Shadows and Shade Box Set

by Amanda Cashure

  Forgive me, Kitten, for whatever it is we’re about to read.

  Six Paces

  I tackle Roarke, and we go down in a tangled heap on the floor. In one hand he has my band, in the other a book he’d snatched up off the workbench. I’m pretty much lying over the top of him, both of his legs wrapped around one of mine and keeping me from wriggling any higher and reaching his hands – and my hair band.

  He stops laughing long enough to suck in a breath. “I will give it back when I’m finished.”

  I’m not even sure why I want it so badly. Except, having my hair flop around in my eyes is annoying, and I only own one band – so the idea of losing it is a little terrifying.

  “But you have to get off me first,” he says, but I couldn’t even if I tried. The guy has serious leg strength.

  “You have to get off me,” I shoot back.

  His chest rumbles beneath me, and slowly he relaxes his legs and the grip they have on mine. “Just watch your knees.”

  I ever… so… slowly lift myself off of him, putting one knee on the floor so close to his crotch that even I’m surprised I missed anything important.

  “Did I miss?” I ask, fluttering my eyelashes just to get another laugh out of him.

  He pushes himself up onto his elbows, his hair falling back in a wave.

  Damn, the guy has good hair. Annoyingly good. Like give-it-to-me good.

  “I don’t need to kiss you,” he says so softly and gently that it takes me a second to realize what he’s actually said.

  “I don’t need to kiss you either,” I whisper back.

  “No, I’m serious. This is taking next to no energy at all. A little, but not like before. My power isn’t hunting for you. It isn’t hunting for anyone.” His sentence ends in nothing more than a whisper; the words – or their meaning – have knocked the volume right out of him.

  He abandons the hair band on the floor and lifts his hand to cup my cheek. “I don’t want to ruin this.”

  His lips are still moving, still trying to get his sentence out, when I dive for my band. I snatch it up off the floor and roll, thumping into the bench seat by the window.

  “Mine,” I declare in victory.

  He offers me a lopsided smile. It makes me think my antics might actually be endearing – but most likely they’re just annoying. He moves across to me, and I’m still trying to work out what he’s doing and trying not to knock over an awkwardly stacked pile of books next to my elbow when he slips in behind me and pulls me into the V of his legs. He leans back against the half-wall under the window seat. Before I can argue, he starts running his fingers over my scalp and through my hair.

  Shivers trickle down my spine, and I may have just moaned out loud.

  Yep – definitely making sounds of pure pleasure right now.

  He chuckles softly, pulling me deeper into his arms, then picking up the book and flipping it to the handwritten notes at the back.

  “I found this in Eydis’ cellar –”

  “What is it?” I cut in, partly because he’s making me think the contents of the book are less comfortable than eating rotten chicken. Which leaves me with memories of food poisoning – do Sabers even get food poisoning?

  “Just, I’m sorry, but it’s a journal of notes she took about you. Pax wants me to read it.”

  My heart stutters, and his hand stills in my hair.

  “I can read it to myself, or I can read it out loud, but I wanted you to have the choice. She might have left clues about the Spring or your father. There’s a reason she locked it in the cellar.”

  I shuffle back a little further, rolling a little to one side and leaning into him a lot. My head settles against his shoulder. One of his hands begins to tease through my hair again, trailing over my skin, while the other opens the book.

  He flicks over pages too quickly for me to see anything but a blur, stopping at the back of the book.

  “What’s this mark?” I ask, running my fingers over the almost invisible markings on some of the pages.

  “The Page Wiping Potion leaves a mark. Paper is precious, and obviously Eydis thought this book was the perfect candidate for keeping notes in.” His words are simple enough, but there’s something hidden in his tone. He flicks quickly through the pages again and scans down a list at the front before returning to the back. “Might have something to do with the original content.”

  “What original content?”

  “Not important,” he says, tapping the first gray page. “Eydis would have dropped the potion onto a cloth and wiped the words away, but it leaves a kind of watermark. Are you ready?”

  I nod. His finger settles on the top left of the page, and he begins to read.

