Pursuit of Shadows (The Keeper Chronicles Book 2)

by JA Andrews

  A spark of anger kindled in her eyes.

  “You didn’t go to Lilit because some distant goddess made you, you went for the same reason I did, because she was dying. You knew there was nothing you could do, but you went anyway, because of your own humanity.”

  Sora met his gaze. Her brow was drawn, but there was a resolve in her eyes.

  “She’s cursed!” Killien spat the words at them.

  “Don’t be stupid.” Will was suddenly exhausted by everything. “And leave Sora alone. Your fight’s with me.”

  Outrage flashed over Killien’s features. “She betrayed me!” He lifted his blade to point at her. “After everything I did for you for three years, you helped Will escape. You helped him steal from me.”

  She stepped forward until the sword pressed against her neck. “You betrayed me. You took what I told you, the thing I hated most, and you used it against me.” Her face was a mask of fury. “I told you the truth. I have no powers. I did nothing.”

  “Lilit was dying,” Killien flung back at her. “If you have no powers, what saved my wife?”

  Sora pressed against the blade, forming the next word slowly. “Will.”

  Killien’s eyes flicked to Will, drawing the sword back slightly.

  “I did nothing but pray that the Serpent Queen would take her quickly.” Sora’s eyes burned with hatred at him. “I told you there was nothing I could do. But Will stopped her bleeding. Your wife lives because of him.”

  Killien cast a harsh glance at Will. “Is this true?”

  Will stared at him without answering.

  “If it had depended on me,” Sora said. “Lilit would have bled out onto the ground.”

  “Why?” Killien’s voice was still harsh, his blade still at Sora’s throat.

  “Because she was dying.” Will wanted to shake the man.

  Killien kept his sword at Sora’s neck, but his eyes shifted to Will.

  “Because Sora wanted to, but couldn’t. And I could.” He paused, the chaos of the night coming back to him. Killien kneeling on the ground, desperate. “Also, because I believed we were friends.”

  Killien took a step backwards, his head shaking back and forth, his face a turmoil of anger and uncertainty.

  “Lilit knows it’s true,” Sora said.

  Killien dropped his sword to his side and he turned toward the window. A goblin screeched far below.

  “You have to stop this, Killien,” Will said. “Call off the goblins. Your father strove to bring peace to the Sweep. You’re…”

  Killien’s face darkened.

  Will searched again for the face he knew, but instead of finding intelligence and discernment, he saw only something raw and feral. Killien wore the same leathers. The same collection of gems glittered in rune-covered rings. But he found nothing familiar in his face.

  Will felt unmoored. Like a leaf torn off the branch and tossed into the swirling winds. How could he talk to a man he didn’t know at all?

  “You can’t convince me to be like you,” Killien said.

  “I’m not trying to. I’m trying to convince you to act on what you already believe.”

  The door to the room opened and Lukas stepped in, his customary scowl replaced by a look of satisfaction, wiping a needle-thin dagger with a cloth spattered with blackish-green stains. Sora stiffened and shifted slightly to face him.

  Will’s breath caught in his throat. For an instant, in Lukas's face he saw all the possibilities of what Lukas could have been. Raised by his family, brought to the Keepers, trained to use his powers. He’d have lived at the Stronghold for the last fifteen years.

  A gaping void opened up inside Will. Lukas would have been another Alaric, another brother.

  Lukas hesitated, taking in the room and his knuckles whitened on the handle of the knife. Will had always hated the grey slave’s tunics, but the sight of it now was like a stab in the gut. Lukas should have been wearing a black Keeper’s robe. Lukas stepped forward, his jarring limp a symbol of the life he must have lived. Unlike Ilsa, Lukas must remember everything. They took him when he was eleven. He knew what he’d lost.

  Guilt churned in Will’s stomach.

  The Keepers should have known. He’d known twenty years ago wayfarers were taking children, and yet he’d done nothing. It should have been Will in Lukas's town, not Vahe. It should have been the Keepers who found him and protected him. The wrongness, the failure was so foundational and so permanent, Will shrank back.

