There Will Come a Darkness

by Katy Rose Pool

  She looked at Beru, a silent understanding passing between them: They could tell this boy enough, but no more. Not the full truth. It was too dangerous.

  “I’ve been sick,” Beru said. “For a long time. Ephyra uses the esha from her victims to heal me. It’s the only way to keep me alive.”

  “Why can’t you go to a healer?”

  “They can’t help,” Ephyra said flatly. There were other reasons—the danger of revealing who she was, the true nature of Beru’s illness—that kept them from seeking help from anyone but the most unscrupulous. “Healers take an oath. If they knew what I’d done to keep Beru alive … even if they could help us, they wouldn’t.”

  “And I can?”

  “We’ve been looking for something that can help me,” Beru said. “A powerful artefact said to enhance the power of the Grace of Blood. With it, maybe Ephyra can heal me for good, so I won’t get sick again.”

  “They call it Eleazar’s Chalice,” Ephyra said, watching him closely. “Have you heard of it?”

  He shook his head.

  “You know about the Necromancer Wars,” Ephyra said. This wasn’t a question. Everyone knew of the Necromancer Wars—the most destructive war in history. Long before the Prophets disappeared, the Necromancer King had raised an army of revenants—dead brought back from the grave—to try to take over the Kingdom of Herat.

  “The Necromancer King had the Grace of Blood,” Ephyra went on. “The most powerful in centuries. Perhaps the most powerful since the beginning of the Graces. But not all that power was his own. Some of it, the Necromancer King had drawn from Eleazar’s Chalice.”

  Anton blinked at her. “So basically,” he said slowly, “you brought me back to your crypt to ask for my help in finding an ancient artefact that was once used to raise an army of the dead? Have I got that right?”

  Ephyra didn’t flinch. “Well, can you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not,” Anton answered. He looked suddenly vulnerable. “I’m really—I’m not lying to you.”

  “Mrs. Tappan told us you’re the only one who can do something like this,” Ephyra went on. “That you have a Grace more powerful than any she’s seen. Was she lying to us?”

  Anton let out a breath. “No, she wasn’t.”

  “She said you might be reluctant,” Ephyra allowed.

  “Reluctant,” Anton echoed dully. “Right.”

  “That’s not how you would put it?” Beru asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “You know I risked a lot, bringing you here,” Ephyra said. “I didn’t have to do that. I could have left you for those hired swords.”

  Beru whipped around to stare at her. “What hired swords?”

  “Later,” Ephyra said curtly. Then, to Anton, “All I’m saying is that if this person who’s after you wants to find you so badly, I don’t have to stand in their way. In fact, I might be better off helping him.”

  She leveled him with what Beru called the Pale Hand stare.

  “Is she always this persuasive?” Anton asked Beru.

  Ephyra’s eyes flashed. “Why don’t you ask that dead priest how persuasive I can be?”

  “Ephyra,” Beru said. “Let me talk to him.”

  Ephyra shot her a questioning look. Beru gave her a slight nod. They weren’t going to get anywhere with this boy by threatening him. But Beru thought that maybe—maybe—she could get through to him. Because beneath the sarcasm and put-on confidence was something she recognized. Fear.

  Ephyra went to the doorway and lingered there a moment before disappearing up the stairs.

  Beru turned back to Anton. “Look, I don’t know what your story is. I’m not asking. I just need you to understand something.”

  Anton nodded. And Beru saw it again—the shadow of fear passing over his face. Not panic, not terror—nothing so immediate as that. But a deep, unrelenting dread that lived quietly in every breath. She’d recognized it in him only because she knew it so well in herself.

  “The thing I’m most scared of,” Beru went on. “It’s not getting sick again. It’s not dying. It’s not even Ephyra dying.”

  She had his full attention now, his dark eyes fixed on hers.

  “There was a time before Ephyra became the Pale Hand. Back when Ephyra and I were just two girls. Orphans. All we had was each other. I guess it wasn’t so different from now.”