  My eyes trace the scrawling scribbles for all of two heartbeats, then they drift closed – sinking into the sound of his voice. It’s different when he’s reading, silky like ink itself. Scrawling through my consciousness.

  “Child orphaned,” he reads.

  Me, I was orphaned – that’s nothing new or raw.

  I settle in to listen.

  “Tried to reach her family in time – died of the mortal flu. Now in the care of the Manor Lord. Being raised by her own kind will be better than bringing her here. Who knows the damage? Bringing her back through the border after whatever the Origin Spring did to put her into stasis has no logical reason for success. I never thought she would come out.

  I wish Raefiya was still living to help me navigate this. Leave the child to the suffering of mortals or bring her back into Silva and destroy her mortal soul? Without some kind of a buffer between her and the magic of this place, surely she wouldn’t last ‘til adulthood? Even in my domain. Haryk-Larsan lived outside the border for a reason… but the girl isn’t just mortal. I will have to sleep on it… ~ Eydis.”

  “Haryk-Larsan was a person, is a person?” I ask.

  “Looks likely.”

  “Like a my-father type person?”

  “Also likely.”

  “Okay, keep reading,” I say, waving him on.

  “Um,” for a second he sounds like he’s lost his place, or maybe like he’s shocked by my reaction. “I have decided to employ tradesmen and build a new cottage with a direct line of sight to the Manor. It will take time, and the flow of water will need to be redirected, but in the end it will be closer to the Origin Spring.”

  “Right,” I interrupt again. “So the Spring is close, is that all?”

  “No, Kitten. There are pages and pages.”

  “But what else is there to know? Or to write about? I’m pretty sure my life consisted of waking, cleaning, and then sleeping.”

  His heel taps a little rhythm out on the floorboards, but the sound is drowned out by someone else climbing the staircase.

  Seth. He’s not in my bubble yet, but I can feel his confidence seeping out ahead of him.

  He reaches the top step and leans casually against the banister. “Pax told me you were up here,” he says, giving me a warm smile. Then he pulls his hand from behind his back, two blocks of chocolate in his grip. “Thought maybe you might need these.”

  I moan, stretching my arm toward them. Chuckling, he ambles into the room. With gentle fingers, Roarke tucks a stray strand of hair behind my ear and then shifts his weight like he’s expecting me to get up.

  “Chocolate is in close competition to most things in life, but not you,” I say, snuggling into Roarke so he can’t escape me.

  Seth holds the blocks out, and I snatch them up.

  “Can I stay?” he asks.

  I grip the hem of his shirt and give it a tug. The guy doesn’t argue, sitting on the ground then spinning around, stretching out, and making himself very comfortable with his head on my stomach. We relax into each other, Roarke’s fingers in my hair and mine naturally running through Seth’s. His golden strands glint in the direct light; there’s almost no filter between the early afternoon sun and us.

  I rip the brown paper packaging with one hand and break the chocolat
e into haphazard portions, holding one over my head for Roarke to lean forward and claim with his teeth before I lower another onto Seth’s tongue.

  Seth moans softly.

  “No sigils?” Roarke asks.

  “No sigils,” Seth echoes.

  “We’ll find it,” I tell them, not that I have any actual reason to believe it myself. “Do you need to read more, or can we just have a nap?”

  “Nap?” Seth chuckles. “It’ll be dark soon. Your nap will turn into a full mortal sleep.”

  I shrug, “You want a nap too – don’t deny it.”

  “I don’t have to read this out loud,” Roarke says, his voice a gentle rumble under my back.

  “Yeah, you do. I want to know all about Vexy. From the first time she picked her nose to the reason she has a scar near her big toe.”

  “What?” I ask, trying to lift my foot high enough to see past where Seth is using my middle as a pillow. A millow? “I don’t have a scar on my foot.”

  He reaches out, grips my foot, and lifts it awkwardly into the air.

  “Right there,” he says, pointing to my instep.

  “I don’t know how I did that.”

  “I bet you Eydis does,” he says letting go of my foot.

