SHADOW WEAVER

by Claire Merle

  “I did not wish to be found,” Jakut answers dismissively. “Has my father returned from the Etean front?”

  “We expect news any day. We thought it would come as soon as the ice thawed, but we have heard nothing from the Ruby Court since the long-sleep.”

  A memory floods the mind-world.

  From a high window, the Duchess watches a lone soldier gallop towards the fort. Then she is rushing down a steep stairway. She holds the child in her belly with one hand, grips the iron rail with another. She tears through stone passages, halts hidden in the shadows of an archway. The King's soldier is greeted by a soldier from the fort. Breathless, Elise enters the courtyard.

  Her mind jumps again. She is sinking to the ground clutching a silver leaf shaped medallion and a signet ring. A gut-wrenching moan swells on the air.

  My legs tremble as I struggle to sever myself from her memories. The Duke's mouth moves but I do not hear his words. The Duchess sways. I step forward to offer support. Her eyes flutter. She is about to lose consciousness.

  “Your Grace,” I hiss. Too late. She's falling. I try to catch her, but as our bodies meet, the gaps in my thinking connect and I jerk with shock. Tug! The Duchess is the girl sealed away in the fortress of his mind!

  She falls sideways pulling me with her. The Duke lunges for his wife. Surprise and the force of her fall unbalance me. I'm tumbling into them, when Jakut's arms fasten around my waist. His chest crushes into my back as he holds me steady.

  “Lady Mirra,” he says, breath warm against my neck. His palms skim over my ribs and settle on my stomach. Through the fabric of my dress, I can feel the tips of his fingers, the rise and fall of his chest. I should play my part, lean into him, but I'm paralysed.

  A lady-in-waiting skitters across the colored stones with smelling salts. She waves them beneath the Duchess’s nose. Elise, lying on the floor in her husband's arms, opens her eyes muttering.

  The Prince releases me and kneels beside his aunt. I gasp at the air as though suddenly free of a mind-numbing, body-freezing spider's venom.

  Tug and the Duchess! He will betray us! Tug's loyalty has always been to the girl in his memories. Even if he doesn't tell his dear Elise what is going on here, his presence has destroyed any chance of Jakut gaining the Duke's trust.

  “My wife is unwell,” the Duke says, addressing Jakut. “There is much for us to discuss, but for now I hope you understand if I ask Chamberlain Velequez to show you to the royal guest quarters.”

  One of the men in his entourage steps forward and tilts his head in a respectful nod.

  Jakut rises. “Of course, uncle.” The five of us retreat, following Chamberlain Velequez towards the doors.

  My throat closes like a fist strangling me. Tug's fist. I have guarded myself against the wrong man.

  If I had my knives, I would use Tug as target practice. I would take one right now and spin it deep into his ankle, snap the tendon and stop him from ever walking with his back to me again.

  He strides ahead of the Prince and I, following Commander Fror and Chamberlain Velequez through the austere royal gardens. Small-leafed berry shrubs arranged in enormous pots provide the only greenery. Eight soldiers surround us, and a girl, assigned as my maid, scuttles along on the outskirts of our group.

  “Is the Duchess sick?” Jakut murmurs. He observes our surroundings with mild interest, though wariness pulses behind his eyes. I shrug off the question, jaw locked, gaze riveted on Tug's head which I would gladly crush beneath my leather boot.

  “What happened in there?”

  “I don't know,” I snap. We are both fools. That's what happened.

  “You're angry with me for touching you.”

  “I almost fell and you caught me,” I say. “Why would I be angry?” I stretch my lips, flutter my eyes, mocking our love-bird farce. We enter a dim passage, and I quicken my pace. He doesn't try to keep up, but falls back into step with Deadran. I hope my behaviour will put off his interrogations until I've decided what to do about Tug.

  I see nothing of the room I'm shown to. My only thoughts are of getting rid of the girl who unpacks dresses, fine linens, and undergarments, courtesy of the Prince. I pace back and forth before three long sash windows. Tug and Brin have an adjacent room, Jakut is in the suite above us.

  “Would you like me to build your fire, madam?”

