glided between the lighthouses, veering so that it drifted sideways, and didn’t stop until it crashed into a moored Porphyrian man-of-war. The crunch of wood on wood reached our ears, but slowly at this distance.

The sailors on the Porphyrian warship were clearly put out by this turn of events. They lay down planks and swarmed over, boarding the Samsamese craft.

The crew of the harbor vessel was strangely dressed. Even at this distance, they didn’t look like sailors in their padded black armor. One stout, balding fellow with a long white mustache seemed oddly familiar as he argued with the captain of the Porphyrians. I was walking eastward, trying to get a better look, when it hit me: that was Sir Cuthberte, a Goreddi knight. I’d met him last winter, imprisoned at Castle Orison. What was he doing here? He was supposed to be training dracomachists at Fort Oversea.

Samsamese Fort Oversea. I quickened my step.

From the man-of-war in the harbor, a dinghy launched. Two officers with gleaming breastplates over their tunics and eight more plainly dressed sailors ferried a single knight to shore, a lanky fellow with stooped shoulders. I recognized Sir Maurizio, Sir Cuthberte’s erstwhile squire. He looked as uncombed as ever and a bit green around the gills.

I rushed toward the landing area, hoping to meet the boat. Sir Maurizio spotted me in the crowd as the sailors moored the dinghy and called, “You, maidy, are a sight for seasick eyes.”