Anhaga

by Lisa Henry

  Tomorrow.

  They would set out again for Amberwich tomorrow, the weather be damned.

  Min gripped the edges of the tub and lifted himself free. Water ran off him in rivulets, leaving his skin prickling with the cold. He dried himself off and dressed in his least-damp clothes—those that Harry had pulled out from the middle of their bags. The rest he and Harry draped around the room—onto the bed, over the edges of the table and the back of the rickety chair—in the vain hope they might dry by morning. After pushing his luck by demanding a private bath, Min didn’t like his chances that any clothing he took downstairs to dry in front of the fire wouldn’t end up in the flames courtesy of some vindictive servant. Min had a vindictive streak of his own and knew never to underestimate petty spitefulness in others.

  He sat on the bed and tugged his damp boots back on, grimacing at the sensation.

  “At least the food is good here, right?” Harry asked, quirking the corner of his mouth upward in a rueful smile. His cheek dimpled, and his curse mark shifted.

  Min looked back at his boots so he didn’t have to stare at it. “The food is fine. The company leaves much to be desired.” He stood, his toes squelching. “Shall we go and hover in the kitchen like flies?”

  They tramped downstairs, making for the kitchen.

  The tub that Robert and Kaz had bathed in was still in the center of the room, in front of the kitchen fire, and Min felt a twinge of disappointment in his gut as he imagined Kaz, pale and long-limbed, water glistening on his skin and clinging to the bow of his mouth like dew. Instead of that particularly alluring fantasy, he had to settle for spotting a tiny black feather floating on the cloudy surface of the water and a trail of wet footprints that petered out before they reached the doorway.

  “Food will be sent to the dining room,” one of the maids said, mouth turned down at the corners.

  Min and Harry headed that way.

  Robert and Kaz and Talys were seated already. A fire flickered in the hearth, bleeding warmth into the room. Min took a seat beside Talys, and Harry sat beside Kaz. The food was served and they ate. The meal was as grand as the one from the night before, but Min took no delight in it today. There was no conversation, only the scrape and clatter of cutlery against their wooden bowls and the crack of the logs in the fire. Kaz didn’t lift his gaze from his plate, Harry and Talys cast furtive, frantic glances at each other, and Robert glowered at them every time.

  Min had been to merrier funerals.

  He ate quickly, like a stray dog thrown an unexpected treat and wary of losing it again. He had no desire to spend a moment longer than necessary in this miserable company. He’d rather fill his stomach with more speed than grace and then go and wallow in his room for a while. Perhaps he’d entertain himself with fantasies of Kaz bathing, the water sluicing off his pale, glistening skin.

  He glanced at Kaz.

  In his fantasy, Min decided, Kaz wouldn’t look so wretched.

  “My lord!” The cry came from somewhere outside, startling Min out of his sordid daydreams, and Robert was on his feet in an instant in response. “My lord!”

  The man who skidded into the room was soaking wet, pale, and shaking.

  “What is it?” Robert asked, already striding for the door.

  “My lord!” the man cried, and pointed toward the front of the manor, as though he could not find any further words.

  Min rose, snatching up a knife from the table as he did so. He followed Robert out into the hall, the others at his heels. The candlelight from the sconces on the wall cast strange shadows and glittered in the glass eyes of the antlered stags’ heads staring blankly down at them.

  The front doors of the manor were open, and the wind was blowing the rain inside.

  There was a woman standing in the doorway. She was dressed in white. She wore no hood. Her dark hair hung loose. She was pale and dark-eyed. She was beautiful. She was—

  Min felt a chill slice through him.

  She was dry.

  Min was frozen with horror.

  There was a hoarse whisper from beside him: “Avice?”

  Robert.

  And then the man was moving, striding forward to close the heavy doors. “Help me, you cowards! Help me!”

  A servant, braver than Min, darted forward to assist.

  They slammed the doors shut and slid the bolts into place just as every candle in the hall guttered and was snuffed out, plunging them into darkness.

