Shift of Shadow and Soul (SoulShifter Book 1)

by Hilary Thompson

  They needed that oar to make it to safety, and with her inexperience, she’d likely tip the boat. Then they’d both be lost.

  A few short strokes brought him to the oar, and he threw it back to Corentine. She clutched it to her chest, and he grinned even though it brought a scowl to her face. He kicked out hard toward the boat, but the current sucked at his legs like thick mud. Shaking the spray from his face, he noticed that the Alimente seemed farther than it should be, farther even than when he had started back. He stroked out again, but each time, any progress was eaten by the sideways movement of the boat, as though an invisible wall kept them apart.

  “Turn the boat north,” he called, glancing over his shoulder. The woods of Umbren loomed in the distance, an indistinct black mass. “It’s getting too close to the river’s mouth.”

  “But you’re not close enough!” She reached the oar out over the water like a lifeline. It was nowhere near long enough. He swore in his head, knowing she was right.

  “Just row north!” He pushed as hard as he could against the current and gained a few inches, but his energy was nearly spent.

  This was magic, he knew. Whether it was Sulit or Umbren didn’t matter. Something wanted him in that water.

  Forcing away the first tendril of panic, Sy kicked again solidly. Only his brutal training as a son of Weshen allowed him to fight through the sensation of the current wrapping around his legs.

  Even so, unwelcome images flashed through his mind: fingers reaching up from the deep dark to pull him under. The great mouth of the river, opening wide to swallow him whole.

  Whispers of a breeze began to swirl around him, and he thought he heard the cackles of witches on the air. Salt began to burn in his eyes from the fruitless splashing.

  “Back to your forest graves, witches. You will not have me tonight,” he whispered fiercely, his muscles trembling as he shut his eyes against the taunting distance between him and the boat. “Corentine, direct me with your voice!”

  “Straight forward,” she called back, and he kicked. “A little left!” And he kicked, filling his mind with her voice and memories of her smiling at him in the sun. Of her sleeping peacefully in his bed.

  “Almost there!”

  His fingers brushed the bark, and he lunged upward, gripping the sides of the boat and breathing much too heavily for the brief distance he’d just swum.

  But even his gasps weren’t enough to erase the laughter dancing on the sweet breeze now.

  “Do you hear that?” he managed to gasp as he hauled himself into the boat, collapsing in a soaked heap at her feet.

  Corentine cocked her head, listening to the night air. She shrugged.

  “Just row,” he whispered hoarsely. “We’re way too close to the Hungry River.”

  The heart was beating too fast. The dark waters of the MagiSea had felt the boy, and frothed the mouth of the Hungry River, sucking at his flesh.

  The heart wanted that boy. His body was strong. Smooth and young. His Weshen fingers held the beautiful magic the heart had dreamed of for so long. It beat frantically against the crystal box, the squish of soft flesh waking the witch who had been sleeping nearby. She pushed the tangle of mud-brown hair and green-black vines from her face. An insect squirmed at being exposed, rooting back toward her scalp.

  “Patience, my love,” the witch cooed, murmuring an ancient incantation that gradually calmed the beating heart. “We will have all that you want, and very soon.” She bent her head closer to the box then, listening, interpreting the beats.

  She nodded, a tendril of vine tapping the ground as she moved. “Yes, the boy is strong and handsome. I have seen him in my dreams. But my heart, other choices are coming to us. Other young, fresh bodies.”

  The heart had slowed again to the steady beat it had maintained for so many, many years. The beat spoke of patience, endurance, and knowing.

  The witch stroked a dirt-blackened nail across the top of the box, smiling. “Yes, there are many boats on the water tonight.”

  Chapter 17

  Coren slumped back in the hull of the boat, her salt-sore eyes closing in relief. The night had been a dark, shadowy blur of aching muscles and whispered curses as they pushed with everything they had to outrun the greedy currents of the Hungry River.

