SHADOW WEAVER

by Claire Merle

  Thank the Gods! I stare wide-eyed at Tug. He has pulled up a memory with total clarity and exactitude. He can dip into his own mind and reveal in the now-time whatever recollection he chooses. My father could do this, but it was something that came with practice and, I believed, because of the close bond between us.

  “How did you do that?”

  “I want his name, Mirra.”

  “A man's face tells me nothing. It is useless if I don't know where to start looking.”

  “I can tell where a man is from by the cut of his boots, his coat and his accent.”

  “If that were true you would not need me to answer your question.”

  “Our wealthy acquaintance has no remembered identity,” Tug says. I meet his wolfish eyes. There is something restless about him tonight. “It makes it easier for him to mimic others,” he continues. “His clothes are from a small town to the east, near the tundra. His native accent is from the Red City, mixed with the middle country around Lyndonia and a trace of something I have not come across.”

  These are easy guesses. The Red City is the capital of Caruca. And the middle country is near the fort where the Prince wishes to take me for his test. But I wonder how Tug recognizes the extent of the Prince's memory loss.

  “Is it common for the Carucan cleansing to take away a man's whole past?” I ask.

  “It is the first time I've seen it,” Tug says evenly.

  “How do you see it?”

  “One does not need the sight to observe. For example, the old man with him is a trusted tutor from his boyhood, who comes from the Deppawieden town a day’s ride from the Red City.”

  Tug could be making it up, but I have no way of knowing. I decide to believe him. I want to believe him. His knowledge of my brother's future whereabouts depends on this skill.

  If Beast-face has already decided to accept the Prince's offer, then revealing Prince Jakut's identity won't change anything. Perhaps it will even give Tug pause to reconsider.

  “Our wealthy acquaintance is Prince Jakut of Caruca,” I say.

  To his credit, Tug's jaw doesn't drop open. “You are sure of this?”

  I nod.

  He roams the room, grabs a piece of hemp, empties the bread and cheese platter into it and thrusts it into my lap. There is a new fire in him as he tidies, gathering the last remaining furs. It scares me more than the cold impassiveness.

  “Time to go,” he says. “Brin and the horses are waiting.”

  Burning flushes up through my throat. “Please... I cannot leave Kel. I will not perform in the Prince's test.” I scramble off the bed, clinging onto the hemp parcel as though for dear life. “If I do his test my skill will be discovered. We will all be hanged.”

  Tug blocks the doorway, arms folded across his chest. “Your brother is in the hands of one of the Lyndonian fort's inner royal guards.”

  I freeze, struggling to piece together his words. “You sold Kel to a Lyndonian?” Kel is with a Lyndonian and the Prince is going to the Lyndonian fort.

  “I thought you might need an incentive.”

  My limbs go soft. The bag of cheeses and bread slips from my unfurling fists. “Kel is going to Lyndonia?” I gaze at Beast-face.

  For some reason, I remember the girl with the chestnut hair and the emerald robe and how well hidden he has kept her in the fortress of his mind. I know he is not doing this for me and Kel, but I cannot help despise him a little less. He is risking his life, along with ours. Why? Not for the gold. It cannot be simply for gold.

  “Lyndonia is a royal fort?” I ask.

  “It is under the King's brother, Prince Roarhil's protection.”

  The knowledge that Kel will travel to Lyndonia at the same time as us, that while I am there being tested, I will be able to hunt for him, makes my body pulse with hope. The tight knot in my stomach loosens and a new kind of anticipation rises through me.

  For years I've been waiting for something to happen. Surviving in Blackfoot Forest is not the same as living.

  I used to dream of a town built from sparkling white rock; a beautiful place filled with people connected by their sight and their deep understanding of one another. I would wake with a fleeting sense of peace and comfort. And while I knew Auran, Island of the Rushing Winds, had crumbled to the seas over a century ago, I had not accepted spending the rest of my life in a miserable hinterland village among people who despised my sight. I had not accepted that I would always have to hide my true nature, or spend my life feeling cursed and freakish until the day my heart stopped beating.

