Shadows and Shade Box Set

by Amanda Cashure

  “Commander Logan,” Four says, and he’s not saying it to compliment the guy.

  Someone chuckles, followed by a shuffle and a thud that rocks the timber floor underneath me. Whoever was on the cart just hopped off.

  “Not for long,” Commander One says. “I’m working on that plan as soon as we have a mission that gives us privacy and time. We can’t let the border go down.”

  Feeling reaches my fingers and toes. I give them a wriggle, take a deep breath, release, inhale, and start to sit up.

  We’re stopped right in the middle of a cross-road. The Drayden – Hirana – Manor intersection. Beyond that is the Capital, about a week’s ride. I could possibly walk there in a month.

  The four guys are standing under the only tree. One with his back to me and his arms crossed. Seth crouched low, and stabbing something on the ground with a stick. Three resting back against the tree trunk, and Four standing with his arms folded. He gives the horses tethered to the back of the cart a glance, but his gaze doesn’t register me, huddled low behind them, at all. I shimmy to the edge of the cart and slip to the ground.

  “Seth,” One says – his back still to me. “Logan is off limits. You don’t touch him. You don’t even touch the things that belong to him.”

  “I won’t get caught messing with him,” Seth says.

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to do any messing,” Three says.

  “Logan is off limits to you, Seth. You are forbidden – do not touch Logan,” One commands.

  My insides recoil from the words, the tone, the weight that bores down with each syllable, as static rushes over me. Power.

  My soul grabs at it, enjoying it and fearing it at the same time. The order is tainted with some kind of magic – and he’s not even talking to me.

  “Okay,” Seth says, his arms up in submission.

  “Leave the cart for the merchant. He said he’d collect it by nightfall,” One says, reminding me that I was trying to make my escape – before I stopped to drool over the guy’s voice.

  There isn’t really anywhere to run. Maybe, if I had ever had anything to do with horses or riding, I’d consider one of their mounts worth stealing. But I haven’t. So it’s flat land and open pasture – or the cart itself.

  I crouch down and crawl backward. It’s just a flat-bed cart. Two axles, four rough looking wheels, and nothing else. Feeling each crunch and thump of the guys approaching as a ticking clock, I wedge my feet on top of one axle and pull my upper body up to rest over the other. Facing down toward the dirt and dust of the road.

  My plan – these guys see I’m gone and decide to ride for home, because little-me is not worth searching for. Then I get back as close as I dare to the estate, sneak in once it’s dark, and wake up tomorrow like nothing ever happened…

  Okay, that’s not going to happen. Lord Martin is going to be pissed off, but pissed at me is better than pissed at everyone else because of me.

  The first set of boots reaches the side of the cart, then stills.

  “Well, she’s gone,” Three declares.

  “Trust you to lose her,” Seth says, stopping beside a horse, then swinging himself into his saddle.

  “Killian?” the Commander growls.

  Silence, except for the creak of leather and stomp of a hoof as someone else mounts their horse.

  “Under the cart,” Four grunts. “Woke up a while ago. Didn’t think you’d care. She’s not scared enough to be stupid.”

  “Bet she’s scared shitless of you, though,” Three says.

  Four just grunts – like he actually knows the answer.

  The Commander’s head appears under the edge of the cart, long-haired Three bending to stare at me from the other side.

  “You are coming with us,” the Commander says.

  “We really should let her choose,” Seth suggests.

  I nod vigorously, but the Commander just rolls his jaw with pent up frustration.

  “You have two choices,” Three says. “And one of them isn’t that Manor. So, do you want to go to Drayden?”

  I shake my head just as vigorously.

  “Good, then you’ve chosen to come with us,” Three says.

  “Out. Cold. Now,” the Commander orders.

  And with each word, my world collapses. My brain obeys, and my body falls to the ground. Hard.

  Inwardly, I groan. Outwardly, I’m like a lump of rotten pumpkin. Nothing but mush. I can feel my cheek pressed flat against the dirt and the dust swirling in my nose. But I can’t even twitch my eye under my closed eyelids.

