Shadow Scale (25 page)

“Abdo, don’t!” I cried, but it was too late. He’d been talking and reaching out to her at the same time, and now he clutched at his head with both hands, as if in pain. I wished I had his mind-sight, or any glimpse of what passed, unspoken, between him and Dame Okra. Her expression, always volatile, ran from horror to pain to triumph to horror again in seconds. She staggered back, her spaniel eyes bulging, her mouth a terrible crooked line.

“All right, then,” she gasped, staring at nothing, her face a pale green. “Travel. Good. It is well.” She limped back into the house.

I looked at Abdo. His face was ashen. One of his hair knots had come undone, as if he’d had a physical altercation; the incongruous corkscrew flopped across his forehead.

Abdo, speak to me!
I cried, my heart pounding.
Did Jannoula seize you?

He turned his head sideways and shook it, like a swimmer with water in his ear, or like he was trying to hear Jannoula rattling around in there. He said,
No. I fought her off
.

I exhaled shakily. What little training the temple had given Abdo had put him far ahead of any Southlander ityasaari, as far as I could tell. No one else could see mind-fire or speak in people’s heads; he’d worked out how to create St. Abaster’s Trap essentially on his own. If anyone could fend off Jannoula, surely it was he.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling he’d been extremely lucky just now.

His gaze had turned sheepish.
I couldn’t unhook her from Dame Okra, though. I don’t see why not. The principle is sound
.

Maybe you can ask this priest when we get to Porphyry
, I said.

No thanks
, said Abdo sourly.
He’d only tell me I need more training
.

“All right,” I said aloud, trying to gather myself. “It’s time we departed.”

Hanse, the old hunter, had been watching without expression, scratching his stubbly chin, waiting for us to finish messing around. Young Rodya translated my words, and the older man nodded, turned his horse west, and led us out the city gates, across country toward Samsam.

Barring another surprise like Gianni Patto, I believed there was only one ityasaari in Samsam: a middle-aged man, bald, stout, and square-spectacled. With his clothes on, he looked hunchbacked; I’d had the dubious privilege of looking in on him while he was bathing, and knew he had a pair of vestigial wings, membranous like a bat’s, carefully folded against his back. In my garden, I called him the Librarian because I’d never seen him without a book in his hand—not even in the bath. He lived in a crumbling mansion in a dismal valley where it always seemed to be raining.

“Thet is the Samsamese highlands,” Lars had said when I’d described it to him, two days before our journey began.

“The highlands are enormous,” I’d said, looking at the map spread on Viridius’s worktable. “Can you narrow it down if I give you more details? There’s a village within walking distance, and a river, and—”

Lars laughed, slapping the table with a beefy hand. “All great houses are near a village and a river. We have a proverb: ‘In highlandts, every man is earl of his own valley.’ Thet means a lot of valleys. Also, means a rude joke in Samsamese.”

“I don’t think I need that one spelled out,” I said.

“Even the valleys have valleys, Phina. You couldt be looking for months.” He jabbed a finger at the southern edge of the uplands. “Thet is why you need to come here, to Fnark, where is St. Abaster’s tomb. On St. Abaster’s Day all the earls come down for their council, the Erlmyt.”

“Just the one day?” With the vagaries of travel, it might be hard to arrive so promptly.

“It can last a week, or a few weeks, but thet is not guaranteed.
On St. Abaster’s Day it begins. Then you see all the earls together, and find the one you’re looking for.”

“How are you so sure he’s an earl?”

His gray eyes twinkled. “Who else in highlandts can afford so many books?”

“What if he doesn’t come to this meeting?” I said. “He seems a solitary sort.”

Lars shrugged his bulky shoulders. “Then perheps another earl will know him. It still saves you months of looking. It is your best chance.”

I hadn’t had the nerve to ask Lars the other question that immediately came to mind:
What if your half brother, Josef, Earl of Apsig, is at the meeting?
Josef and I had not parted on good terms after the events of midwinter; he despised half-dragons, and I was none too fond of would-be assassins.

If Earl Josef was at the Erlmyt, if he learned that the Librarian was my fellow half-dragon … I hardly dared contemplate the trouble that might cause.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the sky clouded over the moment we crossed the Samsamese border—but not by much.

Over the next fortnight, as we hastened toward Fnark past muddy pastures and rocky fields of rye, I tried not to think about Earl Josef at all, although my experience with him surely tempered my treatment of our Samsamese guides. I didn’t trust them. The Eight, from relatively tolerant Ninys, had had enough unease
about traveling with two half-dragons. There was no question in my mind that Hanse and Rodya, hailing from St. Abaster’s homeland, should be kept in the dark about us. The Regent apparently had not told them we were seeking a half-dragon; they only knew that we needed to make it to the Erlmyt on time. I wasn’t going to tell them otherwise.

