Broken Shadow

by Jaine Fenn

  And she could not shake the conviction that, underneath the arch manipulation and mercurial mirth, the duchess had gone a little mad.

  A letter arrived at the townhouse a few days later, from Eparch Sadakh. He opened by saying he regretted not being able to attend her trial in person to defend her, adding intriguingly, “unless my situation changes”. He had considered sending one of his poliarchs, but had decided not to because, as he put it “sadly the Church is not as united as it might be across the world, and although the cardinals of Shen might be distracted by the chance to argue the minutiae of practice with the clerics of another shadowland, doing so is unlikely to serve your cause.”

  He also included a long, detailed and elegantly expressed testimonial. He argued, with logic Rhia could not fault and extensive references to the scriptures how, far from challenging the teachings of the First, her theory glorified God, while reminding His fallen children to approach His creation with humility. The First Himself was at the heart of the universe, unknowable and eternal, and could arrange it in any way He saw fit.

  CHAPTER 27

  The joy of getting away with it thrilled through Dej as she sneaked away from the skykin camp. One thing from her old life still held true: stealing felt good.

  When her hammering heart began to slow, she started to doubt. What if they came after her? Stealing from the skykin was even dumber than stealing from the duke; the duke’s men couldn’t follow her through the skyland, but these skykin could hunt her down with ease.

  When the night began to lighten and there was no sign of pursuit she slowed her pace.

  In daylight the landscape was low and undulating, with circular clumps of waist-high orange vegetation. She continued north. The skykin were heading west. Hopefully they wouldn’t make a diversion to track down one small missing item. Even so, she kept moving until late afternoon, when she found a stand of tree-things that didn’t smell too dangerous and slept for the rest of the day and a full night.

  The next morning she tried to use the cleansing-moss on her pack, running it over the rank, mud-caked leather. Nothing happened. Her heart sank. When Mai-Umae said tech was not for her, perhaps that meant it wouldn’t even work for her. This was probably one of those prohibited items the shadowkin Church talked about. Then she ran the moss up her arm, and felt a tingle. No, it still worked, but only on her, not on her possessions. Tech was inconstant stuff.

  She felt a bit odd, perhaps some hangover of the encounter with the skykin, their food or the air in their tents. But the feeling persisted into the next day, when the terrain became wetter though not, thank the First, another bog. She had an odd, tight, bloated feeling deep in her guts. Perhaps her head was messing with her body. She’d been determined to ignore people, but yet again she’d stayed with them and then run off. Better to have nothing to do with anyone in the first place, shadowkin or skykin.

  She woke up late the next morning, filled with an awful certainty.

  She sat up and looked down at herself. Her chest had been a bit sore for a few days now, the tiny, residual breasts from her bonding oddly tender to the touch. And her belly was a little swollen.

  “No.”

  She put both hands on the swelling, pressing down. The flesh was firm and unyielding. “No I’m not.”

  But she was.

  What had the skykin said? “One in your state must take care”. Befuddled, she’d assumed they meant half-bonded. But they’d known the unthinkable truth she hadn’t even considered.

  She was carrying Etyan’s child.

  She raised her head and howled at the world, just as she’d done when she first discovered her bonding had gone wrong. Now, as then, the world ignored her.

  Such theatrics were an indulgence. She took a deep breath and focused on the problem.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t be surprised; burnheart blocked conception for both shadowkin and skykin but Etyan was neither.

  And now, when she’d finally started to get over him, this. She carried part of the lover she thought she was free of; the beautiful boy, the only person to make her heart sing. The rapist.

  She wanted to hit herself, pummel her treacherous belly, get the thing out of her. Perhaps some plant would purge her of it. But her animus was unlikely to tell her that.

  “I don’t want this!” she told the sky one last time. As she expected, the sky still didn’t care.

  How long had it been inside her, growing unseen? Two months? Three? That assumed it came from the last time they’d fucked. How long did she have before it was born? A while presumably, if it was only just showing, though skykin babies grew faster than shadowkin.

