Jannoula shoved an enormous chunk of marzipan into her mouth and grinned.
“Why would you do that?” I cried, furious with her.
“For your birthday,” she said with her mouth full, a wicked spark in her eyes. “My gift to you: an understanding that everything you love is mine. Mine to spoil, mine to bestow.” She plucked blackberries off the torte, piling them in her left hand, and then rose to go. “Come, we’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”
“You have caused my friends Heaven knows what heartache!” I cried. “I’m not walking away from them like a villain.”
Jannoula clamped a hand on my arm and pulled me to my feet. She was stronger than she looked. “The amusing thing is,” she said, exhaling damp blackberry breath in my face, “you don’t know the half of it. I know them better than you do. I know so many things you can’t even imagine, Seraphina. I know the Loyalists will arrive sooner than anyone realizes, and that I could make St. Abaster’s Trap all by myself.”
Her words struck fear into my heart. This talk of making the trap by herself … had she learned what we were planning? I couldn’t tell. She made sure to leave plenty of doubt.
She marched me back to the Ard Tower. I didn’t resist—there wasn’t time. Jannoula swept me upstairs to the chapel, where the ityasaari lingered over their porridge.
“Forgive me for interrupting your meal, brethren,” cried Jannoula, “but it’s time! The Loyalists approach, and the Old Ard will be close on their tails. St. Abaster’s Trap must be put to its holy purpose. Today the world will witness what the minds of the blessed can do.”
The others leaped to their feet, muttering enthusiastically, and filed up the spiral stair. Camba wasn’t with them; she took her meals in her room because she couldn’t climb the stairs. She wouldn’t know things were moving forward earlier than expected. It was hard to feel for her mind-fire in my garden without calming my mind first, but sometimes desperation did the trick. Camba, I thought at her, be ready to start unhooking people if Jannoula falls.
Jannoula grabbed my arm again, and I jumped. “Come watch us. Even one who insists on walking this world alone must be awed by what we can accomplish together.”
She’d anticipated my request. That could not be good. I followed her up the stairs, my heart sinking into my shoes.
The others were already gathered on the roof, twelve ityasaari: Nedouard, Blanche, Lars, Mina, Phloxia, Od Fredricka, Brasidas, Gaios, Gelina, Gianni Patto, Dame Okra, and Ingar. The rain clouds had parted, and the sunlight made their white garments gleam like a beacon, like the ard fires of old. They stood in a semicircle before the low balustrade wall. Blanche was tied to Lars with a rope too short to wrap around her neck, safe against her will.
If our plan worked, Blanche might soon be free. I hoped for it fervently.
They joined hands in a horseshoe, open toward the northern mountains, Ingar at one end and Nedouard at the other. I lingered to one side. Jannoula joined the very center of the line, her mouth bowed upward into a hard little smile. She began a ritual chant from St. Yirtrudis’s testament, what the Saints of old had recited when they strung their minds with St. Abaster’s: We are one mind, mind within mind, mind beyond mind, warp and weft of the greater mind.
I edged up to Ingar and quietly said, “Guaiong.”
Ingar came to himself, eyelids fluttering open, and nodded at me. He remembered what to do. At the other end of the chain, Nedouard nodded back.
Jannoula closed her eyes. I could almost follow her mind-fire traveling down the line, each ityasaari gasping in turn, expressions melting into something ecstatic—except for Blanche, who whimpered in pain.
Ingar and Nedouard tensed their shoulders as if bracing for a blow, ready to cast their wills against Jannoula’s. I pressed my hands together, praying to no one in particular. This had to work.
Jannoula opened one eye and looked at me, a slow-motion wink in reverse. She grinned with perfect feline malice, threw her head back, and cried out. I thought—hoped—she had been hit with reflected fire, but then Nedouard and Ingar screamed and fell to their knees, writhing in agony.
“I can be a mirror, too,” said Jannoula. “And Nedouard can be my spy without even knowing it.”
Nedouard rolled around, weeping and flailing; Ingar clutched his head in torment.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Don’t punish them. It was my idea.”
“Oh, I’m punishing you, too,” she said. Nedouard and Ingar screamed louder. Tears sprang to my eyes; I could not bear this.
