Strangers Among Us

by Kelley Armstrong

  “Don’t bother,” the older prisoners told the new. “He’s as black-hearted as Kiarak.”

  “It’s not that,” others would say. “He’s mute and stupid, and he lives in his own world of madness.” Perhaps they thought he’d lost his mind in the darkness, or that he was too young to understand his part in holding Kiarak’s enemies until the warlord made examples of them, in the pike and head sort of way.

  “Here,” the prisoners would say, “he won’t spill secrets at least. What harm can a boy like that do? He’s just a flea on Kiarak’s backside.”

  But Colin grew in the shadows of the vault, his eyes downcast to the swept straw of his broom and the scuttling of spiders in the corners. And one day, the door to the vault was left open, and the light of the early evening spilled in like strands of gold. Colin hadn’t much interest in going above—his world was ordered and organized, and had he been able to speak, he would’ve admitted to enjoying the mundane sweeping and emptying and polishing. But it was the whinny of a horse that drew his sharp ears, and the spinning of wagon wheels, and the thundering of hooves shredding sod and kicking into the air in a frenzy.

  Colin ascended the stairs with his broom still in hand, the bristles whispering as they stroked the cold stone walls. The courtyard of the dark towers stretched out around him.

  Kiarak had returned with his troops from a raid gone awry. A soldier slumped in his saddle, bent over the neck of his horse, crimson blood dripping down the tarnished silver rows of his chainmail. Horses cried out and reared and spun in circles as soldiers grabbed desperately at the reins. A legion of riders tumbled to the ground, the stamping hooves of their horses crashing down around them and sometimes on them, followed by haunting cries that shook even the prisoners in the vault below.

  And amongst the chaos rode Kiarak, towering taller than the rest. The wounded soldiers crashed around him like waves around a looming cliff. They said Kiarak’s father was a fairy of midnight dreams, for even in spite of the terror that exuded around him like an oily sheen, there was a majesty to him that made Colin unable to look away. The iron crown on Kiarak’s head fastened down a headdress that draped around him, hiding his face from view. It billowed over his shoulders like a cape of night and stars as his stallion spun in circles and bucked, trying to unseat the Black Scourge of the midnight valley.

  Colin didn’t care much that Kiarak’s face was hidden—he stared instead at the roan stallion that reared and brayed with a hoarseness that rattled in its ribcage. Foam dripped from the bit to the shredded sod of the courtyard. The horse’s eyes were wide with terror, from whatever horror that could make Kiarak’s army turn back from anything. A shadow beast from the island of mist, Colin thought, one that lurked only in sunlight and devoured men whole, but couldn’t be slain, because how could you wound a shadow? Or a drake from the mountains to the south, one with scales of shimmering pearl that glossed away the danger of its sharp and poisonous fangs. But it didn’t matter, for Colin could only focus on the blade that had dug into the horse’s flank, the thin sliver of metal that gleamed in the fading daylight, that no other had noticed but him.

  Colin stared at the fragment of a blade, his skin burning as if he, too, had been sliced open. He ran toward Kiarak, ignoring the looming, oily darkness that kept others a safe distance from the fairy-touched warlord. Colin ran toward the bucking, spinning horse, dropping his broom to the ground with a clatter, and reaching for the sliver of blade in its flank. It wasn’t easy to grab, but Colin moved carefully with the stallion in its dangerous dance, ignoring the horse’s sharp bite on his shoulder as he pulled the fragment loose.

  He soothed the horse with gentle moans even as the blood ran down his shoulder. The stallion snorted, and the coughing and braying stopped. He lowered his muzzle, his breath warm and damp upon Colin’s calloused fingertips. He nuzzled the cut on the boy’s shoulder, and batted at him gently with his broad nose. The midnight valley fell silent as the sun slipped below the horizon and banished the pursuing shadow beasts until the sun could rise again.

  Kiarak’s voice was lead grating against stardust as he asked who the boy was. He asked why a boy who could tame the dark spirits of fairy horses was working such mundane tasks in the vault.

  “Why have you kept such talent withering and wasting with the dead?” His voice dropped like granite from a cliff.

