Shadowlands

by Malan, Violette

  “And it seems that since the Basilisk was defeated, the abandoned Hunt has been feeding freely, and almost exclusively, on humans. I have seen news reports myself, and have been told of others, that describe the toll these feedings take. From what I can gather, the areas most affected are Toronto, Rome, and Beijing, with lesser incidents in Granada, Melbourne, and Seattle.”

  “Places where the Exile lived most recently,” Cassandra said. “Or where one of us Wardens was living.”

  Alejandro inclined his head. “The Outsider with whom I spoke accused us of bringing the Hunt to prey upon humans, and then abandoning them without aid or rescue.”

  “And they are not entirely wrong.” Cassandra clenched her teeth shut, right hand forming a fist. She hadn’t expected that her responsibilities to humans would come so soon, and be so complicated. Rider tourism—for want of a better word—had not even started. “I thought I would have more time.”

  “Pardon?”

  Startled, Cassandra realized she had spoken aloud. “More time,” she repeated. “Contrary to our expectations, the Cycle does not turn by itself; it is taking all our efforts to restore the Lands and the People to prime condition. The last Cycle did not end in its natural time, but was hastened by the actions and errors of the Basilisk Prince. The damage—” she shook her head, exhaustion sweeping through her in a sudden wave.

  “But the Hunt, the Outsiders…” Alejandro’s lips pressed together and twisted to one side. Clearly, he had not planned to be the advocate of the Outsiders.

  “Make the issue of the Shadowlands more urgent, I agree. But not, you must understand, from the perspective of the Lands.” Cassandra rubbed at her brows with stiff fingers. She could feel a headache starting behind her eyes. And who Heals me? “Here in the Lands, I can find problem areas, even individuals, perhaps even the Hunt, through my bonding with the Talismans. But who will find the Hunt for us in the Shadowlands?” Stormwolf could—but she thrust the thought away. How could she ask such a thing?

  “They could be anywhere. What we’re contemplating, what you’re asking, would be to engage in what might very well turn into some kind of guerrilla conflict—”

  Alejandro sat forward, as if he would speak, and Cassandra raised her hand. “Even if I decided to begin such an action, I haven’t the troops for it, not while I need them here. We have taken some steps toward dealing with the Hunt, but you must realize, the Shadowlands are not my first priority. I can’t spare anyone for some long, drawn-out campaign, at least not right now.”

  Alejandro sat back, spreading his hands. “Any help at all would be—”

  A Wild Rider appeared in the doorway.

  “The sleeper awakes, my Prince.”

  I could taste something medicinal in the back of my throat, and felt a warm hand on my forehead. I jerked away, wondering what they’d dosed me with this time, when I smelt saffron, and opened my eyes to a long oval face, pale as marble, except for storm-gray eyes.

  “What did you give me?” And cleared my throat.

  “Gravol.” Her voice was as warm, as liquid, and as soothing as chocolate. “For the motion sickness and nausea. Alejandro went back through the Portal for it as soon as I knew what ailed you.”

  I struggled to sit up, and the pale woman sitting on the edge of my bed slipped her arm around my shoulders, moving the pillows to prop me up. The room swayed and then settled down. Not with any feeling of permanence, however. “He went without me?” Strange, but I wasn’t getting anything but the minimal buzz from her, as if she wasn’t touching me at all.

  “Not at all, foolish child, I am here.” I turned toward his voice and found him sitting in a cushioned chair to my right, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together. I turned to my left and found myself once more looking into a pair of storm-gray eyes in a long oval face.

  “I’m Cassandra Kennaby. You are welcome to my home.” She smiled, and for the first time I knew what the phrase “unearthly beauty” meant.

  “You’re the High Prince,” I said. It didn’t take a psychic to figure it out; I remembered the name. “What’s happened to me? Why can’t I read you?” I would have thought I’d be happy about that, but I actually found it unsettling.

  She held up her hands. They were covered by a pair of silver gloves, with full gauntlets almost to her elbows. They appeared to be made out of scales. Very fine scales.