Jannoula stood between Od Fredricka and Brasidas. She stepped out of line and joined their hands together behind her, like latching a door. I backed away from her without looking, remembered how high we were, and sank to my knees dizzily. Jannoula hauled me to my feet. The world reeled.
“Look!” she cried, forcing me up to the low retaining wall, pointing at a dark line rising above the peaks like a storm front. There were more dragons than I had ever seen at one time, Comonot’s Loyalists making their strategic retreat.
“Now look here,” she commanded, wheeling me around to face the southwest. Past our encamped knights, past our baronets and their bivouacked armies, past the colorful force arrived this week from Ninys, columns of dark-uniformed troops crossed the horizon.
“The Samsamese,” I croaked. “Whose side will they take?”
She shrugged. “Who can say?”
“Surely you can. You maneuvered them here.”
Jannoula laughed. “That’s the beauty of it. I genuinely don’t know. Perhaps Josef will sit and watch. Perhaps some of the Goreddi and Ninysh knights he pressed into service will turn on him. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it?
“You haven’t even seen the Old Ard yet. The sky will be full of fire.” She raised her pointed chin into the wind, like she was posing for a portrait. “Of course, there might have been more, but a third of the Old Ard’s forces went back to the Kerama to intercept Comonot.”
That news arrived like a punch in the face. I had thought myself such a skeptic, the only one who knew what she really was, but I’d believed her when she said she wasn’t working for the Old Ard.
She gazed at me coolly. “Oh, come now, don’t sulk. Comonot has a chance. He’s taken four labs, gaining momentum and support as he goes; he’s persuaded backwater settlements to join him, and every quig in the Tanamoot is his friend.” Her face puckered when she said quig, as if she could smell one. “At least, that’s the last we’ve heard. The Queen’s only communication link to him has been mysteriously severed.”
I suspected this was not so mysterious, at least to Jannoula.
“Anyway, it seemed unsporting that he should walk into the capital virtually unopposed,” she said. “No one would die. Peace might break out before I wished it to.”
“You’ve bent this entire war to your own ends,” I croaked. “You shaped this new ideology of draconic purity so they wouldn’t mind sacrificing themselves.”
“Oh, it’s not new.” The wind made her short brown hair stand up on her head. “It just needed refinement so they wouldn’t mind fighting to the death. After all, a pure dragon should not care about dying. Caring is an emotion; emotions are human and corrupt. A dragon who cares is not a dragon.”
“You don’t care,” I said. “I’ve felt so much guilt for having abandoned you to them. So much pity and remorse. But you just want dragons to die.”
“Not just dragons,” she said, her eyes diamond-sharp. “Humans are no better. My mother left me the memory of my human father and my violent conception. She wanted me to understand human nature. She was a bell-exempt student, walking home at night; he was a rapist. I had nightmares about it when I was small, but now I’ve visited the alley where it happened. I understand what a fool she was. She should have killed him then and there, the treaty be damned. He was a monster; she was not monster enough.”
“I’m so sorry,” I half whispered, as if my pity could make any difference now.
Jannoula scof
fed. “We are Saints, Seraphina. It is our right to decide who dies, our privilege to move pieces across the chessboard of history.” She gestured as if she were crashing two stones together, or two skulls. “We may break this world as we see fit.”
Her face had become a mask. “This is my war. All sides will destroy each other, and those who survive will be ours. We shall rule them with justice and mercy, and we shall finally be free. I have ordained it.”
The first wave of Loyalists had reached us; they screamed by overhead. Jannoula smirked and reached over Ingar’s twitching body for Dame Okra’s hand. Jannoula threw back her head, and the force of her will rippled down the chain. I could not see the light they made, but I didn’t have to.
Dragons began falling out of the sky.
I’d been adamantly opposed to killing Jannoula; that seemed naive now. In a surge of desperation, I rushed her, trying to catch her off balance and disrupt the trap somehow.
Without even opening her eyes, she blocked me with the collective mind-fire and slammed me back against the parapet like some irritating insect.
