Reign of Shadows

by Deborah Chester

  Secret pride touched Agel, and unconsciously he straightened his own slim shoulders. As upset as he was over Caelan’s failure, Agel could not help but see this as his chance to shine. The masters’ attention would now center on him. And Agel wanted that challenge. He wanted to excel, to show everyone how good he could be.

  Caelan was past Agel now, his gaze straight ahead, looking neither left nor right across the faces that stared at him. Agel swallowed hard. He did not think he would ever see Caelan again. Certainly it could never again be as it was, or with welcome and a glad heart.

  Their fates, always entwined, were now separating into two different roads of life. Agel saw his as a path to accomplishment and success. His talent would support his ambitions. One day his fame would surpass that of Uncle Beva’s.

  As for Caelan, his path had already grown stony and broken, heading for a life of disappointment and hard times.

  Their childhood was finished.

  Crossing the courtyard with his escort, Caelan could feel the eyes of the assembly burning into his back. He felt their curiosity and shock flooding over him in a collective mass of emotion that nearly made him stagger. Somehow, he managed to hold it off. This was no time for sevaisin to grip him.

  The wind was bitterly cold, flicking sharp little snowflakes into his face. His breath steamed about his face, and he fought not to shiver. He intended to show no weakness. If the masters expected remorse or doubt from him, they would not get it.

  All he felt now was impatience to get this over with. It would have been easier on everyone if the proctors had just handed him his cloak bag and put him through the gate. No fuss, no assembly, no scaring the first-termers.

  But, no, they had to make a huge ordeal of this, make it bigger than it was. They’d even had to seize one final chance to frighten him by making him think they were going to purify him against his will.

  But soon their games would be over, as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t wait.

  Reaching the dais, Caelan halted. The proctors parted from around him. Looking straight up into the stony eyes of Elder Sobna, Caelan felt defiance fill him like heat. He smiled.

  Twin spots of color blazed in the Elder’s pale cheeks. The Elder’s gaze burned into his; then the mask of severance returned like the slam of a door.

  Caelan looked away, indifferent as the Elder lifted his arms and began to speak.

  Much of it was in the old tongue, no longer used by edict of the emperor. Caelan understood none of it, and even when the Elder switched back to Lingua, Caelan barely listened.

  With his money taken by the soldiers, he had no chance of heading out on his own. He would have to go home. There would be plenty of time on the journey to think of an explanation for his father.

  His whole life suddenly spread before him, radiant with limitless possibilities.

  “Caelan E’non,” the Elder said loudly, startling him, “what is your answer?”

  A hush lay over the assembly as though everyone had held their breath to hear. Even the bell stopped tolling. Caelan had no clue as to what the Elder had asked him.

  It was worse than being caught daydreaming in class.

  Embarrassment flooded him. He almost started to stammer something; then he caught himself short. This wasn’t class. He was no longer obliged to do anything these men wanted.

  Defiant again, he looked up at the Elder and said clearly, “I have no answer to make.”

  A gasp ran behind him, and even some of the masters looked disconcerted, but the Elder’s expression did not change. With a nod he stepped aside and gestured at the masters.

  One by one, they approached Caelan and touched him briefly on his left shoulder.

  “I concur,” each one said.

  Master Mygar came last. Old and stooped, he limped forward, his white robes stained and smelly. His palsied lips made him appear to be mumbling to himself, but his rheumy eyes glittered as malevolently as ever when they met Caelan’s.

  He did not brush Caelan’s shoulder with his fingertips as had the others, but instead gripped him hard.

  “Casna,” he whispered.

  It was the word in the old tongue for “devil.”

  “You will break the world,” the old man whispered, his eyes rolling back in his head. “You are destruction incarnate.”

  Blackness poured into Caelan through the old master’s touch, burning him, defiling him. Such hatred, such decay ... an evil rottenness like a stench in the soul.

  Caelan jerked free of the old man’s grasp. Shocked, he stood shuddering and blinking. A clammy sweat broke out across him, and for a moment he thought he would be sick.

