Malachy was the main Breccan ink producer. His job was uniquely ideal for finding out information because the people that needed ink the most were Pax officials. This meant that he heard a lot of talk when the men came in to get their ink, and he knew a great deal about which families had been raided on a particular day.
However, Malachy was not alone in his job of returning stolen items back to their owners. He had a network of around fifteen children and teenagers who kept an open ear out for any raids that might be happening. They called themselves The Whispers of Breccan, and they were one of the village’s most well-kept secrets. Not one single Pax official had ever heard of them. Despite this secrecy, there were a fair amount of people in the village that knew they existed and even contacted the Whisper network whenever their house was raided.
Though she knew that anyone that had ever had their home raided would never give up the secret of the Whispers of Breccan, they were still gambling with their lives. The second word got out about them, Malachy and his fifteen little helpers would be in a world of trouble.
When they reached the cave that night, Malachy was not yet inside. Oftentimes he was late getting to them, for it was harder for him to sneak past the checkpoints unnoticed.
“Why don’t you check the bags for Iris’s stuff,” Archer suggested to her while he warmed his hands on the fire that Logan had started in the corner of the cave.
Norabel had not been paying attention to him, having been deep in thought about where that mysterious arrow could have come from, and so did not respond.
“Norry!” Archer said, coming over to her and waving his hand in front of her face.
She blinked at the movement and then looked over to him in confusion.
“The thing,” Archer prompted. “The thing that was just so important that you had to get it back to little Iris.”
“Yes?” she asked.
He threw his hands up in aggravation, saying, “How ‘bout looking for it now so we didn’t do this thing for nothing!”
“You call this nothing!” Logan huffed, pointing to the four-loaded bags they had dropped off at the cave wall.
“Well, no,” Archer agreed. “I was only… I mean, she made such a big deal out of, you know. And now she’s just standing there with a blank expression on her face, acting like we didn’t just do this thing for her.”
Norabel turned to him giving him a quiet, “Thank you,” before going to the first of the bags and looking inside.
“Thank you!” Archer exclaimed while she was searching the bags. “That wasn’t so hard!”
“Hey Archer,” Logan said, shooting him a sideways look. “Do you think you could not be so…”
“So what?” he demanded.
Logan chose his word carefully, finally deciding on, “Boisterous.”
“Boisterous!” he exclaimed. “Well, if I’m boisterous, then you’re, you’re girlious!”
“That’s not a thing.”
“Yeah it is.”
As the two boys were fighting, Norabel quietly searched the packs. Her stomach tightened as she reached for the last one, having failed to find the Albatross Seed in the other three. This time she dumped the contents of the pack on the ground, trying to better search through it, but could still not find the Albatross Seed.
They must have destroyed it, she realized. She couldn’t believe how foolish she had been. Why would they hold onto it? It was outlawed. Of course they would destroy it. There was no reason for them to keep it, just because it was precious to a little girl. She couldn’t believe how she had jumped so quickly into this thing without thinking it through.
Noticing her distress, Mason walked over to where she was crouched on the floor, asking, “Did you find it?”
For a moment she debated about lying to him, just picking up any random object and saying it was the one she had been looking for. But she couldn’t think of which one to choose, and she knew for certain her face would give away her deceit the moment she tried.
“Is something wrong?” Logan asked, ending his argument with Archer to come over to them.
“It’s not here,” she whispered out. The second the words came out, she wanted to take them back. She didn’t know why she had said them. It was almost like she couldn’t keep them from escaping.
“What? Serious!” Archer exclaimed, throwing his hands up.
She looked through the objects on the ground once more and nodded.
Mason crouched on the ground next to her so he could look her in the eye. “Would you mind telling me exactly what it was that was so important?” he asked, saying the words slowly and seriously. “So important that the Pax officials, for some reason, didn’t think it was worth their time to even throw into a basket?”
An icy hand clamped around her heart. She knew that Mason was angry, but he would be even angrier the second she told him the truth. She gulped and looked down to the ground, which was dancing in the orange flame of the fire, and quietly admitted, “It was an Albatross Seed.”
Archer was the one to explode first, slamming his foot into the wall and exclaiming, “I don’t believe this! We risked our necks for a wretched tree nut!”
Norabel rose to her feet, saying, “It’s not just a nut! It’s more than that!”
“For crying out loud, Norabel! When are you gonna to grow up?! The Albatross don’t exist! Invisible people with wings that are supposed to watch over you every second of the day! Come on! It’s a children’s myth!”
She clenched her jaw and stared defiantly at Archer. “If they don’t exist, then why did Amias banish all mention of them? You can’t outlaw something if it doesn’t exist.”
“Well I’d still outlaw you if you didn’t exist!” he countered.
“Archer,” Logan shouted. “Will you please shut up!”
Archer looked over to where Mason and Logan were standing, and promptly closed his mouth upon seeing the grave expression on their leader’s face. Norabel turned to him as well, waiting in painful silence for the axe to fall on her head. Mason’s expression was still and blank, but she could see something moving underneath it all, just waiting to burst out. Then, moving slowly, he turned to the entrance of the cave, looking like he was about to walk out, when he swiftly turned around and pointed a finger at her.
