Between the Shade and the Shadow

by Coleman Alexander

  Her ears batted angrily, her markings flushing.

  She stepped from her shade tree. Part of her wanted nothing more than to accuse the Astra in front of the whole darkening for her brothers’ murders. She wanted to see the guilt in the pale of the Astra’s eyes; the rest of the darkening deserved to know their Astra was a coward, who had used an alp to kill Daispar’s shades, all for darkness she couldn’t fold herself.

  Cursing, Ahraia left the shade tree.

  The nit tree above rustled in farewell. She stepped light-footed and heavy-hearted into the central hollow, letting the closure form behind her for the last time. Every sprite in the darkening was gathered, without any of the shades or spritelings. Her father stood at the center of the gathering, near the springs.

  “Shade Ahraia . . .” He nodded in greeting.

  She didn’t acknowledge him. Instead, she looked about, noticing how empty the hollow seemed. Several sprites and wards were missing. One absence, in particular, was more apparent than the rest.

  “Where’s the Astra?” Ahraia asked aloud.

  Sprites flinched and ears flickered all about the hollow. Ahraia ignored their disapproval, looking towards the Astra’s nit tree, expecting her to come swooping out at any moment: she never missed the chance to glower over Ahraia, especially considering the lengths she had gone to bring the test about. The silence grew but she didn’t emerge. Ahraia bristled, shaking from the compulsion to confront the Astra. She clenched her jaw until comprehension dawned on her.

  “She’s gone to collect her seeds, hasn’t she?”

  Her father frowned deeply, ears curving down just enough to belie his calm.

  “She left for Angolor last night, to oversee the completion of your task,” he said. His ears flickered, permitting her to speak aloud. From the twitch in his cheek, she could tell it came only to lessen the edge of her voice. “You’re to meet her there before the Bright Moon is turned again.”

  “And how am I supposed to know where Angolor is?”

  “Golan will show you.” Her father gestured to one of the Astra’s dae-wards. The ward’s veil was woven of the Astra’s own eaves-web, a sign of her favor. He was young; his scars were lighter than Ahraia’s, and his eyes were still pale, not having suffered enough light to turn true golden. Ahraia hesitated, unsure what her father meant for the ward.

  “He’s not coming with me,” she said.

  “No. He’ll show you the way.” By memory.

  Golan smiled at her, his eyes lingering on her entirely too long.

  Why him?

  Her father furrowed his brow.

  Because he knows the way. And he’s not one of the Masai’s. Now sit down.

  Ahraia hesitantly lowered herself in front of Golan, who was already sitting. The ward scooted closer until their knees almost touched. Instinctively, she fortified her mind to keep him out.

  “I’m going to need to bond you,” he said. She felt the coarse brush of his mind and resisted. His teeth showed in what he evidently thought was a reassuring smile.

  For a moment, Ahraia feared what he might see if she let herself be bound. Would he see the bow? Or know about the sparrow? She pushed the thoughts down deep, remembering he was just a ward. She leaned forward. Golan did the same, until their foreheads pressed together. Ahraia smelled the lingering stink of milde-weed and needles of an unfamiliar nit tree, and felt the warm press of his head. Slowly, she let him bind her.

  She saw the darkening, where they sat, and then suddenly his thoughts burst into her mind.

  A thousand miles of night-strewn forests unfurled before her, through foreign woods and past shadow-clad mountains to endless valleys beyond. Narrow spritish paths peeled back before her eyes along with human paths, wide enough for ten sprites to walk abreast. She saw fallen trees spanning perilous creeks and chasms, and great stone bridges that stretched impossibly over churning rivers. Finally, she saw deep, dark vales rippling one after another out of sight.

  In an instant, she knew the path to Angolor, towards the rising Dae-Mon and to the south, around the human realm and the great snowcapped mountains.

  Golan pulled away, opening his eyes.

  That is the way to Angolor.

  “The Astra is making that journey?” Ahraia swallowed nervously. She closed her mind, detesting the sensation of being bound.

  Her father nodded.

