Shadow Scale (66 page)

The Saint—for I was convinced he was a Saint, indeed, whatever the rest of us might have been—now had a fistful of dangling mind-fire threads. “She is broken, this one, in her mind and heart,” he said, carefully scooping up the blazing filaments and packing them back into Jannoula. “You must learn to fill yourself with yourself, Blessed.”

“D-don’t break her any further,” I pleaded, feeling responsible.

He gave me a sidelong look, and for a moment I thought he was angry. But he said, “Would you break a mirror, Seraphina, because you fear to look into it?”

“What will you do with her?”

He held her up in the sunlight, as if examining her for cracks. “She’s interested in the Saint trade,” he rumbled. “After nearly seven hundred years, I may finally have worked out how
to be one. I have the next millennium free. I’ll see what can be done.”

He moved as if to walk away, but an outcry rose all around, from the Samsamese behind me, the Goreddi and Ninysh soldiers to the south, the entire city: “St. Pandowdy!” They’d heard me call his name, I imagined, but how were they concluding he was a Saint? What did they see, what did they make of all this mind-fire?

Pandowdy paused and looked at the tiny people surrounding him, his aspect deeply weary. “I’m not carrying away all your problems, Seraphina,” he boomed. “Only the smallest. This”—he gestured to the armies around us—“is for you to sort out.”

“I understand,” I said, my voice sounding smaller in my own ears. I was fading back into my body; I struggled against it. “How do I maintain this fire?” I cried.

“No one can live like this all the time, inside out,” Pandowdy said over his mountainous shoulder. “It’s too much, even for me.”

“I don’t want to stop seeing!”

He laughed; the earth laughed under our feet. “You won’t. You’ll return to it, and you’ll measure the world by a different scale now. But you can’t stay. Release it, good heart. Give it back to the world. There will be more.”

He turned on his enormous heel, tearing a divot out of the pasture where he stood, and in four strides he was around the end of the city and heading north into the hills. He waded through the Queenswood, over the first of the foothills, and was gone.

I looked back at the conflagration called Abdo. We agreed without speaking and collapsed into ourselves again, the mind-fire exploding outward in a shock of rightness and love and
memory. It rippled through the world in a great wave, rattling the bones of knowledge, shaking the heart of complacency, echoing in a hundred thousand skulls.

I found myself on my back in the dirt, sick and dizzy. I raised my head in time to see the gates of the city open and a golden-haired Queen on a red horse come galloping toward me through the crystalline sunlight.

And then there was, blissfully, nothing.

My first impression upon waking was that I had ended up in Heaven. I was cradled in a cloud. A sweet autumnal breeze wafted gauzy curtains like the gossamer wings of the blessed. Sunlight gilded all it touched; the Golden House was made of sun. Everything made sense now.

This was not my room, not any of my rooms. I raised my head with difficulty, for it was very heavy, and saw Kiggs sitting with his back to me, writing at a desk.

Oh, good—he was dead, too. It wasn’t just me.

“She stirs!” he cried, hearing my suspiration, or the clouds creaking under me. He rushed to my side, flopped onto the golden expanse of nebulous bed beside me, and lay propped up on his elbows. He pushed my hair (a storm cloud) out of my face. He smiled, and his eyes were stars.

“Before you ask: you’ve been out a whole day.” He rested his
chin in his hand, pressing at his cheek as if to stop himself from foolishly grinning. He couldn’t stop. He gave it up. “I was worried,” he said. “We all were. There was this giant Saint, and fire, and you were …” He spread his hands as if trying to encompass the unfathomable scale of it. “How did you do all that?”

I shook my head, which was full of suns, flashing and jangling and making it hard to answer. Maybe this wasn’t Heaven, but I was no longer of this world. Or else I was the world. Maybe the distinction was pointless.

I closed my eyes to quiet the intensity around me. The world was no longer on fire, but there was an echo of fire in everything. A memory of fire. It was still too much. I felt everything.

“The war …,” I began in a voice like autumn leaves.

“Peace has broken out,” Kiggs proclaimed. “Glisselda has negotiated terms with all sides. The Regent of Samsam is heading home, tail between his legs; the Loyalists and the Old Ard are still here, patching broken wings and shattered trust, but they’ll soon depart as well. General Zira reports that Comonot muscled through in the Kerama, but we don’t have all the details yet.”

Kiggs leaned in until I could feel his breath in my ear. “When St. Pandowdy picked Jannoula up, I felt it. Like sorrow or release, or like I loved her for just a moment and wanted her to be well. I wanted the world to be well. It was the most extraordinary thing. And then before you collapsed, it came over me again, this burst of … what?”

He was incandescent even with my eyes closed, too bright to look at. I reached out and touched his face. He took my hand and kissed the palm.

I gasped. I was like an open wound; I felt everything tenfold.

“I don’t know what to call any of it,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

He laughed, like sunlight on water. “Jannoula glowed, but then St. Pandowdy—and you—”

“And Abdo,” I said. He would not have known he was seeing Abdo.

Kiggs would insist on asking me to answer the unanswerable. “I want to understand what I saw. I want to know—”

“If I’m a Saint?” I asked.

He said softly, “That wasn’t my question, no, but feel free to answer that.”

