“He’s strong enough,” Coren muttered to herself, remembering how easily he had pinned her against the tree. Her stomach churned, but then she reminded herself how much had changed. “But I’ll be stronger next time.”
“I saw him on the beach,” Sy said, guilt flashing across his face as he met her eyes. “Before we came here. He left the island and went to Weshen City, following us.”
“He hates me, doesn’t he,” Coren asked, thinking of the look that had swirled in his dark eyes. She somehow wasn’t surprised that Reshra had followed them. She didn’t think he would stop, either.
“Resh doesn’t understand you. He’d never seen anything except Sulit spells until he saw ours. I think once he gets over the shock, and I can convince him it’s shifter magic, he’ll be intrigued. Interested in how useful your power can be. He was so curious why I chose you at the hunts.”
Coren frowned. She didn’t like the idea of drawing more of Reshra’s interest.
“Why did you keep trying to catch me? Why not just go after one of the easy girls?” she asked, lifting her sticky shirt enough to wipe the sweat from her stomach and lower back. “Surely many would offer you an heir.” Her eyes slid down his skin once more, daring to notice how his trim waist tapered into sharp indentations at his hips, and how those lines dipped lower, beneath the band of his training pants.
Sy set down his towel and stepped toward her. “I didn’t want one of the easy girls. Maybe I’m like Resh that way. I wanted to understand you - to know why you ran from the boys instead of playing the game.”
“And do you know now?” she asked, holding her ground as he took another step. They were close enough for her to touch if she raised her hand. She tucked it behind her, her fingers brushing the rock wall.
Sy nodded. “But I’m curious. The more I learn about you, the more I want to.”
“To what?” she whispered.
Sy was silent for a beat. “To learn,” he answered, taking a final step.
“If I tried to kiss you, would you let me?” he breathed, his eyes flicking down to her lips.
Her stomach flopped, twisting tight. Would she? He hadn’t hurt her in all this time. He was safe. He was certainly handsome. And a kiss wasn’t an heir.
Before her nerves could win, she nodded, hating how vulnerable this admission made her. A faint smile crossed his lips, and he leaned in slowly, brushing his mouth carefully against hers. The slightest of touches, then he pulled back. She had barely felt the heat of him until she rested a hand against his chest. She could feel the pulse of his heart beneath the warm skin. He glanced down at her hand between them.
“Stop?” he asked.
Coren smiled shyly and slid her hand down his front, removing the barrier as she rested her fingers at his waist. She arched her neck, offering her lips again, and he bent to her, more urgent this time. He slanted his mouth over hers, and she parted her lips, suddenly interested in the way he might taste. Her hand slid around to his back and tugged him closer.
Sy slid his hand into her hair, cradling her head from the rock wall and tilting her chin back to find the base of her neck. Her breathing quickened as the scruff of his unshaven chin scraped her jaw. And then their lips were joined again, and her breath was his breath, and they both learned something more.
It was Sy who broke away first, his eyes strangely shuttered. He smiled at her, though. “Thank you,” he whispered. “For not pushing me away.”
Then he picked up their empty glasses and damp towels and turned toward the door. “We should go. Damren doesn’t like to wait for meals.”
Coren nodded. “I’ll be right there,” she said and watched him go, her fingers brushing against her lips as she puzzled over his odd expression. Although her skin hummed with a sense of satisfaction, she still didn’t feel the way she had expected.
For years, she’d rolled her eyes at the other girls’ giggles and flushed faces around the boys.
Instead of light as air, she felt even heavier. Somehow, she’d expected a kiss to be more. She’d assumed it would make her want more. And she couldn’t be certain, but the uncertain expression in Sy’s eyes made her wonder if maybe he felt the same way.
Perhaps, although life and magic had thrown them together, love wasn’t in agreement.
Or perhaps love just wasn’t made for people like her, she thought wryly, walking over and tugging the stone dagger from the target. That was the more likely possibility.
