I shook my head, pointing in the direction of Breakwater Canyon and then making a sleeping motion with my clasped hands by my head. I showed him my unshackled wrists, shaking them before his face.
I am free. I’m not leaving my home.
He seemed to get the message because a flash of pity entered his blue eye before he turned away from me, capturing his horse’s reins. The gelding had fled.
“Your house belongs to the city, and it was assigned to your mother. You’re still a liten. Only kongeligs may own property. You’ve not yet come of age. By the end of the week, the district officials will be organising a new owner and your things will be cleared out.”
I grabbed his cloak, forcing him to face me again. I threw up my arms.
Where do I go?
He grabbed me by the waist without warning, tossing me up to his horse. I landed uncomfortably and had to quickly grab the saddle for purchase.
“You’ll be at the mercy of your masters. If they really do divide your sentence up between the five of them, I doubt you’ll have time to sleep at all. You’re a wanderer now, girl. Think no more of houses and homes. You’ve been enslaved three times over: once to the Weaver; once to your sentence; and once to the mor-svjake. The Weaver has decided your path, your sentence has decided the conditions, and that mark on your face has brought danger to your heels. The only way is forward.”
He pulled himself up behind me, and we set off in search of the gelding, finding it a while later back by the beginning of the trail into the forest. As we rode back through Hearthhenge and toward Breakwater Canyon, I began to truly notice the speed with which we travelled. It wasn’t an entirely visible thing—certainly not something that passers-by would notice unless they were paying very close attention. The horse didn’t actually move any faster, but every so often it seemed as though the landscape folded in on itself, and in the space of a blink, we stepped through that fold and skipped further ahead than we should have been. It was like taking a shortcut through the fabric of our environment, so small as to be unnoticeable but so constant as to make a difference.
We left the horses at the public stable just inside the gates of Breakwater Canyon and then continued on foot. I kept my head down, ignoring the whispers of the people we passed, my hair covering the mor-svjake mark. They didn’t dare approach me with a Sentinel at my back, shadowing each of my hunched-over footsteps, but their eyes burned into me, hot with hatred and accusation … and something else.
I watched how they edged from my path, the last emotion finally clicking into place.
Fear.
The door to our home had been wedged back into the frame. The Captain stepped around me to pick it up and usher me through. He followed and stuck the door back into place before casting his golden gaze around. The broken glass had been swept to the side, the bodies removed. Two small black scorch marks marred the worn wooden floor, one of them singeing the side of the rug. I swallowed hard, passing it all without a second glance and heading into the single bedroom. There was a bed on each side of the room, an unsteady dresser acting the stiff sentry between them, the mismatched knobs on the top drawers like crooked, knowing eyes casting a sorrowful gaze over me. I grabbed my mother’s smooth leather pack from the hook beside the dresser. She received so many nice things from her patrons, but she could rarely bring herself to sell them. It resulted in a strange atmosphere within the home—one of rich leather and patched blankets; of thick, silk shawls and bare, empty shelves. The chest at the end of her bed was filled with all kinds of trinkets and treasures. The only pair of boots I owned stood at the end of mine, rubber flaking from the soles.
I filled the bag with a change of clothes, several sets of underwear, my hairbrush, and an old scarf. I kicked the door closed and then moved the little chest in front of it. I almost left it at that before changing my mind and dragging my mother’s bed in front of it, completely invalidating the position of the chest. I yanked my dress over my head, dropping it onto the bed, my underwear landing on top of it. For the first time in days, I allowed the stink of my skin to register in my nose. I was covered in ashes from the hearth and dirt from the floor of my lonely Citadel room. I could smell panic and sweat and sorrow. There was something more horrible clinging to me as well. Old blood and desperation. As soon as it registered, I found myself hunched over, retching.
