Circle of Shadows

by Evelyn Skye

  “What? No! Those were real scars we saw, not makeup. There were fortifications around the camp. And what about the fire?”

  “You know, you can turn fire green with several different chemicals . . .” Fairy said.

  Sora glared at her.

  Fairy put both hands up as if in surrender. “Whoa. Hold on. I hadn’t finished. No need to scowl me to death.”

  Sora still glowered, but she turned down the heat a bit.

  Her roommate wisely did not challenge her but instead continued patiently. “You can turn fire green with chemicals, but you can’t change the flames into serpent heads.”

  “So you believe us?” Daemon asked.

  “If you think something’s off, then something’s off,” Fairy said.

  “I do feel that way,” Sora said. “It’s like a cannonball in my stomach. Aren’t we taught to marry evidence with instinct? But the Council writes us off after one pair of taigas gives a once-over to a pile of trash.”

  “It’s because we’re mere apprentices,” Fairy said. “The warriors expect us to act like adults until it’s inconvenient for them. Then we’re just children to them again.”

  “I suppose it’s also my fault they don’t take us seriously,” Sora said. “I’ve spent years goofing around and doing anything I could to make life difficult for them. Why would they think any differently of me now?” She sank down onto the lawn.

  Daemon, Fairy, and Broomstick joined her, and Fairy rested her head on Sora’s shoulder, her hair like a silky blanket for Sora’s cheek. They sat like that for a few minutes in silence, which Sora knew was difficult for her roommate, who usually couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Sora appreciated it and let her own head rest on Fairy’s.

  It didn’t mean her mind stopped whirring, though.

  I understand why the Council closed the matter, Sora thought. They’d sent a team to look into it, and when the answer came back a definitive negative, Glass Lady and the others had moved on to other leads. This was a crucial time; the Council and all the taiga warriors were stressed and researching every possible explanation for the magic at Isle of the Moon. There were scholars in all the libraries across the kingdom, poring over old texts, day and night. The outposts throughout Kichona were on high alert and on orders to send dragonfly messengers about anything and everything suspicious. And the councilmembers themselves were hardly sleeping as they sorted through all the incoming reports.

  But Sora didn’t accept that what she and Daemon had seen was unimportant. It just meant that the Society was short on resources right now and couldn’t spend more time on chasing a lead that seemed, on its face, easy to explain away.

  I have time, though, Sora thought. Classes were going to be canceled this week, because the Society needed every taiga warrior—teachers included—to help with their research and to be ready to defend the Imperial City should the Isle of the Moon threat appear here. That meant apprentices like Sora were without a task, and without much supervision.

  Daemon sat up and arched a brow. An idea was percolating in Sora’s brain. He could feel the pinging of anticipation through their gemina bond.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked.

  Fairy and Broomstick turned to Sora too.

  She took another moment to think through her idea, just to make sure she really believed in it.

  She did.

  “We need to go back to Takish Gorge,” Sora said. “Or near it. We have to find those people again. The Council won’t investigate this any further now, but just because they’re busy pursuing other leads doesn’t mean we should let this go ignored. Maybe we really are wrong. But what if we’re not and it really is the Dragon Prince? If we do nothing, we will have failed as taigas. Our job is to protect Kichona. Prince Gin would destroy it.”

  Fairy sprang to her feet. “When do we leave?”

  Sora frowned. “About that . . . The warriors might not notice if two of us are gone, but four are too conspicuous. I think it should be just me and Daemon.”

  “But I want to go!”

  “She’s right,” Broomstick said to Fairy. “The Warrior Meeting Hall staff would definitely notice if I’m not at work. Besides, if you and I stay, we can help cover for them.” He turned to Sora and Daemon.

  Fairy slumped. “I feel left out.”

  “Don’t,” Sora said. “If we do find Prince Gin, we’re not just going to take notes and then leave him. I want a way to stop him. Whatever the Dragon Prince is here for, it can’t be good, and I need you.”

  Fairy scrunched her nose, confused. “How can I help with that?”

  “You could pack up some poisons for me.”

