I will my shadow into a line, and it obeys. A black rope attaches itself neatly to the edge of the balcony without need of ties or support.
“Quick now, Grace,” I say briskly, ignoring her wide-eyed shock. “It won't bite. In fact, should you fall, it will catch you.”
“The rumors... the stories... they're true?” Grace whispers, her breath raising a cloud in the cool air. I roll my eyes and nudge her forward with my hip as I watch the man inside anxiously. She approaches the midnight strand like a wild animal. Grace hesitates.
“Now, chela, or your fear might capture us both,” I mutter.
She glances back at me, and her eyes lock onto that now-familiar part of my face that has caused me so much trouble. Her gaze tracks across every whorl of the midnight black symbol, starting at the center of my forehead and wrapping down the left side of my face halfway to the corner of my jaw, all curves and flowing as if in some ancient, unfathomable script. The scar on my cheek is the only imperfection in the dark stain on my skin. It’s a damned inconvenient place for the sign of my curse to show up whenever it’s called. As if my Seer heritage isn’t enough to make me stand out in this light-skinned city.
Luckily, I haven’t misjudged Grace. She takes in the new information, her eyes growing resolute, and gives me a firm nod. With a deep breath, she clambers over the balcony. She lets the darkness take her weight and shimmies down the rope just like I taught her. As soon as her feet touch the ground, I abandon my vigil of the merchant and leap from the balcony.
I let myself fall for a few feet, reveling in the feel of the Winter air against my cheeks. With a thought, I resummon the shadow. The darkness cushions my fall and drops me smoothly to the ground to land gently on my feet. The shadow is eager, and my skin burns with unfettered joy. Hiding my curse is like walking through life blindfolded. Connecting to the shadow is like taking a deep breath after an eternity of illness.
Grace gawks at me, but I grab her hand and drag her towards the nearby garden hedge. She needs no prompting to begin scaling the short wall, a convenient trellis providing ample handholds. We reach the top of the wall safe and sound. None of the commotion occurring inside the manor is audible from our perch.
“I didn't think we were going to make it,” Grace says breathlessly, turning to me and grinning. As I let the shadow go, the symbol on my face fades in return. Grace notices, but doesn’t comment.
“Please. Family forever, chela,” I say, lounging back as if I hadn't been filled with the same fear a few moments before. “We always come through, together.”
“What does chela mean? You keep calling me that,” Grace asks, cocking her head quizzically.
“Where I’m from, it means 'little girl.’ I say it because I like you. Now, we should be gone before whatever the Depths have brought us can come to light.”
“Right,” she says, nodding earnestly. “The Depths.”
I laugh at her ignorance. Strange, people who have always been bound to the land. I ignore the pang of disquiet that goes through me when I think about how long I’ve been from the sea.
As I turn to go, a mighty crash echoes through the night. The sound of shattered glass tinkles across the lawn. A lithe form darts towards the same patch of wall we’re sitting on, blood streaming from half a dozen small cuts. I recognize the man, no, the boy, just as he reaches the wall. He leaps high and clings to the stones like an insect, his whole body jingling with the sound of the purses he’s stolen: Jace, the former apprentice of Jonah Defthands, proud scamp and independent from the Family. The distinctive clack of an arrow striking stone follows him, the sound startling me out of my surprise.
“Don't let him get away!”
I turn back to leave as the boy's hands grip the edge of the wall. Jumping down, I coil my legs and call for the barest hint of shadow to resist the pull of the earth. The shadow pushes upwards against the dark leather straps criss-crossing my torso in the traditional garb of the People, so much stronger and more flexible than the shoddy craftsmanship of the Donirian lands. Landing smoothly, I lift my hands up to Grace to catch her.
Stunned, Grace stares in amazement at the bleeding boy who vaults the wall next to her. He comes down easily, rolling into a dead sprint, at least half of the stolen coins rattling out onto the cobbled street. His skinny legs flash white through his threadbare clothing as he slides around the corner. I don’t begrudge the little rogue the money; Creator knows he needs it more than we do.
