by Matthew Ward
Viktor met each gaze in turn, and found naught to trouble him. Apprehension perhaps, but that was to be expected. “Are we prepared?”
Izack stared across the river. He offered the Thrakkian encampment a brief nod of approval and rapped gauntleted knuckles on stone. “It’ll take an hour yet before the last regiment arrives. A little longer to provision them for the onward march, but we await your order.”
Tanor cleared his throat. “We’ve had plenty of refugees clear the border this past day. Folk telling tales that the garrisons at Kendrog, Halga and Mishvor are gone. Maybe Haldravord too.”
Izack glared. “Of course they’re empty. Shadowthorns know we’re coming by now.”
Tanor scowled. “Not necessarily. For all they know, this is a show of strength to make Thirava behave.” He exchanged a glance with Sevaka. She offered no reply save a taut nod. “Do you know how few eastwealders have made it across the border in recent months? A dozen, no more. We’ve had near a hundred this past day, and they’re all telling the same story.”
“Civilians love telling stories.” Izack folded his arms. “I don’t doubt they tell them to the shadowthorns’ purpose.”
Viktor held up a hand. “You believe this a trap?”
“Thirava’ll not give up his throne without a fight. Let’s be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of deception, but a man at flight sees the world strangely. I’ve a bad feeling about the coming days.”
Zephan chuckled. “Strip the cheese from your suppers. A heavy gut makes every dream portentous.”
Viktor cleared his throat. “If the shadowthorns seek to ensnare us, we shall trust to valour and duty to see us through. To a Droshna’s darkness… and to our Lady of Light.”
Looking very much as if she wished herself elsewhere, Sidara pinched her lips and offered a curt nod. She’d learn bravado. Better the lesson begin now, before the air filled with the thunder of drums and the whistle of arrows.
“I leave Tarvallion in your charge, Governor Orova,” said Viktor. “You’ve militia enough to hold the city?”
“Assuming Selnweald stays quiet.” She barely glanced at him, her grey eyes far away. “We’ve long memories in Tarvallion. All of us.”
Was there something amiss in her tone? Some shrouded hostility?
It didn’t matter. Personal grievances would wait.
Viktor set his back to the rampart. “Then I leave the city in your keeping. For the rest of you? Return to your commands. We march at dusk. Death and honour await.”
Sevaka spoke little as she made her way back to Brackenpike Manor. Nor did she pay great heed to streets thronged with marching soldiers, save what little was required to go untrampled. For their parts, neither Zephan nor Izack seemed to notice – or were at least too polite to pass comment – but as they arrived at the front gates and the parting of the ways, she at last found her voice.
“What if he’s wrong?”
Izack shrugged. “If it’s a trap, we’ll best it. Our recruits may be raw, but the Thrakkians know their business… So does the Reveque girl.” He tugged at his army uniform. “I may be forced to play dress up, but I’ve still got my pride.”
“It’s not the trap that worries me.” Sevaka paused, searching for words to frame nebulous concern. “It’s Viktor.”
Zephan frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. At times, it’s like nothing has changed. At others…?” Should she tell them about Rosa’s claims of stolen memory? “He was always given to bleakness, but there’s an edge to him now. An urgency. Don’t you feel it?”
“Sounds like treason to me,” said Izack, deadpan. “Tie her up, would you, Tanor? But mind her teeth. She’s a biter.”
Sevaka shot him a sour look. “If you think I’m imagining it, have the decency to say so.”
“Perhaps you need to lay off the bedtime cheese as well.” Izack shrugged. “You supported this, back in the city.”
“I know.” Sevaka shook her head, weary with frustration. “Maybe it’s not the ‘what’, but the urgency. Maybe it isn’t even Viktor at all, but me. I told Rosa that if something befell her, I’d avenge her. Part of me still wants to, but the rest screams that it would be a mistake.”
Zephan laid a hand on her arm. “We’ll find Rosa, if—”
“If she’s there to be found?” Sevaka broke off, aware she’d snapped. “I know.”
