A Tempest of Shadows

by Washington, Jane

  The Dealer was a wanted man in Fyrio … which meant that I could add illegal trading to the list of crimes and mistakes that I had committed over the past two days. Ingrid and the split-pupiled man dropped a dark hood over my head, but I could still see through the fibre enough to be sure of my surroundings as they escorted me through Breakwater Canyon. The bridges and cavern hallways were narrow, meaning that we had to walk single file. I could make out seven Sentinels in total, with the Captain leading the procession. He walked with purpose, his shoulders wide and stiff, his stony face frightening everyone away from our path. He didn’t look as old as the Sentinels surrounding him, but he carried his own authority with an enviable ease.

  The stewards were scrambling back beneath the eaves of the closest houses or huddling in the shadows of the tunnels we passed, each of them gossiping in fearful tones.

  “The windows were smashed in, didn’t you hear?”

  “That’s kynmaiden Lihl’s daughter.”

  “There wasn’t a sound from the house until the door exploded.”

  “It’s the curse.”

  “It was bound to happen eventually.”

  “Children are to be protected. How could she have known? What could she have done? She had no choice but to keep the child.”

  “And look how she was repaid.”

  I stumbled, and the split-pupiled man righted me, his hand on my shoulder guiding me forward. As soon as he was sure that I wouldn’t fall again, he snatched his hand away as though I had scorched him. Ingrid was in front of me, leading me by the loose length of chain attached to my manacles. We passed through the gated entrance to Breakwater Canyon and made our quiet way into the woods. The stone tiles were abrasive against my feet, my skin hypersensitive. My mouth was also dry, and now that the fluttering of my heart had eased, I could feel the dull ache that shot from my chest to the base of my skull. I realised why the Sentinels weren’t treating me as a threat, other than to put me in chains. They weren’t acting overtly wary of me, eyeing me as one does a dangerous person on the verge of exploding into murderous shadows. They had been studying magic their entire lives—and not just any magic. With the very rare exception, all Sentinels were of the Vold sector. They knew my power better than I knew it myself. I was exhausted. Tapped and drained. I was no longer a threat to anyone other than myself.

  Our formation changed as we cleared the woods, the split-pupiled man and Ingrid once again boxing me in. It was nearing midday, the sun high in the sky. I flinched away from the harsh light, wishing for the cool dark of the forest. My eyes stung, even with the protection of the hood, my head harbouring a slow and consistent throb of pain. The cobbled road wound up the ridge to Hearthenge, where we passed through another set of gates—though these were manned by two sets of Sentinels. The main road widened, the worn cobblestones making way for a smooth, even brick. The road was decorated in places with coloured tile patterns. The harsh mountains of Fyrio softened past the gates, rolling into hills and streams and small pockets of wood. The sectorians who lived within Hearthenge had more than the single-room mountain homes claimed by the stewards. They had sprawling brick chateaus and large stone fortresses, all of them spread out between useless fields of flowers and more practical farmland, each new estate hidden from the next by towering pockets of fir trees or small, bobbing hills.

  The sun glowered down upon me and I lost my footing once again. The dryness in my mouth had grown worse and I now winced with every breath that rattled through me. Ingrid caught me, but this time my legs refused to stand again, buckling at each of her attempts to straighten me.

  “Captain!” the split-pupiled man called out. “She can’t go on any longer.”

  The Captain turned, his golden eye fixing me in a dispassionate stare. “Fetch a horse from the guardhouse. I’ll ride ahead with her. Not you, Avrid.” He held a hand out when the split-pupiled man turned to leave, and motioned for the Sentinel standing beside him to go instead. “I need the rest of you to ride to Sectorian Hill and send for the Inquisitor. He’ll want to examine the bodies when they’re brought to the Citadel. I can handle the girl on my own.”

