by Lori M. Lee
His black hair isn’t the matted tangle of roots and grave dirt like in my dream. Instead, it falls loose around his face and shoulders, slightly tousled as if recently slept on. He’s dressed simply in dark gray robes, the rot-eaten clothing he was trapped in likely burned away with the flames that consumed his cocoon, the greenhouse, and Ronin’s body.
He’s thin, his dark hair framing the sharp bones of his face that only emphasize the slope of his nose and the angle of his cheeks. He’s beautiful in an unearthly way, and for a man who survived a fire, he’s remarkably unscathed. Proof that, despite how physically weak he might seem, he is far more than his appearance.
His power hangs over me, a wave of ice threatening to crush me beneath its depths. He watches me approach through bright crystalline eyes, narrowed like chips of amber.
Fear rises in my belly, but I hold tight to my fury as the distant cry of the shaman guard trails faintly in the silence.
“Stop it,” I hiss. “I’m right here.”
“Sirscha.” My name is a soft breath from his lips, like a long-held exhale. “I knew you would come to Spinner’s End eventually.”
“Why are you doing this to them?” I say. “They’re useless to you as prisoners. The Dead Wood already does all the work of keeping away enemies.” The shaman’s distant wail has gone quiet, and I pray it’s because he’s let her go.
“Prisoners,” he says, amused. “A castle cannot function with a single resident.”
As he speaks, my craft flows from the tips of my fingers, seeking. I can’t sense any other souls in the immediate gardens. There is only us.
Could I grasp his soul? Could I end it all, right now, if I dared to try?
“What is it you want?” I ask.
“I thought we’d covered this already,” he says.
“If House Yalaeng is your target, then let these people go. Keep a skeleton staff if you must, but release the others.”
My craft skirts around his magic, searching for a way in. If a soul is a flame, then his is a bonfire, blazing and present. As oppressive as the soul of his familiar had been on that ship, his own is a dozen times worse.
Even so, I will my craft to push against the force of his. It’s like wading through a fog of disembodied hands, fingers grasping and clawing at me. I grit my teeth and press on.
Suddenly, agony rips through me. I gasp, and my legs buckle. But instead of slamming to my knees, I’m frozen in place, my soul gripped tight. The Soulless doesn’t move from his recline. He watches me, expression blank, as if his magic isn’t a vise around my soul, as if he couldn’t tear it free and claim it for the Dead Wood with nothing but a thought.
I want to scream, but I can’t. His craft is a thousand razor blades cutting me open. Sisters, is this what others feel when I use my craft? It’s worse than anything Kendara has ever subjected me to. It’s like I’m being torn inside out, everything that I am on the verge of being ripped away with scorching hooks.
Despair washes through me. How could anyone hope to defeat him when, even weakened by centuries of imprisonment, he’s still so powerful?
“You wield your craft like a club, swinging it gracelessly,” he says, sounding disappointed.
The claws grasping my soul loosen enough for the pain to lift. I suck in a hoarse, shuddering breath.
“Have you ever missed the sounds of life, Sirscha?” he continues. “Footsteps on stone. The murmur of voices. The blade of an ax splitting wood. The warmth of a hearth. The scent of cooking fires. I should know these things, yet they’re like memories I can’t quite recall.”
If I could sneer, I would. With painstaking slowness, I grit through my teeth, “You expect me to believe you torture the people here because you’re, what, lonely?”
He laughs, a quiet sound like leaves rustling. “What do you hope to find here?”
“Information.”
“For what purpose?”
To kill you. As Saengo said, I should be clear about my intentions, at least to myself. But to him, I say, “To go home.”
It isn’t a lie. It’s just not the whole truth. Over the last two months, how often have I yearned for the streets of Vos Talwyn and its familiar faces, aching for the simplicity of what had been? I’m so tired of being afraid.
He watches me, expression impossible to read. Fear suffocates me. The pain builds, making my jaw ache with the need to scream. But I don’t. Kendara taught me better than that.