Once the wave of sickness had passed, I moved to the washroom and began to fill the tub with buckets of water from the pump against the wall. I couldn’t heat the water over the fire—not with the Captain in the other room—but a cold bath was better than nothing at all. I usually only filled it a quarter of the way, but this time I filled it halfway before sinking into the depths. The water was freezing, and I ignored the chattering of my teeth as I grabbed the scrubbing brush and began working it into my skin. I attacked myself like I was the kitchen floor, wearing away at the evidence of all that had transpired over the surface of my being. All the scuff marks. The stains. The marks of so many important people’s boots stomping all over me. I scrubbed until pain replaced memory and even the cold water felt hot, and then I tossed the brush aside, sinking my head beneath the surface to let out a silent, water-choked scream.
I screamed and screamed and screamed, the vibration of the water feeling, for the moment, like real sound. I couldn’t see through all those bubbles and was taken by surprise when a hand sliced into the water, flashing by my face and cupping the back of my head, dragging me swiftly up and out. The Captain loomed above me, his eyes wide. He was on his knees, one hand gripping the edge of the metal tub. He had taken his gloves off. That was my last thought before the burn of his fingers against the back of my head flooded through my body, rattling my thoughts from my head and then pulling them back in for a single conclusion.
Calder.
His face changed again, becoming one of those past faces that somehow belonged to him. I heard a woman’s words, familiar enough that my own lips could have formed them.
“I have found my purpose, the pages of my book, without which I cannot have words.”
That voice changed, but the words continued, another woman speaking to another face.
“Every drop you bleed for me will be a bandage upon this world.”
I jumped away. His hand remained frozen, still tangled in the ends of my hair. He looked shell-shocked. I pulled my knees to my chest and kicked at his arm, gathering enough silent fury to burn my own home down.
Where in Ledenaether had those thoughts come from? Whose faces had I been seeing? Whose voices had I been hearing? My teeth began to chatter with the shock, a violent shiver taking residence in my limbs.
“I thought you were drowning.” The Captain cleared his throat, his eyes tracking slowly over to where I huddled at the other end of the small tub.
He untangled his hand, dragging it over his face, hiding his expression from me. “I’ll … just…” He stood, averting his eyes. “Never mind.” He stormed back into the bedroom, and I waited for the door to close before I released my knees, my legs loosening and falling back into the water. I stared at the spot he had knelt, my mind darting back to each of our encounters, furiously examining every detail of them. This was the first time he had taken his gloves off. It was the first time our skin had come into contact. But what did this gut-lurching, earth-spinning feeling mean? Where had those foreign thoughts come from?
It had to be some kind of magic, but nothing I had ever heard of.
I agonised over it while I scrubbed my hair, even going so far as to open up one of my mother’s boxes on the stool beside the tub. She had salts and herbs, dried flowers and oils, scents and soaps. Anything that might enhance her beauty. I had never dared to touch any of it before, other than to turn the flowers over in my hands or to smell the oils. It didn’t feel right to touch it now, either, but I reached for a worn-down square of soap, lathering up my hair and using it to soften the efforts of my earlier scrubbing. I floated in the water, basking in the familiar scent of crush
ed kalovka flowers. They had petals like ice, and they reminded me of the cold snap of fresh snow, though the nectar was sweet and summery. I felt that I could drift off into the past and stay there forever, cushioned by a field of kalovka buds peeking through the snow as it fell and fell and I sank deeper and deeper. Until I was buried so far down that the white turned to dark and where I lay was no different to where my mother lay…
“Hurry up, Lavenia!” The banging on the wall shook through to my teeth, jolting me upright. Lavenia? During this process, not a single one of them had spoken my name. I was unaware that any of them cared enough to enquire after it, or to remember it once it had been spoken. Had he heard my name when he touched me, as I had heard his?