  He stared at Master Mygar. As the black worm of Mygar’s emotions continued to twist through Caelan’s veins, he saw the old man’s flesh melt away. A bleached white skull stared back at him, and darkness—a living, horrible darkness— writhed and pulsed within the plates of bone, flickering at the edges of the eye sockets.

  Appalled by what his inadvertent sevaisin had brought him, Caelan sought desperately inside himself for the patterns of good and harmony. He tried to weave them around the worm of blackness until it stopped twisting inside him and lay still, cocooned in what he had spun around it. Then it faded and was gone, like ashes in his soul.

  Still sweating, his knees weak as though they would let him drop at any moment, Caelan managed to regain his breath.

  Watching him, Mygar widened his gaze. “Casna” he whispered again, then drew back. “I concur,” he said loudly for the assembly to hear.

  Elder Sobna stood in front of Caelan once more. His lingers brushed Caelan’s right shoulder, and this time Caelan flinched. No more emotions came to him, however.

  “And I concur,” the Elder intoned. “You are no longer eligible to be trained for the healing arts here or in any part of the empire.”

  Caelan blinked in surprise. He hadn’t expected such sweeping finality. Still, he didn’t believe they could enforce it. The masters here might be renowned, but they didn’t run the world.

  “You are no longer to wear the blue colors of our training. You may never return through our gates. You will never practice the arts which you have learned here. Our ways and our privileges are henceforth forever denied to you.”

  The Elder raised his hands. “Kneel for the disrobing.”

  Two proctors reached out to push Caelan to his knees.

  “No!” he cried, his voice ringing out across the courtyard. “I’ll never kneel to you, any of you! Here.” He yanked off the novice robe and flung it on the ground at the Elder’s feet. “I have disrobed myself. Now let me go from this place.”

  Despite the rule of silence, murmurs ran through the assembly. The masters looked shocked, and even the Elder lost his severance to fresh anger.

  Blinking hard, his mouth clamped tight, the Elder pointed at the main gates in silence. They swung open.

  The gathered proctors moved aside and Caelan strode out, breathing hard, barely restraining his eagerness.

  The bell began to toll again, its dark tone lifting over the countryside.

  Head high, Caelan walked through the gates and paused to glance back. He would have liked to have said goodbye to Agel. But the gates slammed behind him with a mighty thud, and the Ouon Bell stopped ringing. For Rieschelhold, he had ceased to exist.

  Lightness filled him. Caelan flung his arms to the sky with a shout of relief. Crowing with laughter, he danced in a small circle, kicking up snow. He felt as though he could fly.

  “I’m free. I’m free!” he said over and over. Right then it didn’t matter that he had no money, no cloak, and no traveling boots. If he got himself into trouble again out here, no one would come to his rescue. But he didn’t care.

  Scooping up a double handful of snow, he flung it into the air and let it rain down on him. “I’m free!”

  “Caelan.”

  Startled by that quiet word, Caelan lowered his arms and spun around.

  A man cloaked in white fur step
ped forward from the bushes. He led two white, shaggy mountain ponies by their reins. A pole with a healer’s globed lantern was attached to one saddle.

  The man was tall and handsome, with a fringe of straight brown hair showing across his forehead beneath his fur hood. His face held no expression at all, but his gray eyes were dark with the bleakest disappointment Caelan had ever seen.

  For a second, everything in this man’s heart lay exposed to the boy—a lifetime of hope, ambition, and plans for the future now in ruin. A dream of companionship, of working together for a mutual aim, now shattered.

  Caelan dragged in an unsteady breath. All the lightness in him dimmed. The relief, the joy, the sense of unfurling like a warrior’s banner, faded. He was once again a boy in trouble for his mischief, small and sorry, waiting head down for the word of scolding.

  “Oh, Father,” he said, his voice a mere whisper of sound in the falling snow.

