A Tempest of Shadows

by Washington, Jane

  Vidrol led me from the room, but I paused in the doorway, glancing back to Fjor, a question on my lips.

  “The stewards will be relocated to the empty watchtowers on the outskirts of Hearthenge,” he said, without even looking up from what had captured his attention. I followed his eyes to where his thumb brushed against my mark, and that was when I felt it.

  His energy.

  Dark and cold, sinking, probing.

  I left him, wondering what he would find inside my mark, and if what they had traded was worth it.

  Vidrol descended to the lowest level of the keep and turned towards the south-east wing, which had a very different feel to the rest of the castle. There was a strong scent cloying the halls, spiced and sweet, like burning sap. The lanterns had all been dimmed, their light casting shadows over the walls. Heavy curtains draped the windows and doorways, standing vases dotted the windows, small haeke trees contained within, their thorny branches sprouting blood-red flowers.

  “Where are we?” I asked as Vidrol parted one of the curtains, standing back and waiting for me to pass.

  I began to edge past him but stopped, my eyes widening. At least a dozen women were lounged about in barely-there silks and gowns, their long, graceful limbs stretched out over pillows tossed to the tiled floor or else hanging from the edges of velvet couches. There was a fountain bubbling in the centre of the room, though I couldn’t hear it over the rain that washed down the glass-brick wall opposite us. The other two walls were covered in rich hanging tapestries, chandeliers casting a glow over the exquisitely woven designs.

  “No,” I croaked, trying to back away. “You’re not adding me to your harem.”

  He chuckled, his hand shaping to my spine and shoving me forward. “You’ll do whatever I say, girl.”

  “How is this a good use of my time?” I seethed, spinning to face him as he stepped into the room after me, crowding me backwards. I lowered my voice as the women began to stir, realising that we had entered the room. “Why are you keeping me away from Calder? Why are you doing everything you can to keep me from training? Why—”

  He slapped a hand over my mouth.

  Are you serious? I tried to ask, though it came out more like “aruseeus,” a muffled sound of outrage garbled by his grip.

  “Our intentions have been clear for quite some time,” he whispered, ducking down until he was speaking directly against his hand. “We could fight each other to claim you, but there’s no use. You must choose one of us willingly.”

  “This is all about marriage?” I breathed out against his palm as he loosened his grip enough for me to speak.

  “It’s all that matters,” he confirmed.

  “And if I die?” I asked, my heart thumping.

  “Then you die, and our problem is solved.”

  “So why not just kill me now?”

  “All things must happen at the right time. Not a moment sooner.”

  I reeled back, hearing the echo of Ein’s voice. Those were the exact words she had said to me. It also mirrored the Spider’s sentiments.

  “You want me to die at the right time,” I echoed.

  His eyes flicked from my eyes to my lips, which had pulled into a wobbly frown. His hand dropped to my chin, pulling my head up a little higher—possibly so that he didn’t have to bend down as far.

  “The right time. The right way. There are many ideal and not-so-ideal scenarios. In truth, we made a deal with each other that none of us could directly kill you. It was to stop any one of us interfering with your choice of future husband.”

  “But there are many indirect ways to put me in dangerous situations, where I might die as a result of my service to each of you,” I returned.

  “Naturally.” He pinched my chin. “We just can’t decide.” He was dramatically exasperated. “Are you better off dying now? Or should we wait to see who you pick? You should decide soon, so that at least one of us will want to keep you alive.”

  “What about the Darkness?” I hissed. “The battle for Ledenaether? The end of the world as we know it?”

  “The end of the world as you know it,” he corrected, releasing me. His green eyes flicked up, over my head.

  “I have a game,” he announced, loud enough for everyone to hear him. The women stirred, low voices whispering to each other.

  “I have asked this girl to find some way to greatly please me before the end of the day.” He spun me around, his hands on my shoulders. “Whoever manages to stop her—by whatever means necessary—will become my wife.”