I quickly stepped out of the bath, the chill from the water causing my limbs to shudder as I quickly dried myself and crept back into the bedroom. I re-bandaged the wound on my thigh without looking at it, and then dressed in the patched pants I usually wore running, donning a half-corset beneath my shirt with the torn hem. I pulled on socks, my boots, and moved to the closet I shared with my mother. My faded coat was pushed to the end. I picked past several shawls, cloaks, scarves, and capes, each of them spun like pools of liquid silk or packed with warm, rich wool. I pushed them to the side, extracted my coat and pulled it on, flipping my damp hair out. I braided it over my shoulder, quickly tying it off before it could spring into thick, unmanageable curls.
In a last-minute change of mind, I wrapped up the bar of kalovka soap and added it to my mother’s leather pack before walking back to the door, noting that the force the Captain had used to open it had punched the bed almost back into its original position. The chest had been knocked to the side, its contents spilling onto the floor.
Why had he entered with such urgency?
I frowned, crouching by the chest, gathering the items up and piling them back in. The last was a string of rainstone beads, polished to a bright blue sheen. I sat back hard, my eyes drifting up to the words carved into the head of my mother’s bed.
The bracelet had been a gift from the sectorian who fathered me. I remembered him visiting my mother and the cold, impassionate way he had looked at me.
“Such a pity,” he had muttered, before turning back to my mother. “Such a waste.” He had kissed her hand before slipping the bracelet onto her wrist. “We will try again.”
I curled my fingers around the beads, jumping up to my feet and striding for the door. I was across the room and in the Captain’s face in a second, my displaced anger finding an available target. I was angry at myself, but it didn’t matter. He had trespassed on my bath, and that was the only excuse I needed to transfer all that anger to him. I hit him once in the chest, hard enough to send a sharp zing of pain down my forearm. He grabbed my wrist, and the world dropped away again.
I felt grounded and bursting all at once, as though I had finally found my purpose, but there was so much of it, it was seconds away from busting apart the confines of my skin. The Captain winced, quickly drawing his hand back and moving away from me.
“We need to go.” He was avoiding looking at me again, his hand raking over his face. It was shaking. “Do you have everything you need?”
I stumbled back, diverting my eyes to the floor, where I was immediately distracted by the glint of metal. The Dealer’s collar. It had become wedged beneath the kitchen bench. I dropped the leather pack to the kitchen table and then crouched down, pulling the collar free. It grew hot in my hands, full of power. A living thing.
Suddenly disgusted, I resisted the urge to fling it away from me, because in that moment, I could also sense something else. Something that belonged to me. Something that the collar had stolen from me. My heart called out to it, desperately reaching for it to join with me again. I settled into a kneeling position, resting the collar on my thighs, turning it over and over. I hadn’t broken it when I had dislodged it from my neck, as I had originally thought. I had only broken its hold over me—the latch was still attached, flipped harmlessly open. It was far too powerful for me to truly break. And yet, I could feel its weakness. An invisible crack in the surface of the metal. I could sense a shadow falling over that crack, a darkness that slowly sank into it, clawing deeper and deeper into the endless pool of magic contained within the object. My own magic had finally risen, called by the stranded piece of me inside the collar. My power was smoke, grey-black and liquid-fast. It swam harmlessly through the Dealer’s energy, which echoed out from the depths of the collar. The Dealer’s magic was an inferno: ruby red, molten rock and fire. My cool darkness swept along a pathway of rock, unharmed by the fissures of steam or the slow roll of lava through the cracks in the pathway. My shadow was drawn to something pure and bright, a striking white orb slowly sinking into the liquid fire. The white orb had an unmistakable essence, like the darkest, deepest secrets of the longest winter’s night. Like velvet skies and icy condensation.
It was my essence.
It was mine.
My shadow crept toward it, digging smoky claws into the lava surrounding it. Suddenly, my presence inside the collar was no longer soft and peaceful. The fire burned, and my throat was raw from the soundless scream that tried to form, rubbing against the screams I had already failed to sound into the air. My shadow dug in deeper, clawing at the stolen piece of me, dragging it from the painful, fiery depths of the collar. I sat in a puddle of pain and stolen sound, tears rushing down my cheeks as a fierce shudder began to wrack along the length of my body … but still I wouldn’t release the orb. Suddenly, the shadow was me, and I was pulling, fighting against the lava that crawled up my arms, trying to extract that little ball of light. It was wedged so tightly that I almost thought it to be planted into the bedrock beneath the lava. My heartbeat was racing so loudly that I could no longer hear the roaring of fire in the distance, or the searing crackling of the lava before my face.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Pause … Thump.
