Paths of Alir (A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book 3)

by Melissa McPhail

  The lad truthfully didn’t know what to make of it. His mind felt stretched by the experience, unable to grasp it all, while his insides fluttered with anticipation like linen snapping in the brisk sea wind.

  “Look there,” said the zanthyr. He pointed west.

  Tanis gazed along the line of Phaedor’s leather-clad arm and saw a thin spire of light that erupted from the trees and vanished into the gilded clouds of sunset. He frowned. “What is it?”

  Phaedor turned him an elusive smile. “Our card of calling.”

  Tanis exhaled a long-suffering sigh.

  The zanthyr gave him an amused look. “Come, lad. Your stomach is announcing itself loudly and insistently. Let’s eat, and I’ll tell you what I can of your mother’s house.”

  They ate in the kitchen at a long wooden table that would’ve easily sat twelve. Tanis’s eyes and thoughts kept wandering, wondering if he would happen upon some painting or piece of furniture that sparked a recollection, but so far he’d found no memories of the manor from among his baby thoughts.

  It was doubly strange to be sitting with the zanthyr by lamplight after so many nights where their only illumination had been the dancing flames of a campfire. Now Tanis sat with Phaedor in his mother’s home, and the zanthyr was telling him wondrous things—without even being asked!

  “This manor is the Villa Serafina,” the zanthyr said as Tanis was reminding himself to close his mouth, for it had several times already fallen slack with surprise. “It and the lands surrounding it have been in your mother’s family for generations. The family’s main estate, the Palazzo di Adonnai, is located in the adjoining valley, but your mother preferred living here, by the sea.”

  Tanis felt more within this communication than Phaedor’s words alone conveyed: intimations of his mother’s interests and passions, her pursuits and delights.

  “Your mother came here as often as she could. She loved deeply of the sea and the forest, and indeed, of all of these lands. It made her sad to return—sometimes after many years—and find that the house had aged.”

  Phaedor glanced down at his fork, which lay precisely in line with his knife, as though the alignment mimicked the mental organization of his thoughts. His words followed the line of fork and knife, toward Tanis, but the lad knew much lingered unspoken in the narrow spaces between.

  The zanthyr rose and walked to a window that looked out upon the kitchen yard and an orchard beyond. Shadows collected around him, and some of them formed into one of his daggers, which simply appeared in his hand. He gazed quietly into the yard as he thumbed the blade. “That he might never see your mother saddened, your father laid a web of patterns upon the villa and its surrounding grounds—protective patterns, patterns of preservation.”

  “My father…” Again, Tanis’s pulse quickened upon thinking of his father, who felt so oddly foreign and yet so important to the lad. It both pleased and excited him to know he’d been a wielder.

  Phaedor turned a look over his shoulder, and Tanis sensed a sea of words floating beneath his emerald gaze, vast depths of information about his father. But the zanthyr said only, “The staff from the Adonnai estate come regularly to attend to this villa, but the house needs little attention. It remains exactly as your mother left it.”

  As grateful as he was to learn these small things, Tanis knew that Phaedor was merely skirting the edges of things…walking a circle around a vastly beautiful city and describing only its wall. For all the zanthyr had told him more in the last hour than in all the collected minutes of their travels, the important information remained frustratingly hidden in that protected city, undisturbed.

  “My lord…” Tanis absently pushed some beans around on his plate with his fork. “Who were they, my parents? I don’t even know their names.”

  The zanthyr arched a raven brow. “Is that so?”

  Tanis opened his mouth to again deny such knowledge, but the words wouldn’t form. “But I—I mean…”

  No, he really couldn’t claim that he didn’t know them, yet their names felt so far from his tongue. Tanis set down his fork and fell back in his chair. “My lord, I don’t understand why you can’t just tell me.”

  The zanthyr flipped his dagger and caught it by the point. He eyed the boy beneath the spill of his raven hair. “What promise did I make to your mother?”

  Tanis frowned at him, for he guessed well enough the zanthyr’s meaning. “You promised her you would protect me,” he grumbled, “—but I don’t see how knowing my parents’ names could possibly bring me harm.”

