A Tempest of Shadows

by Washington, Jane

  I stumbled to the Spider’s side, brushing off Calder as he tried to put himself between us. I knelt before her, pointing to the Weaver’s mark on my face.

  “What does she want?” the Spider asked.

  “She wants you to try again.” Calder didn’t sound happy about it. “She wants to hear her fate.”

  “You want to make a deal, Tempest?” She held up her chained wrists. “I’ll give you the premonition—the first vevebre I pulled from the lake that day—if you release me and forget that you saw me.”

  “Not a chance,” growled Calder, as I nodded.

  “No,” he repeated.

  I jumped to my feet, my hands skittering across his belt, trying to find the keys for her manacles. He grabbed my wrist, pulling me away and then quickly switching his grip to my shoulder, keeping me at arm’s length. He ducked his head, his expression angry. “No. The Fated are not to be messed with.”

  The Fated, as in, people with Fated names. Him. Me. Her.

  “She may not be struggling,” he whispered. “But that doesn’t make her powerless. Think about who you will be setting free: a woman who waited seven years in silence, hiding in squalor just to cut your throat when she felt like the time was right. Make no mistake, she means to end you and will not give up just because we stopped her assassination attempt.”

  I gripped his arm as he still held me away from his body, flipping my pen up to scrawl an angry question, which he glanced at.

  “I intend to send her to Hearthenge,” he answered. “To the locked cells in the basement of the tower, where we hold criminals awaiting trial.”

  I didn’t bother writing a reply, only flipped my pen the other way and pointed it to my face, to the mor-svjake. The Spider had full immunity. She could do whatever she wanted to me, or attempt to do whatever she wanted to me, completely without repercussion.

  He had nothing to charge her with.

  He stared at me, shock visibly rushing across his eyes, and I quirked a brow at him, tilting my head in question.

  Did you really forget?

  His frown deepened, and he unclipped something from his belt, tossing it to me. I caught the keys, kneeling beside the Spider. As I was drawing away the manacles, she grabbed my arm, her mouth opening to reveal teeth too white to belong to a steward, too sharp to belong to an old woman.

  “Promise me,” she gasped, her nails digging in, drawing blood to the surface of my skin. “You will release me and forget that you saw me.”

  I nodded, and that horrible white smile widened, stretching morbidly to the sides of her face, her yellow eyes narrowing to slits as my arm began to burn. I wrenched it free, her nails tearing into my skin. The little wells of blood slipped back into the cuts she had made, wriggling beneath my skin to form shapes like stars, skittering into a spiral along my forearm. The spikes of each star thinned and lengthened until a trail of tiny spiders formed. I had seen the same markings on the medicine man, but I hadn’t connected the dots, until now.

  I was staring at the mark of the Spider.

  “I believe we have a deal,” she crooned.

  I moved back to her side, compelled by an unsettling energy inside me. I unlocked her manacles and was immediately pulled backwards, Calder taking my place. He had a short dagger in his hand, the blade and handle both dark metal, the edge of the blade crooked and jagged, whispering with dark, angry energy.

  “Go on, Spider.” His voice was quiet, but I could hear the thundering magic of the Vold behind it. “Where is it hidden?”

  Her wide smile was still in place, her hand steady as she pointed to the fireplace. I approached it, crouching down and feeling around for any loose stones. My mother had hidden any extra money in the same place. I found one that wobbled a little and worked it until it came loose, falling into my hands. I dropped it, reaching inside the hollowed-out section of the wall. There was a box inside; translucent, polished rainstone, far too valuable to be hidden within the walls of a steward’s home. I walked back to the kitchen table, the Spider’s eyes tracking my every movement with yellowed interest. The veined lid had a solid silver latch, which I flipped, propping the lid open.

  The mark on my arm itched, a horrible, ticklish feeling crawling inside me. It was the Spider’s magic, reaching up from the vevebre. The wooden post was a crooked, polished length of pine, the vevebre wrapped tightly around it. The wire was frayed, wet with slime despite its dry housing. A dark green moss spread from the wire to the post, darkening parts of the wood with rot.

