SHADOW WEAVER

by Claire Merle

  “Mirra, what are you doing?” Ma asks, blinking up at me.

  “Keep up the pressure on his wound. Once the bleeding stops, you'll have to build a shelter. Something low and small so the wind won't knock it down. Then you make a fire to keep Pa warm. As soon as you're sure the bleeding has stopped, boil up some water, let it cool and clean the wound. Make sure you keep him warm and don't try to move him. Pa will be able to instruct you after that.”

  “You're going after Kel?” Fear and shock choke her voice. “But you're injured, Mirra. Those men were huge. They'll kill you.”

  It's at moments like this when I would give anything not to have the sight. Not to see what scuds the surface of my mother's thoughts: The man who'd run after Kel knocking her down. Kel screaming and kicking and Ma swatted off like an insignificant fly when she tried to stop him dragging my brother away.

  Ma grew up in the wealthy town of Ebonaska. When she was eight years old, King Rex began rounding up the Uru Ana, drowning them or burning them. Her family hid their heritage, began the Carucan traditions of fasting and cleansing, avoided drawing attention to themselves and carried on, as neighbours, people they'd been friends with for years, were arrested and their glitter-eyed children taken. Her parents did not fight back. I try to remember that as contempt for my mother's weakness festers inside me.

  I occupy myself with gathering the scant remains of our rations. Ice crystals have dampened the chickweed leaves. I take a handful, add a few stalks of the white root plant, two fish, and wrap them in skin. My parents will keep the cereal, tubers, most of the roots, and the leftover fish, enough to stave off hunger for four days.

  Once I have the bare essentials I will be travelling with, I sling the hemp bag over my neck and adjust my sling. Ma stares at me until I meet her gaze. “You know I'll never find Kel if they get too far. When he's in the Hybourg it'll be like looking for a needle in snow.”

  “I know, Mirra. But how can you do anything? You can't even hunt or build a shelter with that arm. You won't be able to make fire. How will you survive?”

  “You worry about Pa. Clean the wound. Keep him warm.”

  She nods. In the wispy light, tears stream her cheeks.

  “We have to be stronger than ever Ma, you hear me?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes, Mirra. Just bring Kel back.”

  “I will,” I say, fighting down tears. I bend down beside her and lean over my father. Awkwardly, I kiss his cheek, careful not to press anywhere that might hurt him. Ma throws her arms around me. Then we are hugging and she is kissing my face.

  “I love you, Mirra.”

  “I love you, too.” I am gentle as I break the grip of her arms around my waist. She doesn't stop me as I rise. I imagine her watching my silhouette slip across these vast forgotten lands. I don't wonder what she's thinking or how she'll manage with Pa. From this moment on, everything must be about what comes next. I can't afford to look back.

  Four

  The land cracks open. Giant boulders mark the murky descent into Blackfoot forest. My knotted hair, crusted with ice whips against my face. My legs tremble and my dry throat hurts when I swallow.

  I crouch down, cut a piece of snow to melt in my flask, then check my position in relation to the Bright Star which resides faithfully over Jade Sword peak. From the direction the men have taken, my guess is they are returning to the river where they have set up camp. I shave off a second lump of snow and hold it to my swollen cheekbone and bruised temple. My arm throbs, but my head is worse. It pounds like I'm being struck over and over.

  In my mind, I call up those last moments with Ma and Pa so that Kel knows Pa's alive and I'm coming. The mind-world ripples with his answer: running through the forest, hearing the startling bark of the wolf dog, peering down between snow-tipped pine needles while I racked my bow to shoot. I feel a small glimmer of relief. He is conscious and not wrapped so tightly into himself that I cannot reach him.

  I sheathe my knife, telling myself I've gained enough on them now to carry on at a good walking pace. But the truth is I can't continue jogging. The adrenaline drained, fatigue has settled over me so that my muscles and bones ache.

  Trees. Nothing but pine and spruce and fir. They grow taller, denser, blocking the starlight. I trip and stumble many times, unable to see the ground, and every time, it's harder to get up.