  She and Ephyra didn’t discuss their past anymore—too much guilt lay there. But there wasn’t a day that went by that Beru didn’t think about it and wonder if her own life was worth what she and her sister had paid for it.

  “But back then, there was a family,” Beru said. “They took us in, in a fishing village on Charis Island. They were kind to us, fed us, gave us shelter. Even loved us. In time, I think they would have come to see us as their own. They had two sons. A boy around Ephyra’s age, and another a little older.”

  A memory of the months spent with that family glimmered to life in her mind. The two brothers sparring with wooden swords in the thistle-infested yard. Their mother stirring a bubbling pot and breathing in warm steam that smelled of lemon and herbs and a hint of spicy peppers. Their father unloading his fishing gear on the front stoop. The corners of his eyes crinkling when Beru and Ephyra blew past him in a footrace that took them over the spigot, around the chicken coop, and into the front yard. And when dinner was served, all of them filing one by one back inside, like ants returning to their anthill.

  The memory blurred together with the memories of Beru’s own parents, until she could not recall if it had been her own mother or this one who’d plaited flowers in her hair and taught her the proper way to catch a chicken. They were a patch of bright sunlight in her shadowed past. But the memory that came next, the memory of what she and Ephyra had done to that family, eclipsed it.

  “A few months after they took us in, I got sick. And it wasn’t the first time. Back in our old village, Medea, I’d been sick with the same illness that took our parents but I … I recovered. We thought that it was over, but a few months after that family took us in, the sickness came for me again. And soon, I realized I was dying.” She broke off, swallowing. “The father left to find me a healer. But I was getting worse quickly, and before he returned, Ephyra decided to heal me herself. And it worked. I got better. But that day, the mother of that family took ill suddenly and died—or at least, that’s what we all thought.”

  Though it had been years, Beru still felt a wash of fresh horror roll over her when she recalled it.

  “After a few months, the sickness came once more. And again, Ephyra healed me. This time, the eldest son died. That’s when we realized what was really happening. That we were the cause of it.” Beru trembled. “The father realized it, too. He was beside himself with grief, terrified that Ephyra would kill his only surviving son. He threatened us. Threatened me, thinking somehow if he took my life, his eldest son and his wife would live again. And Ephyra, she—”

  It all came back in a nauseating flash. The father lunging toward Beru. Ephyra throwing her hands against his chest to stop him. The pale handprint that had bloomed on his skin.

  “She killed him,” Beru whispered. “It was instinct. She was protecting me, and she still couldn’t control her powers.”

  “What happened to the other boy?” Anton asked. “The youngest son?”

  Beru shook her head. “We don’t know. After the father died, we left. When I got sick again, we decided. Not another innocent death. Not because of me. So Ephyra became the Pale Hand.”

  “And that’s what you fear the most?” Anton asked slowly. “That more innocent people will die because of you?”

  She nodded but didn’t tell him the rest. That innocent or guilty didn’t matter to her—every life the Pale Hand took weighed on Beru’s conscience.

  “My sickness is getting worse,” she said. “It happens faster now. It used to take months for me to start getting weak after Ephyra healed me. Now it
’s weeks. I know that someday—maybe even soon—we’ll be as desperate as we were that day in the fishing village. And it won’t matter what someone has done or hasn’t done. Only that their life can be traded for mine.”

  “But if you find Eleazar’s Chalice…” Anton trailed off.

  “Then no one else has to die.” Then, Beru thought, we’ll be free.

  “And you won’t have to be afraid anymore,” Anton said quietly.

  Beru nodded. She knew that Ephyra might be angry that she had told Anton this story. They had no reason to trust him.

  And yet, despite that, Beru felt like she could. Or felt, at least, like Anton might understand in some small way the things they had been through. She could tell that he, too, was haunted by his past. Maybe he understood what this felt like—that the harder you chased freedom, the further away it seemed.

  “So,” Beru said, “will you help us?”

  Anton stared at her for a long moment, pressing his lips together. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I even can. It’s been a long time since I used my Grace, and … well, let’s just say you aren’t the only one with things in your past you’d rather not remember.”