Gianni Patto, grinning toothily, broke the line and approached me with his big hands extended. I’d hit my head; I couldn’t dodge. He tossed me over his shoulder, which stabbed me painfully in the stomach. For a moment, the world seemed to stand still while I saw everything: the blue slate rooftops of Castle Orison, armies crawling across the plain, dragons drifting in the air around us like autumn leaves on a pond. Jannoula laughing.
Then Gianni hauled me down the tower, skittered across the flagstone courtyard on his big chicken feet, and lumbered into the palace. He hit my head on a door frame coming in, and then on another at my final destination, some disused suite on the third floor facing south. He dumped me unceremoniously on the bare wooden floor and banged the door shut behind me.
I scrambled to my feet and tested the door. It wasn’t locked. I opened it a crack, only to see Gianni Patto sitting on the floor outside. He turned his big ugly pumpkin head to grin at me, and I slammed the door in his face.
I took stock of where I was. There was a broad bed with no linens, tall windows with no drapes, empty shelves, an empty cedar chest, an empty fireplace. The suite had only two rooms, the smaller of which, a dressing room, had south- and west-facing windows.
There were no sheets or drapes I could use to climb out a window, and no hidden doors, but I could watch the war from here. Jannoula had thought of everything.
The battle was unfolding before my eyes. The Loyalists flew past the city, doubled back sharply, and clashed with the Old Ard in the overcast sky. The Old Ard had been so close on the Loyalists’ tails that I hadn’t distinguished the two waves until the Loyalists turned. Dragons grappled and flamed above the city. St. Abaster’s Trap brought down dozens from both sides.
Dropping our allies was no accident. Jannoula knew what she was doing.
On the plain, Samsam hit Goredd’s flank; Josef had apparently decided to punish us. The knights left the Samsamese to the Ninysh and Goreddi foot soldiers; their job was to engage the dragons. During the Age of Saints, they’d had ways to fight dragons in the sky—missiles and wings—but these arts had been lost to the ages, or had died with the banishment of our knights. Nine months had not been long enough to revive them. The dragons of the Old Ard stayed high and focused intently on the Loyalists, out of range of our dracomachists for now.
What was happening to Comonot in the north? Had he already struck at the Kerama, only to find it held more strongly than anticipated? I dreaded to think what the result would be if he was defeated.
Jannoula had played all sides against one another. I should have killed her weeks ago. I’d had abundant time and opportunity.
I’d been so certain I could find another way.
If only I could have unbound my own mind-fire, surely I could have made a difference. I flopped onto the bare bed, meditated until I found the garden gate, said the ritual words, and entered. My garden, once so full of life and promise, looked like nothing more than a weed-strewn lawn around the Wee Cottage, with a swamp at one edge of it. There was a rail fence around the whole thing—that was absurd. I might have kicked a rail fence over in the real world, but this one had me bound up tightly. I circled the perimeter—a five-minute walk, if that—and even came up with a silly ritual chant: Unbind, unbind, dissolve, dissolve. Nothing happened.
I looked at my garden denizens, scattered across the lawn like twigs. The little Abdo twig was upright. Maybe it was a sign. I took his tiny hands and whirled out into a vision.
He was still at that roadside shrine, surviving on offerings. In fact, he seemed to have acquired a following; someone had put a knit cap on his head, and there were scraps of parchment tucked into his tunic. Those would be prayers and intercessions. Someone who could meditate as long as he had must have Heaven’s favor.
Abdo had evaded Jannoula for weeks now. If I escaped, the two of us together could figure out how to release each other and fight back.
I returned to my garden, and it occurred to me that there might be a way to walk through my wider mind along the other side of the wall. I’d never tried to see my garden from there; generally the gate just appeared, as if out of a fog. I stepped out and turned to face it. Spreading to either side were the high, crenellated battlements of a castle. This was what held me in, not the rail fence.
I wasn’t going to tumble this wall by walking around it, although I did try. It was all I could think to do.
A knock at the door yanked me out of my head abruptly. I flailed around the bed, disoriented. The room was dark; night had fallen without my noticing.
I felt my way to the door, opened it, and then stood there blinking at lamplight from the hallway. A shadowy figure loomed before me, lit from behind so I couldn’t see who it was. There were two palace guards behind him, and Gianni Patto was nowhere to be seen.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” said a familiar basso voice, and I thought my heart would break.
