Of Ice and Shadows

by Audrey Coulthurst

  “You like ice wine?” I said incredulously. That stuff was too sweet even for me.

  “No.” He blushed. “Evie does.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. Apparently Saia was wrong about the trainees not developing friendships—or in this case, maybe something more.

  “All right, then. How do we sneak out?” I asked, tugging on my cloak.

  “We shadow walk,” he said, and held out his hand. “Um, be forewarned that some people find the experience unpleasant.”

  Whatever he was talking about couldn’t be worse than getting beaten up in training every day—or so I thought until I took his hand. Our fingers laced together, and as soon as he had a firm grip on me, the room faded to pitch black. My head spun, and I had no sense of any firm ground beneath my feet. My stomach felt as though I’d been dropped off the side of a mountain. Tristan tugged me forward through the shadows as distant moans reverberated all around me until they seemed to be coming from inside my own mind. Voices whispered the stories of their deaths and how it had felt when their souls had left their bodies.

  And as quickly as it started, it ended as we stumbled into the snow and the world came back into focus. Slabs of stone stood up all around us, marked with names and symbols—a graveyard.

  “What in the Sixth Hell was that?” I asked, taking deep gulps of icy winter air in hopes of reducing the nausea that still gripped my stomach.

  “We took a stroll through the shadowlands,” Tristan said. He didn’t seem nearly as bothered by the experience as I was.

  “You could warn a person!” I said.

  “I did!” he said indignantly.

  I glanced back, and sure enough the castle wall was visible in the distance. He’d gotten us out.

  “Good gods, why did you transport us here?” I asked.

  “It’s easier to travel to places where the dead rest. The paths are better established.”

  “It’s freezing. C’mon.” I started trudging toward the gate, my teeth chattering. As we passed the grave markers, I started to recognize the symbols on them—they looked similar to those sometimes used for the Six Gods. The nicer ones had pellets of colored glass inlaid in them.

  “Are these graves marked with Affinities?” I asked.

  “It used to be customary to include the symbol of someone’s Affinity on their headstone, yes,” Tristan said.

  “Then what’s this symbol?” I stopped in front of one that had a seven-pointed star hanging on to only the last vestiges of silver leaf. The stone was old and crumbling, the name no longer even legible. The grave had to be ancient.

  “Dunno.” He shrugged.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” I asked.

  “In Havemont we don’t mark graves this way.”

  “It doesn’t seem like they’ve done it here for the newer ones, either,” I observed. So what did the symbol mean in this context? Tristan hadn’t said people could take their manifests with the help of multiple gods, but maybe that was possible. “Could it be symbolic of someone with a multi-Affinity?” That was the only other thing I could think of.

  “Doubtful,” Tristan said, pointing at an ornate headstone with three different colors of glass embedded in it. “Those are usually marked with some indication of all the person’s Affinities.”

  “Strange.” I turned away from the stone and kept walking. My stomach finally settled a little as we made our way down the street toward town.

  “I can ask my mother about it when I return home if I get a chance to visit after I’m apprenticed. She might know something.”

  “Your mother is an expert on ancient graves?” I asked.

  “No, but she lived in Zumorda before the queen took her throne. Perhaps she saw something like this before.”

  “Your mother can’t be the queen’s age,” I said flatly. I couldn’t tell how old the queen was, but she was decades past her childbearing years, and I doubted Tristan was any older than me.

  Tristan smiled. “My mother’s a demigod. I was left on my parents’ doorstep as a baby, like many of the other orphans they take in.”

  I reeled. For some reason, when the queen told me there were no longer demigods in Zumorda, I assumed they’d died out everywhere. “How old is your mother?” As far as I knew, things hadn’t changed in Zumorda in at least a hundred years. How old did that make the queen?

  “I think about two hundred, give or take a few years. Demigods live much longer than humans.”

  I nearly choked. “You’re telling me the queen is also two hundred years old? How is that possible?”

