A Tempest of Shadows
Page 1
A Tempest of Shadows
Jane Washington
Contents
Also By Jane Washington
1. Liar
2. Fated
3. Cursed
4. Secrets
5. Innocence
6. Temper
7. Fantasy
8. Embers
9. Darkness
10. Spider
11. Breath
12. Wings
13. Taste
14. Recruit
15. Contamination
16. Yearn
17. Hunt
18. Torrential
19. Aftermath
20. Freedom
Connect With Jane Washington
Copyright © 2020 Jane Washington
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Washington, Jane
A Tempest of Shadows
www.janewashington.com
Edited by Hot Tree Editing
Cover design by imguss and Jane Washington
Also By Jane Washington
The Bastan Hollow Saga
Book One: Charming
Book Two: Disobedience
Book Three: Fairest (release date TBC)
Book Four: Prick (release date TBC)
Book Five: Animal (release date TBC)
Standalone Books
I Am Grey
Curse of the Gods Series
Book One: Trickery
Book Two: Persuasion
Book Three: Seduction
Book Four: Strength
Novella: Neutral
Book Five: Pain
Seraph Black Series
Book One: Charcoal Tears
Book Two: Watercolour Smile
Book Three: Lead Heart
Book Four: A Portrait of Pain
Beatrice Harrow Series
Book One: Hereditary
Book Two: The Soulstoy Inheritance
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”
T.S.Eliot
1
Liar
I woke with a horrible, lurching feeling. It clawed at me, whispering to me that my time was running out, that the world was falling away from me. A great mist had descended during the night, drawing me from my bed earlier than usual. As I began my run, the haze lifted, revealing a world caught in stillness between one breath and the next, held in a frozen inhalation. My bare feet slapped against the cobblestone road, mist dampening my shirt. The hem had become too ragged, and I had been forced to cut it away. As I ran, the uneven hem pulled free from my pants, the frigid breeze crawling along my waist. The mismatched patch covering my right knee had fallen off, displaying the usual honeyed tint of my skin as it began to adopt a bluish pallor.
It was unseasonably cold, the mountains in the distance capped by stubborn ice that refused to melt into the spring streams. My feet were numb and stinging, but I pushed on. I ran because my legs itched, because there was something restless and unsettled building inside me. I ran to convince myself that I was in control.
I never deviated from my route. I never stopped to take in the scenery, to watch the birds, or to speak to anyone. I never stopped for anything.
Not until that strange, still day.
My feet slowed and turned, my body becoming autonomous, leading me to the rock retaining wall that stepped down to the banks of Lake Enke. There were a few staggered blocks along the wall for people to use as a staircase, but I ignored those, leaping over the ledge and landing below with a stinging slap against the bank.
I felt compelled to keep moving, my eyes drawn to the lines of fishing wire that pulled taut from the posts hammered into the ground around the lake. In Forsan, the ancient language, they were called vevebre. Lines of fate. They glinted in the morning sun, sharp and alluring. They begged me to walk amongst them, to grasp my destiny in my hands. To reel and twist the wire until my future unspooled in my palms. The lines called to everyone, but few were brave or stupid enough to touch them. They were sacred premonitions spun by the powerful Skjebre people, and neither fate nor those wielding the power of fate were to be tested, questioned, or unmasked. An unknown fate was an unending opportunity; a revealed fate was nothing more than a damning sentence—a gamble with impossible odds.
The shoreline was populated by a sea of pebbles in shades of brown and black, dotted every now and then with translucent white stones. They shifted beneath my weight, causing me to sink with every step. The water was a dark, deep, unbroken blue. It lapped at the pebbles, shifting them gently. Mist covered the entire bank, carrying a scent that grew claws, digging into the base of my throat. Both familiar and unfamiliar, it reminded me of a summer storm. I breathed it deeply. The water lapped at my toes, surprising me with the knowledge that I had moved all the way to the edge of the lake. I stared at the calm surface, thinking of a tale that I had heard often during my youth.
There is a beast in the water,
Talons of lead, death in his eyes.
There is a monster in the mist,
Waiting beneath a century of skies.
There is a girl by the water,
Dress of silver, stars in her eyes,
Singing of a beast called Dragur,
Wading in the shore of demise.
There is death in the water,
Hidden by a century of lies.
There is a beast called Dragur,
Waiting beneath a century of skies.
There is a whisper in the water,
Of one to fall, and one to rise.
“The water calls to you.”
