Shadowlands (9781101597637)

by Malan, Violette

  “Warmer than I thought,” I said. The last thing I needed was for anyone else to touch me just now. Relieved that I seemed to be okay, the woman nodded and descended the staircase behind me, heading for the door and the street. The sweat on my forehead had dried, the trembling had stopped, and the latticed tiles had stopped moving. I tucked my bag more firmly under my arm and turned toward the broad alcove, twelve feet away, where I could see the brass doors of the three elevators. Whoever designed this hotel really liked brass, was the useless thought that floated through my mind. Must be a bugger to keep polished.

  There was another woman standing in front of the bank of elevators. She was taller than me, and much slimmer, but without being one of las flacas. She had very fair coloring. She was wearing a pair of narrow black slacks, strappy silver sandals, and a tapered blood-red blouse with cap sleeves. I was intrigued because I couldn’t actually tell what the materials were. I began to have a bad feeling.

  She shot me a glance and looked forward again so abruptly that I actually looked behind me to see what had unnerved her. The corridor that stretched out from this side of the elevator lobby was empty. Then I saw that her eyes were flicking from corner to corner, as if she were trying to see everywhere at once. Agoraphobic? I wondered. Or just paranoid? It was then I noticed she hadn’t pushed the button for the elevator, so I leaned forward and did it myself, careful not to get any closer to her. I could smell the scent she was wearing, something floral but very light and airy. She looked from me to the button and back again.

  “This operates the mechanism,” she said, as though it were a statement and not a question.

  I nodded, as if this was the kind of thing adults in the twenty-first century said in front of elevators all the time. That vise was starting to squeeze my chest again. She was tall, beautiful, with impossibly flawless skin and coloring, and dressed in materials I’d never seen before. There was one fairly obvious conclusion, but I thought a supermodel would likely know an elevator when she saw one.

  I figured I didn’t have to touch the woman to know she wasn’t one—a woman that is. The real question was, Rider or Hound? And if Rider, good guy or bad? Either way, we were probably headed for the same place. And that meant I had to know.

  I gritted my teeth and brushed her with my fingertips on the bare arm, just above her elbow, bracing myself for the expected wave of images. [Manticore; three Riders Singing, one from each Ward; gray-eyed Dragon with honey-gold hair; a Moonward Phoenix; a man in a window seat, staring at the clouds; a room that disappeared; a terrible loss, a Griffin, gone and took her heart with it; a child, growing inside her, wrapped with a ribbon of dra’aj; Manticore.] Oh. [She had once horribly betrayed her sister, and been forgiven; she was very curious about books and reading, since Riders had neither; she’d had a dog named Hilt when she was a child.] She was excited about being in the Shadowlands, and she was looking for the Horn [a tiny flute, made of bone, Dragon or maybe Griffin] this was her chance to really show what she could do [she had a jeweled pin someone named Lightborn had given her tucked on the inside of her collar] She preferred her sister’s colors to those of the Basilisk Prince.

  She was no danger to Wolf; she just needed to tell him something the three Singers had told her. I could feel my pulse slowing down again.

  I pointed at the buttons. “This one if you want to go up,” I said, indicating the one I’d pushed. “And the other if you want to go down.” I kept my tone as neutral as my still tight throat would let me.

  “So, not the direction the mechanism needs to travel to reach me?”

  “Well, no.” I hadn’t even thought of that. “You’re not likely to be sure where the, uh, the elevator is.”

  The elevator came at that moment, and I entered the car to show her how it was done. She came in after me, looking around her now with curiosity more than anything else. I touched the floor button and looked up at her. “Which floor?”

  She had been watching me, and had seen how the button I’d touched had lit up. She reached out and touched the “8,” pulling her hand back sharply when it, too, lit up. That seemed to disprove my theory.

  “You wanted the eighth floor?”

  “No,” she said. “I wished to see whether the light would appear for me or only for…” she licked her lips and fell silent.

  “Only for humans,” I finished for her.