  I barely heard him retreat. I was too focused on the women now sharing glances with each other. One of them stepped forward. Another grabbed a candlestick.

  “For the love of the undead king,” I moaned, running for the hallway Vidrol had disappeared down.

  I could hear the pattering of slippered feet behind me, even over the sound of the storm above, and I considered stopping and simply challenging each one of them to a battle, but that didn’t seem wise. It was unlikely that they would each wait their turn, and they were obviously very excited at the prospect of marrying Vidrol. I also couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t burst out laughing and accidentally take a candlestick to the face. I slammed up against the door we had entered through to get into the south-eastern wing, finding it locked. Of course. I planted my back against it, turning to face an actual horde of women brandishing various lightweight furnishings.

  “I really don’t have time for this,” I groaned before quickly twisting the ring and speaking the name of where I needed to go.

  I was spat right into the middle of the raging storm, the lake at my back, a row of debris to my front. The mansions hidden within the embrace of the mountainside vegetation had been battered severely. Roofs were ripped off, windows shattered. Flood paths traced a destructive road down the mountain, bending trees and washing out building materials.

  “Tempest?” a voice called, and a tall form jumped from the broken wall of one of the houses. Raekov. “When the hell did you have time to dress up?”

  I glanced down at my dress with a wince, but I didn’t have to explain myself to Raekov, so I strode past him, my stupid slippers unable to find purchase on the rain-washed mountainside. In the end, I took them off and threw them back to the roadside.

  “Just leave me alone,” I shot over my shoulder, sensing that he had begun to follow me. “If you think I’m getting special treatment or something—”

  “I’m not stupid.” He was already passing me in his more sensible footwear, reaching back to offer me a hand. Confused, I took it, allowing him to pull me up to the house. “One of the recruits saw Bern assign you two houses. Do you need help?”

  I ducked beneath the part of the roof that was still intact. “Why would you want to help? I thought we were competing.”

  “We were. We are.” He sighed, shaking his head. “Look, I think you’ll make a good Sentinel. You fight hard. Harder than the rest of us. I want you to make it in. I don’t necessarily want you to make it in ahead of me, but we’d lose a damn good warrior if you died before the end of the week, and it looks like we need every good warrior we can find at the moment, don’t you think?”

  I nodded, glancing around the ruin, unsure where to start.

  “Ah, right,” he said, skipping back to the broken wall. “I saved some sacks for you. They’re easy to tie to your horse.”

  He raced across the side of the mountain while I began silently picking through the belongings scattered around. He returned, dropping a pile of sacks through the wall.

  “Thanks,” I said hesitantly.

  He nodded. “Good luck—and don’t tell anyone I helped you, alright?” With a small smile, he headed back to his house, and I started shoving things into one of the sacks.

  I picked out clothing, books, a rare child’s toy, and whatever else they might have deemed of “value.” I found no coin or jewellery, and couldn’t help but sigh at the thought that they had already taken such things with them and still
the Company was sparing so many people to help them pick up their remaining personal effects while the stewards were forced to rely on a boy with a favour on his arm and a faint hope that he might be able to organise shelter for them.

  I cleared out both houses, dropping the sacks off back to the Hearthenge barracks where a steward man was coordinating the return of the belongings. I travelled with my ring, which I felt guilty about while the rest of the recruits were forced to make several trips on horseback through the storm. After I finished with both houses, I returned to Raekov, picking up two of his filled sacks without a word and sliding down the mountain to disappear with them out of view, saving him a trip back to the barracks.

  I didn’t particularly care if they wondered how I managed to appear and disappear, but I didn’t want them to expressly know about the ring. I still had the mor-svjake on my face, and if one of them wanted to kill me for the magical artefact, they could do so without legal repercussion.

