A Shaper's Birthright

by Karen MacRae

  Content that Anna would be fine, Euan turned in his saddle and gestured for the others to gather round outside the entrance to what looked like one of many similar caves they’d passed. “We’re going in here. It narrows then you take a sharp right then left then it opens up into a wide cavern. It’s just under half a mile long and shaped like a basin. We’re going to have to swim through whatever water’s collected in the middle of the bowl. It’s going to feel endless in the dark, but it’ll only be a couple of hundred yards. I want us on a line, just in case one of us gets separated from their horse, which I don’t recommend; it’s disorienting in there. Can you all swim?”

  Four nods answered Euan’s question and a long, thin rope was loosely woven around all five waists. “You might feel like the roof’s closing in. Don’t worry, it’s not. It’d take a month of this sort of rain to fill the cavern.”

  After the noise of the rain hitting the rocky landscape, the rippling water and occasional, echoing drips from the ceiling seemed eerily quiet. “Oh, Spider is just going to love this,” laughed Seleste. “If he’s coming this way?”

  “Aye, Caitlin will bring him this way. Why?”

  “Blind swimming through an underground tunnel in the pitch black? The poor boy’s going to have nightmares for weeks!”

  “But why’s that funny?” Anna asked.

  Malik laughed, the sound echoing weirdly in the gloom. “Because his sister’s a menace, that’s why,” he said fondly. “She’ll be reminding him of it for weeks in revenge for some petty thing Spider did to her as a child.”

  “Perfectly deserved it’ll be too. I did warn him I’d get even with him one day for telling Jasper Bilton I liked him.”

  “Jasper Bilton?”

  “A neighbour. Very handsome,” said Seleste. “For a ten-year-old,” she added, laughing.

  “Ah, then no one I should immediately track down and run through?”

  “Probably a fat, happy farmer, married to his childhood sweetheart, father to six children and who’s never once in sixteen years thought of the small, dark, irritating girl who lived up at the big house.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it. I’m not sure I can stand the competition,” Malik joked.

  “Definitely not. One sign of a happily married farmer with a brood of children and you won’t see me for dust.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of standing in the way of your happiness, Miss Peyton,” the Mastran said gallantly, squeezing Seleste’s hand. He could tell Spider wasn’t the only Peyton not too keen on blind swimming through an underground tunnel.

  They’d gone three hundred yards when walking through water became wading and another eighty yards when it was impossible to stay on horseback. The horses didn’t seem in the least perturbed, happily following Euan’s clicks from the front of the line. Seleste found herself with her eyes clamped shut as tightly as her hands clung onto the pommel of her saddle. She berated herself for being scared, but she couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes despite the total absence of light.

  Malik could hear her heavy breathing and broke into a daft song about a farmer’s wife who chased her unfaithful husband over the edge of a cliff, changing the words so it was about Seleste and her childhood crush, Jasper. They all joined in the choruses and Seleste knew for absolutely certain that she loved this man.

  Euan was right: the swim seemed endless in the dark, but the horses found solid ground under their feet after two hundred yards and then their riders were upright and looking with relief at the light shining down from the narrow exit.

  “No offence, Euan, but I for one would rather take a different route back, if at all possible?” asked Malik.

  Euan laughed. “I’ll bear that in mind, Cherry.”

  “I was going to ask if we could keep going tonight rather than risk Mystrim catching up with us, but there’s not a prayer of that happening,” Finn said. “Assuming our pursuers can’t catch up by another route?”

  “This is the quickest way to the Hall and there’s no other way onto this trail,” Euan confirmed. “Anyway, unless they risked crossing the bog, they must have been five or six hours behind us this morning, they’ve had cassacai to deal with and they’ll won’t know about the collapse so I doubt they’ll get off the first trail tonight. I think we can sleep easy.”

  “What’s to stop them going across the collapse?”

  “A three-foot-thick, twenty-foot-high vertical wall with a drop of a hundred and fifty feet on the other side, a gap of three hundred feet over difficult terrain then an impossible climb up scree and smooth, vertical faces. Believe me, there’s no way across.”

