It felt like me.
I pressed the pen to Asper’s skin, a word floating soundlessly to my lips.
Skayld.
It was me, but not me. The essence of who I was—an empty, velvet night; fragile and unbroken, no matter how many dark deeds were carried out in the shadows of my soul. It was an Aethen word. One of those words of power that were readable as a whole but seemed to slip from the mind like smoke, ungraspable.
Except this word, I understood.
I watched as ink seemed to leak from the pen, strangely silver in colour. It dipped beneath his skin and he pulled his arm away in shock, but the colour only settled into shape, soft and subtle against his skin. He didn’t look frightened. There was an expression of uncertain wonder on his face, his grey eyes wide.
He passed his thumb over the mark, and it rippled, like sunlight hitting silver, before settling back into his skin. I grabbed his arm, dropping my pen. The mark was a crescent moon, perfectly round, perfectly sharp. It didn’t feel evil or harmful, but the truth was … I had no idea what I had done.
I looked back to Calder, who was staring at the mark. His eyes switched to me, narrowing, emotion burning somewhere deep inside him, only an echo of feeling winking out at me.
“You gifted him a favour of some kind, I think.” Calder’s hand slipped to mine, his finger touching my ring. “All sectorians can place their marks, though they hardly mean anything if that individual’s power is not exceptional. You’ve marked him, like the Weaver marked you, but reversed. The marks are a binding, a promise. You’ve not taken a promise from him, but given him one instead.”
Asper’s eyes flashed to mine. “Thank you, Tempest.” He covered the mark tightly, as though to protect it, and the gratitude all over his face had me prickling in discomfort.
I couldn’t undo all the wrong done by the Spider.
I hoped he realised that.
Calder didn’t waste a second longer. As soon as Asper turned away, he pushed the ring in a circle around my finger, his weight falling into my back, his voice pained gravel in my ears.
“Home.”
The floor collapsed beneath us, and I gripped Calder’s arms as both of them wrapped weakly around me. The rock of the canyon cracked open with a deafening sound, and we fell down toward the waves of the ocean below, but even those parted, and then we were falling through darkness, a strange force ripping us apart. I held onto Calder with all my strength, and we dropped with a crash onto a carpeted surface, his back slamming into the ground, mine into his front. I rolled off him, but he didn’t move. I found my knees and leaned over him, my dread increasing. His gaze was unfocussed, his golden eye a slitted haze. I felt a brush at my cheek and turned to see a flash of sun-darkened skin as his hand wrapped around the back of my head, drawing me closer as if trying to see me clearly.
“Ven?” he rasped out, his voice full of pain.
Something tugged in my stomach, and I felt a rush of dizziness as his attention slitted further. I couldn’t answer him, so I touched his cheek hesitantly, lightly, my skin barely brushing his. He closed his eyes, sucking in a deep breath. A quick glance around us told me that we were inside the tower of Hearthenge—the henge was visible outside the window. The room was sparsely furnished, the floor covered in thick carpet, the bed pushed beneath the largest window. An oversized dresser and an armoire leaned against each other, a rack of knives mounted onto the wall opposite the bed. They weren’t decoration—the blades were well cared for, the handles showing signs of wear. A freshly laundered Sentinel’s cloak was folded upon a sturdy chair by the bed, the golden eagle hood resting on top. The windows were closed; a chill had settled into the space, the hearth unstirred. The place had been empty for days.
I looked back to his face and found that he had opened his eyes again and was examining me as I had been examining his room. A brief flash of awareness had bled back into him, and the hand against the back of my head flexed.
“When Alina died, part of me died with her.” The words were roughly spoken, a vein of something dark riding his voice. Disgust or loathing, but at who, I wasn’t sure. “I became merciless, bloodthirsty. I earned my Fated name because I threw away my life. I lived from battle to skirmish to expedition, endlessly. I lived to kill, because I felt dead inside.”