  Tristan laughed at my expression. “Yes. Bonding with a magical creature seems to have dramatically increased the queen’s life span. But she’s still mortal. She can’t live forever.”

  I had no idea such a thing was even possible. “Are all people’s life spans affected by their manifests?” I asked.

  Tristan shook his head. “Not really. I think it has to do with the dragon being a magical creature. Choosing a magical creature as one’s manifest is fairly rare, if for no other reason than the magical creatures themselves are not very common.”

  That meant even though we were related, the queen and I were separated by many generations. No wonder my mother had no idea that her lineage could be traced to the Zumordan throne. Then I remembered what the queen had said about people with multi-Affinities being the only ones approaching demigods with the scale of their powers.

  “Are the demigods related to people with multi-Affinities?” I asked.

  “No,” Tristan said. “Demigods can’t bear their own children. They usually have powers that correspond to whichever god is their parent, though like our gifts, there is a fair amount of variation among them.”

  We walked in silence for a few minutes and I took in the city around us. Like Kartasha, the city was laid out on the side of a mountain, but where Kartasha’s buildings mostly had gabled or cross-hipped roofs, Corovja’s were almost all saltbox style or angled on one side. Snow guards peeked above the dusting of white that had accumulated on many of the buildings.

  “It’s ridiculous that we’re supposed to stay confined to the castle during our training,” Tristan remarked. “There’s so much to see here.”

  “I’m sure it’s because they don’t want us getting distracted,” I said. Plenty of the academic communities in Havemont had similar rules, with excursions being tightly controlled.

  “I don’t think it’s a distraction to get to know your kingdom,” Tristan said. “Especially if one wants to become a guardian. It’s not the same as ruling, but I would think it would take a strong understanding of the people in your region regardless.”

  “That’s a wise observation,” I said. “I’m not very interested in becoming a guardian, though. Not that they’d let me, since I’m without a manifest.”

  “It’s too bad. You certainly have a knack for diplomacy that would give you an advantage. I kept falling asleep over the assigned reading, but it was like you knew it front to back.”

  I smiled bitterly. If only he knew how many years I’d studied those skills. There was no knack involved—only countless hours of practice. “So where are we going to get this ice wine for Evie?” I asked.

  “There’s a spirit shop a little ways down the main road,” he said, picking up the pace. “If we cut through this alley, we can get there faster.” He led me into an alley that took a sharp left turn and was so steep it had stairs.

  “When will you give it to her?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Tristan mumbled.

  I almost laughed. He liked her but couldn’t have been more awkward about it if he tried. “You could invite her over to share it with you,” I said.

  “It’s supposed to be a gift!” He seemed confused.

  “But if you invite her to share it with you, you’ll get a chance to talk to her outside of training,” I pointed out.

  He blushed. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “If you don’t know wha
t to say, make the other person do the talking,” I said, reciting the advice of my etiquette tutor. “Questions are a way to engage your subjects and show that you care about their concerns and are willing to listen to them.”

  Tristan gave me a puzzled look. “Subjects?”

  “People,” I hastily said. “I used to be a princess’s maid. One picks things up.”

  Tristan smirked. “No wonder you got mixed up in all this. Powerful magic, and secondhand princess manners to boot. You know what’s funny? You look a lot like Princess Dennaleia of Havemont. Maybe I should start calling you Princess.”

  “Oh gods, please don’t,” I said. A jolt of panic stabbed me in the gut that he’d so easily stumbled over the truth. “There’s enough of a target on my back already as far as Ikrie and Eryk are concerned.”

  “As you wish, Lady Lia,” he said with false formality.

  I glared at him, which only made him laugh.

  A little farther down the road, he led me through a door nestled in a narrow storefront. The walls inside were lined from floor to ceiling with bottles in every conceivable shape and size. In the far back was a shelf stacked several bottles deep with various kinds of ice wine, many of them local, but a fair number also imported from Havemont. Seeing the labels I recognized filled me with homesickness. I’d seen other vintages and more exclusive bottles in my parents’ collection back home.

