In the Ravenous Dark

by A. M. Strickland

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  To Lukas, for everything

  BEFORE

  There wasn’t much warning the day they came for Rovan’s father.

  Rovan was playing the hiding game with her straw doll in the front room of their house, which lay on one of the main avenues leading to the agora. There were stacks of cloth to tuck herself behind, since her mother didn’t put all her weaving outside on display in the morning. The bolts surrounding Rovan revealed glimpses of leaves and flowers twining in intricate patterns, with butterflies and skulls so cleverly layered you couldn’t tell where an eye socket ended and a wing began.

  Rovan could see her mother outside through the wooden slats of the shutters, shaking out fabrics in myriad bright colors and ornate patterns, letting the warm breeze catch them and draw the eyes of early shoppers. At the echoing clatter of many hooves, Rovan drew closer to the window. A feeling of sick anticipation twisted in her stomach.

  The bloodmages came riding down the stone-paved street. Cloaking their left shoulders were deep red chlamyses with a woven black shield in the center, leaving their right arms free. Familiar crimson marks streaked their skin down their single bare arms and what Rovan could see of their calves. Maybe the symbols twined everywhere, like her father’s, which even came up to his neck.

  The bloodmages were so vivid, their intricate silver helms glinting in the morning air, and yet they were accompanied by dark shadows lurking in the air behind them—silent smudges against the brightness of the day. Except these shadows weren’t cast by the sun. They seemed to sap the light and liveliness, even the joy, from their surroundings. Guardians, they were called.

  Rovan didn’t know how the bright riders could pay so little attention to their so-called guardians. Those eerie, unnatural shadows were nearly all she could look at, as if they were windows into another, darker world.

  The underworld.

  Rovan couldn’t make out any features in the darkness, even though she felt she should’ve been able to. The guardians were people, after all.

  Dead people, watching over the bloodmages.

  The bloodmages, two men and two women of varying heights and builds and skin tones, drew in their horses a few buildings away from her mother’s shop. Wards, her father called them—different from him even though he was also a bloodmage with the same red markings, because they had their shadowy guardians watching over them. Rovan was never to draw their attention.

  Which meant she probably wasn’t supposed to be staring at them, but she couldn’t help it. Lurking guardians or not, these warded bloodmages rode beautiful horses, wore well-woven and dyed clothes, and more importantly, never had to hide. They sat tall, proud.

  Sometimes Rovan wondered why her father was hiding from them—why he hadn’t begged to become one of them. She sometimes fantasized that he had, and he would carry her and her mother away from their house on a prancing horse in broad daylight, his blue hair streaming like water in the sun, and she would have a new dress billowing out behind her. She wished her father could ignore a strange, shadowy guardian for that. But he hated them.

  A hand dropped on her shoulder, nearly making her yelp. She turned to find her father standing behind her, his eyes—usually gold at home but magicked now to look brown—fixed on the figures on horseback. His blue hair and metallic irises were familiar to her, but uncommon anywhere else in the polis.

  “Bastards,” he muttered under his breath. “Stay quiet, love.”

  At seven years old, she already knew to keep her voice down. “Dolon says he wants to be a guardian when he grows up.”

  Her father’s eyebrows shot up. “Who is Dolon?” He wouldn’t have known, because he rarely went outside during the day. While the color of his hair and eyes could be altered, hidden, the marks on his skin couldn’t. They proved he was a powerful bloodmage and made up what he called his bloodline—long strings of red symbols known as sigils weaving over his skin.

  “He’s the boy who lives down the street,” Rovan said.

  Her father cursed under his breath. “This death-obsessed city. What an abomination to let children think … Look, love, I know what they say: that anyone, if they train hard in life and do great things, can become a hero in the afterlife. Maybe even a guardian to a living ward. But it’s not that simple or nice.”

  “Why are the guardians so bad?” she asked, even though she could sense that they were. Feel it in her gut. And yet she couldn’t stop staring. The guardians were like dark flames. Fascinating. Dangerous. Begging to be touched, even at her own peril.

  Her father frowned at the approaching riders. “Because they don’t belong in our world.”

  Being one of their wards didn’t look all that bad, at least. Rovan said as much.

  Her father sighed. “It is bad, love. It can only be bad.”

  “Why?”

  “Because dealing with the dead comes at a price, and the cost to the living is higher than we—”

  With a sharp squeeze on her shoulder, he cut off.

  Because the bloodmages did what they’d never done before: They stopped in front of the shop instead of passing by on some important business. Her mother grew still outside, and her father ducked behind a stack of cloth, dragging Rovan down with him. For a second, she was terrified the riders had seen them, but that was impossible with the shutters mostly closed. Still, the bloodmages spread their horses out in front of the house, sun glinting off their silver helms, coming close enough now for Rovan to see that the intricate metalwork included skulls and blooming flowers.

  “Good morning, my lords and ladies,” her mother managed with relative calm. “Can I interest you in some weaving?”

  The riders didn’t even acknowledge her. A warded bloodmage rode to the forefront. She spoke in a level tone, and yet her voice came out amplified, as if she were shouting. Louder than shouting. Rovan could feel it vibrating in her bones.

