Shadow Scale (18 page)

“We shall be sisters,” she declared. “Oh, how I have longed for a place like this!”

She hugged me. I stood stiffly at first, the way Orma might have, but then she said, “You’ve saved me from despair. Thank you, Seraphina,” and I pitied her again. Strange as this was, maybe it wasn’t so terrible. I really seemed to have helped her. Cautiously I hugged her back.

I left her twirling her new skirt among the flowers while I circled the greater garden’s perimeter, chanting,
This is my garden, complete and contained
, and establishing the final boundary. At last, I returned to myself on the floor of Orma’s office. Night had fallen; it had taken six hours to create the whole thing.

“The connections all feel stable and secure?” Orma asked as he walked me home through rain-slick streets. “Nothing’s chafing you, or likely to jar you into a vision? You’re still going to have to tend them every night to make sure nothing’s come loose.”

He had given me so much time and support that I didn’t like to voice any doubts, but he had to know: “One of them was different. She spoke to me.”

He stopped walking. “Tell me all,” he demanded, folding his arms and looming so ominously that I feared I’d done something wrong. I reminded myself it was his way to be serious. When I had finished, he shook his head and said, “I never know enough to help you, Seraphina. I don’t know how Jannoula talks to you, if the others don’t. Be cautious. Watch her. If she frightens or harms you, tell me at once. Promise you will.”

“Of course,” I said, my alarm rising again. I didn’t know what he could do if something went wrong, but his vehemence was a measure of his caring. That meant a lot.

Over the next days and weeks, I paid particular attention to Jannoula’s part of the garden, but in fact she wasn’t always mentally present when I put my grotesques to bed. Sometimes her avatar sat quietly among the poppies, as vacant as the rest. When
she was present, she chased butterflies or sipped tea at her little table. I would stop and ask, “How are you?”

Usually she smiled and nodded and went back to what she was doing, but one day she sighed and said, “My real life is all sorrow. I feel so lucky to have a respite from it. I only wish I understood where we are.”

“Inside my mind,” I said, sitting down at the tea table with her. “I built a garden here because …” I was suddenly unsure what to tell her. I didn’t like to say I was half dragon and my mind did peculiar things; I was too ashamed, I did not know how she would react, and surely Orma would consider it incautious. “I was lonely,” I said at last. It was true. Papa had kept me on such a short lead that I’d never had friends. My uncle didn’t count.

Jannoula nodded eagerly. “Me too. I’m a prisoner. I see no one but my captors.”

“Why are you imprisoned?” I asked.

She just smiled sadly and poured me some tea.

Once, when she wasn’t present, I took her avatar’s hands and induced a vision. I was trying to be a friend; I wanted to understand what her life was really like, because I worried about her. Jannoula was in her dingy cell, as ever. Her shaved head and mangy fur suit were jarring enough, but then I saw something even worse. The sleeves of her suit had been pulled up, exposing her forearms. The skin was blistered, cracked, blackened, and burned from wrist to elbow. It looked freshly done to me, and her face … she seemed stunned. She wasn’t even weeping.

She looked up at my vision-eye, and then her face filled with rage.

I pulled out of the vision in alarm. Jannoula followed me back to my garden, and for a moment I thought she might hit me. She raised her arms and then dropped them futilely, pacing back and forth before me. “Don’t look at me without asking!” she cried.

She looked like her usual self in my garden, green gown and fair hair, but I couldn’t get the image of her burned arms out of my mind. “Who’s done this to you?” I asked. “And why?”

She looked away. “Please don’t ask. I am ashamed that you saw me like that. You are my only shelter, Seraphina. My only escape. Don’t poison it with your pity.”

But I did pity her. I looked for ways to make her life more bearable, for things to interest and distract her. I observed Lavondaville closely as I walked to and from my music lesson, the limit of my circumscribed existence. At night I described things I’d seen, to her great delight. I left gifts in her garden—a puzzle, a tortoise, roses—and she exclaimed happily over every one. It took so little to please her.

One evening, as we sat sipping tea and watching a glorious sunset I’d dreamed up, she said, “Please don’t be angry, but I heard you thinking today.”

I froze, tea halfway to my lips. I’d grown so used to her that I’d forgotten she wasn’t separate from me as other people were. Her consciousness was inside my head. How entangled with mine could it become? How entangled was it already?

“I don’t hear your every thought,” she said hastily. “Or else you think very little. But you seemed to have spoken to me intentionally when you looked at barges on the river.”

In fact, I had been imagining how I would describe them to
her. The green water between red and blue barges made a striking image.

“I only mean to ask,” she said, blushing charmingly, “if you would describe the city again while you’re walking. I would love to hear it.”

I relaxed a little. As spooky as it was to be reminded of our uncanny link, she didn’t mean me any harm. “Of course,” I said. “I’d be happy to.”

As I walked to my music lesson the next day, I thought at Jannoula, describing everything I passed: the stone curlicues in the balustrade of Cathedral Bridge; the lizard-like quigutl climbing upside down along a clothesline between houses; the shouting pie vendors and their savory-smelling wares.

I wasn’t completely sure she was hearing my descriptions until she replied:
You should eat a pie for me, since I can’t taste one myself
.