  “Bring it to me, and I will read your fate,” the Spider said.

  I reached out, and the door to the home burst open. The medicine man strode in, his sons behind him. They each held short planks of wood—firewood, it seemed—cast out before them, weapons to ward off some kind of evil. The medicine man darted his gaze around, and when he saw me by the table, my hand in the box, he started forward.

  “Don’t!” he shouted, as I made a grab for the vevebre.

  As soon as my fingers wrapped around the post, the end of the wire fell away, unspooling from the post as an eerie echo of the Spider’s voice filled the room.

  You have chosen your fate, Tempest.

  I stared down in horror, realisation settling with a sickening heaviness in my gut.

  The voice continued, weighted by the echoes of other voices, all whispers of the same sound, all reverberations of fate.

  For a world repeated three times, there will be three champions. If three times they fail, evil will be set free, and a final storm will stir in the wind. The storm will fall to the waters, the worlds lost to darkness, her failing heart in the fist of a king.

  The horrible voice faded away, leaving a sound even worse: the Spider’s high-pitched, frantic laughter. I shoved the vevebre back into the box as the medicine man took a stumbling step forward, his expression painted in horror.

  “Don’t,” he repeated, weaker, his voice trembling. “The fate was never true; you had to choose it. You’ve no idea what you’ve started!”

  “Stupid!” the Spider cackled, but she wasn’t pointing at me, she was pointing at the medicine man. “You promised not to interrupt. You almost ruined everything!”

  “I changed my mind. I couldn’t let you do it.”

  “You’re too late,” she snarled back.

  “Move aside,” the medicine man said to Calder. “She’s ours.”

  Calder was still holding the knife to the Spider’s neck, but his eyes were on the box beneath my arm.

  “Killing her won’t free you from a deal, if you’ve made one with her,” he told the medicine man. “If you’ve gone against your promise, you know what will happen.”

  “I’m not going down without her,” the medicine man spat back, his arm beginning to tremble.

  Calder’s hand was also shaking, but with fury. I could tell that he was struggling to get himself under control again. His burning, urgent energy was starting to thunder back into the room.

  “Please,” the medicine man begged as his arms began to spasm.

  I stepped toward him in alarm, but one of his sons suddenly appeared at my side, his hand on my arm, his head shaking. There was sorrow in his eyes.

  Calder stepped away from the Spider, planting his foot in the centre of her back, shoving her toward the medicine man. His eyes were narrowed in fury, his mouth twisted in disgust. He stepped up to me, grabbing my head and pulling it against his chest as the medicine man rushed at the Spider. I heard a heavy whack and the crushing of bone. The Spider wailed and laughed, all in the same feverish pitch, and Calder held me in place as I struggled, listening to the sounds of laughing and the grunts of the medicine man. It took me too long to realise that the Spider didn’t actually sound as though she was in pain anymore … but the medicine man did.

  As the son beside me began to sob, I knew that something was wrong, but Calder’s grip was iron, my vision completely shielded. The thumping grew weaker, the sounds wetter. The laughing persisted, even as the rest of the room
fell to silence.

  I felt a scuffle beside me, and realised that one son had begun to rush forward, but the other was now holding him back. I could hear them muttering to each other.

  “We warned him, Asper. You can’t touch her.”

  “Let me go!”

  “She’s too powerful.”

  “Get off me, Aran.”

  Calder released me, and we both grabbed for the boy at the same time, wrestling to keep him back. He accidentally caught me in the side of the face with his wooden plank, but then Calder stepped behind him and grabbed both of his arms, muttering something over his head that seemed to calm him down enough for us to step back.

  The Spider was near the door. Her laughter had died off, but the wide smile remained, her face specked in blood. On the ground, the medicine man lay face down, his skull destroyed. Blood splatters were everywhere, his plank lying in a pool of it, his hand loosely clasped around it.

  He had…

  He had beaten himself to death.