  Which is not okay. I am not agreeing to this knock-me-unconscious-on-command thing they have going on. First Three, with his smooth-as-silk commands, now One, with his orders-that-can’t-be-disobeyed.

  I claw at the command and manage to hold on to a thin sliver of consciousness.

  A hand grips my arm, rolling me over and dragging me across the dirt before picking me up.

  “Seth, she rides with me. You’re already too attached,” Commander One says, and my weight’s passed up to him.

  For a second, I feel like I might be getting cradled up like a baby, but I don’t have that kind of luck. Nope, I’m draped tummy down over the horse’s neck. One’s hand is firmly on the small of my back, pinning me in place.

  When the horse lunges into a canter, my head smacks against its shoulder, and my weight bounces into the air. I come down with my stomach thumping on the horse’s withers. Moving might be impossible, but feeling is not.

  It is nothing compared to an encounter with Lord Martin, and for the first few hours I convince myself I can handle it. But the hours keep ticking by, and the men keep riding hard.

  Some kind of revenge is in this Commander’s near future. Snakes in his bed? Mud in his boots? I’ll think of something.

  Something that stinks as badly as the air around me does. Air growing thick with the scent of death.

  Power slams into me. Not into my body, but into my being. And not slams like hits, but slams like smashes me into a million pieces and leaves the world black.

  When I stir awake, I’m in a bed in a bloody big dungeon-like room full of about twenty other beds.

  I leap to my feet, but aside from a tender stomach – courtesy of the horse ride here – I’m in one piece.

  In one piece, that’s the important thing. The next most important thing – I’m still fully dressed.

  I turn in a complete circle with my mouth wide open. It’s literally just a stone room with a crap ton of beds lining the walls and a path down the middle of them. There’s a single shelf above each bed, and each person has a small collection of items. A few pictures or books, a ball, a knitting project. That’s all the personality in the room.

  Girls of all colors, shapes, and heights are getting up – but there’s not much difference in size, and even on Lord Martin’s low food budget I still have more curves than most of these women. Women built straight up and down, like saplings.

  They’re all in the same kind of age bracket too, close to my age or a tiny bit older. No one looks under eighteen or above twenty, but that sort of thing can be hard to guess.

  “Hey, you,” a girl says, catching my absolutely confused attention by elbowing me in the ribs.

  She’s wearing a plain white sleep shirt – same as everyone else in here – and pulling her hair up into a ponytail.

  I run my hands over my own locks and snag the band from a matted knot near the base of my neck. Thank you, Cook, for giving me the type of haircut that breeds knots. Shaking it free, I pull my hair back into a tight bun on the top of my head.

  “Over there,” she says, waving toward a tall woman with a ledger in her hands.

  I get the hint, walking purposefully against the crowd to the woman.

  “You,” she snaps, lips pulled to one side, like my existence just ruined her day.

  “Shade. My. Name’s. Shade,” I counter.

  “You came in during the night,” she says, not reacting to my word
s at all.

  “Night? No –” I’m about to protest that it was mid-morning when I left the estate, Commander One can’t have knocked me out for the whole day, and a whole night – that’s a scary long time. But she interrupts me.

  Then my stomach growls, hard.

  “It feels like two,” I mutter.

  “It probably was, if you were on the soot side of the border,” she says.

  My jaw drops and she just stares at me until I manage to pick the thing back up off the floor.

  “I’m not happy about it, either. My job is to make sure things get done right,” the woman tuts. “And mortal soot being dropped in here in the middle of the night is wrong. We consider being a servant an honor – especially a servant here.”

  “I’m good at being a servant,” I assure her.

  “Good,” she says slowly, mimicking my earlier tone. “Is. Not. Going. To. Cut. It. We have to be the best.”

  I cross my arms over my chest and just stare at her.

  Inside, I want to tell her that my standard for good shits all over her standard – but unlike when I’m with those four assholes who dragged me here, I can currently hold my tongue.