  Phaedor flipped the hair from his eyes and settled the lad an ominous stare. “Do you not, Truthreader?”

  Tanis swallowed, for what he actually heard Phaedor saying was, One day you will.

  He held Phaedor’s gaze as long as he could, but he saw no point in trying to out-stare the zanthyr, and there was no mistaking the warning lacing his tone or the river of portentous meaning rushing beneath it.

  Finally the lad cleared his throat and changed the subject to a topic less unsettling. “So…you said the staff would be coming in the morning?”

  Phaedor grinned and flipped his dagger. “Your staff, in response to the spire I showed you. It’s another of your father’s patterns, a beacon high enough to be seen at the Palazzo di Adonnai and far beyond. The spire is raised any time someone crosses within your father’s preservation patterns, that is, beneath the dome—which is the only way to reach this villa.”

  Tanis thought of the luminous spire shooting skyward and marveled at his father’s skill. Who were these people, his parents, who led such lives? And where were they now? He wanted so much to push the zanthyr on the topic, but the question simply hid now from his tongue, cowed by the ominous implications of the things Phaedor wouldn’t say.

  The silence at the table lingered, and the shadows beyond their circle of lamplight felt suddenly heavy. The zanthyr’s gaze took in Tanis’s drooping eyelids, and a quiet smile graced his features. “To bed with you, lad.”

  Tanis hadn’t realized he was so tired until the zanthyr said the words. Afterwards, he wondered suspiciously if indeed he hadn’t been tired until the zanthyr decided he should go to sleep. In the privacy of his thoughts, Tanis suspected that the zanthyr’s ability actually knew no bounds—that indeed, Phaedor might move mountains if his motives required him to. Putting a boy to bed without argument was certainly not beyond his capabilities.

  Yet as Tanis reluctantly trudged up the grand, curving staircase, he wondered how he was ever going to fall asleep. He hadn’t even begun to explore his mother’s house, and the lure of treasures to be discovered had him fair salivating—either that, or the fact that he’d barely touched his dinner. Most of the day still felt surreal; the enormity of it had barely begun to sink in.

  Tanis partly recognized that this new knowledge of his inheritance wasn’t just about a house—it was a house and land and titles and possibly peerage in the Empress’ court and privilege and his parents’ history and their talents and-and-and!

  But all he really wanted to think about just then was his mother and father and the life they might’ve led together as a family.

  He was quite sure as he stripped out of his traveling clothes and slipped between soft sheets, grateful for the quick warmth of the heavenly mattress and eiderdown duvet, that he would lie awake half the night just thinking about his parents. But no sooner had he closed his eyes with a contented smile than he fell into a deep and powerful sleep.

  Three

  “Don’t talk to me of Balance. Fortune favors the bold.”

  – The Adept wielder Arion Tavestra

  A bank of thunderstorms squatted along Agasan’s Caladrian Coast, blanketing the Sacred City of Faroqhar in fog and rain. The usually bustling harbor lay as empty as the streets, with everyone staying put rather than braving the lashing winds. Most of the city’s residents patiently waited out Mother Nature’s foul temper indoors, content to sup or share a drink wherever the rains had caught them. Onl
y the occasional pair of Red Guard could be seen passing on horseback, their animals looking as sullen and ill-humored as their crimson-cloaked riders. Storms in the Sacred City were rare, but when they came, they struck with a vengeance.

  Atop one of the highest hills, separated from the city by miles of parkland, the inhabitants of the Sormitáge University went about their regular affairs with little interruption. Only the doves that nested among the university’s domes seemed bothered by the rains, and they hid their heads beneath sheltering wings, feathers ruffled against the turbulent winds.

  Within a gallery overlooking a rain-swept quad, the young Nodefinder Felix di Sarcova della Buonara waited for a gaggle of first-year Sormitáge students—not so affectionately called frites by upper-classmen like Felix—to make their way down the passage with an agonizing lack of haste.