  “You’re not going to break your promise, are you, Tempest?” the Spider asked, her voice scratching along the back of my skull as she watched me take it all in. “We have a deal, don’t we?”

  Screams rose into the back of my throat, tossed her way with the violence of my energy, though the sounds of them never hit the air.

  You lied to me.

  You tricked me.

  This was never my fate.

  You’ll never get away with this.

  I screamed so hard that I felt something inside me snap, a built-up frustration spilling out of my chest in a curling, dark shadow. I leapt forward, my fingers clawing in the shadow, which only slipped from my grip in thin wisps of smoke. My shadow was rushing toward the object of my frustration, who watched on, bright fascination in her eyes as I tossed myself at her, shouting a single word as the shadow slipped into her eyes and mouth.

  Leevskmat.

  Only … the word didn’t sound into the air, and my life force stayed firmly locked away inside me as the Spider’s began to fade from her eyes. I gripped her shoulders, shaking her violently, trying to dislodge my shadow. I could feel the need building up inside me already. The itching, overwhelming urge to pick up the medicine man’s bloody plank and lay my body down atop his. I had made her a promise, and I was breaking it already.

  Pratek, I thought, remembering the incantation to command the bell.

  Nothing happened, and I was sure I could feel the life slipping away from the body beneath me.

  Pratek, I screamed internally, focussing my mind on the bell in my pocket, one of my hands grabbing for it. I repeated the word as the cold brass bit into my skin, and felt Calder beside me, muttering the word that I couldn’t.

  “Leevskmat.”

  Breath shuddered in the chest beneath my right hand, my left still gripping at the bell, my silent pleas falling flat.

  “Leave.” Calder’s voice was gravelled, low and weak. “Leave right now.”

  My hand was slapped away, the Spider crawling back, scrambling to find her footing. She looked frail, her skin sallow, her mouth pinched. When her eyes met mine, I saw nothing but death, something swirling beneath. For a moment, I thought it was my shadow winking back at me, but then a chill swept over the back of my neck, and my heartbeat began to thump loudly in my ears. The Darkness peered into me from behind a yellow film, and suddenly, the Spider didn’t seem so much a person as a vessel. I choked on the smell of rot, somehow obvious now that I had recognised the Darkness. She was dark and slick on the inside, tissue dripping into an oily, dark mass. I couldn’t perceive of how she was still standing, moving, speaking. The Darkness had been eating away at her for some time. It controlled her completely.

  It was the Darkness that laughed manically as a man beat himself to death.

  It was the Darkness who had tricked me into choosing the vevebre that threatened to bring about the end of the world.

  The Darkness wasn’t just a force of evil … it was also intelligent.

  The door slammed shut as I stumbled back, the Darkness fleeing from view. I laid a fist against the door, spotting the rainstone box forgotten on the floor near where the sons stood.

  Curling my left arm up, I watched the little line of spiders, believing for a moment that I could see them moving beneath my skin. I turned, my eyes meeting Calder’s. He was leaning heavily against the wall, a line of blood dripping from his nose, his eyes unfocussed.

  We are both Vold. I glanced to the words on his arm and thought about why I had chosen those words in particular. I was sick of feeling helpless, voiceless, victim to circumstance. I had always longed for the strength of the Vold. For the mysterious power that lingered beneath their golden hoods, for the fearless way they strode through the world, for the unstoppable legend of their strength.

  I was sure that I had been born a Vold, but somewhere along the way, I had changed.

  I believed myself to be cursed.

  I believed myself to be more, and less—a vast concept of power and a dark promise of death.

  I had lost sight of what I truly was.

  I was born with the magic of war, and we were not afraid of death or darkness. We were born to fight, destined to win, bound to rise again and again through cities of ash and fields of blood.

  There was a storm inside me, and it was time to set it free.

  11

  Breath

  After sending for the Sentinels, Calder explained—much to their disbelief—that the Spider had resurfaced after all these years, forced the suicide of a steward man who reneged on a deal, and then promptly disappeared again. By the time he was finished, he looked ready to pass out. He remained propped against the wall the entire time, while Aran and Asper quietly agreed with his version of events. I found myself standing behind him, trying to avoid the suspicious eyes of the Sentinels.

