Shadows and Shade Box Set

by Amanda Cashure

  “We have work to do,” he says.

  I suck my tongue back into my mouth, taking a few swallows to clear the dryness away.

  “Ass,” I say, as he’s turning.

  He steps through the doorway, and trips.

  Over Seth.

  In all of my acting like an idiot, after Seth had laughed so hard the guy may have peed himself, he’d moved out the door and stood with his foot in Roarke’s way.

  Roarke grunts as he hits the slate. Then he’s on his feet and walking away like nothing happened.

  Seth winks and I struggle through the door before it shuts.

  “You’re welcome,” he fake-whispers.

  The words ‘thank you’ don’t leave my lips, but I’m pretty sure my barely smothered smile shares my appreciation.

  “Where are we going?” I manage to fake-whisper, jogging alongside him.

  Because I really need to jog and I really need to whisper.

  “Work,” he whispers back, playing into my drunken dumbness.

  Drinking always leads to dumb shit.

  On some level, I realize I’m drunk, stupidly drunk, and that the things I’m doing are out of place with reality, but my give-a-shit has vanished. My chest has relaxed. Tension continuing to ease from my whole being.

  “We already worked today?” I whisper.

  “More work,” he whispers back.

  “We didn’t have more work yesterday.”

  “We did, Ravaryn covered for us, but today we work.”

  “Why’d you give me wine at lunch, then?”

  “Because it’s funny,” he says, leaning in real close and letting the words fall with the warmth of his breath onto my ear. “And you’re much more fun when you’re not afraid of everything.”

  Is it that obvious? The way the wine has affected me? The way I feel all of the time without the wine?

  He turns around and starts to walk backward.

  “Come on, little toy,” he says, pretending there’s a rope connecting us and that he’s pulling me toward him.

  Before I can catch up and do something stupid, like try to poke him again, we’ve located the others. Our job this afternoon seems to be polishing posts.

  Posts that look this good, all shiny and smooth, they need maintenance. The three guys are working as a team, Pax standing on the slightly bigger branches that form the top of the half-walls between stalls and reaching up to polish the high places. Roarke is in the corridor using smooth movements on the outside posts and Killian is inside the stall working on the inside posts.

  Pax runs his gaze over me in assessment, but I don’t get a chance to react before he’s tossing a polishing cloth at my face.

  “You, down low,” he says to me, then tosses a cloth at Seth. “You, up high.”

  “I can do up high,” I say in defiance.

  And just to prove it, I climb on top of the nearest post, balancing on the balls of my feet and reaching up – for all of one second.

  “Not there,” Pax grumbles, at the same moment as I slip, feet going backward and the rest of me toppling forward.

  I fall against the side of a horse, then all of the way to the ground. Flat on my back in the straw.

  The horse lets out a snort and turns to investigate the intrusion, nudging me with a gentle nose.

  “The polish is still wet there,” Pax says, but I can hardly hear him over the others laughing. Even Pax is shaking his head in some kind of amusement.

  Killian grunts, turning to put some elbow grease into the post at the back of the stall. Not this stall. Not the one I’m in or the one I was trying to work in.

  Because of course, these guys had already polished this one.

  I wait until they’re over it, the laughter runs out, and their attention goes back to their work before I roll over, tummy down, and shimmy forward. Not toward the stall door, which my clear mind would have suggested. Nope – wine-brain wants me to creep up on Killian’s boots.

  The man wears high ankle, lots-of-buckles boots, but today the top few buckles have been left undone and there’s a glimpse of his black sock inside. I grab a piece of straw, dig it into a clump of horse crap, and edge closer.

  Gripping the edge of Killian’s sock, I pull it out, and feel him look down at me instantly. Before he can say anything, or move, I dump the manure in. Then, as if he can’t see me, I begin to shimmy backward, trying to get myself back through the stall wall and some kind of barrier between us.

  He still doesn’t move, stone still, but I know without looking up that his gaze is fixed on me.