  “So, uh, you don’t happen to know anything about ice wine, do you?” he asked.

  “Only what I saw the royalty drinking sometimes,” I lied. I was familiar with almost all the northern vintners of good reputation.

  “Do they have any of those here?” he asked, his voice eager.

  “You must really want to impress Evie,” I teased him.

  “I just want to get her something good,” he said, flushing a little.

  “This one,” I said, reaching for a bottle with a glittery purple label. I recognized it as a much less expensive version of one of my parents’ favorites. They often served the rarer vintages during meetings with high-ranking merchants or other people who were hard to impress. They’d claimed it wasn’t easy to find outside Havemont.

  “Why that one?” he said, taking the bottle from me and turning it over in his hand.

  “It’s from your homeland, which means it has special meaning and shows that you selected it thoughtfully,” I said. “Also, it’s at a middling price, which means it probably isn’t cheap wine with sugar added, so it’ll be the real deal without being ungodly expensive.”

  “I’m impressed. You sure think things through,” Tristan said with admiration in his voice.

  “If you don’t trust me, ask the shopkeeper.” I gestured to the man behind the counter near the front of the store. “They’re usually familiar with everything they stock. I think this might be one that is hard to find outside Havemont.”

  Another customer burst through the door, setting the bell jangling. The man’s rumpled clothes hung on him like trash sacks and his stubble looked more than a few days old.

  “Ay, got out of prison again, Lestkar?” the shopkeeper called.

  “I haven’t been there for ten years, you old coot!” Lestkar said, shuffling over to a shelf filled with magnums of cheap clear spirits. I wrinkled my nose. They were barely nicer than the alcohols the medics used as antiseptics—hardly worth drinking.

  “You’d best have enough coin to pay for that,” the shopkeeper said, a firm edge to his teasing tone.

  Lestkar waved him off and kept browsing.

  Tristan and I went to the front of the store to make our purchase, though I kept a careful eye on Lestkar, who made his way over to the counter just as Tristan was wrapping up his transaction.

  “That’s twenty,” the shopkeeper said to Lestkar, tying the last knot of twine over the brown paper he’d wrapped Tristan’s ice wine in.

  “Fifteen!” Lestkar roared.

  The shopkeeper sighed. “It was fifteen before you got thrown in prison the first time—ten years ago.”

  Tristan started to edge toward the door, but I grabbed his arm to stop him.

  “I’ve only got fifteen.” Lestkar slapped his coins down on the shopkeeper’s counter.

  “Actually, that’s thirteen,” the shopkeeper said.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said to Lestkar. “Is it true you went to prison?”

  The man turned and looked down at me with a distrusting expression. “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m just a servant, sir. Someone I used to work for got taken to the prison, and I want to see if he’s all right.”

  Tristan looked at me as though I’d lost my mind.

  “Haven’t been there in years,” Lestkar said. “Never going back, no sir.”

  “The bottle is still twenty,” the shopkeeper said, clearly losing patience.

  I pulled seven coins out of my pocket. “I’ll pay for the rest of your bottle if you show us the way there,” I said.

  The shopkeeper eyed my coins greedily, and Lestkar looked back and forth between me and the bottle. Eventually, he decided the bottle was worth the trouble.

  “All right. Pay up and I’ll show you,” he said. “But I’m not going within sight of the guards, and I’m not sharing my drink.”

  “Everyone has their limits,” I said, smiling politely.

  The shopkeeper took my money, seemingly relieved when we all left the building. Lestkar had his bottle open barely three steps outside the store.

  “So, where is it?” I asked Lestkar.

  “We’ll follow the main road to the crystal shop, turn left on the mining route, and when the buildings all turn to warehouses, it’ll be at the end of the block across from the tanner’s. Now hurry up, because I have other business to attend to.” Lestkar took another swig of his drink and shuffled toward the main road at a surprisingly quick pace.