“You’re still a child, you know that?!” he yelled. “You’re exactly the same! You need to grow up! Because I don’t need little girls on my team!” With that, he stormed out of the cave and into the night.
*
Logan raced after his brother, nearly falling on the stray rocks of the cave entrance as he did so. Scrambling to control his balance, he shot forward and grabbed Mason by the arm.
“Mason, why is this so hard for you!” he shouted.
Mason shoved his arm free and continued to hurry forward.
“You are being way too hard on her!” Logan continued. “I don’t see what the big deal is! She was just doing her job. We all were. Now a lot of people will get back what was taken from them. Who cares why we did it in the first place!”
“I care!” Mason said gruffly.
Logan reached out for his arm again, trying to stop him. “Oh, will you please stop moping!” he exclaimed. “Stop holding it against her. You were kids.” He shook his head and took in a breath. “Just innocent kids having fun. What was so terrible about that?”
Mason finally tuned to face him, the dull light of the moon somehow sharpening in his eyes. “Yeah. We were kids. Only I grew up. But Norabel, she’s…” He glanced back to where they had left the cave. “She’s still chasing imaginary creatures. Chasing her own shadow and pretending she sees their wings.”
“She’s not the only one chasing shadows,” Logan stated sadly. “At least hers don’t make her hate the world.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he challenged.
“It means,” Logan said, taking a step towards his younger brother, “that if mom and dad were still here, they would tell you to stop this.”
“Well they’re not here, are they!” he countered.
“And that’s not her fault,” Logan shouted, pointing a finger back at the cave. “Yes, her beloved Albatross didn’t swoop down and save mom and dad from being killed, just like they didn’t save her grandfather! You call her childish, but what do you call what you’re doing?!”
“That’s not,” he started to yell, but stopped himself. “That’s not what I’m doing,” he said, softer this time.
“Then what are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he shook his head. “Just forget it.” He glanced behind him before admitting, “You’re right. I was too hard on her.” He gulped and added, “Will you tell her for me?”
“Why don’t you tell her yourself?”
Mason was silent as he stared at the ground, scuffing his boot against the grass of the meadow.
“Can’t you try to be her friend again?” Logan asked carefully.
His brother looked up and was about to respond when something behind Logan drew his attention. “Malachy’s here,” he announced. “We should get back to the cave.”
Logan’s shoulders slumped in disappointment. He knew his brother was holding something back from him, and he wished he would finally just come out and say what it was. But, it seemed as if that wasn’t going to happen tonight.
Back inside the cave, they found Malachy and two of his oldest Whispers with him. The two boys were checking the bags that were on the cave floor while Malachy looked down at them in careful deliberation. Norabel was also nearby, helping them to place some of the items she dumped out onto the cave floor back into the bag.
“Do you have a good idea of who this stuff all belongs to?” Logan asked, hoping to clear some of the tension away from Mason and Norabel.
Malachy’s sharp, calculating brown eyes turned to him. He rubbed a hand over his brown beard, which was graying in places, no doubt due to the stress of his job.
“I think we can return everything back to their rightful owners,” he answered. “I know a family in the north that will be very happy to see their possessions returned.”
“Not happy enough,” Mason commented from a darkened corner of the cave.
Malachy frowned and nodded. “No, not happy enough. I’m afraid the father was red-flagged a few months back. The Pax has been bleeding them dry ever since.”
“Red-flagged for what?” Archer questioned. He was crouched by the fire and was smelling a piece of stray charcoal. As he looked to Malachy for an answer, he crushed the charcoal in his hands and rubbed the dust under his armpits to act as a kind of natural perfume.
Malachy eyed him curiously for a moment before clearing his throat and saying, “They say they found a painting of Lord Rodion hidden in their house.”
“That was it?” Logan asked, feeling sorry for this unfortunate family.
“From what I’ve gleaned, they’ll red-flag someone for just about any reason when they’re low on supplies,” Malachy explain. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that painting wasn’t planted by the officials raiding their house.”
Logan felt his skin crawl upon hearing this news. He knew the Pax was corrupt, but it never ceased to amaze him how heartless they could be when enforcing their will.
Before Malachy could tell them anymore, Mason stepped out from the shadows of his corner, saying, “Thank you for coming, Malachy. Now you should get going. Your whispers have a long night ahead of them.”
Malachy nodded and then motioned for his Whispers to follow him. As the two boys left, slinging several packs over their shoulders, they tipped their knuckles to their heads in salute to their Harbinger team. Logan wished them both good luck and watched solemnly as they left the cave, heading willfully and eagerly into a dangerous, sleepless night.
Chapter 4
The morning found Norabel sitting on her bed, staring at a small, pale brown shell in her hands. The last of the Albatross Seeds she had managed to smuggle from home. The two halves of the brown shell were tied together with a delicate piece of string. Carefully undoing it, she opened up the shell to see the perfect star pattern that had etched itself on the inside of the shell.