I didn’t admit I spoke Samsamese, erring ruthlessly on the side of caution.

It rained each night and misted every morning; in the afternoons, it poured. We stayed at inns, when there were inns, but half the time we camped. Everything we owned grew steadily damper. The ends of our fingers were wrinkled as a matter of course; I could hardly bear to examine my toes. At least it wasn’t cold; St. Abaster’s Day falls at the point where spring has its first inklings of summer.

Rodya, in an oiled cloak and broad hat rimmed with dangling droplets, was a ceaseless font of drippy cheer. “In Samsam we hev two seasons: rain and snow. Is better along the coast. One week sunshine every summer!”

If he tells one more joke about rain, I’m going to drown myself in it
, said Abdo, slumping in the saddle. I wasn’t enjoying the weather, but it seemed to affect him even more.
All it would take, surely, is to look up with my mouth open
—

How do you say “He talks too much” in Porphyrian?
I asked hastily, trying to distract Abdo from his misery. I hazarded a guess, no doubt butchering the pronunciation.

Abdo gave me the expected fish-eye, but for an unexpected reason:
Wrong gender. You use cosmic neuter for a stranger
.

I glanced at Rodya; he leaned to one side and spat on the ground.
He’s not a stranger anymore. If ever anyone embodied naive masculine, surely Rodya
—

You use cosmic neuter for a stranger
, Abdo insisted.
And he’s a stranger until you’ve asked, “How may I pronoun you?”

But you told me cosmic neuter was the gender of gods and eggplant
, I protested, unsure why I was arguing with a native speaker about his own language.

People may choose it
, said Abdo.
But it’s polite for strangers. You may be almost sure he’s not an eggplant, but he might still be some agent of the gods
.

Abdo enjoyed correcting my grammar, but distraction only went so far, and I began to wonder whether the rain was really the problem. For hours each day he stared into the gray and rubbed the dark, knotty scar on his wrist. He didn’t eat properly—not that I blamed him. The Samsamese are overly fond of cabbage and lumpy gravy. I berated myself for letting him come; after the first week, I was convinced he was unwell. When I asked him, he just shrugged listlessly.

I was keeping scrupulous track of the days. St. Siucre’s Day, St. Munn’s, and Scaladora, our day for remembering fallen knights, all passed with abundant drizzle and little fanfare. St. Abaster’s Day dawned sunny, which seemed portentous, and soon after breakfast we crested a hill and got our first look at the Samsamese highlands. They rose abruptly out of the plain ahead, an imposing green tableland speckled with sturdy sheep and scrubby yellow gorse. The rain, over centuries, had battered the plateau and carved great grooves in its face; outcroppings of rock jutted forth like
exposed bones. The clouds above loomed darker; gray streaks of rain trailed beneath them like an old woman’s hair.

Hanse pointed to the southern end of the formation. “Fnark is beyond those bluffs,” he said in Samsamese. “We should arrive the day after tomorrow.”

Rodya needlessly translated this into Goreddi for me. I replied, “We’re late.”

“Oh, is not a worry,” said Rodya, waving off my irritation. “The earls do not meet for only one day. Most of the earls might not even be there yet. Nobody comes on time.”

I clamped my mouth shut, knowing that railing at him wasn’t going to get us there any faster, but I surely wanted to. I tried to catch Abdo’s eye, to share my pique with him at least, but he stared into the middle distance at nothing.

Fnark, two days later, was larger than I’d imagined, large enough to have streets and visible industry—a pottery and warehouses along the river. The houses abutted each other, end to end, sharing roof tiles; church spires punctured the sky. We crossed the river on an arched stone bridge and passed the market square, where intrepid merchants clustered together under the thatched shelter like cattle under a pasture tree.

In this climate, I supposed, if you wouldn’t shop in the rain, you didn’t shop at all.

Along the river road north, toward the rising tablelands, stood a walled complex resembling a Ninysh-style palasho. As we passed
its iron gates, I saw that it was a shrine—and no small roadside shrine, but an enormous complex. Within its walls was everything a pilgrim could want: dormitories, souvenir stalls, chapels, and eateries. Rain fell on empty tables outside.

The place looked abandoned; I felt my irritation rising again. “You said the earls would be here all week,” I said quietly to Rodya.

He shrugged. “They must be inside. We Samsamese are hardy, but thet don’t mean we stand around in the rain.”

Or maybe the earls had already gone home. If the meeting was of no fixed length, surely it sometimes ran short. I gritted my teeth and followed Hanse up the cobbled road toward the hulking church at the top of the hill.

We tied our horses and entered. The great church was empty but for a cluster of bedraggled pilgrims at the front, led in song by a priest. I knew the tune, a drinking song in Goredd, but it had very different lyrics here: