Shadow & Flame

by Mindee Arnett

  As she and Tira stepped past the entrance into the garden, Kate reached out with her magic. To her relief, she sensed only one person near the fountain at the center of the garden. It should be easy enough to avoid them.

  Kate led the way to one of the benches built around the trunk of an oak tree near the western wall and plopped down onto it, weary from defeat. Tira, always as graceful as one of her cats, eased down next to her.

  “All right,” Kate said. “What are you proposing? That I sway the council into action or something? I’m not doing that.”

  “Of course not,” Tira replied, examining her fingernails. “I’m saying you just go anyway. What’s a little defiance between friends?”

  Kate waved away a fly buzzing around her face. It seemed a great irony that the earthists could keep the flowers in bloom but could do nothing to stop the bugs. “I’m a member of the council, Tira, I can’t just . . . And even if I weren’t, there would be consequences in defying them and breaking the accords.”

  “Yes, of course. There are consequences in everything we do. Good and bad.” Tira rested her elbows against her legs, the dual blades on her back preventing her from leaning against the bench as Kate did. “What will you tell Signe?”

  Kate sighed, closing her eyes. “The truth, I guess. And hope she doesn’t have something sharp on hand to stab me with.”

  “I’m sure she will understand your position. It’s so . . . understandable.”

  Kate opened her eyes to glare at Tira again. “Even if I were to defy the council, I couldn’t get to Norgard without their help.” Kate sat up, only to lean forward and drop her head into her hands. “It’s impossible to travel that far without magestones to protect against the nightdrakes, and none of the magists will disobey Raith.”

  “Harue might. Seems to me she’s made a career out of defying Raith.”

  Kate harrumphed. “Only when his orders interfere with her latest obsession.” For Harue that meant one thing—pursuit of what she called the science of magic. Before joining the Rising, Harue had been a white robe, the magist order dedicated to the study of the high arts. It was a posh position, and she was great at it. Kate sometimes wondered why she sided with the Rising in the first place. Perhaps because the consequences of her disobedience were so much less here than with the League. “And she only gets away with it because she’s brilliant and ends up stumbling across some new spell that makes everyone’s lives better,” Kate added. Not that she was driven by any kind of altruistic intent. Quite the opposite, Harue interacted far more with her books than people.

  “That’s my point,” Tira replied. “It should be easy to come up with some reason why helping you get to Norgard will help her solve whatever mystery is currently preoccupying her thoughts.”

  “Knowing Harue, that could be a hundred different things at once.”

  “Even better. So many to choose from.” Tira bared her teeth in a grin. “And I will come with you, of course. I’ve always wanted to see Norgard.”

  Norgard. Kate allowed herself to picture the city of her birth, the place she’d called home for nearly sixteen years. The towering white wall surrounded by green fields. The statues of Niran and Nelek, the two horses carved from onyx and ivory, standing watch at the gate. Mirror Castle glinting in the sunlight as if it had been draped in stars. And all the pastures filled with the finest horseflesh.

  Yes, it was a place worth visiting. Beautiful beyond words. But it was ugly too, for Kate at least. Home to all of her most painful memories—the execution of her father, the decree of her exile, Kiran’s abduction, and her battle with Maestra Vikas, the woman who orchestrated her father’s death for treason.

  Her and Rendborne. It was also the last place the Nameless One had been seen.

  Kate shook her head, driving the memories away. “You could go anytime you wished,” she said, trying to hide her bitterness at the thought. “No one would recognize you there.”

  “Nor you, with one of Harue’s disguises. And no offense to Chancellor Raith, but exchanging Dal will solve nothing. Even if whoever is threatening him isn’t able to act before we get him out, the threat will still exist, and this person’s plot likely doesn’t end with killing Dal. You’re the only one with any chance of uncovering the secrets behind this.”

  “You mean by using my sway,” Kate said, remembering her argument with Signe earlier. Not everyone was so worried about the morality questions associated with her gift. You’re siding with a mercenary about the morality of using your magic, Kate thought, finding humor in the irony. She was about to point out that Genet had suggested the same thing, but stopped at the sound of commotion. The noise was like a pig being slaughtered, and Kate and Tira rose at once and headed toward it.