  He couldn’t help feeling that he had utterly failed this man. The Keepers had utterly failed him.

  “Killien,” Lukas said, all traces of servitude gone from him, “it seems you’re being haunted by a Keeper.”

  He tossed the damp rag into a corner and shoved the knife into a sheath at his belt, limping toward Killien, grimacing tightly at each step. Will’s eyes were fixed on him, each step tearing something out of him. “It is done.”

  “Good.” Killien showed no surprise at the slave’s demeanor. Lukas set one hand on Killien’s shoulder and blew out a short breath, pressing his eyes shut, the grimace draining off his face.

  Will opened his mouth to say something, but no words came. Lukas glanced at Will with an expression of hatred.

  “The bulk of the goblins should be here by now,” Lukas said, stretching to see out the window.

  “Call them off,” Will said. “Stop the massacre, Killien.”

  It was Lukas who answered, “This isn’t Queensland where you mindlessly follow your queen. On the Sweep power goes to the strong. Those frost goblins are crippling the powerful clans. In a few hours the balance of the Sweep will shift to the Morrow.”

  “In a few hours,” Killien corrected him, “every clan will have a voice.”

  Irritation flickered across Lukas's face, but he said nothing.

  “And thousands of Roven, who want nothing more than to return home to their families,” Will said, taking a half step forward, “will be dead.”

  “Let me guess, Keeper.” Lukas's mouth twisted in contempt at the word. “You’re against fighting.”

  “No. In fact, I’d gladly join any fight on the side of the oppressed.”

  “We are the oppressed, Will.” Killien threw the words at him. “The Sunn and the Boan demand our barley, our herds, our warriors, and all under the threat of annihilation. We are the ones fighting the oppressors.”

  “You were,” Will said, his frustration boiling up into anger. “And you wanted to fight back with ideas that could actually change the Sweep. But now that you have power, you’ve become one of them. And today if I want to fight the oppressor, I have to fight you.”

  “Oppressor? The night the Panos attacked we caught them trying to steal my son.” The raw, feral look in his eye caught at Will like claws raking into his chest.

  A man poised over a child—the image loosed a deluge of anguish and fury.

  In that moment he recognized what he saw in Killien’s face— the same hatred Will had carried for years. It hadn’t started as hatred. It had begun with the terror that someone he loved was being hurt. But that terror gnawed down deep enough that it took root, and a savage hatred grew.

  It wasn’t the foreignness of the hatred in Killien that was so terrible. It was how profoundly Will recognized it.

  The mirrored feelings in himself clawed their way to the surface, and he wanted desperately to push them away, to close himself off to Killien. But he couldn’t ignore how much he understood them. Instead of pushing it all away, he faced it.

  “I know what you want,” Will whispered. “I know the terror and the guilt.”

  Killien’s face grew hard and savage.

  “And I know the hatred that grows from it.”

  “They must pay.”

  The words rang true and familiar. Killien’s eyes glittered with a new sort of ferocity, and Will stopped keeping that at a distance, stopped looking for what he wanted to find in the man. “You want to rip away everything they love.”

  Some
thing vulnerable joined the viciousness in Killien’s expression, opened it up. Will grasped for that opening, letting his own rawness meet Killien’s.

  “You want to rip it all away and make him watch it bleed out on the ground.” Killien’s desire to control the frost goblins blazed up in Will, and he knew that hunger. He wanted the chance to release them on Vahe, tear the man apart.

  Except, of course, it couldn’t end with Vahe. Will followed the hatred in himself forward to Killien and the fire faded.

  “At least you want to, until you ride over the Sweep with him, and learn who he is.”

  Killien’s jaw clenched.

  “He talks of things you love. He’s married to a woman and every time she is near he’s useless for anything else. He has friends who respect him, a clan that needs his leadership, and a son who needs a father.”

  Killien’s eyes stayed fixed on Will.

  “But there’s more than that. Somewhere along the way you realize you understand him. You recognize the things about him that you respect as things you strive for yourself. And you recognize the darkness in him too, because the same anger has lived for decades inside of you, demanding to be recognized.

