“Yes, kongelig,” she demurred, cutting a warning look to me.
I quickly tucked one leg behind the other, grabbed my skirts and ducked my head. A stiff and inelegant curtsey. “Welcome to our home, kongelig.” The term of respect lodged heavy and thick in my mouth.
“So, you are the one who destroyed my ring?”
He strode toward me, his bag thumping to the table. He caught my chin and lifted my face. I stared at him. At the man who collected death. At the owner of those three souls, those three stillbirthed girls whose blood I could never fully wash from my hands.
“I see no obvious magic mutation,” he muttered, though he didn’t seem to be speaking to me. “They start out very small, usually. A little rash, a bump, a scale, a thread of colour where there shouldn’t be.”
“She has a birthmark,” my mother rushed out. She seemed desperate. Perhaps he had refused her and she had begged him to come.
I began to step back from the man, but his fingers pinched harder at my chin. My mother sprang up, her hands busy in my skirts, her cold touch drawing a hiss out of my mouth.
“Here,” she demanded. “Look.”
The man knelt down, one of his hands on my leg, above my knee. My mother was pushing my skirts almost to my hips, turning my right leg to the side. Tears were now threatening to fall from the lower line of my lashes, but I stared up at the roof and held them back. They both stared intently at the small, misshapen white mark high on the inside of my thigh. No man had ever seen so much of me.
“You are sure there is no other mark? No other sign of mutation?”
“None,” my mother promised. “I am sure of it.”
He nodded and then stood, pulling something from his pocket. It was a collar of sorts: long, thin, and metal. It was inscribed in Forsan, the words too small for me to read. I began to shake my head, pleas tumbling from my lips, but my mother stood behind me, holding me still as the collar was placed around my neck.
“Ylode,” the man said to the collar, touching it once.
It was an Aethen word, more ancient than the ancient Forsan language. It was the rhythm behind a word, devoid of letters, its meaning harder to grasp than a wisp of smoke from a spluttering candle. I had no idea what the collar or the word did, but magical objects were far more dangerous than one sectorian alone. Magic could be layered onto an object, incantation after incantation, day after day, sometimes year and year, until it was a hundred times more powerful than any one incantation from any one person.
There was no immediate effect, but then the man spoke, and I slipped into a nightmare.
“Spread your legs and then stand still.”
My body snapped to obey, the collar humming against my skin.
My will was gone, hollowing me into a puppet.
Together, they stripped me naked, him muttering low instructions to my mother as he opened his bag and began to lay out objects. The first was a small bell. He held it before my mouth and muttered another incomprehensible word.
“Stilhaer.”
The breath was pulled from my lips as though the bell had inhaled it—a briefly uncomfortable moment before he placed it on the table. The next was a small wreath of dried flowers wound about a twisted piece of driftwood. I could see the words burned into the wood from where I stood, and my blood began to run cold as he hung the wreath by the door.
The words were readable, but I couldn’t hear their lilting rhythm. They seemed to be only a structure of a word, their true purpose hidden. I was lost before I had even finished the inscription, and was forced to start reading again. This happened three times before I tore my eyes away. Even so, the words filled me with dread.
Mother, I tried to plead, but the word was swept from my mouth, disappearing into the bell on the table. I couldn’t tell if she was mournful of handing me to this man. She stood by the door, her arms folded, her hands clutching her sleeves. Her eyes were cool and still. They were both breaking the law. I was still a liten, a month shy of eighteen, still underage, still to be protected … but I had pushed her too far.
I had forced her hand.
The next item from his bag was a knife, polished and perfect, with a small curve at the ominously forked tip. Still, my mother’s expression didn’t change.
“There is immense power in a liten’s magic mutation,” he told me. “As yet unpractised, raw, without shape or influence. Unabused by years of magic use. It’s a pure source of energy. If their mutation is stolen, their entire source of magic can be stolen with it. Generally, such a pure mark can only be gleaned from a child, but your magic has been dampened for years, growing stronger, still untouched.”