  They rounded the corner toward the fountain in the center of the garden. Anise was there. The healers must’ve brought her out here for some fresh air—and left her unattended. Kate’s teeth clenched at the stupidity of it. No matter how many times she told the healers never to trust Anise by herself, they didn’t listen. They let the woman fool them into thinking she was getting better. She wasn’t. Kate sensed the truth every time she saw her—Anise was determined to die, and nothing could stop it. It consumed Anise’s every thought, her every moment, a cancer planted by whatever had been done to her in the Mistfold that had spread throughout her entire being.

  Looking at her now, Kate gave an involuntary shudder. Once stately and attractive, Anise looked like a corpse whose flesh had not yet rotted, her skin ashen and stretched taunt over a starved body. She wouldn’t eat or drink, not voluntarily, and what little nourishment the healers managed to force on her was only enough to keep her alive.

  Anise screamed again as one of the healers attempted to wrestle her arm away from her neck, where she’d been clawing at her own throat, ripping away skin until it bled. Pushing past her horror, Kate summoned her magic and grabbed hold of Anise’s mind. At once despair and pain flooded her, the woman’s misery becoming her own. For a second it was so powerful, Kate almost reached out to snag a sword off Tira’s back in order to end both of their pain.

  “Obey me or seek death. Obey me or seek death!” Anise chanted, the refrain as familiar as it was chilling. She said it so often Kate sometimes heard it in her sleep.

  Be quiet, be still, Kate thought, forcing her will on Anise. It was hard, the woman’s mind slippery in Kate’s grasp. Be quiet, be still! Kate increased the force, feeling her magic burn inside her at the effort, like the straining of a muscle. Slowly, fighting her at every step, Anise lowered her arm enough for the healer to refasten the leather strap around her wrist. How she’d gotten free in the first place, Kate didn’t know, and she had no desire to find out. She wanted away from Anise’s mind as soon as possible, the death the woman longed for like an infection Kate risked catching herself.

  The moment the healer stepped back from the woman, Kate let go of her mind and drew a ragged breath. The healer glanced at her, muttering an apology. Kate nodded, too tired to bother telling the healer once again that Anise was a danger to herself every moment she wasn’t being restrained. Besides, the damage Anise had inflicted on herself this time would be enough to convince the healers to be more careful with her. For a while at least.

  “Go fetch something to staunch the bleeding,” Kate said. “I will stay with her until you return.” The healer darted away without a word. Tira, who had kept a safe distance, said nothing, although Kate could sense her eagerness to depart this unsettling scene.

  Anise watched Kate with the dull, hooded eyes of a reptile, hatred etched into every careworn line on her face. The first time Kate had met the woman, she commanded respect with her mere presence. She’d been impeccably dressed, her gray hair coiffed with not a single strand out of place. Now, her beautiful hair was long since shaved off, to keep her from trying to choke herself with it.

  “Have you come to let me go at last?” Anise said. Eerily, her voice was the only thing unchanged. She sounded like the comman
ding madam of a brothel she’d been when Kate met her. Anise showed no other signs of mental illness—she could talk and reason, recall facts and memories, and she never spoke of seeing things or hearing voices. She was herself completely. All except for her desire to die. And the fact that whenever she tried to tell Kate what had happened in the Mistfold, she would instead start chanting . . . Obey me or seek death.

  “You already know the answer to that question, Anise,” Kate said with a sad shake of her head.

  The woman shrugged, the gesture causing the collar on her neck to rise up and brush against the still-weeping wounds on her throat. It was a magical collar, studded with magestones designed to keep Anise from accessing her magic. Once, she’d been a hydrist, but it was a power she couldn’t be trusted with anymore, not after she’d used it to drown one of the healers who’d made the mistake of trying to stop her from cutting her wrists open with a dull spoon.

  “Yes, I do,” Anise replied. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t still wish for mercy.”

