I wanted this day to be over so badly, but sleep fled, leaving me nothing but self-recrimination. I should have let Abdo go back to Segosh with Blanche. I should have skipped the monastery altogether and left Od Fredricka alone. I should never have come after Gianni Patto, who had even less language than Blanche and liked to wrestle bears. I hadn’t believed him dangerous; that seemed so foolish now. He’d snapped the monk’s neck with his bare hands. I revisited that moment as I tossed and turned, the monk flopping grotesquely off the rooftop over and over in my mind’s eye.
I recalled Gianni speaking my name, and shuddered. That cat-like expression …
I sat bolt upright, horrified. It was well past midnight, but I leaped out of bed, put my breeches and boots back on, and crept out of my room.
Outside Josquin’s door, I hesitated, wanting to wake him and fearing what he would witness if I did, and what he would think of me after. He’d become a friend, I realized.
I could not bear to lose his regard. I let him lie.
I found my way out of the keep and crossed the moonlit courtyard to the round tower. The outer door was guarded. My Ninysh was too poor to bluff my way in, but the guardsman must have had some idea of who I was. He gestured me to wait while he went indoors; to my surprise, he came back out with Moy. “We’re guarding the wild man in shifts,” said the captain, smiling. “You want a turn? We were rude not to offer.”
“I want to talk to him—alone,” I said. “He’s not still being violent, is he?”
Moy shrugged. “He’s been quiet as a lamb behind that solid oak door. You can talk through the grating, though I’m not sure he talks.”
Gianni Patto shouldn’t have had any language. When he’d said my name, that should have clued me in right away. I’d been too upset about Abdo to notice.
Moy held the tower door open and closed it behind me. I was in a short, high-ceilinged corridor, lit by a single torch in a sconce. There was a knife and whittled stick upon a stool; Moy apparently passed his time carving. The only occupied cell was on the left at the end. The fetid stench of unwashed wild man made the air heavy.
“Gianni?” I said, looking through the door’s grating. A barred window across the cell let in a trickle of moonlight, but not enough for me to see the prisoner. I called his name again, and suddenly his eye was at the grating, pale and rheumy and wild.
He startled me into taking a step back; I forced myself not to look away. “You spoke my name,” I said quietly. “Someone must have taught it to you. Who was it?”
His eye reeled, unfocused. He’d understood nothing; if he’d known any language at all—and I still believed he shouldn’t—it could only have been Ninysh. He’d clearly been living alone on the mountainside for decades, probably from a younger age than Blanche. I could picture his villager mother, once she understood what sort of creature she had borne, tearfully leading him into a winter storm to be respectably lost for good.
I couldn’t communicate with him; it had been foolish to try. I turned to go, but heard scrabbling behind me. I looked back and saw his fingers, the nails cracked and yellow, poking through the grating.
“Fee,” he said, his voice ragged with phlegm. He spat. “Fee. Na.”
I had wanted and dreaded his words. I cleared my throat. “That’s right.”
“Thisss voooice,” said Gianni slowly, exaggerating consonants, dragging out the vowels. He was speaking Goreddi. My blood froze in my veins. “Decadesss of disssuse,” he croaked. “Hard to mek the tongue dooo what I … ge-huhrrgh!” There was a splat upon the floor as he spat again. “What a terrible-tasting mouth I have!”
My heart pounded painfully. The voice dispelled any remaining doubts. I knew its inflections, even channeled through Gianni’s disused voice box and recalcitrant mouth. How she’d accomplished this, I couldn’t imagine. I said, “What do you want, Jannoula?”
Gianni’s eye reappeared on the other side of the grate, now focused and shrewd. “Seraphina,” he said—or she said, using his moist, breathy voice. “You’re all grown up.”
“What do you want?” I repeated.
Gianni’s tongue clicked, scolding. “No ‘Hello.’ No ‘How have you been, Jannoula? I hope you’re not still languishing in prison.’ I suppose that horrid uncle of yours continues to poison you against me.”
The mention of Orma hurt, but I kept my face implacable. “The uncle who saved me, you mean? As I recall, it was you who poisoned things.”
Gianni’s pale brow came down; his crusty eye narrowed. “It has come to my attention that you are gathering our kind together.”
“How could you possibly have learned that?” I said.
Laughter gurgled from the cell. “A mutual friend told me. I could help you, you know. My mind reaches out to our kind, just like yours does.”
Or like it used to, said Jannoula/Gianni in my head, the way Abdo might have.
I had been backing away without realizing it; now I hit the dank stone wall opposite the cell door.
She could not have broken free of her cottage; she could not be loose in my mind!
I squeezed my eyes shut, searching wildly in my own head for the entrance to the garden of grotesques. This was not the way to find my garden; I needed to relax. I could still hear the voice echoing somewhere in my head, Gianni’s gruff fundamental with overtones of Jannoula: Is this where you keep the others now? This narrow trough? It used to be a garden, open to your wider mind.
In an angry rush, I was there: Tiny Tom in front of me, the garden indeed looking strangely shrunken, but there was no time to consider that. Jannoula’s mind filled Gianni’s shape like a hand inside a puppet, but she had not broken through him to enter my mind herself. She was trying, pushing and clawing inside him; I could see her glowing at his core. Tiny Tom glowed, too, with a light of his own, a different color. I had never noticed until his fire was pitted against an alien light from within.
“Tiny Tom” was a piece of Gianni Patto’s mind-fire. Abdo had told me that, but I’d never been able to see it until this moment, under duress.
Jannoula stretched and strained, distorting Tiny Tom’s appearance, and I feared she would burst through. I saw how to release Gianni’s mind-fire: it would be like undoing a button. I hesitated—would the uncontrollable visions return if I severed this connection?—but Jannoula writhed inside him again, and I panicked. With a thought, I unfastened Gianni Patto from my mind. The buttonhole sealed up at once behind him, as if it had never been.
I felt the release not as relief but as bereavement. A stab of grief. My eyes popped open in the real world and I stared into Gianni’s eye through the grating in his cell door.
“What an appalling overreaction,” said Giann-oula. “A great brute of a baby tossed out in half a bowl of bathwater. What could I possibly have done, locked in that cluttered broom closet with the others?”
I did not answer; my jaw was trembling. How had she found him? How had she entered his mind, what did she want from me, and why was I still not free of her after all these years?
I fled the room. She called after me. My only consolation was that her voice could not come with me in my head.