  “Silvean Ballacra, we know you are in there. Come out, and we can resolve this without blood.”

  Rovan’s heart stuttered in her chest. Silvean Ballacra was her father.

  Her mother’s eyes darted to the house and away. “There’s no one by that name here.”

  The bloodmage ignored her again. “There are ten more of us out back, so don’t try to sneak off. If you don’t come out now, we will set fire to the place.”

  Rovan glanced at her father, her breath held.

  His eyes were squeezed tightly closed. “She’s telling the truth,” he said. When his eyes snapped open, they were golden again. “Quick, hide like we taught you. And if they search the house and find you, do like we practiced.”

  “But—”

  “Do it, love, for me. Remember what you promised me.”

  She tried to grab his chiton as he stood, but it tore from her grasp. And then he was outside, standing tall in the sunlight, his feet bare, the crimson marks of his bloodline blazing on his skin for all to see, revealing himself to
be an unwarded bloodmage, at the very least. And maybe something else. The brown of his hair lifted away, leaving only deep blue. His shoulders were squared. He wasn’t hiding anymore.

  She had wanted this, hadn’t she? But it felt all wrong.

  “There you are, our long-lost Skyllean,” the lead bloodmage said. “Some were beginning to doubt you even existed.” She raised an eyebrow, her sharp gaze tracing Rovan’s father from head to foot. “That’s a long bloodline you have there. Longer even than rumor had it. Certainly longer than mine.” She shrugged her marking-covered shoulder. “But there are far more of us.”

  Her father was one man against four warded bloodmages. But he didn’t look afraid.

  Cold dread rose in Rovan’s chest. Her breath came too fast, making her dizzy.

  “I’ll leave quietly as long as all of you leave with me,” her father said.

  The lead bloodmage’s sharp eyes found Rovan’s mother. “Who is she, that you would want to protect her?”

  “No one of consequence. I paid her, if that’s what you mean. For my bed and hers, on occasion.”

  The lead bloodmage frowned. “She’s still a woman who sheltered a foreign spy and unregistered bloodline without reporting him.”

  “She didn’t know I was Skyllean.” He gestured at his hair. “I was disguising myself. And she didn’t know I was unregistered. I wouldn’t want to get her killed in a fight simply for her ignorance.” He raised his hands, as if in surrender. “I’d say that’s a fair trade. You get me, and nobody dies. You don’t die.”

  The lead bloodmage stared at him for a few seconds. Then she turned to a man standing nearby in a threadbare chiton—Dolon’s father, a shopkeeper a few doors down. “Who else lives here?”

  “There’s a child,” Dolon’s father said hesitantly. “She plays with my boy.”

  Rovan’s fear spiked in her stomach like she’d swallowed a dagger.

  Outside, the ward’s eyes lit up, and Rovan’s mother turned on the shopkeeper, staring at him with a hatred Rovan had never seen.

  “Search the hou—” the lead bloodmage started, but then suddenly her neck erupted in a spray of red.

  It took Rovan a second to realize that the liquid hadn’t come from anywhere outside the woman. It was coming from inside her. It was her blood, a fountain of it. And it took Rovan another second to realize her father had done it.

  His fingers were splayed. The woman’s blood spiraled toward him like a snake in water. He threw his hand out, casting her gathered life force in an arcing spray, and then there was fire.

  So much fire. A wall of it, shooting up in a half circle in front of their house and tearing through the four wards and the shopkeeper. Horses screamed and reared. Their neighbor shrieked, his hair and clothes alight. He tried to run toward Rovan’s mother, but she hefted a wooden pole, usually used to display draped cloth, and smashed him in the face. He went down in a burning, thrashing heap.

  Other figures, cloaked in the warded bloodmages’ red and black chlamyses and helmed in their same silver skulls and flowers, emerged from the alleys all around. Balls of fire and vicious-looking wooden stakes were suddenly flying for her father. He batted them away like a cloud of flies. The stakes went spinning, the balls of flame guttering. Only his fire continued to burn, even expanding to the other wards with a red sweep of his hand. But her father wasn’t just waving about. His fingers were twitching, writing. Spelling out destruction. Though the sigils he wrote were invisible, their effects weren’t. Rovan had never seen him do anything like this, and it was both awful and amazing.

  He even turned the warded bloodmages’ own weapons against them. The wooden stakes rose as if by their own accord and launched for the necks and eyes of their wards. Another chorus of screams rose.

  For a second, it looked like her father might win. Rovan felt like she was choking on terror and hope all at once.

  But in the chaos, she had forgotten the guardians. Those shadows came awake—alive wasn’t the right word—and she saw them as they truly were.

  One guardian especially: a man with curly dark hair and flat black eyes—cold, cold eyes—who seemed to draw the light from around him as he materialized. The lead bloodmage, whose throat her father had opened, now lying on the ground half-pinned under her charred horse, suddenly arched her back and let loose a gurgling cry at the exact moment the guardian solidified. It was as if his appearance had caused her more pain.

