Shadowcloaks

by Benjamin Hewett

  She looks out the window as if startled by some noise, even though there is none. The world is quiet. Her eyes scan the horizon, not stopping on me as they sweep back and forth. At this time in the morning the sun drives through the kitchen window like a river of fire, making the rooftops and anyone on them indiscernible.

  She is wearing one of Carmen’s dresses. The nice one. The one Carmen always wore to The Black Cat, because she knew I’d be up in the rafters watching her, because it set her hair on fire and drowned out the other women in the room. It was the dress she wore for me.

  It fits Red well, and the audacity of it burns my soul. Who does she think she is? Living in my house, wearing Carmen’s clothes, stealing our dreams? I feel the heat in my face and the anger in my bones, a fever I haven’t felt in years. I lower myself backward off the rooftop, dropping toward my destiny, the ring absorbing most of the impact. They don’t know I’m coming.

  Red doesn’t stand when I come in, doesn’t shift posture. Her eyes widen just a hair, just now processing the furtive opening of a well-greased door and my whisper-quiet steps on the stairs. She projects the image of a young, inexperienced apprentice who has never run bare-bladed across a rooftop or felt the burn of ragged breath as the thief-takers close in. But I know she is dangerous.

  For one thing, she isn’t surprised enough. She doesn’t try to sound an alarm, though she seems to be alone in my house. She sits at the table, legs spread, one propped up by the tall stool I kept by the fire. Her other leg is folded at the knee, resting peacefully under the table.

  For two, she is confident. “Mr. Steeps,” she says quietly.

  Glittering green eyes. Eyes like Carmen’s. Her face speaks volumes in confidence, though there is nobody else in the room. It doesn’t matter that I’m wearing my ring. This young face has been weaned on deception. She knows things that I do not. My anger dribbles away. I cannot win this encounter.

  I could go. I could dive down the staircase, find Lucinda, and come up with a better plan, but something holds me in place. Red knows. This barely-more-than-a-girl knows where Carmen is.

  “Where is she?” I ask. “Where is my wife?”

  “Mr. Steeps,” she says again, clucking her tongue. “It’s nice to see you again.” Up close, it’s easy to see that she’s grown in the last four months. Her hips are wider than I remember, and her black vest and chemise are properly cut for movement and fluidity. There’s also a hard look in her eye that wasn’t there before, but she’s trying to hide it.

  Despite all the confidence, she still seems like a girl waiting to be asked to a dance, a younger version of Carmen but with straight hair instead of curly. This must be why the Nightshades chose her. The resemblance is infuriating.

  This isn’t what I had expected. I’d expected traps and flying darts, and hell breaking from its moorings. Dancing my way to victory on a cloud of righteous anger to throw open the door to Carmen’s prison. Not this. Not Springtide and maidens.

  Red just sits and watches me with cautious interest.

  I wait for the ‘Shades coming up the steps behind me, the falling nets, or ropes thrown around my neck, but nothing happens. Are the Nightshades just lazier than Sanjuste? So confident of their training that they send a yearling to take me?

  No. Red is here and Carmen is not. This is a trap, but one I don’t yet understand. It’s a trap she thinks she can spring without any advance notice from her friends in the city. Her confidence scares me more than I care to admit. It’s as if I’m still in the jail cell down by the lower market and she’s still trying to figure out what to do with me.

  Silence.

  I shift from one foot to another.

  “Where’s your mistress?” Red says finally. “The one with the long legs and the golden hair. Jimmy got a pigeon saying you’d been spotted together in Vale-and-Baths. Gods, you two move fast!”

  “She’s not here,” I say. “This is personal.”

  “I know she’s here.”

  “I asked you first. Where’s my wife?” I brandish the flat knot of Carmen’s hair from beneath my shirt. “What have you done with her?”

  “She’s dead. Ragus killed her.”

  She says it softly, her face flashing to sorrow with the speed of a practiced con-artist. “I tried to hold them back. She was a nice woman. But they made me watch. I hear her screams at night.” Her sorrow looks so real it makes me burn inside. How dare she!

