A Tempest of Shadows

by Washington, Jane

  “What am I required to do today?” I asked. I wanted to get on with it. There was no use in giving in to my frustration.

  “A wall isn’t going to save you, Tempest.” His voice carried out to the balcony easily, even despite the sound of the waves below and the slow whine of the wind.

  “What am I required to do today?” I controlled my tone, trying to make myself sound bored as I repeated the question.

  “I require only one thing from you today.” He stepped away from the wall and followed me onto the balcony. The wind caught in his silver-white hair, blowing it from his shoulders, the blue in his eyes lightening, turning eerie. He grabbed the front of my corset, dragging me forward, his head ducking close to mine. “A little leaf, that’s all.”

  “A leaf?” I had whispered the question unintentionally, my voice lowering to match his.

  “A leaf from a tilrive tree,” he specified.

  My blood froze in my veins. There was only one ancient tilrive tree left alive. It stood in the centre of Hearthenge, the main, cobbled roads converging to wind around it. I swallowed, thinking furiously of how I might be able to escape his request.

  “You have three hours.” His whisper dropped in tone, becoming something closer to a command, and his head ducked lower, his grip dragging me up to my toes. “If you don’t make it back in time, I’ll tie you to the trunk for the rest of the day … and I hardly need to explain how much that will please Helki’s little recruits now, do I?”

  I turned my face away from him, refusing to answer the question. He set me down, striding back into the domed room, leaving me with my face turned to the sea, the wind whisking away the moisture from my cheeks. I suddenly felt incredibly alone, knowing that Calder wasn’t waiting for me by the doorway, knowing that he wouldn’t be there to save me when I returned to Hearthenge. I stopped in the doorway, unsettled by the way they all still watched me. They had completely abandoned whatever they had been doing before I fell into the room … and they didn’t even seem to realise it. They might have all watched me in different ways, but it was with the same degree of intensity.

  The Scholar, predictably, examined me the way a man of science dissects a particularly interesting subject, with cold but precise detachment.

  The Inquisitor watched me with the self-assurance of a man capable and unthreatened in his power, a hint of amused indulgence wrapped in the dark velvet of his gaze. To him, I was something wild and errant, small enough to be both insignificant and entertaining.

  The Warmaster seemed to switch between glaring at me with pure, unabashed dislike, and a more focussed, heavy-lidded stare that reminded me of silent, lazy beasts stalking easy, clumsy prey.

  The Weaver focussed on me with a quiet and deadly intent, every shift of his gaze composed, unflappable. He looked from my eyes to my lips to the lines of my corset as though every shape were a secret revealed only to him.

  The King didn’t watch me in the hostile, examining ways of the others. His eyes were an invasion, his gaze a snare, his attention a promise that echoed inside my mind.

  I always get what I want.

  When none of them spoke, I cleared my throat, turning to the Warmaster. “What have you done with Calder?”

  “I thought you only had three hours,” he replied.

  “I only need one,” I lied.

  He chuckled, shaking his head, his eyes still lazy. “You get more amusing every day.”

  “What have you done with Calder, and why can’t any of you just answer a question the first time around?”

  “He made a deal,” the Warmaster answered. “I guess he saw an opportunity for more power, and he took it.” He shrugged, his massive shoulders shifting against the chair. “Happens to the best of us, doesn’t it? Is that not what you think we’re doing? I guess your little hero is just as bad as the rest of us.”

  With a scowl, I began to twist my ring around my finger, but a harsh voice halted my movements.

  “Stop.” It was the Inquisitor, striding toward me, his dark eyes fixed on my hand.

  He tugged on my fingers, pulling my hand up before his face.

  “I’ve been very nice to you so far, Tempest.” His voice hung with dark warning as he slipped the ring from my second finger and repositioned it on my third, in the position of promise where he had first placed it. “You don’t want to get on my bad side.”

  “I’m not marrying you,” I said.

