Unspoken

by Celia Mcmahon

  I found myself in a damp and dingy alleyway as narrow as the space under my bed. Crates were piled high on both sides, so I had to climb over most of them. Dirty tables, chairs, and boxes of moth-eaten clothes filled the spaces between. Broken barrels. A torn canvas that was once a beautiful painting. Soiled baby linens. A jug filled with dirty black water.

  I angled through it all until I reached a silent back street.

  I drew my hood further onto my head. At each passing minute, my heart felt as though it would bruise my ribs. It didn’t let up as I approached the set of concrete steps descending to the entrance of the Barge. I drew in my breath, glanced behind my back, and descended the steps.

  As if emerging from day to night, I found myself in darkness lit only by whatever sparse torches the rundown buildings held. I kept my head to the shadows, lurking in the corners and down the alleys. Several people stopped to glare in my direction, but none said a word to me.

  Some of them signed to each other. Voiceless.

  It occurred to me then that the Barge was not like the rest of Stormwall. Nothing here was clearly marked, yet everyone knew where to go. If I were to find a place that stored books, I would have to act as though I belonged there.

  I walked slowly, passing old, decrepit buildings that seemed to lean on each other. Some were so rundown, it was a surprise to see people living in them at all. The smell of sewage and excrement assaulted my senses and made me gag. A woman noticed me. She hobbled from the stoop of a ramshackle building. She wore a black robe and favored one leg.

  Are you lost? She signed.

  I have lost my companion. I praised my ability to sign. Never had I needed it more than that moment. Have you seen a small girl? Red robe. Blonde hair? She said she was heading to the library, but I must have missed when she said which one.

  The woman wrinkled her nose and looked off down the dull street. The old library is just down that way. That is the only one here. Did you look there?

  I have, I lied. But I’ll look again. Thank you.

  Something mischievous shone in the woman’s eyes. There was certainly something different about the Voiceless, but I couldn’t decide if it was something I’d chosen to ignore or something I just hadn’t seen before.

  I let out a breath when I was far enough away from the woman. “Be brave,” I whispered. Bravery was the only thing keeping me moving forward.

  The library was more of a large closet. There was nobody to greet me as I entered but the tall shelving on either side of me. It felt imposing, like every book watched my every move.

  A creaky chandelier gave off the only light in the place. I ran my fingers along the books. They looked ancient and smelled just the same. The stacks went so high I’d need a ladder to gain access. It would take weeks, if not months, to skim through each of them. Weeks and months I did not have.

  As I moved deeper into the stacks, I realized it wasn’t so much a closet as it was a chamber with a lower level below that I could see from the top of a set of iron steps. Odds were I’d have to go down there to find what I was looking for. My luck had been favorable like that.

  “You’re not Voiceless. You’re not a Gwylis either.”

  I started at the voice and nearly betrayed my ruse. I faced the man coming toward me and lifted my hands to sign, only for him to put out a hand to stop me.

  “Speak up, daughter,” the man said. “This isn’t a place for secrets. That must be why you’re here to begin with.”

  I stared the man down. He was middle-aged with an open face, light hair and clear blue eyes. He stood no taller than I and wore simple, brown clothes.

  “Sorry” I said, attempting to mask my royal affect. “You said Gwylis. What does that mean?”

  He kept his face blank. “What would someone like you want with that information?”

  “You offered it.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did so.”

  The man smiled. “You wish to know about the Old Kingdom.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “How did you know that?”

  “Because you’re the first person to come in here in nearly a year.” He leaned forward and sniffed lightly. “And because I smell it.”

  I made a face. “That’s entirely creepy.”

  The man rolled his eyes and brushed past. “If you wish to know about the Gwylis, take heed. It is not a happy story.”

  I moved to match his pace as he led me down the steps to the lower level. “Why are you helping me?”

  He stopped and peered over his shoulder. “Are you frightened?”

  I steeled myself and shook my head. “No.”

  “Good.”

  The lower level was just the same as the upper floor, but a little wider. In the center of the main room, there was a small wooden table with four chairs. That was where the librarian dropped a book large enough to kill a man. It brought up a cloud of dust.

  “What is your name?” I asked.

  “Farrell.”

  “Thank you for helping me, Farrell. I was not expecting that.”

  Farrell pursed his lips. “Sit.”

  I obeyed, choosing the chair nearest to me. Farrell moved about the room lighting candles. The walls were filled to the brim with books. They all appeared weathered with time; some spines were falling apart, and others were missing covers altogether. I wondered how much of Mirosa’s history was in those yellowed pages and how much of it would shed light on a darker past unknown to me. Nevertheless, the smell of the old books lulled me into a calmer state.

  “The Rowan House has a history that extends back further than you and I can fathom,” Farrell stated. “Mostly it is bathed in noted victories and good deeds, but underneath all of that, it is bathed in the blood of their enemies.” He began to speak very quietly. “King Reynald first passed beyond the Archway, severing the tradition of kings before him. He could have gone and come back with tales of beautiful lands and interesting people, but instead, he came back with new lands to call his own. Lands he put his flag upon.” He chuckled softly. “A tyrant if there ever was one, but even he was painted as a champion. And so it continued, and the bodies were stacked high, and the victories were celebrated, and soon the people of the Old Kingdom became too frail to fight back, having fought for hundreds of years. King after king. Until our current king, that is.”