  “I’m supposed to travel there in one turning?” Ahraia said. “And I’m supposed to complete my second task?”

  He nodded again.

  She stood up, brushing the dirt from her knees.

  “What must I do?”

  “Bring the provisions.” Her father beckoned another ward forward.

  A sprite brought forward a travel sack, stinking with the dried keress meat. Ahraia’s stomach turned dangerously. She shook her head.

  No.

  “You have to eat along the way,” her father said.

  Grudgingly, she took the travel sack. She felt sickness rising in her throat.

  Next, her father drew something from his cloak and extended it to her. It was another drain, far more elegant than the one she carried at her side. It was the opposite of the stolen blade: white to the other blade’s black, and stout to the other blade’s frailty.

  “I already have a drain,” she said, not reaching out to take it. It looked to be solid bone, with a handle wrapped in tight, soft leather. It was intricately carved along the flat of the blade. Her father pushed it towards her, forcing her to take it. The instant she touched the handle, she knew it came from the antlers and hide of the keress. She barely stilled the urge to cast it away from her.

  “It’s custom to make your drain from your first kill, taken by force from the innocent,” he said. Since you weren’t here, I did it for you. He glared at her, then went on. “With it, you must make a sacrifice of an enemy. That is your second task.”

  Dread seeped into Ahraia’s heart. “An enemy? What kind of enemy?”

  Her father’s eyes shone as cold and pale as they ever had.

  “A lightwalker.”

  Ahraia’s ears turned down, ringing in the silence. “A lightwalker?” She let out a shallow breath, trying to force her ears upright.

  “And once I do, what then? Am I supposed to drag it all the way to Angolor?”

  “Just its head,” her father said matter-of-factly.

  Wonderful, Ahraia thought. What a lovely journey. When it was apparent that no other instruction was forthcoming, she turned and walked from the central hollow. Her father’s face was measured, and no farewell followed after her, though his voice rang out one more time.

  “Remember what is at stake, Ahraia—not just yourself—but the very darkness around us. The whole darkening is counting on you . . . most of all, your nit.”

  21

  Lightening

  Ahraia ripped back the branches of the Astra’s shade tree and tossed the travel sack inside. It landed with a lifeless thump, the top tearing open, exposing the keress meat within. She hoped it reeked like a jontun by the time the Astra returned; she hoped the smell ruined the tree forever, a permanent reminder of the death and decay the Astra spread.

  She hurriedly withdrew from the nit, hating to be under it, and departed from Daispar without another word to her father or the other sprites. A few had conveyed goodbyes. A few had even wished her luck. But the threat towards Kyah and the spritelings had been aired openly, aloud, and no one so much as looked twice at her father. They were all guilty, with their fiendish insistence on enchantment killings and their ruthless acceptance of condemnations—their willingness to kill and let kill. It burned in her ears and her heart.

  She slipped from the darkening into a silent night, lit only by the stars and the Blood Moon overhead. Not a sound stirred the woods.

  A good night for shades and shadows, she thought bitterly, remembering Hayvon.

  “Speak for yourself,” she whispered, slipping the new drain into her cloak next to her metal drain. Sh
e retrieved her bow and arrows, gathered up the food she had scavenged and the small human tokens and tucked them all close. Stomach grumbling, she ate a handful of berries when suddenly ash spread through her mouth, coating her throat and ruining the taste. A charberry had gotten mixed up with the rest. She spit it out, scraping her tongue across her teeth, wondering if it was a sign of her luck. She spat again and stood up.

  Then, with an ashen taste in her mouth, she began to run south towards the human’s realm.

  It felt surreal, leaving Daispar for the last time, but in truth, the peril of her second task was far more unsettling. Killing a lightwalker wouldn’t be easy. The thought sent crawlers up her spine, as though tendrils of a leech fern were creeping towards her neck to paralyze her.

  I don’t have a choice, she thought, determined to see the task through. Losna’s life depended on it. And if she did it with an arrow, without a binding, then she could live with the guilt.

