Orma, unexpectedly, heard a difference in my playing at our next lesson. “That rondo is much improved,” he said from his perch on his desk. “It’s nothing I taught you, though. You’ve found some way to give it greater depth. It feels—” He cut himself short.
I waited. I had never heard him begin a sentence that way.
“That is,” said Orma, scratching his false beard, “you’re playing as humans do at their best. Filling the music with some discernible—” He waved his hands; this was hard for him. “Emotion? Self? Someday perhaps you’ll be my teacher and explain it to me.”
“But you did teach me,” I said eagerly. “Your meditation treatise gave me the key. I cleared out all the detritus, or something, and now she can hear me play.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. “She?” said Orma evenly.
I had not been keeping him apprised of Jannoula’s actions, even as she’d begun to hear my thoughts and my music. Now it came out, how we talked every day, how she could hear my music and some of my thoughts. Orma listened silently, his black eyes inscrutable behind his spectacles; a defensive warmth rose in my chest against his studied neutrality. “She’s humble and kind,” I said, folding my arms. “Her life is a misery, and I’m pleased to give her some relief from it.”
Orma licked his thin lips. “Has she told you where she is imprisoned, or why?”
“No,” I said. “And she doesn’t need to. She’s my friend and I trust her.”
My friend. She really was. The first I’d ever had.
“Monitor that trust,” said Orma, cool as autumn. “Mind where it wavers.”
“It will not waver,” I said stoutly, and packed up my instruments to go home.
I heard not a peep from Jannoula for the rest of the afternoon and thought she had left me, recalled to her real life in her cell. She was present that evening when I put the other grotesques to bed, however, following me on my rounds and sulkily kicking flowers.
Her table, when we returned to her cottage garden, was set for tea. Jannoula did not touch her cup, but sat with her arms crossed, staring toward the distant trees of Fruit Bat’s grove. Had she overheard my conversation with Orma somehow? I hadn’t narrated it to her, or consciously opened myself. Surely that wasn’t it. I said, “What’s the matter, friend?”
She stuck out her lower lip. “I don’t like your music teacher. ‘Has she told you where she is imprisoned, or why?’ ” jeered Jannoula, quoting Orma exactly.
She’d heard it all. Suddenly I felt very exposed. What else could she hear that she wasn’t bothering to inform me of? Could she hear my every thought, beyond the things I intentionally told her?
That was an alarming line of inquiry. I tried to focus instead on soothing her hurt. “You must excuse Orma,” I said, laying a hand gently on her arm. “He’s a saar; it’s his way. He can sound unkind until you get to know him.”
“You called him Uncle,” she said, flicking my hand off.
“I—he—that’s just what I call him,” I said, a knot tightening in my gut. I had not yet told her I was half dragon, but I’d hoped to someday. It would have been a relief to have a friend who knew. She looked utterly revolted by the thought of Orma being my uncle, though. It broke my heart a little. I changed the subject: “I thought you could only hear through my ears if I deliberately opened to you.”
Her lip curled disdainfully. “Don’t tell me your trust is wavering.”
“It’s not,” I said, shoving down my anxiety, bending the truth to match my words.
Within days I had reframed her new ability as an asset and forgotten why I’d found it alarming. Whenever my father scolded me—a constant of my life, what with his ceaseless worrying that my half-dragon heritage would be found out—Jannoula heard him and would retort sharply in my head: So why don’t you lock us up, then, you monster? Whenever Anne-Marie gave me chores to do, Jannoula groaned, Oh, making up the beds is exactly like torture!
Each time I had to bite my lip, partly to keep from laughing, partly to make sure that I had not uttered those very words myself.
She said everything I wished I could say, and I loved her for it. We were sisters again, a stronger team than ever, our moment of Orma-induced friction forgotten.
But Orma had planted a seed in my mind.
One morning, after chores, I looked for her in the garden, but she wasn’t there. That is, her grotesque sat primly under a giant chrysanthemum (a fancy of hers I’d indulged), with no light in its eyes. Jannoula’s attention was elsewhere.