  My heel slams down onto the timber, making me moan from the vibrating pain.

  “She wasn’t watching her every move. This is more scientific,” Roarke says, ignoring me. As he talks, he flicks back and forth through the pages. “Almost scientific. For a Potion Master, I would have expected consistency. She has dates, rough guesses at growth rate and calculations compared to Silvari maturity rates –”

  “Just read it,” Seth mumbles, opening his mouth wide – like he’s waiting for something.

  For what?

  Oh, chocolate. I snap off another chunk each, letting mine slowly melt on my tongue as Roarke begins to read.

  Each word he says is a dance of sound that lightly steps into my mind, taps out a memory, then leaves an echo of tingles down my spine. And he does all of this so smoothly that soon, I don’t even notice the words. It all becomes a painting on the inside of my closed eyelids.

  Something about a well-girthed woman… Cook.

  Something about the barn fire that left Alfie orphaned and took the skin so badly from one hand that I had to hold him still while Cook sawed off three of his fingers.

  Something about the Soot Day feasts that we held late every year – because Lord Martin always made the five day trip to the celebrations in Hirana as an honorable guest. So we’d unearth buried caches of liquor that had been waiting for years, depending on how well we remembered when to dig up which hole. We never had much to feast on, but we’d share the liquor, sitting in a circle, sipping from jugs and passing them on, singing and laughing. We danced around the fire until our legs couldn’t hold us up. The stars were bright, the world around us black. And life was better than good for that one night. Then we would fall asleep right there out in the open. With Lord Martin gone, it was like nothing could harm us.

  We could always see the green mist shrouding the forest, not that we were close enough to smell it, but we could see it. We had no idea what was inside the forest.

  Roarke turns the page, and the swish of paper against his fingers cuts into the bare second of silence.

  “A black eye takes the child ten days to heal. A split lip three. More confirmation of her mortality ~ Eydis.”

  “The knife wound took a week to heal,” Seth adds, his voice a deeper note through the room.

  “You’re not getting a pen,” I tell Roarke before he can even think about getting up and taking notes. “Ever. No making notes about me. None of you, not about how I heal or anything else. Got it?”

  And just to be sure they’re listening I add a Killian-like rumble to the end of my sentence. No words, just a rumble. I live trapped in a chuckin’ magical bubble, that's as close to a fish in a bowl as I ever want to be. They’re not recording any of this – not if they know what's good for them.

  “Okay,” he whispers, stroking his fingers through my hair until I’ve stopped growling. Then he keeps reading.

  The winter when it hardly snowed, and the fields turned to ice perfect for sliding and skating on. The spring when the sky lit up with shooting stars almost every night. Eydis watched from afar and noted my reaction. Watched me grow. Made calculated guesses at my height and weight.

  And never once came to save me.

  I know that’s stupid of me to think – I never met the woman, and I never expected her help. But she was watching.

  And that twists me up inside.

  “Vexy,” Seth says, his hand lacing up through his own hair and slipping underneath my fingers.

  “I thought she was falling asleep,” Roarke says.

  “No, she’s gone all tense and rigid.”

  “There’s only two more pages,” Roarke says, then his voice lowers. “Can I read the last pages?”

  I nod, letting Seth pull my hand free from my death grip on his hair and settling it underneath his chin.

  “I feel like time is running out, but the girl shows no affinity with any magic, either mortal or Saber. If she touches flames, she burns. If she goes under the water, she drowns. We’ve tested her for every –”

  “Wait, what?” I interrupt.

  “I feel like time is running out –” Roarke begins to repeat, but I cut him off again.

  “How old is this entry?” I ask.

  “What does she mean tested?” Seth asks louder.

  “No, what does she mean by we?” I demand.

  Yep, this conversation has reached the point of demanding.

  Roarke scans the Silvari scribbles before nodding. “It does say we, but it doesn’t mention who.”

  “How old is it?” I repeat.

  Roarke flicks back a page, then two, before answering. “This entry is from last month. Before that the previous entry is from three months ago.”

  “Dustin,” I practically spit.