I was unable to move as the knife bit into my skin. He was in possession of incredibly rare and powerful objects—the likes of which I had never even heard of. And yet he didn’t possess a single canister of cream to numb my skin, which could only mean that he simply didn’t wish to. I opened my mouth to scream but it was coaxed from my tongue before it could become sound. A faint tone rang inside the bell on the table. The ghost of my scream. It was followed by another, and another, until it became a muted kind of song. The man’s eyes sparkled with a concentrated fervour as his hands turned red, blood sluicing over his fingertips.
He wrapped my stolen birthmark in a canvas cloth as I stood, trembling, held up by magic alone. He placed it carefully in a small canister, handling it as though it were the most fragile jewel. He pulled a cotton rag out of his bag and began to wipe the blood off his hands, knife, and the canister. He did it all without taking his eyes off me. He watched the blood run down my leg before switching his attention to my breasts. His eyes slid between my legs, annoyance flashing as my mother rushed forward. She had a bandage in her hand, and her mouth was pinched into a tight line. She wrapped it around my leg, her movements brisk.
“This is not enough payment,” the man said as she stood again.
She spun, looking afraid. “You said—”
“It’s not enough,” he reiterated, annoyance increasing. He pushed her out of the way and stood before me. “Lay upon the ground.”
The collar around my neck heated, and my limbs collapsed even as I begged them not to. My leg was shaking, seizing up with the pain and shock. The man was unlacing his pants with one hand, the other landing heavily upon my bandage.
“She is not a kynmaiden,” my mother said evenly. “She can give you no births and no deaths.”
The man laughed, watching the tears stream wordlessly down my face. “I don’t want her children. She is not as you are. She has something different to offer me.” He stared down at me, freeing himself from his pants and adjusting his position between my legs. He seemed to pause there as though to savour the moment.
“This is punishable by death.” My mother’s voice had a wobble in it this time, and fear sparked in her eyes. She glanced to the door, and I realised with an awful, sinking feeling that she was thinking of fleeing. “If they find out…” Her breathing became heavy, panicked. “She’s still young … please, kongelig, this has gone too far.”
He smiled, leaning over me, still clutching himself in his fist, still hovering an inch from breaching me. His free hand slapped down beside my head, his beard tickling my chin as his face lowered to mine. He smelled like copper and smoke. My stomach heaved violently, tears running onto my tongue.
“Magical objects are not infinite,” he whispered, his eyes flicking from my lips to the collar around my neck. “They become living things, and living things need to be fed or else they die. The collar demands to be fed. What better price to pay for your wickedness than your innocence?”
A pounding noise began to surface somewhere in the back of my mind, like a distant army thundering down a mountain, kicking up dirt and beating a taboo against the earth. At first, I could only feel the pebbles that skipped down the mountain to pool about my feet, but the steady drumming grew louder and fiercer, rolling into my blood and moving outwards to my skin, covering me in a sweltering, vibrating
rage. My mother watched as the man pumped his hand. She listened as he groaned. She waited as he waited, holding on to her fear as he savoured his complete lack of it. He was a sectorian. An Eloi. Strong with the power of spirit. He was important.
We were nothing.
I watched her as she watched him, my eyes drying out as hers began to water. The drumming in my head began to batter at the walls of my mind and then it all happened in an instant—too fast for me to do anything to stop it. He pushed inside me, and the boundaries of my mind snapped like a string pulled too far at each end. Power flooded out of me in the form of a shadow, a thin black wisp that split into two. One of the shadows jumped gleefully into the eyes and mouth of the man on top of me, the other curling toward my mother. Pain burned hot and sharp inside my chest, my heartbeat faltering, my breath halting. The man reared away from me, gasping wordlessly, his hands clawing at his throat, his eyes turning red. My mother collapsed to the ground. We all gasped, our hands gripping our necks. The collar burned up beneath my fingers, nothing more than flimsy, crooked metal as it crumpled away from my skin, the hinge swinging free. I scrambled away from the man as he writhed, the shadow winking out at me from behind his wide eyes.
