Ether-Touched (The Breaking Stone Trilogy Book 1)

by L. M. Coulson

  Darkness pressed around her, hammering iron needles deep into her skin, the pain somehow more potent now that she was outdoors and bathed in raw night. She paused a moment, absorbing the full brunt of it, mindfully pushing each twinge and ache to the back of her awareness. It was such a natural thing to do—even to this extreme—that it was nearly instinctual.

  Vylaena was not entirely immune to the pain, despite her supreme control and otherwise outer tranquility. She was Shadowheart, yes, but still human. Holding command over such anguish strained her awareness; her hearing was not as acute, her eyesight wavered at the edges, and her skin tingled and sparked like lightning. But she would still function. She’d been bred to, after all.

  Vylaena swept a cursory glance to either side of her compound. An errant breeze teased blue hairs from her braided plait. It was quiet—that odd, heavy sort of quiet reserved for the darkest hour of the night. It wouldn’t last long, though. Not in the sleepless Elderwood.

  Satisfied she was alone, Vylaena started toward the short wattle fence—and then stopped as a warning wriggled out from beneath her pain. This is likely a trap, she thought, hovering at the edge of the clearing. A trap laid by that solicitor, to lure her out of her home and into the maze of trees, where she might be at a disadvantage.

  She knew better. What was one wight, really? Better face one ether-addled corpse than goddesses-only-knew-what. Here, her enemy was known and accounted for. Out there . . .

  She stared into the darkness pooling beneath the trees and felt the victim’s pain fading with each passing second. In less than a minute, her trail would go cold.

  She hesitated.

  It wasn’t just the threat of a creature of ether that drew her gaze to the woods. There was something else—something long-buried and long-denied, snagged in the threads of her resolve. Some soft, cursed part of her that she could never quite kill despite long years of trying. It tugged at her, unwilling to be denied. And, for the first time in a long while—unable to explain to herself exactly why—she relented to it.

  She stepped forward.

  The shadows inside the forest were dense and knotted, sliding like syrup over Vylaena’s body as she crept through the Elderwood. They rippled and wavered, morphing into impossible shapes in her peripheral, flickering between stocky trunks and tangled bushes. Even the shadows had shadows—sinuous, smoky twists of black ether that had once been part of the goddesses’s realm. Abandoned, and with no way to return home, all ether eventually found this forest, trying to fulfill a purpose it couldn’t quite remember.

  Vylaena hurried her pace. No rational person entered the Elderwood while the sun still slept beyond the treetops. It was one of the reasons she’d chosen this location to build her cottage, hidden away in the depths of the forest. Even her enemies would think twice about disturbing her beneath the watchful eye of the moon. Tonight, however, someone had finally forced her hand.

  That man—that solicitor—it was likely he didn’t believe the stories. He didn’t understand what happened to the unburied dead in the Elderwood.

  Or maybe that was exactly why he’d done this.

  The pain clawing at Vylaena’s skin began to boil as she drew closer to her quarry, and sweat beaded upon her brow. Typical. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. The body often fails while the mind remains strong—a core teaching from her youth. She would take more frequent trips to the city from now on, to the sick houses or the slums or someplace especially dark and hopeless. How quickly she’d gone soft . . .

  The Shadowheart couldn’t precisely see in the dark, despite what was whispered around the tavern fires, but centuries of living below the earth had given them something close. And had Vylaena’s senses not been half-occupied by keeping her mind off its assault of pain, she might’ve fooled any passersby into thinking the rumors were true.

  The pain was a guide in itself, but other signs made it clear that someone had recently been this way. Broken twigs, dislodged earth, scattered leaves—this person either didn’t care to hide his tracks or didn’t know how.Vylaena followed the trail—both by tracks and by pain—through the underbrush. She couldn’t have asked for a more perfect map.