  I nodded at this new information. I’d known only of my family’s need to expand their kingdom, but to know they took it by force was another thing altogether. “What were they like? The people on the other side of the mountains.”

  “Different than you and I. But once the same.”

  I sighed. I was going to have to dig to get straight answers out of this man. Why was it that men loved to speak in vague riddles?

  “What did my father do?” I asked. The words slipped from my mouth, but I made no move to retract them. I looked down at the book.

  “It’s not what he did, but more what they did,” Farrell replied. “Do you wish for me to continue? Because you may find yourself wishing I hadn’t.”

  Ignoring his warning, I nodded.

  With that, Farrell flipped open the old book. After a few minutes, he settled on a page and bid me lean closer.

  The pages were yellowed with age, but the images were clear. There were crude drawings, simple sketches of people with a sun above, and under their feet were what appeared to be flames.

  “The people of the Old Kingdom formed a treaty with the Uncanny—the devils of the seven hells—and with this pact, they gave up their very souls and became creatures of the night, equipped with magic and the ability to defeat mortal men.”

  My breath caught in my throat. Staring down at the flames beneath the people’s feet, I felt the world around me vanish. My skin prickled, and my voice broke. “I don’t understand.”

  “Monsters, shifters, fire-bringers.” He stopped to study my expression. “Soulless. Wolves. All words to describe the people who are now called the Voiceless. But they are Gwylis.”
r />   He turned a page to a drawing of a monstrous wolf and my mouth gaped open in horror. If I hadn’t seen the wolf for myself, I would have rejected Farrell’s story. But the truth of it crept into my bones and ran my blood cold as ice.

  I swallowed hard. “They dealt with demons to become…these things. To fight my father…” My words trailed off, longing for another world where none of this was real.

  “Desperate men do desperate things.”

  “This deal…this magic came from the Old Kingdom…”

  “There is magic everywhere, girl. You just have to know where to look.”

  “But they had to do it,” I said. “It doesn’t make them bad.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It does make them dangerous. To transform, they must speak the words The Uncanny gave them for great power.”

  “Do you think that? Truly?”

  “I think there is good in people no matter what they’ve done.”

  I thought of Fray.

  The heat of Fray’s body when he was near. The tender touch of his hand in mine. Nobody could feel like that if they didn’t have a soul.

  “Do you believe they truly sold their souls?”

  Farrell said nothing for such a long time that I began to worry, holding my breath.

  He turned a page and read the script there. “‘The king could not fight such unholy magic, and so he poisoned them and left them voiceless.’”

  He slid the book toward me. Under the text was but one drawing: a man tearing at his own throat, searching for the voice he no longer had.

  “My father won,” I said softly, wiping away a tear that had chilled on my cheek. My mind had cleared enough to know that what Farrell was telling me was true. All of it.

  Farrell nodded. “The only problem is, not all of their people chose to fight. They split into two factions. One led by the strongest Gwylis, a king. The other was led by a queen and fled deep into the mountains. A lot of them sided with your father, wanting peace and an end to the bloodshed. They were divided.” He turned a few pages and read more, but his voice might as well have been underwater.

  So, that was where my father was. Trying to find the Gwylis who had fled. But when did they run? Before or after my father had poisoned them? Was there an entire city of fully capable Gwylis running around out there? Are they the ones here in Stormwall?

  I shivered, remembering the men in the woods. And then I was plummeting into that night, and it folded over me over like a waking nightmare. My attacker. Now, I understood the anger in his eyes. I bore the Rowan name, the name that slaughtered and stole. Had our places been swapped, would I have done the same?

  I wondered how long I had been falling when Farrell spoke again. “Is this what you came for?”

  I looked down at the book. Farrell had flipped it to a new page with a macabre drawing of a lithe woman who had been set on fire. But she wasn’t in agony. She was smiling.

  The scene was so jarring that my hands began to tremble. “Who is she?” I asked.

  Farrell swatted his hand over the page as if that would erase the picture there. “It doesn’t matter. She’s gone, like their king.”

  “A queen, then.” The words came out in one breath and did nothing to quash the sadness that began to rise within me. Leaderless, split into factions…the Gwylis had lost everything. Even their unity.

  They were broken. Through and through.

  I drew in a deep breath and steeled myself. “But tell me,” I pronounced, “that you truly consider them evil. That magic is evil, and they are soulless as well as voiceless. Tell me.”

  Farrell hesitated, his brow furrowing. “When it comes down it, what I believe is a speck of sand on a great beach.”

  I gave a faint smile, counting to three in my head to steady my heartbeat. “It doesn’t make it less important.”

  A clock chimed from somewhere upstairs, and I knew my time there was ending. I looked to Farrell, eager for his response. After a tense stretch of silence, I decided he wasn’t going to give one and stood to leave.

  “I think I have heard enough,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t think of them as people,” Farrell said, scraping his chair across the floor to stand.