  “Wait, slow down,” Tristan said to me as I trotted after Lestkar. “Why the Sixth Hell are you wanting to go to the prison?”

  “Sigvar,” I said, keeping an eye on Lestkar to make sure he didn’t take off in a random direction. “I need information from him.”

  “What kind of information could possibly be worth seven coins and trusting a drunken criminal?” Tristan asked, his voice rising.

  “Sigvar has—well, had—a multi-Affinity. I think he might know something that would help me figure out how to master my own powers,” I said. “It would make a big difference for me in training.”

  “But how are you going to get in? You can’t just walk in there,” Tristan pointed out.

  “You’re right. I can’t.” That hadn’t occurred to me. As a princess, I wouldn’t have had trouble gaining permission to enter the prison. No one would have questioned me. Here that wouldn’t be the case. Also, if there was some kind of visitor ledger or magical means of keeping track of who went in and out, that meant the queen could find out where I’d been. I couldn’t risk it. I cursed colorfully enough to make Mare proud. “Six Hells, why is every piece of information so hard to get in this sarding place?”

  Tristan pondered this information for a moment. “Maybe there’s another way.”

  I turned to look at him. “Like what?”

  “A lot of people die in prison,” Tristan said, leaving me to fill in the rest of the blanks.

  “Are you saying we could shadow walk there?” My stomach turned at the thought, but I could already see the potential. We could go at night, get inside the building without ever having to speak to a guard, and escape at a moment’s notice with no one the wiser.

  “I’m saying it’s not impossible,” Tristan said. “But I worry about where we’d land. I’m not familiar with the building, so there’s no saying whether we’d come out of the shadowlands in the right location or somewhere problematic. And there’s only so many times I can go in or out quickly—it does use a fair amount of power.”

  Up ahead, Lestkar took a sudden left, forcing us to hurry to follow him.

  “I have an idea,” I said.
“We’ll still go to the prison, but we won’t try to get in today. I just need to get a sense of the layout first.” I’d have to count on my Sight cooperating, but I felt more confident about it now.

  “You’re more trouble than I would have guessed.” Tristan smiled.

  “Not all the time,” I said. I felt a little bad about involving him in my schemes, but not bad enough to disinvite him. I needed all the help I could get, and in truth, it felt good to have a friend by my side.

  “If helping you with this will prevent me from getting blown off my feet in training by another one of your firestorms, you can count me in,” he said.

  “I make no promises,” I said wryly. “Midwinter is less than a moon away, and I get the impression that Brynan and Saia are expecting us to fight ruthlessly for the honor of the best apprenticeship.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Tristan said, and offered me his arm.

  I laughed and took it, and we hustled down the mining road with the wind at our backs.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Amaranthine

  AFTER MY DISCOVERY AT THE BROKEN CUP, THERE WAS no time to waste before talking to Laurenna. I sent Fadeyka home to give Laurenna an overview of what we’d discovered and was unsurprised when my summons came for that very same evening.

  We gathered in Zhari’s receiving room, an opulent affair decorated with gilded floral furniture. Her staff sat in one corner, the gems embedded in its curved top winking back at me as I took my seat.

  “You have quite a collection,” I said to Zhari. Tables and shelves throughout the room held precious artifacts that looked more like they belonged in a museum than in someone’s home.

  “It tends to happen as one ages,” she said, her tone wry. “I’ve lived in Kartasha since long before you were born.” She settled carefully into her own chair, the heavy fabric of her gray robes pooling around her feet.

  “Let’s get to the point.” Laurenna picked up a glass of wine from the small table beside her chair. “Faye said you had evidence of Alek conspiring with the Sonnenbornes.”

  I nodded. “I’m sure you’re aware that several pages of the ledger for Zhari’s program were stolen from the records master.”