  “You know she wasn’t serious,” Beru said. “When she said she’d turn you over to the people who are after you. She wouldn’t really do that. That’s not who she is.”

  Anton lifted one shoulder in a gesture approximating a shrug.

  “You don’t have to decide right now,” Beru said. “But I’m guessing you don’t want to go back home if those people are still out there looking for you. You can stay here for now, if you like.”

  She could see him hesitate. But it seemed his weariness won out, because he then nodded and helped Beru drag the cushions at the table across the floor to create a makeshift pallet.

  “Get some rest,” she said. She waited a moment until he was settled down with his eyes closed, and then crept over to the door and eased it open.

  Ephyra was standing on the other side. “What did you—?”

  Beru held her finger up to her lips and pushed Ephyra back out into the dark stone passage that led to the mausoleum. She closed the door behind them.

  “What did you tell him?” Ephyra asked.

  “I told him about the family,” Beru answered. She didn’t need to specify which family. She and Ephyra almost never spoke of them, but the memory was always there, haunting every note of their days.

  “And nothing else?”

  “Of course nothing else,” Beru said. “But he’s not stupid, Ephyra. At some point he’s going to start asking questions.”

  “Then until we find the Chalice, we can’t let him leave,” Ephyra said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “And if he decides he won’t help us?” Beru said. “We can’t just keep him here forever.”

  “We won’t,” Ephyra said, a grim finality to her words.

  Beru reeled back from her. “You can’t just kill him, Ephyra!”

  “I’m the Pale Hand,” Ephyra replied. “I’ll do what I must.”

  Beru pulled away, retreating down the dark, cold stone passage.

  “Beru, wait—”

  “I can’t talk to you right now,” Beru said, pushing on.

  She loved her sister more than anyone else in the world. She knew Ephyra felt the same way. She would do anything for her sister.

  But that was what scared Beru the most.

  She couldn’t help but feel like whatever happened now, there were only two ways their story could end—either Ephyra was going to lose Beru, or Beru was going to lose her.

  8

  ANTON

  Anton dreamed, but not of the lake. He dreamed of faces shadowed by hoods, eyes with pupils of black suns. He saw pale handprints scorched against his skin.

  “Kid! Hey—kid! Wake up!”

  Anton jerked himself up, ready to flee. His gaze fell on the Pale Hand, crouched uncertainly beside his pallet of cushions.

  The last few hours rushed over him. The Pale Hand in his flat. Fleeing from Illya’s hired men. Falling asleep in the dark and damp alcove in the destroyed mausoleum.

  “You were shaking,” she said. “Bad dream?”

  “What other kind is there?” He rubbed at his eyes. “How long was I asleep?”

  “A few hours,” she replied. “It’s midafternoon.”

  “Where’s your sister?”

  “She left to get food,” Ephyra replied. At Anton’s frown, she laughed. “Oh, come on. You’re not scared to be here with me alone, are you?”

  “Not scared,” he replied. “She’s just much nicer than you are.”

  Ephyra laughed again. The way she laughed was unexpected—loud, unbridled, open. “That’s not saying much. She’ll be back any moment now, if that puts your mind at ease. You sticking around?”

  Anton folded his arms over his knees. “Do I have a choice?”

  “We’re not holding you hostage here,” Ephyra said. “But I seem to recall that I saved your life last night.”

  “Oh, please. I heard what you said,” he replied. When she fell silent, he continued. “When you were talking out in the stairwell this morning? You must have thought I was asleep.”

  Ephyra’s expression didn’t change. She just watched him, arms crossed in front of her chest.

  “You think it’s too dangerous to let me go.” He swallowed. “You brought me here knowing that you weren’t going to let me go alive.”

  Beru might believe that her sister wasn’t capable of doing something like that, but Anton was no stranger to the taste of desperation, how it trapped you in its claws and forced you to sacrifice even the things you thought you held dear. He’d been on his own since he was eleven years old, and in that time he’d traded parts of himself—dignity, virtue, a clear conscience, if he’d ever had those things—to save the whole. He hadn’t balked once.