  But now, the first slivers of a pale morning sun slit open the darkness above them, and their boat drifted easily north again, away from Umbren and toward the Sulit coast and NewMoon Falls. The falls would be another type of trial, but after a full night on the water, she was more confident now, and a spark of hope had begun to grow where before there had been only despair.

  They were going to make it. Actually make it. She smiled softly to herself.

  A scuffing noise caught her attention, and when she peeled open an eye, she caught Sy watching her.

  The smile faded, but she held his gaze for a spare second, nodded that she was okay, then blinked away. His expression was too intense, as though he wanted to ask her questions far deeper than the water around them. That, she couldn’t do. Not today, and not for many days after today.

  Sorrow still rippled beneath the surface of her exhaustion, pulling like the currents below the Alimente, threatening to suck her under to drown in the depths of loss.

  Deliberately, she turned her gaze to the last few stars and the ghost of a moon that lingered in the sky. We made it, she repeated stubbornly to the darkness lapping at her mind. So would Maren and the twins.

  “I’ve spent my whole life staring at the stars, dreaming of the world beyond the island,” she murmured a few minutes later, when she could trust her voice to be steady. “But I never really believed I’d see them from a different place.”

  Sy nodded, his face turned to the lightening horizon. He dipped the oar in the water, alternating sides as he worked to keep them parallel to the rising sun. “They will always be the same stars, but now they will always seem different,” he answered. She heard the wistfulness in his voice.

  What would he miss, in his banishment?

  Did he hope to see his family again too? Would Reshra’s mistakes be forgiven, and his father’s stubbornness overlooked? She guessed he would be loyal to them, but she hesitated to make him choose, and to hear his choice.

  “We should eat now,” Sy said, beginning to shift the salt from a skin of sea water. Coren nodded and unwrapped the dried meat Reshra had packed in the boat’s secret compartment. Listening to the dawngulls overhead, they renewed their strength as the sun rose.

  Despite rowing north, they had also continued to drift west, and suddenly the Sulit coast seemed to swing out into the MagiSea to meet them, its shoreline like the curve of a scythe against their progress. Sy pushed them harder toward the center of the MagiSea, his muscles flexing and stretching beneath his thin shirt.

  “That’s where I hope your friend makes it with your brother and sister,” he said, jerking his chin to the northern side of the peninsula they were passing, where black-barked trees arced over a tapering river, trailing corkscrew branches of whisper-pink leaves.

  Coren noticed he hadn’t claimed Maren as his mother, but the motion of the trees seemed to draw her into herself, and she simply forgot what she’d noticed.

  “There?” she whispered, her gaze intent on how the slender, ebony branches seemed to reach toward them, beckoning them gently with a flutter of sheer rose.

  “That should be the Shedreck River,” he answered, the same sense of wonder evident in his voice also. The oar slid to the bottom of the boat as they both stared, mesmerized, into the hazy maw of the smaller Sulit river. “It leads to the heart of Sulit.”

  “The heart,” Coren repeated, leaning over the edge of the boat to see it better. Something gray-blue and smoky danced and swirled at the edge of the shore, and a charming laugh floated on the breeze. The ends of Coren’s hair trailed in the unstirring water as she bent even lower and the unguided boat drifted west, closer and closer to the river.

  “The heart,” she whispere
d once more.

  “Yes, that’s it,” SmokeFist cooed from her perch in the highest tree, just above the opening to Shedreck River. Her laughter was a light caress on the wind, her breath stirring the sand on the beach below her into a swirl of golden beckoning. “Come into our home, daughter of Weshen. You are welcome here.”

  The girl was bent nearly to the water now, her brown and bronze hair loosened from its braid, floating on the surface of the MagiSea. Her amber eyes fixed on the mouth of the Shedreck, and SmokeFist reveled in the glorious sensation of the magic in the water meeting the magic in the girl.

  “Yes,” she repeated, excitement leading to impatience. As soon as the girl’s body hit the water, the magic would do the rest.

