Reign of the Fallen

by Sarah Glenn Marsh

  “She’s nowhere near here,” she says in a dreamy, distant voice not quite like her own. Her face is completely blank. A shiver runs through me as I realize Lysander’s eyes are glowing a vivid green, identical to hers. Somehow, she’s searching his thoughts in a way I’ve never seen before.

  “Then we’d better start running,” I murmur. Now that we’re in the Deadlands, there could be Shades nearby. Or the very man I’d like to catch by surprise.

  “No.” To my relief, Meredy sounds more like herself. She meets my gaze, then nods to Lysander. “Riding will be much faster.”

  Every necromancer should see the Deadlands on the back of a grizzly, I decide as I settle myself on Lysander’s warm bulk. The view is different somehow. Sharper, with every twisted tree and every moonflower seeming to jump out at me, vying for my attention.

  Meredy sits in front of me, and at her urging, I wrap my arms around her waist.

  My heart taps out its excitement against my ribs, and there’s nothing I can do—save for letting go of Meredy’s soft curves or tucking my nose into my shirt so I don’t have to breathe her subtle vanilla scent that makes my head spin—to slow it down.

  I just hope she can’t feel the faint pounding against her back, or hear the slight quickening of my breath.

  Lysander picks up speed, and I grip Meredy tighter. He seems to be following the meander of a dark and icy river. As the water rushes past in a blur, my thoughts turn to Master Cymbre.

  The day she first came to see me at Death’s convent, her face was less lined and her fiery hair had no trace of gray.

  She wanted to be a mentor, not a mother, but I was ten years old and I didn’t know the difference. We both learned a lot that first year, as she tried to pass on her knowledge of the Dead while I tried on her clothes and lip rouge and begged to sleep in her bed.

  Wind chills the tips of my ears as Lysander carries us through a grove of trees that have dropped their silver leaves.

  I asked Master Cymbre about the seasons in the Deadlands once. I think I was twelve. She couldn’t explain why there weren’t any, she said, any better than her mentor could when she’d asked the very same thing. But she still knew a lot more than I did, and I never stopped relying on her to answer my impossible questions.

  Why the moon turns blood-red sometimes.

  Why we can’t look upon the Dead without them turning into Shades.

  Why Simeon doesn’t like kissing girls, only boys, but I like both.

  Why love hurts when it’s the thing we live for. The thing some people search their entire lives for. The thing some people die for.

  Why I don’t know where I belong.

  “With me, chickadee,” Master Cymbre would singsong when I asked her that, in the years before I started going by Sparrow.

  She’s never been my mother. She’s always held a little something of herself back from me, just enough to remain as mysterious as Vaia, the Five-Faced God who created our world and then vanished long ago.

  But she’s all I have. All that’s left of our trio, which once felt invincible.

  “You’re quiet back there,” Meredy murmurs, gazing at me over her shoulder. “Everything all right?”

  I nod, still lost in memories. Like the day Master Cymbre first took Evander and me into the Deadlands and explained the price of our magic. That while we could come here and have the freedom to bring spirits back to their bodies, our spirits would never rest here when we died. We’d just . . . disappear.

  It seemed so unfair to ten-year-old me, I’d flopped down under a silvery tree and cried so hard I gave myself hiccups. Nothing we got in return for raising the dead—invitations to all the palace parties, the fame, the heaps of gold for each person we brought back to life—seemed to be a good exchange for our spirits.

  “All magic has a price,” Master Cymbre told me more than once. “If it didn’t, every blue-eyed person would raise all their loved ones and Karthia would be overrun with Dead. If gray-eyed people could change the path of a huge storm without giving themselves a stroke, we’d never have to fear another dark cloud.”

  “Sounds like a perfect world,” I’d grumbled.

  But Master Cymbre had merely smiled. “You wouldn’t think it was perfect. There would be other problems. Karthia would be crowded, restless, and miserable.”

  “What are you trying to say?” I demanded.

  “I’m saying we make our own problems. As long as people exist,” she’d said, her steely blue eyes focused intently on mine, “there will be trouble and discontent and rumblings of how things could be better. There is no ‘perfect.’”

