Shadow Mage

by Sarah McCarthy

  Agnes was watching her sharply. “Weird for you, too, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Must be hard for you. I mean, I at least already knew how to sew. You have like, no useful skills now.”

  Sarai rolled her eyes. “I can still kill people.”

  “Right. And pick locks, and climb things, and pickpocket. That’s going to come up all the time as we go back to subsistence farming here.”

  Sarai laughed.

  “Honestly it doesn’t even matter, we’re going to have to spend all our time carrying water, anyway,” Agnes added. “But I get it. I don’t want to leave either.” In the corner, Payl curled up happily on a cushion, her body wrapped around the remaining half of her pastry.

  “What about Kel?” Sarai asked. She hadn’t seen the strange girl since the day of the ritual.

  Agnes shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone’s seen her.

  “Do you think she still has her powers?” Sarai couldn’t imagine anything affecting her. There was something untouchable about her.

  “No idea…” Agnes swooped down to Sarai’s left ankle and did a quick couple of stitches, then jabbed her with a pin again.

  “Ow, come on, Agnes.”

  “You brought this on yourself,” Agnes muttered, not looking up.

  Sarai sighed. There was clearly going to be a lot of this in her future. Surprisingly, it wasn’t an unpleasant thought.

  67

  Finn

  It was a warm, rainy morning. Strange, Finn thought, standing out in the rain, watching the Baron double check his saddle and tack. Everything seemed back to normal, but back to an old normal, before he turned sixteen, before he found out what he was, before any of this had happened.

  The Baron finished, readjusted his cloak, and turned, extending his hand to Finn.

  “Well, it’s been interesting, that’s for sure,” the Baron said.

  Finn shook his hand. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Uninvited as I was. Sorry again about the whole… assassination thing.”

  “The—what?”

  “Oh,” the Baron looked flustered. “I just assumed the girl would have… well, er…” He adjusted his paunch over his belt.

  “You’re the one who hired Sarai?”

  “Sarai. That’s her name. Yes.”

  “Why?” It was all Finn could think to ask.

  “Oh, you know, I planned to set up my own operation. Magic seemed quite useful to my trading ventures. I planned to get you out of the way, poach your best people… that sort of thing.” He looked down at the ground.

  “Well… I…” Finn really didn’t know what to say, but the man seemed to feel genuinely bad about it. “I mean, it turned out fine. More than fine, actually; she was exactly what we needed, and I’d been meaning to… well anyway it was fine.”

  “Well, thank you, that’s kind of you to say. I hope this won’t, er, sour any future business dealings we might have. Now that you all are staying and you’re…”

  Oh. Running a new town. That’s why he was apologizing.

  “I’m sure that, with our history, you’ll give us a good discount,” Finn said, pausing to let his words sink in. The Baron’s face fell.

  “No, no, of course. Least I could do. Considering.”

  They stood in awkward silence for a few seconds.

  “Well,” the Baron said, adjusting his belt and reaching a hand up onto the saddle. “I’d better be on my way.” He glanced up at the dark, rainy skies. “Looks like it’ll be getting dark early tonight.”

  “Have a safe trip,” Finn said. If the man ever came back it would be too soon.

  Thunder rumbled overhead, and Finn stood with his hands thrust in his pockets, watching the man ride jauntily off.

  68

  Kel

  A marmot whistled, the sound echoing off the rocks.

  It’s all right, I’m not a threat, she said, and felt its blustering confusion as it watched her move farther up the valley, in between the two sharp peaks.

  She had to stop and rest every few minutes. Her magic was there, she could feel it again, but it was so weak. It came and went and depleted quickly. She tried to take it as a hopeful sign that it was there at all. It would get better. Another—very tiny—part of her, though, thought it might be easier if it didn’t.

  She shook her worries from her mind as at last she arrived at her destination.

  The graveyard was small, filled with moss and flowering heather. The headstones were weather-beaten granite.

  She found the two newest headstones and cleared a space beside them. Shifting the earth aside, she gently lowered Illiam down beside his parents.

  She crouched there, looking down at him in silence for a few moments, remembering what she had seen in his last few moments. He’d had a hard, lonely life. And then he’d made choices that had made it harder. She wished she hadn’t had to kill him. She wished she’d been able to talk to him, help him see that he didn’t need to be the hero of some story to be happy, or worthy, or good.

  “I’m sorry you never got what you really needed,” Kel said, as she smoothed the earth back over the top.

  You have too much sympathy, Smoke muttered from her pocket.

  It wasn’t sympathy, though. It was more than that. Kel picked up a handful of cold earth and let it trickle out of her fingers. She thought of all the things she’d grown in the past ten years, all the things she’d made, all the work she’d done trying to avoid causing harm to anything. At some point, she realized, she was always going to have to choose. Sometimes avoiding causing harm to one thing was just going to cause worse harm to another. She wasn’t sure she was ready to make those choices, even though she’d just done it. In a way, she was grateful to Illiam, for forcing her to see what she’d needed to accept.

  She carved a headstone for him to match those of his parents. She wrote his name, and then considered what to write underneath. She thought about what he would have wanted. He would have seen himself as a tragic hero, dying to protect others. Part of her wanted to write that, just so he could have his happy ending. But it wasn’t true, and that wasn’t fair to the people who might look at this stone in the future.

  She could write that the way he imagined the world to be had kept him safe from it but also destroyed any chance at happiness he might have had and also harmed or killed many others.

  But that felt too bitter. Hiding from the world was understandable, in many ways. It was a difficult and painful place sometimes. Maybe often.