Now that my eyes were adjusting, I recognized the beaky nose and piercing eyes. He wasn’t wearing his false beard, and his shrubby hair had been trimmed in some kind of monk’s tonsure—in fact, he was wearing the mustard-colored habit of St. Gobnait’s Order. “Orma,” I managed to whisper.
He glanced behind him as if he were concerned the guards had heard me. They just looked bored. Orma cleared his throat. “Brother Norman,” he said. “I was sent with a message.” He held out a folded parchment letter, sealed with wax.
“W-won’t you come in for a moment?” I said. “And bring a lamp, uh, please. I have no light in here.”
Orma cocked his head to one side, considering. I could have wept at that dear, familiar quirk. The scruffy guards seemed amused. One took a lantern down from its wall niche and passed it to Orma. “Take your time in there, Brother,” he said with a wink.
“Take all night,” said the other, waggling his bushy brows.
Orma, looking perplexed by the innuendo, followed me into the room and closed the door behind us. He set the lantern upon the cedar chest at the end of the bed, and I saw, behind his right ear, the telltale excision scar. I did weep then. I turned my back to him and broke the seal on the letter, sniffling and trying to keep my breath even, wiping my eyes on my linen sleeve. I held the letter so it caught the light, and read in Jannoula’s blocky hand:
I almost forgot that I had another birthday present for you. Well, not exactly for you. Everything you love is mine. That’s how it has to be. Who has hurt me more than you? Who showed me loving kindness, let me dream of freedom, only to snatch it all away? This monster helped, of course, but he’s just an empty shell now. I can’t hollow you out the same way, but you’re going to wish I could.
I crumpled up her letter and threw it as hard as I could across the room. Orma, who had placed himself near the door, standing with hands folded, said placidly, “I take it there’s no reply?”
There was no point asking if he remembered me; he clearl
y did not. I said, “Are you the one Jannoula visits at the seminary? Her spiritual advisor?”
“It would be inaccurate to call me an advisor,” he said, looking mildly puzzled. “She comes to the seminary to dictate her memoirs to me. Her handwriting is terrible.”
So I’d been right about one thing. It was cold comfort. “But why are you at the seminary to begin with? You’re not a monk. I know you’re a saarantras.”
He ran his tongue over his teeth. “And how do you know that?”
“I used to know you,” I said, my heart pounding. Was it wise to talk to an excision victim about the things he couldn’t remember? I nervously twisted his ring on my pinkie, and then suddenly it hit me: What if the ring he’d sent me was the trigger for his mind-pearl? I hardly dared hope. I held out my finger and waggled the pearl ring at him.
He stared blankly at my hand, then at my face. Nothing changed in his expression.
“You may be mistaken,” he said. “The human mind produces an astonishing variety of false memories—”
“You were excised!” I cried, furious and frustrated. “You’ve got the scar. I’m one of the things they took from you.” I racked my memory for anything else Eskar or the exiles had told me about excision. “Do you take destultia?”
He recoiled a little from my vehemence. “Yes, but again, you are mistaken. I have a heart condition called pyrocardia. When I am full-sized, my heart overheats until it catches fire inside me. Human form is safer, but I still could suffer an infarction. I was prescribed destultia, and they excised my memories of catching fire, because those are traumatic.”
“You used to be a musicologist,” I said. “Do you remember none of that?”
He shrugged. “I study monastic history. You have clearly confused me with someone else.” He paused, as if this conversation were too boring to sustain. “If that’s all, I should be getting back.”
And then he was gone. He took the lantern. I was too shattered to protest.
I fell asleep at some point. Another knock dragged me from my dreams. I buried my face in the feather mattress. The knocking continued. I had no idea what time it was, only that I was furious and exhausted. I pulled myself out of bed and threw open the door. The leering guards from earlier had been replaced by a gray-haired, wiry man in the Queen’s livery, with pox-scarred cheeks and a large jaw. Illuminated from below by a lantern, he looked sinister. He held out a scrap of palimpsest. I took it with trembling fingers.