  “But they are people.”

  Farrell shook his head. “They’re not, and the minute you think of them as such is the minute you will find yourself down a road you cannot come back from.”

  Chapter 19

  The awful feeling stayed with me for hours afterward. Dressed in my favorite black and gray walking dress, paired with a cropped studded jacket and Henry’s worn boots underneath, I stalked the mostly empty hallways. I moved my fingers across the cold stone and skipped over the splashes of sunlight from the bowed windows.

  Still dazed from my visit to the Barge, I made my way to my balcony and looked over the forest below.

  The ocean was there, to the north. Anything beyond that, I didn’t know much about. On a map, the other side of the mountains was merely marked “The Old Kingdom”.

  I looked east to the snowcapped peaks silhouetted against the skyline. The Archway. The unknown.

  The place of soulless men and wolves.

  I stood there for a moment until the blue sky blurred and I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes.

  For all I knew, Fray was the spawn of a demon’s game.

  Soulless.

  Voiceless.

  Magic.

  I heard the massive doors of my bedroom creak open. Footsteps—heavy ones—and then the familiar voice of my cousin calling my name. My racing heart slowed as she approached. But my relief was short-lived and shifted to confusion when I saw her face.

  “Gods, where have you been?” Lulu asked. Her dark hair was frizzy, as if lightning had hit her. Her off-shoulder trumpet-sleeved gown was twisted like she had put it on blindly. She positioned the body-hugging fabric until it was in place and sighed. “I’ve been searching the entire castle for you. I thought you’d run away!”

  I lied. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

  “Outside the gates—” Lulu stopped, gathering herself. “Someone staked a giant wolf’s head into the ground. It’s standing there like a scarecrow!”

  “Wolf?” I couldn’t even get the word out without catching it in my throat. I was dizzy, spinning on a top.

  Lulu shook her head. “Something was written on the gates. In blood.”

  My mind flashed with something from my nightmares. “You saw it?”

  “A guard told me.”

  I wanted to shake her until every word fell out. “What did it say, Lulu?”

  My cousin looked at me as if I were crazy. I may have seemed that way. I grabbed her forearms and shook her like a doll. She bristled a little, and I loosened my grip but didn’t release her arms. “Lulu, what did it say?”

  “I don’t know. We got interrupted. Izzy, are you all right?”

  I dropped my cousin’s arms. I felt the blood drain from my face as I took a step back. “I have to see it for myself.”

  I departed, a frantic Lulu trailing behind. It would take great luck to get across the sky bridge without questioning, so I retrieved my cloak and pulled the hood up. Something in my head went dark, shadows echoed and groaned. Don’t go. You won’t like what you find.

  Fear gripped at me, weighing me down, but I pumped my legs faster. I mustn’t be scared. Henry taught me that fear was a murderer leaving me weak and powerless. I wouldn’t let it conquer me. Not anymore.

  We weren’t the only ones running. I heard shouts and murmurs, and dozens of feet moving around me. Lulu grasped the back of my cloak so as not to lose me. By the time we arrived, I was so breathless that I nearly toppled over as I bent forward, hands cupping my knees, to steady my heart.

  “Izzy,” Lulu shouted next to me.

  There was such a crowd that nobody took notice of us. But they gawked and pointed, and some were already trying to explain it. Some held hands to their mouths. A servant was crying. A stern looking
guard was interviewing her. Maybe she had been the one to find it. Lulu looked apprehensive as we pushed to the front of the crowd, but when we finally got our turn, it was me who gasped.

  It was no ordinary wolf. This thing had to be double—triple—what a wolf’s head would measure. Bigger than the one I fought off. It sat atop the wooden stake, its mouth agape, teeth gleaming, saliva still wet as if it had been alive only moments ago. Its white fur was caked with blood.

  “A monster,” someone said.

  No. Not a monster. A human. Gwylis.

  Memories tore through me. Visions of outsides that should be insides and of lifeless eyes and red. A lot of red.

  The crowd began pushing us away as guards attempted to seal off the area. Before being ushered from the scene, I caught a glimpse of the words on the open gate. Lulu had been right. It was written in blood.

  And it said, I am the beast.

  “Izzy, what is that thing?” Lulu asked, now gripping my arm so tightly that my arm began to ache.

  “I don’t…” But I did know. I knew exactly what it was. But how could I put it into words? How could I explain to my cousin what my father had done to the Gwylis? What he had driven them to?

  I swallowed the fear and revulsion and stepped forward as far as the guards would allow me. I forced myself to look into the wolf’s eyes and realized that even dead, they shone an icy steel blue. I knew animals. I loved them all. They provided food and medicine and sometimes, when I wasn’t hunting, I would sit and watch the deer or the birds in their uncompromised beauty.

  I also knew that wolves’ eyes turned red or gold when they reached adulthood.

  With an agonizing tug at my stomach, I knew this wolf was not one of the ones who wanted my family dead.

  The crowd began to stir again as more guards arrived to contain them. Someone pulled me back, but I resisted and stepped forward close enough to graze the wolf’s fur with the tips of my fingers.