The Shadow Reader ml-1

by Sandy Williams

  He chuckles. “You’re stubborn to a fault, nalkin-shom. I will win you over. Eventually.”

  The door closes and locks behind him. I’ll never admit it out loud, but his healing does make it difficult to hate him.

  SEVEN

  SOMEBODY SHOULD TELL Naito and Kelia to get a room. They might be swinging swords at each other’s heads, but there’s something suggestive about their sparring. They’re both drenched in sweat and their chests heave almost in sync as they stare into each other’s eyes. Kelia’s toying with him. She moves slowly enough for Naito to think he might have a chance, then she coyly ducks or flits back just out of reach. She stays mostly on the defensive, but on the occasions she chooses to attack, her dulled practice sword always scores a hit.

  The clash of metal on metal rings again across the clearing. Naito manages to block one of Kelia’s offensives. He grins, catches the playful punch she swings, then pulls her into his arms, slanting his mouth over hers. Chaos lusters spark between them.

  “Curious?”

  I nearly fall off the picnic table when I spin toward Aren.

  “What?” I squeak, my heart leaping into my throat. When Aren smiles, my heart stays lodged there. Damn him for being this devilishly attractive and damn him for reappearing now. He vanished a second time after healing my arm four days ago, and I just stopped looking over my shoulder for his return.

  “You’re watching Naito and Kelia,” he says. “You want to know how it feels to kiss a fae.”

  I know how it feels to kiss a fae. That’s the problem.

  “Back to stay this time?” I crane my neck to look up at him when he steps in front of me.

  “I’d be happy to satisfy your curiosity.” His grin grows even more mischievous. My stomach somersaults, and I have to fight to keep my expression blank.

  “Kill anyone while you were gone?” I ask.

  He leans toward me, lowers his voice. “It would be an interesting experiment, don’t you think?”

  Unwilling to cower away from him, I keep my back rigidly straight as he eases closer. I try to appear bored, but my heart beats a quick staccato against my chest. I’m not afraid of kissing him. I’m afraid that I’ll like it. In fact, I’m certain the edarratae will make me like it, and there’s something downright disturbing about that.

  Aren’s gaze drops to my mouth. I panic when he begins to close the distance between us. Before his lips touch mine, I raise my hands to shove him away. He laughs and dodges aside.

  “I wouldn’t touch you without permission,” he says as he hops up to sit on the table beside me.

  What the hell? “You always touch me without permission.”

  “I . . .” He stops, chuckles. “Well, yes. I guess I do.”

  A chirpy squeak makes us both look toward the ground. Sosch, the adorable but villainous kimki I found curled up in my backpack a week ago, scurries to the picnic table. He stops, lifts his front paws off the ground, and perks his ears forward.

  Aren picks him up, but as soon as he sets him in his lap, Sosch chirps again and stares at me. I keep my arms folded. No way am I letting him near me. He belongs to Aren, and I will not let his nose-crinkling turn me into a vulnerable puddle of goo.

  Aren clucks. Apparently, this is all the permission Sosch needs to leap into my lap. He nudges my crossed arms. His nose is soft, damp.

  “You’re going to hurt his feelings,” Aren says, reaching into his pocket.

  I don’t move until he tosses something to me. I catch the drawstring pouch—my drawstring pouch—in the air. The anchor-stones inside grind against one another when I tighten it in my grip.

  “You’re giving this back to me?” He might as well. Without a fae to take me through a gate, the rocks are useless.

  “I’ve spent the last two days fissuring to those stones’ locations,” he says, watching Sosch slip under my arm. The kimki’s fur feels like silk against my skin. I let the thing stay in my lap, but I don’t pet him.

  Aren’s mouth curves into a slight smile before he refocuses on me. “Most of them were predictable: your home in Texas, several Provincial Gates, and a few of the Realm’s major cities. One took me to a Missing Gate we hadn’t found yet. Useful, that one.”

  A chill settles over my skin. I tear my eyes away from Aren and drag my hand over Sosch’s back, making his fur turn silver.

  “There’s only one location I couldn’t fissure to.”