  “Well, there are worse fates,” she finally says, but I’m not sure if she’s referring to my fate or hers.

  I don’t tell her that I’m awesome at being soot – I just never realized there were servants who are not soot, and by the sounds of it, not mortal either. But I hold my tongue about all of that too.

  Partly because there’s a chance Cook could be right about the whole Seeds and magic thing, and whenever there’s a chance Cook could be right, I need to listen.

  “Okay, where is here?” I ask.

  She shakes her head, then drops her gaze to the ledger in her arms. A thin stack of papers that have been fixed to a stiff board to make it easy to work with while carrying the thing around. “Your new home is the bonded-quarters of the White Castle, but the world out there is Silva. Not that you’ll ever see it. What you will see is hard work. Those boys might have been the old Crown’s sons, but they mean nothing to the new Crown. Just because their Elite asses dropped you in here doesn’t mean anyone is going to like it. Half the Masters in this castle still revere them – the other half do not. You don’t want to be in the middle of any of that.”

  “Great, let me out of here, then. Just point me in the right direction.”

  She completely ignores me, again, marching toward the exit.

  “I don’t want to be here, you don’t want me here, so just point toward Desayer Realm.”

  “You didn’t have a say in this, did you? Where exactly did those boys snatch you from?” She stops her sharp walking long enough for me to see that her dilated pupils are bordering on horrified.

  “Nowhere great, actually,” I reassure her. “ And I guess they didn’t technically snatch me, more like acquired.”

  “You’ll get three meals a day. One day off a month. Fresh clothes and bedding, always. The showers are hot, and you’ll sleep safely every night. Don’t try to run off – I feel the need to warn you because the mortal world is a pretty safe place. Silva is full of everything that can kill you. They’re all big, angry, fighting for profit or territory, and eat meat. It takes teams of Sabers to keep this kingdom and its species and magic from ripping the place apart. I think you’d last a few hours out there, and it’s days and days to the border by foot.”

  Which is a pretty compelling argument.

  “After your fifty years of service, you’ll be paid – in gold. Silva currency is gold coin, and I imagine that will still buy you anything you want in Desayer Realm. You just have to live that long. Even without encounters inside Saber bedrooms, soot do just seem to die before their fifty years is up.”

  “Fifty years?” I gasp, clinging on to the slightly more hopeful information. What good is the promise of gold if it’s fifty years away?! I force that idea into my back pocket. Something to puzzle over later. A safe bed, even without the pay, might be better than anything waiting for me on the other side of the border.

  Except Jake and Cook and… but none of them need to see Lord Martin whipping me unconscious the minute he lays eyes on me. Which he will. Especially if it takes me a week to walk back there.

  “Okay,” I begin, swallowing over the dryness in my throat before continuing. “What do you do here? Serve your Crown?”

  “No,” she says, her voice an audible frown. “We serve three kinds of people. Sabers, Elite Sabers, and Masters. It takes a twisted soul to serve the Crown. Sure, your pay packet is triple – if you survive.”

  The hall grows quiet as the other servants file out of here, and Ledger-Lady turns to walk behind them into a long, dark and quite damp hallway. We pass open doorway after open doorway, the rooms inside almost completely black, and I find myself turning in circles, trying to get a good look in each one.

  “They’re all the same. I’ve never had a soot before, plenty of Silvari servants but no soot. I mean, mostly your kind get dumped in the sections that work the suites. If Logan brings someone in, he wants them to be in his rooms as his play thing, and not scrubbing dishes.”

  I’m good at scrubbing dishes. My family all happened to get the Taridan Flu and had the fantastic luck of not surviving it. I don’t remember much, just Cook arriving one day and carrying me back to the Manor. It was probably a few hours by horse, if she’d had a horse. She didn’t, and she carried me through the night.

  I started washing dishes that morning.

  Ledger-Lady leads me up a sharp set of stairs, taking them one at a time but practically at a run.

