A Tempest of Shadows

by Washington, Jane

  It was almost unfair.

  I dragged my sore body away, disentangling my left arm from where the weight of his was pinning me to the floor. As I stood, I noticed the rainstone bracelet on my wrist. I hadn’t tied it there. The stones glowed lightly, the colour both pure and translucent, swirling around lazily. The bracelet didn’t exactly put off any warmth, or any sense of power, but the longer I stared at it, the stronger a certain emotion grew within me. It was unadulterated joy, tied up in childlike wonder. I wasn’t staring at a bracelet, I was gazing to the moon, and I felt that I could make any wish in the world. The horrible tightness about my heart eased, and I gazed back to the Captain.

  There was something there, between me and him. I couldn’t tell if he knew what it was or not, but he could definitely feel it. It wasn’t natural or normal. I didn’t know him, I couldn’t possibly feel any organic feelings for him, other than the apprehension inspired by his presence. What’s more—he didn’t know me outside of the fact that I had made a deal with the Weaver before killing two people, one of them my own mother. None of those facts inspired care or fellowship, and yet there he was, passed out on my kitchen floor after having spent his last moments of consciousness knotting the bracelet around my wrist.

  I moved to the cupboard beneath the kitchen basin, pulling out a quarter-full sack of flour. I sat facing him as he slept, dusting the flour over the floor and thinking back to the word he had whispered over me the day before.

  Leevskmat.

  I tried spelling it out in the flour, but my finger wavered, unsure. I could say the word in my mind, but I didn’t know which letters it consisted of. My reading and writing skills were abysmal. I did my best and then sat back, mouthing the word without truly speaking it. Even though I didn’t have a voice, there was still too much power in words, especially Aethen words.

  I hadn’t noticed the Captain wake up until his hand was brushing mine away. He messed up the flour and wrote the word properly, somehow guessing what I had been trying to spell.

  I peeked at him beneath my lashes, quickly switching my gaze back to the word when I felt him staring back at me.

  “Life force,” he muttered, his voice rough. “That’s what it means.”

  I frowned, retracing the letters, trying to learn them. They were the letters of the ancient language, but the word itself belonged to something older, something more powerful. It was the summary of a word, a definition instead of a sound or the summation of letters. The Forian words felt sharp and rigid in comparison, flat with unbending meaning.

  Life force in Forian was a little different, two of the letters replaced with another, the entire word split into two. But somehow, those small changes shifted the power of the word completely. I messed up the flour again, writing a single word in Fyrian, the common tongue, which was far easier for me to communicate in.

  Why?

  “You were dying,” he answered. “It’s possible to save someone on the brink, but not to bring them back from over the edge. If I hadn’t given you some of my energy … your life would have been irretrievable.”

  I finally looked at him properly, my eyes widening. He had said the word twice. I hadn’t simply gone too far, I had almost killed myself twice. And he had done something that definitely wasn’t commonplace to keep me alive. He wasn’t simply protecting me. He was endangering himself to keep me alive.

  This child is doomed to death, and to share death with those closest to her.

  I reached out, underlining the word before me several, furious times, my eyes burning hotter than his, two burning spheres of coal beneath the golden fire he cast down. He smiled, the gesture foreign and breathtaking, a stiff sadness hovering at the edges.

  “Because our fates have been written together. If your pages stop turning, so do mine. I don’t know it for certain, but it’s how I feel, and I’m not willing to test it. Not yet.”

  I felt the truth of those words, the rightness of them settling into me. It made so much sense to me … and yet it made no sense at all. I underlined the word again, my hand shaking. He shook his head, his large shoulders hunching in, discomfort tensing his muscles.

  “It’s only something I feel, not something I have proof of. But you…” He pointed at my face, his hand large and unwavering. “You have the mark of the Weaver. You’ve heard your fate.”

  I frowned, muddying the word before me and scribbling again.

