Shadow Scale (19 page)

Her table, when we returned to her cottage garden, was set for tea. Jannoula did not touch her cup, but sat with her arms crossed, staring toward the distant trees of Fruit Bat’s grove. Had she overheard my conversation with Orma somehow? I hadn’t narrated it to her, or consciously opened myself. Surely that wasn’t it. I said, “What’s the matter, friend?”

She stuck out her lower lip. “I don’t like your music teacher. ‘Has she told you where she is imprisoned, or why?’ ” jeered Jannoula, quoting Orma exactly.

She’d heard it all. Suddenly I felt very exposed. What else could she hear that she wasn’t bothering to inform me of? Could she hear my every thought, beyond the things I intentionally told her?

That was an alarming line of inquiry. I tried to focus instead on soothing her hurt. “You must excuse Orma,” I said, laying a hand gently on her arm. “He’s a saar; it’s his way. He can sound unkind until you get to know him.”

“You called him Uncle,” she said, flicking my hand off.

“I—he—that’s just what I call him,” I said, a knot tightening in my gut. I had not yet told her I was half dragon, but I’d hoped to someday. It would have been a relief to have a friend who knew. She looked utterly revolted by the thought of Orma being my uncle, though. It broke my heart a little. I changed the subject: “I thought you could only hear through my ears if I deliberately opened to you.”

Her lip curled disdainfully. “Don’t tell me your trust is wavering.”

“It’s not,” I said, shoving down my anxiety, bending the truth to match my words.

Within days I had reframed her new ability as an asset and forgotten why I’d found it alarming. Whenever my father scolded me—a constant of my life, what with his ceaseless worrying that my half-dragon heritage would be found out—Jannoula heard him and would retort sharply in my head:
So why don’t you lock us up, then, you monster?
Whenever Anne-Marie gave me chores to do, Jannoula groaned,
Oh, making up the beds is exactly like torture!

Each time I had to bite my lip, partly to keep from laughing, partly to make sure that I had not uttered those very words myself.

She said everything I wished I could say, and I loved her for it. We were sisters again, a stronger team than ever, our moment of Orma-induced friction forgotten.

But Orma had planted a seed in my mind.

One morning, after chores, I looked for her in the garden, but she wasn’t there. That is, her grotesque sat primly under a giant chrysanthemum (a fancy of hers I’d indulged), with no light in its eyes. Jannoula’s attention was elsewhere.

I hesitated. What was she going through in the real world? Every time I’d asked, she’d changed the subject; she wouldn’t let me watch her in her cell. I believed she suffered, and I wanted to understand what was happening. I wanted to help. Could I reverse our strange connection and see for myself without alerting her to my presence? This grotesque was merely a metaphor, after all, a way to make sense of the truth, not the truth itself.

If I took Otter’s hands, I’d have my usual floating vision; she’d sense me right away and be angry. Could I enter her mind the way she entered mine?

I had a harebrained notion that if I could enter her avatar, I might enter Jannoula herself. How, though? I thought of splitting her down the middle, but rejected that as disgusting. What if I were immaterial, like a ghost? I imagined myself so. I pressed my immaterial palms together like a river diver and pushed them into her grotesque’s face. They passed through her nose like it was mist. I was up to my elbows; my hands didn’t reappear out the back of her head. I bent my head and pressed on until—

I landed hard on the floor of a dim, narrow corridor lined with
featureless gray doors. Rising shakily to my feet, I looked both directions; there was no obvious way back to myself.

Without warning, the air seemed to compress around me, a terrible pressure that nearly brought me to my knees. The pain eased up momentarily before rushing over me again in an agonizing undulation. I prayed it would recede before it broke me.

It did. I panted like a dog and trembled all over.

Voices echoed down the corridor. I pressed forward, walking when I could, waiting out more waves of pain. I could make no sound when the crush was upon me, only lean against the wall, panicked and paralyzed. Cries built up in me, unuttered.

I tried doors, which all opened into a darkness I dared not enter. One lightless room emitted a blast of icy wind; one smelled of acrid alchemical fumes; one was stuffed full of screams. I closed that one quickly, but the hallway’s strange acoustics wouldn’t let the sound die. It echoed on, a second wave amplifying the roll of pain. I plowed ahead, buffeted about, not daring to open any more doors.

Was this the inside of Jannoula’s mind? Did she live with these constant waves of pain?

The corridor grew darker; I couldn’t see. I felt my way, a hand on each wall, until the walls abruptly ended. I could no longer feel a floor under my feet. I looked back for the hallway I’d just come down, but I couldn’t see it. There was nothing. Nothingness. My saved-up screams burst forth inaudibly, swallowed by the dense, anechoic emptiness. This void could not be filled.

A violent force bowled into me, shoving me back. The
corridor reappeared, doors whizzing by on either side as I was pushed backward, faster and faster—

I landed flat on the ground, all the air knocked out of me, in the dirt of my own garden. Jannoula stood over me, gasping, her hair disordered, her fists clenched as if she had punched me in the stomach. Maybe she had. Pain—my own—radiated from my core.

“What did you see?” she shouted, her face contorting.

“I’m so sorry.” I coughed. My head lolled back onto the ground.

“Don’t you … ever …” Her breath came as raggedly as my own. “That’s none of your business.…”

I wrapped my arms around my head. She sat down beside me with a rustle and thump. “That was your mind,” I said bleakly. “All that pain. Those were your screams.”