  Chapter 10

  MIN DID not consider himself a superstitious man. He’d tossed a few coins toward a few shrines in his life whenever custom or whimsy dictated, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever prayed. And now, fumbling in the darkness with the cries of the panicked servants ringing in his ears, he really wished he’d paid more attention to his lessons when his mother had sent him off to the priest down the street a few days a week so he could get an education. It was supposed to have been six days a week, but Min’s mother had made the mistake of trusting Min with the quadrans a day it cost for his lessons, and Min had often managed to spend that before reaching the priest’s house. It had been months before his mother had discovered his ruse, and a good few days before he could sit down without wincing in pain for all the bruises on his tender backside.

  The point was, Min really wished right about now that he could remember a few of those prayers the priest had tried to teach him.

  “Light!” Robert called imperiously above the noise. “Bring me light!”

  The faint glow of the fireplace in the dining room drew Min back there. He caught Harry’s wrist and pulled him along with him, realizing only when he was crossing the threshold into the dining room that it wasn’t Harry he had grabbed at all, but a shivering Kaz.

  “Did you see her?” Kaz whispered. He broke Min’s hold and reached out and twisted his fingers in Min’s tunic. “Did you see her?”

  “I saw her.” Min snatched a candleholder from the table, looking back at the door as Harry and Talys darted inside. They were holding hands, like scared little children. Min didn’t blame them. He crossed to the fireplace and lit the candle from the flames there.

  His efforts were in vain.

  By the time he moved back to the hall, servants were lighting the candles in the sconces again, perhaps having rushed to the fireplace in the kitchen. Min returned to the dining room and set the candle down on the table and then went and stood in front of the hearth with Kaz and Harry and Talys. The warmth and the light from the fire did nothing to quash the fear that sat heavily inside his gut, ice cold.

  “Who was that?” Harry whispered, wide-eyed.

  Min clenched and unclenched his fists, trying to regain control of his trembling fingers. “Avice,” he said. “He called her Avice.”

  Talys darted her gaze quickly to Kaz and then back to Min. “That… that was the name of my father’s sister.”

  Kaz’s breath tumbled out of him in a tiny gasp. “My mother? That was my mother?”

  Oh, and there was a lifetime of heartbreak in his tone that Min couldn’t even begin to untangle. It hung in the air like regret and hope all muddied in together, and it made Min’s chest constrict with sudden sorrow. “Kaz.”

  Kaz reached up and touched the iron collar around his throat. His forehead creased with a frown. “But I didn’t… that isn’t what the dead look like, Min.” He shook his head. “I didn’t do this! He will blame me, but I didn’t do this!”

  Min gripped him by the shoulders. He kept his voice low. “He won’t blame you. He can’t. You are a hedgewitch, remember? Just a hedgewitch.”

  He caught Talys’s gaze and saw the sudden understanding light in her eyes.

  “He’s bound by iron,” he told her. “Whatever the true nature of his Gift, he didn’t do this.”

  Harry looked at her beseechingly, and Talys jerked her chin in a nod.

  “I didn’t do this.” Kaz squeezed his eyes shut tightly, brows knitting together as he mumbled. “Her hair wasn’t wet and neither was he
r dress. No physical form, so she was not summoned from the grave. A spirit? A shade. Yes, a shade, an echo. But an echo only occurs when there has been noise, so what is the noise? I need—” He stopped suddenly, a visible shiver running through him. “I don’t know. I don’t know what caused this.”

  Min reached up and pressed a hand against Kaz’s cold cheek.

  Kaz opened his eyes again and looked suddenly, achingly uncertain. “What does she want, Min? Why is she here?”

  Min didn’t know the answer to that.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  Because when the shades of the dead came unbidden into places where the living dwelled, how could that be a portent of anything but horror? And how fucked were they all when Kaz was looking to Min for comfort?

  I kidnapped you, he wanted to say.

  I’m the villain of this story.

  And so are you, kid. You’re a necromancer.