I snatched for my dress, pulling it up against me as I huddled back against the kitchen cupboard. Dizziness took a hold of me, my heart skipping another beat, and then another. It fluttered weakly, and I watched the thin stream of blood drip from my mother’s parted mouth. I tried to reach out to her, the bell pulling a plea from my lips. My heart flopped sickeningly, like a waterlogged bird attempting to drag its wings up before collapsing one final time. I melted into darkness, my hand twitching into stillness against the floorboards.
My last thought was a final, desperate whisper in the recesses of my mind.
Forgive me.
3
Cursed
I awoke beneath a blanket of water, my eyes and cheeks aching, my brain sluggish, my limbs waterlogged. Sound was drowned out and muted, my vision blurry and warped. A pair of boots appeared by my head, leather against worn wood.
The worn wood of our kitchen … where I was lying on the floor, my arm still extended. The feeling of drowning swept away from me, reality crashing in.
I struggled to turn over, my eyes travelling up the leg of the man as others filled the room. The boots continued up his calves, long, featherlike pieces of armour sewn into a pattern from his ankle to his knee. His pants were a thick, woven material, patched in places by boiled leather. The same pattern of feather-shaped armour circled the hardened leather that circled the lower half of his torso. It was smoothed down in that area, the edges softened so that they wouldn’t tear into his skin. He wore a short cloak that looped dark grey material over his front and back, the armour pattern spanning over his shoulders and hooking together with a chain across his chest. His upper chest was bare beneath the sections of his cloak, the skin dark brown and riddled in scars. I knew that the cloak would have a hood of the same featherlike bronze, with a tarnished beak that would slip down over his forehead—though he currently wore the hood thrown off. It was a uniform that I had seen often. A uniform I had once dreamed of wearing, in the darkest, most private spaces of my mind.
The Sentinels had arrived.
The others in the room were dressed exactly like him, and I saw flashes of magic mutations as I tried to take in everything at once: clawed hands, scaled arms, a bright white rash. The man above me had a single golden eye, the colour dripping over the line of his lower lid, tracing a line down his face, his neck, and his chest. It disappeared beneath his armour.
I groaned, my head falling limp again, my eyes crawling over the floor, over the slight tinge of smoke and copper that still stained the air, over the limp body of the bearded man, his shrewd eyes sightless, his pants unlaced. I kept going even though I didn’t want to. I looked past him to the second inert form, whom one of the guards was kneeling beside.
“Dead,” he declared, reporting to the man who still stood over me.
“Not this one,” the golden-eyed Sentinel stated. There was a frown on his face, pulling at the deep white scar that cut through his cheek beneath his right eye, almost matching the golden line on the other side of his face. He crouched, his frown deepening, his hand reaching out as though to touch me, though his fingers only hovered, his eyes detached. “Magic residue,” he muttered, eyeing something that I couldn’t see. He sniffed, his frown deepening. “It clings to her. It reeks of death. Restrain her.”
He stood without another glance, striding for the doorway. A man and a woman stepped forward, catching my arms and pulling me to my feet. The dress that I had draped over my front crumpled to the floor and the woman paused, passing me over to the man, who supported my dead weight.
“Captain,” she said. “Look.”
The golden-eyed Sentinel turned, his eyes skipping over my nakedness, pausing only when he caught sight of the bloodied bandage wrapping my leg. His brows lowered, flicking up to my face. He searched for something in my features, but my attention was slipping off to the side. The Sentinel had straightened away from my mother, revealing her to my eyes.
Dead, he had said.
Her eyes were wide open. She still looked on the verge of tears. Fear tracked the hard line of her lips, her hand limp against her chest. The neckline of her silks had parted slightly, showing the dark scorch mark that crept over her skin.
The shadow … my shadow…
This child is doomed to death and to share death with those closest to her.
My cracked lips parted, a hoarse sound stolen from my tongue. On the table, the bell whispered a reply that only I could hear.