Sy ignored Damren’s glare as he took his plate down the hall into his room.
He was confused, and he just didn’t want to talk to either of the women.
He’d been thinking of kissing Corentine for days now: imagining it, dreaming of it. And now that he had done it, he was more uncertain than ever. The whole time he had felt a strange sense of detachment, as though his lips hadn’t connected to the rest of his body.
He hadn’t felt the kiss anywhere but his lips - and he’d expected to. He’d expected to feel more, to want more. To want to push her hard against the wall and slide his hands down her side to her slim waist and lower.
But as much as he’d expected the desire - even wanted the desire - it simply wasn’t there.
Leaning back on his bed, he sighed. He’d wanted to learn more about her, and he’d accomplished that. He just hadn’t expected to learn more about himself in the process. Perhaps their experience in the hunts had tainted their touches forever.
Perhaps when they reached EvenFall, or StarsHelm, or even later when the Weshen were free to love and partner again - perhaps then he would find a girl that made him feel everywhere.
Love existed, Sy was certain of it. He’d just have to wait a little longer to find it.
Damren’s bell rang again to begin the afternoon session, and he breathed a curse, knowing she would only train him harder if he were late. When he reached the training room, Coren was already busy trying to learn fusion with a glass of tonic. She had separated the sources, but they refused to rejoin.
“How am I supposed to put it back together if I don’t know how it goes?” she said, the frustration evident in her voice.
“Stop thinking so much,” Damren retorted. “Just feel the sources. Listen to them. They’ll tell you where to put them.”
Coren huffed and closed her eyes, tilting her head toward the glass before her. Sy suppressed a laugh. He remembered this part of his training all too well, and it had taken him many days to learn. Days they didn’t have, though, if they were going to have a chance to rescue the Wesh.
“Here,” he said, walking to her. He dipped his finger in the water, then the salt, and then the sticky lemondrine. Then he pressed the mixture against her temple. “This is where you hear the sources. In your mind, not your ear.”
Coren looked up at him, her mouth parted and brows drawn in confusion. “They speak in your mind?”
Damren snorted and Coren flushed.
“Not in words. Sources aren’t sentient,” Sy explained, ignoring the old woman. “But if you quiet your mind, you’ll feel it, like a magnetic pull. You’ll understand where they need to go.”
Coren’s eyes closed and her face relaxed. He touched her other temple with the mixture and waited.
The minutes passed in silence with no result, and he was trying to figure out another way to explain it to her when she figured it out. The salt began to roll, grain by grain, up the side of the glass and dissolve into the water, and then the murky lemondrine droplets did the same. Sy felt the side of the glass, and the heat needed to complete the tonic was there too, just as it should be.
Coren’s eyes opened, a smile spreading across her face. “I did it, didn’t I?”
“Great. Now do it with the rock,” Damren said, earning a glare from Coren.
“I heard the sources,” she said, turning her face up to Sy’s. “I felt them in my mind, just like you said.”
“Well, then I guess you don’t need me anymore,” Damren cackled, but she didn’t move to leave.
Coren stood, an odd nervousness to her movements. “That’s not the first time I’ve felt the magic with my mind, though,” she said. “The Cheetana. When you were unconscious in the cave…she spoke to me. She licked my temple, here,” Coren said, touching the place where the salt and lemon had dried on her skin.
“A MagiCreature spoke to you?” Sy said, trying hard to keep the disbelief from his voice. He’d never heard of that. Of course, she’d hit her head in the cave, too. Maybe she’d dreamed it.
“What did it say?” Damren asked, her voice sharp, and Sy snapped his attention to her. Was it possible, then?
Coren blinked at the woman. “She said I’d taken some of her magic, and I should go. That the shadows were following me.”
Damren rose so quickly her chair toppled over. “The Shadow,” she emphasized.
Coren nodded, taking a step back. Sy nearly pulled a muscle trying to get to Damren before she crumpled to her knees.
