I started, alarmed that she knew where Orma was; she smirked, then leaned in and whispered, “Abdo had an interesting and relevant memory when Josef was examining your pearl ring yesterday. I visited his mind while he was sleeping and found it.”
She tried to shove me toward the dinghy. I resisted, crying, “What are you trying to accomplish here? Why Josef?”
She eased off pushing. “There is no end to your questions. Here I am, helping you along, and you still won’t trust me. What will it take, Seraphina?”
“That’s easy. Release Abdo, Dame Okra, and everyone else whose minds you’ve caught on your hooks, and I’ll consider—”
She shoved me hard, and suddenly there was no embankment below my feet. I fell toward the sea, and her eyes widened as if she were surprised to have unbalanced me.
I landed hard in Ingar’s lap, making the boat buck and violently throw up spray. Ingar, looking mildly astonished, squeaked, “Oh!” Abdo helped me right myself, but I pulled away from him and stood up in the tilting, rocking boat. I shouted at Jannoula, “I’m going to Porphyry for my Queen, not for you. I’m not helping you!”
Jannoula turned her back on me and stiffly climbed the stairs toward the castle, its spires dark against the lightening sky.
The ship was a two-masted Porphyrian merchanteer anchored far out in the water. Ingar had vouchers for our passage, all in order, and so the sailors hauled us up one by one in a sling chair. Abdo pushed off the side of the ship with his feet, so he spun as he ascended; Ingar bumped his way up like a lumpy sack of grain.
I hated to admit Jannoula was helping, but she had gotten us out of Blystane quickly, and at the Regent’s expense. Regardless of her reasons—which I could not possibly trust—we were on our way. This was the final leg of our search. I would find the seven ityasaari in Porphyry, locate my awful uncle, as Jannoula called him, and return home at last.
Home. The word seemed to echo in my heart. I wanted nothing in the world so much as that. Even thoughts of Orma didn’t buoy me the way they usually did.
Abdo missed his home, too, I knew. Simply being on a ship among Porphyrians, listening to them talk, seemed to cheer him immensely. He bounded around the deck, eager to explore; Ingar gamely followed him. I questioned a sailor in my shaky Porphyrian; he eventually understood and led me down a claustrophobic corridor beneath the forecastle to the single, cramped cabin where the three of us would board.
I thanked the man, who departed for his duties, and then I learned the crucial importance of ducking through doorways.
The cabin, I discovered once I’d managed to enter without braining myself, had three narrow bunks: an upper and lower built into the left-hand wall and one to the right atop a chest of drawers. I claimed the lower left bunk for myself, assuming Abdo would want the top. Ingar could sleep by himself across the room, all of two feet away. I peevishly kicked his empty bunk. I did not want him here; maybe he’d fall in the ocean. I sprawled crookedly, keeping my boots off the scratchy coverlet, and felt the ship roll beneath me.
A feeling rolled inside me, too. I didn’t want to look at it.
My entire expedition seemed to have gone wrong. It had started so wonderfully, with Nedouard and Blanche; I felt they were kindred spirits, and that I’d truly done some good for them. Everything had slowly disintegrated since then. Casually lethal Gianni Patto. Mean Od Fredricka, forced into friendliness through Jannoula’s manipulations. The seizing of Dame Okra and Abdo.
Jannoula, still barred from my head, was free from her old prison, walking the world, and entering the minds of others. She could do all kinds of damage now. Hateful Earl Josef, who’d partly credited her with his ascension, might be only the beginning.
I ground the heels of my hands into my eyes. She wanted me to bring the Porphyrian ityasaari back to Goredd to join the others. How in good conscience could I even ask them, not knowing what she had in mind? Even if Kiggs and Glisselda stopped her bodily at the Goreddi border and locked her up, did it matter where she was if she could reach everyone with her mind?
Ingar entered the cabin. “Oh, excuse. You were nepping?” His accent was as hard as cold butter.
I rolled onto my side, turning my back on him. I had no desire to talk to Jannoula’s spy, but he kept talking to me. “I am, eh, so fery pleased to mit you. It is egzekly like she toldt me. Soon together we shell be!”