“You’re not going to kill me,” I say, infusing my voice with disgust.
Why come to me in my dreams otherwise? Why tell me he wants to know me? He spoke of fate and meetings. He spoke of a brother as well, which means, somewhere inside him, he remembers what it is to be human and to crave what he lost.
Suddenly, it doesn’t seem quite so ludicrous that he might be lonely. The realization floods me with new determination.
Although he’s recovering from what Ronin did to him, maybe that isn’t his true weakness. The most powerful evils can only be driven by something equally powerful.
Maybe what drives the Soulless is a fear of being alone.
Abruptly, he releases me. I gasp and stumble. The pain of my knees striking stone barely registers after the agony of the Soulless’s craft. My fingertips scrape over stone and bead with blood.
Neither of us speaks, but I am acutely aware that I’m alive only by his whim. I push to my feet, willing my knees to hold me up.
The silence takes on a presence of its own, steeped in the wordless threat of the Dead Wood. Surrounded by haunted trees, there is no birdsong, no creatures snuffling through the underbrush. Despite those who remain prisoners here, even the castle is quiet.
Since he hasn’t contradicted my assertion about not killing me, I dare to ask, “Why Queen Meilyr? Evewyn isn’t strong enough to stand against both Nuvalyn and Kazahyn.”
I doubt he’ll admit she has his familiar, and presumably, their alliance includes his intention to reclaim it.
“Worried you won’t have a home to return to if the other kingdoms raze it?” he asks, head tilting. “The queen has her uses.” He doesn’t elaborate. A moment later, his gaze slides past me.
The human guard from earlier comes up the path, somehow summoned without a word. I wonder what the Soulless is doing to him, to his soul, and I wince in sympathy. He doesn’t look at me. He only bows once as the Soulless orders him to escort me to a room.
The relief to escape his presence is slow to come. His magic burns through me, a poison I can’t expel.
I follow the guard, and to my surprise, he leads me to the rooms I’d shared with Saengo the last time I was here. It feels wrong returning to them without Phaut shadowing my steps or guarding the door, glowering at me. Guilt stabs at my back, along with the memory of Juleyne’s hatred.
Before I can close the door, the guard stutters, “Thank you. Thank you for going to him. To save my friend.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t have a choice. And I can’t … I wish I could help you escape. But I don’t know—”
“It’s impossible,” he says, looking down. “He’ll know, and he’ll kill us. The last one who came to help us, the shadowblessed gate …” He closes his eyes as a tremor races through his entire body. “We didn’t know that he was here yet. He surprised us.”
The anger helps to focus me. “We’re going to beat him. And then we’ll come back for all of you. Do what you must to survive until then. Okay?”
He doesn’t look like he believes it, but he nods all the same. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to offer hope when I can barely muster any for myself.
Once the door is shut, I slump against it, the back of my head thudding against the wood. My things, which I’d left in Ronin’s study, are now sitting just inside. On the table, a maid has left me a modest meal of rice and boiled greens in bone broth. Anger heats my chest at the idea of anyone being forced to serve me when we’re all trapped here together.
What does he mean by treating me l
ike a guest rather than the prisoner I am? What’s the point of this farce?
I don’t have much of an appetite, but I eat to keep my strength and to thank whoever made this meal in such circumstances. Afterward, cleaning up in the attached washroom feels strangely routine, as if Saengo and I were here mere days ago rather than weeks.
Our beds are exactly as we left them, the blankets neatly tucked. But the truth is in the light layer of dust that coats everything. No one’s been in here since Ronin died.
Without him, Spinner’s End will return to what it was before—a ruins to be devoured by the Dead Wood as if he’d never been here at all. It’s sad, I suppose.
Even the legacy of Ronin the Spider King, who lived for centuries as one of the most powerful shamans in all of Thiy, can be easily erased.
Dust and ash.