  Damn it, damn it, damn it.

  “I had to find a stone-reader to be sure.” He takes my right hand—without permission—uncurls my fingers, and presses a semitransparent rock into my palm. He closes my fingers over it. “She told me where it goes.”

  Damn it!

  It was stupid to keep it, but I wanted to remember the night Kyol fissured me to the Sidhe Cabred. Fae can only enter the Ancestors’ Gardens with the king’s permission; humans aren’t allowed to enter at all. The Sidhe Cabred is the closest thing to holy ground in the Realm, and Kyol . . . he wanted to take me there. Because the gardens are located within the silver walls of Corrist, the Realm’s capital, the only way to get me past the heavily guarded entrance was to use a Sidhe Tol, a special type of gate that allows fae to fissure into areas protected by silver.

  It doesn’t hurt fae to come into contact with silver; it simply prohibits them from fissuring wherever the hell they want. The homes of the rich are protected by the metal. So are prisons, military installations, and any place that holds something of value. The Realm’s kings have kept the locations of the few Sidhe Tol they’ve found a secret, but since Kyol is Atroth’s sword-master, he knows where they are. He fissured me through one to get me inside the gardens.

  I don’t know if any place on Earth can compete with the beauty of the Sidhe Cabred. As Kyol led me down its seldomtrod paths, I felt like I was walking through a paradise, some cross between a rain forest and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Maybe it’s because even without magic sculpting the vegetation, all the trees and plants and flowers were exotic to me. A river cut through the center of the gardens before it crashed over a steep, rocky cliff into a clear pool at the base of Corrist’s northern wall. It’s there where Kyol led me, there where we almost . . .

  But we didn’t. Again, I was completely willing, and Kyol was so close to breaking, but he held himself back. It wasn’t a surprise. I was used to not crossing that line, used to being satisfied with kisses that stole my breath and edarratae that electrified my skin.

  Beside me, Aren reaches up. With two fingers along my jaw, he turns my face toward him. “You’ve been through a Sidhe Tol, McKenzie.”

  The evidence is fisted in my hand. I can’t deny it.

  “I was blindfolded,” I say.

  “I don’t believe you.” He doesn’t remove his hand from my jaw. Instead, he slides it back until his fingers weave through my hair, until his thumb slides over my cheek. “If you tell me where it is, I’ll let you go.”

  His touch is too intimate. Edarratae flow into me, spiking down my neck and into my chest. I swallow and clench my teeth, trying my damnedest not to enjoy the sensation. I make the mistake of looking into his eyes. He doesn’t look like a killer. The way his hand cradles my head makes me feel safe. I feel like I can trust him. I feel like he . . .

  Son of a—

  I shove Sosch into his lap and stand. “That won’t work.”

  He keeps the seduction charade up another moment before flecks of silver glitter in his eyes. He sets Sosch on the table. “You can’t blame me for trying, can you?”

  “I can. I do.”

  He laughs. “Of course you do. I meant what I said, though. Your freedom for the Sidhe Tol. A fair exchange, I think, but the offer won’t last long.”

  “Your offers aren’t worth shit anyway.”

  The light leaves his eyes. “You really do hate me, don’t you?”

  “Yes!” I turn away, searching for Kelia in hopes that she’s finished sparring with Naito so we can resume my language lessons. Neither of th
em is in the clearing, though. They must have taken my unspoken advice and found a room.

  “Do you not doubt the Court at all?” Aren asks.

  I turn back to him and snap, “Not since Brykeld.”

  He flinches as if I’ve just taken a swing at him. He recovers quickly, though, steeling his expression. “Brykeld was—”

  “An accident?” I demand.

  He slowly stands. “I wasn’t there—”

  “Liar.”

  “—when it was burned,” he finishes, his eyes narrowing. “I wouldn’t have allowed it.”

  “Were you there for the rapes, then?”

  A muscle twitches beneath his right eye. “No.”

  “Convenient!”