I looked at him over my shoulder. A vapid smile split Ingar’s fat face. His bovine brown eyes drifted vacantly behind square lenses; his moony pale head reflected the blue gleam from the porthole. Perhaps this spy could cut both ways.
“What else does Jannoula say?” I asked, sitting up carefully.
“Wonderfool thingks about you, always!” he cried, his doughy hands gesticulating his enthusiasm. “You are her favorite, and thet is a great blessink upon you.”
I was her favorite. My stomach turned. I said, “How long have you known her?”
“Four years,” he said, looking shyly at his feet, as if I’d asked him how long he’d loved her. Maybe I had. He added, “But we only mit—meet? Is more correct?” I nodded, and he continued: “I hev meet her for the first time two months ago. Before thet … no, that. Before that, I only speak to her in my head. You understand.”
“I do,” I said, but I was silently calculating. Four years meant soon after I’d locked her avatar in the Wee Cottage and shut her out of my mind. She hadn’t stayed lonely long. “How did she find you four years ago?”
Ingar hefted his bulky frame onto the bureau-top bed and beamed. “She sees me the way she sees us all: through the Eye of Heaven, with the helpink of the Saints.”
That was uninformative. I tried to refine the question. “But what did she do once the Saints helped her find you? Did she just show up in your mind one day?”
He blinked. “I heared her voice. She saidt, ‘My friendt, you are not alone. Let me to come in. I am of your kindt, and we are blessed.’ ” He kissed a knuckle toward Heaven.
He’d heard her voice, then, and answered her. Could he have ignored it? If he’d said, No, don’t come in, would the reply itself have been enough to give her an opening? She’d implied that Dame Okra had been keeping her out successfully.
I said, “She said a mutual friend informed her of my travels. Who might that be?”
“One of the other helf-dragons? She holdts spiritual hands with six of us.”
I did some quick addition and couldn’t make it work. “Who?”
He counted off on his fingers. “Abdo, me—of course—eh, Gianni, Okra, Od Fredricka, and my countryman Lars.”
I clapped a hand to my mouth. The room was suddenly too small. I couldn’t breathe. “Excuse me,” I muttered, pushing past Ingar’s knees, heading for the cabin door.
“The ship is rocking too much,” he said cheerfully, miming it. “I understand.”
But he didn’t. I slammed the door in his face.
I had to ask Abdo, even if it meant Jannoula would learn that I had asked. “Was she in Lars’s head before we left Goredd?”
No, said Abdo definitively. I never saw her mind hooked into anyone’s until we met Gianni Patto. But it’s been almost three months since we’ve seen Lars.
We stood by the prow, gritting our teeth into the briny wind. Sailors bustled around us, nautically occupied, knotting and climbing and swabbing and unfurling. We tried to keep out of their way.
“Well, if Ingar is to be believed, she hasn’t taken Blanche or Nedouard yet,” I said, trying to feel encouraged. Abdo leaned over the railing and got a faceful of spray, presumably on purpose.
She will, said Abdo matter-of-factly.
I looked at him sidelong and saw his unguarded expression of bleak resignation and despair. It broke my heart. I laid a hand on his arm. “We’ll go to this Paulos Pende and have him unhook her from your mind the minute we land in Porphyry,” I said firmly.
Abdo pulled away from me and said nothing.
All our talk about Lars had given me an ide
a. I could speak with my mind to the ityasaari I’d met in person; I had only to induce a vision. “Lars could get word of Josef’s ascension to the Queen. I should contact him before it occurs to Jannoula that I can.”
How do you know Jannoula won’t be present in Lars’s head while you’re talking to him? said Abdo, hopping down from the railing to follow me belowdecks. Or that she isn’t listening through my ears this very instant? She could stop Lars from reporting to the Queen easily enough.
“I don’t,” I said as we descended the narrow stairs, “but I have to try. Besides, my more immediate concern is Ingar. If he gleans that I’m contacting Lars, he’ll surely bring Jannoula into it. I need you to distract him.”