  If there was one of them who shouldn’t have been shitting himself right now, Min felt it should have been Kaz. Death was his Gift.

  Min reached out and swept his thumb along the curve of Kaz’s cheekbone and held his wide gaze. “I don’t know either, sweeting.” He could summon none of the usual sharpness he usually reserved for the word. “I don’t know.”

  They might have stood there for hours, frozen still in that moment, if Robert hadn’t strode into the dining room. Their little tableaux broke apart into pieces then: Min stepped away from Kaz and Harry from Talys. Kaz turned and stared into the fire, the glow bringing the dark shadows under his eyes into sharp relief.

  “A trick,” Robert said sharply, taking a seat at the table as though he meant to finish his meal. “An illusion, no doubt wrought by an enemy of our House.”

  Talys lifted her chin. “For what purpose, Father?”

  Min didn’t miss the way Robert’s hand shook as he reached for his knife.

  “To see if we frighten like children,” Robert said, but Min knew he didn’t believe it. “Sit. Eat. Put it out of your thoughts.”

  Of course. Because the shade of a dead woman turning up on the doorstep in the middle of a storm was nothing at all to fear, right? Because a mage or a sorcerer—the only Gifted ranks who could even begin to knit together an illusion as convincing as the apparition had been—just happened to be wandering the countryside waiting for an opportunity to fuck with the Sabadines. The lie was as brittle as Robert’s strained composure.

  “I will not,” Talys said. “I have lost my appetite.”

  Robert glared at her. “Then go. All of you, go!”

  Min stood his ground while the others scattered. He regarded Robert steadily for a moment and then sat back down in his seat and picked at the remains of his meal.

  “He is bound by iron,” he said at last. “And you know a hedgewitch could never do anything like that anyway.”

  Robert pressed his mouth into a thin line and then snorted. “You concern yourself too much with the boy. Do you think I haven’t seen your interest?”

  “It is my only interest that you don’t snap and beat him to death before we get back to Amberwich,” Min said.

  Robert stared at him, as though searching for the truth behind his words. He said, at last, “He looks like her. Like Avice.”

  Pale-skinned, dark-haired, and sloe-eyed. The resemblance had been unmistakable.

  “That was no illusion we saw just now,” Min said. “That was your sister’s shade.”

  If Robert hadn’t been holding himself as stiff as a board, Min might not have seen the shudder than ran through him.

  “She was kind,” he said at last. “Sweet. Even after….” He clenched his jaw for a moment, and a muscle in his cheek jumped. “Our father had her locked away for her convalescence, to protect her from scandal. My brothers and I were forbidden to see her. The midwife said she asked to be buried here at Pran. She said she begged us not to hate the child.”

  Min wondered if Robert’s guilt had been enough to summon her. Perhaps the shade of Avice Sabadine had risen from whatever place her bones rested and had come to her brother’s doorstep for a reason. To accuse him. To shame him. To stare into his eyes and demand to know why he intended to marry his own nephew. Her son. That seemed the sort of transgression that might pull a soul from rest.

  Robert’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile. He raised his cup of wine and drank and then set the cup down again. “And yet, how can I not hate him? He is the spawn of the creature that violated Avice and the thing that killed her. I wish my father had left him to rot in Anhaga.”

  “So does Kazimir, no doubt,” Min said. He grabbed the jug of wine on the table and poured himself a cup. “But since your father has us all trapped in the same web, I shall keep my sympathies for myself.”

  Robert grunted, lifting his cup in Min’s direction, and Min took it as grudging agreement.

  He drank, startling briefly when he felt a touch against his leg. He looked down to see a small gray cat bumping its head against his calf. Min dropped his hand down, and the cat butted his fingers and then vanished under the table.

  Min brought his wine up to his mouth to take another sip and saw something floating in it. A leaf? He set his cup down and fished two fingers in it to pin the offending article to the side and drag it out. He set it on the table.

  No. Not a leaf at all.

  A small black feather.

