Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Silver Shard
The Author
The Silverwood Series
You Might Also Enjoy
Title Page
SILVER SHARD
BETSY STREETER
Copyright
Copyright © 2016, by Betsy Streeter
Silver Shard
Betsy Streeter
lightmessages.com/betsystreeter
[email protected]
Cover and interior illustrations by Betsy Streeter
Published 2016, by Light Messages
www.lightmessages.com
Durham, NC 27713
Printed in the United States of America
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61153-169-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61153-168-8
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 International Copyright Act, without the prior written permission except in brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Dedication
for Rob, Jen and Sean
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Light Messages and Elizabeth Turnbull for believing in the Silverwoods and their world, and helping this book be the best it can be. I’m grateful to my family, and first readers. I appreciate everyone who read Silverwood, especially young people who came up to me again and again to tell me what they enjoyed about it. And I’d also like to take the opportunity to express appreciation to some of the people from whom I have drawn inspiration at various times in my life: Jacques Cousteau, Carl Sagan, Martina Navratilova, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie—each of them pointed the way to a new place, in their own style.
Prologue
Long ago, a baby girl was born to a baron and baroness in a far-flung region of a lesser-known kingdom. Her parents were delighted, having adopted many children but never having one of their own. They doted on the child, bringing her gifts and letting her have the run of the estate grounds.
As she grew, though, the girl began to behave in ways that her family found strange and unsettling. She would cry and run away from close relatives and from her siblings. She recoiled from the family dogs. She reacted with fright to harmless and everyday things, so much so that by the time she reached her teen years she barely ever left her rooms.
Across the region, word spread of the young girl’s peculiarities. Some believed that she must be possessed by a demon only she could see. Others argued that she simply needed to get out more; her fears would abate with travel abroad. Still others began to whisper of witchcraft.
Her parents, desperate to discover what ailed their daughter, took her to a healer at the outer edge of the kingdom. But as soon as the healer laid eyes on her, he condemned her and declared that she possessed powers she would ultimately use for evil. Her parents quickly took their daughter home, refusing to believe the terrible words the healer had said.
Even from within her rooms, the girl would shriek and call out warnings of accidents or calamities. The townspeople could hear her cries from her window, her thin voice floating over their heads in a never-ending series of dire pronouncements. But no one was listening.
And then, one day, an event—one that the girl had warned of—came to pass.
No one noticed at first. They had grown accustomed to her words and her warnings. When several of the townspeople had fallen sick with a mysterious illness, it only seemed natural that the girl in the window would tell passersby that they would be the next to become ill. They still were not listening.
But then the girl told one man passing below her window that he would be the next to fall sick. And he did, the very next day. Then she told an old mother. And she became sick too.
In fact, the girl told all of the townspeople, in order, who would become sick next.
The town went into an uproar, terrified residents declaring that the girl was a witch, that she had enchanted the town and was killing all of them, one by one. It stood to reason that such a girl, so frightened of everyone around her, would want them all to go away. Surely this was her way of accomplishing her terrible intent.
The baron and baroness tried to defend their daughter, to no avail. Her siblings, long estranged, had nothing to say on the matter. A growing crowd outside the estate called for a trial, or worse, for the girl’s execution. Only by ridding themselves of this evil presence could they stop the plague that was killing them one by one.
Her parents realized that soon the estate would be overrun; their entire family was in danger. Under cover of night they banished the girl, sending her alone into the forest. It was for her own good, they told her. The danger was too great. This was the only way to save her.
Inside, though, the baron and baroness knew they were also saving themselves. Their decision tore at their hearts.
The girl wandered into the woods, walking for many days and eating the provisions her parents had lovingly packed for her. She made her way higher and higher into the mountains, predicting the weather and the behavior of the animals.
Eventually she came upon a tiny town high on a mountainside. The people there had a strange aspect about them. They were peaceful, but fierce. They held to strange rituals in which they painted the ground with fanciful designs in special silver chalk. And at intervals they would send a young person away, up the mountain, to be offered up to a silver tree that none of them had ever seen. And most importantly, they were not afraid of the girl at all—even when she told them of her visions.
After some time in the village, the girl began to have a new kind of vision in which she said she could see the silver tree. She said she could see the travelers arrive at the tree’s location and what the tree and the surrounding scenery looked like. At first the villagers suspected she was attempting to fool them in order to gain access to their precious source of power. But she never made any such attempt. Instead, she would tell the townspeople the stories of each person who ascended the mountain. She did this as a tribute to their bravery, and her storytelling became part of the ceremonies honoring the tree and the people who made the journey to it.
