Shadow Scale

by Rachel Hartman

On the sixth night, however, we crossed a ridge and found ourselves above a “vulture valley”—a draconic cesspit. An enormous old male had been resting on the ground, concealed by the ridge; he spotted us overhead and flew to intercept us, screaming, “Land and be identified!”

  The hatchlings had strict instructions to comply with all such demands. Per Comonot’s orders, they were to land on the nearest snowy peak and explain that I was another dangerous deviant (like Orma, I supposed) to be delivered to General Laedi.

  My entourage had other ideas. Brisi plunged into a sudden nosedive straight toward a knife-like ridge; her quick movement triggered the old male’s prey drive, and he barreled after her. Icy wind bit my cheeks; I could not catch the air to breathe. The earth spun and tilted sickeningly as Brisi stretched her wings. My sight blurred; my ears rang; my head snapped back painfully.

  She circled back up toward her fellows. The bright spots in my vision cleared, and I saw that the others had stretched a net of chains between two of them. They flew at the old saar’s face; he was focused on Brisi and couldn’t dodge in time. Claws and horns entangled, he thrashed and bucked, pulling the net out of the hatchlings’ grip. They screamed in dismay, but the net did its job. The hostile dragon was too tangled up to fly. He careened out of the sky and hit the sharp, rocky ridge at a horrifying angle. He died instantly, his neck broken.

  The hatchlings, alarmed, buzzed around him like bees. They’d only meant to entangle him so they could escape, but there was no undoing what had happened. After a hurried discussion, they carried his body in the net to a more secluded ravine, where flames wouldn’t be a beacon to our enemies, and burned him according to Porphyrian funereal custom. Brisi spoke words I didn’t know, until I realized it was her native tongue in a dragon’s voice, a hard-mouthed Porphyrian. I understood just enough to discern prayers to her gods, Lakhis and Chakhon.

  Giving the unknown dragon a funeral had struck the hatchlings as the fitting and proper thing to do. I marveled at this. Comonot had been loath to give the Porphyrians quigutl devices, but he’d utterly failed to foresee the Porphyrian innovations the exiles would bring with them: voting, cuisine, and now funeral rites. The world was changing indeed.

  It was nearly dawn, so we found ourselves a different secluded gully to sleep in. As I tried to get comfortable on the rocky ground, I said to the hatchlings, “It was clever to bring a chain net, and to know how to use it. Dragons are famously bad at working together, but you made it look natural.”

  Brisi examined her talons, a coy gesture a human girl might have made, but completely bizarre in a dragon. “We learned to use nets from the fishermen back home.”

  Around us the others softly murmured, “Porphyry!” like another prayer.

  Three nights later, Brisi pointed out the slender Acata River, which Comonot said was the border of Loyalist-held territory. Within an hour, we were found: the Loyalists, expecting our arrival, had sent a small battalion—a flight of thirteen dragons—to keep an eye out for us. The hatchlings screamed Comonot’s watchword, but the Loyalist dragons still nipped at their wings and tails, herding us south to a sloping valley above the tree line, where their ard was stationed.

  General Zira was a canny old female, small but with great presence. Something in her gaze must have reminded the hatchlings of their own mothers; they flattened themselves submissively. “I’ve received word from the Ardmagar!” Zira screamed. “Seraphina is to be transported to Lavondaville; one of my ard is to take her.” Around me, the Porphyrian dragons began to protest. Zira shrilled over them: “The hatchlings are to remain here. The Ardmagar hopes I can make decent, disciplined fighters of you.”

  “We’re already fighters!” cried Brisi, clutching my basket to her. “The Ardmagar gave us this duty. Completing it is surely discipline.”

  Zira, unimpressed by this argument, agreed to a compromise: Brisi would finish the journey with an experienced guide, while her comrades remained with the Loyalists.

  We slept that day and left at first dark. Lavondaville was a single, long night’s flight away, due south. Brisi muttered incessantly that it was not so hard to find and she didn’t need help. Our guide, a spiny male called Fasha, had recently returned to the front from the city garrison at Lavondaville; he led in stoic silence. We passed Dewcomb’s Outpost, the northernmost Goreddi settlement, and soared over the rolling hills of the Queenswood. Then, just as the sun poked its bright nose over the eastern ranges, I saw my city. The walls held new constructions—trebuchets, ballistae, and other machines of Lars’s devising—but I knew the silhouettes of the rooftops, knew the castle and cathedral tower. This was my home, however far afield I roamed. I choked up to see it again.