  Skykin protected their children by leaving them in shadowkin crèches, to be raised away from the burning skyland Sun, suckled by wet-nurses whose breasts still produced milk. If Etyan’s brat was born out here, it would die. Which would solve the problem. But could she do that?

  The way she felt at the moment, she could. And that was appalling, at least as appalling as what Etyan had done.

  She should just turn around and head back to the shadowlands right now.

  The fuck I will.

  She got up, and looked down at herself again. The swelling hardly showed.

  She faced north and started walking.

  CHAPTER 28

  “M’lady I’m sorry!”

  Rhia started awake, and focused on the boy in her bedroom. Kerne stood a few steps away, his hands tangled in front of his chest.

  She sat up, sleep still clogging her mind. Now she was no longer obliged to study the scriptures in the morning – Sur Lectel had tested her knowledge and declared her as well-briefed as she was going to get – she was letting herself catch up on some of the sleep she’d lost these last few months, although the more she rested, the more tired she felt. “Kerne? What is it?”

  He grimaced. “The model…”

  Her mussiness evaporated. “What about it?”

  “I… “ His hands did another loop around each other. “I think I broke it.”

  “Show me!” Rhia leapt up, tugging at her shift to make herself nominally decent, and followed her apprentice out the room and up the stairs. In her study, he stopped and pointed. At first Rhia saw nothing wrong with the celestial model. Then she noticed how the Maiden, on its spindly pole, sat at a peculiar angle. “What did you do?”

  “I was fitting the new metal rods to the cogs, and I tried to crank the model, to get to the smallest cog, only it jammed, and I… I should have left it but I thought I could wind past and–”

  “What broke?”

  “The cogs beneath the Maiden. They locked and then… the big ironwood one cracked. The new iron cogs were too strong for it.”

  Rhia leant over, and confirmed the damage. Suddenly her concern and frustration bubbled over into anger. “There is not enough grease on these! How could you be so stupid?” She straightened. Everything was falling apart. No enquirer would come to her aid. The mathematics had become all but insoluble now she was using ellipses. The third judge was not someone she wanted ruling on her fate. And now this! “It’s only a week until Between. We’ll never fix this before the new year!”

  “I know, I’m so sorry!”

  Her anger fell away. “It’s all right. You’re tired and stressed. We both are. You were doing your best.” Last week he had turned up with a black eye; when pressed he reluctantly admitted to “having a scuffle” with a boy at the horticulturists who’d referred to her as Countess Cuckoo. She’d offered to speak to his guildmaster, but he’d said it was nothing. She forced a smile. “Just imagine how much worse it would be if we had tried to rebuild the model with ellipses.”

  He smiled back uncertainly.

  “We need to forget the outer Strays entirely. Take what you need from them. Concentrate on the Maiden. That’s the key.”

  Once she had got him started, she returned to her bedchamber to dress. The rain was expected to clear tonight so she may as well wear men’s clothes, for ease of getting up the
ladder to–

  “Rhia!”

  She paused, hand in her clothes’ chest. That wasn’t Kerne’s voice. And it came from downstairs.

  “Ree? Anyone?”

  She straightened and ran out onto the landing. Someone stood in the hall below, just inside the open front door. The kitchen door was also open but Rhia barely registered it. “Etyan?” Could this bedraggled scrawny figure really be her brother?

  He looked up, and grinned. “There you are, sis.”

  “Etyan!” She raced down the stairs. “Have you been in the skyland all this time?”

  He looked like it, pared down to muscle and sinew, the last of his boyish fat gone. And his skin was burnt to dark bronze, bringing out its odd scale-like patterning. “Pretty much. But I’m back now.”

  She hugged him. He was soaking wet but she didn’t care. He hugged her back, and gave that mischievous laugh she knew so well.

  When they broke apart Etyan took in what she was wearing and raised an eyebrow. “I see dress standards have slipped in my absence.”

  “What? Oh, I was just getting dressed.”