  Mercy. The word was like a knife to Kate’s gut. She understood that it would be merciful to give Anise the death she craved. She suffered worse than anyone Kate had ever seen. And yet it’s not her, Kate thought. That will to die had been placed inside Anise somehow, just as it had Kiran and Vianne, and the other wilders they’d been unable to free from the Mistfold.

  It had been placed inside her by someone.

  Rendborne, Kate thought. He might not have done the actual work, but he was responsible for them ending up there in the first place. Hatred swelled inside her, her need for vengeance like a physical ache. But in order to have her vengeance she had to find him first. Where is he?

  Norgard. It was the last place he’d been seen, at the Hellgate inside the Wandering Woods north of the city. She hadn’t been back there since the battle where she killed Isla Vikas, Rendborne’s lover and second-in-command, but it seemed the best place to start tracking him down. She’d waited long enough.

  Kate held silent until the healer had returned and seen to Anise’s wounds, allowing her and Tira to finally exit the gardens. The moment they were alone again, Kate turned to Tira and said, “Defiance it is, then.”

  Tira grinned, looking like a cat that had just caught sight of a mouse. “Let’s go talk to Harue.”

  6

  Corwin

  THE GODKING’S PALACE RESIDED AT the center of the city of light. From the terrace of his new quarters, high in the eastern tower, Corwin could understand why Luxana had been given such a name. With the sun rising over the horizon, the city looked afire. Most of the buildings, including the Sun Palace, were built from the red clay so common in Seva. The fiery effect came from the shale mixed with the clay to form the bricks. Mined from lake beds long since drained, the shale contained minuscule crystals that reflected the red of the clay whenever light touched them, as it did now.

  Corwin drew a slow breath, finding no comfort in the beauty. He was surrounded by too many beautiful things these days to care, his rooms alone an obscene example of the Godking’s wealth. A blanket made of the white fur of snow leopards from the far northern country of Ruzgar adorned the four-poster bed, whose columns boasted exquisitely carved galloping bulls circling around them from bottom to top. The satin sheets beneath were woven from the silk of Furian spiders, found only in remote islands scattered throughout the Fury Sea. More furs covered the gold-inlaid marble floor, these made from the hides of black panthers, animals native to Seva. Even Corwin’s robe and the loose-fitting pants and shirt beneath were the finest he had ever worn, woven from a cotton so soft it felt like a second skin.

  With a sudden restlessness, Corwin turned away from the terrace and reentered the bedchamber. He took a pace about the room, feeling as if he’d been awake for hours instead of mere minutes. The month since he’d been freed from the mines had wrought a startling change in him. Most notably in his body and how much stronger he felt, how much more like himself. He could run laps around the room and not grow tired.

  And yet, he remained a slave in a golden cage. The truth galled him: as with the mines, there was no way to escape.

  Coming to a stop, Corwin glanced down to see he’d arrived at the trestle table set next to the door to the terrace. His stomach clenched as he stared at the bottle on the table, the dark glass hiding the bright content within. He hadn’t meant to stop here. He didn’t want to drink any of the concoction inside. And yet the sight of it—and the smell leaking out from the uncorked top—set his senses afire, making his throat ache with the thirst of a man three days lost in the desert.

  Don’t drink it, Corwin, he told himself, but even as the thought slid through his mind, his hand reached for the bottle of its own accord, the glass smooth and cool beneath his fingers, a tease of what the drink would feel like as it slid down his gullet.

  Don’t drink it. Don’t. He tipped the bottle over the edge of the goblet, the pale-blue liquid almost seeming to glow as it sloshed into it. Or maybe it was glowing, just a little. Corwin could never be sure, but it wouldn’t surprise him. Although the drink was partly wine, made from white grapes grown in the Florri province of Seva, it was mixed with something else—nenir. Godtears.

  Corwin hadn’t realized it at first, even when they’d told him the drink was called nenath. No, it wasn’t until he took that first taste that he made the connection. It was the smell, mostly, a familiar sweet, musky smell, one he’d grown to associate with good fortune after his time in the mines. And the glow, of course, that too.