  “Can I set you in that clearing?” Brisi screamed, circling a relatively treeless spot at the southern edge of the Queenswood. She was proposing to dump me in the swamp. I’d be soaked and muddy by the time I waded home.

  I cried, “Not here! Castle Orison.”

  Saar Fasha heard our conversation and shrieked, “No dragons may land on the castle.” It seemed a very sensible rule, honestly, and I wondered what had happened to make it necessary. Fasha led us west around the city, across the Mews River, and south toward an armed encampment on the plain.

  At first I wasn’t sure whose army it was, but then I saw the Goreddi green and violet flying from one of the larger tents. These were our knights, it looked like, the ones who’d escaped Fort Oversea with Sir Maurizio.

  The night watchmen, who’d been playing cards and watching the sunrise, cried out at our approach and scrambled into a more defensive stance, polearms at the ready. A skinny fellow—Sir Maurizio himself—emerged from one of the largest tents in just his breeches, blinking and scratching his shaggy head. As we drew closer, he spotted me, waved enthusiastically, and tugged a shirt on over his head.

  We set down in a nearby beet field. Brisi miscalculated the softness of the ground and had to flap her wings like a hummingbird to avoid crushing my litter into the dirt. Sir Maurizio struggled against the hot headwind but was soon at my side, reaching out to untangle me from the basket.

  He helped me get clear of the flapping wings, then turned and saluted the two dragons, shouting, “Thank you, Saar Fasha and Saar Other-Dragon-I-Don’t-Know!”

  “Colibris!” screamed Brisi, arching her neck proudly. “A Porphyrian dragon. Witness how I am not as useless as you supposed!”

  That last comment was directed at Saar Fasha, I assumed. He took off again at once, without a word; Brisi had to scramble to catch up. Once in the air, she flew impertinent circles around his head like a crow harassing an eagle, and I couldn’t help smiling. That hatchling was going to find her own way.

  Around camp, dracomachists had emerged from their tents in defensive stances, as if they slept with their polearms at hand; they now relaxed and stretched and went looking for breakfast. Sir Maurizio led me to one of the command tents—distinguishable by its stripes and by the fact that an adult could stand upright inside—just as a young man came barreling out, still buttoning his scarlet doublet, and nearly crashed into us.

  It was Prince Lucian Kiggs. “Seraphina!” he cried, clasping my hands impulsively and letting them go almost as fast. He’d kept the beard, to my absurd delight.

  “She fell from the sky like a comet,” said Maurizio, grinning roguishly. “Is Sir Cuthberte decent? In body, I mean. His mind is always in doubt.”

  “These walls are quite thin, you know,” called a grumpy voice, only slightly muffled by the canvas. “And of course I am. I was up before all you laggards.”

  “Good morning, Prince Lucian,” I said, my voice husky with exhaustion and disuse. “I need to speak with the Queen at once, and then I should like to sleep. I’ve been nocturnal for the past week; I’m up past my bedtime.”

  The smiles around me had all evaporated; Kiggs and Maurizio exchanged a glance I couldn’t interpret. I was suddenly struck by the strangeness of Kiggs camping out with the knights. “What is it?” I said qui
etly. “What’s happened?”

  Kiggs’s mouth puckered as if he tasted bitter bile. “I can’t take you to the Queen. She’s forbidden me to set foot in the city.”

  “What?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  Kiggs shook his head, too angry to speak. Maurizio stepped in. “We arrived two weeks ago; Jannoula arrived three days before we did.”

  I inhaled sharply, my heart sinking like a stone. “Saints’ dogs!”

  “The guards at the gates had orders to seize her on sight, but she persuaded them not to, or so I’m told,” said Sir Maurizio. “Lars of Apsig, who was overseeing construction on the city walls, supposedly smuggled Jannoula into the palace.”

  “She’s wormed her way into my home,” said Kiggs, worry written plainly in his eyes, “and has clearly influenced Selda—”

  “We don’t know that yet,” said Maurizio.

  “The worst of it,” said a portly old man with a drooping white mustache, opening the tent flap behind Kiggs, “is that Jannoula’s proclaimed herself a Saint, and instead of sensibly throwing her out on her ear, the city can’t seem to get enough of her.”