Izack nodded. “And if she’s not? I’ll take great bloody pleasure in delivering you Thirava, a selection of knives and the blindest of blind eyes.” He cocked his head. “Or maybe it’ll be hammers? Maybe both. Variety’s a pleasure all its own.”
She shuddered. “I’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself.” He offered another shrug. “Look, maybe Viktor has lost what little sunny side he used to have, but he’s never steered us wrong. We’ve abandoned the Eastshires too long.”
He was right – about the Eastshires, if nothing else – so why did it feel wrong? Sevaka clung to the cold, silent certainty in the pit of her stomach that Rosa still lived. She told herself it was a holdover from the strange bond they shared with the dead, and not a flight of heartbroken fancy.
“Take care of yourselves,” she said at last. “Both of you.”
Izack slapped Zephan’s shoulder with enough force to set him staggering and received an exaggerated eye roll from the younger man for his trouble. “Don’t you worry about this whippersnapper – I’ll keep an eye on him. Essamere has the honour of serving as my bodyguard until I say otherwise. Lord Marshal I may be, but my place is in the thick of the fight.”
“Slowing us down,” said Zephan.
Izack narrowed an unfriendly eye. “More treason, is it?” He shook his head sadly. “Come on, Tanor. We’ve laggards to rouse and shadowthorns to thump.”
Sevaka clasped Izack’s hand and kissed Zephan on the cheek. Then she passed through the gate and up the uneven steps of Brackenpike’s tangled gardens. As she reached the top she glanced back. Both had gone. Swallowed up by the east.
When she turned again, she found herself staring into a mirror.
Or almost so. The other woman was older, though the difference was less pronounced than at their last meeting, years before – as if time had left her untouched. Then there was the auburn hair with its badger’s streak, the heaviness of eye sockets darkened by makeup of a sort seldom employed west of the Ravonn.
Hand to her mouth, Sevaka staggered, overwhelmed by memories of a cold night and colder steel deep in her belly. “Apara?”
Apara’s throat bobbed. Pale lips pinched tight. A hand darted beneath robes more shadowthorn than Crowmarket, and emerged clutching an envelope. “From Rosa.”
“Rosa?” Sevaka blinked, the Ice Wind carrying away old fears. “I don’t understand…”
“Read it.” For a moment, she looked as though she meant to say nothing more, but pressed on anyway, her low-tongue flecked with a Hadari accent. “She’s alive. She didn’t want you to worry.”
Sevaka brushed trembling fingers across the delicate, copperplate letters of her own name. Unmistakeably Rosa’s hand – no one else was so fastidious. Her heart turned cartwheels. The rest of her stared numbly. “Where is she?”
Another hesitation. Sevaka recognised the tiny twitch of the cheek that so often marred her own attempts at impassive expression. Strange to share habits with a woman she barely knew.
“Tregard,” Apara replied. “I… One of the Empress’ agents rescued her from Thirava’s cells. And then Rosa saved the Empress’ daughter from assassins.”
The bold, implausible claim could only ever have been true. Of course it was what Rosa would have done. The Rosa that Sevaka had fallen in love with long ago, before the Raven had driven them apart and then brought them back together.
“A shield first, and a sword second,” Sevaka murmured.
“If you want more, read the letter.”
Apara turned to leave. Sevaka, screwing scraps of courage tight, grabbed her wrist. Her gut ached a
s fingers closed about the rigid metal of concealed talons. She swallowed hard. That was in the past. How many times had she dwelled on this moment? Hoped for it?
“And you?” Still shaking, she met Apara’s gaze. “What of my sister?”
“She…” Her throat bobbed, and she looked away. “She has to go.”
“I understand. I do. I don’t know what to say either.” Sevaka shook her head. “No, that’s not true. What happened before… What you did to me… It wasn’t your fault. It was our mother’s. If we remain strangers, she’s won.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Nothing ever is.” She twitched the envelope. “Even without this, I’d have forgiven you. Go if you must, but promise you’ll return. Just once, if that’s all you can bear. But please, say you will.”
Apara gave a long, slow nod. “All right.”