  This time she looked at me closely, studying my face. Again, there was no fear, no worry in her eyes, just curiosity. I was reminded of a friend Alejandro used to play chess with in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, on summer evenings. Alberto would study the chessboard, calculating the possible moves, in just the dispassionate way the Rider was studying me.

  “I’m Valory Martin,” I said. “I’m the fara’ip of Graycloud at Moonrise. The High Prince of the People has named me a friend.”

  A light went on in her face as she smiled. “You know my sister? She has mentioned you to me, a Truthreader. I am Walks Under the Moon, my mother was Clear of Light, and the Manticore guides me.”

  Now that I knew, I thought I could see a resemblance. Walks Under the Moon’s face was a little less oval than her sister’s, more heart-shaped, and her coloring was a different shade, though she was still clearly Starward. Their eyes, though, were identically gray.

  “You’re looking for Stormwolf?”

  “You also?” She gave me a look then that it took me a minute to recognize. She was smiling, and looked me up and down as though she’d known me my whole life. My eyebrows shot up when I realized what she was doing. She thought I was interested in Wolf, and was checking me out—not like his wife or girlfriend would, more like a sister. I wondered what my sudden blush was telling her.

  “You may call me Moon,” she finally said. Evidently I had passed some test. “Wolf is my fara’ip.”

  The elevator finally came to a halt on the top floor, and I gestured for her to leave first. “The person nearest the door should get out first, though you’ll find some older men will let you precede them, even though they’re closer.” It seemed strange to be passing along the same bits of instruction Alejandro had been giving to me not so long before.

  Moon went directly to Wolf’s door and placed her hand on it. “He is within,” she said, and used the dragon-shaped knocker while I had my hand half outstretched to stop her. Suddenly I wasn’t as sure I wanted to speak to him as I had been back in my dining room. Was it the encounter with the Hound that had me second-guessing, or was it the presence of his fara’ip?

  For half a minute I thought Moon must be wrong, but then the door opened. Wolf looked straight at me, as if there was no one else there, and I swallowed, feeling a sudden warmth blossoming in my chest. But it was very quickly followed by a chill, as something I’d read from the Hound on the street fell into place. I immediately pushed past him into the suite, without waiting to see how he and Moon would greet each other. I went all the way into the sitting room, and to the far wall, but then found I was too nervous to stand by the windows. I crossed my arms, hugging myself, and came back far enough to stand with my back to the fireplace. Cold now, but somehow comforting in its solidity.

  At least, it was comforting until I thought about what could come down the chimney. I sidled away. I looked up to find both Wolf and Moon watching me, the identical quizzical expression on their faces. If it wasn’t for the differences in coloring, they might at that moment have been real siblings.

  “Did you get my message?” Wolf asked. He held his hand up to his face as if he was holding a phone. “We left you one, Nik Polihronidis and I. He is a very brave man.”

  Nik and Wolf together? I started to reach into my bag, but stopped. Not much point in checking messages now.

  “Your brother is looking for you,” I said before I could consider whether or not I should.

  Wolf was naturally pale, like any Moonward Rider I would guess, but now his almond skin went so white the faint scars around his eye stood out. Moon took a step to one side and looked
at him, brows drawn together, mouth twisted in a frown. Clearly this was news to her, and I wondered whether I should have kept quiet. The shock of the realization had just been too much. Not only had Wolf been a Hound himself, but his brother had been part of his Pack—was still part of it.

  “Where did you encounter him?”

  “Outside.” I gestured at the window with a hand that had, maybe, started to shake again. “He doesn’t know you’re in here, which I guess is lucky, huh? Only that you’ve been seen here.”

  Wolf lowered himself onto the front edge of a wing-backed chair. “If you touch me,” he said, looking up at me, and holding out his hand, “it will save me from having to explain.” Part of me realized that no one else beside Alejandro ever knowingly volunteered to be touched by my talent, and the implication of absolute trust would probably have frightened me a little, if another part of me hadn’t been so pissed off.