  The shadow-man didn’t even glance at the dying woman. He only had eyes—dead eyes—for Rovan’s father. Raising a gleaming sword, he charged. The guardian moved like smoke, impossibly twisting and weaving around the streaks of fire her father launched at him. And yet her father ducked the blade as quickly as the guardian moved, and he blocked whatever he couldn’t avoid with fiery, sparking shapes he pulled from nowhere. At the same time, an inferno flared right under the guardian’s black boots, and all the flying wooden stakes spun in the air and spitted him like a pincushion. He went up as if made of straw, leaving nothing behind but wisps of shadow and stakes that clattered to the ground.

  “Die again, dead man,” her father snarled.

  If only that guardian had been the only one. Three more appeared around Rovan’s father. Three swords glinted in the sunlight.

  It was her father’s turn to cry out in agony as one took him in the shoulder, one in the back, and one in the thigh. It didn’t matter that the guardians and their swords vanished immediately after. The damage was done. All her father’s magic evaporated in swirls of smoke, and he collapsed in a flood of his own blood.

  Rovan couldn’t help it—she screamed. Her mother did, too, when Rovan came charging outside, her hiding forgotten. Rovan didn’t know what to do, only that she had to do something.

  She didn’t get far. Two wards caught her arms in invisible sigils, ignoring her thrashing and kicking, and hauled her forward as if she were a puppet on strings. The sight of her father made her sob. He was trying to gather his own blood before him to launch another attack, though he looked ready to faint, his face paler than pale. He stopped when he saw his daughter. The blood hovering before him spattered to the paving stones like rain, and he slumped over.

  A ward marched up to Rovan, his cloak singed. The woman who’d been in command was now staring sightlessly at the sky.

  “Who are you?” he barked.

  Rovan was weeping too hard to answer. She was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to tell the truth, anyway.

  “That’s my daughter!” her mother cried. “She’s only seven. Please spare her, I’ll do anything!”

  “Silence, woman,” the ward snapped. He turned on Rovan’s father. “Silvean, is she yours?”

  Her father shook his head drunkenly. Blood dribbled from his mouth.

  “Why all this, then?” The ward threw his arm out to encompass the destruction, the death. His eyes were wide, nearly wild. “Why attack bloodmages like yourself?”

  Her father spat red at the ward, though it didn’t reach him. “I’m nothing like you, you death-tainted fools. I’m free.”

  The man shook his head. “You’re mad. You freaks always have been.”

  “It’s far madder to make compacts with the dead,” her father said. His voice had gone weak, and his eyes slid to the side as he slumped lower.

  “His kind isn’t warded!” someone shouted in the crowd. “They’re trying to take over our polis, just like the blight wants to! They have no one to stop them!”

  “Get rid of all Skylleans, I say!” cried another.

  “Fool, don’t you know the crown prince is supposedly married to a Skyllean witch?” someone hissed.

  “Mad,” was all the ward said, still staring at Rovan’s father, and then he turned back to Rovan. “Bring her here.” He tore off his gloves, fumbled at his belt pouch, and withdrew a gleaming silver pin as long as her hand. It had an ornate silver skull at the top.

  Rovan knew what was coming. Her mother always had a needle stuck into her sleeve for this exact pu
rpose. Her mother would prick her own finger, draw blood that had no magic in it, and then Rovan would be able to do her trick. Fool them all, swapping her mother’s blood for her own. She’d done it before, but never with this much of an audience.

  Rovan glanced around, but neighbors who’d patted her head or given her treats with indulgent smiles now looked on with hard eyes as the ward seized her wrist. There was hatred in their expressions, she realized. For her blue-haired father, and what he was—which was not one of them. And maybe hatred for her, if she proved to be like him.

  Why they didn’t hate the guardians in their midst was beyond her. She had seen their true faces now, with their dead eyes and their wicked swords, and knew beyond a doubt that her father was right. They were evil. Wrong.

  Rovan was relieved when the ward pricked her finger carefully with the frightful needle. Blood blossomed around the tip—just not Rovan’s. It was a simple matter to keep her own hidden deep under her skin, and move her mother’s to that spot instead. The ward swiped away the drop with his own finger, held it up, and examined it with a frown.

  “I told you,” her father slurred, blood bubbling from his mouth. “Just an ignorant slut and her brat.”

  The ward spun away from Rovan, losing interest in her as quickly as that. “To do all this for nothing…”

  Slut. Brat. Nothing. The words hit Rovan like stones, winding her, leaving pain in their wake.

  “I wouldn’t say nothing,” her father said. “I took some of you down with me.” He slumped entirely to the ground, his head thumping the cobbles, without another look at his daughter or her mother.

  A scream was building in Rovan, one that felt too big for her small body. Her mother only looked on in glazed shock.

  One of the wards stepped carefully up to her father, knelt, and put fingers to his neck. “He’s dead.”

  The ward who’d pricked her finger glared and spat on the ground. “What a loss,” he said. “If we can’t gain anything from him, we at least need his corpse to prove we found him. Bring him.”