Sevaka relaxed her grip and watched the other descend to the street. She barely dared breathe for fear of awakening herself from what had to be a dream. Rosa was alive! And Apara…? Perhaps Izack was right. Perhaps the fears were only in her mind. Unable to wait any longer, she ripped open the envelope and began to read.
Hood pulled low, Apara navigated Tarvallion’s busy streets, habits honed in Dregmeet’s crowds guiding her through the bustle with scarcely a jogged shoulder. With every step, she fought the urge to return to the manor’s overgrown gardens. So many times, she’d almost left the letter with a servant and fled to the anonymity of the streets. She’d tormented herself with fantasies of swords drawn and guards summoned. Her mother’s harsh, disappointed glower stretched across her sister’s face. Instead, there had been forgiveness. Hope. For all that the steps leading away from Brackenpike were reluctant, they were lighter than those that had carried her there.
Lingering at a street corner long enough for a pair of constables to pass by – old instincts died hard – Apara slipped into the ruined streets bordering Tremora Gardens and its forlorn, overgrown towers. Retracing her steps through the firebreak bonfires, ever-careful not to stray into the coiled briars of Selnweald’s sweet-scented overgrowth, she at last came to the old Lunastran chapel and the crumbled likeness of a sleeping cat upon its lintel.
The mists came readily enough at her call, seeping into the archway behind a pulpit.
“Apara Rann.”
She froze, throat so tight that a panicked breath stuttered to nothing. A voice out of the past. One she’d laboured to forget. She silently pleaded the mist gate to hasten.
“Lord Droshna,” she croaked. “It’s been a long time.”
Slowly, reluctantly, she turned about. The chapel’s far end was cloaked in the shadow that had once made her a slave, the boundary between magic and master blurred at the edges. The Viktor Droshna she recalled – the Viktor Akadra – had been a man. The one who bore down upon her filled the space between the sagging rafters and the rubble-strewn floor. An eternal’s altered perception, or a difference in him?
Him. It had to be. The pressure of his being reminded her too much of the Raven… even of Ashana.
“I believe I instructed you to do better with your life when last we met,” Droshna replied. “Have you done so?”
“I’m free of the Crowmarket,” she stammered.
He drew closer, shadows writhing. “And yet you still wear thieves’ garb. And there’s something else… the Raven no longer holds you close, does he? Where once you were shrouded in feathers, there’s only moonlight.”
Apara shuddered as the first tendrils of shadow buried beneath her skin. But beneath the revulsion, something else stirred. A memory of contentment. A piece of her recalled what it was like to be smothered by Droshna, to act only as he wished. A primal longing that echoed through her bones. She wanted to be sick. To flee into the mists.
To her horror, Apara found she could do neither. Sensation was already cold and distant, her limbs numb. Even the sound of the streets had faded to nothing.
“Ashana… saved me from the Raven,” she gasped. “I’m free of him, too.”
He cocked his head. “The Empress’ patron. Curious that I should find you in Tarvallion now, of all times. While our armies muster to unmake old wrongs. Tell me, little crow, what brings you here?”
The shadow writhed beneath Apara’s skin, urging obedience. The small, treacherous piece of her soul joined it. Her mouth filled with words not her own: confession of her friendship with the Empress that would give Droshna every reason to kill her. Frantic, she choked them back.
“I wanted to see… my sister.”
The shadow howled its disdain through her thoughts.
Droshna shook his head. “Don’t lie to me. I can afford neither mercy nor patience, not with so much at stake.” The shadow pulsed, sheathing Apara’s thoughts with ice. “Tell me everything.”
A whimper stammered free. Apara felt herself slipping into shadow. Something servile arose in its place. Her recent nightmares awoken, and she trapped within. Helpless. Powerless.
No.
The last time Droshna had shackled her thus, she’d come back to herself covered in blood, her mother’s corpse at her feet. But she’d been younger then. Ephemeral. A woman without the strength to do what she knew was right.
Droshna wasn’t the same. Nor was she.
A flick of her wrist and the talons snapped free of their housing. She lunged at Droshna’s heart with every ounce of eternal strength at her command.