  And, in a whirl of activity that overwhelmed Colin, his world changed once more. He rested his hand on the calmed horse until he was pried away, pulled backward by two of the soldiers.

  “Another idiot to amuse the Black Scourge,” one muttered, and Colin squeezed his eyes shut and moaned and beat his chest. The greasy warmth of the horse’s muzzle was gone from under his fingers, and the men held him too tightly in their grip. “With the war horses of all things,” the soldier said. “Put this pig in with the seed crop and then see what’ll happen.”

  But the other sniffed. “He’s harmless, that boy. Can’t even understand what’s going on around him.”

  He could, Colin thought. He just understood in a way the soldiers couldn’t. The world was different to him. Darkness and shadow and light, small things casting huge shadows that he didn’t care to look at.

  But the world lightened, then, like the dawn after a fading nightmare where one can only remember the sweat and the heartbeat and the fear. Colin was surrounded by roans and bays and war horses of all types. Fairy horses, stallions and mares, majestic greys and Arabians, Percherons stolen from murdered kings. One of the stable hands gave Colin a new broom, spider webs woven between its bristles, and a flask of water, and directions to the wheelbarrow and the curry combs.

  Colin’s eyes lit up at the princely rows of horses in their stalls. He breathed in the greasy smell of them, the stale air close around him like a familiar blanket. And he thought of the clank of his father’s hammer, and the sizzle of iron horseshoes plunging into water, and he felt a longing in his chest that he hadn’t felt for five years. And then he felt a depth of love and affection toward the blackest of hearts; for Kiarak, son of midnight dreams, had given to Colin everything he had ever wanted.

  Colin stayed up all that first night, brushing each horse until it gleamed like oil and ink, working steadily down the rows until morning, without a care for sleep or water or food. He swept the aisles and laid down the soft shavings and breathed in the sawdust until he choked on it.

  He didn’t notice the eyes gleaming in the dark, watching him, nor the glint of metal in the shadows. He didn’t notice anything but the elegant horses, their contented snuffles and the swishing of their tails. And it wasn’t until he reached the last empty stall, when he bent to touch the tattered cover of a book half-buried in hay, that the girl grabbed him from behind and held the sharp gleam of a knife to his throat.

  “If you try anything, we’ll kill you,” she said, and Colin said nothing, because he couldn’t speak. The sharp edge of the blade bit into his throat and he moaned a low sound, and after a moment the girl saw that he was different, and helpless, and she wondered what harm a boy like that could do, so she let go of his throat and sheathed the knife as he beat his fists against his frightened chest.

  The girl collapsed backward as Colin’s moans rose like the tide of an ocean. She sat in the empty last stall beside her blanket and her buried book, and she rocked back and forth with her hands clamped over her ears. But she didn’t look away from him, like the others did. She watched him with wondering eyes, and with sympathy, not pity nor disgust. Colin noticed this, as he noticed the little things that others missed. When his wailing stopped, the girl lowered her slender fingers and blinked at him with eyes the colour of lavender.

  “You were sold, weren’t you?” she said. Colin didn’t answer, but looked at the side of the stall. He tried to concentrate on the sound of a gelding stomping at a fly, the muttering of a bay as he tossed his head from side to side. “We know,” she continued. “We were sold too, to work in the stables.”

  Her voice was gentl
e now that the blade was gone. Colin wanted to ask her why she’d attacked him, but he couldn’t, so instead he ran his hand along the soft grain of the stall wall and was careful not to look at her.

  “There’s something wrong with us,” she said, and at first he thought she meant her and Colin, and maybe that was true. But she meant only herself. “The voices never stop,” she said, twisting her index finger against her temple. “It’s a curse from a gremlin, we think, on our mother’s firstborn. At least that’s what they said when they kicked her out of town. That’s what she told the lady in silver when she sold us. So now we look out for ourselves. You can’t trust anyone in the midnight valley.” She flashed a glance down the aisle, but the other stable hands were nowhere to be seen in the middle of the night. “We’re Alyx,” she told Colin, and then Alyx reached out her hand to him.