Ingar was still on the bureau-bed, now reading a book the size of his hand. His rucksack was open beside him, and it appeared, from this angle, to contain nothing but books. I wondered how many he had brought with him, and whether books were an angle one might take toward … what? Manipulating his loyalty? Buying his cooperation?
Abdo, at Ingar’s knee, widened his eyes endearingly and smiled up at the turnip-headed older man. Abdo must have silently spoken, because Ingar looked up from his page and replied in Porphyrian: “What kind of fish? I’d love to see it.”
His Porphyrian’s better than yours, said Abdo. He slipped out of the room ahead of the old bookhound.
I flopped back onto the scratchy coverlet and tried to focus my mind. The ceaseless rocking of the ship bothered me, but I finally calmed myself enough to locate the garden of grotesques. After my unintentional experiments with neglecting it, I’d gone back to tending it religiously, even though there had been no unfortunate repercussions, as far as I could tell. It calmed me, even if the garden denizens didn’t require quite such rigorous supervision.
But a parent who spends every day with a child can’t see the child growing. Similarly, my constant presence had blinded me to my garden’s incremental changes. When I went in looking for Loud Lad, I immediately found myself teetering on the lip of his ravine. It lay unusually, perilously close to the entrance today; there was barely space to stand between the gate and the chasm. I threw myself backward and avoided falling in; as I lay there in the dirt, I saw Loud Lad on the other edge. I waved at him, expecting he would build a peculiar bridge and cross over to me.
He didn’t; he leaped across. It was a much longer leap than I could have attempted, and his black boots barely got any purchase when he landed. He had to grasp at the clinging shrubbery to keep from falling back, which was alarming. However, I was far more alarmed that he could jump the ravine at all.
It used to be wider than this, I was certain. It had shrunk. When? How?
Had the whole garden been shrinking? I glanced at the cloudless sky, the distant dunes and fruit trees. Everything looked the same as yesterday, but that was inconclusive. Was there some way to measure? I would consider how to do it.
Loud Lad dusted himself off and picked his way toward me along the ravine edge. I clasped his hands in mine and a whirling vision overtook me.
My consciousness emerged dizzily, hovering near the ceiling of a parlor in Castle Orison. I knew every detail of the room: the harpsichord with a sunburst inlaid on the lid; the satin curtains, opulent Zibou carpets, and overabundance of cushions; the wide gout couch where Master Viridius, my erstwhile employer, reclined with his feet up. He closed his eyes and dreamily waved one bandaged hand, conducting the earsplitting music that filled the room and surely threatened to break the windows again.
Opposite the old man, Lars gingerly balanced his muscular bulk on an ornate chair and played a double-reed instrument, a soprano shawm. It took a lot of air—his face reddened right to the roots of his hair—and was correspondingly loud.
A wave of homesickness bowled into me. I would have given anything to be in that firelit room improvising harmonies, sore ears notwithstanding.
Lars glanced toward my vision-eye, aware of me watching him—or aware that I had taken hold of his mind-fire in the garden? How did it work, exactly? He played to the end of the piece. Viridius cried, “Bravo! My second theme needs polish, but it’s coming.”
“My dear,” said Lars, examining the reeds of his instrument, “you remember I toldt you thet Seraphina can look upon me from far away? Well, she does so now.”
“Indeed! Can she hear me?” Viridius looked up at the wrong corner of the room, drawing his bushy red brows together, and spoke with exaggerated slowness: “Hel-lo, Se-ra-phi-na, we all miss you here.”
Lars smiled fondly at the older man. “I wantedt you to know so you don’t think I am talking out loudt to myself. So, Phina! Goodt evening to you.”
I didn’t know you played shawm, I said, amused.
“I am picking it up again after a long time,” he said, his big fingers fluttering on the finger holes, playing the shadow of a song. “But it is not exactly a shawm. It is the Samsamese bombarde.”
It’s loud, I said.
His round face split into a grin.
I continued: Listen, I need you to take a message to the Queen and Prince Lucian.
“Of course. But hev you lost your quigutl locket?”
It was stolen—this was awkward—by your brother.
Lars frowned. “My brother? He was at the Erlmyt?”
No one was at the Erlmyt, but Queen Glisselda knows that. I need you to tell her that the old Regent is dead, probably murdered in a coup. The new Regent is … is Josef.