The air crackled with ice. Her talons shattered. The shadow beneath Apara’s skin boiled into her lungs, her veins. Droshna’s hand closed about her throat and tipped back her head. His eyes bored into hers.
“Tell me everything,” he rumbled.
The world rushed black, and the treacherous, broken piece of herself that Apara had hoped dead so long cried out in delight.
Buoyed by Apara’s visit and Rosa’s letter, Sevaka’s good mood survived the curt summons to Tarvallion’s jail. It endured the perfunctory, cold-eyed Drazina who’d replaced Corporal Setherin’s avuncular presence. It tolerated Izack’s and Zephan’s awkward greetings, and Viktor’s brooding silence. And then Viktor flung open the cell door, revealing a listless Apara, her wrists and ankles shackled and her outer robes divested, hanging from a chain like a side of meat in a butcher’s window.
Joy boiled away.
Heart afire, Sevaka rounded on Viktor. “What have you done to her?”
His expression didn’t even flicker. “She will recover.”
“She shouldn’t have to!”
Sevaka twisted away before the urge to strike him became unbearable. She drew closer to Apara. Close enough to catch the involuntary spasm of muscle that spoke to a life not fled. To hear the small, plaintive murmurings of a child lost to nightmare. Apara’s eyes remained fixed on a point only she could see. She offered no reaction when Sevaka pressed a hand to her cheek. That there wasn’t a mark on her only made it worse.
“Can you hear me? Apara?”
Apara’s eyes twitched but found no focus. A thin moan eased from her lips.
Sevaka spun about, her fury instead now directed at Izack and Zephan. “Are you part of this?”
“No.” Zephan’s jaw clenched tight. “Before Lunastra, I am not.”
“Izack?”
“She’s a spy.” He spoke softly, the conciliatory tone so rare that it might have given Sevaka pause, were she not lost to wrath. “By rights, she should be dead already.”
“She brought me a letter! From Rosa!” She threw it at Izack. “Read it! The Empress is freeing the Eastshires. She wants peace! That’s why the garrisons are empty. It’s over!”
He caught the letter, but made no attempt to read. “Does it say the rest?”
Sevaka drew up short. “What do you mean, the rest?”
“Your sister is the head of the Empress’s icularis,” rumbled Viktor. “She’s been her confidante for some years now.”
Sevaka blinked. “How do you know?”
“She has no secrets from me.”
>
Sevaka looked again on Apara. Rosa’s claims of what Viktor had done to her a year before took on fresh significance. Had he left Rosa thus after Darkmere? “What does that matter now? The Eastshires are free and without a drop of blood shed. Let her go!”
Viktor and Izack exchanged a glance. Zephan’s glare remained frosty.
“There’s something else,” said Viktor. “The bulk of the Empress’ army is deployed far to the south, suppressing internal divisions. What remained in Tregard was all but wiped out by recent treachery. The city is defenceless. It offers opportunity.”
Rage receded, leaving something shuddering and cold in its wake. “What do you mean?”
“If the Eastshires are empty of shadowthorns, we can be at the city’s walls in less than three days. The Kingdom of Rhaled is the Empire. With one stroke, we’ll avenge the slaughter of generations and deal such a blow that the shadowthorns might never again threaten the Republic.”
“Rosa is in Tregard.”
“And can you think of a better means of ensuring her freedom?” Viktor stepped closer, voice and eyes burning. The chamber’s shadows lengthened. “We cannot let opportunity pass us by.”
“Vengeance? The Republic used to be about justice. So did you, Viktor!” snapped Sevaka, her eyes again on Apara. “If you’re wrong, you’ll be throwing lives away for nothing. Worse, for something we already have!”
“And when has peace with the shadowthorns ever lasted?” growled Viktor. “When have their claims of friendship ever borne fruit?”
And just like that, he was a stranger. Perhaps he’d always been and she’d never realised. A man for whom wars would never end, because there’d always be one more reason to strike the tinderbox. And maybe the shadowthorns deserved it. All Sevaka’s life, the Republic had watched its eastern border, wary of invasion. Was Viktor right? Or did she consider that possibility only because she feared what she might have to do if he was not?