  Colin didn’t take it. But he did try very hard to meet her eyes with his.

  His gaze turned again to the small book beside her blanket, a rearing horse printed on the cover. Alyx saw his eyes fall upon the torn volume, and the guilt overwhelmed her. She lifted it gently in her hands.

  “Do you like to read?” she asked him. If he could answer, he would’ve told her he hadn’t learned how to read. But of course he couldn’t answer. So instead Alyx shuffled aside in the stall, and after a moment Colin sat beside her, his eyes fixed on the printed rearing horse and then on the stall wall.

  She opened the first page and began to read. And though he felt his mind drifting as she spoke of fairies and mares and knights galloping across valleys, Colin liked the rhythm of her voice. It was like the gentle clopping of the workhorse harnessed to his father’s wagon—clip clop, clip clop—or the whirring of the wheels spinning the pathway into musical gold. It was comforting in a way his own mother had never been, a warm blanket of sounds and cadence and words, and he felt a deep gratitude in his heart to her, and to the Black Scourge of the midnight valley for giving his world this gift.

  “Be quiet,” Alyx snapped suddenly, breaking the music of her reading in two. Colin startled, for he hadn’t said anything. “It’s us,” she explained to him. “She wants us to get the knife again. She doesn’t trust anyone. But we won’t listen to her, so it’s all right.”

  Another time, she stopped reading and began to cry, rocking as she had when he’d moaned. He matched her rhythm in the rocking, and she noticed him then, keeping pace with her. The motion calmed her, and her lavender eyes dried, and she picked up the book and read once more.

  “Maybe we’re a good pair,” Alyx said, when at last she finished many chapters. “The voices in our head never stop. And you never speak. There’s enough noise in here for the both of us.”

  And Colin liked Alyx well enough, and she liked him, for he wasn’t like the stable hands that looked at her with disgust or lecherous thoughts. He was harmless, for he couldn’t speak or think complexly enough to look at her like that. And what harm can a boy like that do?

  So they sat together for the rest of the evening and rubbed the saddles with oil and polished the bits until their fingers shriveled with dried soap and grimy leather. And the next day they rubbed down the horses and cleaned the stalls, and read together, and rocked and moaned and cried, and they did this for the next night and the next, until many years had passed and they were the closest of companions.

  Kiarak’s iron grip on the lands spread like a plague, and kingdom after kingdom fell. Outside the midnight valley and the dark towers of Colin’s world, the boldest of kings cried out in terror for a mercy that didn’t come. They shrieked and drowned in blood and horror, and the gold and penance came in, and the coffers filled with tribute. All fell to the warlord whose father was the fairy of midnight dreams. None could stand against his army or his might. All shook before him, except Colin, who loved him fiercely for the companionship of Alyx and the horses.

  Colin knew nothing of Kiarak’s black heart; not even when his own village fell, not even when that tavern went silent, its windows shattered and pounded by rain. Colin’s world was warmth and fur and cobwebs. It was straw and whinnies and barn cats that purred like the whirring of spokes. It was Alyx and spirited fairy horses, saddle soap and leather and polished bits and buckles.

  And it would’ve stayed that way, had Kiarak not welcomed a shadow rider, traveling with begrudging tribute on the back of a shadow beast from the west. He stayed and drank too much of the stardust draughts from the kitchen, and he leered at the lady in silver who had paid two gold coins to Colin’s father. He took the keys to the cells in the vault and he played merry tunes on the bars of the prisons as the men pleaded and reached for the iron keys to their freedom. He splashed kerosene about the hallways and lit the straw on fire and left the prisoners shrieking in the smoke, as the child who’d replaced Colin beat the flames out with the worn, patched apron tied round his waist.

  For, while the son of midnight dreams was dark indeed, even midnight comes in shades, and the darkest black can be darker still than the eye can see. Kiarak did not do such things, for his cruelty always had purpose. This was a rider of shadow beasts, and atrocity was his plaything.

