Shadow Scale (60 page)

“Isn’t it astonishing?” he cried. “Back when it was just Lars and Abdo, with Dame Okra tossing teacups, I never would have guessed how powerful and beautiful it would eventually become. Selda and I had hoped it might be one defense among many, but I think this could keep the city safe, and everyone in it.”

“Yes,” I said miserably. “Perhaps it could.”

“Can they make it without Jannoula?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Because we need this,” said Kiggs. “Unless you find evidence that she’s sabotaging the war effort or betraying us to the Old Ard, I hate to say it, but her Saint act can wait to be debunked. There will be time to free the other ityasaari from her grasp after all Goredd is free from war.”

“I suppose,” I said, my voice weak.

“Goredd must come first,” he said. “I have to say, though, this is the most astonishing thing I have ever seen.” He spoke as if he’d positioned himself at a door or window of the cathedral in order to keep watching the sky.

“I can’t actually see it,” I said, irritation creeping into my voice.

“Can dragons see it, or not? I should ask the garrison here. You know what it reminds me of? The words of St. Eustace: ‘Heaven is a Golden House—’ ”

I didn’t want to hear it. I said, “As you check on war preparations, would you keep an ear out for news of Uncle Orma? Comonot’s garrison or the scholars in Quighole might have seen or smelled him.”

“Of course, of course,” said Kiggs distractedly, and I felt that he had ceased to listen, all his attention transfixed by the golden sky.

I returned to the chapel. When the ityasaari finished practicing St. Abaster’s Trap, they came down from the tower, laughing and chattering. It seemed Camba had not participated, but it took me a few minutes to notice that Lars and Blanche were missing.

On the stairs, Lars began shouting for help.

“Blue St. Prue!” said Dame Okra, pushing past me. Lars staggered through the doorway, Blanche over his shoulder. Dame Okra helped him carry Blanche into the chapel and lay her down before the hearth. Blanche was not unconscious, as I’d supposed, but weeping silently. She wrapped her arms around her head and curled into a ball.

A rope still connected her to Lars.

“Not again!” cried Nedouard. He was at Blanche’s side in an instant, taking one of her slender hands and feeling her pulse. Single scales dotted her skin like scabs; bruises purpled her throat.

“Sorry,” sobbed Blanche. “S-sorry.”

“She waited until you’d gone downstairs,” said Lars miserably, his gray eyes rimmed in red. “Wrappedt the rope around her neck and jumpedt. She almost took me with her this time.”

“We can’t keep forcing her to participate!” Nedouard cried incautiously. “The mind-threading hurts her. It’s cruel.”

Padding footsteps on the spiral staircase paused. I glanced back and saw Jannoula watching us narrowly. She turned away from Blanche’s misery and continued down the stairs without a word. In that moment I hated her.

Nedouard got Blanche untied; I helped him take her to her room. We tucked her, still weeping, into her narrow bed. I turned to go, but the doctor gripped my arm fiercely and whispered, “Don’t let the light in the sky fool you.
This
is Jannoula’s true handiwork. We submit, or she breaks us.”

I clasped his hand, my heart hurting. “We will find the way out of this.”

Jannoula had called me her Counter-Saint; it was time to start countering.

I quickly learned the routines of the Sainted ityasaari: they woke at dawn for prayers in the chapel, followed by morning council, St. Abaster’s Trap, and lunch. In the afternoon, they went their separate ways for various tasks—preaching, painting, performing, reaching out to the populace—and then they took their evening meal together, spent a quiet hour in the chapel, and went to bed.

Jannoula was absent every evening; I tried to follow her once, but Gianni Patto apparently had orders to keep an eye on me. He planted himself in my way, idly scratching his dagger-like claws in the dirt. I gathered my nerve and attempted to step around him, but he grabbed my arm with one enormous hand and hauled me back inside.

I attempted to find ways to speak with Glisselda. The Queen had seemed to swallow uncritically Jannoula’s explanation of her association with the Old Ard, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be reasoned with. Surely I could find a way to talk to her, to loosen Jannoula’s grip without appearing to do so.

Alas, I could never find an opportunity to speak with Glisselda alone. Jannoula was always present before and after council, and in the afternoons, when Her Blessedness went to preach at the cathedral, she assigned Dame Okra to escort me everywhere. Try as I might, I couldn’t give the old ambassadress the slip; she
was on me like a tick. I succeeded exactly once in arranging a meeting in the Queen’s study. Glisselda looked up eagerly from her desk when I entered, but the moment she saw Dame Okra, her expression fell closed. We spent an awkward half hour, sipping tea and speaking of nothing. Dame Okra watched hawkishly, and a wiry, gray-haired guardsman, Glisselda’s deaf bodyguard, lurked in the corner like a statue. I hinted that Glisselda might order Dame Okra away—she was still Queen, after all—but the only person who picked up on the hint was Dame Okra herself, who was cross with me for the rest of the day.

Cross, but no less present.

I tried to sneak out to see Glisselda at night. I would surely do better at bluffing the guards this time; I’d say Jannoula required the Queen’s presence in the Ard Tower, and then I’d escort Glisselda there, giving us a chance to speak privately. Alas, I never made it out of the Ard Tower. When I opened the front door, there was Gianni Patto, curled up in the courtyard, blocking my only way out.