The villagers desired to see more of this woman’s special visions and asked that artists be brought to illustrate her stories. She described the terrain, the travelers’ efforts to climb through it, and their setbacks and victories. She also described the tree: its trunk, its size, the perfectly round leaves hanging from its branches.
There was only one thing that the woman (for she had inevitably grown into a woman as the years passed) could not see: Once the travelers reached the tree, they disappeared. She could not tell the villagers where their bravest had gone.
The woman grew old in the village and had many children and grandchildren. The village grew and its people expanded their territory. A villa was built some distance away on a prominent outcropping with a view of the valley below. The building was decorated with a new crest: a drawing of the tree made to the woman’s specifications. Here the woman took up residence and received visitors. Major ceremonies took place in the building’s enormous main hall.
As the woman grew old, her stories took on a troubling tone. She said that she feared the tree was sick, or that some force had taken it prisoner. She described metal straps with bolts driven into the bark and ropes where the roots should be. She said that a branch had fallen off of the tree and lay on the ground. She told the villagers that someone must retrieve that
branch or risk it falling into the wrong hands.
The villagers were fearful but clung to their traditions as a source of solace. They did not dare make any changes to their regular offerings and continued to send a single traveler at intervals up the mountain. Soon, the woman told the villagers that the fallen branch was gone. Someone had taken it, but she could not tell them who.
She had grown old by this time, and her body had become weak. She never left her bed, and she seemed to shrink smaller with each day.
And then something terrible happened. The Tromindox attacked the villa and stabbed the helpless woman in her bed with their venomous claws. The members of the clan who had grown immune to Tromindox venom attempted to free her before she could be dissolved and digested, but the only thing they were able to save was a single, blinking eye. They placed the eye in a bell jar where it remained, suspended in the air, for many more years. When it came time for the woman to go to sleep for good she closed her lid and the eye turned into a gleaming pearl.
The pearl was kept at the villa as a remembrance of this woman and her special gifts and the help that she had brought to them. The clan would refer to her from then on as the Vision.
Many of the Vision’s children and grandchildren inherited her gift and became storytellers themselves. They and their descendants gathered in the mountain village for long periods, honing their abilities and drawing the things and events that they could see. After many years of these gatherings, they decided that they required some designation and named themselves the Guild.
Silver Shard
Anna Helena Silverwood tightens her arms around the foremast of her ship. If she’s done this right, in a few seconds the vessel will ride its last wave.
The horizon tilts to a crazy angle and the ship rises high on the wild water as if it might take off and fly. Anna grits her teeth and hugs the mast even harder. Her thick braid of sopping dark—red hair hangs out sideways from her head.
The hull finally drops out of the air and smashes onto an outcropping of jagged black rocks. Anna’s legs fly up and she loses hold of the mast. Her body crashes to the deck and she slides on her back toward the bow.
The ship convulses, heaves to starboard and smashes down again. Black water surges ahead of it onto the shore the ship’s rickety wooden body, which splits open on the rocks with painful, screaming sounds. Most of the debris thuds onto the sand—except the objects that don’t fly that far and end up in the water or on the rocks instead.
The now-useless vessel settles onto the rocks and quiets down. Anna lies on her back on the deck, looking up through powder-blue eyes. It’s almost peaceful. Overhead the mast points like a finger at a flat gray sky. The sails hang limp. In a few brief moments this big boat has gone from a mighty transport to a beached skeleton.
Anna had named her ship “Bozo,” by accident. After a while alone on the sea, she found that she tended to talk to it, argue with it, and shout at it when the water got rough or things did not go the way she wanted them to. It must have been the solitude combined with the stress of staying afloat and avoiding detection. She would shout things like: “What are you doing, Bozo?” or, “Help me out here, Bozo!” Eventually Anna realized that the ship had a name, and that name was Bozo.
Realizing she has to keep moving, Anna lowers herself through a gaping hole torn by the rocks in Bozo’s hull and drops feet-first into the shallow water. After all the two of them have been through together, seeing the ship like this hurts her heart. She blinks back tears, but she knows she can’t waste time being sentimental. She pats the side of the ship and says quietly, “Many thanks, Bozo. You had good energy.”
Anna doesn’t feel ready to come ashore yet. She’s grown used to being alone, having time and space to think. She’s written in stacks of journals. She’s carved ornate patterns in the ship’s wood. She’s lived hidden from the world, and for the first time in her life, she felt safe. Not anymore.
Anna slogs toward the beach, lifting her boots high in the knee-deep surf. She is twenty years old and strong from her time at sea. Her braid falls over one shoulder, loose hairs blowing across her oval face. Her dark-green cargo pants and leather jacket stick to her body, caked with mud.
Instinctively, as she has done for five years, Anna reaches up to touch the pendant around her neck. She doesn’t find it right away. Maybe it swung around onto her back in the crash. She reaches around, grasping, but doesn’t find anything there either.