  He wandered then to the stable, and he hobbled the mare in the first stall for sport. At the shriek of her agony, Colin leapt from the empty stall where he’d been paging through Alyx’s book. He didn’t panic at the sight of the shadow rider, for he’d seen many such terrors in his life and not recognized them as any darker than the midnight valley. He didn’t even worry when he saw Alyx hiding in the shadows, for he knew she was safe there. But then he saw the panic and the anguish on the mare’s face as she limped, and he began to moan in empathy and clench his hands into fists.

  The rider’s face twisted with delight, and he came at Colin to make sport of the boy, but Alyx and her knife tackled him from behind, and the shadow rider fell to the aisle where Colin’s broom had just swept away the straw and the cobwebs.

  The shadow lord grabbed the blade from Alyx and rolled on top of her, tossing the blade to the side of a nearby stall. He saw the beauty in her face as the others did, and he despised her for it, and the shades of dark swirled in his mind as he contemplated how best to destroy her. She saw the destruction in his eyes and she screamed, all of her voices at once, and Colin knew he must save her, but he didn’t know how. And so he moaned in great wails that spooked the fairy horses and sent them rearing in a calamity of braying and smashing and chaos. The whole world shook with the hundreds of hooves moved by Colin’s moans of terror, and he forced himself to unclench his fist and reach with shaking fingers for Alyx’s knife. He gripped the handle as the shadow rider laughed with delight, as he towered over Alyx and the slow-witted stable boy. He grabbed at Alyx’s neck and choked the screams from her, but the cacophony of hooves and moans brought the soldiers and Kiarak himself, bursting through the door, a manifest nightmare, his cape of stardust and midnight fluttering like the inky wings of a raven.

  Alyx and Colin looked to Kiarak as the soldiers grabbed the shadow rider and dragged him from the stable. Alyx cried bitterly, collapsed in upon herself with relief. And Colin beamed at the stable wall, with Kiarak just in his view. The warlord had saved him once more, just as he had freed him from the vaults and given him the horses and Alyx.

  Kiarak stepped forward and helped Alyx to her feet, and Colin’s heart glowed with light, and it took him several minutes to realize that the son of midnight dreams was beating her.

  And when he was done, Kiarak dropped her in the aisle, bloody and whimpering, for Alyx had put her safety first, and had not protected his prized war mare.

  Then Kiarak saw Colin staring with unfocused eyes and it grated against his patience. He stepped toward Colin and slapped the boy across the face with the back of his iron glove, and the sharpness of the metal was nothing to the sharp metal taste of blood that filled his mouth.

  “Stupid boy,” Kiarak spat, the words like flint sparking rock in a black desert cave. And he stalked out with his cape seeping starlight and uns
ettling dreams behind him.

  When dawn came, the shadow beast of the rider galloped across the mountains, its stirrups swinging, its saddle empty. The rider was swallowed by darkness and never found, not even a single shred, of which, it was whispered, there were many scattered about.

  And darker still was Colin’s confusion and betrayal, for these things were all too complex for a harmless boy like him to understand. He stood with one fist clenched, the other loose, fingers still wrapped around the blade of Alyx’s knife as she whimpered on his swept floor between the stalls. He looked at the blade as ideas and shadows and plots swirled in his troubled mind.

  After a time, after the other stable hands helped Alyx up and dabbed her wounds with stained cloths from the tack room, after they ladled warm water from the trough into her mouth, Colin finally forced himself to move, the knife still gleaming between his fingers. But when every chore was finished, he dropped the blade from his hand, for after all, what harm can a boy like that do?

  No monarch could stand against Kiarak and his black hearted army. All the kingdoms had fallen but one, on the other side of the isle of shadow beasts, and the troops marched onward, ready to take the last in the resistance. An elven prince had risen there to guide the foolish in a massacre waiting to happen, for none could stand against Kiarak.

  They still speak in that country of how Kiarak fell to the elven prince, how he fell to goodness and justice and the last spark of hope.

  They speak of how the warlord charged forward, iron blade gripped in iron glove, and how the girth of his saddle snapped and dropped him to the feet of the army, how they surrounded him with spears, his cape spread out like a midnight of glittering stars.