  “I'm not cold.”

  “Then I will heat your bath water.”

  “No,” I say. “I wish to rest. You may return an hour before we are expected for dinner.” I hug my arms around my stomach and stare out the window, waiting for her to leave.

  “Would you like me to draw your curtains or undress you?”

  “I'll manage.”

  Finally, she goes. I stretch my consciousness into the mind-world and glean the impressions of six guards stationed around the tower. Tug and Brin are in the next-door room. The Prince and Deadran are above us. Satisfied, I creep into the hall.

  Tug opens his bedroom door seconds after I knock. I sense Brin concealed behind it, no doubt knife in-hand, ready to spring.

  “It is Mirra,” Tug says. He steps out to join me in the corridor. Brin emerges behind him.

  “What does she want?”

  “I'll deal with this.” Tug closes the door in Brin's face. His eyes check left and right down the dim, stone passage.

  “There is no one to hear us,” I say. “Explain what is going on or I'm speaking to the Prince now.”

  The black tattoos painted over his eyebrows arch upwards. “What's the problem?”

  “You and the Duchess are the problem. She knows you are not the man His Royal Highness Prince of Caruca claims you are.”

  My words are like the false step that sets off an avalanche. A massive shift moves over Tug. In the mind-world, it's as though the high fortress walls crumble only to reconstruct themselves into a new maze-like formation. I stare at him in amazement. In my mind, it's as though the tattoos vanish, and I am looking at the face he once had. His true face. A man ready to die protecting the woman he loves.

  “You will never speak of this again. It will not affect the Prince's test for you.”

  Tug's unexpected resurrection almost undid Duchess Elise in the great hall. How could this little fact not change everything? The Duchess will be in turmoil. She may concede to her husband's wishes to remove Kel from the fort. She will certainly encourage him to double or triple the soldiers assigned to watch over us. Getting to Kel will be impossible.

  “I do not care about the Prince's test for me. I care about my brother. Your presence has made the Duchess nervous. And when people are nervous they are more inclined to stupidity.” I barely stop myself from spitting the last word in his face. “Before she saw you they were talking about getting rid of Kel because of the Prince's unexpected and unsettling arrival. Now she will be even more agitated.”

  A door clicks. Tug's head whips around to see Brin peering from their chambers. Brin stares at Tug pointedly, as though bringing up a conversation I have missed.

  “We should get paid and leave,” he says.

  “Leave with only half the gold?” Tug retorts.

  “Leave while we still can.”

  “You're a free man.”

  “She is weaving shadows around you,” Brin growls. “You're already different and her hold is growing on you by the day.”

  I swish forward, propelled by an inward burning to strike at Brin's unfounded prejudices. I grab the threads about his chunky neck and rip away the crystals. “These will not protect you,” I say, dangling them in front of his flat nose. He grabs his knife and wields it at me.

  “Good thinking, Brin! Try explaining to the Duke why you've stabbed me!”

  “Enough!” Tug pinches my arm. I struggle to free myself, as he marches me to my bedroom. He slams the bedroom door and thrusts me down. I land sprawled on an embroidered rug, skirts creeping up my legs. I scramble to my feet, instinctively patting my hip for my knife and hissing at its absence. />
  “The Duchess Elise will not speak of me to the Duke or change her course of action because I am here.”

  “I want my knives back!”

  “She has neither heard of me, nor seen me for twelve years. Until today, she thought I was dead. It was the shock of seeing me alive that made her react so. She will show no such emotion again.”

  I retreat to the fireplace, lunge for the poker. I am desperate for a weapon in my hands, desperate to feel less vulnerable. “Why have you come back from the dead?” I ask.

  “Grow up, Mirra.” Tug huffs and strides for the door.

  “If you leave without answering, I'm going straight to the Prince.”

  He halts and I feel victorious, until he opens his mouth. “Five of the Prince's escort are missing,” he says without bothering to face me. “Where do you think they are?”

  “Don't change the subject.”

  In an instant, he has swung around, and is barreling across the room. I recoil, until I'm squashed to the wall, clutching the useless fire poker. Knife throwing and arrow shooting are not hand-to-hand combat, and I am no match for Beast-face.