  “You want to kill a member of the imperial family?” Fairy’s eyes went wide in shock. Broomstick gawked at Sora. Even Daemon, despite his gemina bond that had clued him in on her feelings leading up to this, was numb with shock.

  “No,” Sora said. “I want to kill a traitor to the kingdom, who would upend the entire planet in his selfish quest for the Evermore if he could do it.”

  What she didn’t say out loud, but which was equally true—

  I want to kill the man who murdered my sister.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sora and Fairy climbed up to the third floor of the girls’ dormitory. The building’s black rice paper windows were thrown open, so even indoors it smelled like sunshine. It was a jarringly cheerful sensation, given that Kichona’s destruction loomed on the horizon.

  They turned down the hall, passing several doors until they reached theirs. Sora slid it open and stepped inside, nearly tripping on the nunchucks she had left haphazardly in the middle of the floor before going on the Autumn Festival break.

  “Yipes!” Sora said as she caught herself on a bedpost.

  Fairy merely shook her head. There was an unofficial but obvious line down the center of their room. Sora’s side was littered with dirty uniforms and unread books and the occasional nunchucks. Fairy’s side was spotless and tidy, especially her botanicals lab—a small desk and set of shelves lined with jars full of dried leaves and vials of flower nectar, as well as flasks of experiments, some successful and some not.

  “I’ll, uh, tidy up your side of the room while you’re gone,” Fairy said.

  “You shouldn’t have to,” Sora said. “I’ll do it when Wolf and I return. But I know you’ll worry while we’re gone, so if you need something to occupy your mind, maybe you can work on Wolf’s birthday surprise?” His birthday was only a couple weeks away, and after the success of their firework tiger at Rose Palace, Sora had an idea that she thought he’d love.

  Fairy smiled a little. “That’s a good plan.”

  But already, Sora was thinking of the journey ahead. And the last lines of the Evermore fable also lingered, a haunting reminder of what was at stake.

  It was not man who achieved immortality but, rather, the curse, which trailed their greed like an unshakable, eternal shadow.

  The Evermore was never worth its price.

  But the opposite was also true. It was worth any price to stop Prince Gin and everyone else who pursued the unattainable legend of the Evermore.

  Sora threw open her closet and grabbed a bag. She’d need some clothes, a canteen for drinking water, which she could fill in ponds and streams, and a cloak for concealing herself and keeping warm in the night.

  And of course, weapons. She unhooked two leather bands from the wall. One had her usual throwing stars, and the other had spikes, poison darts, and exploding eggshells filled with blinding powder. She strapped several more knives onto her body and into the hidden pockets in the sleeves and every fold of her tunic.

  When she turned around, Fairy handed her a small leather pouch. Her favorite, which she always kept strapped to her belt.

  Sora’s mouth fell open. “Fairy . . . you don’t have to give me your satchel. I can just take a few of your concoctions—”

  “I want you to take it,” she said. “Then I feel like . . . I don’t know. This is stupid. But I�
�ll feel like a part of me is there with you, helping.”

  Sora hugged the satchel to her chest. Inside were half a dozen squat glass vials of poison, each with its own slot. These were Fairy’s babies wrapped in blankets, all in a row. She didn’t like going too long without cradling them. It was a big deal to hand them over to someone else. “Thank you.”

  Sora jostled the finicky latch and opened the leather flap. She admired the different poisons, which Fairy lovingly milled and distilled herself.

  “What is this syrupy amber one again?” she asked about the leftmost one.

  “Demon sugar. One drop on a cake or in a cup of tea will send the victim into paralysis and a slow, strangled death.”

  “Right,” Sora said. “The blue powder, I remember, is ground gaki berry mixed with salt from the Emerald Sea.”

  “Yes. A little sprinkle of that on a dish, and the victim will get so hungry, he’ll go crazy and eventually devour his own limbs to satisfy his appetite.” Fairy went on to explain the other four powders and serums in the pouch.