  I met Sir Cuthberte’s sad gaze; he held the tent flap wider. “Come in, all of you. Seraphina hasn’t told her news yet. I suspect we’ll want to be sitting down.”

  Sir Cuthberte Pettybone hobbled into the dim command tent and sat gingerly on a three-legged folding stool. Sir Maurizio motioned us toward places on the floor beside a large map covered in little figurines. The morning sun shone through tiny holes in the canvas ceiling.

  “You’ll forgive an old man taking the only chair, Prince, Seraphina,” said Sir Cuthberte, rubbing his knees as if they ached. Besides his long white mustache, what hair he still possessed stuck out behind each ear like a pale, tufty bird’s nest. “It’s hardly courteous, but I am not as spry as I once was.”

  “Liar,” said Sir Maurizio. “We know you’re saving it up for the dragons, going to kill them with courtesy.” Sir Cuthberte cough-laughed.

  My eyes adjusted, and I noticed that the markers on the map weren’t figurines as such, but stones, clumps of sod, and a handful of broad beans. The map was a charcoal sketch on a blanket.

  “The Old Ard are rocks. Our side—Goreddi and Loyalist, and the Ninysh, if they ever get here—are clods, which I thought apropos,” explained Maurizio, noticing where I gazed. “The beans are the Samsamese. Our scouts report that they’re coming from the south-southwest, and that they’re delicious in stew.”

  Sir Cuthberte struggled with a smile under his mustache. “Forgive our squire, Seraphina. You recall what a dedicated nuisance he is.”

  “That’s Sir Dedicated Nuisance now,” said Maurizio, sniffing in mock offense.

  “The Samsamese look close,” I said. “How long until they get here?”

  “They could be here in a week,” said Maurizio.

  “And how long until the Loyalists feint south?” I asked. The map, for all that it was cartoonish and covered in clods, made this looming campaign feel suddenly real.

  “General Zira’s current estimate, based on Comonot’s progress reports, is three weeks,” said Sir Maurizio. “He’s just taken Lab Six, if that means anything to anyone, and he wants to connect with more Loyalist enclaves before he enters the capital.”

  I gaped at Maurizio. “So we could be fighting the Samsamese before the Old Ard even get here?”

  “Could be,” he said. “We’re not entirely sure what the Regent thinks he’s doing.”

  “When the Samsamese took Fort Oversea,” said Sir Cuthberte grimly, “I said to myself that Josef must be itching to fight dragons. I didn’t see how he was going to persuade the Ninysh and Goreddi dracomachists to cooperate with him.” From inside his tabard he untucked a silver chain holding a pendant in the shape of a dragon’s head. “You remember Sir Karal, my comradein-arms?”

  “Of course,” I said. Karal had been imprisoned with Cuthberte when I’d interviewed them about a rogue dragon. He’d been much surlier than Cuthberte.

  “You recall what a skeptical old nut he was. He never would have agreed to Samsamese treachery.” Cuthberte waved the dragon-head thnik. “I can speak to him with this. For a few days after our escape, he was plotting and scheming, looking for a way to free the lot of them from Samsamese tyranny. Then something happened.”

  I had a terrible feeling I knew what it was.

  “The knights and dracomachists were visited by ‘a living Saint,’ ” said Cuthberte bitterly. “Sir Karal told me—joyfully!—that he’d seen the light of Heaven in her, that it was lucky he hadn’t escaped with the rest of us, or he’d have missed his higher purpose.”

  “And what is that higher purpose?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “To kill dragons,” said Sir Cuthberte, glaring under his brows like a formidable owl. “All dragons, even Goredd’s allies.”

  I tried to make sense of this. If Jannoula was General Laedi, working for the Old Ard, why would she raise an army of Samsamese to fight against the dragons? Did she think they’d kill more Loyalists than Old Ard dragons, or that they’d fight Goredd, too, and weaken us? It reminded me of the Old Ard victories she’d plotted, where so many dragons had died on both sides that victory was hardly the word for it. Did she consider those losses worth it?

  The Old Ard seemed to, with their new logic. I felt like I had all the pieces in front of me and couldn’t put them together.

  “Anders saw the light of Heaven, too,” Kiggs was saying. “Phina should hear his story.”