  Felix’s desire for privacy might’ve been granted sooner had the quad not offered an evening’s unexpected entertainment in the form of three frites who’d apparently been locked out of their dormitory by some arcane means. Glowing dormitory windows on the far side of the quad illuminated the frites’ drenched and sullen efforts to regain entry; likewise the host of laughing boys standing safely inside.

  Felix might’ve ordered the gawking frites in his own gallery to move on, claiming Devoveré privileges—for he had his first ring at only fifteen, a rare accomplishment that had garnered him many envious new enemies—but then the frites might’ve remembered seeing him.

  Felix misliked anyone noticing him while he was about his activities, and especially frites. First-years were notorious gossip-mongers. Like fledgling birds, they noisily craved the worms of rumor, no matter how many times the disgusting things had been regurgitated.

  Like now, for instance. Though they were apparently captivated by their drenched compatriots in the courtyard, the frites were running their mouths nonstop about the Imperial Princess Nadia van Gelderan showing up only minutes ago to attend a lecture. Rumor spread in tsunami fashion upon the mouths of frites.

  Felix waited impatiently in the shadow of a statue, inwardly cursing the fool-headedness of frites in general and these in particular, and willing them to find some other place to idle away their evening—he, for one, had somewhere important to be. After a nauseating length of time, they finally grew bored of the display and meandered off in a buzz of inane chatter, like a swarm of sluggish flies.

  “Boccalone,” Felix hissed in his native Calabrian tongue. Big mouth gossips!

  When the passage fell silent, Felix poked his head around the edge of the statue. He aimed a pair of mismatched eyes—one blue and one green—to the left and right, and then the rest of his body followed his head out into the open passage. Quick as a cat, he darted down the gallery toward the node he meant to travel.

  The passages of the Sormitáge were rife with nodes and leis. A Nodefinder had merely to open his inner eye and an onslaught of portals accosted him. Creating a slight hitch in this plethora of potential adventures was the fact that said nodes had long ago been twisted and sealed off. Peering across them revealed only darkness, and traveling them was widely known to be impossible. Indeed, attempting to so much as stick one’s head across the threshold of a twisted node was a foolhardy endeavor that even frites understood as idiocy beyond contempt. Such a one would go nowhere at best and at worst find himself stuck within the Pattern of the World, trapped until he starved to death or the forces raging within the realm’s magnetic grid ripped him apart.

  But Felix was no ordinary Nodefinder.

  His mother laughingly claimed he’d been bastard-born of a love affair with a handsome avieth named Firenze, which might account for his mismatched eyes and oddly tri-colored auburn hair; but Felix had never seen a handsome avieth and suspected his mother was far too savvy to entertain a Wildling lover right underneath the Lord Sarcova’s nose—especially considering how easily Davros Sarcova divested himself of wives who’d displeased him.

  Felix didn’t really know what divine powers had invested him with the variant talent he secretly possessed, but he knew enough to keep quiet about what he could do. He’d often wondered if his gift enabled him to untwist the nodes as he traveled them, or if it gave him the ability to simply travel their contorted pathways unharmed. Whatever the case, he’d long resigned himself to suffer the mystery, since he certainly couldn’t ask any of the maestros about it—they’d only want to know why he wanted to know.

  Traveling on the twisted nodes of Faroqhar, however, amounted to illicit use of his talent, and he’d face a tempest of trouble if anyone ever caught him in the act. Raine’s truth, the Empress’s Red Guard would string him up by his toes, smear him with honey and lower him into a hole of rats. And that would just be the appetizer.

  But all the fun of a game lay in its inherent risk.

  It’s no game tonight though, he thought with the slightest pang of unease.

  Tonight he was finally going to find out what had been bothering his roommate, Malin van Drexel, so desperately that the older boy had dropped a whole notch on his belt.

  Over the past month, Malin had become increasingly withdrawn and unsociable. He kept odd hours, jumped at shadows, and took his meals alone. Felix had been trying for weeks to get Malin to talk to him. Then, just that afternoon, he’d appeared in their chambers, announced where and when Felix should meet him, and vanished again.

