Free Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman

railing.
    “Ah, children,” growled Dame Okra, watching him climb. “I forget what darlings they are. How I long for the opportunity to forget once more.”
    “I’ll be taking him off your hands soon,” I said soothingly.
    “Not soon enough,” she huffed. “Pesavolta will provide, have no fear, but—regrettably—it may be a few days before you can set out.”
    “That’s fine,” I said, my patience thinning. “Finch is here in Segosh. We’ll look for him tomorrow.”
    Dame Okra peered up at me over her spectacles; her eyes were wide-set and watery like a spaniel’s. “Finch? Is that what you call him in your head? I shudder to imagine what you once called me.”
    It was clearly an invitation to tell her, but I pretended not to understand. I foresaw only two ways she might react to the nameMiss Fusspots: amusement or incandescent anger. I was not so sure of the former that I cared to risk the latter.
    “Does he have wings?” she continued. “Or chirp?”
    “Finch?” I said, momentarily confused. “No, he’s got a … a beak.”
    Dame Okra snorted sharply. “And he lives here in the city? Blue St. Prue, you’d think someone would have noticed.”

    The next morning, we walked to the heart of the city, Abdo bounding along like he was full of grasshoppers.
Hello
,
city! Hello
,
monuments!
he chattered as we navigated the busy streets, uphill toward the Palasho Pesavolta. We admired the great plaza with the palasho on one side, the golden domes of the Cathedral Santi Wilibaio on the other.
    A Saint’s day procession approached the cathedral, passing through the triumphal arch of King Moy. Abdo pranced excitedly and pestered me until I identified the Saint for him. It was St. Clare, the clear-seer, patron of truth-finding.
    I decided to take it as a propitious sign.
    Still, Finch was a needle in a city-sized haystack. From his mask and leather apron, I knew him for a plague doctor; in visions I usually glimpsed him in sickrooms or down alleys, trapping rats. My vision-eye couldn’t stray far from the ityasaari I was observing; it was hard to know where those sickrooms were.
    And it would be hard for me to ask. I didn’t speak Ninysh, due to a peculiarity of my upbringing. My stepmother, Anne-Marie,came from the notorious Belgioso family, exiled from Ninys for a variety of crimes. My dragon mother had not been public knowledge, and Papa was anxious to keep it that way; his dastardly in-laws surely would have blackmailed him had they but known. My tutors were to teach me Samsamese and Porphyrian, but no Ninysh. I’m not sure what Papa thought—perhaps that a wily old Belgioso auntie could trick me more easily in her own tongue? My stepmother’s generation were all native Goreddi speakers. Whatever Papa’s motives, I had no Ninysh. I was not so enamored of grammar that I’d gone looking for it.
    I hoped Abdo’s ability to see mind-fire might make up for my language deficit—maybe he might spot Finch across a crowded plaza or down an alley. We skipped the shiny parts of town in favor of more workaday neighborhoods, where brewers’ vats gusted hops-scented steam, wood turners swept sawdust into mounds, mules brayed, tanners scraped hair off stretched cowhides, and butchers washed blood off the abattoir floors, pushing it into the gutter with flat brooms. Neither Abdo nor I saw the first sign of Finch.
    I did manage—through drawings and gestures—to find a hospital, but it was a facility for the well-to-do. An attendant nun who spoke some Goreddi turned up her nose when I asked about plague houses. “Not in the city,” she said, looking scandalized.
    It wasn’t until the third morning that Abdo caught my arm and pointed out a space between two half-timbered shop fronts, a dark slit from which emanated a sigh of decay.
I saw a glimmer, very faint. Through the buildings. It’s gone now, but we should follow it
, he said, his eyes bright, almost as excited as he’d been to see thecathedral. I