  The trees became thicker and more crooked the farther she walked. The limbs overhead formed a labyrinth of skeletal fingers, as if they wrestled for dominion over each other. Spare a few bare spots where bleary starlight blinked down at her, the forest was shrouded in perfect darkness. Her already-impaired senses would not be trustworthy here, where rogue, mist-like ether pooled in visible clouds, oily and saccharine, twisting around branches and dancing up vines. As if following her.

  Vylaena increased her pace and then broke into a run, muttering obscenities under her breath. Normally there was little to fear from the common ether that roamed Enserion and its surrounding kingdoms, as it was worn out and tired and had lost most of its original potency. She was not ether-touched; she did not have to worry about accidentally prodding the stuff into something more dangerous.

  But there were always exceptions, and she was in the Elderwood, where reality blurred into something not-quite and the usual rules did not always apply. This was a sacred place—a primal place—one of the handful of sites in Aethryl holy to a particular goddess. And it just so happened that this place was touched by Ikna, the capricious deity of—among other things—deception and violence and death.

  There was far too much of the cursed stuff around for Vylaena’s liking, and she still had ground to cover. Who had dared brave the Elderwood on such a night, simply to make a statement? It was foolish, foolish.

  She avoided the thickest patches of ether, zigzagging through the underbrush, following the throbbing echo of pain leading her farther into the forest. Visions flickered at the corners of her eyes, peeking between the trees: red, glowing towers with no doors; naked, dancing women with round mirrors for eyes; tall, faceless humanoids made of melting, opaque alabaster; and stranger, terrible things she had no words to describe. This was ether at play: in this place, at this hour, it was as close to home as it might ever be again. And that closeness gave it power—benign, usually, but Vylaena didn’t want to look closer to find out for sure.

  Goddesses. She should not be here.

  She jogged around a gigantic blackwood strangled by thick bands of scarlet ivy, and a round, grassy clearing rose into view, suffused with the stale glow of moonlight. Vylaena slowed as she finally spotted her quarry, tucked between the roots of an ancient willow just beyond. But she hesitated before stepping into the open, an unsettling feeling pricking the base of her spine.

  What if this was a trap? What then? She didn’t do stupid things like this, putting herself in situations without knowing exactly—

  You can take care of yourself. You always have.

  No fear. No weakness.

  Never.

  Vylaena pursed her lips, lifting a boot.

  The sounds of the forest died away as she stepped into the clearing, leaving behind a silence so complete it could rival the grave. For half a breath she hesitated, her heart giving a fluttering beat. But then she smothered her remaining indecision and continued forward.

  As expected, the unlucky victim beneath the willow was in bad shape. She was female, and young, but her features were impossible to make out beneath a slick mask of blood. She could have been anyone—a mercenary from the frozen fjords of Ieda or a housewife from the copper-roofed city of Jivika. More likely, though, she was an ordinary Cyairian street rat, abducted and sacrificed just to get Vylaena out of bed. A disposable pawn, worth nothing to those with enough power to afford the luxury of autonomy and enough self-righteous hubris to justify stealing the freedom of those deemed beneath them.

  Her jaw hardened.

  Vylaena crouched beside the woman, assessing the long scarlet lacerations decorating her pale skin. She whistled, low and soft. It took a special kind of person to be able to endure such abuse. A mercenary, then. Someone accustomed to the inevitable byproducts of that kind
of work. The woman was still breathing, but barely. Even then the clouds of rogue ether drew near, awaiting her passing.

  The woman hissed, twitching a little on the leaf-strewn dirt, and the clouds of ether drew back.

  “I know,” Vylaena murmured, unsheathing one of her daggers. She kept an eye on the shadows as she bent over the woman, wishing dawn would stop taking its good time in coming. This was folly, to sit here so exposed, so near the creeping ether and the forest’s visions. She held her knife to the woman’s throat, careful not to draw any more blood.

  And she waited.

  The whistle of the woman’s feeble breath marred the perfect silence. In, out, in, out. Vylaena had never considered herself particularly patient, but she had little choice now. If the woman could hold out until morning, the ether would recede and the threat would pass. If she died before then, Vylaena was in a good position. Wights were fairly hard to kill once the ether took hold, but in such close quarters, ready to intercept the creature, she had as much of an advantage as she could hope for.