The voice shocked me out of my stupor, and I took several hasty steps back from the water’s edge, spinning around to find the speaker, the movement splashing my ankles. A man stood behind me, a rough, dark-brown scarf looped around his shoulders, forming a cowl over his head and covering the lower half of his face. He wore black linen clothing with leather wraps around his hands, wrists, and over his boots. There was a thick strap angled over his chest—peeking out from beneath the scarf—and an assortment of leather purses, wires, strings, and tool pouches dangling from his belt. At six and a half feet tall and over two hundred pounds, he was unnaturally large, with a leanness of muscle beneath the visible skin of his forearms. If the other locals had been raised by the shore of Lake Enke, then this man had been raised by the vast Sea of Storms, far beyond the mountains, where the ancient giants had once lived.
A Skjebre walked out of the mist on the other side of the bank, crouching beside one of the posts, touching the line attached to it. His mouth moved, but he was too far away for me to hear his words. His face was visible, his hood thrown back. His cloak, which swept against the rocks, was of the finest quality.
I turned my attention back to the giant man with a wince. The rising sun was to his back, his scarf shielding his features from me—and yet, despite having never met him, I knew exactly who he was. People did not sing songs of this man; they preferred to whisper stories of him as they huddled about the fire with their necks prickling and their eyes wary-specked. He was only a figment of a myth, that horrible echo of a dark deal dancing with a choked remittance. He was an unending undoing, waiting for someone stupid enough to pluck at one of the unspooling threads he offered.
Someone stupid like me.
“Weaver.” The word escaped my mouth before I could stop it. I could taste the mist in the word. Sweet. Electric.
“Who seeks me out?” His voice was rough, as though he had just awoken. It scratched out of his throat and all the way into mine.
I swallowed around the discomfort, opening my mouth to answer. He cut me off, motioning to my clothing. “You clearly do not have the means to make a deal with me.”
He was right. My clothing was that of a steward, not a sectorian. I belonged to the lower class of people in Fyrio. The people without magic. I nodded in answer, not daring to speak another word. I hadn’t called to him or sought out his cottage hidden within the thatch of towering sequoia trees by the lake. He had no reason to believe that I had deliberately disturbed his work, and he would be forced to let me on my way. And yet, he stared.
He waited.
I could just make out his eyes—as deep blue and unbroken as the water behind me. His gaze passed right through me, igniting a healthy fear within my chest. That fear grew roots, shooting down my stomach, itching along my legs and sprouting through my feet to plant me firmly to the spot. I wasn’t permitted to stand before a man as powerful and important as the Weaver without very good reason … but there I was. Drawn to the bank, cajoled by the song of the water, taken prisoner by the thick dawn mist. I wanted to leave. My feet refused to budge. The Weaver was an impossible sight, and I couldn’t look away. I had never seen him at the markets, or by the bank of Lake Enke beneath the warm afternoon sun as the children raced along the rocks.
Deep in the darkness of night was when he emerged, along with the other chosen within his sector. They spun the vevebre, casting those lines of fate into the water. By midday, they were all gone, the Skjebre and the vevebre both. Hundreds of fates discarded to the ocean, released to the powers of chance, or reeled into precious, inescapable premonitions. I had wondered—as had most of us—if any of the premonitions concerned me, but I would never have sought out the Weaver to discover my fate. A deal with a sectorian of any kind was bound to cost more than I could afford, but a deal with the Weaver would place me in an unforgivable lifelong debt.
He was rarely called upon by the stewards or sectorians—even the richest of them—but more often by the King of Fyrio, his governors, or the small council members of Hearthenge. It was said that the King was the only person left in the kingdom to remain in debt to the man. The price was too high for the rest of us. All the stewards bearing his mark had died within a year of obtaining it, the burden of their debt crushing them into their graves. The sectorians were said to last longer—sometimes years—but never as long as the King of Fyrio.
I grew rigid with cold as his eyes drifted from my face to my toes, an icy vapour breathing onto every inch under examination. He noted the rip in the knee of my pants. The loose, windswept tendrils of hair about my face. My bare feet. The dirt on my toes. The burn on my neck, just above the collar of my shirt. The gooseflesh on my arms. That strange, icy gaze touched every part of me and then passed clean through me. Once his assessment was complete, he released a sound. Gravelly, utterly without inflection. It gave away nothing, and yet it seemed to drip with dissatisfaction all the same.
He took a step closer, and I matched it with a quick step backwards, the icy fear inside me quickly melting away to reveal a deeper, more urgent terror.
I had always possessed a stubborn, bullheaded kind of bravery, but this was not a man to be messed with. If fate was a force best left alone, then the Weaver of Fate was a force to expel considerable effort to flee from. At all costs.
“Ex-Excuse me, I was just passing by,” I forced out the words as I finally came to my wits, scurrying to the side. He followed me with his eyes but made no move to stop me, and that was all the opening I needed.