“I…I need to sit in prayer,” Damren said, her voice weak. Sy glanced back at Coren apologetically but didn’t stop to explain before helping Damren to the door, then down the stairs and to her room. Damren sat heavily in her rocking chair and shooed him away.
“Don’t leave her alone, Sy. We’re safe from Shadow here, but if she were to go outside…”
“But Damren, we’ll have to go outside. We have maybe a week before those Wesh should be transported.”
She shook her head. “She won’t be ready in time. I’m sorry, Sy. I know you want to help save those people. And they deserve to be helped. But something your father does realize, and that you’ll need to understand as well, is that sometimes you can only save one. Syashin - make no mistake. If it comes to that, you must save Corentine. Her power…”
“Rest, Damren. Pray. I’ll work with Coren and bring dinner in later. We need you, too,” he smiled, forcing a soothing tone to his voice, even though all he wanted was to argue with the stubborn old woman.
By the Magi, he intended to rescue those Wesh. It may seem like a choice to Ashemon and Damren, but not to Sy. If it came to a choice, he would leave Coren here with Damren while he traveled alone.
His mind spinning with this new plan, he shut Damren’s door and returned to the training room. When he got there, though, it was empty.
Coren wandered the spiral of the library, wishing she had known these books her whole life. Wishing she had known her magic longer, so she could control it.
And more than anything, wishing she could understand the darkness that had settled in her heart. She couldn’t quite pinpoint when it had begun, when it had shifted from frustration to rage.
But she raged.
She pulled out a book at random, but the words refused to form before her eyes, and she shoved it back unread. There was no organization here. She kicked at a shelf, wondering which of these books held the secrets to MagiCreatures who spoke in your mind, or SelfShifting with the abilities of a Cheetana.
She imagined the power she would hold over the Restless King if she could merge her body with that of the beautiful Cheetana. Then again, the animal had been easily captured by her whip. Perhaps a stronger creature would be better.
“What are you searching for?” Sy asked from below. She leaned over the railing to look at him. He sat backward on a bench, resting against the study table as he gazed up at her.
“How to SelfShift with a Cheetana,” she admitted, hating the petulance in her voice.
“Damren will never teach you that. It was one of the first things I asked for, as well.”
“Then I’ll teach myself,” she said, toying with the sources of the railing. She separated a handful of the metal easily and fused it into a spike, thin and deadly. It pleased her how simple the magic seemed after the day’s practice.
Soon maybe she wouldn’t even need a teacher. She contemplated throwing the spike at the spines lined before her in the attempt to spear the right book. That seemed as good a method as any.
“What do you know of Shadow?” Sy asked. He wasn’t watching her, only staring down at his legs stretched before him.
“I’ve never heard of it,” she said, although this wasn’t entirely true. Sorenta had occasionally muttered in delirium about shadows in the singular form, and although she’d asked about the dreams, she’d never gotten a comprehensible answer.
“Shadow is Umbren, and ancient,” Sy answered. “We know little of it, but it has always been, and it always will be. Some say the Shadow can be good or bad, but it’s always been a tale of nightmares for the Weshen.”
“Umbren is blood magic,” Coren recalled, and he nodded. “Is my whip from Umbren?” she asked abruptly, remembering how each time she took an animal’s lifeblood, the whip seemed to grow stronger. And now animals weren’t the only thing she had killed with that whip. “Is that why this Shadow thing follows me, because I killed a man with blood magic somehow bound in that braid?”
Sy’s brows were drawn in confusion. She knew her logic must sound ridiculous and incoherent, but she had no patience to explain. Something in the darkness of her heart nodded at this reasoning.
“I have no way of knowing,” he said, but his voice was low and troubled. “Have you ever felt a soul?” he asked then, changing the subject so abruptly that it was her turn to frown at him. She walked down the stairs slowly, circling him as she headed toward the ground.