  Growing greedy, the witch twined her power like a twisted black branch across the breeze, hoping to reel her target in just a few more inches.

  Just a few more…

  Sy registered the thickening purpose in the air, and it activated his trained instincts, snapping him back into his own mind just in time. He spat a curse, reaching to yank at Corentine’s arms just as she began to tip head first into the glistening water. He heaved her back in the boat, and the craft rocked wildly as they tumbled together to the bottom of the boat, droplets of the sea shimmering like oil as they squirmed down the wood.

  Corentine was limp in his arms, though her eyes were bright. Glassy and almost feverish, they flitted from side to side without seeing him, as though she were watching a dream with eyes open.

  “Come on!” he yelled, his face too close to hers. She flopped against him, awake but lost. Her lips parted, whispering nonsense. And he knew, he knew. The Sulit witches were out there, waiting for them. Waiting for her.

  “Coren,” he begged, shaking her harder. “Don’t go with them.”

  A roar began to register in his ears, and he realized they were even closer to NewMoon Falls than he had thought. Maybe if he could get them farther from Sulit…

  He pushed Coren down into the hull of the boat, making certain none of her body was touching the water, and began to row furiously.

  Coren opened her eyes, seeing nothing but blue sky. Her mouth was dry, so dry. She coughed and tried to shake her head free of the webby feeling left from a summer’s afternoon nap.

  Her body rocked left and right as her bed tumbled strangely beneath her. A face appeared above. “Kosh?” she murmured. No, not Kosh. Too old.

  “Corentine?” a voice said. She knew that voice…how did she know that voice?

  “Drink this,” the voice said, and Coren found a skin placed to her lips. Yes. She was so thirsty. She scrunched her eyes against the sour, salty flavor, but her head was tilted back and the liquid poured down her throat anyways. Coughing again, she tried to spit it out, but a hand clamped over her mouth. “Swallow it!”

  Gulping and spluttering, she swallowed what she could without choking, struggling to free herself from the rough hand over her face. Some of the haze retreated from her mind, and she began to remember.

  Of course that voice didn’t belong to Kosh.

  Syashin.

  Fingers forced her lips apart, and more of the salt and sour poured into her mouth. She gagged and bit down on one of the fingers, but the liquid slid down her throat anyways, burning all the way to her gut.

  “Drink it!” he repeated, his arms holding her close to him. She felt the liquid settle in her stomach, sloshing and scraping at her insides. But it burned away the confusion too, and as she blinked again and again, the world came back to her. She relaxed against Sy’s grip, and he removed his hand, his fingers ending in a sort of caress along her jaw.

  “I thought you were lost to the witches,” he breathed.

  She sat up slowly and scooted around to face him. The boat bounced over a wave, and her stomach churned, forcing her over the edge. Sy lunged for her, his arms closing around her waist as she retched into the sea. She allowed him to pull her back, slumping against the side of the boat.

  She was so spent she couldn’t even care that his arms still rested at her hips.

  “Better?” he said, his voice wary.

  She nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice rasping against the rawness of her throat.

  They both sat up, and he retreated to the bow of the Alimente, eying her. “For a second there, I thought you were going to start swimming for shore.”

  Coren tried to smile, but she was starting to remember just how close she’d been to doing exactly that. “That was Sulit magic?”

  Sy nodded. “I’ve been trained to resist it. Or at least recognize it.”

  “How?”

  He gazed out over the water several seconds before glancing back to her. “There are captives…witches. In Weshen City. Once hunters have reached Paladin status, they can train with the Sulit.”

  “Prisoners?” Coren repeated, the nausea threatening to return.

  “Sulit magic isn’t like Weshen magic,” he answered. “The Weshen have always had to protect themselves. Now more than ever.”

  She didn’t answer, knowing he was right. And just now, she was intensely glad he had been trained to recognize and resist the witches. But what price had the Weshen paid for such training? What unforgivable things had been done?