  “Logan didn’t bring you in. You should feel lucky about that. But the Elorsin brothers are their own kind of trouble. Roarke was known to bring back a girl or twenty every night, a few decades ago.” You wouldn’t think she was running up stairs the way her voice remains even. “Before my time, but the dignitaries banned it. That boy’s not allowed a girl in his room, on account of them never coming out alive. Perhaps they’re testing the waters with you. Seeing how the dignitaries who run the castle are going to react.”

  “They’re what?” I demand, my mind still lost on the part about one of the boys killing the girls that he’s had in his bed.

  I bet it’s Four. Four’s definitely scary.

  I try to stop myself from thinking about that.

  “Forcing a servant is off limits. Quick unexplained deaths get overlooked. And if you consent to something that carries the risk of death, then it’s your own fault,” she says.

  She’s walking so fast, I’m practically jogging to keep up.

  “What’s counted as forcing?” All I can think about is how I was unconscious on command – twice.

  She shrugs, her relaxed shoulders a contrast to the furrow on her brow. “That’s a blurry line. I’d probably say yes – personally. The Elorsins are soul-melting, and I’m Silvari – which makes me a lot stronger than you. So I’d probably say yes and I’d have a good chance of surviving.” She has a dreamy tone to her voice for a split second before she snaps back into serious boss-lady mode. “Denying Saber requests is also against the law. That’s what we’re here for. To serve them. So if you see the Elorsins coming – maybe run the other way.”

  “Wait,” I say, grabbing the woman by the arm.

  She dusts at my fingers as if they’re dirt. As if I’m dirt and she’s dusting me off her lovely, clean, pressed and perfect white shirt.

  White is not a color they should put on me. My current attire of dark brown sleeveless tunic, stockings, and boots, wasn’t terribly clean even before it was passed on to me – two years ago now.

  “So, the rules say that if one of the guys makes a move on you, you have to let them?” I ask, an out-of-breath-from-climbing-a-million-steps gasp in my voice.

  She chuckles then, but not like she’s actually amused by my words, more in the ‘I pity you,’ kind of way.

  “If they ask you to wash their feet, you say ‘yes’. Get it?”

/>   Three more stairs and we step out into a hallway. One whole wall is a sheet of frosted glass, flooding the place with light. The other wall is still stone, but it’s been painted white. White clothes, white walls, what is it with the white?

  “Does it happen often?” I ask.

  “Being asked to wash feet? Depends on the Saber.”

  “No, I mean the guys asking servants into their suites.”

  “It’s rare. I mean, some of them see servants as sport, but the way their Seeds react to other Seeds makes us less fulfilling. Unless they enjoy watching the life get sucked out of a person.”

  “Seeds, like the real magical kind?” I ask.

  “Whenever you hear Seed, think power. Magic. Soul. That kind of thing. Do you have Seeds on the other side of the border?”

  “No, just stories.” Ones that Cook was right about all along. “Does Logan have the type of Seed to suck the life out of a person?” I ask.

  She nods, then frowns.

  “Logan’s worse. Every woman he’s with dies, even the Elite, even before he got the calling and arrived here. His sister was said to be the same, before the rumors of her vanished. There’s only so many times that can happen before the dignitaries call a stop to it. He’s still new around here – at least that’s why I think they’re waiting and not acting yet.”

  Silva – this weird-ass realm I’ve ended up in because I opened my stupid mouth and started a conversation up with a chuckin’ Elite who has a crappy sense of humour. A realm that isn’t even on the map because the only thing on the map is the enchanted forest.

  She continues. “Those of us without Seeds are just plain Silvari – those with Seeds are Sabers, and all up there are almost four-hundred living here at the White Castle. Sabers are in teams of three called triunes. Except the Elorsin team of four – a tetrad. There are no teams of five, they’re a fairy tale, and if a triune loses a member, they get disbanded, so no teams of two either. Training is mandatory while they’re here, they do classes and hit shit too, and they can be sent on assignments without warning…”

  She trails off, maybe because all of my features have begun to melt with information overload.