  “But it won’t save me.” I could hear the harshness in my voice and cleared my throat. “I’d still have to explain it to Moon, here, wouldn’t I? So why don’t you go ahead? Cut out the middle man?” Why should I make it easier for him?

  Moon looked at me with narrowed eyes, and then she transferred the look to Wolf without change. She didn’t know what was going on, and she was reserving judgment until she did.

  Wolf sat a few minutes longer with his head in his hands. Long enough that I wondered if I would have to touch him after all. Finally, he raised his head.

  “As Valory says, I have a brother. And, as she knows but does not say, he is among the Hunt.” Moon made a strange noise and Wolf cleared his throat, sat up straighter, and rubbed his hands along his thighs. “He may be Pack Leader now. Now that I am no longer there.”

  “Your brother. You have a brother.” Moon’s voice was as thin as Wolf’s had been. Apparently, this news wasn’t sitting well with any of us.

  “Why have you not spoken of this? Does the High Prince know?”

  “Which of us can say what the High Prince knows and does not know.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “By which he means no, at least, he never told her.” I rolled my eyes and sat down on the edge of the hearth, realized what I’d done, and moved to the other chair. Moon came and sat on the arm of it. The easy intimacy of that didn’t strike me until later. At the time, all I felt was that she and I were on the same side.

  “It is not quite as simple as that.” Wolf’s tone had hardened, his eyes flicking back and forth between us. He wasn’t defensive, he wasn’t pleading.

  “It never is,” I said to Moon, out of the side of my mouth. I regretted it almost immediately. After all, I was the one who was making him tell the tale, and snarkiness was uncalled for, not matter how irritated I was. “Sorry,” I said. “I know this isn’t easy for you, but honestly, it’s not easy for any of us.”

  He inclined his head once, in a sort of bow. “It is not so much that I wished to hide the facts of my life with the Hunt, as it is that I wished to forget them. I did all that I could to put them from me. But memories are not old shoes, to be cast away when desired…” He spread his hands out as if he wanted to grasp something. “When we were with Honor of Souls,” he said, speaking directly to Moon, “the Hunt no longer seemed part of my life. I remembered being a Hound but not the way I remembered the fight on the Stone of Virtue, the transformation of the High Prince, and my fostering with you, Moon.”

  “You seemed then to be someone awakening from a dream.” From her tone, Moon was thinking back.

  “A nightmare, more like. It is more as though my life in the Hunt had happened to someone else.” He gestured at the window, in the direction of Union Station. “All this world is familiar to me. I have been here as a Hound, Hunting the Prince Guardian when he was in Exile. But I feel rather as though I know it from a Song I once knew well.”

  “So you felt that you no longer had a brother?” I could tell Moon was trying not to judge, and maybe finding it harder than she hoped. Something lay behind that, I thought. She had a sister herself, whom it was obvious she loved very much. Was it as simple as that? She couldn’t understand how Wolf could set aside thoughts and memories of his brother.

  With a shock that made me blink, I realized that I could have a brother, too, or a sister, and not even know it.

  Wolf was shaking his head. “No. I remembered Foxblood. But I could not remember whether he had returned to the Lands with me. When the High Prince set me this task, I was looking for him…” His voiced died away.

  “While you were looking for everyone else,” I said.

  Without raising his head, Wolf looked from me to Moon and back again. She was close enough to me that I could smell her floral scent, feel the warmth from her body. If I moved a fraction of an inch, I could touch her.

  “I did not shirk my task,” he said, and I believed him. “But I did hope to find my brother. To undo what I did to him.”

  “You made him a Hound.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. Moon leaned away from me, but only to see me better without moving from the arm of the chair. “When I touched Foxblood just now,” I said. “Out on the street. That’s part of what I saw, what I read from him. He follows you. He’s always followed you.” I pressed my hands together, palm to palm, lifted them to tap my fingers against my lips. “He thought you were stuck on the other side of the Portal. Now that he knows differently—is there someone named Running River? River Current?—now he’s trying to find you.”

