In the Ravenous Dark

by A. M. Strickland

  He smiles slightly. “There aren’t many colors where I come from.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Originally from Thanopolis, like you.”

  “And now?”

  He cocks his head. “I think you know. You just don’t want to know.”

  I scoff. “Right. Thanks for the insight, whatever it means.” But something scratches at my thoughts, an unpleasant suspicion. I take a step back.

  He takes a step forward.

  “What do you want from me?” I ask, my voice climbing higher.

  “Like I said, to meet you. You and I are going to be companions … for a while.”

  And then I remember where I’ve seen such strange eyes before: on the guardians, the dead men. These eyes are the same. Cold and dark and flat. Dead.

  He’s one of them.

  “Oh shit,” I say. I take another step back and meet the wall of the chamber with my heel.

  He cocks his head to the other side, looking almost catlike. Predatory. “I must admit, it surprises me to hear you say that.”

  I force a laugh, and it comes out like a bark. “Ladies don’t curse where you come from, either? No colors, no cursing … it must be terribly dull.”

  “There aren’t as many ladies as men, truth be told. But no, most of them don’t curse much.”

  That doesn’t make sense. The underworld should hold the shades of as many women as men. But now isn’t the time to ask about that. As he’s spoken, he’s taken another step toward me.

  “They can’t talk, then, these dead ladies?” I ask, trying to sound calm.

  The dead man’s mouth quirks up at one corner. “So you do understand where I come from. And no, it’s more that they are well bred. Manners prohibit vulgarity.”

  “Do you live in a palace in the afterlife?” I ask as if trying to piece together a puzzle, when in reality I only want to keep him talking until I find a route of escape.

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, I’m not well bred, so why the surprise?”

  “Perhaps because the shape of your mouth doesn’t match a word so crude.”

  I blink. Is he saying my mouth looks nice? While at the same time trying to sneak up on me and do … something … bad to me? My caution evaporates like water thrown on a blazing fire. “Go stick your head in a chamber pot until you drown. Oh wait, you’re already dead. Can you go die again?”

  “I must decline,” he says with a slight bow of his head.

  He takes another step toward me. I don’t have space to flee backward, so I edge sideways. How the hell does one leave a room with no doors or windows?

  “Don’t ever expect politeness from me,” I spit as I move away blindly, my gaze locked on him. “If you come near me I’ll scratch your weird black eyes out.”

  He purses his lips. “That will make it difficult for me to kiss you.”

  I nearly trip to a halt. “Excuse me?”

  “Ah, now, that was polite,” he says. “My lips, rather regrettably it seems, have to touch you. Not necessarily your lips. A hand would do. I was planning on kissing the back of yours when I took it.”

  I resume circling. “Over my dead body.”

  He pivots in time with me, though for the moment he doesn’t come any closer. “I’m afraid we can’t fight to the death. As you know, I’m already dead, and your spirit is trapped here, so this has to end sooner rather than later and in only one way.” He sighs. “I don’t usually have to force this. They often come willingly.”

  “Because you’re so charming?” I snarl.

  “No, because they’re usually younger than you. Less distrustful.”

  My mouth falls open. “And you kiss them, too? That’s disgusting.”

  “Did you not hear me say a kiss on the hand suffices? Trust me, it’s not passionate. It’s all just part of the bond.” His tone is infuriatingly patient. Polite.

  “Why are they younger?” I keep moving, keep talking, trying not to let my eyes dart around too obviously as they search for some crack in the perfect black walls. “I’m not that old.”

  “I didn’t say you were. Most bloodmages simply get their guardians as adolescents, when their abilities are first confirmed.” He hesitates. “Although your father was older than you when I was bound to him.”

  I freeze. “My father … wait. You’re his guardian, too?”

  “I am.”

  “But how can you guard two people? Isn’t that … too much?”