  So when Ephyra threatened to turn him over to the people hunting him, when she told her sister that she might kill him if he didn’t help them, he believed her.

  “You know why I brought you here,” Ephyra said. “I need your help to keep my sister alive.”

  “And if I refuse? You’ll let me leave?”

  Before she could answer, the sound of footsteps echoed from the secret staircase. A moment later, the door shuddered open and Beru shouldered her way in, carrying a basket of potatoes and flatbread.

  She paused awkwardly in the doorway and looked between them. “What’s going on?” Worry edged her voice.

  Ephyra’s eyes were fixed on Anton. Expectant.

  He knew what his answer had to be. He met Beru’s gaze. “I’ve decided I’m going to help you.”

  * * *

  It had been almost a year since Anton had last used his Grace, but the moment he stepped into the scrying pool, he felt a familiar quickening of his heart. The shock of cold water on his legs wrenched a gasp from his throat. He was already shivering. In his left hand, he clutched the only gift he’d ever received in his sixteen years, given to him by the Nameless Woman the last time she’d dropped in on him. A lodestone, no bigger than an apple, smooth and gray and utterly unremarkable.

  At the edges of his awareness, he felt the esha of the two sisters who stood in the empty mausoleum with him. Ephyra’s—that same fluttering vibration he’d felt when she’d snuck into his room. And Beru’s. There was something off about her esha. Anton had first noticed it in the crypt. There was a strange cloudiness to it, like the muffled ringing of a bell. Like it was no longer a whole, unbroken sound.

  “I’ve never seen someone scry before,” Ephyra said from behind him. “How does it work?”

  Anton was hardly an expert. Everything he knew about the specifics of the Grace of Sight, he’d learned from Mrs. Tappan. For all the good it did him.

  “Each of the Four Bodily Graces has a different way of interacting with esha,” he said. “You, for instance, can give and take esha from living things because you have the Grace of Blood. People with the Grace of Heart ca
n enhance their own esha to make themselves stronger and faster. Alchemists and artificers, with the Grace of Mind, can imbue ordinary materials with esha to make them do the impossible. Incandescent lights that glow without a flame, or wine that cures seasickness, for instance.”

  “But the Grace of Sight doesn’t let you give esha, or enhance it, or transform it,” Ephyra said.

  “No,” Anton agreed. “I can’t manipulate esha, but I can sense it. All esha in the world vibrates at different frequencies. I can feel those vibrations. Even right now. Scrying lets me home in on them, search through the patterns of esha that flow throughout the world. Usually, scryers can just find people. But what you’re looking for—an artefact that was once used to raise the dead—that’s something only an artificer could have made, meaning it’s imbued with esha.”

  “So since all artefacts are imbued with esha, you can find them?” Beru asked.

  “Not quite,” Anton said. “Scryers need one important thing to find an artefact or person—their name. A person’s name binds their esha to them. That’s why we have Naming Days. Unlike people, though, most everyday artefacts don’t have names. But the rare ones do, because names help bind esha to the artefacts and make them more powerful.”

  “Like Eleazar’s Chalice,” Ephyra said.

  “Right,” he replied, looking down. He didn’t tell her this was all theoretical. If most scryers had the kind of ability Anton did, they could have made themselves rich tracking down lost, powerful artefacts from prophecies past.

  “And what’s the purpose of the water and the stone?” Beru asked.

  “It’s a way to focus and direct my Grace,” he said. “Like the movements of the koahs do for the Grace of Heart. Or the patterns of binding for the Grace of Blood.”

  The stillness of a scrying pool, the Nameless Woman had taught him, helps the scryer focus. The ripples of the lodestone echo the vibrations of esha, amplifying them so a trained scryer can parse them out.

  Anton waded out into the center of the scrying pool. He took a breath and tossed the lodestone into the water. At once, the water began to churn, shifting and swirling.