  “Gra’if?”

  “You know it, then?”

  “I bear a sword,” Alejandro said from behind me, and the High Prince glanced at him with a smile. I could see the edge of a gra’if mail shirt peeping out from the collar of her red tunic, as well as a torque around her neck. Gra’if was made from a Rider’s own blood, I remembered Alejandro telling me, and it was unusual for one Rider to have much of it. That was why Alejandro always spoke of “bearing” it, rather than “wearing” it.

  “It appears that gra’if insulates you against the exercise of your talent. This is contrary to common sense and logic, but then, gra’if usually is.”

  I swallowed three times, quickly. “What happened to me?”

  “You appear to have suffered an extreme case of vertigo and motion sickness. Disorientation, dizziness, nausea, and so on, upon passing through the Portal. I was not the nearest Rider with the Healer’s talent, but since you were coming here anyway…” She shrugged, a gesture made oddly more human by her using it.

  “I remember. It was so nice and warm, but then—” I swallowed, and clutched at the side of the bed.

  “Hush, now. Relax. When I touched you, at first you began to Heal, but almost immediately your symptoms worsened beyond what they had been before. Can you describe to me what passed?”

  I outlined what I remembered of what I had seen and felt. The spinning and the dizziness, the lines of color and the patterns. “Could it be a migraine?” I asked. “I’ve heard they can cause nausea and light effects.” But she was already shaking her head.

  “She tapped into your Binding, as you suggested,” Alejandro said. “But why should it affect her so? Without doubt, she has Rider blood—it is what accounts for her talent.”

  “She is definitely Dragonborn or, rather, her ancestor was. That’s what your psychic ability really is,” Cassandra added, turning to me. “It’s a knowing of and recognition of the truth. All who are guided by the Dragon have it, though it manifests in different ways. It’s why I can Heal, for example, because I see the truth of the body, and can restore it.” A wrinkle formed between her honey-gold brows and disappeared without a trace. “I can also see the truth of the Lands, and, through me, you experienced that truth as well, but unfortunately you are not Rider enough to bear it.”

  “But the drugs, they are working?” Typical of Alejandro to worry about me. And I had to admit to a mild curiosity myself.

  “Certainly, but for how long? Things of human making don’t work as effectively, here in the Lands. And that is when they work at all. Valory has been given the whole day’s dose of Gravol already, eight tablets, and she is barely able to sit up.”

  I remembered what the Rider at the Portal had said. “But humans have been brought here before,” I pointed out. “At least, there are all those old songs and ballads that say so.”

  “True,” she agreed. “Both pure-blooded humans and children of mixed blood. But psychics? That’s something we’ve never seen before.”

  “Maybe it’s like an allergy,” I said. “Maybe repeated, small exposures would give me an immunity.” I didn’t really need to see the answer in Cassandra’s eyes. I already knew it.

  “We don’t know enough—yet—to solve this problem.” Her voice was very gentle. “You have enough Rider blood, and therefore enough dra’aj, to sense the Lands, the connection that we all have that allows us to Move, though not enough to Move yourself. It is confusing you rather than helping you.”

  “So pure-blooded humans would have no difficulties, since they wouldn’t be able to sense the Lands at all?” I
asked.

  “Exactly.”

  I rubbed at my forehead, feeling the corners of my mouth starting to tremble. My ability, the thing that marked me as part Rider, that might have given me some rights to the Lands, was the very thing that prevented me from staying here. “So what now?”

  “Now you will go home, until such a time as we can bring you here without drugs.”

  That would be never, I guessed, but she was still speaking.

  “But first, I would have you both interviewed by Singers. We must give them all the information we can about the new form of the Hunt, and about the Outsiders.” As if on cue, another Starward rider, dressed in the same colors as Cassandra, appeared in the doorway. “Would you bring Graycloud at Moonrise to Moon, and ask that a Singer be sent here for Valory?”

  I waited until Alejandro had kissed me on the forehead and left with the strange Rider before I asked the question I’d been waiting to ask the Dragonborn High Prince.