  “One day you realize that a Keeper from Queensland and a Roven Torch aren’t foreign to each other. Then the hatred starts to cool into something different. Something more complicated. And you’re left with…more than you had. A tangle of things that feels like anger and failure, but also friendship.”

  The Torch shifted almost imperceptibly, but Lukas's face blackened further. Sora stood perfectly still.

  “It has its own form of pain. A more internal, digging pain. And it’s so tempting to go back to the hatred. But the new place is more…true. And the only reason you want to go back is that it’s easier just to hate. But when you can look at it honestly, you know the hatred’s killing you, and killing any hope that the future could be different.”

  Lukas’s hand clenched on Killien’s shoulder. “You know nothing of hatred.”

  Will took in Lukas's furious face and found he had no words to answer him with. “If you don’t stop, Killien, the future will not be different. The clans will strike back. Sevien will never be safe. Lilit will never be safe. The others will regain their strength and they will destroy the Morrow.”

  “They deserve this.” Lukas's tone held an unexpected authority.

  Killien spoke in a hoarse whisper. “They have so much blood on their hands.”

  “They do,” Will agreed. “But until today, you didn’t.”

  “Until today we didn’t have the chance,” Lukas said.

  “The Torches are here,” Will continued. “Let this be the time when a Roven could have overwhelmed with force, but instead offered peace.”

  Killien turned away from the window. A shadow lay on his face, but also a clarity Will hadn’t seen in ages.

  He took another step forward, a bit of hope kindling. “Call off the goblins, Killien.”

  The frenzied screech of the goblins rose and fell, slipping between the rushing sound of the wind.

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can,” Will said. “You obviously have a frost goblin you’ve used to call the others. Just change what it believes. Convince it there’s a vast mountain of metal far to the north. Let it spread that idea to the rest.”

  The Torch shook his head. “You don’t understand. I can’t. When we give a goblin the idea of all that metal, it goes mad.”

  Sora let out a long, defeated breath. “You had to kill it.”

  Killien nodded. “The only goblin I had is dead.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Sora let out a long breath that was half growl, and stalked toward Killien.

  The Torch raised his sword and Will’s heart lurched in his chest. Killien held the blade only a handbreadth away from her neck, his eyes fixed warily on her.

  “Untie me.”

  Killien stared at her for a moment, his face growing incredulous. “No.”

  She leveled him with a look that was all too familiar to Will. “You want to stop this,” she stated, and Will knew she was using a great deal of restraint to not call Killien an idiot.

  Killien’s eyes narrowed at her words, but the tip of his blade wavered.

  Sora blew out a short, irritated breath. “It’s going to be harder for me to catch another goblin if I’m tied up.”

  “Back away from the Torch.” Lukas pointed the thin knife at Sora.

  Far more than Killien’s blade, Lukas's face was so dark that a dart of terror stabbed into Will and he stepped up next to her.

  “You can’t go catch a goblin,” Will said. “There are too many of them.”

  Sora ignored both Lukas and Will and kept her eyes fixed on Killien. “Untie me.”

  Killien still didn’t move, his face unreadable. “Why should I trust you?”

  “I have always told you the truth,” Sora said. “I didn’t leave you because of Will. You and I were done the night Lilit almost died. I told you that then.”

  “Back away from the Torch!” Lukas repeated, his voice harsher.

  Sora turned a scathing look on him. “Are you going to catch another goblin?”

  “We don’t want to catch one.” A thin smile pulled up one side of Lukas's mouth. “Everything is going exactly as we planned.”

  An idea whispered into Will’s mind. Lukas stood next to Killien, shoulder to shoulder, and Killien didn’t object. The slave’s shirt was grey, but for the first time Will realized it was a disguise.

  Lukas had lived with Killien for most of his life. Killien had taught him to read, taught him how to use the skills that the Keepers should have taught him. Lukas was always well dressed, rode one of Killien’s horses, stood at the Torch’s side, ate next to him, lived with him. Even if he hadn’t wanted to be so close to the Torch, the pain in his hip would have kept them close. Lukas was part of every one of Killien’s plans.