  Accident. Not hear fate. I cringed, though there was no use in being embarrassed about my lack of reading and writing skills. Carrying around the mark of the most despised subcategory of person in the world really put things into perspective. The Captain was frowning at the words and the longer he did, the more I realised them to be not entirely true. I shook my head, scooping in the flour that had begun to spread out too far and pooling it in the centre again. I wasn’t confident that I would be able to write out everything the Weaver had said to me as he placed the mark upon my face—not that I remembered his words perfectly in any case. He had mentioned water and death. Of course he had mentioned death.

  Tempest-born and tempest-dashed.

  Shuddering at the memory, I scrawled out one word.

  Tempest.

  “Tempest?” the Captain asked.

  I nodded.

  “The Weaver gave you a Fated name?” His frown grew darker, the furrow etching dramatically deeper into his forehead.

  I nodded again, and we sat there staring at the word until there was a knock on the door. I got up but froze, realising this wasn’t my house anymore. The Captain moved past me, grabbing the outside of the door and lifting it up and to the side, propping it against the wall. On the other side stood two girls around my age. Their hair was harshly pulled back and tied into neat little knots, their eyes squinting into the dim light of the kitchen. They were clearly sectorians: one with markings in her eyes and the other with dark yellow nails. I could tell from their robes that they were servants of the Obelisk, though they were still underage. Most litens would leave the schoolyard at some point to enter into apprenticeships or service to one of the institutions. The fertile steward girls would relocate to Hearthhenge, finding room and board in one of the kynhouses, where they could watch and clean and learn. That was the best a young steward girl could hope for, unless she had a particular aptitude for one of the entertainment crafts and a willingness to travel so far away that she might never return home.

  The sectorians didn’t have to work in the fields or the metal crafting shops or the kynhouses. Hundreds of years ago, they grew to be the dominant race through a simple loop of supply and demand. They had magic but needed labour, and the stewards had labour but needed magic. We became set in that cycle. The stewards were the roots of our society, toiling in the ground, seeking nutrients and stabilising the sectorians as they strove for the sun, dropping fruit back to the stewards who waited below. With the stewards, we all had life—but it was the sectorians who made that life magnificent.

  The two girls before me would have been in their first year of service at the Obelisk, and they could only have belonged to the Sinn sector, with the power of the mind.

  “Yes?” the Captain asked. It wasn’t a kind tone, and the girls flinched a little.

  Behind them, the two Sentinels who had escorted me to Hearthenge stepped into view: the man with the split pupils and the woman with the metal hair.

  “Ingrid? Avrid?” The Captain’s frown dipped. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Ingrid replied, her eyes flicking to me. There was suspicion in her face, washed clean by a quick flash of resentment. “You didn’t return to the tower last night, so we went to the Citadel. Caught these two on the way out—the Scholar sent them to fetch the girl. He said she would be here.”

  “Not a difficult deduction to make,” the Captain muttered before flicking his fingers at me. “Let’s go. Your sentence is starting.”

  I scuffed my foot over the flour, obliterating the word that still glared up at me from the floor. Wh
ile I was crouched down, I grabbed the discarded collar and quickly stuffed it into my mother’s leather pack, looping the straps over my shoulders. I pushed past the Captain, ignoring the little shock that travelled through my system. Yes, we were connected in some way, but I wasn’t his captive. I raised my brows at the two sectorian girls who scattered away from me, their eyes on the mor-svjake. They still hadn’t said a word.

  Ingrid and Avrid didn’t seem surprised to see the new addition to my face—they didn’t, in fact, even give it more than a passing glance. They must have been at my trial.

  We all travelled quietly back to the gates, the two girls whispering together behind me, the Sentinels a few feet behind them. I could tell that Ingrid had questions, but she didn’t ask them. She fell into step behind the Captain, her eyes on the ground. The stables produced horses for us all, but the two girls separated from our group as we mounted, riding off without a word.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Sinn sector.” Avrid rolled his eyes. “If they can predict your response, the conversation has already happened.”