  Finn laughed. “That’ll do it, but what about the other teams?”

  Euan thought about timings. “Caitlin should be catching up with us tonight if they set off at dawn. Ailie will come in from the other side. That’d be the meeting I’d worry about, but it’s highly unlikely. It’s going to take the spies a while to find the detour round the collapse so I reckon they’ll miss each other by at least a couple of hours.”

  “What if they picked up a guide at Mistress Petrie’s?”

  Euan shook his head. “Her husband was a Stone Crafter, but he died years ago and I don’t think the rest of the family or their farmhands have ever stepped foot on the hills. They’re on their own. I’ll have the beads in the fire long before they arrive.”

  “You burn them to destroy them?”

  “Sort of. It’s not like ordinary fire although I can’t really explain it to you. It’s a form of the pressure we use to reduce and polish the stone, but moving it so quickly creates a fierce heat. The fibres of the stone twist and fall apart if it’s strong enough. I’ve never done it to quality beads though. They’ll be harder and that means even hotter.”

  “Do you know anything about black peristone, Euan?” asked Finn.

  “Nothing for certain. White is an amalgamation of all eight colours of peristone and black is the impurities rejected in the process, but what the process is, I’m afraid I don’t know. It’s been banned for centuries and the art of making it has died out.”

  Seleste noticed nothing unusual in Euan’s aura, but Anna could feel he knew more than he was saying.

  “Did anyone else notice we’re not shouting?” asked Malik.

  “You’re right, the rain’s much lighter,” Seleste agreed. “Mystrim must be near exhaustion or they’re high enough to have got fed up getting drenched themselves so he’s called it off.”

  The truth was somewhere in between. Mystrim had called a halt. “I can’t keep the rain up. What with that awful glue weed and a lengthy weather manipulation, I’m exhausted. I have to rest for a few minutes.”

  “Ten minutes,” said the Reader. “Sailor, water the horses. Nijel, pass around some rations, double for the weather mage.”

  Mystrim dismounted and lay flat on his back in the middle of the trail. The rain eased off and the weather mage’s clothes began to steam.

  “You’re too tired to ride, but you can dry your own clothes?” Elona asked sarcastically.

  “That’s me done until tomorrow. I’ve got nothing left.”

  “I can maybe help a bit if you dry my clothes too, weather mage,” bartered Nijel quietly as he handed the man some trail rations.

  “Heal my cheek and I might manage your boots,” offered Mystrim.

  “Clothes and boots,” countered the Healer.

  “Fine. You first.”

  Nijel placed his hands on the weather mage’s face and pressed the broken bone into the correct position before drawing the poison into his Healer’s well. He could feel how depleted the mage was, but he could also sense the man held a little in reserve.

  “I’ll dry you when I’m rested,” Mystrim told the teenager.

  “Did you know that a select number of Healers’ Guild students are taught how to empty their wells?” Nijel said with a low voice. “Right into anyone they’re touching.”

  Mystrim sat up abruptly, knocking the boy’s hands away from him.
“You lie,” he accused.

  “Try me.”

  The weather mage met the teenager’s eyes full on. The Healer stared straight back at him, steely-eyed, resolute in his lie, if it was a lie. Mystrim belatedly realised the boy had real potential. He’d been dismissing him as Elona’s pet until now. “There’s more to you than meets the eye, young man. You could have a good future with us. With the right mentor.”

  Nijel smiled as he felt his clothes begin to dry and his body warm.

  “My thanks, weather mage,” he said politely.

  Pyteor joined the two, oblivious to their new understanding. “You were awesome with that weed, Mystrim. Terrifying stuff. Touch it and you’re glued to the spot, burn it and it grows. I mean, what? It grows in fire?”

  “Shame whatshisname didn’t get out of the way in time,” Nijel said. “He made a right racket as it swallowed him and the torch up.”

  “Better him than us,” Pyteor said firmly.

  “Light, yes, but that’s what the Reader brought them for.”