EIGHTEEN
I spend the first two days combing through the castle, even the parts Ronin had left undisturbed, but the crumbling floors and collapsed ceilings are enough to convince me that the ruins are too treacherous to be useful as a means for hiding a secret archive.
When my search turns up nothing, I change tactic. Maybe I’m thinking about this too hard. Ronin would’ve needed a large storage space. The library seemed too obvious, but now I wonder if it’s actually the perfect place to hide such records. It’s also the largest room in the castle.
I take a lantern and walk the entire perimeter of the library. The last time I was here, the servants kept at least some sconces lit for the castle’s guests. Now, aside from a few windows, the vast space is largely shrouded in darkness.
Saengo and I spent countless hours in here. My worry for her is a constant pit in my gut. With so much distance between us, I can’t sense her emotions anymore, but our connection remains strong, her candle flame undimmed. If she’s kept her pace, she should reach the grasslands within the next couple of days. After that, it’s only a few days more westward to Falcons Ridge.
I continue onto parts of the library I haven’t explored before. Several minutes pass before my lantern illuminates a plain door, tucked between two wall shelves and easily overlooked, especially in the dark. It’s small enough to be mistaken for a cupboard.
When I yank on the door, I’m unsurprised to find it locked. I can’t find a keyhole, though. Seeing as no one is left in the castle to care about whether I break anything, I return to my rooms to retrieve my swords. Then, with less elegance than I would like, I wedge the blades between the door frame until the hinges snap.
It’s a messy job, and it would never pass any of Kendara’s tests, but I succeed in opening the door. I have to bend over to pass through the entrance, but once inside, I lift my lantern to reveal what could almost be an entirely separate library.
The room isn’t nearly as large, of course, but it’s filled to the brim with books, scrolls, and stacks of parchment. My heart thunders as triumph soars through me.
Holding the lantern high, I cross the length of the room, taking quick stock of its contents. Most of the shelves are covered in dust. Pulling a book off one such shelf, I brush away a thick layer of gray before opening the cover. My pulse races in anticipation.
All at once, my excitement turns to frustration. The handwriting is Ronin’s, but it’s written in a language I don’t recognize. It isn’t Nuval, which I can’t read anyway, but something else entirely. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it was from Ronin’s home in the north—a language that’s likely gone out of use after centuries of assimilation into the Empire.
I check several more books and stacks of parchment, my frustration growing as they all reveal the same. It shouldn’t surprise me, yet I feel like an idiot for not anticipating this. It’s no wonder these records are so poorly protected with a single lock. Should someone find their way in here, no one but Ronin would be able to read the contents.
Damn him. I slam the lantern onto a desk against the wall and sink into the accompanying chair. My craft rushes through my veins, making my fingers twitch restlessly as I rub my temples. I can’t give up so easily. Not until I’ve gone through this entire room.
It’s already been a few days, and I don’t have much time left before I need to escape and return to Saengo. I constantly worry about how much her infection has spread.
I begin my sweep of Ronin’s documents, starting from one end of the room to the other. Although it takes the better part of a day, I finally discover scrolls in Evewynian, a bound manuscript written in Nuval, and several stacks of correspondence in Kazan.
The Evewynian scrolls date back centuries and appear to be letters exchanged between Ronin and a former Evewynian queen about a marriage with a Nuvali royal. They’re not relevant to what I’m searching for, but I tuck them away with my things. I imagine Prince Meilek would be interested in such historical documents.
I can’t read the Nuval manuscript, but it might be useful in teaching myself the language, so I hold on to that as well. I briefly entertain the idea of seeking out a shaman guard or maid to help translate, but since I don’t know what the manuscript is about, I can’t trust sharing it with just anyone.
As for the Kazan correspondence, Ronin has jotted notes in his language along the margins, but the original messages are intact.
It’s an old dialect, and I can’t understand everything, but I can pick out enough words to understand their meaning. Each piece is dedicated to one of the temples in Mirrim, detailing things like who the High Priest or Priestess was at the time, the hierarchy, methods of training, and each craft’s strength and weakness. With a jolt of surprise, I realize these must’ve been written by Kazan spies.