  Beva E’non drew in his pain, closing it behind the gates of his own will. In silence he turned away from Caelan and mounted his pony. The globe lantern bobbed and shook on its pole as he settled himself in the saddle.

  Gazing down at Caelan, he held out the reins to the other pony without a word.

  Equally silent, Caelan took them. A wool tunic and cloak lay across the saddle. Caelan shook snow off the garments and put them on, grateful for their warmth. He hesitated a moment, hating to be collected like this, haling to still be a child in a man’s body. But at last he climbed into the cold, stiff saddle. It was his own, the stirrups shorter now than they’d been on his last visit home. He looked at his father’s erect back. The white fur made Beva almost vanish into the snowy landscape.

  The man had always sought to blend into his surroundings, to never stand out, to never insist that he be seen or heard. This inner stillness, this silence of manner, appearance, and word, only added to his great mystique.

  Hut lot Caelan, it made his father impossible to approach.

  Worse, he had not expected Beva to know yet, much less come for him. Beva must have overheard everything in the ceremony. Everyone in Trau would soon know of Caelan’s public disgrace, and it would mark the first failure of this famous man.

  How to explain anything to the unyielding back riding in front of him?

  Caelan sighed. He glanced over his shoulder at the immense walls of Rieschelhold, and still felt no remorse. His way lay elsewhere, even if he did not yet know what his life was to be. Perhaps now, at last, Beva would accept that.

  Frowning, Caelan kicked his pony and followed his father home.

  Chapter Five

  THE SNOW FELL harder through the afternoon, the flakes large and wet. Caelan pulled up the hood of his cloak and searched the saddle pockets until he found a pair of gloves. His feet were freezing in their thin leather shoes, but he made no complaint. Concentrating on the patterns of warmth and well-being, he tried to make his toes warm. It didn’t work very well.

  Beva swung his mount onto the imperial road, and Caelan followed. In silence they galloped along the empty ribbon of stone, hoofbeats echoing against the wall of forest on either side beyond the ditch. Clipping past the place where he’d been ambushed, Caelan found himself holding his breath. But no lurkers were in evidence today. Even the corpse had been dragged away, probably by wolves. The soldiers of course were long gone, with no trace of their passing except a series of fresh clearings off the road, with blackened fire sites and raw stumps sticking up jaggedly.

  After about a league, the forest thinned to marshland. The imperial road rose up atop a levy, but a common road of frozen mire branched off from it, skirting the marsh and heading south toward Meunch. At this spot stood an immense archway of imported granite. Although plain of any curving or ornamentation, its architecture was foreign, exotic. The speckled stone seemed to speak of other lands, other customs, calling to travelers to seek them out. Strange letters had been etched into the base of the arch tall, spiky letters in a script as foreign as the stone.

  Towering almost as high as the trees, the arch spanned the imperial road, testament to one of the emperor’s greatest achievements. The roads spanned the length and breadth of the empire, making every corner of it accessible. As for the archway itself, its sheer massive size stood as silent testament to the emperor’s power and long reach. Had the archway stood at the edge of a large town such as Ornselag, imperial troops would have maintained sentries and a check- post.

  Beva reined up beneath the arch and gave the ponies a breather. He watched the forest and sky with extra care and seemed reluctant to venture out into the open marshlands.

  “What’s wrong?” Caelan asked, thinking of the shadowy denizens said to inhabit the marshlands.

  “We must gallop on,” Beva said. “We dare not stay long in the open. Come.”

  “But—”

  Beva spurred his mount, and the pony plunged off the paved road and down a short embankment to the crude track that led north. Caelan followed more cautiously, wondering why his father had not lit the healer’s lantern bobbing on the pole. Normally it was a signal to all robbers that this was a man of good traveling on a mission of mercy, lacking money to steal. Most bandits respected the lantern, and Beva had never been attacked in all his years of traveling. For him not to light it now, especially if he suspected danger, made no sense unless it was the unworldly he feared.