  “The Reader brought them to be useful in a fight, not to get swallowed up by weed,” Elona stated from behind them. “Still, it was amusing to see all those little seedlings suddenly appear all over him. Almost as if popping corn had developed a taste for eating men.”

  The four laughed together for the first time in… ever, realised Elona. They might be disheartened by Braxton beating them to Shae, but they were confident they could steal at least a couple of good sets of beads. Nystrieth would be pleased. Sourcing black peristone might prove harder, but something would turn up and, if not, there were still the books.

  “You did do a decent job with the weed, weather mage,” Elona said grudgingly. “It’s a shame you didn’t think of freezing it earlier, but it was certainly effective. Now, shall we go?”

  Three hours later, Elona’s good mood vanished the instant they discovered a twenty-foot-high wall stretching across the trail. “Where did they go?” she shrieked. “Someone get up over that wall and see what’s on the other side!”

  Mystrim felt sufficiently recovered to protect himself from retaliation so he risked pointing out that it was too dark to see much and he didn’t have enough strength to thin the clouds so perhaps they should wait until morning.

  Elona screamed and ranted for several minutes before deciding to climb the offending wall herself. She realised the sense in Mystrim’s words when she could hardly see to find the first holds. “We camp here for the night,” she said as if Mystrim had never suggested it. “Find shelter. And whoever’s first to the top of that wall in the morning earns my favour. I want to know what’s over there and I want to know if there’s an obvious detour. We haven’t passed any horses and I can’t see any way to get them over a vertical wall. Braxton must have turned somewhere.”

  Across the valley, Spider’s group had stopped dead when they heard what sounded like an animal shrieking in pain. “What was that?” Spider asked.

  “Not animal,” said Caitlin, shaking her head.

  “There’s no animal on Shae makes a noise like that,” agreed Beitris.

  The three visitors looked at each other as the same conclusion occurred to them. “Elona,” they said at once. It had to be. The men who travelled with her couldn’t possibly reach those notes.

  “Cave close,” Caitlin told them, clicking at her horse to make it walk on ahead.

  It was a reserved reunion. Finn’s team had also heard Elona’s fury and didn’t want the enemy to be able to pinpoint them. Euan explained she was half a mile ahead and three hundred feet to the right.

  “That is spectacularly precise for a sound that bounced all over the hills,” noted Jimmy.

  Euan smiled. “The trail collapsed just there. She wasn’t too pleased to discover we’d vanished.”

  “No noisy nightmares tonight then,” said Seleste. “No tunnels collapsing and drowning in the dark. All alone in the damp air. In the pitch black, lost, your muscles tiring, the water closing over your head…”

  Spider looked at his sister in horror. “How could you, Seleste?” he asked, his voice faint.

  She leaned in close. “Jasper Bilton,” she whispered.

  “Jasper Bilton?” Spider asked, confused. “Oh, for light’s sake, you are kidding me? Jasper Bilton?”

  Seleste grinned.

  “Cherry, never put a foot wrong with this woman,” Spider warned. “She’ll hold a grudge forever!”

  CHAPTER 27

  N ijel was struggling to sleep. His dreams were full of the sailors they’d lost to the weed and the bog, as if nature itself were against them. He noticed the barest lightening of the sky and crept out of the cave. He’d keep his mind occupied by climbing the wall. There was nothing else to do and it couldn’t hurt to be in Elona’s good books. The climb was tricky, made trickier thanks to the lack of light, but he’d climbed worse as a child. He made it to the top with plenty of time to spare before the sun rose.

  The top was about three feet thick and perfectly level. Nijel sat with his feet dangling over the edge, waiting for the sun to properly reveal what was below, wondering at the skill of the locals to make such a perfectly straight, solid wall with nothing to cement the stones together. He wondered what would happen if he jumped: if he’d hit the ground after twenty feet or two hundred feet. Why build a wall across a path? Maybe these Stone Crafter types could do it instantaneously and it was just to delay them?