His fingers loosened, shifting back but not falling away completely, his eyes roving over my face distractedly.
“And then I realised … Alina might have died, but I had been given another chance. A chance at something that had never been possible before.” His grip cradled my skull again, his eyes flashing, those dark emotions swimming back to the surface.
“My existence had been promised to Alina—I would live to be her protector, the brother to her soul, the foundation to her power. We would live for each other, our only family … but that meant we would never find love.” He spat out the word, his fingers now too tight in my hair. “I would never grow old and find a wife. I would never make a family of my own. There would be nobody standing by our graves but each other. Eternal brother and sister, sworn to die and live for each other, with no room for anything but the battle between good and evil that dogged our every step.”
I stared down at him, my body uncomfortably warm, thoughts warring for attention inside my head. I found myself peering at him closer, trying to gauge an age from his appearance. If he had been Alina’s age, and Alina had died on the day of her kongelig ceremony seven years ago … then he was seven years older than me. He was twenty-four. He had lived far too much in such a short amount of time.
“I had another chance,” he whispered, and I was convinced that I was somehow torturing him with my wordless stare. “I might have lost her but I could have had those things again. I finally allowed myself to hope.”
My fingers brushed against his cheek again, and his free hand shot up, gripping my wrist, holding it back.
“And now we are bound,” he growled out, and I still couldn’t figure out if his disgust was for himself or for me. “But you are not my sister, and I am not your brother. You’re too close for me to love in any way, too close for me to hate, too yo—” He snapped his lips shut with a snarl, shifting me almost gently away from him as he struggled unsteadily to his feet, staggering toward the bed. He fell heavily into it, too large for the frame, and I sat on the floor, my mind reeling.
Too young? I had been sure that he was about to say that, but too young for what? I was seventeen, less than a month from my kongelig ceremony, which meant a great deal to our people. The word was Forsan, meaning royal one. Stewards and sectorians alike were born as litens, a Forsan word that translated into spring twig. When the stewards and sectorians came of age, it was believed that their souls separated from this world and became aligned to the next. The stewards remained stewards, but the sectorians became kongeligs, as they would rule in the afterworld just as they did in this world.
I stood cautiously, approaching the bed. Calder had completely passed out, the tortured expression easing from his hard features. I watched him sleep for a moment, wondering why the self-hatred building up inside me couldn’t quite pierce my heart. I felt wretched for him—for this man who had given up everything, lost everything, and allowed himself hope only to be forced to give it all up again. My heart bled for him, but somewhere deep inside, I was bleeding for myself, too. Because I was realising what he had already known.
I would never be permitted to find love.
I would never have a family of my own.
I was locked into a battle against the world’s greatest evil, my future utterly forfeit.
Calder had dared to hope, but I hadn’t even thought of the possibilities. I had thought of pleasing my mother. I had dreamed of the Vold, had fantasised about wearing the cloak of the Sentinels. But I had never dared to hope. I had never acknowledged what had been torn from me until that very moment.
For the second time that day, I felt something inside me snap. It was less violent than the first time, more of
a gentle breaking apart, a slow funeral for the pieces of me that I had never known as they fell about the floor. I allowed myself a moment to mourn before straightening my shoulders and forcing myself into action, a dull throb of anger fuelling my movements.
I grabbed the medical pouch from Calder’s belt, emptying it onto the bed. I was by no means a medicine woman, but I did my best to wipe the blood away and dress his wound. It looked like it needed closing, but I had no idea how to do that, so I wrapped it in layers of gauze held in place with a bandage. The Vold didn’t exactly heal themselves, but some of the more powerful could survive wounds easier. Blades were naturally repelled from their main arteries, while spears and arrows were knocked off course just before penetration. It made sense that Calder had easily disregarded the wound for so long but offering his life force to another would have been a step too far combined with the blood loss. I scribbled a note for him and then sat in the centre of his room, my legs crossed, my eyes closed. I focussed on my breathing for several moments, banishing all thought from my head. The little bell was fished from my pocket and placed on my palm as I opened my eyes again, the bronze surface dulling as the sun sank lower into the sky, cold settling deeper into Calder’s rooms.