  “We’ll see,” he replied, twisting the ring around my finger with a smile. “Hearthenge,” he said, before releasing me.

  I fell through the ground in a panic. I had intended to return to the outskirts of the city. To formulate a plan. Instead, I dropped into the capitol marketplace, knocking into a crate of apples and drawing the eyes of everyone around me. I skipped away from the apple cart that a steward man had been unloading, shouting back a quick apology as I raced down the collection of stalls.

  I spied a rack of hunting equipment and my step faltered, my eyes catching on a small hand blade. Bern had said that we weren’t allowed to use weapons from inside the city centre, but would it really matter that I had obeyed the rules if I ended up dead? With a growl of frustration, I ran on, knowing that breaking the rules would likely result in being discarded as graceless.

  “There she is!” I heard a shout carried across the road, but I kept my head down, picking up my speed as I twisted my ring and sent myself to the base of the tilrive tree.

  A quick look over my shoulder showed that the recruits had fallen far behind, and were no longer in sight. I was so focussed on the road behind that I didn’t notice the body barrelling towards me from behind the tree, crashing into me and sending us both sprawling into the grass. I recognised the golden crown colouring Raekov’s red hair a second before his fist slammed into the side of my face, causing my vision to swim with dark spots.

  “This is not a fight you want to pick,” I warned him breathlessly.

  “I really think it is,” he countered.

  This time, when the drumming sounded faintly in the back of my mind, I welcomed it. I ran towards it, letting it fill my chest and reverberate through my blood. Strength began to bleed into my limbs, fuelled by my frustration and fear. I threw my hips up, unsettling Raekov’s balance. He tried to force me back down again, power funnelled into his own movements, but we ended up rolling to the side, each of us gaining and losing the upper hand.

  “Stay back,” he shouted, the other recruits skidding finally catching up to me. “She’s mine.”

  I twisted his fingers back until I heard a crack. His teeth tore into my shoulder. We kicked and snarled, fighting like animals instead of soldiers. I could hear running footsteps as a few more recruits found us, but they all held back, watching. Waiting.

  I felt the surge of Raekov’s power, and instinctively curled in on myself, missing the fist that flew a hairsbreadth from my face, sinking into the ground with a great, groaning crack of stone, and sticking there.

  “What the—” He struggled to pull it out again, confused as to how I had sensed the attack.

  “I’m an Eloi,” I rasped, crawling out from beneath him as he tried to pin me with his legs.

  “No.” He managed to tear his arm free, abrasions covering the skin. “You ran like a Vold. We all saw it.”

  I smiled at him, jumping up to my feet and stepping backward as he faced me, the others crowding behind him. Word must have been spreading down the road of a fight having broken out, as another two recruits were now running down the road toward us. Raekov held out his arm to warn the others not to advance, his green eyes bright as they tracked my progress backwards.

  “How about you turn yourself over, Tempest?” he asked, tilting his head to the side, matching each of my measured steps. “Then we don’t have to kill you. Wouldn’t that be better?”

  I heard movement behind me, and realised that someone must have snuck around to cage me in. The other recruits began to fan out, moving faster as I moved faster, trying to box me
in. I turned to run, but there was a girl behind me, dressed in Vold leather, an axe in her hand. She must have taken it from a feller’s horse in the woods.

  I thought about using my ring, but I couldn’t risk them seeing it. My heartbeat now as loud as the drumming inside my mind, I reached my arm out before me, my hands clawing in the air.

  “Lotte,” I muttered, trying to step away from this danger as I had tried to escape Calder’s fire experiment.

  Just as the girl jumped at me, I dove forward, tumbling onto the same road … though it was colder, greyer. I sprang back to my feet, ready to fight again, but the recruits had disappeared. Before me, the road slowly, lazily constructed itself, grass spurting from the sides, forming into the rolling hills of Hearthenge. Everything led to that strange, suspended moon. No houses appeared along the hills.