  Kyol apologized a thousand times for taking me to Brykeld. He said he never would have done so if he knew how bad it was going to be. I had nightmares for weeks afterward. Even now, more than two years later, I sometimes hear the screams. The rebels locked entire families inside shops with silver-painted walls. They boarded up the windows and doors and then set the structures on fire. The Court fae tried to help, but they were occupied fighting the rebels. I did what I could, ignoring the flames to hack at the buildings with a dead fae’s sword. I came away with deep, ugly burns on my hands, arms, and face. It took one of the king’s healers to repair the damage, and I only saved one fae.

  “I gave you the person responsible for Brykeld,” Aren says.

  “You were responsible for it.” And I can’t stand here talking to him a second longer. I turn abruptly and head for the inn.

  “Madin, son of Vinth,” he calls after me.

  I recognize the name immediately, but I don’t stop walking, not until Aren grabs my arm and forces me to face him.

  “You know who he was,” he says.

  “One of your fae. So?”

  A chaos luster flickers over his clenched jaw. “I leaked his location to the Court the week after Brykeld. I handed him to you because of what he did.”

  I lift my chin.

  His eyes narrow. “Since you’ve been with me, have I done anything that makes you think I’d condone a massacre?”

  “No. You’ve been on your best behavior,” I tell him. “When you’re around me. I don’t know what you’re doing when you’re gone.”

  “I’m fighting a war. Honorably fighting it.” He lets go of me with a little shove.

  I snort. “You don’t know a thing about honor. You allow rapists and murderers to fill your ranks.”

  “I don’t have direct control over every single fae who supports the rebellion.”

  “You should!”

  He opens his mouth to retort, stops. He scans the clearing. So do I. Lena and two other fae watch us from the front porch like our argument is some source of entertainment.

  Something bites into the palm of my right hand. I glance down at my fist and force my fingers to relax around my anchor-stone. Yes, I was a fool to keep it. Eventually, Aren’s patience is going to run out. He’ll start listening to Lena and the other fae who want to get rid of me, but he won’t kill me without prying the location of the Sidhe Tol from my lips.

  I’ve heard rumors of what he and his people do to get information out of the Court fae they capture. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to resist Aren’s interrogation, not when he decides it’s time for me to talk. I have to escape before then. If I don’t, if they can get to the Sidhe Tol, the rebels will be able to invade the Silver Palace. They might even be able to kill the king.

  OVER the next two days, I design and dismiss several dozen escape plans. If the rebels weren’t so damn vigilant, one of them might have worked, but even though I’ve pretended to be resigned to my captivity, they haven’t let me out of their sights. My time is running out—I know it is—so when a fae’s shadow falls over me early in the afternoon, I tense thinking Aren’s finally decided to force me to give him the Sidhe Tol. But it’s not Aren. It’s Sethan, who I haven’t seen since the first night I met him.

  “Kelia tells me you’re learning our language quickly.”

  I shrug. I’m learning it quickly because all my two- to three-day jaunts into the Realm over the years have added up. The sound and cadence of their speech is familiar; I just needed a little formal instruction to begin understanding the words and phrases.

  Sethan pushes aside the jaedric cuirass I had set on the picnic table to dry and sits on the cleared edge.

  “Thank you for your help,” he says with a nod to the piece I’m working on now. I use my thick-bristled brush to spread a clear, quick-drying glue over the strips of black bark I’ve stretched over the leather. The bark is tough and nearly impossible to cut. The fae harvest it by pulling off whole pieces from the jaedric tree. Once the paper-thin, lightweight strips dry over the cuirass, they can stop arrows as effectively as police vests stop bullets.

  Yes, there’s a certain irony to my making armor for the Court’s enemies, but it gives me something to do. Plus, every so often I stretch only four layers of bark over the shell rather than the five Kelia told me to. Despite her random inspections, I haven’t been caught yet.

  “No problem,” I say and pick up another strip of jaedric from the dwindling stack at my feet.

  “The Court has treated you well, hasn’t it?”

  I stretch the bark across the middle of the cuirass, using my knee to keep one end held in place. Without looking up, I say curtly, “Yes.”

  “The king provides for you.”