  Meredy gives me another worried look, and my face warms as I realize I’ve been staring absently into the distance. Still, the heat in my cheeks feels good compared to the cold breeze that’s numbing every bit of my exposed skin as Lysander bounds up the side of a small mountain, his pace never lagging.

  “What’s the price of a beast master’s magic?” I ask her, careful to keep my voice low.

  If Meredy’s surprised by the question, she doesn’t show it. “When we exercise any amount of control over our beasts,” she murmurs, “we become like them for a little while. Feral. In possession of only our most basic instincts.”

  I think of how different she sounded as she searched her bear’s mind earlier. “You didn’t seem very beastly after you and Lysander did your silent-talking thing.”

  “That’s because it was brief. Just a little magic. I wasn’t trying to see through his eyes, or to fully possess him and force his limbs to move.” Meredy’s lips twist in a grim smile. “As you’ve seen, I’m quite capable of controlling my . . . less human urges.”

  “Like what?” I ask, trying to distract myself from thoughts of Master Cymbre fighting for her life, from horrible scenarios playing out in my mind like a shadow-puppet play on a wall. “Eating raw fish? Running naked through the Deadlands?”

  Meredy doesn’t answer.

  It’s hard to tell in the Deadlands’ perpetual dimness, but her cheeks look redder than usual. I wish I could read her mind right now.

  Instead, I’m left alone with my thoughts. I should’ve paid more attention to Master Cymbre after Master Nicanor’s death. I was so caught up in trying to get revenge on the giant Shade and in grieving for Evander that I didn’t notice how she must have been grieving, too. Maybe we could have mourned together.

  Maybe if she’d thought I was willing to listen, trusted that I wasn’t some potion addict trying to escape the past anymore, she would’ve told me what she was planning tonight. But I’d sided with the healer and insisted she rest. I should have known better.

  She’s too much like me to just sit on her hands and wait when something is wrong. She’s doing this to protect me.

  Lysander suddenly comes to a halt on a narrow stretch of beach beside a large dark lake, breathing hard. Meredy leans forward, wordlessly talking with him again. He stomps a huge paw and lowers his head.

  There in the sand, right beneath Lysander’s nose, are a few fiery red hairs streaked with gray.

  I scramble off the bear’s back and drop to my knees, sifting through the chilled sand for any other sign that Cymbre was here. For any reason to hope she’s still alive. Meredy joins me, walking up and down the lake shore so many times I get dizzy watching her.

  “Don’t touch the water! Not even with your boot!” I warn her over the lump in my throat as Meredy’s path veers closer to the water’s edge. As she moves farther out of my reach.

  There are a few spirits floating farther out in the lake, toward the middle. From shore, they look like mist or fallen clouds as they hover on the water’s surface. They don’t notice us, too busy forgetting who and what they were as the lake strips away their dearest memories. I don’t want that to happen to Meredy, and all it would take is one accidental step into the water to make her forget something about
herself.

  “We should move on,” I tell Meredy as she strides toward me again. “Can Lysander try to pick up Cymbre’s scent again?”

  Meredy shakes her head, her face pale. “The trail ends here.”

  I swallow hard as a wave of cold crashes over my head. “Does that mean . . . ?” I can’t finish. I can’t go through this again. Meredy steadies me with a hand on my shoulder, and after a moment, I find my voice again.

  “There’s no body. How can we be sure she’s dead if there’s no body?”

  “Breathe,” Meredy urges, squeezing my shoulder.

  “Where’s her sword, if she’s really dead? She wouldn’t have gone looking for the Shade-baiter if she didn’t have her sword and her—”

  “She’s dead, I assure you. She made a nice meal for my hungry Shades,” a harsh voice says, causing us to whirl toward the sound. “As will you both. Very soon.”

  XXVI

  Even with his tall form hidden beneath a handsome cobalt cloak, his face obscured and his eyes shadowed by a painted silver mask, I’d recognize him anywhere thanks to his gravelly voice. Vane, the powerful rogue necromancer, strides briskly down the shore toward us.