  To fill the bleakness in my heart and the rolling blackness before my eyes, I consider whether Kel was trying to tell me something with his memories of the wolf dog. If the men have not given the hound nightshade to subdue its pain, nor killed it, my chances of cutting Kel free and the two of us escaping without waking the hunters are zero. And I cannot take on either of the men. Even uninjured it would be pure idiocy to try.

  But if I cannot steal Kel from their camp, how long can I follow in the shadows? With my injured arm I cannot build shelter, or wield fire with my fire board. Besides, I could not risk them seeing the smoke.

  I strain to make out the trees in the darkness. I am beginning to lose my sense of direction and time. The thick canopy of pine branches obliterates the sky, but even if the heavens could guide me, I wouldn't stop to look up—I would never get going again.

  I reach for the soft, feathery shape of Kel's mind to orientate myself. Luminously bright and as gentle as dandelion seeds. I have always loved the feel of it. Light and airy and bright. So bright! My wandering thoughts snap to attention. So bright because he has stopped moving and I am not far from him. So bright, because the bounty hunters' minds are sunless and dull in comparison.

  They have reached their camp. It takes every fragment of will I possess not to collapse to my knees and rest for a few minutes. Sit down and you will fall asleep and freeze to death. Even bundled in my one fur, if I sleep without shelter or fire, I will die from the cold.

  I slump against a tree, pack pressing into the muscle knots that riddle my shoulders. I am exhausted and I can't focus. My mind feels like dirty sludge. After a brief pause, I force my eyes open, shake off my pack carefully so as not to pull on my arm sling, and fumble inside for the skin with the chickweed and white root. I take a root and chew on it while thinking.

  Staying outside all night, totally exposed is not an option. Nor is returning to Ma and Pa without Kel. Could I find my way back to our old camp? It must be less than an hour’s walk from here. Yesterday we dug banks from the snowdrifts, which had formed in the clearing. I could burrow into one. But it would be too far to sense Kel's mind. And if the men woke and set off before me, I would lose them.

  Have I passed a snowdrift recently? My mind seems foggy as I try to remember any slopes in the land where the wind might have blown in enough snow to dig out a man-sized hole. I mentally retrace my steps. Apart from dips and bumps the forest has been flat and dense for at least twenty minutes.

  I crouch and sag forward, leaning my forehead against the pine trunk. Bark scratches my skin. I'm too tired to cry, but my distress at being so close to Kel, yet so far, is unbearable.

  I wonder how he is holding up. It has been some time since he last attempted to communicate through the mind-world. Perhaps he is sleeping. Mentally, I reach for the luminous softness of his mind.

  Entering a mind is not the same as seeing memories that echo in the now-time. It requires concentration and energy, and finding what you want is an art I am unpracticed in. There are minds that drag you under like the great surf of an ocean; minds that disorientate as though you're walking through woods but whatever direction you take, you end up back where you started. Kel's mind is as beautiful and light inside as out. I slip in easily, searching close to the edges for a recent memory.

  He sits crouched near the fire, eyes closed, shivering. Smoke blows in his face and chokes his lungs but he's cold and probably too scared to move. He hunches inward as the crunch of footsteps encroaches.

  “Please, please,” he whispers.

  For a moment nothing happens, then the man standing beside him wraps a blanket over his shoulders.
Still Kel's eyes remain shut. My chest clenches with sadness and anger. He must be beyond terrified!

  “Come,” the man says. “It is warmer in the tent.” He lifts my brother and carries him away from the heat of the fire. Stiff hide brushes Kel's face, then he is placed on a bed of furs. “Did you eat enough?”

  Kel nods. There is a rustle and a wet nose rubs against Kel's neck.

  “Her name is Trix. She'll keep you company,” the man says. “Now try to sleep. The worst is over. You will not be hurt.”

  I return to my shivering body and the dark forest in a daze. It is four years since I last mind-travelled. There has never been any reason to enter my brother's mind, and I stopped foraging in Ma and Pa's memories when it began to feel like an invasion of their privacy. It made it harder to accept the everyday shortcomings of our meagre life in Blackfoot forest. I forgot how confusing it is, how you lose your sense of time and place.