  “I believe I can manage the both of you,” he says with a slight smile. He doesn’t sound overly confident, only matter-of-fact. “That’s why I was chosen for you, because I was able to contend with your father so well. He was … resistant.”

  “Ever hear the saying, ‘Like father like daughter’?” I squint at him. “If you’ve been his guardian for nearly thirteen years, and you’ve warded others before him … How old are you?”

  His smile slants into something crooked. “I’m twenty-three.”

  “Like hell you are. How long have you been dead?”

  The dead man’s gaze slips away for a brief moment. “Not as long as some. But let us say I have experience. Besides, I won’t have to guard both of you for long. Once he passes you his bloodline, which will be imminent…” He trails off at what he sees on my face.

  “Then what?” I whisper. When he doesn’t say anything, I scream, my nails trying to dig into the wall, “Then what?”

  “I’m sorry.” He sounds sincere, which makes me want to sink to my knees. Because that means what has gone unspoken is the truth.

  My father will die when he gives me his bloodline.

  “I thought you knew,” he murmurs.

  I don’t crumple to the ground like I want to. I straighten my spine and hold up my fists. Blood magic won’t work here; I can sense that. So I’ll just have to use my hands.

  He arches a black eyebrow. “Are you going to fight me?”

  “Did my father fight you?”

  The dead man regards me. “Like a wildcat. But he lost. And you don’t strike me as—”

  With a feral screech, I throw myself at him.

  It doesn’t go well. He traps one arm as soon as I claw at him, followed promptly by the other, and then he holds me pinned as I thrash and scream. He cinches me tight against his hard chest with one arm while he cups my head with the other to keep me from biting him—which of course I try to do as soon as he’s close enough. Our stance could almost look intimate.

  How is the man so strong, so solid? It isn’t fair. He’s a shade, and I’m supposedly alive, and yet he’s subdued me as easily as if I were a child.

  He brings his lips to my ear, and his breath stirs my hair. “I truly am sorry,” he says in a gentle ghost of a voice.

  And then he kisses my cheek, which is wet with tears and stuck with strands of my hair. His lips are cool and soft, and yet, for a brief moment, I feel like they’re stealing something vital from me. But then I don’t feel anything anymore, because the dead man is gone from the chamber, and so am I.

  5

  I awake in dimness. For a moment, I’m wildly afraid I’ve come to on the stone slab, and someone will be washing my body, and I’ll be dead …

  But I’m only in a room with heavy curtains drawn. A ridiculously opulent room, I realize as my eyes adjust. My bed has posts like twining trees with real leaves and flowers laced in a canopy overhead, and nearby sits a wooden desk shaped like a blooming rose.

  I sit up, and a wave of dizziness hits me. Where on earth am I? And who has put me in a night shift, the quality of which is too good for me to have ever afforded? Also, I can’t be positive, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been washed, hair and all—hair that once again possesses its natural blue tint, which I haven’t seen in years of magicking it into something more normal. I take a whiff of my arm. I’ve been perfumed, too.

  “Do you often sniff yourself?”

  I jump nearly a foot off the bed and barely swallow a shriek. It wasn’
t a dream, or a nightmare, or even a poppy hallucination. Because there he stands, near the window, as solid as if he were made of living flesh: the dead man. He’s wearing the same dark attire as before, black cloth and leather. He looks just as young and infuriatingly handsome. It’s as if he’s walked straight out of that tomblike chamber and into the real world. My world.

  “Get out!” I shout at him, drawing the bedcovers to my shoulders.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to this,” he says, nodding down at himself. “I’m here to stay.”

  “Why can I see you now? Aren’t you supposed to be, I don’t know”—I flap my hand at him, as if waving away a bad smell—“a shadow or something?”

  “Now that I’m bound to your spirit, you can see me as if I were truly alive.”

  I pick up a brass candlestick shaped like a woman with the wings of a dragonfly. “Can I hit you as if you were truly alive?”

  His tone is as patient as ever. “You can try.”