  Ingrid and Avrid didn’t leave immediately, but helped me to the side of the road and left me sitting on a low stone wall. Ingrid passed the Captain the bell from her pocket, speaking lowly to him before following the rest of the Sentinels. The Captain walked towards me, his golden eye glowing hotter than the sun. He pulled my hood off, his eyes passing over my face.

  “The woman who alerted the Sentinels this morning told me about you,” he said, turning away once he had taken stock of me, his gaze fixed to the road. “She said you were cursed.” His fingers clawed inward, pulling the hood into his closed fist. He turned to look at me again, but this time there was a sentence in his eyes. “I don’t believe in that sort of thing. If you kill, it’s because you have death inside you. It’s because killing is in your nature.”

  I couldn’t respond, but he knew that. He pulled the bell from his pocket, turning it over in his fingers as though he could barely stand to touch it. I was surprised when he tossed it into my lap. I barely managed to catch it before it tumbled off.

  “Magical objects are living things,” he said as I struggled to stuff it into the pocket of my dress. “It lives on, even after its owner has passed … but make no mistake. The Dealer was its owner. It answers to him. You’ll not be able to command the bell, and nor will anyone else. You’ll have to wait for its power to wane and there’s no telling how long that could take. You may never speak again.”

  I sat there, my reply tucked into my pocket, my eyes cast toward the brick road. I had lost my mother, my home, my freedom, and even my voice … all in the space of a day. The Captain knelt before me, the hood half-raised in his hand. He was about to drop it back over my head, but something stopped him. He didn’t just pause to consider me. He froze, his eyes hard on mine. I could feel the agony that poured out of me, and I watched as it registered in him.

  “It was a mistake.” Not a question. There was a grim kind of revelation in his voice.

  I looked at him—really looked—for the first time, and felt him looking back into me. His hair was a dark, tarnished gold, braided along the sides of his head to a spot just behind his ear. The top section of hair was secured by bronze rings, with strands curling loosely above his neck. He had hair like unwashed satin. Textured, stained in darkness, but somehow also polished. His golden eye wasn’t consumed by the colour at all—I could see the faint outline of his pupil and his iris, both of them a different shade of gold, stark against the white of his eye. The golden line dripping from his lower lashes reminded me of that terrible rash I could feel within my heart, the threat of it spreading and taking over a vital part of me still present in the back of my mind.

  I switched my attention to the other eye, sucking in a quick breath. It was like being doused in sunshine and ice, the crystal blue as full of secrets as his golden eye had been empty of them. Other than the thick scar running down his right cheek, I could also categorise a litany of smaller scars spread across his face. A brief line through his eyebrow. A small nick at the edge of his mouth. A hook across his earlobe. I was so busy looking that I didn’t notice him moving closer. I didn’t realise when the hood dropped to my lap, his fist still clenched in the material. I could feel the heat of his gloved hand through my dress, but I was too focussed on the deep lines beginning to furrow into his forehead to register it properly.

  “I …” He paused, his breath short and sharp, edged in confusion. “Have we met before?”

  I began to shake my head, but his features suddenly began to feel familiar to me. I wasn’t just staring at him anymore, I was staring at many versions of him, older and younger, darker-haired, with two blue eyes, with two green eyes. I began to feel dizzy, the images merging back into his face before separating again. I could feel that they were all different men … and yet they were the same. I could hear their voices, but couldn’t make out their words. I frowned
, my hand lifting to his face, to trace the thickness of his lower lip, which I suddenly felt that I had seen pull into a grin a thousand times before. He jerked back before I could touch him, his expression incredulous. He quickly slipped the hood back into place over my head and took a step away from me, turning his back on me. His tense shoulders had grown as stiff as stone.