  Caelan wrapped his cloak tightly around his chest and kicked his own pony to catch up. They rode hard and fast, the ponies’ breath steaming in long white plumes. Geese rose off the water with startled honking as they galloped by. More than once their path dipped into the semifrozen slush. The ponies leaped and plunged through it, kicking spray high behind them.

  Beva never rode hard like this, but Caelan enjoyed it. Their pace was exhilarating. The sense of mysterious danger gave the adventure extra spice. He found himself watching land and sky as warily as his father was, his senses drinking in the cold outdoors that he’d missed while in school. The air was crisp and clean with scents of pine and spruce over laying the bog smell. The snow stung his face and malted his eyelashes. It was glorious.

  Finally forest curved ahead of them. Beva dove into the cover of trees and undergrowth and drew rein beneath the sweeping branches of a larch. Breathless, his heart pounding, Caelan stopped beside him and let his snorting pony drop its head. Both animals were heavily lathered. Steam rose off their wet bodies into the cold air.

  Around them the forest lay still, with only the soft rattle of falling snow through the branches. Occasionally a jackdaw could be heard in the sky.

  Beva finally blinked and seemed satisfied.

  “What is it?” Caelan asked softly. “Can we return to the road?”

  “No. Too dangerous. We must stay in the forest, where there is cover.”

  “But if we go this way, it will take twice as long to get home.”

  “Better to be safe than quick,” Beva said, adjusting his gauntlets.

  “If you’re worried about robbers, light your lantern.”

  Beva shook his head. “Light will only call attention to us. We must take great care.”

  “From what?” Caelan asked in bewilderment. “What kind of robbers do you fear?”

  “Not robbers.”

  Caelan waited for his father to continue, but Beva was looking into the forest, tight-lipped and plainly worried.

  “I can’t help if I don’t understand,” Caelan said in frustration. “Why the secrecy?”

  Beva shot him a glance, his face unreadable. He hesitated, then said, “Imperial troops are being withdrawn from the eastern borders.”

  “Yes,” Caelan said impatiently. “I know thai. You aren’t afraid of them, are you? What happened to me was just a—”

  Beva glared at him. “Some of the auxiliary forces are comprised of Thyzarenes. With their release from service, they have begun raiding—sometimes as far as the northern rim.

  Caelan’s mouth fell open. Instinctively he ducked farther beneath the bran
ches. “Thyzarenes!”

  His mind churned with the thought of it. Thyzarenes were worse than devils. They were said to attack from the sky, riding huge winged monsters that breathed fire. They were merciless savages who pillaged and destroyed. There had been none in Trau in Caelan’s lifetime.

  “But—”

  “Quick hunt-and-strike raids,” Beva said grimly. “If the emperor wants to use them against his enemies, that is one thing, but he should not turn them loose on a peaceful and loyal populace.”

  “But why are they raiding us? Are you sure it’s not just rumor to liven up winter days?” Caelan asked with a skeptical laugh.

  “I have seen their work,” Beva said. “Two holds burned so far and one village. People slaughtered or carried off. The few survivors are in no shape to bury the dead, and that of course brings the wolves.” His mouth tightened with the little twist that always came when he failed to save a patient.

  Caelan was ashamed now that he’d laughed. “But the army has moved on, hasn’t it? I mean, when I saw them they were marching fast, not living off the land or raiding as they went. Wouldn’t the Thyzarenes go with them?”

  “Who is to say what such savages will do?” Beva asked. “Trau joined the empire for protection, not to be pillaged for sport.”

  “When we get home we’ll have to open the arms room,” Caelan said. “We need to make preparations to fight if necessary. Did you bring weapons today for protection?”

  Beva stared at him in disapproval. “The idea of fighting pleases you.”

  “Well, I think we should defend ourselves, not—”

  Beva turned his pony and rode on through the trees without another word.

  Caelan scowled, feeling the dismissal as strongly as the blow of a proctor’s staff. His words, his opinions were not worthy enough to be heard. To his father, he remained a child of no standing. Resentfully, Caelan sat a long while, reining his pony when it tried to follow the other one.