  I chew on another white root, perplexed by the hunter's behaviour. The man who showed my brother kindness did not have the gruff voice of the brute who snatched him. It must have been the one with the mind shaped like walls inside walls. The one whose physical and mental strength make him the clear leader of the two.

  A plan forms in my head, a crazy plan, but now I am sure the dog is conscious, it is all I can think of to stay with Kel and not die in the process: become their captive too. An unidentifiable Uru Ana of my sixteen years, not yet enslaved in the tundra goldmines, would fetch a high price on the black market. The Carucans may despise our talents and believe our shadow powers doom us, but that hasn't stopped them from using my kind to fulfill their own greedy ends. The men will want me for the gold I can get them. And in the three or four days it will take to reach one of the towns, I will find a way for Kel and me to escape.

  In the vast emptiness of the forest it is hard to believe there is anyone nearby until the smell of smoke drifts on the crisp air followed by a whiff of fish and garlic. My mouth waters and my stomach growls. A hundred footsteps from their camp, flames flicker between the trees, swelling out in an orange pool across the snow. I try to walk steadily and evenly, hood pulled over my head. The man who was kind to Kel is also the man who stabbed Pa. I hesitate. Perhaps my thoughts are too muddled.

  Barking resounds across the clearing. They know I'm here. I steel myself, send up a desperate prayer to my mother's Gods that I will not be harmed, that this is not a mistake, and enter the glade. As their camp comes into view I see the men outside the large skin tent, gathering their weapons. They stretch arrows in their bows. I gulp, a frisson of terror like a sunburst explodes in my chest.

  Both hunters are stripped down to their cotton shirts and deer skin trousers, despite the below-freezing temperature. The one with a sleeve rolled up and a dressing on his forearm has dark crisscross markings covering his bald head and face. At first I think some kind of hanging net casts strange shadows, but then I realize the marks are made with staining ink. His appearance is fearsome, but it's the other one I'm worried about.

  Tall, broad, unflinching. The tattoos on his face make his lifeless eyes appear slanted and distort his crooked nose and thin mouth to resemble a beast of the forest: a bear or wolf. Shoulder length, wavy hair, folds into his furs to heighten the impression.

  “What do you want, boy?” he asks. It is the voice of the man who carried Kel, though there is no softness in it now.

  Stay strong, Mirra. You did not imagine the way he treated Kel. He is not as fierce as he appears to be.

  I raise my good arm slowly, showing an empty hand. Then I pull back my hood. The beast-faced hunter does not react to my age or gender though I'm not sure I would recognize emotion in his strange face.

  His companion stops scanning the shadows and turns. “Is that a girl?” he growls, his low voice husky with lust. He steps forward, lips rising in a gruesome smile. A shudder slips down my spine and my whole body shakes.

  Beast-face blocks his companion with his long bow, forbidding him from approaching me further. “I said, what do you want?”

  “I want to travel with you.” At the sound of my voice, the wolf dog starts barking again. I glance towards the skin tent, sides packed down with snow, Kel inside.

  “She's alone,” the man with the fishnet head says, pushing away his companion's bow, sucking through his teeth. I avoid his disgusting mouth, study his arm instead, noting that his injury doesn't appear debilitating, nor would it stop him from effortlessly pinning me down.

  “Come closer,” Beast-face orders. I edge towards the firelight, which dazzles after so much darkness. There is a tiny flexion of movement above his eyes where his eyebrows should be. He has recognized me. Rather he has recognized the bruising he left down the side of my cheek and temple. “Forget you ever had a brother,” he warns.

  Fishnet-head straightens, lust suddenly vanishing, replaced with suspicion. “How did you follow us?”

  “Your minds were clear enough.”

  “She's a shadow weaver!” He reaches inside his shirt, pulls out a multi-faceted glass medallion and holds it up like it's a protection amulet. If I wasn't so exhausted and scared, I might have laughed at his stupidity.

  “Enough, Brin,” says Beast-face. He looks at me now with a strange mixture of intent and regret, as though I've pushed him down a path he can't back out of, and won't, even though he wants to.

  I swallow the lump in my throat, doubting my plan. “You could get a good price for me,” I say quietly.

