“He knew of your existence, of course, but as hard as we searched, we couldn’t find you. Not until you stumbled onto the lake that day.”
“You and the other masters?”
He leaned forward, his eyes flashing, a hint of animosity creeping into the room. “Only the most powerful in this world would have felt the shift in power the day your magic broke free seven years ago. Only the most powerful in this world would have known what you were, would have thought to seek you out. Do not insult us, girl.”
“So you and the other masters then,” I confirmed, pretending to be unaffected by the flash of fury in his gaze. “And you sought me out because you want to overthrow the king of Ledenaether? Because I’m your chance at greater power? That’s why the Scholar insisted I would be married soon.”
The door opened again, Jarl returning with a tray in hand. He began to lay out the Inquisitor’s dinner setting while we stared at each other from across the table.
“Take the girl to the cellar,” the Inquisitor instructed him. “She will sleep there the night and will be permitted to eat whatever I do not finish.”
Jarl’s step snapped toward me without hesitation, but I rose before he could drag me out of the chair. I followed him to the door, pausing at the Inquisitor’s side, resting a hand against the table, bending my face to his, my voice lowering to a whisper.
“You said that the Scholar didn’t know what to do with me, but it’s you who has no idea. If you treat me this way, I will never choose you.”
He smiled, the flash of teeth disarming, strikingly genuine, sharply dangerous. His fingers flicked to my collar, slipping down to press sharply against my chest. The pressure was unnervingly exact, tight against the exact spot where my heart pitter-patted frightfully against my rib cage, deceiving my steadfast expression.
“I am the master of spirit, the most powerful Eloi alive.” His fingers pressed harder, bruising, burrowing his magic through my skin, where it whispered and crept around the crevices of my ribcage, rattling my insides until I felt like nothing more than bone stacked on bone, easily toppled, totally exposed to long fingers plucking me apart. “I don’t need to bribe you or manipulate you. You’ll choose me because nobody else can teach you about your power.”
I stepped back, and once I was safely out of reach of his unsettling magic, I allowed my eyes to shutter, my expression to fall blank. It finally made sense—how disturbed he had seemed that I had used the unspoken incantation, that I had figured it out on my own. It meant that I might not need him, and his strategy depended entirely on exactly that.
“Don’t be so sure,” I warned, spinning for the door.
Jarl waited on the other side, his blue eyes dancing briefly over my shoulder before he led me down a wide, carpeted hallway lit with bronze sculptures dropping from the ceiling, twisted branches holding a multitude of candles. He deposited me in a cold cellar, dropping a blanket onto my lap before retreating again, all without a word. I fiddled with the ring on my finger, the return of my voice somehow making me feel as though the world had opened back up to me, endless options now spreading at my feet. But that wasn’t entirely true. I was still a prisoner, though I had the illusion of freedom. This night, the Inquisitor was my master, and he had given me direct instructions.
I had yet to defy their orders, so I wasn’t sure what punishment might await me when I did, but I wasn’t in a rush to find out. It was a possibility that they would take away the one decency they had afforded me, my only shield against the hungry eyes of vengeance that shone out at me when I walked through the canyon.
They could take away my protection.
They could take away Calder.
12
Wings
I fell into a fretful sleep, jolting upright at the sound of the cellar door unlocking. A pair of golden armoured boots stepped into view, a large form momentarily darkening the lantern-lit walkway beyond. The door closed again, the lock falling back into place.
“I have to teach you how to stitch a wound,” Calder muttered. “You did a terrible job.”
I heard the swoosh of fabric as he removed his cloak, laying it on the ground beside me. He sat, his back against the wall, his forearms stretched over his knees. As my eyes adjusted, I could see the line of his neck as he stretched his head back, his eyes closing.
“You should have rested more,” I said.
He went still, his eyes flashing open. “You can speak.” He turned slowly, his golden eye searching for my face in the dark. “You used an unspoken incantation.”
“How did you know to come here?” I asked, instead of answering.
“You have enough sense in you to return to the Inquisitor instead of defecting on your duty. This is where he lives. It was an easy guess to make.”
He shifted, lowering down the wall until his shoulder was planted against the ground, his hand rising to my face. I felt a brush against my lips, the roughened pad of his thumb, before he drew his hand away. I couldn’t tell in the dark, but it seemed from his inhalation that he might be about to say something, but instead he bent his arm behind his head, returning his stare to the ceiling. I had been so desperate to actually talk to him, but the words were now slow to reach my lips. It was easier when I looked away from him, resting my head back down again on the blanket. I sucked in a deep breath and began with the most important thing.
“You said that Alina died on the day of her kongelig ceremony?”
He made a sound in answer, which sounded like a grunted yes.
“We shared a birthday,” I told him. “I turned ten the day my power exploded in the schoolyard. The day she died. Do you think that means something?”
“The Fjorn and the Blodsjel are always born on the same day. Your Blodsjel should have been born on the same day as you. It might mean something, but it doesn’t seem significant. What does seem important is that your power chose that day to surface. Had there been any bursts of energy before that?”
“No.”
“Anything at all?”
“Nothing but the curse.”