  “We’re very close to the falls,” Sy said a few moments later, and Coren realized she’d been hearing the roar of water on rocks for a while now. “We need to go northeast, and now that the sun is up, we’ll be looking directly into its glare. It’ll be hard to see the rocks around the falls,” he continued. “But we have to row back around the top of Weshen Isle to get to the city.”

  He handed her the oar and Coren nodded grimly, steering the boat while he stretched his arms and drank deeply once more. “There,” he said, pointing ahead as he reached for the oar again.

  First, all she could see was white mist. Then it separated into the spray and foam of water crashing down from unseen heights. The rocks loomed next, black and slimed with the remains of the sea.

  Coren quickly learned that the larger, vertical shafts of stone, although terrifying, were less treacherous than those half-hidden beneath the churning water. These appeared from almost nowhere, smacking and scraping the fibers from the bottom of their boat.

  “Watch me, not the water!” Sy called back to her, and she fought to obey, though her eyes itched to search instead for the rocks waiting to break them open.

  Several times, Sy chucked the oar at her without warning as he bent double to shift the wood back into place, plugging a crack in the bark. When that happened, she struggled to push them from the path of each rock, sometimes the width of the oar blade being the only thing between the Alimente and its destruction.

  The look on Sy’s face alternated between desperation and determination, and Coren’s gut twisted with worry and helplessness. But what could she do besides follow his direction? This was so far removed from anything she knew. A few times she tried to shift away water that splashed into the boat, but it returned almost immediately. The spray and the sun glinting off the water nearly blinded them.

  Finally the boat swung free of the falls’ grasp, and as they entered the calmer water near the Weshen shoreline, Coren felt a smile of relief break across her salt-cracked lips, and a laugh bubbled up from her throat. She could see the NeverCross Mountains clearly for the first time in her life, jagged and emerald and onyx, and impossibly high before them.

  They drifted easily now, parallel to the shore, and Coren closed her eyes, whispering a prayer of thanks to the Mirror Magi.

  Somehow, for reasons yet to be disclosed, their gods had saved them from banishment. She knew there would be payment due for such a favor, but for now, she was simply grateful to be alive.

  Chapter 18

  Sy watched her as she mumbled what sounded like a prayer, her face turned up to the brilliant sky. He knew he shouldn’t be caught staring, but she was so beautiful, even disheveled and exhausted from their journey. Perhaps because of that.

  Corent
ine twisted back to watch the falls retreating into mist again. He could barely glimpse a glint of metal at the top of the falls, on the Riatan side, so he pointed to it when she glanced back to him. “The Restless King has been trying to build a bridge across the ridge of the falls for nearly a year. Rumors are that he means to conquer Sulit next.”

  “Conquer Sulit!” Corentine said, her eyes widening in shock. She lowered her voice. “No-one could conquer Sulit. Right?”

  Sy shrugged and adjusted their course slightly. Anyone could conquer anyone, he guessed. Some just took longer. “Rurok is there, at the western edge of the falls.” He gestured toward a black mass of what could be towers, rising above the splash and steam of the falls and the fog of the forest. “If he makes it across the falls, he could attack the capital city.”

  “Maybe that would be for the better,” she mused. “Maybe the witches would be the ones to finally beat him, and we could all be free.”

  Sy snorted, pushing the boat around a slight curve that blocked Rurok from their view. “Witches don’t deal in freedom.”

  “I’ve never met one,” Corentine said, and he heard the slight disbelief in her voice.

  He guessed she was thinking of her family, apparently headed to Sulit right now. Swiveling back to look directly at her, he said, “I truly hope Maren knows what she’s doing taking your family there. But all I’ve seen of witches is destruction.”

  “Maybe because all you’ve seen are prisoners,” she said, turning her attention to the cliffs above them. He sighed and focused on watching the shore. Eventually the sound of the falls grew too distant to distinguish from any other sound on the water, and Sy knew they were approaching the beaches that surrounded Weshen City.