  To pass the time, she concentrated on her body—on the exquisite lacework of pain she wore like some fancy courtier’s gown. She inhaled it, savoring the anguish like a fine wine, allowing it to settle into her muscles, conquering every twinge and sting. As excruciating as it was, it was comforting to know she could still endure this kind of torture without losing control.

  “Why . . . ?”

  Vylaena met the woman’s tormented gaze. The wounded mercenary’s raw lips wavered, twitching, as she struggled to form the words.

  “Why . . . don’t . . . end it?” she choked.

  “There’s too much ether lurking here tonight,” Vylaena replied coolly. “I don’t want a wight stomping around my house.”

  “Have some . . . compassion.”

  Vylaena stared, flat-eyed. Compassion. It was a word the Elders had spat upon. She would have never learned the term had it not been written in one of Karthus’s sweet-smelling leather-bound books. A word almost as troublesome as love.

  “Please . . . will end . . . your pain, too.”

  The blue in Vylaena’s hair must’ve been more visible than she’d thought. Or maybe it was finally drawing close to dawn. She leaned back, peering through the willow branches in an effort to discern whether it truly was getting lighter or whether it was merely her eyes playing tricks on her.

  “Please . . .”

  Vylaena turned back to the mercenary, holding her gaze. The woman’s slitted eyes, startlingly clear for the pain she was in, begged for release.

  Just like those children, tortured and slaughtered right in front of me. And for much the same reason—simply to hurt me, to jar me. To make me give in to their demands.

  Vylaena shoved the thought away, but something beneath her ribs had faltered. She found herself leaning closer, close enough to whisper in the woman’s ear . . .

  “Suffer well,” she breathed, and slit the woman’s throat.

  It was brief, the pain that flashed hot and sharp across Vylaena’s neck before fading into the night. A clean job; she should be happy. But instead, a dull shadow lingered at her core, gnawing on the soft flesh of her insides.

  She had hesitated too long. With a surge of speed, the waiting pools of ether collapsed upon the dead woman’s corpse like a cat pouncing on its prey, shoving Vylaena sideways into the dirt before she could fight them off. Springing to her feet at once, bloody dagger in hand, Vylaena readied herself to face whatever had decided to take up host in the woman’s now-vacant body.

  The corpse writhed on the ground, limbs shaking, as though it were a rag doll in the hands of a careless child. Its jerky movements churned up leaves and dirt and clouds of ether that hadn’t quite been fast enough to fill it. And then it stopped, sat straight up, and stared at Vylaena.

  And smiled.

  Its eyes were nothing more than orbs of swirling blue-black light, like charged thunderclouds roiling before a storm. Blood seeped from the fatal cut at its neck, darkening the front of its tunic, but the creature inside did not seem to notice. All its attention was centered on Vylaena, ignoring the dagger she held threateningly toward it.

  “How unlike you, to put yourself at such a risk,” the creature inside the woman’s body crooned, in a voice that had once haunted Vylaena’s nightmares.

  “Ikna.” Vylaena stiffened, lowering her dagger. She glanced to the sky, begging dawn to arrive. The Goddess of Midnight had cut it close, venturing out of her realm so close to the new day.

  “None of that; I have a little time yet. And I need to speak with you.”

  Vylaena lowered her chin to meet the corpse’s eerie eyes. “And this is how you get my attention? Who was that woman? Or do you not care?”

  “Do you?”

  Vylaena pursed her lips.

  The goddess inside the dead woman laughed. “She was on her way to kill you, to tie up loose ends. I decided to take the opportunity that presented itself.”

  Vylaena was silent. What did the goddess expect, thanks? She could have handled a lone assassin. She gritted her teeth. She should have known better. She should have known who would be waiting to climb into this body, and left damn well alone.