  When she finished, she whirled abruptly and hurried to a set of drawers, the one that seemed like a bottomless pit of anything one could possibly need. It was, of course, meticulously organized inside into little trays. Sora had seen Fairy retrieve everything from hair clips to seaweed strips to a romantic novel from the drawers’ depths. Now Fairy came back with a small red envelope.

  “Hold out your hand,” she said. She took what looked like two pink coins out of the envelope and placed them in Sora’s palm. They were heavy too, like coins. Lines crisscrossed the disks.

  “What is it?”

  “Pressed rira powder. In small doses—like an eighth of this disk—it will put someone to sleep. In large doses . . .”

  Sora’s heartbeat stumbled. But perhaps that was the point. Fairy was giving her and Daemon a way out, in case they got in over their heads, and in case the dancers’ camp really did turn out to be Prince Gin and a small army.

  “I hope we don’t have to use them,” Sora said softly as she slipped the rira disks into the leather pouch.

  Fairy looked away. “I hope not too.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Getting out of the Citadel hadn’t been a problem for Daemon and Sora. The Council and the other taiga warriors were too busy preparing for another attack from their mysterious assailants to pay attention to the apprentices. He and Sora simply had to show the guards at the gate their leave passes, which Broomstick had gotten for them.

  A day after leaving the Citadel, Daemon and Sora arrived at the base of Samara Mountain, where Sora’s parents lived. The trails that led up its steep face were as dark as the taigas’ cloaks, obscured entirely by the night and the fog. The Kichona Sea tinged the air with salt, and its waves smashed themselves into the saw-toothed cliffs.

  Sora bit her lip as she looked upward. Her fear seeped through their gemina bond and into Daemon’s pores.

  “I know I’ve been obsessed with the idea that we saw Prince Gin,” she said. “And I know that maybe we were wrong. But that doesn’t mean there’s no threat. I’m scared about the attack at Isle of the Moon. What if it happens again? And what if next time it’s not an island with just five taigas on it, but a place like this with ordinary people too? People like my parents. They could be hurt.”

  Daemon nodded. Being this close to her family made the threat more real. He brought his horse next to Sora’s and squeezed her shoulder. Even though what he really wanted to do was wrap her up in his arms and tell her everything would be all right. But he couldn’t do that, for multiple reasons.

  “We should probably stop for the night,” Sora said, trying to shake off her worry.

  “Yes, but let’s ride a bit longer. I recall a creek not far from here.” It wasn’t that Daemon wanted to travel more tonight; they’d been riding hard enough to make good time. It was that he thought it would be better to draw Sora away from Samara Mountain. Unlike Glass Lady, Daemon believed that emotion could be beneficial to a taiga, providing motivation when it was needed. But in this case, the mountain was such a looming reminder of what was personally at stake for Sora, it was probably the right choice to move on.

  Brows knit tightly, she looked up the switchbacks once more before she nodded and nudged her horse to continue.

  They rode until they heard the lullaby of the water. There was a clearing set back from the road, sheltered by a cluster of ancient camphor trees, their moss-covered trunks as wide as Daemon’s horse was long, their fissured branches plunging deep into the fog. A patch of muddy grass would have to do as both grazing for the horses and bedding for him and Sora. The air smelled of damp and camphor mint.

  They brought their horses to the water and tied the reins to the trees. Daemon caught a few small carp from the creek, which they cooked over the fire Sora started. Soon after dinner, a chill sliced like a scythe into the night.

  Sora shivered as she unrolled her sleeping mat.

  “Cold?” Daemon asked. “You can have my blanket.”

  She smiled but waved him off. “I’ll be all right. Thank you, though.”

  Daemon looked at her a few seconds longer than he needed to. When he caught himself, he coughed and glanced away.

  Sora lay down on her mat and pulled her wool blanket over herself. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “I do. Do you think the camp will still be there when we arrive?”

  But Sora had already fallen asleep.

  Daemon lay on his own sleeping mat and listened to the featherlight in-and-out of her breath. After a while, her teeth began to chatter.

  He removed his own blanket and spread it over her. He’d make do with his riding cloak.