  What a fool he’d been to drink it so willingly when Lord Gavril offered it to him. It was the first of his so-called “conditioning sessions” with the wilder, which had started the day after his confrontation with Prince Eryx and his sister. It seemed Gavril didn’t suffer from the same loss of magic the other wilders had when Corwin first came to Seva, which he could only assume had something to do with the amount of time the man spent inside the Mistfold, remembering how Kate and Bonner’s magic had come back to them once they were inside it. Corwin felt nothing when he drank the nenath, other than the warmth familiar to him from drinking any normal wine. It was only later, after he’d gone through several of the sessions, that Corwin began to understand the nenath was a tool of Gavril’s magic. Three times a day, every day, Gavril had visited him for a session, offered him nenath, and then used his sway on Corwin.

  You will obey my every command, Gavril would speak right into Corwin’s mind. You will not harm any of the Fanes. You will not harm yourself. You will not try to escape.

  You will obey my every command. You will not harm any of the Fanes. You will not harm yourself. You will not try to escape.

  You will obey my every command . . .

  Over and over again, Gavril gave the commands, forcing Corwin to repeat them, to feel the weight of them push and tug on his mind, bending his will. At first, Corwin assumed the commands would fade when night fell. That was how it had been with Kate’s sway, or with any of the wilders’ magic in Rime—nighttime rendered it dormant. But not here. At least, not Gavril’s magic. Perhaps this was because of the nenath, that its poison of godtears made it possible. But by the time Corwin had begun to suspect this connection, he found that he was unable to refuse the drink.

  Not because Gavril forced him. On the contrary, Gavril never spoke a word any time Corwin turned it down. Instead, the man waited, patient as a priest in a holy ceremony, the full bottle on the table between them, until Corwin’s need for the drink grew strong enough that he gave in, guzzling down whole glassfuls to quench some unbearable thirst.

  Don’t drink, Corwin told himself now, as he did every time. But drink he did, downing the first cup, and then the second, and more until the need subsided. With shame flooding through him, Corwin picked up the empty bottle and threw it at the wall, where it shattered into a dozen pieces, glass glistening darkly against the immaculate floor.

  The door swung open, and a boy wearing a page’s robe entered the room. “Are you all right
, your highness?” Spying the shattered glass, Zan frowned. The troubled expression made him look older than his fourteen years.

  “I’m fine.” Corwin cast him a cool look. “What do you want?”

  Zan grinned. “Time to get you dressed, highness. The ceremony starts today.”

  The ceremony. Bile burned the back of Corwin’s throat at the thought. Clenching his fists, for a second he envisioned striking the boy and then fleeing. There would be few guards this time of day; he would meet minimal resistance between his room and the south doors of the palace. But the moment the thought came to him, a violent shudder struck his body. Sweat broke out on his skin, and his legs trembled so fiercely he nearly collapsed. He stumbled toward the bed and sat down, drawing a ragged breath.

  If Zan noticed his strange behavior, the boy made no comment as he headed toward the wardrobe in the room and swung the doors open. “It’s to be black for you today, I’m afraid, an unfortunate color in this heat, but the Godking’s box is nicely shaded, and there will be servants with fans and misters for your comfort.”

  Finally recovering, Corwin stood from the bed and faced the boy. “Why are you so excited for a wedding? You sound like a besotted child.”

  Zan glanced over his shoulder, a flush rising in his cheeks. “It’s the Spectacle, your highness. There’ll be wilder matches today, and it’s not often we’re treated to those.”

  Corwin pressed his lips together, saying nothing even as disgust roiled through him. The Spectacles of Seva were known throughout the world for both their extreme violence and grandeur. Several of the mercenaries Corwin had served with in the Shieldhawks had been former Spectacle fighters, some of the rare few who lived long enough to earn their way free. The fights were commissioned by the crown, and the Godking spared no expense in the entertainment he provided, often pitting fighters against rare, exotic beasts when they weren’t pitted against each other. And now, it seemed, he’d added his captured wilders to the contest. It seemed that like Gavril’s, their magic must work beyond the confines of the Mistfold, at least for a time.