  When his man returned with the horse, he swept me up from the wall, his hands tight on my waist, holding me away from his body. He lifted me to the saddle, and I clutched weakly at the reins as he jumped up behind me. He took the reins as he muttered an order to the other Sentinel. As we rode, he sat as far from me in the saddle as he could manage, which wasn’t very far at all. The simple reality of his size meant that I was forced to lean back on him even as he strained away from me. I tried to hunch over the front of the horse, but that only slipped the lower half of my body further backwards in the saddle, eliciting an unhappy sound from him. By the time we reached the Citadel, my body was thrumming with pain and exhaustion from attempting to keep my back so ramrod straight.

  We cleared the final ridge, riding out from between a sparse stretch of wood. The closer we got to the capitol of Fyrio, the louder the water rushed by our road. All the streams and lakes of Hearthhenge flowed gradually toward the Citadel, converging into two wide rivers that wove down toward a passage between the monstrous mountains of the Wailing Crag. The road turned into a vast bridge as the rivers merged, the bricks making way for ancient stone. Tufts of moss and vine sprouted through the cracks, climbing over the thick, carved stone railing. Mist clawed up over the bridge, produced by the churning water below, and I thought back to the day before, when the mist had spirited me to the bank of Lake Enke. It was convenient to think that this was all the fault of the Weaver. He had approached me by the lake. I had been running from him when I tripped over the vevebre. I had been fighting off his enchantment when my ring began to falter. It was his fault that I had been cut and defiled; that my mother was dead and I was in chains.

  I slipped a hand beneath my hood, feeling the slightly raised mark on my skin.

  What could the Weaver demand of a prisoner?

  As we approached the entrance, I found my head falling back, my eyes drawn to the rock figures protruding from the sides of the Wailing Crag. The statues faced each other over the vast divide below. A man and a woman, their arms weighed down by a giant stone orb. Time had textured the orb, forming ridges and valleys, carving out lines and hollowing sections for birds to nest within. Moss grew over it in some places, like painted grass upon a map of the world.

  Something fierce pulled taut inside me, my hand flashing to the reins. I gripped the leather, ignoring the way the Captain jerked his hand away. A robed woman carrying a covered basket slipped to our side, continuing on ahead of us. I hadn’t even heard her on the road behind us.

  “What is it?” the Captain asked, tension in his voice.

  I pointed to the statues.

  “You’ve never been to the Citadel?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “The first Fjorn,” he explained, reclaiming the reins.

  We began to move again, but I kept my eyes trained to the statues. To the way they stared at each other. The way their hands clasped the globe. There was tension and fear there, vibrating from the stone. There was something fierce, too. Something unbreakable.

  I pointed again, more insistently this time.

  “You don’t know the tale?” The Captain sounded surprised. “Of the king of Ledenaether, ruler of the afterworld, of all dead things?”

  I shot him a look.

  There wasn’t a single living person who didn’t know about the king of Ledenaether.

  “There was a prophecy foretold a long time ago that three women would be born, each of them three hundred years apart,” he told me. “They would have incredible power. Power to rival the ruler of the afterworld.”

  A shiver crept up my spine as he spoke, and he slowed the horse as we stared up, his hand lowering absently to my lap, no longer holding the reins so stiffly. I could tell that he was also staring up, as his breath no longer stirred against the top of my head.

  “The prophecy stated that these three women might be the only chances to overthrow the king of the afterworld, to take control of Ledenaether, to herald in a golden age of undiluted magic, fertility, and prosperity for our people.”

  I twisted around, and his eyes immediately flicked down. He must have been able to see me partly through the hood, as he glanced from one of my eyes to the other, and then to the confused twist of my mouth. I gestured to the Wailing Crag and the statues carved from the rock, easily the size of seven great estates all clumped together, and then I motioned between the Crag, to where the water converged and fled through. It pooled into a natural rock basin, the edge of the Citadel marked by a great arched perimeter, seeming to curve from one side of the Crag to the other, walling in the water and the Citadel both. A large stone mound rose from the water in the center of the basin, richly dark in colour, like a strong pillar of a mountain whose imperfections had been chipped away and filled in with polished granite turrets and towers. It rose halfway up the Crag, rippling blue flags flying from several of the battlements, granite walkways curving upwards around the stone base, which met eventually with the bridge we had paused on.