  Maurizio unfolded his lanky frame and left the tent. He soon returned, leading a callow young dracomachist with a shock of straw-like hair. The fellow had been apprehended in the middle of breakfast; his upper lip was foamy with goat’s milk. He wiped it on his sleeve.

  “Squire Anders,” said Sir Cuthberte sternly, drawing his frosty brows down. “This is Seraphina. She wishes to hear about your meeting with the Queen.”

  “I delivered your missive, as per your command,” said young Anders, standing stiffly at attention. “An’ I made sure the Queen read it and all. She threw it in the fire and said under no circumstances is Prince Lucian to set foot in the city, and that he could obey his Queen for once in his life, the villain.” The squire paled and nodded courtesy at the prince. “Begging your pardon, Your Highness.”

  Kiggs gave a desultory nod and gestured for him to continue.

  “What happened as you were leaving?” Sir Cuthberte prompted.

  Anders’s expression softened and his gaze grew distant. “Ah, that’s when I saw the living Saint, sir, coming in as I were leaving. She knew my name an’ touched my chin an’ said, ‘Count yourself among the blessed, and take my word to your squadmates.’ And then she … she …”

  “Tell the rest,” said Sir Cuthberte.

  Anders kicked at the ground with his toe. “No one believes me. If you’ve brought me in so this maidy can laugh at me, I don’t—”

  “No, no,” said Sir Maurizio gently, clapping the squire’s shoulder. “She’s well brought up; she’ll wait until you’ve gone.”

  “Well,” said Anders, peeking shyly at me, “then I saw the light of Heaven. I swear by St. Prue, it were all around her, glowing like a Speculus lantern, or the moon, or … or like the heart of the whole world.”

  I didn’t laugh. I felt a terrible sadness, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because Jannoula was preying on the gullible; maybe because even the gullible could see this light that I could not.

  “Thank you, Anders, that’s all,” Sir Maurizio said, letting the lad out. The tent flap swung behind him, and Maurizio sat back down.

  Kiggs met my eyes, a quiet outrage in his. “How are people taken in by this?” He didn’t say it out loud, but I suspected there was another question behind the first: Do you think Glisselda has been fooled as well?

  “I warned the Queen about it,” I said, trying to reassure him. “It’s the ityasaari mind-fire, the stuff they weave St. Abaster’s Trap with.” I wav
ed a hand around my head, as if I had this unseen corona. “Jannoula can make hers visible to humans. That’s how she could influence Josef even though he hates and fears half-dragons.”

  Kiggs slapped his thigh. “I knew there had to be a trick to it! She’s no more Saint than you are.”

  His words hit me hard; he was right in more senses than he knew, but I couldn’t tell him about Orma’s theory, St. Yirtrudis’s testament, or the Great Mistake. Not now, in front of everyone. I didn’t know how the knights would take it.

  I wasn’t sure how Kiggs would take it, either. He’d be interested, I had no doubt, but he was more religious than I was. Would it also be upsetting?

  Kiggs, who was studying my expression, said gently, “There was something you needed to tell Selda. What was it?”

  I took a deep breath and dove in. “I learned some things about Jannoula at Lab Four. Her uncle, General Palonn—is that a name you’re familiar with?”

  Sir Cuthberte nodded solemnly. “He’s the Old Ard’s most aggressive general. Likely to be the next Ardmagar, if and when they finish the current one off.”

  I grimaced. “Palonn gave Jannoula to the Censors as an infant, and they experimented on her.” There was a sharp intake of breath around the tent. I continued: “The Old Ard learned she was a talented strategist. They nicknamed her General Laedi.”

  “The butcher of Homand-Eynn?” said Sir Cuthberte incredulously.

  “And she’s in the palace with Selda!” cried Kiggs, who seemed ready to leap up and storm the gates of Lavondaville himself.

  Sir Maurizio was shaking his head, coming up with an argument of his own. “I can’t make it make sense,” he said, scratching his shaggy head. “If Jannoula is working for the enemy, and she’s the strategist you claim, why would she goad the Samsamese into biting her masters in the arse?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The Old Ard believe she’s acting in their interests, but they also plan to kill her when she stops being useful. She’s astute enough to realize this, I should think. Might she be taking countermeasures to save herself?” It still didn’t add up. “We need to learn her true purpose, and how much influence she has over Queen Glisselda.”