  Etyan looked past her, up the great staircase. “Really?”

  Rhia followed his gaze. Kerne had come out of her study and was leaning over the banister. “Go back to work please!” she called up. Looking back, she was favoured with Etyan’s cocky grin, looking odd on his new face. “What?” she said, trying not to snap. She knew the kind of conclusions he might draw at her being half dressed with a strange youth in the house.

  Except Kerne wasn’t a stranger. “That’s Kerne, you remember? Markave’s boy.” She gestured to her steward, hovering at the kitchen doorway, flashing him a sympathetic smile.

  “I remember.” When Markave’s sons had lived in the servants’ quarters Etyan had sometimes played with them, though his greater age and status had made the games somewhat lopsided; occasionally his behaviour had verged on bullying, and Rhia had intervened. “What’s he doing in your study?”

  “He’s my apprentice.”

  “Your what?”

  “So much has happened while you’ve been… absent. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  “All right. But can I get cleaned up first?”

  “Of course.” Rhia turned to Markave. “Please heat water for a bath. And I expect my brother’s hungry.” Markave nodded and withdrew.

  “Hungry? I’m ravenous. Where’s Yithi?”

  “Out hunting I expect. The rain has brought the rats out.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Talking of girls… “Is Dej, um, around?” She wasn’t sure how to phrase it.

  “Dej is gone, Ree. Long gone.”

  Rhia tried not to let him see how pleased she was with this news. “But you’re here. I’m so glad.” She resisted the urge to hug him again. “Get yourself cleaned up. We’ll talk later.”

  They ate in the dining room. Agitation dulled her hunger but Etyan devoured everything put in front of him. He was wearing one of his old doublets; it hung off his lanky frame.

  He didn’t interrupt while she summarised recent events, though how much was because he was listening and how much because he was busy shovelling cassoulet into his mouth Rhia could not say. But when she got to the end of her summary and sighed he reached over and gave her hand a quick squeeze, before sitting back with a stifled belch. “So I haven’t been replaced in your affections by Markave’s boy then?” He grinned to make a joke of it.

  “Of course not.” She had considered asking Kerne to eat with them, given he was not exactly staff, and she wanted Etyan to get used to his presence, but tonight was for family; her only family. “As I said, I needed an apprentice to help me with my work and in case… the worst happens.”

  He looked away. He’d been visibly shocked when she spoke about her possible fate, which in turn had made it one step closer to being real, and had been enough to kill the last of her appetite.

  She wanted to tell him how he could help, but she doubted he’d want to talk about matrimonial matters given his recent experiences, and she needed to know where they stood before she broached the subject.

  When the silence stretched she said, evenly, “The duke’s men reported that you went to the red valley.” When he didn’t respond she added, “And that you argued with Dej there.”

  “Yes. I did.” He pulled another hunk off the ravaged loaf next to him and, in denial of a lifetime’s table-manners, used it to wipe the last of the gravy off his plate.

  “Then she ran off. And you went after her.”

  Etyan spoke with his mouth full. “Right again.”

  “I’m sorry if this is painful, but I just need to know what’s what with you and Dej.”

  He swallowed. “There is no ‘me and Dej’.”

  “Right.”

  “I imagine you’re happy about that.” The bitterness in his voice cut deep.

  “I never said that. I hate that she hurt you.”

  “So why keep going on about it? All right, here’s how it is: we rowed, she ran off. I went after her but I was weak from wandering around so she got a good lead on me. Then I got lost. I’m no pathfinder. And maybe I didn’t want to find a path, a way back. Maybe I wanted the skyland to kill me. But it didn’t. It hardened me.”

  “Yet you came back.” She could not keep the delight and relief out of her voice.

  “There’s nothing for me out there now.”

  “Oh Etyan. I love you, little brother.”