  “Are you?”

  She smiled, knowing right away what my question meant. “Your mother? Or many times great-grandmother? No. I bore no children during my time in the Shadowlands.” She smiled when she said this, and I thought she might be planning to have children now. It was strange not to be able to read her. Not unpleasant, just strange. “It will have been some other guided by a Dragon, not I, and if your coloring is true, likely a Sunward Rider. As Alejandro will have told you, there was more traffic between our worlds in the time before the Exile.”

  “But you can do what I do?”

  To my surprise, she shook her head. “As I said, I see the truth of the physical essence. I see when that essence is not true, and now that I am bound to the Talismans—to Sword and Spear, to Cauldron and Stone—if I see an untruth in the Lands, or in one of the People, I can repair it, Heal it.” She paused, brows drawn down in thought. “I can usually tell when someone is lying to me.” She smiled. “But not always, if they are lying to themselves as well. I cannot see the truth of things apart from the person, as you do.”

  I hadn’t thought about it that way, but that did describe what I could do. “Toward the end, when you were touching me, I thought I felt scales—warm, though, not like a snake.”

  “That was my Guidebeast you felt.” She tapped her chest. Her gra’if mail gloves had fingernails on them, short, thick, and rounded off at the tips of her fingers, as though they were claws. I was already becoming accustomed to the natural look of Riders, so her fingers didn’t seem unnaturally long to me, though her hands were very beautifully shaped. “My Dragon, or rather, the Dragon that is me. It was only through becoming my Guidebeast that I was able to stabilize your condition at all.”

  I remembered then that she had lived as a human for a long time. And a doctor, Alejandro had said. But she was still speaking.

  “I cannot cure the illness that comes upon you here,” she was saying. “I cannot stay a Dragon for you. My Healing no longer belongs to me alone.”

  “You healed Stormwolf,” was what I said aloud.

  “He is a Rider,” she said.

  “I haven’t told Alejandro,” I admitted. “That Wolf, that he…” I searched her face and saw she understood. “He’s ashamed of it, Wolf, I mean. And now that we know the Hounds can look like Riders, Alejandro would never trust him, no matter what I say.” And that was the bleak truth of it, I realized. Alejandro would continue to believe what he believed, no matter what the evidence to the contrary.

  Cassandra brushed my hair back out of my face, and just for a second I was a child again, in my bed, and my mother was putting the back of her hand on my forehead to test for fever. Even with the gra’if on it, Cassandra’s hand was warm and gentle. I wanted to stay in this bed forever.

  “I know human addicts, and human addiction. Until I understood what had made the Hunt, I did not believe addiction was possible for the People. But how it functions in Riders?” she shrugged, the gesture looking altogether too human for her, though, like Alejandro, she did it perfectly. “How can I be sure what happens? With human addicts, we could cure the physical cravings, even at times the psychological ones, but we weren’t able always to remove the circumstances that led to the addiction in the first place.”

  “You’re afraid this might be true of Wolf as well?” I cleared my throat, swallowed. “You can relax.”

  “You have no such concerns? You trust him?”

  I nodded, finding my mind ready to drift off on the warm tide of her voice.

  “Why?”

  “Because I know.”

  “You see the future?” I shook my head. “Then you have a very hard road in front of you, Valory Martin. I wish I could be of more help.”

  You’re not asking me why, I thought. Why I wanted to help Wolf. And that was good, because I wasn’t sure I knew the answer myself.

  We were interrupted at that moment by the Singer, Piper in the Meadow, a Sunward Rider who was guided by a Roc. Cassandra left us, telling me that she would be back when they were ready to Move me, and I should rest as soon as the Singer left me. She gave me more Gravol to take.

  “Don’t worry about overdosing,” she said, smiling her quiet smile, “that I can cure.”

  I told Piper in the Meadow everything I knew about the Outsiders, including everything I could remember of what Nik had said, and what I’d gathered from him the few times I’d touched him. The Singer hummed while he was speaking to me, but his eyes never left my face, and I knew that he was getting every word. He asked me a couple of questions, thanked me, and left.