  My message was clear.

  This was a golden age.

  We were surrounded by grandeur at every turn. We were overrun by deposits of precious stone. Our soil was rich, our crops in excess. The magic of our people was strong, their strength in battle legendary.

  He seemed to understand, his breath stirring my hair again. “It’s just a tale.” He coaxed the horse into a trot.

  I took the reins again, pointing to the other statue. The man.

  The Captain grumbled something, one of his hands yanking the chain attached to my manacles as he recaptured control of the horse. “That would be the Blodsjel. How can a silent girl have so many damned questions?”

  Blodsjel. Soul brother.

  It was a word in Forsan I hadn’t heard before, but it was easily translatable, comprised of two words that I was familiar with. A chill raced down the back of my neck, and I quickly looked away from the statues, spooked.

  I left the Captain alone as we entered through the gap in the Crag. Sentinels stood guard atop two watchtowers I hadn’t noticed hidden within the mountain. Several of them glanced down at us moving past, and one of them noted something to the man standing beside him, causing them both to laugh. I pressed my teeth together, glaring down at my chains. The mist had dampened my dress, which was missing a corset and an overskirt, and still hadn’t been fastened properly. My feet were bare, my hair in tangles. I looked as disconnected with reality as I felt.

  We rode into a small forecourt, where a stable boy rushed forward to take the horse. The Captain slid out of the saddle, his hands on my waist in an instant, lifting me down beside him.

  I was already feeling a little stronger. I was able to walk without support as we made our way to one of the winding paths that wrapped its way up to the top of the Citadel. The air grew thinner the higher we climbed, but I refused to ask for a break, only stopping as we walked along the first battlement to a large tower at the far end of the rock. We were facing away from the entrance to the Crag, and I was able to peer over the wall to where the earth fell away from the mountain. If the Wailing Crag had seemed vast from the other side, it was nothing compared to what I was seeing now. The water that flowed through the Citadel passed between the arches of the curved dam wall, dropping into a vast waterfall that ended only in mist and echo.

  My mother had been to the Citadel, but she had never told me of the statues or the waterfall. She had told me of the Wailing Crag: how people thought it to be a doorway to the afterworld, and how the wind would howl through the gap between mountains, carrying the tortured songs of the dead. She had thought Ledenaether to be a place of darkness and horror, the undead king a maste
r of punishment and repentance. Others thought that he was wise and benevolent, or that the afterworld was an endless paradise.

  I wondered which Ledenaether my mother had found. I wondered which king had greeted her.

  The thought almost undid me.

  4

  Secrets

  I was kept in one of the Citadel’s towers for three days, in a bare room that overlooked the sheer drop on the northern side of the mountain. There was a blanket on the floor for me to sleep on, and I was released once each morning to visit the latrine. I was fed twice—a bowl of porridge on each occasion. The Captain had disappeared after depositing me there and didn’t reappear until the third morning.

  “Your trial is to commence,” he told me, the sun streaming into the room behind him, the flung-open door banging against the wall.

  I jumped up from the blanket, astonishment on my face. I pointed to my lips and held up my hands in a helpless gesture.

  “You won’t need to speak,” he told me. “We will take the testimony of the dead and let that be our truth. Come.”

  He turned, and I followed for fear of being left alone in the room again. We walked up a few more levels of the Citadel before coming to a vast platform, open on all sides and supported all along the border by long marble pillars. The tiles underfoot were so polished that I could see myself in their reflection, my hair a matted mess, my eyes as glittery and dark as ever, though there was something different about them now. A sharp agony that hadn’t been there before. My skin was a ghostly colour, my lips a startling blood red, darker than the sunshine-red of my hair. I sucked in a breath, seeing my mother staring back at me, and focussed ahead.