  He closed his eyes, weary from lack of sleep, but a vision of roots closing over bubbling water disturbed his rest after only a few minutes and he felt his shoulders come up and the muscles in his neck tense in fear. He forced his shoulders down until he felt the stretch start to relax them then slowed his breathing and circled his neck. As he lifted his chin to the left, he thought he saw something move out of the corner of his eye. He focused on it, his aching muscles forgotten. It had almost been nothing but had definitely been something. He felt his stomach flutter in excitement. Had he found Braxton?

  He lay down on the top of the wall to make himself less visible and waited. When the sun revealed the valley below, he was glad he hadn’t jumped. A huge swathe of the trail had collapsed. He ignored the danger and kept his eyes on the path on the far side. As soon as he spotted a figure, he went scrambling down the wall as fast as he could.

  “I’ve been up the wall, Elona,” he said, gently shaking the Reader awake. She woke without any confusion, her mind straight to the problem they’d discovered the night before.

  “And?” she asked.

  “The trail is gone. Braxton is on the other side, about half a mile west of here. If we wait, they’ll go right in front of us. A crossbow bolt won’t reach, but one of Mystrim’s fireballs will.”

  Elona grabbed the teenager and kissed him hard on the lips. “I knew there was a reason I kept you around,” she said.

  Nijel grinned.

  Elona went around the cave, kicking men awake. “Pyteor, take the sailor and find the detour. It’s almost certainly on the right as you go down the slope. Mystrim, how’s your gift?”

  “Recovering still, Reader. What did you have in mind?”

  Elona smiled. “Chaos and death, mage. Chaos and death.”

  Across the valley, Finn and his team had been waiting patiently since sunrise for Nystrieth’s spies to go searching for the detour. In the meantime, Euan was making sure everyone knew what lay ahead. “We’re half a mile away from where this trail meets the collapsed trail. In a hundred yards, we’re going to go through a tunnel which takes us there. When we come out, we have to go left and follow a ledge around an L-shape back onto the original trail. The horses will walk round quite happily. All you have to do is stay on.”

  “Ledge?” asked Malik.

  “It juts out three feet from the cliff face. It’s perfectly sound but looks scarier than it is.”

  “And I thought yesterday’s swim would be the highlight of our trip,” Spider joked nervously. “Just how long are we tottering on the edge of this pre
cipice?”

  “Not long. It’s only fifty feet: thirty feet then a bend to the left and another twenty feet. Then it widens into the main trail.” Euan looked at the worried faces and realised his description wasn’t helping to reassure anyone. “It’s much easier than it sounds, I promise. To put your mind at rest, we’ll use a line, but all you have to do is trust your horse. Saying that, Jimmy, how are you with heights?”

  “Fine, Euan. I’ve always loved climbing.”

  “Good. Then it’s probably best you walk. It’ll be an awfully tight squeeze for your big horse with you on board.”

  The Ionantian nodded, quite happy at the thought of walking around a ledge fifty feet up in the air. “What’s the drop like?” he asked.

  “Forty-five-degree overhang, vertical for twenty feet with very few holds then relatively gently slope with a lot of scree gathered up behind jutting sections that drop straight down on the other side. The valley floor itself is a mess of rocks. Not the easiest terrain to get around, but doable. Not really worth the effort if you’re looking to climb though. There are much better slopes elsewhere. There’s a cracking climb on the north side of the hills. If we ever get the chance, I’ll take you.”

  “You’re completely mad, the pair of you,” said Anna, shaking her head.

  They waited until an hour after sunrise before setting off from the cave. It took a little over fifteen minutes to reach the ledge. Caitlin waited for her and her horse’s eyes to adjust to the change of light then set off to secure the end of the line to the main trail. Euan felt the tug on the rope to tell him the line was ready and began tying the long rope to everyone.

  “Get your eyes used to daylight before you go out, please. Your horses too. You don’t want to be blind when you get out there. There’s a bit of a drizzle and a fair updraft so just let your horses follow the one in front and no peering over the side or you might find yourself floating away on the wind. Everyone ready?”