  Frowning at these thoughts, Felix stepped across the node and emerged in a hallway leading to the kitchens of one the residential houses. The clatter of pans and dishes underscored the discordant hum floating down the passage from the dining room. This was just the first of several forbidden paths he would travel on his way to meet Malin, each one compounding his chances of being caught.

  Lord and the Lady, what are you thinking, Felix?

  He’d never attempted anything so utterly reckless, except perhaps the adventure that had landed him in the Princess Nadia van Gelderan’s bedchamber—but that had been an accident, inasmuch as he hadn’t known the node connected to the Imperial Palace and the private apartments of the Empress’s heir.

  Still, Evans Hall had better food than his own dining room in Chresten, and his cousin Phoebe lived at Evans, so he had some right to help himself to their delectable menu, even if Phoebe had been on holiday for over a fortnight.

  See what risks I take for you, Malin? Felix ducked his head and slipped through the shadows towards the dining room, away from the kitchen’s glow.

  Not much later, Felix stepped off another node into the dim corridor between two rows of high bookshelves. Immediately he collided with a ladder used to access the highest shelves. The spiteful thing tumbled, and Felix just caught it before it crashed to the floor—though not without a considerable amount of cursing that, in retrospect, might’ve made more of a ruckus than the ladder slamming down.

  Regaining his composure, Felix adjusted the diagonal strap of his satchel across his chest and headed to the end of the row to figure out where he was.

  In nine hells of misery if they catch you in here, Felix.

  Considering that he stood in the restricted section of the Sormitáge’s Imperial Archives and had used a forbidden node to get there, it was a conservative estimate.

  “Felix?”

  Felix turned at the whispered voice that carried easily through the silence and saw Malin approaching out of the gloom.

  “Lord and the Lady!” Malin’s face broke into a wide grin of relief. “I didn’t think you’d actually make it.”

  Felix scowled at him. “Then why’d you ask me to meet you here, of all bloody places?”

  “Well, I hoped you would.” Malin clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m starving. Did you bring us supper?”

  Felix placed a protective hand on the satchel at his hip. “It’ll cost you—an explanation for every bite of bread.”

  That same shadow which had haunted Malin for days returned to his gaze. “I’ll tell you everything, Felix. Raine’s truth, I’m desperate to tell
someone.” He tugged on Felix’s arm and headed back the way he’d come.

  Felix followed, but not without reservation. It was one thing to pop into places unannounced, do your business, and exit again before anyone knew you’d been there. It was quite another to steal into the Imperial Archives for a bloody picnic.

  He could just see the faces of the Empress’s Red Guard arriving to find him perched on a stack of priceless books munching on a tart. Their imagined expressions were so comical that Felix almost smiled; but the dim light of the vast, vaulted room was too oppressive, the silence too loud in his ears, for any levity to find purchase. The stacks themselves seemed to decry their outrage at his presence. Felix feared a smile would only further incense them.

  “Why here, Malin?” Felix trailed uncertainly behind the older, taller boy. It felt like the shadows were clinging to his body, slowing his pace, leeching the courage from his steps.

  “It’s the safest place I could think of to talk.” Malin shot him a glance over his shoulder. “There’s no one about, Felix, don’t worry. I’ve spent many a night here with the Imperial Historian’s blessing. Once the sun goes down and the restricted section closes, not even the literatos brave the stacks.”

  Felix didn’t find this point exactly heartening. Literatos were a good deal smarter than them. “Why not?” He spared a glance for the towering shelves, whose ends were each carved with a different effigy. The faces were all glaring at him.

  “Superstition, I think,” Malin said, but his voice lacked the luster of conviction. “Most of these are books of power—you know, they all have patterns in them—which is why they’re cataloged in this section. Even dormant, the patterns collect elae. Maestro Greaves cautions all of his interns to be careful when opening any book in the restricted archives.”

  “Good to know,” Felix muttered. It didn’t explain in the least why the literatos stayed out of the stacks after sundown. He could well imagine some monster prowling in the darkness—Sancto Spirito, this was the Sormitáge. The place was nearly as old as the realm itself. Who knew what lurked in its depths?