  Min stared at it, disquiet building in him. An omen? Min was not superstitious, but he’d already seen the shade of a dead woman walking the earth tonight, so at this point why the fuck wouldn’t he feel disturbed by an incongruous feather? At this point, Min felt, it was entirely rational to think everything was a portent of disaster.

  Except this wasn’t the first time he’d seen a feather like this one, was it? He’d seen one floating on the surface of Kaz’s bath, and before that as well, at the little ford in the stream on the road back from Anhaga when Harry had plucked one from the tangle of Kaz’s hair.

  Kazimir, he thought, his heart pounding faster. He rolled the shaft of the tiny feather between his thumb and forefinger. You are the stone I wish I had left unturned.

  The wine barely disguised the bitter taste of the lie.

  AVICE SABADINE’S shade was not the only one to haunt the manor at Pran. The whispers of the servants followed Min as he climbed the stairs toward bed, and the chink and rattle of a chain drew Min past the doorway of the room he shared with Harry and toward the room where Kaz slept. The hall was dark and shadowed, and the skin on the back of Min’s neck prickled as his perverse imagination summoned a hundred more shades to stalk him through the darkness, their black voiceless mouths open in hunger.

  Kaz’s door was open. He was sitting on his bed in the darkness. He was unchained but was running the links through his hands, letting them puddle on the floor before drawing them up again like a fisherman bringing in his nets. His hands fluttered palely in the scant light, and Min thought of the large moths, as white as the moon, that used to tremble and shudder against the window of the attic room in his mother’s house when he was a child, drawn by the light of his lamp.

  “Does that burn?” Min asked quietly from the doorway as Kaz fed the links through his hands again.

  “Not as much as it did.” Kaz looked at him and then down again. “It feels like grasping a stinging nettle.”

  Min pushed away his disquiet. The iron had been strong enough to cause Kaz to faint the first day he’d worn it. Was there some impurity in this chain that made its effect weaker, or was Kaz developing a tolerance for iron? Min wasn’t sure how he felt about the second possibility at all. “Then why do it?”

  Kaz shrugged and let the chain slide to the floor. He looked up again, his face as pale as his mother’s shade, his eyes as wide and dark as caverns. “Min….”

  There was a note of despair in his voice, or perhaps it was a strange sort of longing. Min didn’t trust himself to judge it or to respond to the plea he imagined there.

  “I found a fe
ather in my wine,” Min said at last, when he could trust his aching throat to push the words out without mangling them. “I thought of you and of disaster.”

  He couldn’t be sure in the gloom, but he thought he saw Kaz’s mouth quirk. “Me and disaster. We are the same thing, I think.”

  It was truer than Min wanted to admit. He felt the cold shadows crowding at his back.

  This boy.

  This impossible boy.

  This boy with a boot in both magical camps—both fae and human—and political too, with nothing to bind him but the iron around his throat. Kaz might have considered himself a footnote in his grandfather’s history, but Min wondered if the boy was selling himself short. Wondered what might happen if he chose to unlock his collar. Kaz would be wilder than the storm still raging outside. A part of Min, that part swimming in sour guilt, wanted to unleash chaos. A part of Min thought the world, and the men like him who lived in it, deserved it. A part of him thought it would be magnificent to watch Kazimir Stone scourge the world with fire.

  And then he thought of Harry and the curse mark on his cheek, and he pushed such dangerous thoughts away.

  “Good night, Kaz,” he said softly.

  Kaz turned his face away. “Good night.”

  And Min wondered, as he walked back toward his room with the darkness swirling around and the storm howling outside, whether necromancers had dreams when they slept, or nightmares.

  MIN TOSSED and turned with the storm. Harry’s cold feet were pressed against Min’s shins, and he snuffled into his pillow like a pup and snored like a wheezy pair of bellows. Harry could be quiet and watchful as a sentry in his waking hours, but when he slept, he was a danger to his bedfellows. Min had woken up covered in bruises in the past, and not even any sordid memories to make the getting of them worthwhile.