The uneven, flopping rhythm filled me, fluttering through to my body and into my hands. My fingers twitched, my grip slackening, the orb slipping.
I barely registered the fingers that slipped into the neckline of my shirt, pressing over my heart, or the word that was muttered against my hair. “Leevskmat.”
I heard only the sound of my own heart and the screams that made no sound at all as I tossed all remaining strength into my task, pulling at the orb with everything I had. Finally, it dislodged, and I fled back down the path, my shadowed being splitting into steam and escaping through invisible cracks to withdraw back into my skin. I collapsed back, but when my elbow knocked hard against the floor—a hard arm preventing me from falling further—I noticed something bright and shining curled within my palm, shivering away from the world, nestling into the faint lines of my skin. Without thinking, I dug the rainstone bracelet from my pocket. It was the nearest object, and I felt that the light was beginning to wane and flicker already, unable to survive out in the open. I dropped the bracelet into my palm and closed my fingers around it, wrapping my other hand around my right fist. I brought it to my mouth, closing my eyes and searching for any vestiges of power. Anything that might help compel the light into its hiding place.
“Forene,” a deep but faint voice whispered into my ear, the word sounding warm and right.
Forene, I repeated in my mind, pressing my lips to my fists and squeezing my eyelids tighter together. I muttered the word again and again, stirring my unwilling magic back to the edges of my skin. I couldn’t see the shadow of my magic, but I knew it was there. I could sense it dragging along my arm. It was injured, unwilling, barely able to move. I repeated the word faster, desperate to keep this part of myself. Desperate to claim back one small piece of me that had been stolen out of the many I would never see again. The shadow warmed the back of my hands, passing over my lips as I continued to mutter the word.
It was the only point of warmth on my body. The rest of me dropped several degrees in temperature, my lips becoming stiff as that horrible sound filled
my head again.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Pause …
A rough curse sounded in my ear just as I collapsed back, my head landing on something warm. A large, rough hand enclosed mine, and the fingers that remained against my fading heartbeat pressed inwards again, that strange word returning to my straining ears.
“Leevskmat.” A rough, shuddering breath, and then, “Dammit.”
The sickening sound of my heartbeat faded into the background again as the stones in my palm warmed, the light burrowing inside. I cracked my eyes open, my hands falling to my lap. The Captain was behind me, supporting my weight. One of his arms was wrapped around my front, his fingers dipped into my shirt, now limp against my skin. His other hand cradled mine, but our fists loosened as they hit my lap, our hands cracking apart to reveal the bracelet, whose beads now shone a pearly, translucent white.
“What was that?” the Captain grated out, his voice tinged by pain and frustration.
My innocence, I thought before my eyes fluttered shut.
6
Temper
Rousing from sleep felt like someone draining too much water from my lungs in one painful purge, and that was how I knew I had gone too far again. The light piercing my eyelids was a miracle. I rolled over, making strange, soundless hacking noises, my throat raw. My hand slapped against something metallic and round, my fingers curling against it instinctively. A shot of heat travelled into my palm, and I peeled my eyes open, staring at the Dealer’s collar. And then at the large, battle-worn hand that lay beside mine. I froze, realising that I was lying against the Captain’s leg, my spine twisted awkwardly over it. He had fallen off to the side, his head against the doorjamb to the bedroom. He should have been less intimidating, all splayed out on the floor, his golden eye hidden behind closed lids, but instead, it just served to illustrate that he was too large to fit properly into our small kitchen space. He had the height of a man whose boyhood had been soaked in sunlight and crisp mountain air.
A Tempest of Shadows Page 7