  In one day, I had been present for two steward deaths. Soon, it wouldn’t matter how many stories Calder conducted or how many witnesses we had. Soon … they would come after me, and there would be too many for Calder to fend off.

  It was decided that Aran and Asper would continue living in the medicine man’s home until a new family was chosen for them, and a team was summoned to clean the place up. As the Sentinels filtered out, Asper appeared at my side, his eyes sad and grey.

  I placed him at a few years my junior, Aran even younger.

  “You can’t speak, can you?” he asked quietly.

  Calder shot us a look, but continued speaking quietly with Ingrid, who had shown up as the body was being cleared out. He had convinced everyone that once again, his presence at the scene provided the only testament needed to avoid further investigation.

  I shook my head, and Asper pressed closer, something urgent flashing in his expression.

  “There was something wrong with her,” he rushed out in a whisper. “It got worse over time. She would sit there vacantly, sometimes for weeks. She never ate or drank. I don’t know how she survived. There was … evil inside her.”

  I gestured the few remaining Sentinels, and then made a talking motion with my hand.

  “Why am I not telling them?” Asper questioned, his eyes darting to the others and then back to me.

  I shook my head, and as I was trying to figure out how else to ask him, he guessed again.

  “Why didn’t I tell them earlier?”

  I nodded quickly.

  “That would have been interfering. Father made a deal. He would not interfere in her plan, and if her plan were to fail, if anything were to happen to her, he would kill you himself.”

  Frustrated at not being able to answer, I grabbed my pen, but before the tip had even touched my skin, Calder was at my side. He dropped his shoulder heavily against the wall, and I could smell death and sweat clinging to him. I was momentarily distracted from my conversation as dread skittered across my consciousness, but then Calder’s right arm was twisting around my front in offering and I was trying to find a patch of skin that I hadn�
��t already written on.

  Why kill, I wrote. Plan was— I stopped writing, tapping the vevebre box sticking out of the top of my pack over my shoulder. I had no idea how to spell the Forsan word.

  The boy looked confused, but Calder’s voice croaked out above my head.

  “Why kill her when the plan all along was to trick her into choosing the vevebre?”

  “She used to say…” Asper paused, glancing around again. He met Aran’s eyes, and something passed between them. A bond forged in fear. Briefly, Aran nodded before turning back to helping a steward woman scrub the floor.

  “She used to say that there would be a war, and that you—she called you so many different things: the storm, the shadow, the tempest, sometimes just ‘the girl’—were destined to die. She said that it was very important for you to die at the right time. Making you choose the vevebre…” His eyes shifted up, his mouth tightening in fear. “It was her way of forcing you to die at the right time.”

  “Either way, her plan was for Ven to die.” Calder’s voice was faint, but at the nickname, I had to force myself not to glance up at him. He didn’t even seem to realise that he had used it.

  Asper nodded. “Killing her immediately wasn’t ideal, but it was better than her dying at the wrong time. That seemed very important to the Spider.”

  I reached out, my hand hovering over the boy’s arm. He hesitated, but eventually held it out for me, passing it up into my grip. I tipped my pen to his skin, but found myself lost for words. I had wanted to say that I was sorry. That I wished I could have saved his father. That it wasn’t his fault. That I would make sure nothing bad ever happened to them again.

  But I couldn’t.

  I found my attention drifting from the pen to my rainstone bracelet, bright and cool against my wrist. It swirled gently, lit from within by a pure essence, strong in its fragility, bright with its subtleness. The more I stared at it, the more I felt the meaning of what lay there, protected, untouched, a beam of moonlight cut carefully from a fathomless nightmare. Its essence touched the very edges of my consciousness, familiar and wonderful. I felt the drip of melting ice on my tongue, the sweep of night’s breeze against my neck, the relieved breath of the kalovka flower as it pushed through the snow.