  Frowning, I approached the tilrive tree. The tower of Hearthenge should have been cutting into the sky behind it, but there was no sign of it. The henge still stood, great big slabs of rainstone stripped of the colourful market stalls and banners that usually jutted from the rock. The road curved around, winding about the great big tree. As I approached, I realised that the packed dirt beneath my feet should have been cobblestones. The circle of light brown earth around the tree looked so bare, so unadorned.

  I slowed to a walk, my eyes cast up, my breath catching. The tree was … different. The red-gold leaves wilted, a dark stain spreading up from the base of the truck. It was fuzzy, like velvet, and seemed to wriggle before my eyes. It drew me nearer, winking at me, feathering and wiggling over my senses, pulling my arm up, extending my fingers. My palm was pressing to that dark velvet rash when the smell hit me. Horrible, sickening rot. It had a metallic undertone, like blood, and it seemed to drip with oily intention. I stumbled back in horror, my eyes widening as bile filled my mouth.

  As if spurred by my touch, the Darkness began to spread, consuming the tree, sucking it dry, hollowing it of life and … was that magic? I could sense the strange power of the tree, grey and suspended, like this world. Old and weathered. Deep and growing, like roots curling further and further into the earth. I felt that power bleeding out and then somehow disappearing as the Darkness swelled and spread. The Darkness seemed to be feeding on the magic of the tree.

  I stared at my hand, expecting to see black sores, or the beginning of a dark rash, but there was nothing, only skin made golden by the sun and covered in the marks of those people who fought to claim me. I thought back to what the medicine man had said, about the Darkness contaminating an object in its entirety, content not to spread any further unless its vessel was destroyed. Lifting my eyes back to the tree, I realised that I wasn’t seeing the slow death of a living thing. I was witnessing the reveal of what already lived inside it. The leaking and disappearing energy that I had felt was only the illusion of what once was, flaking away.

  Its transformation complete, the tilrive tree shook the last of his colourful cloak, a few dry leaves floating away from the bare branches. It now stood before me, completely dark, the knots in the trunk like knobbly black eyes, wide and grotesque, the pupils leaking tears of inky sap from red-tinged scabs in the bark.

  Forsj, a voice whispered inside my mind. I recognised it easily, this time, and glanced up to the sky as though I might see the first Fjorn somewhere in the silver of the moon.

  “Ein,” I whispered.

  Forsj, she repeated, more insistently, her voice fading.

  I had the strangest feeling that she wasn’t actually speaking to me. Her voice seemed like an echo, a reverberation through time, carried by urgency, a memory tied to the earth beneath me. One of those whispers of fate the Warmaster had spoken of.

  “Forsj,” I muttered, as though repeating the word aloud might help me to understand better what was happening.

  A thin, frigid breeze whispered around me, and the word filled my mouth again, but this time, it wasn’t the name that I spoke, it was the meaning.

  “Pathway.” Forsj was a Forsan word, which translated to “pathway” in Fyrian.

  Swallowing hard, I forced myself to move close to the tree. Calder had said that I couldn’t transport my body into my head, which meant that I had gone somewhere real. This strange, suspended grey world actually existed.

  “Forsjaether,” I breathed, disbelieving.

  I thought of the Tale of Three Worlds, my eyes floating back up to that backwards, suspended moon.

  The midworld, Forsjaether, was a place of echoes and mirrors, ghosts and shadows, torn between the light of the foreworld and the darkness of the afterworld.

  I had somehow folded through one world and into the next. The gravity of my situation settled over my shoulders, sinking heavily into the pit of my stomach as my horror-filled eyes crawled slowly back to the tilrive tree.

  “You’re infected, too,” I said, as though the midworld could hear me.

  But the Darkness spread no further than the tree, and I muttered that word again as my fingers hovered over the black bark.

  “Forsj.”

  The entire midworld was a pathway. The legends had always told of it as a link between life and death. But here, there was nothing living, and nothing dying. With a deep, steadying breath, I set my hand against the tree again, trying to ignore the horrific sensation of the sap that stuck to my palm, or the wriggling fuzz that nestled my fingers.