  But he couldn’t sleep. His mind raced with thoughts about Isle of the Moon, about the Evermore story that he’d hated as a kid, about the scars on that man’s face in Takish Gorge. Maybe his scaly skin had been stage makeup, as the Paro Village taiga report suggested. That would be good. Daemon and Sora could return to the Citadel knowing that there was no Prince Gin, that he was (still) dead, and they’d leave the Isle of the Moon attack to the Council and actual warriors to deal with.

  Then again, if the hooded man really had been the Dragon Prince, Daemon and Sora could return to the Citadel as heroes for having uncovered it. Maybe they could even sneak into his camp and assassinate him. Daemon imagined riding triumphantly through the iron gates at the Citadel, the evil Dragon Prince’s body thrown over the back of his horse.

  He let his mind wander to other versions of victory.

  But eventually, he got up. His inexplicable need to see the stars nagged at him, tugging at him from up high. I need to clear my head.

  Daemon found a tall pine nearby. He climbed quickly, and when he broke through the fog at the top, he cried out like a man in the desert who’d finally stumbled on an oasis of water. His cloak was cold and damp from the mist, and pine needles poked into his hair, but none of it mattered. There was sky, sky, sky, not the suffocating blanket of fog. There were stars and there was the moon, glowing fiercely into the night.

  Why did he crave this so badly? Was it simply because he’d been raised in the wild? Or was there something else in his past that made him need the freedom he found at the tops of the trees? Maybe he’d spent his infancy in a mole tunnel or something.

  But then Daemon closed his eyes, and he imagined not only the comforting, dark infinity of the sky around him but also the smell of leather and steel mixed with black currant and sandalwood. The curiously alluring scent of Sora’s weapons and her soap. Daemon breathed in deeply and let his mind wander, just a little, to Sora’s smile, the taut lines of muscle on her body, and to a recent sparring session when she’d pinned him to the dirt floor of the arena and straddled him, pressed her knife against his throat, and leaned forward to whisper, “It looks like I win.”

  Daemon had grinned, though, because he’d felt he was the winner of that match. Not because
of the fight itself, but because she’d been so close to him, her lips nearly grazing his ear, the razor edge of her hair skimming his cheek as she declared victory . . .

  He exhaled.

  Everything was going to be fine. It had to be.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Paro Village was a town swallowed by the forest. Trees draped in long sheets of flowering vines curtained the buildings, so thick that a traveler could easily pass the city by, if not for the fact that the gravel roads ended abruptly here, going no farther south. The shops and homes themselves were made of stone and covered in thick blankets of moss, as if they’d risen from the forest floor as part of the natural landscape. And a waterfall in the nearby cliffs kept the air thick with chill.

  Gin stood in the village square—really, a grassy field in the middle of the town—as the citizens assembled. Even the people here seemed a part of the woods, preferring rough-spun clothing the color of bark, their hair untamed in the breeze that whistled through the trees. Shopkeepers stood in the doorways of their stores. Families brought the elderly and the young. Whether it was because they were curious or scared or both, everyone turned out to see the Dragon Prince.

  On the edges of the crowd, the Paro Village taiga warriors stood at attention. Hypnotizing them had been Gin’s first order of business here. Since he’d failed to take control of the Council at Isle of the Moon, this was plan B—stealthily enchant as many taigas as possible to create an army, then march on the Imperial City and take the rest of the Society. Without the taigas guarding his sister, Gin could seize the throne.

  But that wasn’t all he needed. In order to begin his quest for the Evermore, Gin would have to perform the Ceremony of Two Hundred Hearts. He needed to persuade ordinary Kichonans to give their lives to Zomuri.

  A ripple of nausea rolled through Gin’s stomach, the warning of seasickness before a storm.

  Am I really going to do this?

  He looked over at his original taiga warriors, who had stood by him since the Blood Rift. He remembered how close to death he’d been, and how dedicated they’d been to bringing him back to health. And then they’d spent years training in the Shinowana mountains, fumbling with this new magic, bruising themselves while sparring, and finally, mastering it.