  Ingrid snorted, turning her horse onto the road and setting off at a fast pace. The Captain waited for me, clearly unwilling to let me ride behind everyone. I set off after Avrid, my mind surprisingly blank as we travelled. I didn’t expel any power, but their Vold speed seemed like a blanket thrown over all four of us, keeping us in formation as we winked subtly ahead of time. It was only an hour or two after daybreak when we dismounted in the forecourt of the Citadel. A boy waited for us, swathed in the navy-blue robes of a servant of the Obelisk.

  “Come,” he said, his eyes on the mor-svjake.

  He turned, ignoring the others, and I followed him to the side of the winding stone passageway that twisted up to the top of the mountain the Citadel had been carved from. The passage wasn’t narrow, but it was shadowed by colourful sails overhead, stripes of dark blue and bright gold hiding us from the gentle, searching fingers of morning sunlight. As we circled around the base of the Citadel, we encountered another set of Sentinels, who watched us pass through with barely concealed interest. The Obelisk servant led us to the far north-eastern side, where the water from the rivers pooled into a fast-flowing basin, tipping toward the edge of the Wailing Crag. There was a bridge leading stiffly over the water to the dam wall that curved around the basin, burrowing into the mountain either side of the Crag. We passed a set of Sentinels at the beginning of the bridge, another set at the end, and then we were alone. There were no other sectorians, no robed men and women of the Citadel bustling about in hushed conversation, no people of the small council flocked by sectorians chattering rapidly for their attention, no servants or young apprentices carrying wares and missives.

  The passageway marked the edge of the Citadel—and by extension, the north-eastern point of the Fyrian empire. To travel any further was impossible, as the Crag was too monstrous for anyone to climb down, and even if they made it by some miracle, they would then need to survive the Vilwood, a dark and tangled place free of safety and civilisation.

  Our footsteps were drowned out by the roaring of the waterfall passing between the arched wall beneath us and the long moan of the wind whipping through the second set of arches above us. Ingrid and Avrid were talking to each other, their heads bent together. They were shouting to be heard, but no noise carried back to me. We followed the walkway to the other side of the Crag, where it disappeared through an opening carved into the rock. We were plunged into darkness, and my feet immediately stopped, though a hand at my back prompted me forward as my eyes adjusted. I knew that it was the Captain touching me from the slight jolt to my system. I examined that feeling as the soft flickering light of several lanterns began to register in the sudden shock of darkness. It wasn’t a feeling of excitement, or a thrill of any particular sensation. It was more of an acknowledgement.

  Calder. His name echoed with the touch, searing into the back of my mind.

  My mind simply … knew him.

  “The Obelisk,” the boy announced, leading us through the other end of the tunnel and back into the blinding sunlight.

  I stopped, momentarily blinded again, while the Sentinels kept moving. The Vold didn’t flinch from the sun. The Vold didn’t flinch from anything. As my eyes adjusted again, I found my head tipping back and my mouth dropping open. The Obelisk was a tower of dark, rippling stormstone—a material as rare as rainstone, as fathomless and sharp as rainstone was reflective and crystal-bright. A huge, cylindrical cavern had been dug out of the Crag, curving around the left of the platform below us, another arched dam wall circling the other side—the smaller twin of the Citadel’s dam wall. The Obelisk itself was set away from the Crag, keeping its rock shell at a distance as it jutted imposingly into the sky. It was entirely hidden from the rest of Fyrio, visible only from the Vilwood and the untamed lands below us. I imagined standing so far below, peering up through the gnarled forest overhang, through the low mists curling around the base of the Crag to the sharp stormstone spire slicing through the mountain like some kind of giant obsidian sword. The Obelisk seemed, in that moment, more than simply a place of learning and knowledge, a safekeeper of history and the secret-keeper of our great society. From where I stood, it looked like a remnant of some great, forgotten past. An artefact of a time when Fyrio had needed colossal watchtowers to scare away the rest of the world—and more importantly, the rest of the world beyond. The afterworld.

  Suddenly, the things they said about the Wailing Crag made sense. If the screams of the afterworld carried on the wind through the mountains, the Obelisk was the lone sentry absorbing each cry.