  Now I will venture further from the glacial mountains than I've ever been. I will see the Carucan kingdom's wonders with my own eyes. I will enter the poisoned realm of the royal family who have turned my people into slaves, outlaws, nomads, when we helped them win the Great Carucan-Etean War.

  I worry for Kel. Whatever happens, I must find him quickly. But my blood vibrates at the prospect of knowing my enemy. An enemy known is an enemy that can be fought. The tundra mine guards, mercenaries and bounty hunters are the limbs of a beast, but the royal family is the head.

  Tug throws Brin's pack at me, (it is twice my size), and straps on his own. “Brin waits for us at the edge of town. We must cross the Hybourg. It is worse here at night. And there are those who saw us in the Pit. I need you to focus.”

  I nod. I am ready. It is amazing what a decent meal can do to clear one's head and boost morale.

  Fifteen

  We travel the twelve miles to the Prince's tavern in less than an hour. Riding a horse feels nothing like my father's memories. The power and rhythm of the beast makes my heart soar and fly above the ground. It is like being swept up by the wind and once I find my balance and confidence, the whoosh of exhilaration is unlike anything I've ever experienced.

  By the time we arrive at the tavern, I am windswept, breathless and my shoulder burns. The strain of holding the reins has ripped the old arrow wound, and it bleeds again.

  “Are you staying up there all night?” Tug asks, as a stable boy appears to tend to the horses. My hands feel locked on the reins, my aching muscles clench around the beast’s belly. I lift my leg awkwardly over one side and fall. Tug catches me. I let out a yelp as one of his hands presses against my arm. Without a word, he stands me on my feet and leaves me to stagger behind him and Brin to the backdoor.

  I follow them into a room lit by a large fire and lanterns on every table. The Prince sits by the hearth with a book. The blind man snoozes in an adjacent chair. As we enter, Prince Jakut rises, shoulders relaxed, expression satisfied, but I notice the tight grip on his closed book.

  “Brin, Ule,” Tug says introducing the men. The Prince nods but Brin only stares, behaving one hundred percent like the loutish thug he is.

  “I am pleased you have accepted my offer,” the Prince says. He searches me out beyond my captors. I let our eyes meet, allowing him to think I am relieved and grateful and enchanted—after all I have been at the whim of two brutal mercenaries and now a Prince has saved me! Then I hastily drop my gaze as though remembering my place.

  He sets his book on the mantlepiece and crosses the empty dining room. I attempt a curtsey, though with one hand down my parka to staunch my reopened wound, it is clumsy.

  “What's wrong with your arm?” he asks.

  “It's nothing,” I say, still short of breath and buoyed up from the ride. “Just a scratch.”

  “May I?”

  He reaches out, guiding my outer parka over my head. Days of sweat, grime and smoke cling to my skin but he doesn't flinch at the stink. I try to hide the way my muscles tighten. He is so conceited he believes he can help me undress! If my memories were a forest of devastation, and I relied on an old, blind man to tell me who I was, I would not be so arrogant.

  Beneath my furs, my shirt and hand are bloody. The cloth around my neck is also stained with blood.

  “This is an arrow wound?” the Prince asks.

  Tug moves to join us. “It is from when we caught
her,” he says.

  “And what is this?” he asks, touching the rag at my neck.

  “A warning,” Tug says.

  “We will be riding through the night. Deadran will tend to both wounds immediately.”

  I frown while the blind man rouses and the Prince calls the innkeeper. Prince Jakut, or Ule as we are all supposed to call him, seems irritated over Tug's neglect of my person. Obviously he's concerned arrow-wounds and knife-wounds could lead to questions about my true identity. But some tiny part of me wonders if he finds violence towards a vulnerable girl distasteful. Even if the girl is an outlawed shadow weaver.

  Maybe I have overplayed the weak feminine angle. Though it is not like I have fainted or cried. Still, I do not want him to think I am so delicate he is worrying about my health, and having me watched all the time.