  I fling it at him. My aim, miraculously, is true. Except the winged woman flies beyond his leather breastplate, passing right through him, and clangs violently against the wall.

  “You said—!”

  “I said you could try.”

  For a minute, I only seethe at him from across the room. “Where is my father?”

  “You’ll see him soon enough.”

  My words are clipped, boiling. “What if I really, really want you to go away?”

  “That’s at my discretion. But since you so politely asked…” He nods at me and vanishes into the shadows.

  “And don’t come back!” I shout.

  A knock sounds at the bedroom door.

  Ignoring it for the moment, I slide out from under the heavy covers and stand, bracing myself on a bedpost until I find my balance. Then I stumble over to the window’s thick curtains and whip them aside.

  I stare down over the polis from a higher vantage than I’ve ever seen before. I must be in the wealthy sector, atop the hill in the center. Maybe I’m in a manor or … no, I can’t think about the alternative. The spread of buildings and streets beneath me is nearly impressive enough to distract me from anything else, but it’s what lies beyond that makes me gasp.

  It looks as if there’s merely a shimmering glass pane between the outer farmlands of the city’s plateau, which are sunny and verdant, and the blowing expanse of ice and rock that sprawls across the horizon. The entire world outside is white, endless white, with huge clouds billowing up where the wind parts around the jagged black claws of boulders raking the blanket of snow. I’m facing north, then, not south toward the desert. I can see better than ever what the blight has done. It’s too much nothing. Too much death, especially with the jumbled ruins of old towns and cities poking up like broken teeth in a few places. The veil suddenly seems both incredibly frail and immensely powerful.

  For a brief moment, I wish the veil would fall and the blight would bury Thanopolis. I wonder, too, for the first time, if my father has ever wished for the city’s demise after how its people have treated him.

  My father is alive. I have to find him.

  Casting around, I discover a length of cloth, deep green like the one my father wore, and heavily embroidered with twining vines. I throw it over my shoulders, partially covering my thin night shift, and push open the bedroom door.

  I’m in a sun-drenched marble hallway, lined in arches as delicate as spiderweb and spiraling windows of cut glass that also look out over the city.

  “Oh, mistress!” a voice squeaks behind me. I spin to find a girl, younger than me, in the simple tunic of a servant. “I knocked because I heard a noise … If you had told me you were awake I would have … Shall I help you dress and put up your hair? That cloth is meant to be pinned as a peplos…”

  Wearing it as such would be far more elegant, but I don’t care about that or my hair, which is already more brushed than usual. I’ve never had a servant try to serve me, besides. This is all too much, too overwhelming, and I need to keep moving.

  I half trip on a rug too plush for my feet, and hurry down the hallway, trying to ignore the dizzying wealth around me. I have to find …

  Him.

  I practically burst into a marble dining room lined in graceful columns, intricate tapestries, and verdant plants growing in elaborate shapes. He’s seated at the opposite end of a long, polished wooden table that looks like a vertical slice of a massive tree trunk, with a strange woman and a girl about my age on either side of him, both dressed in practical, short, and yet finely-woven chitons, hardened leather bracers on their wrists and leather headbands strapping down their hair. The woman has a long dark braid tossed over one shoulder, showing the first signs of gray, and sun-bronzed light skin; the girl’s hair is almost black, her skin warm brown, and yet there’s an obvious resemblance between them, likely mother and daughter. Neither has a bloodline. There’s a pair of wooden swords leaning against one wall, as if the women have just come in from a training session.

  There’s something so familial about all of them seated here like this that for a moment I think perhaps my father does have another child. But it doesn’t seem likely that this girl is his, not with the woman and my father being so light skinned. Besides, the girl would have been born about when I was, and my father lived with my mother and me for another seven years after that. And why else would everyone be so excited to discover my existence, if he already has a blood child?

