Shadow Scale (12 page)

He cocked his head to one side.
When was the last time you had a vision?

“Midwinter. It was a vision of you, if you recall. You were aware of me.”

I was looking for you
, he said.
I caused that vision, reaching out. But before that?

I shook my head at him, perplexed. “I don’t remember. Not for years. I tend my garden religiously.”

Ha
, he said, lying down at last, his face thoughtful.
I suspect you mean
superstitiously.
You should try ignoring it. See what happens
.

“Not while we’re traveling,” I said, taking my kettle off the fire. “What if a vision bowled me right off my horse?”

He didn’t answer. I turned to look at him and saw that he’d fallen asleep.

Early the next morning, we were mostly dressed when our escort came to wake us. I was still lacing up my riding breeches—thank Allsaints I’d had them padded—and wore only my linen shirt up top, but Abdo answered the door anyway. In filed Josquin, Moy, and Nan, unconcerned about my state of disarray, bearing a hot loaf and crumbly goat cheese. They set up breakfast on the floor, since our room had no table; I put on my blue wool doublet and joined them.

Captain Moy moved the cheese to one side and spread a parchment map of Ninys before us on the floor. From a pouch at his waist, he fetched a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles and perched them incongruously on his nose. “Now,” he said, accepting a hunk of bread from his daughter, who was hacking at the loaf with her dagger, “where do you expect to find these half-dragon ladies?”

Nan’s eyes flashed briefly to my face when he said
half-dragon
, plainly curious.

“Unfortunately,” I said, “I don’t know Ninys at all. I see the others in visions, but only their immediate surroundings. That doesn’t tell me much.”

Moy seemed genuinely, absurdly delighted by my answer. “That’s the challenge. Two women, one large country. If you’re not back in Segosh in six weeks, Samsam will declare war on us—”

“No, they won’t,” said Josquin hastily, in case I couldn’t tell Moy was exaggerating. “But my cousin will.”

Moy shrugged and grinned. “We three know Ninys well. Describe what you’ve seen.”

I knew most about Bluey, the painter whose avatar left colorful swirls in water. “One paints murals. She’s doing a St. Jobertus now—I don’t know where—but previously she painted an amazing St. Fionnuala at Meshi.”

“Santi Fionani?” asked Nan. That was the Ninysh name for the Lady of Waters.

Moy jabbed a finger at a city along a river east of central Ninys. “How do you know it was Meshi?”

“I got lucky,” I said. “I once saw her outdoors, and glimpsed the city banner.”

“The one that says Meshi, under a pine,” said Josquin around a lump of cheese.

“They’re subtle in that part of the country,” said Moy. His daughter unscrewed the lid from a pot of ink and carefully dabbed a red dot next to the city with a brush.

“The priest at Santi Fionani’s may know where she went next,” said Josquin. “And Meshi was on Dame Okra’s list of
strategically important lords, for the sulfur mine, no doubt. We would stop there in any case.”

This was encouraging. I hazarded a description of the second ityasaari, Glimmerghost: “The other woman lives a hermetic existence in a great pine forest—”

“The Pinabra,” said Moy, without blinking. “Meshi is at its western edge.”

Josquin made a sweeping gesture at the map. “It’s a large region, though. It rings the eastern mountains like a skirt.”

“Zat is place to get lost,” Nan said hesitantly. It was the first Goreddi I’d heard her speak. Her accent was poor, although she seemed to follow the conversation well enough.

“One thing at a time,” said Moy. “Meshi is goal enough for now, with plenty of palashos for us to visit between here and there.”

He got to his feet, Nan rolled up the map, and we were on the road in half an hour.

The palashos were numerous indeed; they dotted the countryside like carbuncles. Some days we stopped at two or three. Word got out that I played flute and Abdo danced, so we were often asked to perform. The Ninysh sometimes brought out dancers of their own. Abdo watched with rapt attention and then imitated the leaps and posturing all the way upstairs to bed. At some point Moy began to teach him the saltamunti and the voli-vola.

“Baronet Des Faiasho screamed in my face this evening,” I reported, about a week into our journey, to Glisselda and Kiggs from one of Palasho Faiasho’s guest rooms.

“Oh no!” cried Glisselda, simultaneously with Kiggs’s “Are you all right?”

I was reclining upon a four-poster bed that was draped in silk and bulging with feather bolsters; Des Faiasho knew how to treat a guest, even one he’d screamed at. “I’m fine. As ever, Josquin was right: these lords aren’t all gracious about what they owe Goredd. Some get defensive.”

“Josquin sounds like he’s quite often right,” said Kiggs drily.

I wanted so badly to tease him for being jealous, but of course I couldn’t. Luckily, Glisselda piped up: “Josquin this, Josquin that! Don’t let the suave Ninysh rascal lure you away. We want you home after all this.”

