The Queen’s support for the project, however, depended more on whether we could get this mysterious barrier working than on my wish to find the others. I gathered the three ityasaari of my acquaintance that afternoon to see what we could do. Lars offered the use of Viridius’s suite.
Viridius was home and, because he was having a good day gout-wise, sitting up at the harpsichord in his brocade dressing gown, caressing the keys with his gnarled fingers. “Don’t mind me,” he said when I arrived, waggling his bushy red eyebrows. “Lars tells me this is half-dragon business; I won’t interfere. I just need to get the second theme of this concerto grosso down.”
Lars entered from the other room, a delicate porcelain teapot held gingerly in one large hand. He paused by Viridius and squeezed the old composer’s shoulder; Viridius leaned briefly into Lars’s arm and then turned back to his work. Lars brought the tea around and filled the five cups on the ornate table by the gout couch. Dame Okra had claimed the couch, putting up her feet and spreading her stiff green skirts around her. Abdo, swathed in a long knit tunic against the cold, bounced on his upholstered chair as if he could barely be constrained to sit, his long sleeves flapping over his hands like flippers. I took the other couch, and Lars settled his bulk carefully beside me, trading me a cup of tea for Orma’s letter, which the other two had just read.
“Have you heard of anything like this?” I said, glancing from Dame Okra’s scowl to Abdo’s wide brown eyes. “Mental connections have occurred with some of us. Abdo can speak in our heads; my mind used to reach out compulsively to other half-dragons.” Jannoula had entered my mind and seized it, but I didn’t like talking about that. “What kind of connection is this mind-threading?”
“I’ll tell you right now, I won’t participate in any mind-threading,” said Dame Okra flatly, her eyes swimming behind her thick spectacles. “It sounds horrible.”
It sounds interesting to me, said Abdo’s voice in my head.
“Do you know whether the Porphyrian ityasaari have ever joined together this way, or used their … their mind-stuff for this kind of physical manifestation?” I asked aloud so Dame Okra and Lars could hear half the conversation, anyway. Abdo’s mouth and tongue were shingled with silver dragon scales, and he could not speak aloud.
No. But we do know about mind-stuff. We call it soul-light. With practice, some of us can learn to see it around other ityasaari, like a second self made of sunlight. I can reach out with mine a little; that’s how I talk to them. I send out a finger of fire, said Abdo, sending his real finger in a slow, dramatic arc to poke Lars in the stomach.
Lars, his lips moving as he read, swatted Abdo’s hand away.
Abdo gestured at Dame Okra with his head. Her light is spiny, like a hedgehog, but Lars’s is gentle and friendly.
I saw nothing around either of them, but I noted an omission. What about mine?
Abdo studied the air around my head, toying with one of his many hair knots. I see strands of light sticking out of your head like snakes, or umbilical cords, where we three—and others—are connected to you. Cords of our light. I don’t see your light, and I don’t know why.
Heat rose in my cheeks. My light was missing? What did that mean? Was I deficient? An anomaly even among anomalies?
Dame Okra interjected in a voice like a braying mule: “Might we all participate in this conversation? That requires it to be audible.” She paused, her scowl deepening. “No, don’t talk to me silently, you villain. I won’t tolerate it.” She glared at Abdo and waved a hand around her head as if fending off gnats.
“He says we’ve all got—” The word soul-light didn’t sit well with me; it smacked of religion, which brought me quickly to judgmental Saints. “Mind-fire. He can see it.”
Lars carefully folded Orma’s letter and placed it on the couch between us, shrugging his bulky shoulders. “I can’t do anythink special with my mindt, as far as I know, but I am heppy to be a bead if someone else is the string.”
“I’m sure that will be fine, Lars,” I said, nodding encouragingly. “Abdo or I will discover the way to thread through you.”
I don’t think you can reach out like that, Phina madamina, said Abdo.
“I’ve reached out with my mind before,” I said, more waspishly than I meant to. I had reached back into Jannoula’s mind; I suppressed that memory at once.
Recently? he said, pulling the neck of his tunic up over his mouth.
“Give me a minute to relax into it. I’ll show you,” I said, glaring at the little skeptic. I nestled into a corner of the couch, closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing. It took time, because Dame Okra snorted like a horse, and then Viridius kept tinkling away on the harpsichord until Lars stepped over and gently asked him to stop.
I finally found my garden, and then Loud Lad’s ravine in the middle of it. Loud Lad sat upon the lip of the chasm, as if waiting for me, a beatific smile on his round face. I prodded him to standing, and then concentrated on myself. I always imagined myself bodily present in the garden; I liked feeling the dewy grass between my toes. When I had tried this before—with Jannoula—I had needed to imagine that the grotesque and I were immaterial.
With effort, Loud Lad began to blur around the edges, then turn translucent in the middle. I could make out shapes through him. My own hands grew transparent, and when I was insubstantial enough, I stepped into Loud Lad to join my mind-stuff with his.