Souls didn’t have substance to feel, did they? They weren’t sources. But sick swirled in her belly as she remembered Tellen’s passing, and how it had felt as if her cousin’s very soul had brushed against hers. “No,” she said, swallowing against the sensation.
Sy watched her, tapping the pads of his fingers soundlessly on the table behind him.
“Yes,” she whispered, stopping at the top of the last step and using her magic to shave the iron spike into flakes like black snow. She blew gently on them, and they drifted in the air, like feathers shorn from an invisible bird.
“Damren told me yesterday of Triple magic. I think it’s what the king covets, and if we can find it, we can change everything,” he answered.
“What is it?” she asked, still intent on the flakes floating in the air, like broken pieces of shadow.
“SoulShifting.”
The word yanked her out of her reverie. “SoulShifting,” she repeated in a whisper. Even the word was the stuff of ancient magic. “And who has done it?”
“Damren says no-one for generations. But once, long ago, it was your family, Coren. Damren said that long ago someone in your family was able to pull the soul from one body and push it, still living, into another body.”
“Life and death. A shifter who could control the very source of life,” she nodded.
This.
This was something a king would grow restless to find, willing to tear apart countries and families in the search.
This was something she could pour her heart into learning.
Chapter 25
Sy rose early the next morning, even before Damren. He listened at her door but heard nothing, so he began to prepare the strong tea and oats that had prefaced each day of his training.
“Is Damren okay?” Coren asked, coming into the kitchen and rubbing her eyes.
“I haven’t seen her yet, but I think she will be.” He set a mug before her and smiled at how she bent her face to inhale the steam.
“How many days do we have before the Wesh are moved?” she asked after a sip.
“Six, if the papers are correct. But we need two of those to get down the mountain and through the passage. I think we’d have a better chance taking them from the auction house in EvenFall than on the road.”
She tilted her head at him, her brows drawn. “I would have picked the opposite.”
He grinned. “But I’m a Paladin and the General’s First Son. This is something I’ve trained for my whole life.” He shrugged when she glared. “It’s time all my lessons work for something other than hunting creatures and talismans.”
“So what do you plan, exactly?” she muttered, turning her attention to a bowl of oats.
“I know the auction house, and where they keep the slaves. I’ve been there with Father before. And I have contacts in EvenFall that can be persuaded to help, I think. They can certainly help me hide the slaves much easier than I could on the road. Plus they’ll be closer to the passage to Weshen.”
“Four more days,” she said, setting down her spoon and shaking her head. “I’m afraid I won’t be ready.”
“You won’t be,” Damren said from the door. “Which is why you will stay here with me, while Syashin goes alone to EvenFall.”
Sy glanced down at his breakfast, not wanting Coren to see his agreement.
“No!” Coren said, startling Sy with her forcefulness. She pushed away from the table, seething at both of them. “I have lost everything. My family, my home, my simple existence. In one day I began to live an entirely different life. But I gained so much, too,” she continued, controlling her voice better. “I have the power to help these people - my people - and I would be no better than the dark kingdoms if I refused to help them. Killing the king is a dream, certainly. But this. This is something I know I can do.”
Sy could tell how much it pained her to admit all of this. Even though Damren had said nothing, he knew she would never agree to Coren going. Not with the threat of Shadow so heavy on the old woman’s heart.
He didn’t truly understand the threat, but he trusted Damren, and so in that moment he made a decision. He would train like normal for four days, then leave in the secret of the night, without telling either of the women. Neither would be able to follow him - Damren was too old to travel the mountains, and Coren would have no map.
Nodding at the decision, he took the last bite of his breakfast and stood.
“Ready to train?” he asked Coren, catching Damren’s eye and winking to let her know he would smooth the situation.
Coren scraped what was left of her oats in the trash and followed him from the kitchen, shoulders slumped. As Sy left, he saw Damren sit heavily at the table and bury her face in a mug of tea. These women were too similar, he thought.
Shift of Shadow and Soul (SoulShifter Book 1) Page 24