  The innkeeper leads the old man and me to a cellar room with one narrow bed and a washbasin. The innkeeper's wife hurries in with a pot of hot water, and a basket filled with ointment bottles, cotton gauze and wraps.

  “That will be all, thank you,” the blind man says. After they leave and we are alone in the cellar room, he instructs me to take off my blouse. I glance at the closed door before slipping my injured arm out of the sleeve of my shirt.

  “I am Deadran.” The old man dips a cotton pad into warm water and dabs the knife cut. It stings, forcing me to suck through my teeth. Then he cleans the arrow wound. “We will bandage both up, and you must ride with me tonight. ”

  He reaches for the basket and sorts nimbly through phial bottles, identifying some by touch, others by scent. “This is it. Let us put a little honey on to help fight any infection.” He smears sweet smelling goo over the wounds, presses wads of cotton over the paste, and wraps my arm and neck with gauze.

  Once he has finished, his eyes turn towards the lantern. He seems to drift to sleep for a moment. I slip my arm back into the sleeve of my shirt. The cuts tingle. I fasten the buttons on my shirt.

  “I have lived a long life without Rhag,” he says, suddenly breaking the silence, “and now I find at the end of it I am confronted with two mysteries.”

  Rhag is the name for the Carucan path to the Gods. The faithful, like my mother, walk the path through prayer, worship and once or twice in a lifetime, the spiritual cleansing.

  “To be reunited with the Prince,” he continues, “is a blessing I had not hoped for. But you...” He shakes his head. “All those days Prince Jakut went to the Pit, searching for the impossible. And when all seemed lost, you found him.”

  A true miracle! I pick up my inner parka. It will be chilly riding through the night so I will need both layers.

  “I have no business with Rhag,” I tell him, annoyed he considers my capture and the “slaughter” of my family an answer to the Prince's prayers.

  Though I have to admit, finding a mature shadow weaver, whose eyes have settled, is a conundrum. A mature shadow weaver means any physical proof of the mind-reading talent has gone. This is why poachers and hunters don't bother with us. I push my bandaged arm into my inner parka, grunting at the tight, painful fit.

  “Stop,” Deadran says. “I will lend you a cloak.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Prince Jakut,” he continues, “is nineteen, but he has known great loss from the youngest of ages. His mother died in childbirth with a sister. He was only four. She was not in her grave when his father packed him off to his uncle in Lyndonia, accompanied by an already elderly tutor whom the boy had never met.”

  “You?” So Tug was right! I try to hide the interest in my voice, but the more I know about the Prince, the better armed I am to deal with him.

  “Indeed,” Deadran nods. “He lost everything he knew in one sweep of fate. Only to lose it all again at eight years old when his father summoned him back to the Royal Court, and I was dismissed.”

  “You have not seen the Prince for eleven years?”

  “Eleven years,” Deadran echoes.

  “And yet of all those he could choose,” I say, “he has called on you.” If someone wanted to hide their true nature and intent from a shadow weaver, what better way than erasing their memories and surrounding themselves with people who only knew them as a child? Has the Prince so much to hide, he has risked hiding it even from himself? What does he really want from me?

  “It is difficult for a young Prince, purposefully isolated by his overbearing father, to make trustworthy friends. With the attempt on his life, he cannot put his faith in anyone from the Royal Court until King Alixter returns from fighting on the Etean front. Jakut's enemies are powerful and daring enough to have infiltrated his own escort.”

  Deadran hopes to elicit my sympathy for the Prince by weaving connections between us. We have both lost beloved parents, (at least he thinks mine are dead), both been snatched from our homes and brought into strange and dangerous worlds. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Before we arrive at the fort in Lyndonia, if you are to blend in as part of the Prince's new escort, you will need to know much about court life, the history and traditions of Caruca, politics and hierarchy.”

  How a scrawny, sixteen-year-old outlaw is expected to blend in as part of the Prince's replacement escort I have no idea. Perhaps they will pass me off as a serving boy.

  “This will be the Prince's test?”