  “I'll tell you where they are. Dead. By his sword.”

  I shake my head. Tug has no idea what happened to those men. “Why would the Prince kill them?”

  “No witnesses.”

  “Witnesses to what?” Frustration is sharper than any knife cut. Once again Tug twists my thoughts against the Prince, but I cannot ignore him. This is his world. He has survived wars, advised commanders, fought campaigns for the King. He understands politics and the treacherous power plays that riddle the ruling nobility.

  “You have nothing to gain by telling the Prince that the Duchess and I once knew each other.”

  “When you were selling Kel in the pit, and a Lyndonian officer made an offer for him, you knew the officer was working for the Duke or Duchess. You came here to find out why. You came here because you thought the Duchess must be in trouble if she would risk breaking the King's law by using the talents of a shadow weaver.”

  Tug's eyes close, a beat too long to be blinking.

  “I came here to get paid.” The finality in his voice says he's done. Which is just as well because there is no fight left in me. Once he has gone, I sink into the armchair by the empty grate. I need to start searching the mind-world for Kel. Who knows how much time I've got before the Duke decides to remove him from the fort? But for a while all I can do is sit numbly digesting Tug's accusations against the Prince. Five of the Prince's men were not found dead with the rest of his escort. Where are they now?

  Twenty-Two

  The muscles beneath my eyes twitch with tiredness. I meant to sleep before tonight's banquet in honor of the “found” Prince of Caruca, but the last ten hours have sped by in a state of tense anticipation. Over and over, hope swelled as I stretched my awareness through the fort. Driven by the conviction that the next mind I touched would send me tumbling into a warm cloud of feathery dandelion seeds. The next mind would be Kel's. Or the next one. Or the next.

  But I have not found him. And now jittery and washed out, my taut attitude is doing nothing to appease the nervous maid. She tugs the threads of my dress too tight. She dabs garnet lip-dust on my lips and smudges dark charcoal so thickly around my eyes I look ghoulish. As she braids my hair in front of a silver-wrought mirror, I make a mental map of the fort, trying to work out what my search missed.

  But doubt spreads through me. What if the Duke has ordered Kel from Lyndonia? What if there is some truth in Brin's amulet protections, and they have confined my brother in a crystal-padded room where I cannot sense him. Or, worst of all, what if Kel's mind has altered beyond recognition? Experience shifts perception. The way we perceive and interpret the world alters the form and texture of a mind. Tug's mind reshaped right in front of my inner eye! How much could Kel’s have changed over the last few days?

  There comes a knock on the bedroom door, splintering my thoughts. The maid jumps. Flower-headed pins scatter.

  “Leave them.”

  “But your hair,” she stutters, “is half done.”

  “It is fine.”

  My visitor is not Tug, Brin or the Prince. I nod at the maid and when her back is turned, rush to the fireplace to stand with my hands in reach of the poker.

  The door opens. The maid curtseys and shuffles aside revealing the Duchess.

  “Your Grace,” I say, curtseying and bowing my head. Her guards wait out of sight. How many are with her, or where they are positioned is inconsequential. She is the threat, not them.

  As the maid leaves, Duchess Elise stands by the door, watching me. I do not rise until the tilt of her head shows me I have her permission. In the soft glow of the room's torchlight, her face is a mystery. Not a single line around the mouth nor eyes reveal her thirty years. Not a hint in her expression tells of her shock and sudden illness in the royal hall. It is as Tug said. As though it never happened.

  I smooth my hands over the pale-gold waist of my silk dress and take slow breaths, my chest pushing against the fitted bodice.

  She sways towards me, enquiring eyes locked on my face. “It is as I feared,” she says. “They have exhausted you riding through the night on horseback.”

  “I am well, Your Grace. Thank you for your concern. And I am happy you seem in better health now,” I add, prodding to see if there are any cracks in her mask of dignified composure.

  “I am much better, thank you, Mirra. A disagreement with the dragon-fish I ate for lunch. May I sit with you before we are called for dinner?”