“Ah, Your Majesty, jealousy does not become you,” I said to Glisselda, sending Kiggs an indirect message. I rolled onto my stomach and propped myself on my elbows. “In any case, after clarifying that Goredd can’t push him around, Des Faiasho went on to commit fifteen hundred fighting men, armed and supplied, as well as grain, blacksmiths, carpenters—”

Glisselda listened no further than the number of men. She whooped in a most unqueenlike fashion. “An army! We’re accreting a foreign army. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Kiggs, I knew, would be jotting everything down conscientiously, so I continued listing supplies and specialists, finishing with the baronet’s strangest offer of all: “Des Faiasho imports
sabanewt oil from the southern archipelagoes. He insists it’s a worthy substitute for naphtha in pyria.” Pyria was a sticky, flammable substance the knights employed in their martial art, the dracomachia.

“Is he certain it works?” said Glisselda, attentive again.

“I’m certain he wants to sell us some,” I said. “I can have samples sent.”

“Have them sent to Sir Maurizio at Fort Oversea so the knights can test it,” said Glisselda. “No one here can make St. Ogdo’s fire.”

“That’s not entirely true,” said Kiggs quietly. “The murder at that warehouse involved pyria. If our suspect in custody can’t make it himself, he knows who can.”

“Murder?” I asked, alarmed.

“I forget that things happen here that you don’t hear about,” said Glisselda. “Comonot established a dragon garrison shortly after you left. He called it ‘a large gesture of good faith.’ He said that several times, in case there was any mistaking.”

I was glad he’d taken my advice and unsurprised by the ham-handed execution.

“It’s gone over badly,” said Kiggs. “The Sons of St. Ogdo are crawling out of their ratholes again. Protests, mostly, but also one violent riot, saarantrai assaulted, and a female dragon officer missing. We found her burned body in a warehouse by the river.”

I closed my eyes, sickened. The Sons of St. Ogdo were a clandestine brotherhood of fanatical dragon-haters. Half the trouble at midwinter had been their fault; they so despised dragonkind
that they were easily persuaded—by the dragon Imlann, in human form—to participate in the assassination attempts against Comonot. Lars’s estranged brother, Josef, Earl of Apsig, had been in the thick of things; he’d returned to Samsam in the end, tail between his legs, humiliated to learn he’d done the bidding of a dragon.

“His large gesture of good faith has been a large headache for the city watch,” said Kiggs.

“He meant well,” said Glisselda. It was the first time I’d heard her defend Comonot’s clumsy efforts. “Anyway, the Sons of St. Ogdo won’t get away with murdering saarantrai. You know what a dogged investigator Lucian is. We’ll take whatever steps are necessary to keep the peace.”

“Comonot’s Loyalists are our allies: that’s the reality,” said Kiggs. “Goredd must learn to adjust.”

“Of course,” I said weakly. “I know you have it well in hand.”

When our conversation finished, however, I lay on the bed a long time with my arm over my eyes, feeling dully disappointed. I don’t know what I had imagined would happen in Goredd after I told the truth about my origins and revealed my scales. Did I expect the Sons of St. Ogdo to dissolve into dust, or that Goreddis would learn in four months the kind of trust they hadn’t learned in forty years?

Of course that was impossible. That didn’t stop me from wishing I could change the attitudes of Goreddis single-handedly, reach in and make people see sense.

The members of our Ninysh escort, despite Josquin’s protestations to the contrary, were not entirely sanguine about accompanying half-dragons. They concealed their feelings behind their professionalism, for the most part, but the longer we traveled, the more slips I began to notice. Once I noticed, I couldn’t unsee.

Some of the Eight made St. Ogdo’s sign if Abdo or I came too near. It was a subtle gesture intended to ward off the evil of dragons, just a circle made with thumb and finger. At first I thought I’d imagined it. The soldier saddling our horses seemed to make the sign over the beast’s withers, but when I looked straight at him, he wasn’t doing it. One soldier may have made it over her heart after I spoke to her, or did she have an itch?

Then there was the day Nan bought a bundle of barley twigs—slender, crunchy breadsticks, which Abdo loved—and Abdo reached right in and took three. Two of our soldiers, who had ridden up eagerly, now hesitated, reluctant to take any. Finally one of them made St. Ogdo’s sign, as unobtrusively as he could. Abdo saw it and froze mid-chew; he’d spent enough time in Goredd to know the gesture.

Nan saw the sign and went incandescent. She flung the remaining barley twigs to the ground, leaped from her horse, and pulled her comrade headfirst off his. She went at him, fists flying. Moy had to break it up.

Nan ended up with a split lip, but she’d given the other fellow a black eye. Her father imposed some kind of discipline on them both; I didn’t have enough Ninysh to understand, but Josquin paled. Nan seemed not to care. She returned to us, patted Abdo’s horse, and said huskily, “Do not take zis to heart,
moush
.”

Moush
, meaning “gnat,” was her nickname for Abdo. Abdo nodded, his eyes wide.

I was the one who took it to heart.

I could not be completely comfortable now. It galled me to play my flute in the evenings. Josquin noticed the change, but if he fathomed the cause, he gave me no indication. “You’re a herald, not a circus bear,” he said one evening. “You can say no.”

But I didn’t say no. Playing flute was the one thing I knew could make people see a human, not a monster.