  Deadran nods. “The first part.”

  “And the second?”

  “Your ability to uncover useful information without being suspected.”

  I turn from Deadran and, careful not to strain my wound, pull my looser outer parka over my head. If men in the court are as wary and skilled at blocking their minds as Tug, it could take days or weeks to glean useful information. Even an open mind, easy to search through, can take hours of combing to uncover anything significant. And I am not practiced. I shunned entering my parents' minds for years. In the three decades since the Uru Ana were banished from Caruca, I expect the tales of what we are capable have become highly exaggerated.

  “My life has been long and mostly blessed,” Deadran says. “As a young man I had many Uru Ana friends. I am ashamed of what Caruca has done to your people. And I am sorry for the danger we are putting you in. But I will do everything I can to help you. I am sure if you serve the Prince well, he in turn, will help you.”

  How honorable. And if I fail to do as he wishes, he will denounce me and see me hanged.

  “I have known few men other than my father, and they have all been cruel,” I say. “I thank you for your kindness.”

  Sixteen

  For four days we ride through the night and sleep outside deep in the shelter of fields, hills and forests, away from the roads. Sunrise to sunset lengthens, lasting almost five hours, warming the lands and the air.

  We are in the habit of establishing camp before dawn and waking in the late afternoon twilight. My body adjusts to the physical exertion of riding, which puts a different strain on muscles used to snow trekking. I am energised by regular meals and the power of the sun. But every time I feel life humming through my veins, I also feel guilty. Is Kel faring well with his Lyndonian captor? Will he remain strong, even though he does not know I'm coming for him?

  After breaking fast after the fourth night of riding, Brin and Tug take care of the horses, and Deadran instructs the Prince and me on Carucan geography. Our prior lessons have all been about court politics and etiquette, a subject, which briefly fascinated me, but quickly became tedious. Geography is a welcome change.

  Deadran unrolls a worn parchment, holding down the corners with stones. Jakut and I sit on the ground before him. We lean forward to see better, our shoulders brush, and awkwardness spikes through me. I pull away, but the Prince is faster to sit back, so I am free to take in the Kingdoms of Ederiss.

  I used to enjoy sketching the lands of Ederiss from Ma's memories. It was what I did when she gave me ink and paper instead of practicing the Carucan alphabet. But Deadran's map has many details and subtleties missing from Ma'
s map, or at least her memories of what she studied. My attention is drawn to an island southwest of the Etean Kingdom.

  “What is this island?”

  “Auran,” Deadran says. My head jolts back. Auran, Island of the Rushing Winds, where my people came from, and which was supposed to have drowned beneath the waves over a century ago.

  “How old is this map?”

  “Twenty long-sleeps, but it was copied from a map in the Ruby Palace whose date I do not know.”

  The excitement in my chest flows out leaving me disappointed. This map must predate the catastrophe.

  “Is this,” the Prince asks me, “where your people came from?” I had not noticed him moving, but now his face is almost next to mine. He speaks softly, as though he understands how important my heritage is to me. As though he realizes this is not just history, but the missing roots I feel I cannot really grow without.

  “Accounts of Carucan history,” Deadran says, “site this island as the origin of the glitter-eyed children.” Deadran's milky eyes are turned on us in his usual unfocused, but attentive manner.

  “Origin?” the Prince echoes. “Then why do they hide in the northern forests? Why doesn't the King allow them to return to their island?”

  I bristle, wondering what could possibly hold Jakut's interest in Uru Ana history.

  “The island drowned,” I say.

  He nods. “And so your people came searching for new lands.” He erroneously assumes my people imposed themselves on lands that did not belong to them.

  “The Etean King,” Deadran interjects, as though sensing the rising tension, and trying to diffuse it, “or Alaweh as he is known to the Eteans, was responsible for Auran being swept under the sea, after he mined their crystal cliffs and coral reefs. Only four hundred or so Uru Ana children, brought by his fleet to Etea, survived.”

  I feel the Prince's gaze, but when I look at him he looks down.