  In the end, she left it blank. Only his name carved into grey stone.

  She scattered seeds across the broken earth and white, three-petaled trillium sprouted and bloomed.

  The wind lifted, whistling through the stones, bending the leaves and petals and making the hairs on her arms stand up in the sudden cold.

  Slowly picking her way back down the valley, Kel rubbed her hands on her upper arms. A few green tendrils were showing in her hand, now, and she smiled down at them.

  On her human hand, the silver ring glinted. The door she had made was there, just below her conscious awareness.

  She could feel the veil, saw it flutter gently as magical currents moved behind it. She thought about the Ael, waiting just beyond that veil.

  Someday, she knew, she was going to go through that door.

  She closed her eyes, moved a little closer, feeling for the opening. But the marmot called again, and her eyes snapped open.

  Not today. Today she would go back to Finn and Isabelle and the others at the Table. Help them rebuild.

  But someday.

  69

  Finn

  Far in the distance, across the tops of trees and over the rolling hills, the sun sank to the horizon in a blaze of fiery orange and pink. Above them, the sky had darkened to a star strewn indigo.

  Finn and Isabelle sat together at the top of the ruined tower, their feet dangling over the edge.

  Even though he knew it wasn’t her styl
e, Finn reached out and gently took her hand. She hadn’t said much about the loss of magic. She’d been quiet the whole journey back. Thoughtful, as if she’d sunk inside herself.

  This new, quiet Isabelle was more unsettling than anything he’d ever seen before. And, coming from Isabelle, that was saying something.

  He glanced at her profile in the darkness. Her delicate chin, her aristocratic nose. He barely recognized her face without its characteristic grin, the mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

  They’d walked to the top of the tower. And now, if they wanted to rebuild it, they’d have to do it the way humans had long ago. Brick by brick. Dug and shaped and carried by hand.

  He turned and followed her gaze, out across the darkening landscape. The school was quiet and subdued below them. A few of those who had chosen to stay wandered the gardens or stood talking in clusters of two or three.

  They’d all lost so much.

  He took in a long, deep breath. A deep breath that for the first time in ten years felt free, free of that tightness that came from the knowledge that his time was limited, that his work had a precise deadline.

  Morthil was gone; the Ael were gone, and people were safe from both. And from magic.

  That heat that had been in his chest since he had turned sixteen was gone, too. He didn’t know if that ever-present awareness would ever go away. If he would ever stop tensing up every time he felt angry, fearing he would lose control.

  He sighed, but more from relief than from anything else. It was a burden that was gone now, even if it had been power, too, and his whole identity for the past ten years.

  He wondered what the next ten years would hold and took another sideways glance at Isabelle. She was clearly taking this harder than he was, but he would be there for her through it, would be there for her always. Whatever she needed.

  A tiny smile came to his lips. He had time. Finally. And time without burdens, without responsibilities. Well, unless you counted leading this new community of ex-mages. But after spending ten years teaching sixteen-year-olds with unruly, unpredictable magic, crippled by the guilt of his past mistakes and knowing with utter certainty that he had to die within ten years or risk releasing a demon into the world, this would practically be relaxing.

  Now he could finally do what he really wanted to do. Be with Isabelle. Be with Kel. Relax. Watch a sunset, rather than meditate through the sunrise every morning.

  He took another deep breath of the perfumed night air, feeling kinks in his shoulders that had been there for ten years finally release. He squeezed Isabelle’s hand and, to his surprise, she squeezed it back. Then she turned to him and, for the first time since the night they’d lost magic, she smiled.

  “Hey,” she said, her face in shadow. “Watch this.”

  She held out her hand, palm up. At first, Finn couldn’t see what he was supposed to be looking at. He thought maybe he saw something, but then it was gone again.

  “What?”

  “Shh. Watch.”

  He stared at her slim white palm, pale in the darkness. The tiniest flickers of light appeared, then winked out.

  Finn’s heart stopped.

  “Isabelle. What was that?”

  She shrugged, then grinned, eyeing him sidelong. “I think it’s still there.”

  “What? No. Kel said it was gone.”

  She glanced at the drop-off.

  “Isabelle?” He followed her gaze again. “What are you—no. No no no. Don’t even—”

  Her grin widened. She leaned in, kissed him hard on the mouth, and slipped off the edge of the tower.

  Acknowledgments

  Every time I write a book, I learn a little more about the process. The only way I learn, though, is from the thoughts and feedback of friends, editors, and other writers who generously and kindly tell me what they liked and didn’t like. What worked and what didn’t.

  As always, I am incredibly grateful to the crime writer Nick Feldman, who helped me with the initial outline for the book. I often find myself getting caught up in plot, and he pulls me back into thinking about character, which is where the real soul of a book is.

  After I wrote the first draft, I was lucky enough to get to work with Zoe Quinton, an immensely talented and thoughtful editor, who helped take the collection of scenes I’d written and form them into a cohesive whole.

  Thank you so much to Robb and Josie Effinger. I am incredibly lucky to have friends who are not only kind enough to read the early drafts of my work, but also happen to be geniuses. You guys helped me see where I wasn’t quite hitting the mark. Robb, thank you for finding the inevitable timeline problems in every book I write. Josie, thank you for helping me see what was interesting and what was frustrating about the various character arcs I was attempting. You helped me feel excited about fixing them, too.

  Lastly, thanks to all of you who read my books, and especially those who leave reviews. I read them, I try to learn from them, and seeing that people enjoy my books makes it easier to write the next one.

  More

  For more, visit www.SarahMcCarthy.ninja

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