It is generally inadvisable to obey voices in your head, and indeed I froze when I heard her, downright spooked that she could talk to me when I wasn’t visiting my garden. Still, it wasn’t much stranger than the fact that she’d heard me, and what a sweet request. I smiled in spite of myself and said,
Well, if you really insist …

I had hoped she could taste the pie while I did, but she couldn’t. I described the sweet apples and flaky pastry until she laughingly cried,
Enough! I’m envious now
.

We started conversing during the day as I walked around, and for the first time I began to feel I truly had a friend. She wasn’t always there; her own life—her captors? I could only imagine—sometimes demanded her attention and, she explained, she couldn’t
be in two places at once. When she was gone, I saved up details for her: the legless beggar singing in St. Loola’s Square; the way falling red maple leaves gavotted in the autumn breeze.

What does
gavotted
mean?
she asked when I shared these things later.
Or
singing,
for that matter?

“Have you never heard music before?” I exclaimed aloud, forgetting in my astonishment that I was eating dinner with my family. My father and stepmother stared; my little half sisters giggled. I stuffed a forkful of jellied eel into my mouth.

Poor Jannoula, though. If she was truly deprived of music, I had to correct this.

It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Jannoula could hear thoughts directed at her, but she could not sense through my senses. My daily music lessons with Orma could not enlighten her; she didn’t hear me playing my instruments. I tried thinking at her while I played, but that just made my playing suffer. I sang to her in the garden after I’d settled the other grotesques for the night, but I was a self-conscious and indifferent singer even in my own head. I imagined an oud and played that, but it was only a pale shadow of the real thing. She remained unfailingly polite, but I could tell she didn’t see the point.

Then one day I was practicing flute, thinking not about Jannoula but about some beastly arpeggios that kept tripping me up. I tensed every time they approached, overthought and overshot them. Orma’s suggestion—that I play them extremely slowly until I had the technique down—was good as far as it went, but it didn’t solve the way I cringed, or how the cringe itself tightened my timbre into an excruciating shrill.

Solving the notes was the easy part; I had to solve the dread, and I couldn’t.

I took a break, stretched, tried again, failed, kicked over the music stand (I am not proud of that), and wondered whether I had reached the limits of my musical ability. Maybe I’d never had any. Surely someone with a modicum of talent wouldn’t have to work this hard.

The music stand had hit my table and knocked a cascade of books and parchments onto the floor; I had my uncle’s proclivity for filing by piling, alas. I picked everything up, leafing through to see whether I couldn’t relocate this mountain to the bottom of my wardrobe and forget it. The avalanche consisted mostly of scores that I needed to study, but then my eyes lit upon Orma’s scrawled handwriting:
On Emptiness
. It was a short treatise he’d written for me, back when we’d hoped to quell the visions through meditation. I drifted over to my bed and read the whole thing again.

And had an idea.

I needed to get out of my own way, release this anxiety and relax into the arpeggios. I had gotten good at vacating my mind; the obvious jokes aside, meditation practice had enabled me to create my garden, and to visit it. I lay back on my bed and imagined myself empty, pictured doors in my heart and how I would fling them open. I was a hollow channel; I would be my own instrument, reverberating.

I didn’t sit up or open my eyes, just put my flute to my lips and began to play.

Oh!
cried Jannoula in my mind. There was such anguish in her voice that I broke off in alarm.
No, don’t stop!

It took me a moment to understand that she had finally heard me—through my ears, or some other method? I wasn’t sure. I only knew that I had found a way to open myself to her. I laughed, long and loud, while she continued to grouse. “Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, grinning. I took a deep breath, filling and emptying myself together, and let my whole being ring with music once again.

Orma, unexpectedly, heard a difference in my playing at our next lesson. “That rondo is much improved,” he said from his perch on his desk. “It’s nothing I taught you, though. You’ve found some way to give it greater depth. It feels—” He cut himself short.

I waited. I had never heard him begin a sentence that way.

“That is,” said Orma, scratching his false beard, “you’re playing as humans do at their best. Filling the music with some discernible—” He waved his hands; this was hard for him. “Emotion? Self? Someday perhaps you’ll be my teacher and explain it to me.”

“But you did teach me,” I said eagerly. “Your meditation treatise gave me the key. I cleared out all the detritus, or something, and now she can hear me play.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. “She?” said Orma evenly.

I had not been keeping him apprised of Jannoula’s actions, even as she’d begun to hear my thoughts and my music. Now it came out, how we talked every day, how she could hear my music and some of my thoughts. Orma listened silently, his black eyes inscrutable behind his spectacles; a defensive warmth rose in my chest against his studied neutrality. “She’s humble and kind,” I
said, folding my arms. “Her life is a misery, and I’m pleased to give her some relief from it.”

Orma licked his thin lips. “Has she told you where she is imprisoned, or why?”

“No,” I said. “And she doesn’t need to. She’s my friend and I trust her.”

My
friend
. She really was. The first I’d ever had.

“Monitor that trust,” said Orma, cool as autumn. “Mind where it wavers.”

“It will not waver,” I said stoutly, and packed up my instruments to go home.

I heard not a peep from Jannoula for the rest of the afternoon and thought she had left me, recalled to her real life in her cell. She was present that evening when I put the other grotesques to bed, however, following me on my rounds and sulkily kicking flowers.