  “Did you just put shit in my sock?” he asks, an odd air of perfect calmness to his voice.

  Killian and calm aren’t two words I’d normally put into one sentence.

  Seth cackles. Throwing himself at the roof rafters above the stalls and swinging arm-over-arm to dangle above us.

  I look up into Killian’s deep black eyes. Black with a sheen of emerald, like the feathers on a rooster.

  “No,” I say, cringing. “I think he did it,” I add, whispering like it’s a secret and stabbing my thumb in Seth’s direction. “He’s a bit of an ass like that. I told him not to and everything.”

  Seth drops onto the horse’s back in Killian’s stall.

  “She thinks she’s better than me,” he says to his brother.

  Killian clocks him over the back of the head with an open palm. Which momentarily wipes the smile off Seth’s face. My stomach clenches with the effort of holding in my laughter. Laughing now would bring Killian’s attention back onto me and I’m quite happy with it being on Seth.

  “I didn’t tell her to do it,” Seth says, rubbing his head.

  “You gave her wine,” Killian grumbles.

  The big guy yanks Seth’s boot off, followed by his sock, and then lifts his own foot high enough that he can, in a few swift movements, get his own shoe and sock off.

  “That’s childish,” Seth says, pushing himself up to crouch on the back of the horse.

  He coils, ready to leap and swing himself out of reach via the rafters, but instead a great chunk of manure whacks him in the back of the head and he drops back on the horse to keep himself from falling to the ground. I’m not sure who threw it at him, Roarke or Pax are both contenders. Killian pins Seth’s leg under one strong bicep and yanks the poo-sock onto his foot.

  “Ew, nasty!” Seth squeals, trying to wriggle free.

  Which Killian finally lets him do, but not before putting the man’s boot back on first.

  Seth throws himself off the horse and marches from the stall, sitting in the middle of nowhere to take his boot back off. I shimmy forward, still belly down, and stick the top half of my body out from under the door. Which gives me a view of Seth’s bare feet.

  Behind me, Killian is putting on Seth’s cleaner sock and pulling his boot back on. Pax has gone back to polishing and Roarke is still chuckling softly.

  “How’d you get scars on your foot?” I ask.

  “Tournament, and they’ll heal soon,” he says, looking at me with a mischievous twinkle in the bright blue of his eyes.

  He ended up with poo in his sock and he still enjoyed the whole thing.

  “How do you get your boots cut up in a tournament?” I ask, then realize that they returned to their rooms barefoot after tournament. “You fight without shoes?”

  “We fight without anything,” Roarke corrects.

  My mouth drops open, my jaw resting on the slate of the floor.

  “Like fully naked? Even against girls?”

  “Girls fight girls, guys fight guys, we all fight naked so no one can cheat,” he says.

  “What if there are both guys and girls fighting?”

  I pull my hands up under my chin and rest my head on them.

  “There never is. Triunes are either guys or girls.”

  “Polish,” Killian says, throwing my rag at my head as hard as he possibly can.

  I consider myself lucky it’s just a rag. Rolling onto my back, with m
y legs still in my stall and my head and shoulders out, I start polishing the underside of the branches-built-into-a-gate.

  “Not there,” Killian grumbles.

  “You too, Chaos,” Pax orders as he moves into the next stall down.

  “The border picks the people?”

  “We’re born to become Sabers, the border decides when we take up weapons. Usually in our fiftieth year – Logan is an anomaly.”

  “What’s your border’s name?” I ask.

  “What?” at least three of the four say in unison.

  “Your border. If she does things like pick groups of warriors then she must be a living entity, what’s it called?”

  “It. Border,” Killian grunts.

  “That’s not very nice. She’s working hard, you know. Keeping you all safe, keeping my realm safe, sucking the magic from things… What about Ximena?”

  “Border.”

  “A border called Ximena.”

  Pax growls the kind of growl that I should be worried about, but I’m not. I just keep polishing the underside of a branch.