  I draw my sword and step in front of Meredy and her grizzly, the necromancer’s words cutting into me like a dagger to the stomach, laying my insides open. Cymbre’s dead. And all her stories, her hopes, her loves, her wisdom have died with her.

  Lysander growls, low and menacing.

  Several more cloaked figures form a half-circle around us, creeping closer by the moment. If we want to flee, we’ll have to go through them. Or swim out into the lake, which is as good as a death sentence.

  Vane holds a broadsword at his side. It’s so much larger than mine, I don’t know that I have a hope of matching him in strength. But I might be quicker. And perhaps smarter, too.

  It isn’t until I spot the five Shades waiting in the distance, in the field at the necromancers’ backs, that my heart seizes and I don’t know how we’re going to make it out of here alive. But we have to try.

  I raise my sword.

  “Vane,” another of the cloaked Shade-baiters—if that’s what they are—mutters worriedly. “Don’t forget to collect the Sparrow’s pin as proof of her death.” She locks eyes with me. “He could stiff us if we don’t follow orders exactly as he gave them . . .”

  “Who’s he?” I glance briefly at the woman, whose dark curly hair spills out from her hood. “Tell me, and maybe I’ll bring you to the dungeons instead of killing you.”

  “Silence!” Vane raises his free hand at the female Shade-baiter like he’s about to strike her. Then he turns toward me, no doubt sensing where I’m standing. “You all kill the others. I want the satisfaction of slaying this one myself!”

  He charges toward me, swinging his blade. I stop him mid-strike with mine, metal screeching against metal as I try to push him back, my shoulders burning with the effort.

  “Don’t worry about the others,” Meredy says tersely from somewhere behind me. “Lysander and I will keep them busy.”

  Lysander darts past me, his eyes glowing green again, charging up the beach and making the other necromancers scatter as he tries to eviscerate them with his claws.

  Someone screams. A sword drops onto the sand, accompanied by a spray of blood, and I have a feeling someone’s just learned not to point a blade at a bear.

  “You’re lucky he let you live this long,” Vane growls.

  Something tumbles from his cloak pocket as he slashes at me. I dance away from his blade, and as my mind makes sense of the tiny object on the sand, my heart lurches. Vane might as well have stabbed me when he dropped it.

  Master Cymbre’s ancient book of poems.

  The one with my sticky jam fingerprints on the front page and a few of my tears in the middle. There’s a page still carefully held by the braided silk bookmark I gave Cymbre on her birthday last year.

  She’s really gone.

  She’s gone, and I still need her. Just like Evander.

  Vane lashes out again and again, never even breaking a sweat. Without his vision, his other senses are heightened, making him more than a match for me. My forehead grows slick, my mouth cotton-dry as I jump and dodge to stay a hairsbreadth away from his blade. Each time our swords clash, my body screams with the staggering force of his blows. I can’t keep this up much longer—the realization that Master Cymbre’s gone forever has made my blocks and jabs as clumsy as a beginner’s.

  There are Shades waiting beyond the shore, their skeletal bodies restless with the need to hunt, and I’m sure the only reason they aren’t charging toward us is because they’re waiting for Vane’s order. It could come at any moment.

  I barely deflect his next blow, which knocks the breath out of me and shatters the vials of honey and blood on my belt. I try to scoop some of the honey into my hand, but it oozes through my fingers, and tiny shards of glass slice my skin.

  “Oh, did you need those?” Vane snarls as the vials crunch.

  He throws me to the ground, ramming his shoulder into my chest. I get a brief glimpse of Meredy as I go down, standing mere paces away near the water’s edge, her eyes glazed in concentration as she controls her grizzly like a puppeteer. I hope she snaps out of that daze before Vane comes for her.

  Pain blossoms through my middle as I writhe on the sand, my sword lying just out of reach, everything hurting too much for my body to obey my commands to roll away. My neck is exposed, ready for Vane’s blade to come swiftly down and cleave my head from my shoulders.