“Sorry, Kettle!” he throws over his shoulder as he disappears from sight. Grace still sits stunned on the wall.
“Hurry, chela, jump!” I say desperately, clapping my hands together.
“Bring him down!”
The rough shout echoes through the night. She smiles at me, full of trust, and brings her hands up to push off. Her body jolts. The arrow bursts through her chest and mists my face with her blood. She falls, boneless, limp, all of the dainty elegance gone from her limbs. I catch her, spinning her over, praying to the Creator with all of my soul. Her lungs fight for air, but blood seeps from the corners of her mouth. Life already ebbs from her eyes as they vacantly reflect the stars. With a shudder, she falls still.
The shadow hiding under my clothes boils out without conscious thought. I can’t look away, even when the starlight reflected in her eyes darkens under the cover of my curse.
The voices of the men from the merchant's personal guard drift in the night. They laugh and joke about confirming their kill and the reward they’ll receive. My heart freezes like the frigid depths of the northern seas. I stand up, the shadow forming a sword in my hand. My steps don’t raise so much as a whisper of sound. The dust on the streets lays quiet and still at my passing as if even the earth fears what treads upon it. I round the corner of the house to see the three men walking forward, a lantern held high. When they see me, they squint, their small brains desperately trying to make sense of the scene before them.
I don’t raise my blade or make a noise. I just begin running. They glance at one another. In that moment of hesitation, I strike. I scythe through them before their eyes can register surprise. Twirling between them, my blade cuts high and low. The shadow knows no resistance. The men fall in pieces, the sound of their blood and bones hitting the ground unsatisfying. I glance at the house, thinking of the fat merchant, but the need for revenge evaporates as suddenly as it came. More death will serve no one. I step over three growing pools of blood on my way back to Grace.
The sword evaporates into smoke, the shadow rising up and gently wiping Grace’s blood from my face. A kindness, what little the shadow can do to comfort me. I reach her body, bending down and slowly lifting her in my arms. She weighs nothing, as if her body is little more than a dream. If I squeeze too tightly, even this sad remnant of her life will disappear. I walk into the nearest alley, scaling it and calling on the shadow to draw Grace's body up. We set out across the rooftops, the tiny child cradled in my arms.
Even though it takes me half the night, even though I’m bone weary as I stagger up the steps, even though I know that her body means nothing now that the pure soul that animated it has fled, I carry her home. Because the Family looks after its own.
***
“I'll kill him for ya,” Timo growls, his anger heating the room in waves. His gigantic hands curl into equally gigantic fists. “Tha' little bastard is meat.”
“Wait,” I say, my voice tired and dull.
Grace's body is freshly in the ground outside the city walls. The city cemetery is long since full, the few remaining spots designated for the nobility and the wealthy. The funeral was a somber, silent affair. As was fitting, we laid Grace into the ground at midnight. The twinkling stars were the only witnesses, the shadows welcoming Grace into the next life. We hadn't said anything but the simple words that bound us together: family forever.
Grace is the first we’ve lost in two months, perhaps a casualty to the speed at which we’re growing. I can’t train them all fast enough. You have to be care
ful, quiet, and above all decisive in the business. Grace failed at that final test, and she paid the heaviest price. My soul darkens at the thought of the little street rat who put us in this situation. Some part of me knows that he can’t be blamed for this accidental convergence, but logic is often worth its weight in gold.
“Why?” Timo says, turning back to me. “He refused ta join the Family, spit in our face, and now he's killed one o' us!”
“He spit in your face, I believe,” Corna drawls from the corner. “While I'm your sister and all that, I know the boy could have been convinced with a bit more... tact.”
“Shut yer hole,” Timo spits back. “What's done is done, and the boy has done it. He needs ta die.”
“Do you have any idea how nonsensical what you just said is?” Corna rolls her eyes. “How many times can we fit the word 'done' in a single sentence? Perhaps if you weren't so dun, we would have already made up our minds what needs to be done.”