  Wolf shuddered and buried his face in his hands. Moon looked at me, and I nodded. She rose and, kneeling beside him, took him into her arms. He allowed it, I saw, but he didn’t relax into her. No way was he letting himself off the hook.

  Moon swung her head to look at me. “Would you do what you require? Would you touch him to see if he has kept anything more from us?”

  “That’s a tall order,” I said. “There might be all kinds of things about himself he hasn’t told us. Perfectly innocent things.” But a change of direction often helps to put things in perspective, I thought and, mindful of what I was doing there in the first place, I thought I had the perfect distraction. “I’m not here by chance. Three of the People you’ve found here were also visited by Hounds. Nighthawk thought you might be involved somehow, if only by accident. The High Prince asked him to bring you back to her.”

  “He said he would not.” Moon was on her feet. “He said he would…three People?” She looked as though she needed to sit down.

  “He was looking for more evidence?” I nodded. “And he thought he found some, that’s why he told her. He knows better now, but—”

  “She asked for this? She believed I led the Hunt to her People?”

  Moon and I looked at each other, and I can only think that my face must have shown the same distress that hers did, maybe more, since I knew just how deep the despair we’d heard in his voice ran. And there was just the touch, just a vibration of anger. After all he’d done for her—that’s what he must have been thinking.

  “She wanted you to be safe,” I said. “She did think it was possible that the Hunt has just been following you without your being aware of it,” I added.

  “Impossible,” he said, with an abrupt stroke of his hand. “I would have scented them. Hounds are always…” His voice faded away.

  “But you’re no longer a Hound.” Moon’s voice was gentle. “You’re a Rider now, and they could not prey upon us, if they were not able to pursue us.”

  Wolf was nodding, but almost as if he didn’t want to believe it.

  I thought it was time to interrupt again. “The point is, Hawk still thinks you should go back, and I thought…” I swallowed. “I thought you might have other ideas.”

  “You could return with me,” Moon suggested. “We could go directly to my sister.”

  “Is this why you came? To arrest me more sweetly than Nighthawk could do?”

  Moon got to her feet, leaving Wolf alone in his chair, and crossed to the far side of the fireplace
. Her lips were pressed tight, and her hand was touching the pin she had in her collar. I rolled my eyes. Typical. Here we were trying to help him and, somehow, all this was our fault.

  “I came to ask if you could remember anything about the Horn.” The tightness of Moon’s voice showed that her thinking had been much the same as mine. “The High Prince has tasked me with finding it, or making a new one.”

  Wolf sat up straighter, drawing his sloe-black eyebrows together.

  “The Horn? She would use it? Then I will not be able to help them, to offer them the chance of the cure I was given.”

  Had forced on him was a more accurate description, I thought, but he was happy about it now, so maybe that wasn’t as big a distinction as I thought.

  “But do you not see how having the Horn would help you in your plan?” Moon’s gray eyes sparkled. They were on the same side again. “I have researched the Songs that speak of the artifact, and have only one clue that may be useful. A fragment of Song. It is a mountain I search for, or a range of mountains. ‘Born of Ice Tor, the caller of the Hunt’ is how one fragment has it. I wondered,” here, her voice softened, “I wondered whether you might know, might remember, some Song from before the time you were a Hound, that might give me some further clue.”

  Wolf was shaking his head. “I believe I might have been a Singer, that is true. But of what I Sang…” he shook his head.

  “Just a minute.” I got to my feet. “You want to know where Ice Tor is, is that it? And you think Wolf might have known, once upon a time?” Moon nodded, watching me. As soon as I was close enough, I took a firm grip on his forearm, just below his rolled sleeve. His skin was wonderfully warm. [A lyre made from living Wood and gra’if and the hair of a Water Sprite; a Starward Rider, impossibly old, listening to him Sing; a new tune, but an old Song.]

  “From the Quartz Ring,” I said. “Across the Moor of Ravens, beyond the Sea of Ma’arban.” I hoped I was pronouncing it right. “That is where Ice Tor dwells.”