Lars hung his head and sighed bleakly, his shoulders sagging. Any news of his brother was hard for him to bear. Until he had taken up with Viridius, Lars had never had an easy family life; his father had killed his mother upon learning Lars was half dragon, and then Josef had killed their father in revenge. Something had stopped Josef from killing Lars, but brotherly love had never seemed to be part of the equation.
“How did this happen?” he asked.
“What has your brother done now?” Viridius stage-whispered from across the room, ready to get indignant on his behalf. Lars waved him off irritably.
Please tell Viridius, I said. If Jannoula checked in on Lars before he could tell the Queen, she might stop him. Certainly, Josef did not want Glisselda to know; I assumed Jannoula agreed. Nothing would stop Viridius from passing the news along.
“But you haven’t toldt me everything,” snapped Lars. “Did my ferdamdte brother kill the Regent himself?” Viridius clapped a bandaged hand to his mouth. Lars pinched the bridge of his nose and continued, “Why wouldt the earls and bishops make him Regent after thet? It takes a consensus to invest a new Regent.”
A consensus of everyone, or merely of those present?
“Those present,” he conceded, shaking his head. “This is why the highland earls feel sometimes, eh, shut out.”
Well, the highland earls don’t know yet. As for the others … I hesitated. Ingar had been there; was a consensus of one enough? How would Lars react if I mentioned Jannoula? I dared not chance it. Queen Glisselda needs to know this immediately.
“We will tell the Queen at once,” said Lars, meeting Viridius’s eye. Viridius nodded vigorously and reached for his polished walking canes.
Tell her also that I won’t be reporting in until I get a replacement thnik from the embassy in Porphyry. That could be two weeks or more.
Viridius was rising awkwardly to his feet, saying, “Phina, if you can hear me, come home soon. The choristers have gotten unruly without you. It isn’t the same.”
Tell Viridius I miss his grumping, I instructed Lars, but he wasn’t listening.
I wished I could plant a consoling kiss on top of Lars’s head, but of course I could not really reach him. Viridius did it for me.
I emerged from the vision, and another wave of homesickness hit me.
No, a different kind of sickness.
Abdo, I called with my mind, come back. Quickly. Bring a bucket.
He arrived in time, but only just.
For two ceaseless, churning days, my stomach tried to tu
rn itself inside out. It raged and tempested. I couldn’t stand up. Abdo and Ingar took shifts dabbing my head with a sponge and feeding me spoonfuls of honeyed water, half of which came back up.
You’re green, Abdo informed me one night, his eyes wide. Green as a lizard.
On the third day, I slept at last and dreamed that I was alphabetizing an infinite library that turned out to be myself. When I awoke, I staggered up on deck, blinking in the wind and sunshine, and found that life had gone on without me. The sailors were allowing Abdo to climb the rigging, bandaged hand and all, and Ingar not only spoke better Porphyrian than me but had taken to the sailors’ impenetrable patois like a second mother tongue.
“Nautical Porphyrian wasn’t difficult to pick up,” Ingar explained over dinner in the crowded sailors’ mess. He, Abdo, and I were crammed together at a side table, eating salt cod and mushy lentils off square plates. “Once I realized they said braixai where standard Porphyrian has brachas, it was a matter of substituting diphthongs and—”
“You have a facility with languages,” I said, impressed in spite of myself. His Goreddi had improved, his Samsamese accent melting away before my ears, even during our first conversation.
He turned pink to his scalp. “I’ve read a lot, in many languages. That gives me a basis for speaking, but I didn’t have the phonemes until I heard them.”
“But how did you learn to read so many languages?”
I pressed. He looked up from his lentils, his spectacles reflecting the lantern light. “I examined the words from all angles until they made sense. Isn’t that the usual way?”
For the first time in days, I cracked a grin; my face felt like it had forgotten how. The usual way? It was the daft, steep, unscalable way, and yet I felt like I was glimpsing the real Ingar, not Jannoula’s stooge. “Maybe you can help me with Porphyrian grammar,” I said. “I’m hopeless at—”