  “Of course.” I move to the window seat, showing her my back so she cannot read the disappointment in my face. I had planned on spending a few minutes spying on the Duke and Duchess before the banquet. I wished to scan what they have done since our meeting in the great hall. The Prince will expect it. And without more information about the Duchess, I am vulnerable.

  She sits close beside me. Her auburn hair has been restyled in a stunning weave of gold and silver clips. Matching gold and silver leaves embroider her ruffled cream dress.

  “Your father must trust and esteem your guards very highly to have sent you and Prince Jakut all this way with a two-man escort.”

  I sit up straighter, tiredness diminished by a prick of adrenaline. She is probing for information about Tug. No Tug, she won't simply forget you. She might not divulge your presence to the Duke, not yet, but that is because she wishes to understand it first.

  “Tug and Brin are his best swordsmen, and Prince Jakut wished it so,” I say. “Under the circumstances, my father accepted it would be safer for us not to draw attention with a large group. I disguised myself as a boy.” I laugh, feigning embarrassment at this confession and hoping it will win a little of her confidence.

  She tilts her head and looks away, then she smiles. “Well, I can see you are resourceful and you must hold the Prince dear to your heart.” The tiny muscle beneath one of my eyes twitches wildly. “Tell me, what is your agreement? The Prince has asked your father for your hand?”

  I do not answer, knowing she will take my silence for assent.

  “Your father was not aware he is promised to another?”

  “What do you mean?” I blurt, not having to fake the surprise.

  “He has been promised to the Princess of Rudeash since he was fourteen. It is common knowledge in the Ruby Court and, I thought, in every court throughout Caruca.”

  Rudeash. A northern kingdom separated from Caruca by a hundred miles of snow and ice.

  The Duchess’s scintillating gaze is like the heat of a fire. I want to turn away. Deadran and Jakut have kept this from me on purpose. Jakut's confession in the great hall was timed to turn me into an unpoised, distracted girl from the north. How better to convince the Duke and Duchess I am so naive I believe the Prince's interest in me genuine? After all, I cannot even remain composed greeting a Duke! But how will he justify such a ruse of unkindness to his aunt and uncle?

  “We have not
had the chance to get to know one another,” the Duchess says, adjusting a silver pendant around her neck. It is the heavy, leafed pendant she clutched in her memory of losing Tug. “Such news from a stranger must be difficult to bear, but I can see it has not gone too far yet, and I must warn you of the Prince's reputation.”

  “Reputation?” I echo. My dress grows itchy. I pull at the waist where it's cutting off my breath.

  “He has seduced several young women at the royal court. His recent relationship with Lady Calmi led his father to advance the wedding. Last summer, he sent Prince Jakut to the tundra, ordered to return with his bride though she is not yet thirteen.”

  This explains why Jakut was in the far northern regions when his escort was attacked. I prickle at the idea of a young girl traded off to an unknown man in a kingdom thousands of miles from her home and family. Apparently, it is not better to be a princess than an outlawed Uru Ana.

  “I do not understand,” I say feebly. She pats my hand, then rises and crosses to my door. I think she means to leave, but she returns with a serving boy holding a tray. She takes two shiny silver goblets and hands me one.

  “It will help calm your nerves.”

  I sip. The wine tastes bitter, but the warmth that blooms in my chest is pleasant. I take a longer gulp, pretending to watch the boy as he slips away, while from the corner of my eye I observe the Duchess. Does she really believe my father is Lord Tersil from Delladea, and out of ignorant good faith, he allowed me to leave home with my fiancé Prince whose life is in danger? What fear lies in this court that they risk harbouring a child shadow weaver and close the fort to visitors?

  The wine unwinds my muscles. I sink back into the window seat, feeling more relaxed and confident. I will find a way of playing the naïve, wounded maiden to my advantage. Maybe Elise will take pity on me and help me escape Jakut. I could ask her for horses and secret passage from the fort. I could stow Kel in a giant chest of dresses, or a wagon, and remove him from under their noses.

  The Duchess studies me. “This is a lot to take in. But I can see you are a sensible girl.”