He hummed, a gravelly undertone to the sound. “The stewards were gossiping about a curse the day I discovered you.”
“My father was a sectorian, so an Eloi was called to my mother’s birthing bed to look inside me for any sign of magic, to see if I had an affinity for any of the sectors. He looked inside me and said ‘I do not sense her heart. Where it should be, there is only a storm. This child is doomed to death, and to share death with those closest to her.’”
“Did you feel cursed?”
“I didn’t feel anything at all. Until that day.”
“I think the Fjorn power might have transferred from Alina to you, and in a way … I was also transferred to you. It’s the only answer I can come up with, though it makes no sense at all.”
“But it’s not Alina’s power, not really. You said that by the time the Fjorn power reached her, it was weak, only a sample of each of the sectors, barely strong enough to specialise in one of them.”
“And already you have performed magic equalling some of the most powerful of each of the sectors—though you’ve almost killed yourself doing it, and you do it with the grace and self-control of a clumsy animal. You pulled me into your mind. You’ve used wordless incantations more than once—with the Vold magic, with the Eloi magic. Your power is as potent as that of the first Fjorn.”
“But how do you know that? How is the legend of the Fjorn known at all? I had never heard of it until you told me.”
“The stewards know the tale, they just know it in a different way. Does the story really not sound familiar to you at all?”
I frowned, thinking over the tales we had shared in the schoolyard, the stories told over the fire every time the celestial feast spilled to the edges of Breakwater Canyon. The Tale of Three Worlds, had been the most common, the most chilling, as it was the tale that introduced most children to the concept of Ledenaether. I closed my eyes, the words summoned easily to my l
ips, my gut aching with empty familiarity as I repeated the tale.
“There were once three worlds, linked by magic. Foraether, Forsjaether, and Ledenaether. Together, the worlds completed the great cycle of life. It all began in Foraether, the foreworld, the world of the living, and it all ended in Ledenaether, the afterworld, the world of the dead. The midworld, Forsjaether, was a place of echoes and mirrors, ghosts and shadows…” I faltered, the exact wording escaping me for a moment. Though the tale was familiar, I had never retold it in my own voice.
“Torn between the light of the foreworld and the darkness of the afterworld,” Calder picked up the story, “Forsjaether gave birth to three silver spectres, sending them to Foraether where they might protect all the worlds from falling out of balance. The first silver spectre was born on the dying gasp of Foraether. She saw that it was her fate to fight back the darkness of Ledenaether. She fought until she could fight no more, and then she cast one last trick upon the forces of darkness, casting herself up the sky, where her power would forever hold the darkness at bay until the rising of the sun.”
I gazed up at the stone ceiling in the dark, taking over the tale again. “When Foraether was again gasping for help, the second silver spectre appeared, and looked up to the night sky, seeing a crescent of light where the first spectre had fled to. She knew her duty, and fought until she could fight no more, and then just like the first, she cast one last trick upon the forces of evil, sending her power up to the sky where the crescent moon grew larger. A light even stronger than the first to ward off the darkness until the rising of the sun.
“The third silver spectre saw the moon in the sky and knew that they had failed in their battles. She sacrificed her power immediately, filling the moon with her essence so that they might each live on after their failure, lighting the way from dawn to dusk. Eternal guardians against the dark forces of the afterworld.”
“Alina loved that story.” Calder’s voice was faint. “She liked it better than the sectorians’ version, which told of three fated women and their three fated Blodsjel, all destined to battle the king of Ledenaether. And the world … destined to collapse if they failed.”
“I like the steward version better too.” I twisted onto my side, studying the side of his profile. “The masters know what I am.”
“Clearly.”
“I think they fought over my sentence because they want to use me to overthrow the king of Ledenaether.”
“It seems the most obvious explanation,” he agreed mildly.
“I don’t think I can overthrow the king of Ledenaether.” The last few words were hissed out between my teeth, annoyance burning within me at the lack of expression on Calder’s face.
His lips twitched, though he didn’t truly look that amused. “If the masters believe him to be true … his existence is more real than I ever truly believed. We always knew that we were fighting off something horrible. As Alina neared her kongelig ceremony, terrible things began to happen, just as they’re happening to you now. She was fighting off some evil force at every turn, though she couldn’t see it as you can. She just knew it was there, attacking her, stalking her. She could feel it invading her mind, poisoning her blood. She knew that if it took her, it would take the rest of the world. When she died, I expected people to start dropping like flies, but it didn’t happen. Nothing happened, not until you reached the same age as Alina was when things started happening to her. I counted the days—you were exactly a month away from your kongelig ceremony when that shadow burst out of your chest.”
“And now we’re three weeks away,” I concluded.
“Each of the Fjorn seemed to be around the same age as Alina when they died,” Calder cautioned. “But the darkness isn’t just attacking you this time, it’s attacking everyone. The king of Ledenaether is likely real, but our battle is here and now.”
“The darkness is attacking everyone around me,” I muttered. “It broke out where I was living, in Breakwater Canyon, and then it was in one of the vials of medicine that I held.”
“It was inside the Spider for years—she was never near you.”