  “Get up,” he orders.

  “Can’t. Stuck,” I counter.

  “I will pull you out of there.”

  “Please.” I think I mean it, until he grips my tunic and drags me out, forcing me to my feet.

  Then I consider getting back on the ground and crawling right back into that stall.

  “The border is called the border, and we have work to do,” he says, some measure of badass-alpha leaking into his tone.

  He lets go of me. I sway dangerously to the left, and he grabs my shoulders again.

  Then I begin to laugh uncontrollably.

  “I’m so sorry.” I laugh, which makes me more horrified at the way I’m acting.

  He says something sharply to Seth, something that I completely miss.

  “Go sleep it off,” he tells me, slowly releasing his grip.

  I sway, but manage to set my feet far enough apart that I don’t succumb to gravity and hit the ground.

  Seth sidles up next to me.

  “Can I carry you? Please?”

  I push him away.

  “Nope, I can walk.” And I start a meandering journey down the hall.

  “See, Pax, I used my manners,” Seth says, clearly not to me. “You’re going the wrong way.”

  But that was aimed at me. I spin around, almost fall on my face, grab a stall for balance and march forward at the fastest pace I can muster.

  Seth walks beside me. We turn a corner and find six stable boys all holding shovels. My escort wraps a quick arm around my shoulders, pulling me in, and with his other hand he nestles my head close to his chest. It makes for awkward walking.

  “She’s got the vomiting-sickness, keep clear,” he says, before I can push him away and shout something about him needing to respect my personal space.

  The servant’s reactions are hidden, with Seth’s cream colored shirt in my face, but no one says anything.

  He tries to steer me around the corner and all I manage to do is trip over my own feet. Making me stumble forward. At the last second he grabs me by the arm, steadying me.

  “What –” I begin, huffing my hair out of my face and taking stock of my surroundings. Horse stalls down either side of me, many of them empty – their horses in use somewhere. Straw and dirt is strewn across the slate floor, which means the stable boys were probably working in this direction. “– was that about?”

  “I thought it would be easier.”

  He lets go of me, and I continue to walk through the T in the stalls and into a section of the stables that has already been cleaned. The difference is obvious, and no – I’m not the kind of person who normally notices the cleanliness of stable floors.

  “Easier than what?” I ask.

  “Maybe just faster,” he says, from somewhere behind me.

  I turn sharply to see him just leaning against the stall on the corner, smiling.

  “What?!” I demand.

  “This way,” he says, pointing to his right.

  Oh, of course I was going the wrong way. Again.

  It takes a few haphazard steps before my feet find their rhythm.

  Is it possible for Silvari wine to get stronger after you’ve drunk it? I feel like I’ve consumed another bottle in the last ten minutes.

  “Faster than seeing what you were going to say, or do, to those stable hands,” Seth says, smiling devilishly at me as I march past him and toward a familiar dead-end.

  Seth swipes a hand over the wall and waves me inside.

  “Your fault,” I manage to say, slipping past him and into the room.

  “There’s more over there if you want some.” He waves to where Killian has a stack of weapons on display. “And I think the words you’re looking for are ‘thank you’.”

  “Why would I say ‘thank you’ to you?” I drawl out.

  I collect myself a bottle from the crate beside Killian’s arsenal. Bottle number four. Seth already has one in his hand and he’s sitting on the edge of a bed, pulling his boots back off, the dirty sock stayed on the ground out in the stables. He wears the kind of boots that just slip on, no buckles like Killian, or laces like Roarke, or a combination of the two like Pax.

  “Because I got both of us off work duties,” he says.

  “I’m pretty sure I did that.”

  He snorts. “Hardly.”

  “Wholly,” I counter.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It means the stunt that got us back here was wholly mine.”

  He crosses the room, and for a second I think he’s walking up to me. Then I realize his boots are in his hands and he’s just going to put them by the door. I lean back against the wall, Killian’s weapons on my left, the closed door on my right, and all the lounges and beds and everything else spread out in front of me.