  It was just a matter of finding one alone, and at night.

  The first several nights passed easily—if easily meant dread with every step and only her brooding thoughts to keep her company. For some reason, she felt ill at ease—not just with her task, but with the very woods. The trees creaked ominously. Maple spinners whirled down amongst the leaves in a steady crackle. She sensed padding feet and watchful eyes, but every time she turned about, she was alone. She imagined bushes rustling and her ears twitched to the sound of leaves crunching underfoot. Twice she hid in trees, even circling back, but eventually, she decided she had just been without her shadow for too long.

  Her mind was fraying. She needed Losna back.

  Before the dawn of the third day, she passed beyond where she and Losna had ever run. She was getting closer to the human realm and the woods were changing. The trees felt different: quieter and slower, asleep even, with light sewn right to the tips of their leaves and needles. The creatures felt different too: timid and skittish. They darted away from her, leaving the woods as empty as the night she had bound Losna. It made her nervous. And yet the watchfulness remained.

  On the fourth night, the clouds broke and the mountains of the south emerged in earnest. They were far grander than they looked from the Endless Plains, and even in the night they were radiant, capped in white snow. She wondered if there were deep hollows beneath them for a shade and a shadow to hide. It was hard to imagine there wouldn’t be.

  The next day came swiftly. She spent it huddled in a hollowed log, wishing for the thousandth time that she and Losna had fled when they had the chance. She bound a pair of scanty pines and brought them down over the entrance, creating darkness, cramped and incomplete. She slept fitfully, awaking hungry and stiff, her mind strained from holding the trees all day, and her stomach clenched from eating nothing but acorns and berries for the last turning.

  The thinnest crescents of the Dark and Bright Moons waxed in the west when she crawled from her underdae. The Blood Moon was high overhead already. She had hardly taken two steps when she stopped and sniffed the night air. It was fresh, crisp with dry leaves and the first cold of autumn. And with it hid the faintest hint of . . .

  Woodsmoke.

  The wind came out of the south and she sniffed again.

  Humans.

  She took the bow from her shoulder, her eagerness to be done with her task heaving against her rising dread.

  What an impossibly light-wrecked tree, Ahraia thought, staring in disbelief at the shade tree before her. Or was it a nit? She wasn’t sure. The scent of humans had led her to where she stood, cowering in the woods, staring at the strange tree. She ran her thumb over her own nit’s broken orb in her pocket, the rough touch of it reassuring.

  The human’s tree grew as an unnaturally neat gathering of wood, harnessed together in the most preposterous of shapes: a perfect square—with light streaming from square closures in the sides, even though night already engulfed the world.

  Hesitantly, she searched out with her mind, not for life within—she had no intention of bonding anything inside—but to the structure itself, to see if it was alive.

  It wasn’t. It felt as dead as a rock.

  She had heard of their stone darkenings and had expected something like the Stone Tree. But this was something else entirely. The light made her stomach turn.

  Her nostrils flared. Iron and horses and woodsmoke scented the air. But something else smelled rich and simmering. Food. It also made her stomach turn—though in a much different way.

  The light formed a steady, yellow glow, without the flickering of their angry fires, shining like light stolen from the Dae-Mon. It lacked the gelded quality of a nit orb, but she wondered in terror if there were some other form of orb, a day orb of sorts, like a miniature Dae-Mon that they kept inside their walls.

  It’s not a shade or a nit tree . . . it’s more like a light tree, she decided from the safety of the woods. A lightening.

  She watched the lightening, wondering how the humans got in and out through the closures. They were small, and too high to be of any use—almost above her head. She wondered how they opened and closed. If the wood was dead, how could they? Or did the humans crawl in and out like some wild, overlarge insects? The lightening was rather like a nest of sorts, she supposed.

  From the far side, she heard something whine, almost like a tree creaking in a high wind, but loud and sharp and—

  Bang!

  Wood clattered against wood, slapping out after the whine. Startled, Ahraia ducked behind the cover of the trees.