  I flame across the room, knife aimed for her heart, a falling star in its final descent. There is thunder in my ears and smoke in my nose.

  The world will burn.

  I see the dust motes in the early morning sun, smell something else that I don’t recognize, see smoke rising from Red’s shoulders.

  She doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t hold her knife at the level of my eye. If anything, she sticks her chest out, making a target of her heart. “Kill me,” she says. “I deserve to die.”

  Yet my knife slows as it nears the target. My arm, my body, and my weapon all stuck like a fly in amber. I pull backward, trying to roll away, and I tumble to the floor. I try again, this time slicing instead of stabbing. I get closer, but it’s like running in a dream. With a little effort I think could push through the resistance, but Red does not wait for me to push through. Her lip curls and she casually side-steps, putting a hand gently on my cheek as she does so, feeling the hair that falls past my ear.

  I smell Carmen’s smell, lavender and prairie sage.

  “We can avenge her,” she says quietly.

  “I’m trying to,” I growl, taking another swipe at her. My hand stops again, caught by invisible amber. “Dammit!”

  Red laughs, patting my cheek again.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I gasp, panting. “What are you doing?”

  “The old man taught you nothing?”

  “He taught me traps by selling them to Ector’s rich.”

  “Typical,” she says, sidestepping me again.

  “He poisoned my friends for the fun of teaching antidotes.”

  “Of course.”

  “He taught me balance by his gait in the street and in the bar after drinks.”

  This time Red grabs my wrist, pulls me in so close that I can smell her breath and her perfume. She whispers in my ear, ignoring my anger. “He didn’t teach you the oaths, did he?” she says. “Didn’t teach you the . . . rules.” She blows hot air in my ear and pushes me away. The dance begins again with me attacking, finding nothing with my knife but air as thick as shipping tar.

  “Rules?” I growl, taking another futile swipe at her.

  “You’re a Nightshade, Mr. Steeps. You wear the ring. So you can’t just waltz into my home and kill me. Not even your beautiful, brand-new ring is going to work against house magic. There are rules.”

  “It’s my home, not yours.” I stab at her thigh. A Sodoroff ring might have punch through, but I gave the Sodoroff to Father Loring for safekeeping. Whatever protection she had is slowly fading. “And I haven’t taken any oaths.” I say, trying to maneuver into position again.

  She doesn’t look quite as confident as she did a moment ago. She slips sideways this time, keeping a little more distance. “You don’t have to go to the black altar to make your Oaths, Mr. Steeps. You just have to wear the ring. The Oaths find us all eventually.”

  This time my knife nicks her cheek, turned aside at the last moment.

  “And a ‘Shade. Can’t. Kill. Another. ‘Shade.” Red kicks me in the chest this time. The thunder of it knocks the dagger from my hand and throws me backward across the room. She follows like an earthquake, filled with inexplicable power. “Not in her own home.”

  My mind races. House magic, she said. I don’t know a sod-rusted queenpence about house magic.

  Remember Archus.

  I remember. I remember . . .

  Archus gasping on the floor of the Black Cat, clutching his throat, his dread-magic fading.

  “Thomas . . . step aside.”

&
nbsp; Tom towers over him, cruel and mighty.

  “My home,” he whispers, smiling.

  Whatever it is Tom did, Red has done the same.

  “But this is my house!” I scream.

  She grins down at me, planting a knee on my chest, fine, stringy, red hair framing her face and tickling mine. She’s been living here for months. Even if she hadn’t found Carmen she would have come here. That’s part of the trap, I see, the part that protects her from my blade. From any Nightshade’s blade. An assassin is safest in her own home.

  Her fingernails dig into the back of my neck as her hands close around my throat. “You wear the ring but you don’t know the Oaths.”

  “Then tell me,” I gasp. “I want to know why I’m dying.” The pinpricks of light start as she pushes her thumbs across my windpipe.

  Red is gleeful, ignoring my question. “They said he trained you. They said you’d be the best, the liars!”

  She’s not giving my throat her full attention. I take the opportunity to suck down burning air.

  “But he didn’t. He made you for me, and nobody else knows it.”