  “Would you really avoid me forever?” Ikna asked, cocking her bloody head to the side. “Do you covet worthlessness as other mortals covet lynd?”

  “My worth is mine to decide.”

  “And given the choice, you settle for mediocrity.”

  Vylaena wiped her blade on the edge of her sleeveless shirt and shoved it back into its sheath with visible annoyance. She didn’t have to reply; she didn’t have to explain herself. Dawn would come, and this nightmare would slip back into the Ether where it belonged.

  “You won’t allow my Wolves to kill you, but you won’t live, either. Tell me, Vylaena—are you just frightened, or is this obstinacy born of spite?”

  “Neither. But I don’t expect you to understand.”

  The goddess laughed. “You are not the only one who struggles, little mortal. And there are many types of death. Just because you refuse one does not mean you haven’t embraced another.” She paused, the ruined face of her host growing somber.

  “My children are being taken from me,” she continued, in a voice like iron and bone. “I fear . . . I fear why.”

  Vylaena’s frown deepened. “You expect me to care?”

  The goddess gave a violent shudder as the first rays of dawn peeked through the leaves overhead. Vylaena watched, a neutral observer, as Ikna fought for control over her borrowed body, pitching sideways into the leaves.

  “You may have denied my gift but you still belong to me,” she spat, one cheek pressed into the dirt. She glared up at Vylaena, who did not move to aid her. “Find them, Vylaena. Find them.”

  The air grew lighter, less choking, as morning unfurled through the trees to chase away the mists. Ikna hissed and then abandoned her host, leaving the discarded body beneath the trees. The rogue ether lingering at the edge of the clearing retreated back into shadow.

  Vylaena stood vigil over the battered corpse for a good half hour, until the air turned a serene shade of pale blue and the first trills of birdsong broke the dense silence. Only then did she permit herself to believe the goddess was truly gone.

  “I am not yours,” Vylaena spat, ignoring how fragile the words sounded leaving her lips. “I belong only to myself.”

  She took a breath and then let it out, allowing her anger to subside. Then she strode forward and pitched the assassin’s corpse over her shoulder, grunting beneath the woman’s weight.

  She would burn this one. Better that than risk a shallow grave, where the ether might still find it. She turned and headed for home, cursing Ikna’s name with every overburdened step.

  3 | The Sun-Crowned

  Vylaena sat at the scarred kitchen table, frowning at her calloused hands. The charcoal and flakes of blood caked beneath the curves of her fingernails displayed a perfectly preserved record of the day’s macabre work.
Disposing of the would-be assassin’s body had taken longer than she’d anticipated.

  Vylaena traced the whorls in the wood grain, deeply irritated.

  Six thousand lynd. All that, just to stop a caravan? Not to mention the bounty for her head, which the assassin had obviously come to collect. If Vylaena were to guess from the last figure, the number should range in the high hundreds.

  She let out a breath. If she’d taken the job—and even if she’d hired a few mercs to help out—she’d have walked away a rich woman. Why in all of Aethryl would someone offer to pay six thousand lynd for a job any sell-sword would accept for half?

  It was enough to buy even the most loose-tongued merc’s silence, she supposed.

  Vylaena leaned back on her stool and gritted her teeth. The whole thing smelled worse than the docks of Elska. What was so important about this caravan that a man would offer a veritable fortune for its disposal? She had no interest in participating—not in the slightest—but the job was strange enough that it had piqued her interest. Not much did that these days.

  It hadn’t been on her mind when the solicitor had offered her the job, but now, after her experience with Ikna, Vylaena realized that the impending carnage would pose another problem: a massacre like that would be tremendously tempting to the ether that crawled these woods, despite its natural abhorrence of the well-warded Etherway.

  The Etherway’s wards had once been strong enough to survive the Emperor’s War, and the ancient highway normally repelled rogue ether like blood against an oiled blade. But like most etherial relics, it required upkeep—periodic maintenance—to ensure it wouldn’t unravel.