I looked up; she was absently ripping a marigold, picking its orange petals apart. “Promise me you won’t go back,” she said, her lower lip trembling. “It’s hard enough that I must go.”

I studied her profile, the decisive nose, the subtle chin. “What would happen to your body in the real world if you stayed here?”

Jannoula looked at me sidelong. “I’m no good to them dead; they’d force-feed me, I suppose. Perhaps my catatonia would amuse them.” She dug out the heart of the flower with her nails.

“Then stay,” I said firmly, impulsively. “Don’t go back to that pain, or go as little as you can.” Orma would disapprove of this scheme, but Orma didn’t have to know.

“Oh, Seraphina!” Jannoula grabbed my hand and kissed it.
Her lashes were bright with tears. “If we are to live as sisters, then let us have no more secrets. You asked who imprisoned me. It was my father’s enemies.”

I let out a low whistle. “But why?”

“They hope he will pay a usurious ransom. But he won’t. He doesn’t love me. He’s ashamed of me.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, thinking of my own father. I wasn’t imprisoned, but … I wasn’t free, either.

“Is it not a terrible fate to be robbed of a father’s love?” she said.

“It is,” I whispered, my heart aching for her.

A cat-like smile slowly crept across her lips.

How happy we were from then on!

Having Jannoula around all the time took some adjustment, of course, for both of us. She began to find the garden confining. “I don’t like to complain, when you’ve been so generous,” she said, “but I miss being able to see and taste and feel.”

I tried to accommodate her by opening myself to sights and tastes, the way I’d done with music, but I couldn’t make it work. Maybe I didn’t have a strong enough emotional connection to my other senses, something that could permeate the garden’s boundaries and pull the experience through.

“What if you left the garden gates ajar?” she suggested one evening. “I tried opening them, but they’re locked.”

“I wish you’d asked me first,” I said, frowning. We were in her garden eating cakes, which were not as delicious as the real thing. She was right to be frustrated.

Her green eyes widened. “I didn’t realize there were places I wasn’t allowed. Since I live here now, I assumed …” She trailed off, downcast.

I left the gates open the next evening, experimentally. She reported back that some things trickled in—stray emotions, sensations, and thoughts—but it was all rather muted. Timidly, politely, she asked, “May I step out into your wider mind?”

I hesitated, feeling instinctively that this was a very big favor to ask. I said, “I don’t want you digging around. Even sisters need some privacy.”

“I would never pry that way,” she said, so warmly that I felt silly for doubting. I took her hand in my garden and guided her through the gate myself.

She was rapturous, as if she’d been freed from her real prison, out in the world. Her happiness was contagious; I’d never felt the like myself. I decided to leave the gates open all the time—at least I think I did.

She began wandering my mind at will, discreet and unobtrusive, but sometimes she had accidents. Once she knocked over whatever sluice gate held back my anger, and I raged for hours until she figured out how to close it again. We laughed about it later, how I had screamed at my half sisters and smacked my father’s balding pate with a tea tray.

“You know what’s interesting?” she told me. “Anger tastes like cabbage rolls.”

“What?” I yelped between gales of giggling. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s true,” she insisted. “And your laughter tastes like marzipan. But best of all is love, which smacks of blackberries.”

I’d eaten a marzipan torte with blackberries just the evening before; apparently it had made a profound impression on her. She was always making these kinds of unexpected associations, and I enjoyed them. They painted the world a different color.

What does this do?
Jannoula once asked while I was walking home from my lesson, and suddenly I couldn’t remember my way. I found the river, though it flowed a strange direction. North was surely to my right, but when I turned, my inner compass reeled, too, and north was still to my right, always just out of reach. I kept turning until I grew dizzy and fell in the river. A barge woman fished me out and took me home, drenched but laughing. Anne-Marie was not subtle about sniffing my breath.

“Who would give me unwatered wine?” I laughed. “I’m only eleven!”

“You are twelve,” said my stepmother sharply. “Go to your room.”

I remembered with a start: the marzipan torte with blackberries. That had been for my birthday. Such an odd thing to forget.

Sometimes I would lose control of one of my eyes, or an arm or leg, which frightened me, until Jannoula explained.
I wanted to see the cathedral for myself
, she said, or
Just let me feel your velvet bodice
. It was perfectly understandable. She lived with such deprivation, and it was but a small sacrifice to give her tremendous joy.

Then one night I was awakened by Orma sitting on the edge of my bed. I yelped in alarm. “Don’t wake the house,” he said, shushing me. “Your father is always looking for reasons to be angry with me. Last month he was accusing me of sending you home drunk.”

“Last month?” I whispered. I’d fallen in the river only … what day had that been?

His face was in shadow, but I could discern the whites of his eyes. “Is this Jannoula present and awake in your mind right now?” he whispered back. “Make no assumptions. Go to your garden and check.”

His intensity frightened me a little. I descended to my mind’s garden and found Jannoula’s avatar, sleeping among snapdragons.

Orma nodded curtly when I told him. “I assumed she sleeps when you do. Do nothing to wake her. What do you remember of our lesson today?”

I rubbed my eyes and thought. I had retained very little, it seemed. I looked at him sheepishly. “I played harpsichord and oud, and we talked about modes and intervals. We argued over a volume of Thoric’s
Polyphonic Transgressions
 … didn’t we?”

“At the end. What happened prior to that?”