  “Damnit, Yewl . . . I told you to bring more wood about today,” a human voice said from out of sight. It was gruff and deep. A man, likely.

  “Sorry, Da. I can get it,” came a softer voice. The whine rose again and then another bang echoed out. Ahraia flinched.

  There was more than one human.

  “I’ll manage. Get back inside the house and get your sister another blanket, her fever will break yet.”

  House. The word passed through Ahraia’s thoughts and formed into the strange structure. A house, a human lightening.

  Suddenly, something brilliant burned around the house’s side, somehow getting brighter, bouncing towards her and sending great flares under the eaves of the woods.

  Ahraia ducked lower. A radiant light emerged around the corner of the house. Panicked, she stumbled at the sight, staggering away through the underbrush. Leaves shook and branches broke.

  She scrambled into a dark shadow and stopped, chest heaving, well aware of the obvious racket she had just made. She was crouched behind a large, unnatural stack of broken wood.

  The bouncing light stilled.

  She held her breath.

  The night was suddenly silent. She peered over the stack of wood and saw a man standing perfectly still, raising a dazzling something in his hand and staring right at her. Ahraia’s skin and eyes burned, her heart racing. She squinted from behind the wall, not daring to move.

  The something spit light across the space between them, spreading dangerously over the woods about her.

  Holding light in its hand . . . his dae-mon. Ahraia couldn’t imagine the horror of the human’s magic, or the pain of holding it. It took all her self-restraint not to bind him, to make sure that he couldn’t see or sense her.

  “Oi! Bear! Get out of here!” the man called, unflinching.

  Ahraia stared back, wondering if his senses were so blunted that he really thought she might have been a bear.

  Maybe they are as blind as trees, she thought. She didn’t move.

  The man grunted and kept walking, hardly seeming concerned. He was tall, at least two heads taller than the tallest sprite, with a beard thick beneath his chin, like a keress. His breath rattled out loudly as he wrestled something from beside the house: a miniature wagon that he pushed by hand. It rumbled across the ground before him.

  Ahraia watched, rooted where she hid. She couldn’t have run if she wanted; the forest was overflowing with searing-hot light. The maples about her shim
mered in fiery colors: angry red and burnt yellow. The night burned with an unfamiliar scent, like pine oil spilling into the cook fires. She wrinkled her nose, peering through a tiny gap in the wall of broken wood. The human was hardly a dozen paces from her.

  There won’t be a better chance, she realized belatedly. She hadn’t bound him yet, not beyond just mirroring his words. Hastily, she slid the bow from her shoulder and placed an arrow to the string. She readied herself, closing her eyes briefly and steadying her breaths. The string whined quietly, drawing tight.

  She hesitated. There was still the damned light. It was everywhere. Once she shot him, his body would fall, still surrounded and protected by the dae-mon.

  A scratching came from the other side of the human lightening, breaking off her thoughts. A moment later, she heard the same whine and crack of wood that had proceeded the man. Expecting another human, she peered towards the lightening. But what came around the corner scared her far more than any human or light would. Ahraia drew a sharp breath.

  A shadow.

  It was slightly larger than a fox, with long drooping ears and a strange coat of broken black and gray.

  Humans aren’t supposed to have shadows, she thought, letting out the tension in the string.

  “Come on, boy,” the man said to it.

  It didn’t look like a “boy” to her. It looked like Losna and Reyn mixed—but all out of sorts. It was too small by half, with short legs, and broken ears that fell down next to its jaw.

  None of the other humans she had seen had shadows. To make the kill now would be impossible; she wasn’t about to kill a shadow. She watched numbly, paralyzed by fear, unsure if the humans could, in fact, make bindings.

  The human placed his dae-mon inside the wagon, then turned and pushed it right towards Ahraia. The shadow jogged next to him, sniffing at his heels. In a panic, Ahraia crouched deeper beneath the broken wall of stacked wood, drawing a small maple over her, desperately exposed and woefully hidden by the sparse undergrowth. She couldn’t see the man, but his footsteps grew louder. His breathing grew closer.