  After helping Raekov, I did the same for Frey and Bjern, and then the three of us struggled across the mountain, helping whoever we could. It seemed that the shift in Raekov’s behaviour had been echoed in the others. It was one thing to hear Bern announce at the sorting that we would soon be at war, and it was a whole other thing to feel the shift in the world itself. Never in living memory had a storm so severe devastated Fyrio, cleaning out Breakwater Canyon and Sectorian Hill both before losing some of its violence as it spread east.

  When our job was done, we all trudged back to the roadside, everyone loading the last of their haul onto their horses and making their slow, exhausted way back to the Hearthenge. Bjern and Frey both waited behind, standing beside their mounts, watching the others make their way down the road.

  “What’s going on, Lavenia?” Frey asked quietly.

  I looked up to the sky, seeing nothing but roiling, swelling darkness. I couldn’t tell what time of day it was. I hadn’t been able to since the storm began.

  “The world is ending,” I told them. “The plague that started in the canyon isn’t a plague at all. It’s the Darkness. It’s a living thing.” I breathed in deeply, smelling sulphur in the air. “It consumes things, possess people, eats away at the entirety of a thing until its very core is rotten.”

  They followed my eyes up to the sky, and I thought about that old steward tale of the three Fjorn who fled to the moon, sacrificing their power to light the way through the night and hold the darkness at bay. The storm blocked out sun and moon both.

  “The plague was only the first sign,” I said. “I think the storm is the second. I think the world is sick, and it’s weeping. It can’t hold off any longer.”

  “What do we do?” Bjern asked immediately as Frey grew silent.

  “Honestly?” I looked back to them. “I don’t know. I need to get past the great masters first, and the only way I can do that is by winning the Legionnaire battle.”

  “Get past them?” Frey asked, her eyes becoming strangely unfocussed. Vacant, even.

  “They have their own agenda,” I growled. “I’m not sure that it lines up with ours.”

  “There’s no chance,” Frey answered, her voice as vacant as her eyes before she shook her head, refocussing again. “I’m sorry, Lavenia. There’s no scenario I can see where you might be able to beat the Warmaster in battle. Not a fair battle—and if you try to injure or poison him beforehand, there’s no chance that you won’t be found out and immediately executed.”

  I smiled as Bjern groaned, shaking his head.

  “You’re a piece of work, Sinn,” he said.

  “There’s a piece to the puzzle that you aren’t factoring in,” I added, even as uneasiness settled heavily into my stomach.

  “What would that be?” She actually sounded insulted.

  “Calder,” I muttered, glancing up to the sky again so that the rain might wash away the tears threatening in my eyes. “He won’t let me die.”

  “Are you sure?” Frey prompted, sounding almost gentle.

  “Yes,” I lied. “I’m sure.”

  20

  Freedom

  When I asked the ring to take me back to the Sky Keep, I was too fatigued to focus properly on a destination, and it dropped me back into the driftwood room. For once, it was empty, and I briefly considered simply sinking to the rug by the hearth and allowing my shuddering limbs to dry and warm by the dying embers of the fire … but I decided not to push my luck with Vidrol. He had turned out to be far more unpredictable than I had realised.

  I crept through the darkened hallways of the keep, jumping at every shadow or passing servant until I found the room Vidrol had been in that morning. When I slipped through the door into the sitting room, I was unsurprised to find him by the fire, a woman in his lap, his hand creeping along her thigh beneath her dress.

  “We have company,” his deep voice rumbled, a hint of power riding the words, hinting that he was in a heightened emotional state.

  “Yeah,” I said, leaning against the side of the fireplace before them, kicking one dirty, bruised foot up against the bricks. I levelled my eyes on the woman. “Shouldn’t you be pulling my hair or sticking incense sticks into my eyes or something?”

  She looked up slowly, and I saw her reach into the front of the bodice of her dress. I started to dart away, but Vidrol laughed, grabbing her hand and jostling her from his lap. A tiny dagger-shaped thing tumbled to the floor. I was pretty sure it was a decorative hair pin of some kind.

  “Game’s over,” he said, patting her on the bottom. “You ran out of time, sweetheart.”