Anna freezes. Of all the things to lose! Did it fly off?
She retraces the crash in her mind: the ship hitting the rocks, the direction that she fell on the deck—if the pendant did come off, it must have flown this way.
Everywhere she looks, glimmers and reflections draw her eye. Could that be it? What about that over there? She looks straight down; plants and sand shift around her boots.
A thing on the beach moves some distance away. It’s a wisp of a man, dressed in a ragged knee-length black overcoat. He shuffles across the sand, bent forward like a brittle stick, eyes fixed on the ground. When the wind hits him he wavers, as if the air might snap off the top part of his body. He appears oblivious to the presence of Anna or her wrecked ship. A silver glint on the ground catches his attention and he bends down, laboriously, to pick up something. The object flashes in a bit of sunlight breaking through the clouds.
Anna watches the man with caution. She steps off of the rocks and her boots sink in wet sand. He still ignores her, but she can see he’s found something on a chain.
She marches straight up to confront the man, and puts out her hand. “What you got there?” she says.
“I found it in the sand,” the man says, unhelpfully.
“Well if you don’t mind,” Anna says, her hand still extended, “that’s mine—or rather, I’m keeping it right now—and I’d appreciate it back.”
The man says nothing. His head swivels back and forth at an unnatural angle, like a doll whose head got popped off and put back on. His pupils expand and contract with a whirring sound. Anna can hear the clicks of levers and gears.
“Look,” Anna says, “there are many valuable things around here that you can have instead.” She waves her arm at the refuse all around them. “Like that chest over there. It’s full of treasure. Or, the big armoire by that rock. It’s all yours. All for that one little necklace you’ve got in your hand. Okay?”
“Really?” the man surveys the beach, his eyes moving around in their sockets. For the first time he seems aware of his surroundings. There is certainly a great deal to choose from.
“Sure, help yourself,” Anna says.
The man walks by Anna, eyes fixed on the riches before him, his knees clanking as he goes. As he passes, Anna snatches the necklace out of his hand.
“Go ahead,” Anna says, “take whatever you’re going to take, but move it along. I’ve got to clean up this mess.”
“You did make a mess,” the man mutters, swiveling his head back and forth. “Quite a mess…” He stoops down and pulls a silver ladle out of the sand, turns it over a few times, then sets it down near a rock farther away from the water. He repeats the process for a wooden box, which is so heavy he must drag it behind him, leaving a track across the beach.
Anna holds the necklace up in front of her by the chain. Hanging on the end is a mangled half of a metal circle, a couple inches across. The spiral pattern on its surface has almost worn away; its broken edge is jagged where it was violently chopped in two. “If only I could lose you,” she says. “I wish I could, more than anything.” She places the half-portal pendant back around her neck where it belongs.
After several trips back and forth on the beach, the man raises his voice to be heard over the surf and the wind. “Are you by yourself?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Anna replies.
“All alone—just you and that big ship? Nobody else?”
“Nobody,” Anna says.
The man considers this. “You must be good with boats,” he says.
“Really,” the man says. His head pivots to look at the ship, then back at the young woman. He frowns, and his gray skin crinkles. “What would possess you to crash a ship like that?”
“Well, I needed to get out of it,” Anna explains. “That was the only way.”
“To smash the ship all to bits?” the man asks.
“Pretty much,” Anna says.
The man thinks about what he has seen and heard, then turns his attention back to salvaging objects from the ground. Eventually he tires, seats himself on a rock and surveys his new possessions. He tugs on the lid of the chest—perhaps it contains tangled pearl necklaces and handfuls of loose gems. The whole structure bends and warps as he pulls the lid off. The lock is long gone. The only thing keeping the box together are the metal fittings at the corners.
The inside of the chest is still in pretty good shape—although it doesn’t contain piles of jewelry. Instead, it holds a trove of photographs and papers. No wonder the thing was so heavy.
The man reaches in with a bony gray hand and lifts out an oval picture frame. It’s a portrait of a stern-looking woman, dark hair pulled back, black dress with a white lace collar, a bit of colored pencil tinting bringing some pink to her cheeks. Underneath this picture there’s another matching oval frame, this one containing the portrait of a man, equally unpleasant-looking. This fellow’s got a thin, triangular beard and dark clothes. Maybe these two people were once a couple. Not the sorts you’d invite for a lively dinner party, by the look of them.
The chest offers up more pictures, mostly frameless. Some are packed together in hefty bundles tied with string; others are loose. The man extracts a couple handfuls and leafs through them one at a time. Anna comes up behind him and watches his progress.
“Are these pictures of anyone you know? Family portraits?” the man asks without looking up.
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