I hesitated. What was she going through in the real world? Every time I’d asked, she’d changed the subject; she wouldn’t let me watch her in her cell. I believed she suffered, and I wanted to understand what was happening. I wanted to help. Could I reverse our strange connection and see for myself without alerting her to my presence? This grotesque was merely a metaphor, after all, a way to make sense of the truth, not the truth itself.
If I took Otter’s hands, I’d have my usual floating vision; she’d sense me right away and be angry. Could I enter her mind the way she entered mine?
I had a harebrained notion that if I could enter her avatar, I might enter Jannoula herself. How, though? I thought of splitting her down the middle, but rejected that as disgusting. What if I were immaterial, like a ghost? I imagined myself so. I pressed my immaterial palms together like a river diver and pushed them into her grotesque’s face. They passed through her nose like it was mist. I was up to my elbows; my hands didn’t reappear out the back of her head. I bent my head and pressed on until—
I landed hard on the floor of a dim, narrow corridor lined with featureless gray doors. Rising shakily to my feet, I looked both directions; there was no obvious way back to myself.
Without warning, the air seemed to compress around me, a terrible pressure that nearly brought me to my knees. The pain eased up momentarily before rushing over me again in an agonizing undulation. I prayed it would recede before it broke me.
It did. I panted like a dog and trembled all over.
Voices echoed down the corridor. I pressed forward, walking when I could, waiting out more waves of pain. I could make no sound when the crush was upon me, only lean against the wall, panicked and paralyzed. Cries built up in me, unuttered.
I tried doors, which all opened into a darkness I dared not enter. One lightless room emitted a blast of icy wind; one smelled of acrid alchemical fumes; one was stuffed full of screams. I closed that one quickly, but the hallway’s strange acoustics wouldn’t let the sound die. It echoed on, a second wave amplifying the roll of pain. I plowed ahead, buffeted about, not daring to open any more doors.
Was this the inside of Jannoula’s mind? Did she live with these constant waves of pain?
The corridor grew darker; I couldn’t see. I felt my way, a hand on each wall, until the walls abruptly ended. I could no longer feel a floor under my feet. I looked back for the hallway I’d just come down, but I couldn’t see it. There was nothing. Nothingness. My saved-up screams burst forth inaudibly, swallowed by the dense, anechoic emptiness. This void could not be filled.
A violent force bowled into me, shoving me back. The corridor reappeared, doors whizzing by on either side as I was pushed backward, faster and faster—
I landed flat on the ground, all the air knocked out of me, in the dirt of my own garden. Jannoula stood over me, gasping, her hair disordered, her fists clenched as if she had punched me in the stomach. Maybe she had. Pain—my own—radiated from my core.
“What did you see?” she shouted, her face contorting.
“I’m so sorry.” I coughed. My head lolled back onto the ground.
“Don’t you … ever …” Her breath came as raggedly as my own. “That’s none of your business.…”
I wrapped my arms around my head. She sat down beside me with a rustle and thump. “That was your mind,” I said bleakly. “All that pain. Those were your screams.”
I looked up; she was absently ripping a marigold, picking its orange petals apart. “Promise me you won’t go back,” she said, her lower lip trembling. “It’s hard enough that I must go.”
I studied her profile, the decisive nose, the subtle chin. “What would happen to your body in the real world if you stayed here?”
Jannoula looked at me sidelong. “I’m no good to them dead; they’d force-feed me, I suppose. Perhaps my catatonia would amuse them.” She dug out the heart of the flower with her nails.
“Then stay,” I said firmly, impulsively. “Don’t go back to that pain, or go as little as you can.” Orma would disapprove of this scheme, but Orma didn’t have to know.
“Oh, Seraphina!” Jannoula grabbed my hand and kissed it. Her lashes were bright with tears. “If we are to live as sisters, then let us have no more secrets. You asked who imprisoned me. It was my father’s enemies.”
I let out a low whistle. “But why?”
“They hope he will pay a usurious ransom. But he won’t. He doesn’t love me. He’s ashamed of me.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, thinking of my own father. I wasn’t imprisoned, but … I wasn’t free, either.
“Is it not a terrible fate to be robbed of a father’s love?” she said.
“It is,” I whispered, my heart aching for her.
A cat-like smile slowly crept across her lips.