  To Lukas, Killien wasn’t his owner—he was his equal.

  The understanding shifted everything. Lukas's face was bleak, and Will realized this discussion wasn’t just with Killien.

  “Every moment you wait,” Will said, keeping his eyes fixed on Lukas, “more Roven are dying. More hatred is growing and the chance for the Morrow to live in peace is growing dimmer.”

  “You don’t understand, do you?” Lukas said. “With every moment the Morrow grow more powerful and it is our enemies who grow dimmer. We finally have the power we need.”

  Lukas’s face was determined, almost victorious, but out of the corner of his eye, Will caught the hesitation in Killien’s. Lukas stood shoulder to shoulder with Killien, and hadn’t even noticed that Killien had already surrendered.

  The Torch nodded to Sora and she turned around.

  “What are you doing?” Lukas demanded.

  With a quick slice, her ropes were cut. Sora ran across the room and grabbed her knives off the floor. Will took a step after her, pulling at his own ropes, his mind scrambling for someway to help her, but she slipped out the door. Lukas's fingers dug into Will’s shoulder, pulling him back.

  Will pulled against Lukas toward the door. “You can’t let her go alone.”

  “Sora always does everything alone,” Killien answered with a short laugh, walking back to the window and looking down at the fighting below. “Whatever it is you two have going on, you must know her enough to know that.”

  Will let Lukas pull him back a step. “Nothing had better happen to her.”

  “What could possibly happen? She’s only running into an army of goblins,” Lukas said. “We should send you with her. Solve both our problems at once.”

  Will ignored his words. “We should be ready when she gets back. Do you need to make a new stone? Or can you reuse the last one?”

  Lukas gave him an incredulous look. “We’re not actually going to do it.”

  “Let him go,” Killien said tiredly.

  Lukas’s hand didn’t loosen.

  “
Let him go.” Killien sounded more firm. “And get a new compulsion stone ready.”

  Lukas stood perfectly still. “Why?”

  “Will is right.” The calm in Killien’s voice barely hid the anger. “If the Sweep is going to change, it has to be done differently than this. We’ll call off the goblins, give the clans time to realize that they aren’t the only ones with power. And then, if I haven’t already ruined it, we’ll find ways to build peace.”

  When Lukas still didn’t move, Killien leveled an unbending expression. “Let him go.”

  Lukas shoved Will away. With a dangerous look at Lukas, Killien came over to Will and cut his ropes.

  “Get the stone,” the Torch commanded harshly.

  Lukas wrenched the door open and turned down the hall.

  Will rubbed at the skin on his wrists where the ropes had rubbed. Killien moved back to the window, his shoulders stiff.

  “It’s the right choice,” Will said.

  Killien stood unmoving, his jaw clenched. Every line in his body hummed with anger and Will felt a hint of loss that the man he’d talked to on the journey north seemed to be gone.

  “What changed?” Will asked. “When did you stop looking for peaceful ways to change the Sweep?”

  Killien didn’t turn around. “I got tired of doing nothing and feeling helpless. My father’s plans for peace got him killed, and mine almost did the same.” He scrubbed his fingers through his hair and let out a growl of frustration. “I’m so angry at all of it. So tired of the Morrow being weak.”

  “They certainly weren’t weak today.”

  Killien leaned on the windowsill, looking out. “And it just made us more enemies.”

  “Yes, but you got their attention. Killien, you flew on a dragon.”

  Killien glanced over his shoulder at Will and a small smile flashed across his face. “You saw that?”

  In spite of everything, Will let out a small laugh. “It was impressive.”

  Killien grinned and for a moment looked like himself. “It was…like a dream. The power in his wings, the Sweep spread out below like a rug, covering hill after hill. We flew over this mountain.” He flung his hand toward the ceiling. “Over it! It was icy cold and the wind almost ripped me off. But mostly it was…so removed from everything. Somehow from up there the Sweep felt small, the clans so close to each other, they seemed like one group. The idea of a unified Sweep felt…possible.”