I passed through him as if he were fog. A second try gave the same result.
“It’s like trying to travel through a spyglass,” said a voice behind me in the garden. “If we could do that, I’d step through and visit the moon.”
I turned around to see Fruit Bat—Abdo’s double—animated by Abdo’s consciousness. He could speak in my garden, unhindered by his scaly throat; this was how he spoke in my mind.
“I’ve done this before,” I said.
“Yes, but your mind may have changed since then,” he said, his dark eyes solemn. “It has changed in the time I’ve known you. I walked out of this garden and into your wider mind once—do you remember?”
I did. I had been depressed, and then a door had appeared in the undifferentiated fog of … of the rest of my mind. He had stepped through to comfort me, but I’d taken him for a second Jannoula. “I made you promise to stay in the garden after that,” I said.
He nodded. “That’s not all you did. You took precautions. There used to be an Abdo-sized hole in the wall, but you bricked it up.”
Not intentionally, if so. The garden’s edge was in sight; I pointed crossly. “Bricked? It’s a woven willow fence.”
“Ah, madamina. I know you call this place a garden, but it doesn’t look like one to me. I see us confined to a narrow gatehouse, with no admittance to the castle of your larger mind.”
I looked around at the lush vegetation, the soaring blue sky, Loud Lad’s deep ravine. “That’s absurd,” I said, trying to laugh, but deeply confused. This place had been created by my imagination, of course, but was its appearance so subjective?
This wasn’t solving our mind-threading problem. “Even if I can’t reach out to Lars,” I said, “can you reach out and thread your mind-fire to mine? Make me a bead on the string?”
Abdo bit his lip and darted his gaze about. “Maybe,” he said slowly.
“Go ahead and try it,” I said.
There was a pause and then a blinding flash of pain, as if my head would split in two. I screamed—in my head? in the real world?—and scrabbled around the garden, looking for the egression gate. I found it and returned to myself, my throbbing head cradled in someone’s hands.
Abdo’s. He was leaning over me, his brown eyes brimming with regret. Did I hurt you, Phina madamina?
I sat up straighter, shakily, blinking against the glare from Viridius’s windows. “I’m all right now.”
I should have listened to my instinct, he fretted, patting my cheek and then my hair. I can enter Fruit Bat, but I can’t go any further into your mind than that. I can’t see, let alone touch, your soul-light, not even from your garden. I don’t know what else to try.
I took a juddering breath. “T-try with Lars. The Queen won’t let me go looking for the others if we can’t make this work.”
Lars’s sea-gray eyes had grown enormous, watching me; he ran a nervous hand through his bristly blond hair. Abdo must have spoken reassuringly in his head, because Lars joined him on the Zibou carpet, sitting cross-legged and joining hands. He nodded at intervals, then turned to us and said, “We are tryink one idea Abdo has. He doesn’t know if it works. He asks thet Dame Okra tell him if she sees anything.”
“What kind of anything?” said Dame Okra warily.
“Soul-light. Mind-fire. Whatever you like to call it,” said Lars, smiling. “Abdo is curious whether you can see it when we weave ours together.”
I was excluded from that hope, I noted sourly. Was it because I had no visible mind-fire? Did that make me more like an ordinary human? All my life I had longed to be ordinary; how ridiculous to be disgruntled when I finally was. It was no use being envious; we were all different.
Dame Okra emitted a skeptical grunt. Viridius, who’d resumed composing, did a quarter turn on the harpsichord bench, the better to see this mind-fire for himself. He’d been excluded from Abdo’s hope as well; at least I wasn’t alone.
Abdo and Lars closed their eyes; Lars’s enormous pink hands almost engulfed Abdo’s wiry brown ones. I studied their faces and was relieved—not envious—to see no pain there. Indeed, Lars’s face went slack and sleepy. Abdo pursed his lips, concentrating.
“Blue St. Prue!” cried Dame Okra.
“Do you see it? Where is it?” said Viridius, his blue eyes darting sharply.
Dame Okra squinted at the empty space above Lars’s and Abdo’s heads, the lines beside her mouth deepening. “That wouldn’t stop a dragon,” she said. She tossed back the dregs of her tea and then threw the cup as hard as she could toward the space.
Viridius, in her line of fire, threw up his gout-swollen hands, but the cup never reached him. It stopped short, wobbling in midair as if caught in a giant spiderweb, and remained suspended for several seconds before dropping to the carpet between Abdo and Lars.
“Saints’ dogs!” Viridius swore. He’d picked up that expression from me.
Dame Okra sneered. “That’s not nothing, but is it really the best you can do?”
Abdo opened one eye, which twinkled mischievously, then closed it again. Dame Okra watched, arms folded. Suddenly she cried, “Duck!” and threw herself flat on the ground.
Viridius followed suit without questioning, flinging himself off the harpsichord stool. My pathetic reflexes, alas, were too slow off the mark. Harpsichord strings twanged and windows shattered as I was bowled over the back of the couch.