  Just leaning here, sipping the sweet fruits and letting my eyes drift shut.

  My stomach growls and the word, “Food,” escapes my lips.

  “Not my name,” Seth says, freaking me the crap out because he’s only an inch from my face.

  I stare at him in shock. Pure youth, dazzling blue eyes, and gold-flecked hair fills my vision.

  “I’m going to cut your hair off,” I warn.

  A seductive smile graces his lips as he runs a hand through his locks.

  “I was just going to suggest you lay down before you fall down,” he says – shoving a pastry into my hands before he walks away.

  I gulp, devouring the pastry and recorking the bottle – the bottle goes back in the damned box. Mostly because my head is really swimming, but also because I shouldn’t be considering the guy’s lips as seductive. I need some distance, some water, some time to remember my morals.

  They run through my head as I move toward the furthest couch from him – then decide the edge of Killian’s bed is actually further away, and perch myself on that instead. Our living quarters are basically an open space inside the pentagon created by four horse stalls and a magical-branch-wall. It’s all open space, so every possible spot to sit still keeps Seth in my sights.

  Roarke’s bed isn’t an option, and I wonder if that’s part of my problem. I’ve been so busy keeping my walls up around these guys that the minute they’re down, the me that was cowering inside does some really stupid shit.

  Stupid, clearly, is just a part of who I am. Quiet is also not on the list of Shade’s Attributes.

  Gentle. I’m gentle. I’m caring. I don’t like seeing others hurt – but recently I discovered that doesn’t mean much when the ‘other’ is a stranger and my own life is also in danger. I really like keeping myself safe.

  I don’t like…

  Seth laughs at me and I swallow hard.

  … Men. No, that’s not right. I definitely like men.

  “Take your boots off,” he says.

  “Why, so you can put shit in them?”

  “No, so you don’t end up sleeping in them.”

&nb
sp; “Who says I’m sleeping?”

  “You’ve been drinking Silvari wine. For us it’s a mild relaxant, but Roarke said it’s probably going to knock you out.”

  “I bed I stay awake longer than you,” I counter, without thinking, almost without even making sense. I bed?

  Clearly without thinking, because the guy is going to be awake for another three or four days – I think.

  “If you don’t sleep, then why did you build yourselves beds?” I ask, hoping to overshadow my challenge.

  He gets up and crosses to me, all confidence and muscle.

  “Because,” he says as he walks, pausing to sip his own wine. “Our bodies still need to relax. We can’t just work and sit, work and sit, and we aren’t immune to the odd nap.”

  “Right,” I mutter. “And how long do you sleep when you actually sleep?”

  “Eight hours, roughly. Normally that’s plenty.”

  He kneels down in front of me, and it’s only once he’s this close, that I realize he was a bit blurry over there.

  “Can I take your boots off, please?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” I say, shrugging and ordering my body not to inch away from him.

  Because this is Seth and even if Seth does stupid things, he’s never hurtful – and Pax isn’t Seth and Pax would definitely kick his younger brother’s ass if stupid things happened in here. The close kind of stupid. Skin to skin. Lips to lips. That kind.

  I’m about a hundred percent sure Pax would be pissed… “Wouldn’t he?”

  “Wouldn’t he what?” Seth asks.

  He slips my final boot off, but waits for me to answer before moving.

  “Wouldn’t Pax be upset?”

  “Because you took your boots off?”

  “No, if you touched me.”

  Way to make things super weird, Shade.

  He laughs, not an ‘I just pulled a prank on you’ kind of laugh, but a lower, gentler, smoother sound.

  “Pax would kill me if I did anything to you without your permission,” he says.

  Then he sprawls out on the bed, on his side, propped on one elbow, head in his hand, and just lays there looking at me – on the same bed as me.

  The hay bale beds are considerably larger than a normal bed, though smaller than the beds in their rooms. Even still, Seth has made himself at home right next to me. A hand-span of air between my knee and his legs.