I thought about the word the Inquisitor had given me. Pratek. I rolled it around on my tongue, trying to separate the letters one by one, to spell it out. As much as I tried, the exact formation of the word skittered away from me, the letters escaping my grasp as though repelled from my mind. I stopped trying to form the word, and started simply repeating it, assigning different meanings to it.
Just as exhaustion was setting in, the word finally unravelled on my tongue, the meaning whispering into my mind. Pratek wasn’t just a word, it was a question, and it required an answer. It was the invitation to conversation, the incite to protest, the plea for reciprocation.
Feeling elated, I gripped the bell and asked it pratek, and it hummed into my palm, ringing with stolen sound that flocked back to my throat, tasting of hot metal as it filled my mouth. I was elated, devastated, confused, frustrated, terrified. I swallowed a hundred of my screams, choked on another hundred sobs, and felt the force of so many unuttered words of power. I pushed it all down, shoving my pack off my shoulders, stuffing the bell inside it, and turning the ring once around my finger.
“The Citadel,” I croaked.
This time, I was ready. When the carpet was pulled through the collapsing floor, I covered my head with my arms and braced my legs for the inevitable landing. I fell hard all the same, rolling several times across the cobbled marketplace to land with an uncomfortable thump against a market stall piled high with apples and pears. Several of them rolled onto me, and I hastened to gather them up while the steward man behind the stall accepted them back with a frown and a wary glance to a robed sectorian standing behind the stall—evidently the stall’s owner.
I apologised quietly, my voice hoarse and faint. He waved me off quickly while the sectorian still had his back turned, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he would have done if he had looked closely enough to see my mor-svjake or if gossip of my deeds had reached the sectorians as it had reached the stewards. I climbed the passages of the Citadel to the Inquisitor’s specimen room, but the Sentinels guarding the door stiffly informed me that the Inquisitor was not there and refused to open the doors.
“Where do I find him?” I rasped, my attention on the closest guard, who watched me with suspicious eyes.
The sectorians may not have been concerned with the deaths of a few stewards, but the Sentinels all seemed to know exactly who I was. A secret Vold discovered in hiding? One of their captains—a Fated one, at that—sent to guard me? The man cast his eyes between each of the marks marring my skin.
“I do not track the whereabouts of the Inquisitor,” he finally said.
I stepped away and descended down a level, where I was able to tuck myself into an empty alcove beside a staircase. Calder had said that it wasn’t wise to tamper with magical objects, but I didn’t have any other choice. I turned the ring once around my finger, picturing the Inquisitor’s face in my mind as I spoke his true name.
“Fjor.”
The world dropped away from me, spitting me through darkness to land with a sudden, jarring impact against a polished granite floor. I tried to maintain my footing this time, but only ended up lurching forward and colliding with something large and hard. Rough hands wrapped around my arms, and I stared down at them, taking in the multitude of scars, burns, and markings that covered the skin. The closer I looked, the more I was able to decipher some of the shapes—they were the same as the carvings that decorated the sides of the Scholar’s head.
“You’ve made your way back to me,” a soft voice noted, sounding the way one did when congratulating a pet for something particularly clever. Not the Scholar, but the Inquisitor.
I looked up as he set me back on my feet, wary of the deep black of his eyes. I nodded, forgetting for a moment that I could speak, before casting my attention around the space. The room was vast, almost cavernous, like the specimen room from earlier, but we were not in the Citadel anymore. We were nestled high atop Sectorian Hill, the winding paths and forests of the mountain stepping down below the vantage of the huge windows on one side of the room. At the very bottom of the hill lay Lake Enke. The mists were creeping in with the dusk, shadowed specks moving along the shore: the Skjebre, weaving the vevebre. I shuddered, rubbing at the line of spiders crawling around my forearm, and the Inquisitor’s attention snapped immediately to the movement.