  “And why would you want us to sell you?”

  “You killed my father. I won't survive out here by myself.”

  The moment he jabbed his knife into Pa flutters to the surface of his mind. There's something odd about the memory. It holds a precision and clarity that suggests he knows exactly where he struck Pa. As though he only meant to injure him.

  “We left your mother alive,” he says.

  “My mother is weak. I will not stay out here and starve to death with her.”

  “And why would you starve? You shot my wolf dog well enough.” No emotion shows on his savage face or in his body, but the slight rise of his voice belies his affection for the creature. His anger.

  “I'm injured,” I say.

  He comes closer, sinewy muscles in his shoulders and forearms bulging as his body flexes. I recoil, almost tripping on a broken tree branch.

  “Don't, Tug!” says the companion he called Brin. “Don't touch her.”

  “You touched the boy,” he counters.

  “The boy is too young to weave the shadows. But she—she is almost fully grown.”

  “And worth a fortune,” Tug says.

  The anxiety in Brin’s voice makes my skin prickle, but hope also leaps inside me. His fear of my kind will stop him from trying to gratify any physical desires he has with me. Thank the Gods!

  “She will have cursed us long before we reach the Hybourg,” Brin says.

  The man named Tug does not share his companion's concerns. He moves so close that I almost retch at the stench of him. I'm not particularly small for my sixteen years, as far as I know, but I'm like a child beside him.

  “Prove it. Prove you have the sight.”

  “The dog is called Trix. You told my brother the worst was over and you would not hurt him.” I hold his stare, despite the heat rising to my cheeks and the desperate need to look away. It is not his brute force that makes this man dangerous, it is his intelligence and the keen control he has over his own mind.

  “And have you entered my mind?” he asks.

  I shake my head. He lunges forward so that my heart skips a beat. I cry out in pain as he grabs the top of my wounded arm and drags me to the fire.

  “Show me this injury.”

  I fumble to take off my pack, arm flaring in agony. A movement by the tent catches my attention. Kel appears in the doorway flap.

  “Mirra!” he shouts.

  I gasp. There's something wrong with his eyes! White, shiny pus seals them shut. “It's all right, Kel,�
�� I hiss. “I'm all right. Stay where you are!”

  When I turn back, Beast-face is staring at me with an intensity that makes my flesh crawl. I remove my outer parka as quickly as I can, clenching my teeth against the pain. Unless he sees my useless arm, he will not risk taking me with them. The parka with the fur turned inwards is a tight fit and I have not removed it since the winter hibernation—it has not been warm enough. I can smell the snow den trapped in the deer fur, the perfumed oil we cover ourselves with to protect and insulate our skin, the sweat of the last eight days.

  Tug inspects my wound through my ripped inner parka and undershirt. I tremble from the cold and from his touch, fighting the urge to throw up the white roots I have just eaten.

  “You haven't cleaned it,” he says.

  I scowl. “I was in a hurry.”

  Something sparks in his memories, so fast I can make nothing of it but a blur.

  “We'll take her,” he says.

  “No, we shouldn't. Let's tie her to a tree and leave her to the forest.”

  Tug ignores his companion, pulling me towards him so that his nose is almost pressed to mine, his breath warm on my lips. “You should know two things,” he says. “You shot my dog.” He pauses, so that if I hadn't understood his affection for the creature, now there is no mistaking it. “And I have no mercy for anyone who makes me regret a decision. Try anything and your brother will be the one who pays.”

  I nod. He thrusts my two parkas into my stomach. I stifle a small cry, cling to the warmth of my fur, unable to tear my eyes from him.

  “Clean the wound before you sleep. I wouldn't want to go to all this trouble just to have you die on me.”

  Five

  Kel's trembling and sniffling has given way to dreamless, exhausted sleep. I lie curled around him, my bandaged arm hooked across his waist. My eyes burn like they're on fire. After I'd dealt with my arm, Tug brushed my eyes with a warm, smelly paste. Now my eyes are sealed shut, which means Kel and I are as good as blind. It hurts so much I am afraid my sight will be permanently damaged. My hate and rage for our captors is only subdued by the fear.