Timo looks confused, as well he might, but I just close my eyes. My two lieutenants are as different as night and day. Corna was raised a noble of a minor house, her parents reasonably successful traders in fine cloth. When she was declared a woman at fifteen (a barbaric practice, in the Isles you become a woman when you damn well please), her parents arranged for her to marry a man who was two tiers above her in rank and four times her age. Being Corna, she would have none of that particular bargain, disappearing in the night and making her way to the capital. Her pretty smile and auburn locks allowed her to pass through doors that should have been closed to her. Over the course of two years, Corna danced and twirled her way through half of the high society in Donir, naturally keeping any gifts granted her by suitors and robbing them blind on the back end of each relationship. When I met her, she was the most wanted woman in the city, the reward on her head practically astronomical. We faked up a corpse and collected that money for good measure, putting the case of the Demonic Debutant to bed.
Timo, on the other hand, was born on the left side of a gutter, raised on the right, and taught to beg and steal before he had the strength to crawl out. His mother used him for as long as she could, back when he was young and reasonably adorable, but he grew so fast that soon she was forced to switch tacks. She convinced him to take up strong-arm robbery, mugging the drunk and the unwary. His giant fists pounded away, and each strike drained the big man of humanity. I found him drunk in an alley, two knife wounds festering high on his chest, closer to dead than alive. He couldn't have been more than seventeen at the time. I had been walking quietly through the alley when he began to shout, delirious and unaware, the words of a play: “What passes here but the long approach to silence? Only in the stillness of the grave can we finally rest.” Somehow, a street tough from the desperate edge of the Abyss had learned the final words to The Lost Lore of Isa. I was confused enough to ask him how.
Both of them jumped at the opportunity to start again, despite their skepticism of something so intrinsically different from their lives as the idea of a family. But the nature of the Family is that we are all orphans, all cast aside, each of us lonely and desperate. We are all of us looking for something to belong to, someone to love and to trust and to sleep soundly next to. When I left the Isles, I vowed I would have that feeling, even if I had to fight and kill for it. So I made it happen.
The two of them are still bickering, their words like a gentle caress in the back of my head, comforting, reassuring. Grace's death cut me adrift, but the familiar arguing between the two returns me to ground. I still have the rest of my Family to look after. I can’t dwell.
“Enough,” I say quietly. Timo turns to me, mid-tirade, and drops his arms. Corna just cocks an eyebrow. “I would hear your thoughts. Take your time; think it through. What should we do about Jace?”
“Ya know what I want,” Timo says. “It’s tha’ third job he's botched for us, and now he's killed Gracie! We canna let him live in our city.”
“Regrettably, Kettle, I agree,” Corna says reluctantly, shooting Timo a look as if the very act of agreeing with him is, well, disagreeable. “While I do think that he could have, at one time, become one of us, he has put his dirty little foot in our business far too many times. I don't know if we need to kill him, as my simple brother suggests, but something does need to be done.”
“Is the answer to death more death?” I ask, shaking my head. “Very well. It's late. I’ll sleep on it. The two of you do the same. Have Jeld go and watch the boy's nest in case we need to find him.”
“He's a slippery one,” Corna agrees. She stands, her silk nightgown leaving little to the imagination. It’s a credit to Timo that he doesn’t so much as glance at her as she stretches. The two really have become siblings. “Are we sure Jeld can mark him if he leaves?”
“Fine, let Sario and Ret tag along. They need the experience. Tell them that, if they’re spotted, they’ll sleep outside for a week.”
Our manse looms innocuously in the middle of the Corpses, the set of dilapidated merchant and noble houses stuck on the wrong side of the Abyss from the market and the palace. The Abyss had been one of the many things I gawked at when I first walked Donir's streets three years before. Halfway to the walls on the northwestern side of the city, the Abyss is a gigantic circular pit in the cityscape, stretching down into impenetrable darkness. On the night of the Desolation fifteen years ago, tens of thousands of souls fell into the Abyss as the ground just dropped away underneath the city. Supposedly, the Sealord had killed the cursed Master of Earth, and his death unleashed the cataclysm.