“Can you speak?” the Captain asked. He had taken a step forward, waiting for the sound that struggled to manifest from me. He was imposing, even for a Sentinel. He carried his own vast size in such an effortless way that he almost seemed to widen the world around him. His golden eye glowed subtly, staring right through me. I couldn’t imagine him having a friend or smiling. I couldn’t imagine him doing anything other than glaring and tossing out orders. He seemed to me like the Vold statue raising his sword over the Steps of Atonement. Fierce and impersonal.
I tried again to speak, tears welling in my eyes as grief and anger fought for purchase inside my still-fluttering chest. He watched with lowered brows. I had thought that he was utterly unreadable until I saw the quick flash of disgust in his one blue eye.
Defeated, I shook my head.
“Cover her up.” He turned for the door again. “Call in a Sjel to examine the bodies. We can’t know for sure what happened here, but all souls have secrets to tell. Even the dead ones.”
I refused to look at my mother as the female Sentinel grabbed my dress off the floor and, together with the man holding me, managed to wrangle it into place. She pulled a set of chains from her belt and snapped the manacles around my wrists, touching them and muttering a word.
“Stille.”
Another empty word that echoed with a sound I couldn’t understand.
I could sense the magic in the iron as it thrummed against my skin, the whispers of many voices brushing against my skin, all of them saying the same word.
Stille.
Stille.
Stille.
At least a dozen people had poured their magic into these chains and yet … I could also sense the mechanism in the lock. The object’s weakness. I imagined flooding my own magic into it and could feel how easily the lock would turn, how simply the cuffs could become as brittle and useless as the collar. It made sense to me now that I had done it twice before with the ring and the collar. At the thought, my heartbeat increased, and I turned my attention inward with the same critical eye, sensing another weakness.
My own weakness.
It was right there, caged against my ribs, fluttering nervously.
I could see myself crumbling just like the cuffs and the collar, just another object layered in magic, pressure grinding me into brittle emptiness. I
had a power like a hammer and an anvil in a smithshop dedicated to destruction instead of creation.
I did have a magic mutation of some kind. I could feel it as surely as my own fingers and toes. There was a sickness inside my heart. A spreading rash. I felt that if I reached for my power, the sickness would grow, or swell, or something awful. I could imagine the rash feeding off my power, becoming overwhelmed until it was bubbling, replicating, consuming the organ giving me life. If that ever happened, there would be nothing left of me.
I was cursed.
Death was inside me.
Somehow, all these years, I hadn’t believed it.
The Sentinels took me by the upper arms as I held the sagging dress to my front, the back of it still unsecured. I was reeling, trapped within my thoughts. I almost allowed them to drag me out of the room, but I dug my heels in before it was too late and pointed to the bell. I moved my finger from the bell to my lips and tried to speak again. The woman understood, grabbing the bell and turning it over in her hand. Her flaxen hair was braided along her skull, the braids hooked against her head by bronze circles with bronze needles threaded through them. Where the braids should have ended, there were only a multitude of bronze spikes. Hair to metal—her mutation. She shared a quick, dark look with her companion, and then she slipped the bell into her pocket.
“Is that really the Dealer?” she whispered as we passed through the doorway. Both Sentinels had snuck a last peek at the bearded man on the ground.
“Ingrid.” It was a warning, spoken anxiously by the male Sentinel, whose pupils were split into two. He cast a look to me and then they were both silent.
Fyrio had a healthy fear of words. Names had power, just like incantations, and so the most powerful sectorians were all referred to by Fated names—words formed from the whispers of their deeds. The Dealer was an Eloi infamous for dark deals and even darker power, though he was rumoured to be of Reken descent, residing in the desert far to the east of Fyrio, across the wide ocean. It wasn’t conceivable that the man in our kitchen was the Dealer, but it was even less conceivable that I hadn’t realised it earlier. Who else would trade for the lives of three unborn children? Who else would deal in blood and the theft of something so precious it was nothing more than an abstraction? Who else possessed the power to hide my curse for so long?
A Tempest of Shadows Page 3