  “Dustin?” both of them repeat. And neither of them sound delighted.

  “Who’s Dustin?” Roarke asks.

  “The water stores, the wash house, and the fires used to clean clothes are all on the western side of the Manor. Eydis can’t have seen me burn myself early in the summer, and she couldn’t have seen Martin hold me in the trough until Dustin made a scene about a snake.”

  “Eydis had a Saber at the Manor?” Roarke asks, each word slowed by the racing of his mind.

  Both of my guys have gone tense. Seth rolls his hand into a fist, then forces his fingers to uncurl again. Roarke’s tremor wouldn’t be noticeable if I weren’t watching the shake of the book in his hand.

  “I don’t think he was a Saber – there was only one of him, and he wasn’t as pretty as any of you.” Pretty is the word that makes Seth relax a little. “Dustin made himself scarce, worked the fields and the Brahmans mostly. But he hung around me like a bad smell every time he was at the Manor house. His jokes were all terrible, and his conversation lacked intelligence,” I throw the insults around, trying to get Roarke to relax too.

  In truth, Dustin was a nice guy; his looks were above average, but he was always smeared with dirt or cow shit. A fact that I now wonder wasn’t deliberate and designed to hide something – or to give people plenty of reason to look away and not remember him beyond the guy who smelled bad.

  His conversation was nice enough, and he even got along well with Jake when the three of us were in the barn playing darts, but those occasions were limited. I played darts most nights; Dustin maybe joined us once a week.

  But he’s the only option. It can’t have been Jake – he grew up out there with me. None of the other servants were around when I burnt myself or the time I almost drowned, even Jake.

  Dustin scared Lord Martin off with the snake, then picked me up and carried me inside to Cook. He didn’t actually say anything and never mentioned it again, but Leon knew something.

  “Leon,” I gasp his
name.

  Both guys are super tense all over again.

  “What about him?” Roarke asks.

  I pat his leg. “Both of you stop being so male!”

  “We’re not,” they both chorus.

  “Someone explain how Leon factors into all of this?” Seth asks.

  “The mortal mage mentioned that he knew Shade had been purchased, so he’s been to the Manor, and he was also working with Eydis. Logic says either he’s her mole –”

  I cut Roarke off. “Can’t be, I’d never seen him before.”

  “Or they’re all working together.”

  “Eydis, Dustin, and Leon,” I list their names, trying to link them together, and the Potion Master is the odd one out.

  Was Dustin a mage? Did he have powers?

  I don’t bother asking because neither of these guys have an answer, and neither of them seem too happy about the topic either. So instead of asking more questions I try to move the conversation along. “But the Manor gets all sorts of people passing through. Hunters and miners and people who ran the wrong way – fresh out of luck – from the cities. But Dustin never quite felt like he belonged; he wasn’t broken enough, which actually made him scary.”

  “If he was working with Eydis, he was probably a Saber, and we shouldn’t feel right to mortals,” Roarke says.

  “That’s never been an issue for me before.”

  “But it would have for Lord Martin and the other servants. Would explain why he spent so much time away from the Manor.”

  “And that would have given him a chance to meet with Eydis and compare notes.”

  “Keep reading,” Seth insists, patting my leg to highlight his instruction.

  Not sure how my leg affects Roarke’s voice at all, but it works.

  “Okay, next entry. The problems within this Realm have grown insurmountable. The odds are stacked too high. The mortal girl is a lost cause. Shade, she’s called. Which sounds nothing like the name her mother gave her. Leon has finally arrived, but his accomplice will remain at the Manor for now –”

  “Aha! I was right,” I announce, but Roarke doesn’t stop reading.

  “– There’s no better vantage point, and as a mage, he’s sworn not to intervene with the Lord – though I can see he wants to. I have come to the conclusion that the only way back into this realm for that child will be right back through the Darkness that she’s already traveled – and that I am too old a woman for such an enormous task. The girl will stay with the mortals, and we will begin looking for other solutions ~ Eydis. After that there’s just a weird diagram, circles and lines that make no sense.”