  He raises his sword again. I force myself to gaze into the slits of his mask, hoping I’ll make Master Cymbre proud by witnessing my own death. By not letting Vane win entirely, because I’m not afraid. It’s exactly what Cymbre must have done earlier, on this very spot. I won’t disappoint her.

  Fury sings through my veins as I greet my coming death.

  His sword slices through the air but swings wide as it flies out of his hand. Finally, I manage to draw a shuddering breath that clears my head a little. But the pain in my chest is still white-hot as I roll across the sand to dodge the errant blade.

  Vane crashes to the ground beside me, a dagger sticking out from between his ribs. That explains his poor aim with the sword.

  Running over to admire her handiwork, Meredy gives a satisfied nod. “Finish him, Odessa,” she growls, looking past me and raising an arm. I follow her gaze in time to see Lysander raise that same arm, his claws slashing the face of an already-wounded man.

  Beside me, Vane groans, drawing my attention.

  “I think your dagger might’ve done the job,” I tell Meredy, but she’s not listening, once again focused on fighting through Lysander.

  Still breathing hard, I wrap my bloody, sticky hand around the hilt of the dagger in Vane’s ribs and shove it in a little deeper. My stomach does a flip as his scream fills my ears, but I hold on tight to the blade in case he’s less injured than he’s letting on.

  “Silly girl,” he coughs. Blood flecks the narrow mouth opening of his mask, like it flecked my lips the day Evander died and I nearly lost my life. “I would’ve made quick work of you before the Shades cleaned up your remains. Now you’ll have to feel their every bite.”

  I glance toward the horizon. Sure enough, the Shades are opening their cavernous mouths and scraping their bony fingers against the hard ground—impatient to come for us when their master gives the order.

  Still, we can’t leave yet. Not without knowing who paid these people to create more monsters the world didn’t need.

  “I can either dig this dagger in deeper and scramble your insides or give you a swift end if you answer my questions,” I whisper, not sure it’s a promise I can make. His end seems to be coming swiftly with or without my help. I rip off his mask, flinging it into the sand, wanting to study his face for lies as we talk. “Now tell me, how w
ere you controlling these Shades?”

  He spits blood in my face.

  I wiggle the dagger just a little, and once he stops screaming, he starts talking in a ragged voice. “Magic. I taught myself. My eyes may be weak, but there’s nothing wrong with my Sight. I see differently than you, so my powers are different. I thought you’d noticed last time we met, when I didn’t have a mask in the way.”

  I gape at him. “So you can . . . control Shades, like a beast master controls an animal?”

  Vane nods stiffly.

  I make a hasty note to tell Valoria, if I ever see her again. Maybe there are others with powers we don’t understand or even know about. And perhaps, like Vane, there are others who have mastered their abilities alone in the shadows.

  In the distance, Lysander roars. I hope he’s running down the other Shade-baiters without any trouble, but Meredy must be worried, as she edges away from us and draws another dagger. Still in her dreamlike state, she runs farther up the beach.

  “What were you planning to do”—I rip my gaze from her and quickly return my attention to Vane as the Shades beyond the shore moan and grumble—“with all those monsters?”

  He laughs, though it’s more like a splutter. “Why should I tell you? I’m dying, and you’re as good as dead. Soon . . .” He tilts his head in the direction of his companions’ shouts farther up the beach, where the other Shade-baiters are trying their luck against Lysander—and suddenly, I understand. He’s preventing his Shades from attacking to buy his companions time to escape, time they wouldn’t have if they were still around after the monsters finished with me.

  “Tell me what you were planning!” I demand again. Even with Vane stalling on behalf of the others, it won’t be long before he’s gone and we’re all Shade food.

  He shakes his head, still laughing.

  I punch him in the chest, just to stop the sickly sound ringing in my ears. “Fine. Allow me to guess, then. First, you kidnapped Dead nobles from the palace and pulled off their shrouds to turn them into Shades. Then you fed people to them, like Master Nicanor, to make them stronger. Then you kidnapped His Majesty, probably to make another Shade. You’ve been killing necromancers and creating Shades, building an army from our Dead—but why?”