  I could feel it returning my stare, piercing into me as it pierced into the sky.

  We see all.

  We know all.

  A shiver passed through me as we followed the Obelisk servant over the granite-inlaid rock platform to the main entrance. Every single inch of the tower seemed to be made of stormstone, from the entrance steps to the grand entrance itself. There were no doors inside the several-foot-wide archway, pillars and cornices carved into long, winding stories that seemed to follow the deep and mysterious pattern in the stone. The antechamber was wide and open, a few bubbling fountains set inside moon-shaped basins, the water appearing electric against the stone.

  “You’re late, Tempest,” a voice announced, the last word uttered as a profanity.

  A girl strode into view. She had raven-black hair and bright blue eyes, as sharp and shocking as the colour of the water in the fountains. “The Scholar waits for you.”

  She was talking to me, but I had no way of answering her. I was too busy reeling from the fact that she had used my Fated name. The Weaver had been speaking to the Scholar about my fate, and the Scholar had spoken to his Obelisk servants. Soon, all of Fyrio would know the sordid story of the Tempest who had killed her kynmaiden mother. The girl’s eyes narrowed sharply, her arms crossing over her chest. Her blue Sinn robes shifted against the floor.

  “Hurry,” she finally said, turning on her heel. She paused at the other end of the antechamber, glaring between the Captain and the Sentinels trailing after him. “Just you,” she reiterated.

  “This is the Captain.” Avrid strode up to the girl, his thumb motioning behind him.

  The Captain, and not the Captain. It was a Fated name, not a title. I frowned, glancing back to him. Of course it was a Fated name—hadn’t I felt compelled, even in my head, to continue calling him that even after I had discovered his real name? It was the way of Fated names: once they were heard, they became easier to repeat than the more powerful, true names. Weaker minds would struggle to ever mention those true names again.

  “Very well,” the girl said, her eyes lingering on the Cap—on Calder.

  We ascended the stairs to the first level, which opened immediately into a great library as tall as the Obelisk itself. There were no windows, and it had a far smaller circumference than the tower, indicating that it was only the core of the building. Shelves upon shelves curved ar
ound and around, ladders stepping up to platforms peopled by blue-robed Obelisk servants plucking books from the shelves or sliding tomes back into place from the narrow carts pulled behind them. Every second pillar of the balconies merged into a stormstone lantern—thin as glass, glowing softly in hues of red, orange, and yellow. The hundreds of lanterns cast the entire library into a hazy glow, fuelled by the sunlight pouring into the tower through the thin, spired roof. Veins of stormstone caught the light, causing the occasional flicker of shadow to cut through the main shaft of sunlight.

  The blue-eyed girl glanced around, scanning upwards, along the shelves. “He was on level thirty this morning. Had quite a temper. Far too angry to have calmed down already.” With that, she took off along the floor, marching through the glittering shaft of sunlight to the other side, where several cages on long cables sat into the wall.

  “Level thirty,” she said to a young man sitting in a small booth beside the cage.

  To be serving sectorians in the Obelisk was an enviable job for a steward—and he was most definitely a steward. He had no magic mutation, and the cloth of his jacket was thin, a few threads trailing from the collar. His hair was cut unevenly, his beard rough. He nodded deeply, but didn’t speak, his eyes cast downward. The blue-eyed girl motioned me into the cage. Calder stepped in after me, Avrid and Ingrid pressing in after him. The blue-eyed girl closed the cage door and took a step back as it groaned into motion, pulling us up.

  “Never actually been in here,” Avrid muttered, glancing down through the cage bars, the split in his pupils making it hard to tell exactly where he was looking. “Thought it’d be smaller.”

  “You thought the biggest tower in Fyrio would be smaller?” Ingrid gritted out, shooting a look to me. Angry that he had initiated a conversation in front of me.

  “The Sky Keep is the biggest tower in Fyrio,” Avrid argued, his hand now gripping the cage door as he leaned further into it, his eyes flicking around rapidly. “Everyone knows that.”