  “And I love you, sis.” His smile was genuine, despite the pain in his eyes.Later, alone in her room, she wondered what that last, devastating row had been about. The two of them sometimes bickered when they were at the estate, but always made up. Perhaps they had just had enough, and fallen out of love. No, Etyan still loved Dej. Had Dej found out the truth about Derry, about what Etyan had done? It seemed unpleasantly likely, but Rhia had no intention of asking. On top of everything else, she could not bear to uncover that darkness again.

  CHAPTER 29

  Sadakh smiled at his flock from his dais. He had been letting his subordinates take too many services. This was his life, his calling.

  Seeing the congregation’s joyful, receptive faces lifted his heart; knowing his words touched them raised his spirits. He made a difference to many lives, leading people to fulfil their potential. There was no greater work.

  But whenever he was alone, he found himself fighting off despair. Mekteph no longer attended restday services at the priory and he sensed that the prince’s low-level enmity had now sharpened to active animosity, thanks to his refusal to betray the caliarch’s confidence. With every visit to the Eternal Isle a gauntlet of hostile stares, trailing guardsmen and tense-not-so-chance encounters, Sadakh had only visited the caliarch twice in the last month, giving excuses for missing two of their weekly meetings. And Numak was fast losing his grip on reality. On his last visit, earlier this week, he had insisted that Sadakh pray with him. This was not unprecedented; what was new and disturbing was his insistence that surely the eparch must be able to hear the voices of the dead caliarchs. When Sadakh admitted he could not, Numak had cried.

  The caliarch was losing faith in him. And he had begun to lose faith in himself. He had touched many lives, but how lasting was his influence? And how long did he have left to continue his work, spiritual and temporal?

  His response to Observer of Shen had been a pleasing if all-toobrief diversion. His initial elation at finding she was related to his escaped test subject soon faded. Could he really expect her to sell out her kinsman in return for Sadakh’s aid at her heresy trial?

  Rhia Harlyn had a sharp and incisive mind, but he knew nothing of her save what she revealed through her writings. Or perhaps he did…

  The Shenese boy had been abducted from the priory’s infirmary. Two separate sets of intruders had taken advantage of the caliarch’s birthday regatta two years ago to sneak in to steal him away. They had ended up fighting each other. One group, whose two survivors had b
een extensively questioned, had almost certainly been hired by the prince. Evidence suggested that the prince’s interest in the boy was political, not medical. Relations between Zekt and Shen had turned frosty after a failed dynastic marriage a decade and a half ago, back before Sadakh arrived in Mirror, resulting in Mekteph’s twin sister being exiled to Shen.

  The other party in the priory had apparently been Shenese. One of them had turned on his comrades, and been killed by them; the rest of the party fled, taking the boy with them. And one of the Shenese had been a woman of early middle years. Could she be the boy’s older sister?

  If so, then given she had travelled to Zekt and put herself at risk to get him back, it seemed unlikely she would hand him over, even in return for a testimony that might help save her work. Assuming she even knew where he was. If her possibly-brother was living in the skyland, perhaps with a skykin lover, Rhia Harlyn would have even less chance of finding him than Sadakh himself did. And if she had been one of those who snatched Lord Harlyn, what did she think – and more importantly know – about the boy’s presence in the religious house run by the enquirer she later began corresponding with?

  He had already been inclined to help her. And if Rhia Harlyn might – perhaps inadvertently – help him find his missing test subject, he needed her on his side. The lengthy letter he finally wrote kept his options open but could, he hoped, make a potential ally of her.

  Now, with no news to either encourage or dismay him for weeks, he was taking what pleasure he could in the rituals of his Order.

  The service finished. He liked to remain available to any supplicant who wished to speak to him after the morning’s formalities, whether it was a priest wanting spiritual advice or a trusted initiate with useful information. When he spotted Taklew he nodded to the bodyguard, and had his secretary show him in first.

  Taklew was still looking after Ereket at the launderers’ house. Her burns refused to heal, and she was becoming increasingly lethargic and lacking in appetite. Although Sadakh himself felt no signs of illness or impending mortality, her failing health was one more blow, one more sign his efforts might be doomed.