  I swallowed the tiny pills with the help of the glass of water on the table next to me, tasting the sharpness of the medicine on my tongue washing away under the freshness of the liquid. I had a momentary panic when I thought that maybe I shouldn’t be eating or drinking anything here in case it trapped me. Weren’t there stories about that kind of thing? But surely Alejandro would have warned me, and Cassandra was doing everything she could to get me home.

  I lay back in the bed and tried to relax, surprised to find that after a while there were tears trickling down the sides of my face from under my closed eyelids. Somehow the knowledge that I would soon be back in Toronto, in our house in the Beaches, wasn’t very comforting, even though my stomach felt better. With that knowledge came the awareness that this place, the home of at least one of my ancestors, would never be my own.

  Chapter Eleven

  NIKOS POLIHRONIDIS RAN whistling up the steps of Elaine’s double-fronted Victorian. Both the design firm and the architects who occupied the main floor were in, so Nik muted his whistling as much as his mood would allow. For the first time in months he was beginning to feel that they might be getting a handle on things, that everything might yet return to normal—or at least what they’d considered normal for the last century or so.

  Arlene and Marg were at their desks when he reached the second-floor landing, but he could see that Elaine’s office door was open, so he blew them kisses as he went by. Elaine was dictating into her headset—looked like the Finnegan Brothers were going to settle out of court—and she raised her finger at him. He waited until she finished, and unhooked her earpiece.

  “How are you feeling?” he said as he threw himself into the more comfortable of her client chairs.

  “I believe the expression is dazed and confused.” Elaine leaned back in her own chair and sighed. “Nikki, I take back every time I ever felt impatient with you, and every time I got pissed when you took off, leaving me to deal with clients while you ran off to help someone. I had no idea.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head, her eyes glinting. “How long have you…” She rotated her hand in a “keep going” gesture. “Tell me it gets easier.”

  “Obviously it does. Look at me. You’ve known me how long?” Nik used his most matter-of-fact tone. Elaine was scared, but an attitude of business as usual would be the thing to steady her. There were still things he needed to tell her—thank god she’d never shown much interest in having children—but
he’d save that till later. When she was stronger.

  “What happens now?” Elaine’s eyes flicked to the light blinking on her phone until it stopped.

  “You have to be careful the first month or so, but Marg and Arlene already know what to look for, so we’ve nothing to worry about.” Except where I’m going to get you your next shot of dra’aj. Nik was careful to keep smiling.

  “I didn’t say anything to the ladies.” Elaine lifted her head toward the outer office, where their assistants sat.

  “Good.” It was one thing for Elaine to know—lots of Outsiders had a normal person they confided at least part of the truth to—but experience had shown them it was better their condition didn’t become general knowledge.

  Elaine’s eyes shifted to look over his shoulder and Nik turned around. The smile faded from his face when he saw the short man with the dark blond hair and Slavic features who stood in the doorway, Arlene hovering behind him.

  Nik forced himself to look welcoming and got to his feet. “It’s okay, Arlene. This is an old colleague of mine from Kitchener.” Poco helped him out by giving him the handshake, shoulder-hug, kiss-on-both-cheeks greeting of the Mediterranean intimate. “Elaine, I don’t think you’ve ever met—”

  “Your cousin from out of town?” Elaine put out her hand and seemed pleased when Poco kissed it.

  The small man’s blue eyes twinkled as they shifted from Nik to Elaine and back again. He slapped Nik on the arm with the back of his hand. “Dude.” He turned back to Elaine. “My friends call me Poco, and now you can do the same.” He looked around at Nik. “Just now I’ve got something I need Nikki for, so if you don’t mind…?”

  “We can go to my office.” Nik picked up his cue.

  “I hope to see a lot more of you from now on,” Elaine said, as she sat back down and picked up a folder.

  “Nuthin’ more likely, darlin’.”

  As he led Poco to his own office—a corner office, just like Valory Martin had said—Nik braced himself for the blast he knew was coming. Poco waited until the door was closed behind them.