  “Lotte,” I whispered, pushing into the tree.

  It cracked wide open, folding me into the dark. Vapourous breath filled my mouth, the Darkness clawing at my skin like the claws and wings of bats, screaming around me as I tossed my arms out, completely blind. When my fingers scraped against bark, I began to tear at it frantically with my fingers. Light spilled in, and I widened the hole until I could stumble out of it, my fingernails chipped and bleeding, my chest heaving. There was thick grass underfoot, the blazing of the sun overhead. There was no sign of the suspended moon—in fact, it seemed to be the right time of day again—but the sun was still falling on the wrong side of the sky. Frowning, I spun around, taking in my surroundings. Tilrive trees surrounded me, their papery bark the colour of driftwood, their leaves a bright, pinkish gold. The tree that I had broken out of was free of Darkness, appearing as it should have. There was still no sign of the disease on my skin. Astounded, I walked among the trees until I spotted a slash of rainstone jutting from the earth. I picked my way toward it, spotting more and more of it through the leaves and branches above. It seemed to stretch high into the sky.

  Tempest.

  I heard the call. Ein’s voice floated to me like a ghostly song, and I drew closer to the castle, examining the rainstone turrets, the long, sprawling battlement, the lowered drawbridge. There were figures moving within, but the closer I got, the stranger they seemed. They were larger than the people of Fyrio, with growths spurting from their backs—odd, misshapen things that might have been wings. I shrank back to the trees, examining one of the creatures that strode out onto the drawbridge. He had a braided hair, long, strong limbs, and coal-black wings that seemed almost the length of his person. Small, dark horns curled from his head. His eyes were also dark, but they glowed subtly, pupil merging with iris. He reached the end of the drawbridge and shook out his wings, jumping up into the air and launching himself up with a single flick of those powerful limbs.

  Tempest. That call sounded again, and I was sure that it was coming from inside the castle. With a quick groan, I started toward the gates, my head down, my feet fast.

  This isn’t a good idea.

  I was almost through the gates when I spotted another of the strange creatures walking toward me. I spun to the side, pressing into the lower room of the gate tower, my back against the cold stone, my eyes closing as I quietened my heartbeat. When the creature passed, I poked my head out of the door and looked toward the castle’s main entrance—an opening the size of a small house, great big doors pushed back against the castle walls. There were a few creatures scattered about, and I waited until none of the
m seemed to be facing the castle before I slipped out of the tower room and jogged toward the entrance. When I got inside, I ducked to the left, pressing myself up against the back of a statue as voices rumbled through the corridor to my left. They were speaking Forsan, and I struggled to translate their words into Fyrian.

  “The borders are being tested again,” a male was saying. “The people are unsettled.”

  “They know the great war has begun,” another voice answered, the two creatures striding toward the castle opening. They wore black uniforms, swords strapped to their hips. “They’re unsettled.”

  As soon as they passed, I ran into the hallway they had vacated, led by an echo of sound that drew me lower and lower into the belly of the castle. It was slow going, as I was forced to slip into rooms and behind objects on every level to hide from those strange, winged creatures, but I eventually found myself before a simple wooden door in the coldest, dampest part of the castle.

  “You don’t have long,” a voice croaked, soft and broken.

  “Ein.” I pressed my hand to the door in disbelief, shaking the lock. I was sure that there was an incantation that I might have been able to figure out, to unlock the door, but her voice sounded again, dissuading me.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” she warned. “Ledenaether is a place for the dead. If the living stay too long, they will not be permitted to return … and you must return.”

  “You called me here,” I whispered back, somehow sure of that fact.

  “Because you’re our last hope.” I heard her move closer to the door, and a small thump as though her head had fallen against the wood. “Each of us sacrificed our power to create you, Tempest. We bled into the waters and screamed into the wind to create a storm to tear the evil of the worlds apart.”