Pulse racing, I shuffle through the pages to find the Temple of Light. There’s mention of a High Priest, an exhaustive list of subordinates, a description of the Light Temple grounds, and then the various lightwender crafts. My breath catches when I see “soulrender” among those listed. This was written before the conquest, before soulrenders were hunted and stricken from training at the Temple of Light.
The paragraph on soulrenders is tragically short, and I almost laugh at a remark about how the craft is generally useless given it can only be used against game and small animals. History would make fools of everyone who ever believed that.
The most interesting part, though, is an observation of a soulrender teacher sharing her magic with a student to help her learn how to summon her craft. I linger over the word, wondering if I’m mistranslating it. But even as I consider the word choice, the Soulless’s magic stirs within me, uncomfortably close ever since he held my soul in his grip.
I can almost feel his magic slithering beneath my skin, a snake in the high grass coiled to strike. I’ve been avoiding him and ignoring the pull of his magic trying to lure me back to him.
When I fought Ronin and allowed the Soulless’s magic to fuel my own, I thought I was using his power as one might a talisman. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this sharing is why our crafts can bridge our consciousness in dreams—why my magic has felt unruly and unpredictable since allowing his magic to mingle with mine.
I skim the letters for further mention of soulrenders, but there’s nothing—no mention of the Yalaeng Conquest, or the Soulless, or how to defeat him.
I should begin searching the library for mention of talismans, but the question of soulrenders and sharing magic remains like a pebble wedged in my boot.
For all my frustration, there is one source of information in this castle I’ve not yet tried. It seems I will have to face the Soulless again.
There are no guards. He needs none.
This time, I don’t find him reclining on a stone throne like an ancient king reawakened. Instead, he has relocated to a chaise at the center of what might have once been a reading room. Overhead is a domed glass ceiling that would fit right in at the Temple of Light.
Sunlight filters through the glass, bathing him in a soft glow. His skin is so pale that I can make out the faint impression of veins just beneath. His dark hair spills over the s
ide of the chaise in a black tangle. A line of silver buttons runs from his high collar down the center of his tunic to his waist, where his long fingers are loosely laced.
He is completely still as I enter the room. Only his eyes move, his gaze shifting from the glass ceiling where the sunset has drenched the sky the color of persimmons, to me.
I wonder if he watches the sky because he was kept from it for so long. I shake away the thought. I may pity him, but that’s not the same as sympathy.
He watches me approach, his expression neutral. His stillness is disturbingly unnatural.
This isn’t a social visit, so I don’t bother greeting him. Instead, I ask, “What does it mean that soulrenders can share magic?”
His gaze shifts away, back to the sky laced in wispy pink clouds. The shadows beneath his eyes have deepened as if he’s had trouble sleeping. Or perhaps he doesn’t wish to sleep, having had enough of it.
“You’ve kept yourself busy, I see.”
Although I remain near the door, it still feels too close. There can never be enough space between us and his poisonous magic. “Is it true?” I prod.
“All soulrenders have the ability, but as with most things, some possess a talent for it, and others do not.”
“But we do.” It’s a statement, not a question.
“It’s not quite so simple. Even those with a talent for it have to find a receptive match. All souls are unique, after all.”
I mentally cringe at the idea of being a match with him in any capacity.
“Depending on the soulrender, our magic can function like a current,” he continues quietly. “Why do you think the mere awakening of your craft resonated with all lightwenders? That is a rare thing, but only possible because the nature of our craft allows our magic to touch other souls.”
Frowning, I ask, “But what about Ronin? He could use your magic, but he wasn’t a soulrender.”
He sounds almost amused when he replies. “Ronin was an exception to much of shaman magic. He consumed his familiar. It changed his soul, and his craft, in ways we can never truly know. He was not quite a man, not quite a familiar.”