  “Yes,” I answer again. Shadow-reading is my job. The king gives me just enough cash each month to pay my tuition and bills, to buy groceries. I could probably live in a threethousand-square-foot house if I wanted to—Atroth would pay me more if I asked—but I live cheaply because I don’t want anyone asking where my money comes from.

  “We could provide for you, too,” Sethan says.

  This time, I do look up. “ Are you trying to buy me?”

  “It’s preferable to other methods of coercion, is it not?”

  I keep my expression blank. “My loyalty’s not for sale.”

  Sethan’s lips thin. I don’t think he likes me much more than Lena does. I’m surprised he’s letting Aren have his way instead of his sister, who still wants me dead. But then, from what Kelia’s told me, Sethan and Aren are practically brothers.

  Speaking of Sethan’s family, Lena’s voice carries across the clearing. I miss what she says, but she’s striding toward us carrying a cloth sack. An unfamiliar fae trails behind her, his face drawn and ragged.

  Sethan stands, but I don’t move from my perch straddling the picnic bench, not until Lena overturns the sack and a severed head thumps onto the table.

  I leap away. My boots slip on the rock bed and I crash down on my ass. The stench hits me a second later. My stomach lurches, but I can’t take my eyes off its eyes. The head rests on its left ear. The right eye is open, but the silver iris and gray pupil are nearly invisible beneath a white film. I can’t see the iris and pupil in the left eye because of the stake jammed into the socket. A part of my brain registers the fact that the metal also spikes through a bloodstained note. The other part of my brain registers nothing.

  Aren pulls me to my feet. I don’t know where he came from. I hear his voice, but can’t make myself understand his words. He’s not talking to me anyway. He’s speaking in Fae to Lena and the man who followed her.

  I make myself focus on them, on Aren actually, hoping his face can block out the image of the thing on the table.

  He glances at me. “Is the Court not as benevolent as you thought?” he asks.

  My gut tightens. I’ve heard of the rebellion sending heads with messages, but I’ve never seen it before. When fae die, they disappear in a flash of light and their soul-shadows—white mists visible only to humans with the Sight—dissolve into the air. Kyol calls it “going into the ether,” which I guess is their equivalent to going to heaven. Severing a fae’s head prevents that, though, and it’s considered exceptionally malicious.
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  “You do it, too,” I say quietly.

  Lena snorts. “So of course that makes it okay for them to do.”

  No. It doesn’t make it okay. A trace of doubt snakes through my confidence. What if I’m wrong about the Court? What if I’ve spent ten years reading shadows for the wrong people?

  Lena rips the note from the spike and shoves it in front of my face. “This is a threat. The Court wants you back. If we don’t give you to them, they’re going to begin random raids on cities and encampments until they find you. They’ll kill or capture anyone who puts up resistance, even if they have no connection to us.” She slaps the bloodstained paper down onto the picnic table. “We should send you back to them dead. That’s what the king would do.”

  She strides away before I can say a word. Not that I know what I would have said. I can’t defend this. It makes me sick, but it doesn’t fit with what I know of the Court. Kyol goes out of his way to capture the rebels, even when it would be easier to kill them. The swordsmen he trains are the same. I’ve never seen them do something cruel or ruthless.

  But I don’t monitor them constantly. Uncertainty churns through my stomach.

  “You’re pale,” Aren says at my side. His voice is soft, maybe even concerned.

  “I’m just . . . I just need to sleep.”

  I hate the way he nods, like he’s assessed my condition and determined sleep is exactly what I need in order to think clearly.

  Before I head toward the inn, I force myself to look again at the note. I can’t read the words, but I’m certain it’s not Kyol’s script.

  My next breath comes a little easier. This is just one instance of cruelty committed by one of the king’s supporters. If Kyol finds out about it, he’ll punish the fae responsible.

  I glance at Aren as I pass by. Immediately, I jerk my gaze to the ground. I think I caught a hint of satisfaction in his eyes. It was so brief I almost missed it, but I’m sure something was there.

  A new wave of uneasiness runs through me.

  He wouldn’t . . . ? No. Surely not even Aren would do this to one of his own fae. He wouldn’t commit this crime just to plant a seed of doubt in my mind.