Jannoula brought Kiggs back with her from the seminary, and he was seamlessly reintegrated into castle life, as far as I could tell. If Glisselda was angry with him for disobeying her orders and entering the city, I presume Jannoula smoothed things over between them. The details didn’t reach me; I could only observe from a distance. Kiggs attended council, made plans for the defense of the city, toured the walls, and drilled with the Queen’s Guard.
Kiggs was easier to approach than Glisselda. Two days after Jannoula had apprehended him, I spotted him striding purposefully across Stone Court with three others of his regiment. I called after him and he waited for me, letting the others walk ahead toward the barbican gate. I was a little out of breath when I reached him, but I had to know: “Did you see her spiritual advisor? Was it Orma?”
He shrugged, turning the helmet he carried in his hands. “I didn’t see him, Phina. But you know, even if it is Orma, she may have a very good reason for keeping you from him. She’s not quite the madwoman you always made her out to be. She’s got a remarkable mind, and if she has some rough edges, well, she can be reasoned with—”
I turned away, unwilling to hear more. Jannoula’s glamour had clearly affected him; I could no longer feel safe speaking to him openly. That was one more ally gone.
Jannoula did not gloat about Kiggs, which of course raised my suspicions. She would not have forgotten seeing him, through Abdo’s eyes, coming out of my room in Porphyry. She knew Queen Glisselda had ordered him to stay away. I had wondered whether the two things were connected, whether Jannoula had told Glisselda what she’d seen in Porphyry, and Glisselda hadn’t wanted to see Kiggs as a result.
That didn’t add up, though. Glisselda was not herself, but she should have been furious with me as well as Kiggs, if she’d really found out the truth. I felt certain Jannoula was saving it for a special occasion.
Time passed relentlessly. My anxiety grew. I wanted to stop her before the war came south so that we’d have time to determine whether the other ityasaari could make St. Abaster’s Trap without her. Kiggs had said we needed this trap, and I agreed; it would not do to hobble Goredd’s defenses, but that meant incapacitating Jannoula in some way that was reversible, in case we found the other ityasaari couldn’t make the trap without her. That ruled out killing or poisoning Jannoula. Camba, Nedouard, and I, conferring in hasty whispers when we could, had come up with no better way to stop her.
Astonishingly, the solution came to me from St. Yirtrudis’s testament. I’d read it three times through by now and had grown quite fond of my secret patroness and her lover, the Counter-Saint, monstrous Pandowdy. The first time through, I had pictured him as a big, horrible swamp slug—I couldn’t help it—and had found their romance off-putting. The second time through, however, I paid attention to Yirtrudis’s descriptions of him. Pandowdy was no slug. He was tall and fearsome (I pictured him as a younger, handsomer Gianni Patto, with nicer teeth). He was a mighty fighter, a berserker who’d killed dragons with his bare hands. After the dragons were defeated, he’d been lost and out of place, prone to rages. Only Yirtrudis seemed to see a man and not a monster. Under her tutelage, he learned to control himself; together they’d founded a school of meditation.
Yirtrudis’s envious brother, Abaster, who had already murdered three other Saints for daring to contradict his doctrines, had had Pandowdy buried alive. My brother has undone the best of our generation, Yirtrudis wrote, because Pandowdy would not call the World-Light “Heaven.” When Abaster is through with us, there will be no more room for interpretation. He will have pruned our myriad beautiful visions down to one.
Mention of the World-Light gave me chills. I suspected I couldn’t have called it Heaven, either. I rather liked this Pandowdy.
Only on my third read-through did I realize that Pandowdy had once wrecked St. Abaster’s Trap. There was a single sentence about it, easy to gloss over: Pandowdy became a mirror, reflecting the fire back at Abaster until he was so burned we could not rouse him for three days.
It was the last night before the Loyalists’ retreat; we had only one day left to try something before the barrier would be in active use against enemy dragons. I met with Camba and showed her the passage. She was sitting up in bed, Ingar curled at the other end like a big, dreamy cat. “What does that mean,” I asked, “and is it something we can do?”
“It’s possible to reflect her mind-fire,” said Camba thoughtfully, sitting up straighter. “I tried something like that once, on an intuition. I stood at the end of the line during St. Abaster’s Trap and pushed the fire back at her with all my will. It stung her like a bee.” Camba rubbed her leg absently. “She was furious. That’s when she made Gianni throw me down the stairs.”
I winced. “It didn’t incapacitate her, though?”
Camba shook her head. “It hurt enough that she doesn’t let me participate in the trap anymore. I can’t even climb the tower. Also, she takes a precaution: she stands in the middle of the line instead of at the end. If anyone reflects fire back at her, it will roll past and carry on down the line. If both ends reflected it at the same time, though, perhaps she would be caught between two waves.”
“Was it hard to reflect the fire?”
“You must be consciously present,” said Camba, making a bowl of her hands, as if that were where awareness might be centered. “You have to time it so that just as it reaches you, you harden against it.”
“I can’t participate in St. Abaster’s Trap because I’ve bound myself up. You can’t participate. There’s only one of us who might be able to help,” I said, thinking of Nedouard, “and I don’t know if his mind is strong enough.”
“Ingar would help,” said Camba. Ingar lolled at the end of the bed, humming tunelessly. “We would need to explain the plan when he’s lucid, so he understands. You could trigger his mind-pearl at the last moment.”
That would require me to go to the top of the tower while they practiced, and Jannoula had never yet let me do that. Surely I could bluff her; to my surprise, I rather looked forward to trying.
“Won’t Jannoula learn the triggering word if I say it aloud?” I asked.
Camba scoffed. “It’s subtly pronounced, and he only wakes if you speak it exactly right. Ingar has a finely tuned ear for language, even in this state.”
The word was guaiong, antique Zibou for “oyster”—Ingar’s little play on the idea of mind-pearls, I supposed. I practiced saying it, under Camba’s patient tutelage; there were entirely too many vowels. It took a quarter of an hour, but I finally resurrected Ingar’s will consistently. He understood the plan and approved. I practiced a few times more, until a dire headache overtook him and we had to quit. He lay with his head on Camba’s lap, and she rubbed his forehead.
Camba’s eyes held a cautious hope. “If this succeeds, I will try to unhook Jannoula from the others,” she said softly. “I can’t reach out to them without opening the door that would let her fully into my mind. I’ve tried it; even when she was sleeping, she noticed immediately. I can’t help anyone else when I’m fighting for sovereignty of my own mind. If she were incapacitated, though, I could surely free the others.”
“What about yourself?”
Camba shook her head. “I don’t know. Pende always said it’s impossible to free yourself, but perhaps it depends on how inert she is.”
I nodded slowly, wondering if there was a way to keep Jannoula incapacitated. Nedouard might have some drug that would do the trick. I would talk to him next.
I left Camba’s and crept through the sleeping tower to Nedouard’s room on the fifth floor. He was awake. I entered silently, closed the door behind me, and whispered in the old doctor’s ear, “I have a plan for tomorrow.”
“Don’t tell me too much.” His beak made his whisper a challenge to understand. “I’ve evaded her interest so far, but she could pry anything out of me if she wished.”
I told him what he was to do, and no more. He scratched his ear uncertainly. “I’m not sure I can do what you ask,” he said. “Is that really all it takes to reflect the fire? I simply will myself to be a mirror?”
“Yes,” I said firmly, hoping it was true, trying not to let him see my doubts.
“Pray it works,” said Nedouard. I kissed his cheek in parting, trying to reassure him, though I no longer had any notion whom or what to pray to.