But then, what would Glisselda have said if I’d spoken to her? The same things Kiggs was telling me every evening over the thnik, that Goredd needed St. Abaster’s Trap and the ityasaari could wait to be freed until the war was over?

A week passed, and then another. The Samsamese army, which had been only a week’s march away, kept its distance for now. The Loyalists were to feint south in just six days. I felt like I’d accomplished nothing.

Since Jannoula was out every evening, my one consolation was that it was easier to speak with Kiggs than I’d initially feared. One
evening, he had surprising news: “I see Jannoula, about a block ahead of me, on the river road. Do you want me to learn where she goes?”

“If you can follow without her seeing you,” I said, sitting up in bed, as if I might add my alertness to his.

It was some moments before his voice crackled again: “We’re turning south with the river. She’s got a following, people drifting out of taverns and alleys. They’re like gulls behind a fishing boat. And you know what? She lets them touch her and smiles at every one. For all that she’s an egotist, she seems a kindly one.”

“She’s not a kindly one,” I snapped. She had an allure even when she wasn’t speaking or glowing with mind-fire.

He chuckled infuriatingly, and for a while there was nothing but the sound of his footsteps. He reported crossing Cathedral Bridge. “She’s heading for the seminary gate,” he said. “If she enters, it may be difficult to follow her inside.”

“Don’t follow her inside. That’s all the information I needed,” I said. I would go to St. Gobnait’s Seminary and see for myself as soon as I could. I could lose an ityasaari chaperone in town; this was my city.

Kiggs stayed quiet a long time. I stared at the thnik ring, one finger over from Orma’s pearl ring, wondering whether to call his name. Suddenly he said, “That wasn’t difficult. A prince of the realm can still go wherever he needs to.”

“You followed her in?” I said, shocked.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The door monk believed I was here to guard Jannoula. Why would he ask her about me when she already knows I’m coming?”

I frowned, disliking the risk he was taking, but there was nothing I could do.

“Whoops,” he said.

“What is it?” I whispered, my heart in my throat.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I thought she went down this corridor, but it’s a dead end.…”

He trailed off, which frightened me more than anything he could have said. I was about to call his name, but luckily I hesitated.

“You were following me,” said Jannoula’s contralto voice. She sounded amused.

I bit my lips shut. His thnik was still on; if I spoke, she’d hear me. Kiggs said, “You’re mistaken.” His voice was muffled, as if he’d concealed the device in his fist.

“Am I? You’re not here to chasten me for my impiety? Don’t look so sheepish—I know skepticism when I see it, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a relief, oddly, to meet someone who doubts.” She sighed, like one who bears an impossible weight of duty. “Here, at last, is a person I can’t disappoint.”

Kiggs laughed; my stomach turned over.

She’d read him quickly and taken exactly the right tack: humility, doubt, and obligation. He was cautious, but she could use caution. All she needed was an angle.

The prince’s thnik buzzed once and clicked off.

Jannoula brought Kiggs back with her from the seminary, and he was seamlessly reintegrated into castle life, as far as I could tell. If Glisselda was angry with him for disobeying her orders and entering the city, I presume Jannoula smoothed things over between them. The details didn’t reach me; I could only observe from a distance. Kiggs attended council, made plans for the defense of the city, toured the walls, and drilled with the Queen’s Guard.

Kiggs was easier to approach than Glisselda. Two days after Jannoula had apprehended him, I spotted him striding purposefully across Stone Court with three others of his regiment. I called after him and he waited for me, letting the others walk ahead toward the barbican gate. I was a little out of breath when I reached him, but I had to know: “Did you see her spiritual advisor? Was it Orma?”

He shrugged, turning the helmet he carried in his hands. “I didn’t see him, Phina. But you know, even if it is Orma, she may have a very good reason for keeping you from him. She’s not quite the madwoman you always made her out to be. She’s got a remarkable mind, and if she has some rough edges, well, she can be reasoned with—”

I turned away, unwilling to hear more. Jannoula’s glamour had clearly affected him; I could no longer feel safe speaking to him openly. That was one more ally gone.

Jannoula did not gloat about Kiggs, which of course raised my suspicions. She would not have forgotten seeing him, through Abdo’s eyes, coming out of my room in Porphyry. She knew Queen Glisselda had ordered him to stay away. I had wondered whether the two things were connected, whether Jannoula had told Glisselda what she’d seen in Porphyry, and Glisselda hadn’t wanted to see Kiggs as a result.

That didn’t add up, though. Glisselda was not herself, but she should have been furious with me as well as Kiggs, if she’d really found out the truth. I felt certain Jannoula was saving it for a special occasion.

Time passed relentlessly. My anxiety grew. I wanted to stop her before the war came south so that we’d have time to determine whether the other ityasaari could make St. Abaster’s Trap without her. Kiggs had said we needed this trap, and I agreed; it would not do to hobble Goredd’s defenses, but that meant incapacitating Jannoula in some way that was reversible, in case we found the other ityasaari couldn’t make the trap without her. That ruled out killing or poisoning Jannoula. Camba, Nedouard, and I,
conferring in hasty whispers when we could, had come up with no better way to stop her.