  She turned with a pout on her full, pink lips, and I had to admit … she was the smartest of the group for sticking by Vidrol’s side. I couldn’t “please him greatly” without approaching him at some point.

  “Off to bed now,” he said, dismissing her.

  She flounced from the room, giving me one last petulant look before slamming the door behind her.

  “Wow,” I muttered, my eyes returning to Vidrol. “And you wonder why I don’t want to marry you.”

  “I don’t, actually.” There was a tenor of something rough riding his tone, and I looked back to him in alarm.

  “Oh?” I asked, realising that his eyes were on my exposed leg.

  My shoes were missing. There was mud everywhere. The dress was ruined.

  “You have a unique skill for staying alive. Of course you don’t want to marry me.”

  “You make a great case for yourself,” I noted dryly.

  He rose from his chair, setting aside a glass of wine, his eyes travelling up to my face and touching on my hair. “This habit you have of appearing before me in such a way is not at all endearing.”

  “You have a few of those not-at-all-endearing habits yourself.”

  He inhaled deeply, trying to calm himself down. “Tempest,” he growled.

  I held up my hands, backing away. “I get it. I’ll wash. I may need clothes though—”

  He tore his shirt off, tossing it at me, his eyes spitting green fire. I leaned forward, catching it without a word and quickly skipping into the washroom. Vidrol’s temper was almost as bad as the Schol—as Andel’s. Though Andel’s was quiet. It burnt slowly before sweeping out in swift, dangerous outbursts. Vidrol’s was louder. Closer to the surface.

  I turned the taps, filling the bathtub enough to wash myself quickly. I combed my hair out with my fingers when I was done, pulling the shirt over my head. It smelled of wine and fell almost to my knees. Dressed thus, I crept back to the sitting room only to find that Vidrol had disappeared. I checked the attached bedroom, but it was cold and dark, so I curled up on the couch in the sitting room with the fire warming my face.

  As comfortable as I was, sleep didn’t come easily. The storm persisted tirelessly, shocking me back awake with flashes of lightning whenever my eyelids closed. My thoughts became stuck on Calder again, and I rolled to my back, staring at the flickering firelight on the ceiling until exhaustion eventually took over and my limbs slackened
to the side.

  My thoughts slipped into dreams, and at first, I simply dreamed of Calder’s face. Of the two cuts that ran perpendicularly over his eyes, tugging at both the upper and the lower eyelid. The scars didn’t detract from his looks. The one on the left had bled into the line of gold dripping from his eye, while the one on the right had connected with an existing scar on his right cheek, resulting in a strange, compelling kind of symmetry. Soon, I was imagining his voice, the feel of his skin. I was desperate to touch him, to feel that he was real, that he was with me … that we hadn’t been separated. I wasn’t sure when that desperation turned to another kind of desperation, but when two large hands fit beneath my body, lifting me into the air, some part of my subconscious convinced me that it was Calder, and I reached out, needing his skin against mine, needing to feel that our link hadn’t been severed, even though it had been defiled. Even though it had melted into something wrong, something against the very nature of who we were.

  I felt hard muscle beneath my fingertips. The sharp line of a collarbone, the stubble of a strong, sloping jaw. My lip sang with a prickle of pain, and my eyes flew open, reality crashing into my head as the man who had been carrying me stopped walking, staring down at me.

  Vidrol.

  His green eyes narrowed as my hand flew to my lips.

  “What were you dreaming about?” he asked.

  I refused to answer, my eyes still wide on his face. There was an awful need coursing through me, heating my body to an almost painful level. He cursed, dropping me to the floor.

  “I was going to let you sleep in my bed but not if you’re…” He flicked a hand over me.

  I laughed, short and sharp and disbelieving, my fingers still pressed to my lips. “I can control myself,” I assured him. “I wasn’t thinking about you.”

  His eyes darkened, and I realised I had said the wrong thing. He stepped forward, and I stepped back.