  “Rovan,” my father says, sounding slightly breathless. His cane is propped near his chair, a fine green himation draped around his shoulders. Time has marked his face as surely as the bloodline his skin. He looks so much older. He leaps up, as fast as he’s able with his cane, and takes a few quick, lurching steps toward me.

  I take a step back, and he stops. My mouth works. “What…?” I’m not sure where to begin.

  His own mouth seems incapable of forming words. His eyes hold too much to decipher. There’s pain in them, despair even, but he also looks at me as if he’s thought he would never see me again.

  My stomach is churning. I fold my arms across my chest, wrapping myself in the cloth like a protective blanket, and stare back at him, my throat almost too tight to breathe, let alone speak.

  “We weren’t sure when you would wake up,” he finally says. “Are you hungry?”

  A strangled laugh escapes me. Food is the last thing on my mind. “What have they done to you? What do they want with me? And who are they?” I ask finally, waving at the other two at the table. The woman and the girl stare at me like I’m an animal on parade, and not a very special one at that. Neither of them has gotten up.

  “Who are we?” the girl says. “More like, who are you? This is our home.”

  My father turns to them distractedly. “This is Princess Penelope, the youngest sister of the crown prince, and her daughter, Crisea.” He doesn’t call the princess his wife, even though I know she is, nor Crisea his child. “Penelope, Crisea, this is Rovan … my daughter.” He gestures to a chair. “Please, Rovan, sit. You’ve been asleep since yesterday. I know the process can be draining.”

  “The process,” I repeat, without moving for the chair. “You mean when I was bound to a dead man against my will? The same dead man who is your guardian, apparently?”

  My father’s half smile doesn’t crease his eyes. “There’s not much of me left for him to guard, I’m afraid.”

  “Silvean, sit down if she won’t, before you fall down.” Penelope’s tone is stern, impatient, and wholly practical. No love lost between them, then. The princess turns the same coolly assessing gaze on me. “Carrying the weight of a bloodline, especially one as heavy as his, wears on a body. The more powerful the bloodline, the worse it is. He should conserve his strength.”

  “That’s it, my dear,” her father says with a bitter twist to his mouth. “It’s only my bloodline that’s using me up.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Don’t start with your theories again, Silvean. No one wants to
hear them.”

  Goddess. They sound like an old married couple. They are an old married couple, and I can’t stand to hear it.

  “I want to know,” I say, my voice rising. “What’s using you up, and how do we stop it?”

  My father’s expression seems to soften at my concern, but Penelope speaks over him.

  “As for what my family wants with you, other than to see all rogue bloodmages warded … You’re the only one who can receive Silvean’s bloodline, which is becoming too heavy for him to carry. It’s a bloodline they can’t stand to lose, which they will if he collapses under its weight. You’re their best hope.” She says best as if I’m not very promising at all.

  “But I don’t want it!” I cry. “I don’t want any of this!”

  “Believe me when I say this is the last thing I ever wanted for you, too,” my father murmurs. “But you may not have a choice.”

  “Help me, then,” I say desperately. “We can help each other, somehow.”

  The dead man appears, his back against a pillar at the edge of the room, arms folded across the black armor of his chest. “She’s resistant enough as it is, Silvean. Don’t continue in this vein. You know it will only be harder for her.”

  I spin on him. “Who invited you here?”

  Penelope looks back and forth between me and my father, before her eyes settle in the dead man’s general direction. “Oh, is that Ivrilos? How is he today?”

  She must only be able to detect a vague shadow without making out the details or hearing his voice. Lucky her, I think.

  “How is he?” I say incredulously. “Who cares! I despise his very essence.”

  “Fine choice of words,” my father says. “Essence is exactly what he is, as a shade. Or pneuma, or breath, or whatever people have called it throughout the ages—it’s all the same, the intangible substance that composes the spirit.”

  I glare at the dead man. “If he’s all air, can he blow away and let us get back to our conversation? Better yet, why aren’t we burning this place to the ground and leaving?”