I squeezed my eyes more tightly shut. I had been waking slowly into myself again, but that question accelerated the process, made me harshly aware of my physical form. My sleep chemise—who’d dressed me?—was stiff and my scales itchy; I had blisters between my toes; my mouth was unpleasantly dry, and I could really have stood a trip to the garderobe. Every prosaic ache and quirk and failing rushed to my notice at once. I put a hand over my eyes. “Pandowdy may be a Saint, whatever else is true.”

“Agreed,” said Kiggs.

“I saw everything, Kiggs. I held the whole world in my mind at once”—I didn’t hold it now; I could feel it still trickling away—“but don’t … I can’t call myself a Saint.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Maybe that question isn’t for you to answer.”

I rolled onto my side, facing him, still not opening my eyes. “But there was something … extraordinary. I was more than me,
and the world was more than the world. How do I reconcile myself with that, Kiggs?” I asked, my voice cracking under the weight of new distress.

“With what, love?” he asked.

I took his face in my hands; it was terribly urgent that he understand. “How am I to fit back into myself after this?”

He laughed softly. “Haven’t you always been more than yourself? Haven’t we all? We are none of us just one thing.”

He was right, of course. I opened my eyes at last and examined the beautiful surface of him. His teeth were slightly crooked; that was the only difference between them and diamonds.

His face was too smooth. “You disappeared your beard,” I muttered.

His brows arched in surprise. “So you did like it. Glisselda didn’t see how that was possible.”

“Glisselda!” I said, pulling my hands away from his face. “How is she?”

He nodded, firmly affirmative. “She’s Queen,” he said wryly, “and then some. Like none we have ever witnessed before.” He smiled. “She and I have talked, and confessed our hearts’ transgressions, and I believe we understand each other. What’s left to say should perhaps be said with you present, as it pertains to you also.”

My head lolled toward him, then sank deep into a pillow. He lay his head beside mine and brushed my cheek with a finger. I rippled like the ocean.

“All will be well,” he said.

He was right; I had seen it. All was well—or could be, if we
worked to make it so. We were the fingers of the world, putting itself to rights.

I had no chance to explain this because he kissed me.

Who can say how long that lasted? I had learned to step outside of time.

By evening I had ebbed entirely into myself again. Life still glowed around me—the ityasaari blazed like torches—but I no longer saw everything at once.
No one can live like this all the time
, Pandowdy had said. It was a relief in a way. There were mundane things that needed my attention.

We ityasaari sat up with St. Eustace for Nedouard that night. A private wake at the seminary was followed by his interment beneath St. Gobnait’s at dawn. Only the ityasaari, Prince Lucian Kiggs, and Queen Glisselda attended; he’d had no family in Ninys to track down.

Dame Okra Carmine, his ambassadress, made sure he had the proper Ninysh touches: spruce wreaths at his head and feet, pine-flavored pastries, and sweet Segoshi raisin wine. She wept harder than anyone, ashamed of all she had done and been. I didn’t see how to reassure her; my forgiveness—or Blanche’s—could not make a dent in her guilt.

Nedouard was interred in a wall niche in the cathedral’s catacombs. I wept for the kindly, unfortunate doctor. He’d asked me a question once:
Are we irretrievably broken?
I hadn’t known the answer, but I thought I knew it now. After most of the others had
filed out of the crypt, I whispered to his grave plaque: “Never beyond repair, good heart.”

Blanche, kneeling in prayer nearby, heard me. She stood, brushing the dust of centuries off her dark blue gown (we were none of us wearing white, I noticed, though this was a funeral). She took my arm and silently accompanied me out of the catacombs.

We caught up with the others climbing the hill to Castle Orison. A quilt of cloud shrouded the sun, and the breeze blew chill; the rains of late autumn would set in soon. As we trudged along, an unexpected shouting arose behind us, a voice that was simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar: “Phina! Prince Lucian!”

The street was full of people following us while trying to appear like they weren’t. Kiggs stepped up beside me and pointed. “That’s not … is it?”

“It is!” came another shout. Abdo ducked out from behind a cartload of firewood and charged up the hill toward us.

“You can hear him?” I asked Kiggs.

“How can I not? He’s shouting.”

“And I will shout again!” cried Abdo. “I can’t stop shouting!”

He was completely filthy, as befitted a lad who’d spent weeks camping out in a shrine and trekking across swampland. His hair was tangled, full of moss and twigs. The cleanest thing about him was his grin, which was enormous and gleamed like the moon.

“Hello, everyone!” he shouted without moving his lips. The other half-dragons’ mouths already hung open; there were only eyes left to bug out, which they did alarmingly.

“How are you doing thet?” said Lars.

Abdo did a little waggling dance, sticking his tongue out and making antlers of his hands, the whole and the broken. “I figured it out! My mind is as large as the entire world. I could speak to everyone at once, if I wished. It’s not talking, exactly, but it sounds the same, doesn’t it?”

He was using his mind-fire—the way everyone had heard me say Pandowdy’s name—to make a sound heard with the ears and the mind and the heart all at once.

Lars said, “It wouldt be less eerie if you move your lips and pretendt the sound comes from your face.”

“Oh!” said Abdo, contorting his lips. “I’m out of practice.”

He was moving his mouth in the wrong ways at the wrong time, clearly faking. It was hard to watch. “You could practice in front of the glass,” I suggested.

He shrugged, grinning, too delighted with himself to take it as criticism. He bounced around us, greeting each half-dragon in turn. He hugged Camba, in her wheeled chair, and laughed when she told him he needed a bath. Blanche, who still clung to my arm, watched him in wonderment, a smile slowly creeping across her lips.