Closing her eyes, she remembered the day that her grandfather had told her about this star. She had been so little at the time. As she walked with her grandfather in their orchard of trees, her arms could barely reach up to touch the lowest hanging branch. Then her grandfather had plucked a nut from the tree and had given it to her, and when she opened it up and ate the nut inside, she found this star pattern hiding underneath. She remembered gasping and looking up to her grandfather when she saw this. Of all the times she had eaten an Albatross Seed, the pattern behind the nut had always been a random and wrinkly set of lines. But the star—the star was beautiful.
“You know what that is,” her grandfather had said, crouching down in the dirt to look her in the eye. The large brimmed hat he always wore was silhouetted against the bright sky behind him. “That’s one of this world’s greatest rarities. In my lifetime working here, I’ve only ever found three.”
Norabel’s eyes had widened, and she asked, “What does it mean?”
“It’s a sign,” he had answered, giving her a smile and tousling her pale hair. “A perfect star on the inside of this nut means that your Guardian Albatross has laid his hand on it. So, every time you hold that nut, it’s like you’re shaking his hand.”
Norabel kept her eyes closed as she gripped the Albatross Seed firmly in one hand. She had loved it when her grandfather would tell her about the Albatross. Her family’s land was located on the side of a mountain where the butterfly called the Woodland Albatross would migrate across during the spring and fall. He would take her to a meadow that was filled with them and recount the story of the Albatross to her. He would point to the snowy-white wings of the butterfly, telling her that her Guardian Albatross had those very same wings; that her guardian was, in fact, very much like the butterfly, only, instead of an insect between his wings, there was a man. But he never migrated away. He would be there, watching her at all times, making sure that nothing bad would happen to her.
Then her grandfather would pat her on the head and call her special, for her hair was nearly the exact same color as the wings of the Albatross.
“You have a connection to them,” he told her. “One that most people will never experience. And they may not understand it, either. They may even dislike you for it. But you should never forget how special it is, Norabel.”
She lifted the Albatross Seed up to her face, cupping it in her hands like a pool of water. The shell still carried the faint earthy and smoky scent of the nut, reminding her so much of home. Then, lowering the seed, she whispered out a solemn goodbye. Of course she knew that her Albatross wouldn’t leave her just because she was about to give up the seed. But, just the same, she felt like a fragile thread was breaking between them, and she didn’t know how many there were left before she was cut off completely from her guardian.
Opening her eyes, she willed those thoughts from her head and promptly rose to her feet. She straightened her skirt and took in a deep breath before heading out of her bedroom.
Going outside, she found Iris and her mother and father retrieving the small Pax basket that was sitting on their doorstep. This was called the Amias Gift. Every single household in the kingdom of Galerance received one each morning. Normally it was filled with simple, cheap things—an old loaf of bread, a few grains of wheat, the things that any villager would be able to buy for themselves if the Pax didn’t constantly seize any of the excess money they tried to save up.
Norabel had a hard time excepting even the most menial thing inside of her Amias Gift. It was a patronizing and sneaky act. Those in the kingdom with only half a brain would take this daily gift for benevolence and the sign of a good leader. They didn’t realize that he was only able to give these things away because he stole them from other villagers during house raids. And the worst part was, those that were considered f
riends to the Pax always received more, and those that had shown reluctance to it in the past were hardly given anything.
However, as much as she hated the Amias Gift, the baskets on everyone’s doorstep were also the perfect way to re-gift back what was stolen.
As Norabel walked up to her neighbor’s house, she could hear Iris’s mother and father speaking in hushed, excited voices, deciding what they should do with everything they found in their basket.
Hiding the Albatross Seed in her hand behind her back, she knocked on their front door. It was the father that answered. He looked her in the eye and nodded his head, as if to say he knew what she had done. Then, before anything could be said, Iris came running over to her.
“Norabel, it isn’t…” she started to say, but stopped when she saw the smile on her face. Iris’s eyes widened as Norabel brought her hand forward and revealed what was inside.
“You’ll be careful with it,” Norabel told her. “Never leave it in a place where they can find it.”
Iris carefully accepted it, turning it over in her fingers a few times before hastily reaching out and wrapping her arms around Norabel’s stomach. She held onto her for so long that eventually her mother came over.
“Iris, sweetheart, she has to get to work,” Vera told her daughter. “You have to let her go.”
When she pulled away, Norabel turned to leave, but not before taking one last look at the Albatross Seed in the little girl’s hands.
Please let that not be the last seed left in the world, she silently begged her Guardian Albatross. Please don’t leave us when that too is destroyed.
*
Hunter stared down at the breakfast bowl in his hands, allowing a gradual smile to form on his lips. It wasn’t that his breakfast was particularly delicious. In fact, this morning it was an exceptionally gray-looking, mushy porridge. But what had him secretly smiling had nothing to do with what was in the bowl, but rather, the bowl itself.
He lifted his thumb and rubbed the bowl’s rim. There was a simple, wavy ridge on the top. Most people might miss it. Though the bowl was an earthy brown color, it reminded Hunter of the blue waves of a lake shore. Carefully taking it in his palms, he lifted it up to his face. There were only a few bites of watery porridge left.
Chasing Shadows (Saving Galerance, Book 1) Page 4