  It’s hard to understand her, and even harder to talk. “Who?” I gasp.

  “My father.”

  I can hear laughter in my head as I pass out. Tom’s laughter. Or hers. I can’t tell.

  She is Tom’s daughter. She is the daughter of a Dreadlord.

  #

  When I wake up I can’t move. I feel the pulse of the room around me, and this amplifies as she approaches. Thunderous and sweet. My hair stands of its own accord, radiates from my scalp like a giant dandelion-head. Her hair is unnaturally still, bending inward toward her body instead of hanging limply as it was doing when I passed out. Red caresses my face, touches my bare arms, hands drifting.

  “Stop,” I cough.

  “Or what?”

  My face burns. I try to shove her away but I’m weak. My arms are so weak. All that strength from my ring is just out of reach, all my speed gone.

  Time still slows as she bends toward me. “Or what?” she repeats.

  I can feel power coursing through me, but I can’t touch it because it’s going all to Red. There’s a throbbing in my head as well, and it’s growing. Like the buzz I feel around traps but so much stronger, so much more present. So loud it must be coming from inside my own head.

  “What are you doing to me?”

  She smiles. I feel cold hands warming against my burning skin. I see her hairs flattening against her head, plastering against her face and neck, sticking to her as much as mine are floating in an unseen lake.

  The throbbing in my head is the beating of her heart, the pounding of earth beneath and sky above.

  Red sees my eyes go wide.

  “You’re a magii,” I say.

  She bends low, breath hot on my ear. “Then where’s my better half?”

  It is too easy to know, now, too easy to see what I’ve been missing all these months.

  Why can I hear buzzing in the locked and dusty armoire?

  I am magii.

  How do I sense the traps not built of metal, tubes, and springs?

  I am magii.

  Where did I learn to sniff out magii in the belly of a ship?

  I didn’t learn. I’ve always been magii.

  “No.” Red shakes her head, as if reading my mind somehow. “You’re not magii. We’re magii. It takes two.”

  I struggle, trying to shake her off, but she’s as heavy now as Lucinda’s horse, while my body wants to float away, as light and weak as a child’s.

  The earth and sky beg me, show to me their hidden rivers. Without thinking I gulp power in, filling the empty spaces between Red and me. I feel a shock like the one I felt outside. Then another. Small trails of lightning leap from her fingertips back into my body.

  “Carmen,” I whisper.

  “. . . is dead,” Red whispers. “Let her go.”

  I can feel my sanity breaking into lightning shards around me.

  Carmen is dead. It must be true.

  Something inside me stretches out, the world blurs, and I catch hints of everything that Red is. Loneliness. Desire. Emotion.

  Emotion gives way to memory.

  The small, dark room is prowling with shadows. It is late and there is someone nearby, though I can’t make out a face. I see a small, black cloak, inexpertly sewn, hanging over a tiny, pale arm. I hear the whisper of a child’s voice.

  “. . . made it for you, Rose! It will help you hide when you get bigger, so you can come visit me.”

  I force my eyes open.

  There is an ache in Red’s face. Her eyes are closed, lips parted, hands hot against my chest, as she listens to my own memories, and not ones I want to share. “Oh,” she whispers.

  I know her name through her thoughts. It crashes down on me from a hundred different memories, as if this is something Red has wanted to tell me ever since she stopped by my prison cell. Rose.

  “You called me Red,” she whispers, my own name for her ringing in her head as our worlds collide in chaos and brilliance.

  The thunder has to go somewhere. A halo of lightning forms around Red’s brow, circling her head and flattened hair. With each second it grows brighter and thicker. We’re going to blow the windows out. The rooftop. The world.

  As if in answer, the back door shudders downstairs, and the bar jumps. Rose must have . . .

  Red. I force myself to use her old name. Need to use her old name.

  No you don’t.

  When I look at her now, I see Carmen.

  Dammit, Pan. Help me! I don’t want to lose my soul to a Nightshade. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life pretending this woman is Carmen.

  As always, Pan is silent.