“And who has laid claim to you now, Tempest?” His hands slid down, his right hand switching to my left arm as he pulled it up, a long, scarred finger tracing the line of spiders.
“Interesting,” he mused, as though he knew exactly to whom the mark belonged. His eyes flashed to mine before darting over my shoulder. They narrowed, searching the room behind me. “Where is your shadow?”
For just a moment, I had thought that he was referring to the shadow inside me, but then I realised that he was looking for Calder.
“I brought myself here,” I answered, and his entire being seemed to gather size, pulling up to a greater height.
He dropped my arm but pinched my chin, the darkness of his eyes wrapping around me as he tilted my face up. It was a cold, uncomfortable feeling.
“You were able to use a wordless incantation on the bell?” he asked sharply, his fingers pinching harder.
“Obviously,” I bit out.
He stared at me, and I realised that the bitterness, the vicious undertone in my voice had shocked him. Did he think I was happy about my servitude? My life had been spared, that was true … but despite the guilt that ripped at me in the secret place of my heart that I steadfastly refused to visit, I still believed that I hadn’t meant to kill anyone. I had been defiled, attacked, and my magic had exploded without my meaning it to.
I hadn’t been given the chance to defend myself.
As far as I knew, the Weaver had orchestrated the entire accident to force me into a situation where I would be under their complete control. Because they knew what I was.
“Now there’s something I want to know,” I rasped as his eyes grew impossibly darker. “Did the Weaver always know what I was, or did he somehow figure it out the day he saw me on the lake?”
The Inquisitor’s grip remained tight, his eyes unflinching. “What exactly do you think you are, Lavenia?”
The use of my name shocked me, dislodging some of the anger and allowing a thread of fear to wind back in. I swallowed, and he watched my throat for a moment.
“I’m a Fjorn.” I heard the rightness of the statement, but also felt the wrongness of it, a thread of discord humming inside me. “Those old legends are true, and now I have their power, but with me it’s different.”
Not an ounce of shock pierced his expression, though he had grown incredibly still.
“All of this in a day,” he mused quietly, releasing my chin and stepping a
way. “You must have found your Blodsjel; you must have seen the memories of the past Fjorn.”
The comment was far too casual, his movements too measured as he stepped up to a dining table, pulling out a long-backed chair in ivory wood, motioning for me to sit.
“No,” I lied. “I don’t think I have one. I told you, it’s different with me.” I sat and watched as he took the seat at the very opposite end of the sprawling table.
He reached for a bell before him, and at the second chime, a door at the other end of the room opened, a tall steward man entering. He had sloping blue eyes, black hair tied neatly behind his head, and broad shoulders—but he was no sectorian. His skin was rough from sun damage, the material of his shirt and pants second-grade. He didn’t glance at me once but stopped beside the Inquisitor, bowing slightly, not a word uttered.
“Bring my dinner, Jarl.” The Inquisitor’s voice was not unkind, but there seemed something inhuman in the cold dark of his eyes.
Jarl’s turn toward the door was a snap of movement, his silent exit swift and efficient. The Inquisitor settled back, those dark specks of metal above his left brow glinting at me, his wide shoulders spilling past the edges of the chair. He stared, considering me at leisure. I had stormed in with such bravery, brimming with questions, but had somehow been tricked into fearful silence again. I pulled my own shoulders back, imagining that they weren’t minuscule compared to his.
“When did he know?” I asked, forcing my voice to carry weight. “Was it that day, by the lake?”
“It was,” the Inquisitor confirmed, his lips twitching briefly. I wasn’t sure if he was amused with me or about to snarl.
“He knew as soon as he saw me?” I tried to keep the wonder away from my voice, but I heard it anyway. Their power was simply extraordinary.
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