I turned and ran, the water singing out to me as I passed, woefully calling me back. I ignored it, my attention straining so fiercely for any sound of pursuit that I missed the length of fishing wire before me. It caught around my ankle as my other leg slammed into the wooden post that it had been secured to. In a matter of seconds, I was on my knees, the dislodged post in my hands, utter disbelief deflating my shoulders, making my body heavy as I sank into the damp pebbles. The line tugged gently against my grip as the bobbing tide toyed with me. The Weaver’s shadow fell across my back. He knelt behind me, blocking out the rising sun. The smell of the mist clung to him.
“You have chosen your fate, Tempest.” His voice carried through me with so much gravelly force that I felt immediately ill, and the fishing wire began to shake before my eyes.
He had given me a Fated name. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Fated names—while sounding like normal Fyrian words—actually carried the sound of an Aethen word. The language of power. They sounded different to other words, and carried the essence of their meaning in their cadence. When the Weaver spoke the word Tempest, it sounded like violence and death, a violent storm to end storms.
“No.” My voice was strong. Far stronger than I felt. “It was a mistake. I tripped. I didn’t ask for this. Release me from this deal, and you’ll never see me again. By the king of this world and the next, I swear it. I’ll disappear.”
“It is done, and it cannot be undone,” he countered plainly, reaching around me to grasp the wire.
His hand was twice the size of mine. A little darker, covered in scars and callouses from years of casting the vevebre. How many years, I didn’t know. He didn’t have the posture or voice of an old man, though the tales of his deeds seemed to go back—impossibly—for hundreds of years. It was a testament to his great power.
“Stop.” I tried to stand, but I was frozen again. I willed my arm to move and watched as the muscle jumped beneath my skin. I was trying to move, but some unnatural force was preventing me.
Of all the five sectors dividing up the great sectorians, there wasn’t a single one that could have frozen a person to the spot. Not the fate magic of the Skjebre, the soul magic of the Sjel, the war magic of the Vold, the mind magic of the Sinn, nor the spirit magic of the Eloi. There wasn’t a single person—magical or otherwise—who should have been able to seize my body without even an uttered incantation.
The Weaver wrapped the wire around his hand again and again, winding it in as the sun clawed over his shoulder, shedding a bare beam of light onto the back of his hand. He crouched further over me, dousing me in mist and ice, his voice sounding different, as though the voices of many men spoke through his mouth.
“Tempest-born and tempest-dashed, be wary of the forces of chaos that brought you into this world, as they would see you leave it the same way. Bathed in blood and screaming. Look to the deep waters for your fate, for your soul is not your own.”
“Stop.” I threw all my weight into the word and it exploded out of me with a force that shook through us both. “I didn’t ask for it, and I won’t hear it!”
The ring around my finger hummed. It was something that happened whenever my slumbering magic attempted to surface—a magic that I wasn’t supposed to have. The ring worked as a barrier, dousing both my emotions and that little spark of magical energy in cold water, sending it all beneath a heavy blanket. For seven years, it had held strong, but now the silver metal was darkening and burning against my skin. The enchantment that froze my body in place faltered before dissolving away completely, overpowered by the surge of energy that escaped from somewhere deep inside me. I could move again. My magic had broken free.
The Weaver’s cold form slipped away, but I didn’t pause to find out why. The post tumbled from my hands and I surged to my feet without hesitation, dodging posts and striving for the road that would take me home.
To my real fate.
The mist thickened and swelled, trying to envelop me, filling my lungs to overflowing as pain shot through my chest, stars swimming before my eyes. Somehow, that thick haze was becoming a living thing, pleading me with vaporous breath, wrapping me in a smothering embrace, begging me not to flee. My ring burned again and this time I definitely felt my magic answering, leaking out from imagined cracks in the smooth metal, spreading over my skin
and bringing clarity back to my vision, allowing me to cut through the fog.
I ran to the stepping stones and made it to the top of the wall without looking back, energy tickling through me and leaking into my muscles. My magic was injecting speed into my step, enhanced focus to my vision, determination to my desperation. The ring was burning painfully hot.
I would get away … because my blood willed it. My birth demanded it. In that moment, it didn’t matter that there would be consequences to my actions. The story that had been hammered into my mind for seven years began to chip away, the words that had easily sprung to my lips so many times before flaking to the back of my mind, drifting about like ashes in the breeze.
I am a steward. I live to serve the great sectorians. I was born without magic. I am unworthy.
None of it was true.
The magic of war ran through my veins, unable to part from me and me from it. It belonged to me just as the magic of fate belonged to the Weaver.
I was not a steward.
I was violence, strength, and power. I belonged to the unbroken sector. The warriors of this world and the next.
I wasn’t unworthy.
I was war.
I was a …
“Vold.”
The word, spoken in the Weaver’s voice, followed me all the way home. It was the word I longed to hear every night in the darkness, an acknowledgment I yearned for every morning as the sun rose … and I had finally heard it as a dogged condemnation, nipping at my heels as I fled from my fate.