“It was inside her for years after she became obsessed with her predictions about me. The correlation is still there.”
He hummed that gravelly sound in reply again, and something flipped in my chest. A nervous rush of excitement that I could finally discuss these things with someone. Someone that, inexplicably, I trusted. I didn’t trust him in the way people trusted one another after years of proving their loyalty and honesty and steadfastness. I trusted him in my own dark way. I trusted him because I could feel the impossibility of his betrayal with everything inside me. I trusted that for as long as I was bound to him, he would be forced to fight on my side.
I trusted him because I needed to.
We talked in low voices until I fell into an exhausted sleep, only to be awoken by the loud sound of heavy boots thumping against the cellar floor by my head. My eyes snapped open, and I scrambled from beneath the heavy weight of a cloak—Calder’s cloak—only to find that he hadn’t been sleeping beside me. He was standing by the cellar door, tossing down his gloves and revealing the delicate golden band of my ring, crooked onto the end of his pinky finger. He held it out to me, and I took it back wordlessly, fitting it onto my second finger, avoiding the position of promise on my middle finger, where the Inquisitor had placed it.
“Where did you go?” I asked him as I spotted a tray on the inside of the door. The leftovers from the Inquisitor’s dinner comprised half a cup of wine and a bite of bread.
Calder caught me staring at the tray. “I had to go back to the tower; the garrisons are in chaos. My second-in-command, Malthe, is in open revolt because I handed my duties down to Ingrid, who is third-in-command.”
I knew enough about the Sentinels to know that the only people who had rank and command were the Companies, who organised groupings of garrisons across Fyrio. Each city, or section of land, was assigned a garrison tower and a garrison to populate it. There was one tucked into the forest by the gates of Breakwater Canyon, another at the base of Sectorian Hill, disguised in a pocket of towering sequoia trees, and another lying inside the beating heart of Hearthenge. The others I didn’t know the locations of, but I knew that they existed.
The Company in our area was comprised of a captain and three Sentinels, his second, third, and fourth in command. Together they governed the garrisons from the ocean flowing into Lake Enke to the very edges of the Wildwood beneath the Wailing Crag.
The Captain might have been his Fated name, but he was also quite literally the most important-ranking captain this side of Fyrio. To have achieved such a thing at his age was astounding, and it made his Fated name seem even more fitting.
He dropped my pack onto the ground, pulling out two paper-wrapped packages from within and handing one to me. Inside was a hunk of buttered bread, a slab of ham, and a generous wedge of cheese, beside another, smaller wrapped package. I inhaled the food as I uncovered the second package, my stomach growling even as I swallowed. I groaned as the smell of powdered sugar hit me, the little jarkrem cake falling into my palm. The jarkrem was a traditional Fyrian breakfast delicacy, often enjoyed by the sectorian women over flower-scented tea. The small hearth cakes were made with a sweetened oatmeal batter, hollowed in the centre and filled with clotted cream and fresh, minced strawberries. I had tried to recreate them, once, with coarse flour and goat’s milk fermented in sugar, but had failed miserably.
“Never had one?” Calder guessed, eyeing me quietly.
“Never,” I said, staring at the treat. “Thanks.”
He almost smiled. “Eat it quickly; we need to leave. Who are you serving today?”
“The Warmaster, then the Weaver, then the King.”
“I should have brought more food,” he muttered. “You’re going to need it.”
“Today can’t be worse than yesterday.”
“You don’t know the Warmaster. We’ll likely waste most of the day j
ust trying to find him, and then you’ll be punished for not arriving with the sunrise.”
I shook my head, holding up the ring as I bit into the jarkrem, a wonderful burst of flavour dissolving onto my tongue.
“It can take us to a person, not just a place,” I said, after swallowing my bite, wriggling my finger at him.
“Do you know what could have happened if you had tried something that the ring couldn’t do?” he asked, not at all impressed, his paper food wrapping crinkling as his hands fisted.
I shook my head, still stuffing the cake into my mouth.
“Magical objects are alive. They need to be fed.” His words echoed those of the Dealer, forcing the food to stick, thick and tasteless in my mouth. “This ring might have enough of the Inquisitor’s magic to last it years, but if you ask it to do something against its nature, it will demand an extra price, and the price demanded by an object will always be worse than one demanded by a person. Magical objects are products of the Eloi magic, first and foremost—spirit is their currency. It could steal your very essence, some part of you that you didn’t even realise could be separated from you. It’s worse than losing a limb. Sometimes, worse than losing your life.”
I touched the translucent bracelet around my wrist, feeling that same essence brush the edges of my mind, as though coming out to greet me. It was right there, beside me, attached to me … but it would never again be inside me. It was forever severed from me.
“My innocence,” I explained as Calder’s eyes drifted down to witness my fidgeting.
There was no pity in the sharp reflection of his blue eye, only grim understanding. He bent to dig through my pack, extracting one of the packages that the King had left for me, a section of leather escaping the wrapping.
“You’re going to want the extra protection,” he said, tossing the package at my feet and turning his back, his arms crossed as he stared at the cellar door.
A Tempest of Shadows Page 17