  Again something collides with the door downstairs. The bar jumps and rattles. Rose must have locked the door after I passed out.

  “Teacup!” Lucinda screams. “Teacup, they’re going to kill you.” Her voice is frantic.

  No, they’re not, I think slowly.

  No, I’m not, Red thinks, just as slowly.

  I feel as drunk as Markel on a Deepwinter’s Eve, and see that same look reflected in Red’s eyes.

  Just beyond the brilliant halo something moves, shadowy and snakelike. It lurches from my old bedroom. I know it is just one thing, but I see it twice because I see it from Red’s eyes, too, as she turns to look at the creature.

  The entire world tilts, overlapped and drunken, doubling. It wobbles and dances between my view and Rose’s. It takes me longer than it should to sort the images into a mental picture. A man. He is tall, with a bent nose and black, hooded cloak like Tom’s. He is very pale, and his presence dampens the magic flowing through me, brings the world back into focus just a little.

  This slithering man cocks his head. “He brought a Paladin!”

  “She’s . . . just . . . barmaid,” Rose says, her speech slow and slurred. “Nothing . . . worry about.”

  Just a barmaid, my sluggish mind echoes. Nothing to worry about.

  “Nothing to worry about?” His lips curl and his eyes rip into Red. “With a white scar where my brother struck her? A woman who kills like a man with twice her years? A woman whose prayers breathe life into those around her? And you think she’s nothing to worry about? She’s no barmaid. If she moves like the thunder, then she’s a Paladin.”

  “Woodman. Manhawk. Hawkman. Hawkwood.” I mutter feverishly. I know I’m not making any sense, but I can’t help myself.

  The man tries to ignore me, though his head jerks a little when I say “Hawkwood.” He certainly looks like Hawkwood, thin and gaunt with the nose and dark eyes, but that traitor is dead.

  “Your time has passed,” he hisses at Red, urging her. “Do it now!” He licks his lips with a skinny tongue. “This is what we kept you for, why we fed you and taught you. Half the magii, the lodestone to draw him to us. Now prove yourself. Prove to us that we made no mistake.”

  He gestures to me, pinned beneath her.
“One knife, one target. Finish it,” he snarls, “and the two become one. He’ll make you free from us forever, and you’ll both be happier.”

  Rose is drunk with hope and power. I can see her green eyes amid the storm, hear her thoughts begging me for favor. Her lips quiver, trying to hold in this prayer. She knows killing me won’t make her free.

  Lucinda hits the door again. The bar jumps and doesn’t fall properly. It won’t hold her, but it will hold long enough. And then there will be two Dreadlords waiting for her.

  The black shadow hovers just outside the circle, whispering poison. “You don’t have to hurt him, Rose. Just a little knick, like I taught you. Drink up his soul, bind it to you forever. He will serve you, then. He will enjoy it.” His words twist and drip.

  Rose ignores him. It doesn’t have to be this way, her mind whispers to me. I’ve seen your memories. I’ve seen your magii friends in the mountains. We could run together. We could feel everything together. Build. Destroy. Build and build again. Alone together. They’d never find us.

  Part of me—all of me—wants to believe her. This connection is intimate and intoxicating. I feel more alive than I have in months, drawing power through the doors of earth and sky for her.

  But . . . there is something else hidden in my core. Something precious. A face that coaxed me down from the center post of the Black Cat. If I fall now, if I forget, then that forgotten part will haunt me for the rest of my life. It will always be looking for the woman who held me in place with tales of baste and tack, warp and weft, edge stitch and bias. A woman whose fiery, red hair couldn’t be flattened by magic, and whose magic was the peaceful sort: a well-sewn seam, and a soft hand in mine.

  As beautiful and triumphant as Rose is now, as much as she wants to be Carmen, she isn’t. Carmen, pulling me toward the dart board, wild, red hair falling about her shoulders like untamed wisteria. Carmen, reminding me what it means to want something, what it means to be loved and understood. All the power in the world can’t make Rose into Carmen.

  As I fight to hold that image, I suddenly see Carmen in Rose’s mind, chained and caged somewhere in the city. She isn’t dead.