Though the manse is as broken down and ugly as its fellows on the outside, the inside is the product of close to three highly successful years of theft and mischief, a display of opulence so absurd that it even makes me cringe from time to time: ornamental rugs spun so delicately you feel as if clouds cushion your feet, each piece of furniture carefully selected or crafted from exotic woods, each wall adorned with tapestries and art worth more than the rest combined. The Family lives like royalty, beyond the fathoming of anyone who has never entered the house.
My feet are silent on the extravagant rugs and even quieter on the polished hardwood. We could recruit every single orphan in the city if we showed them the inside of our home, but we don’t. It’s easy to choose to be a part of something beautiful. I don’t want a child to come into the Family just because she sees the house and wants a warm place to sleep. I tell them nothing but that we’re thieves, and the life is hard and dangerous. A child shows courage when she chooses to be a part of something difficult and frightening.
The quiet knock of wood draws my eyes to three young children playing with knick knacks in the corner. They are all fairly new, each less than three months living with the Family. I can’t help but smile at their laughter and their tiny bodies. Already, Elan has filled out, his bones no longer peeking from beneath the skin. Tera is healthy for the first time in her short life, her cheeks bright and red from laughing. Kit is quiet, but stern, his gaze focused down on his hands as he plays. A flash of metal turns my grin to a frown.
“Children, what are you playing?” I call, walking over.
“It’s a game Uncle Timo taught us!” Tera says. My heart sinks. This cannot be good.
“Yeah,” Elan says, eyes fixed on Kit's hands. “Timo said we need to learn if we want to start pulling our weight.”
The way the boy says it makes me certain he has no idea what 'pulling our weight' really means. I reach the circle of children and suppress a sigh. Kit has a short knife in one hand, quickly and confidently jabbing the blade between his splayed fingers. Two shallow cuts gleam red on his fingers, and I can’t hold in a groan at the bandages wrapped around the fingers of the other two.
I almost reach down and snatch the knife out of their hands, but I stop. Before tonight's events, I probably would have. But Grace's death reminds me that the children need to grow up far faster than I want them to. Kit begins to pick up the pace, the knife blurring as he slams it into the woo
den board they’ve laid over the hardwood. His dexterity is impressive, the knife sure and true despite the speed. Both of the other children watch, eyes wide.
“Do you know how to play this game, Mother?” Kit asks, his voice calm and even despite the knife's continued play.
“I find it rather dull, but I’ve played with knives before, yes.”
“Can you do it faster than me?” he asks, stopping suddenly and flipping the knife into his off hand. The boy can’t be more than nine, but the glint in his eye, the challenge, shows that age is nothing but a number after the streets.
“Perhaps another time,” I say, yawning. “I think we should all get to bed.”
“Please, Mother!” Elan says, eagerly looking up at me. “Will you show us how to do it?”
“Yes, Mother, please,” Tera joins in.
“Oh, all right,” I mutter, sitting down in the circle. “But just once, and then we all head to sleep.”
Kit slides me the board, offering me the knife and a smirk. The boy is certain of himself, I have to give him that. I take the knife from him and flip it quickly through the air a few times, testing the balance. I grimace. It’s one of the steak knives from the kitchen, tip blunted and bent from the game. Timo and his stupid ideas.
Without preamble I begin, opening my fingers wide. Firmly, yet almost gently, I stab the wood beneath. Picking up the pace with each revolution, my grip remains certain and my aim impeccable. The countless tiny scars on my hands are mostly from a living a dangerous life, but a few are from the first moments after I learned this stupid game back in the Isles. Still. Kit feels like he’s superior, like 'Mother' should be challenged? Let's see the look in his eyes when I finish.
Soon, I have the knife humming, the sound of each strike on the wood blending into one long knock, unbreaking. I flip the knife up, catch it in my left hand, and press my right to the wood. Before the sound can die, I resume the breakneck pace with my offhand. The children gasp in delight, and I smile to myself as the knife continues to work. I switch back and forth twice in rapid succession. Turning to look at Kit, my hands move even faster than before. He smiles at me, a self-conscious grin of self-reproach. Winking, I flip the knife and offer it to him with a flourish.
The Crux of Eternity: Eternal Dream, Book 1 (The Eternal Dream Saga) Page 2
