by Jade Mere
TWO DAYS had passed since his encounter with Zinc, and this morning was the first morning he hadn’t needed to take painkillers. His head still hurt, but he decided he could tolerate the pain if it meant keeping a clear mind. Dyraien had asked about his bruises, and Tahki had told him a gingoat had kicked him. The prince offered to put the animal down, but Tahki begged him not to. Tahki had also told Gale he’d filled the order for her. He lied and said everything went fine, but she whacked him on the head with a wooden spoon anyway and said not to do her any favors. The paper for Sornjia’s documents still hadn’t come, and Gale reordered it. Tahki hadn’t told her about Dyraien’s visit, a risky choice, but Sornjia said he’d be extra cautious in case he stopped by again.
A few things still bothered Tahki about the incident in Edgewater. First, Gale claimed she’d never dealt with Zinc before, but Dyraien claimed she had, so one of them was lying. Second, when Gale dropped off lunch yesterday afternoon, Dyraien appeared agitated around her. Third, Rye told Dyraien Zinc tried to steal their money. He gave him a different version of the story so as not to condemn Tahki or Gale but made certain to emphasize the scam. Dyraien only shrugged and told him that that was the risk of hiring criminals. Tahki had expected him to be outraged, not indifferent.
Although these things troubled him, something good had come of the Zinc incident: his friendship with Rye. They hadn’t spoken much the last two days, but every few hours Rye would happen by his room and glance in to see if his injuries were healing. This morning, Tahki had woken up extra early to help Rye lunge the gingoats, a task he hadn’t enjoyed, but he liked spending more time with Rye.
He drew busily now at his desk, ideas popping into his head left and right. Though none of his designs were completed, a few of them showed potential.
Tahki leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms, careful not to strain too hard, when he heard a loud thump a few rooms down. He sat still in his chair and listened. Two more thumps sounded. The walls rang lightly from the vibration. The castle had been unusually quiet this morning. Not even the queen wailed.
Three more thuds knocked against the wall, and this time he followed the sound to the taxidermy room. The door was closed. He heard footsteps inside. Maybe Dyraien had brought his mother to pet the animals.
Something inside hit the floor with a thunk. Tahki knocked. “Dyraien?” No one answered. He pushed the handle slowly and slid his body through the gap in the door. A plume of dust rose among the animal heads and bodies. He looked around the room until his eyes settled on the great black cat in the center. Someone had pushed her over. The wind might have tipped her, but the windows were shut, and she looked too heavy to be brought down by a draft.
He stared at the great black beast. She looked so foreign here, contained in this small room. He wondered where she’d been caught, where the bullet had pierced her, taking away her last breath, and then he thought of Sornjia. His brother always sympathized with animals, even dead ones. One time he tried to save a few goats from the meat markets, but their father made him return them. Sornjia fasted and meditated for three days straight after that, and when he emerged, he said he understood that everyone must make their own choices in life, and he wouldn’t interfere with the life of a shepherd again. Tahki hadn’t understood what Sornjia meant at the time, but now he knew it was about choices. Sornjia chose not to eat or harm animals, but he couldn’t make that choice for someone else.
Tahki started to leave the room, but the idea of leaving the cat on the ground seemed wrong somehow. He reached down to try to tilt her upright, but as he did, the faintest grumble rolled out from inside her throat.
He froze.
The cat lay still. He’d probably imagined it and reached for her again. When his hand touched her face, a jolt of energy surged through him, the way static moves, only it shot through his entire body.
Tahki jerked back. His body tingled, arms and legs feeling as though they were asleep. He rubbed his sides until his skin felt normal again and faced the creature. The dark walls of the castle felt too close. The air in the room tasted humid. He took a deep breath and then reached for the animal one more time.
The cat blinked.
Tahki stopped. “What?”
He stared as she turned her moist, reflective eyes his way. Before he could act, the black cat leaped off the floor, her paws catching him in the belly. She bared her long white fangs in his face. He squirmed beneath her, pain coursing through his body from his previous injuries. He kicked as hard as he could at the fur on her belly. The cat moved an inch, and he slid out from under her, scrambling to his feet.
She hunched in front of the door, claws extended. He ran to the other end of the room where hunting knives hung on the wall. He grabbed one with a red handle and faced her, his back pressed between deer antlers. The cat released a deep roar that drummed in his skull. Several boar heads fell off the wall. He wanted to scream for help, but her roar would bring everyone there.
The cat lunged. Tahki darted left and brought the knife into her shoulder. It didn’t go deep, but it stuck. She knocked his body over with one paw the size of his chest. His breath left him and he gasped, falling to the floor as an explosion of pain tore through him.
The cat regarded the knife with an intelligent look of irritation. Tahki watched in horror as a nest of black, oily eel-like creatures erupted from the wound. They slithered like ink around the knife, formed a sleek black hand, and yanked it out. It fell to the floor with a clank. He had read stories and seen illustrations of gods and demons, but he’d never seen anything like her. She turned toward him and padded forward, her golden eyes flickering like the sun.
Tahki scooted back. He sat about ten feet from the door and stood slowly. The cat growled and lowered her head, muscles tensed, ready to pounce. Then he reached behind him and grabbed a taxidermy black-winged fox with both hands. Before she had a chance to attack again, he hurled the fox at her face and jolted for the door. The cat hissed and screeched, and he heard her paws leave the ground. He reached the door, slid into the hallway, and slammed it shut behind him, his body bracing against it for the expected impact.
Nothing hit the door. He waited and pressed an ear to the wood. No sound stirred inside.
“What are you doing?”
Tahki jumped. Dyraien stood in the hall, watching him.
“Aren’t you a sweaty mess,” Dyraien said. “What have you been up to?”
Tahki swallowed. “I… I was….”
“Yes?”
He studied the prince. Surely he’d heard the cat roar or wondered about the sounds of their fight. Tahki’s hands shook, his teeth pressed together, and his knees buckled. Below them, he heard Rye sawing in his workshop. No one had heard, and he couldn’t tell them about the cat. They’d think he was crazy.
“I just wanted to stretch my legs,” he said in the most confident voice he could muster. “I guess I’m a little out of shape.”
Dyraien raised an eyebrow. “You know there are at least a thousand acres of land outside to run around on. But you chose to do it in here?”
Tahki tried to shrug, but his muscles felt stiff with fear. “I wanted to be near my room in case I had an idea.”
Dyraien smiled a little, but it was an impatient smile. “And how are your ideas coming along?”
Tahki needed to look inside the room to see if the cat was there or if it had been another hallucination.
“Actually,” Tahki said. “I have a design. It might take me a few days to finalize it, but I think you’ll be pleased.”
Dyraien beamed at this. “That’s good to hear, Tahki. That’s very, very good.” He opened his mouth, shut it, then opened it again. “I was beginning to think—well, never mind. I look forward to seeing your work.” He walked away with a smile on his face, and Tahki wished he hadn’t lied. None of his ideas were close to perfect. But he’d needed Dyraien to leave him alone so he could process the cat attack.
Tahki held his breath, turned to the
door, opened it a sliver. Nothing stirred inside. The black cat was gone. The boar heads lay on the ground, the red-handled knife resting in the center. Tahki brought his hand to his chest and cringed. He lifted his shirt. A great red mark spread across his skin, tiny beads of blood dripping down from where the cat had pounced.
This wasn’t right. The last time he’d hallucinated, everything had reverted to its original state. There had been no water in the halls, and his clothing had been dry. But now he bled, and the taxidermy room looked like a sandbull had been let loose inside.
Which meant it hadn’t been a hallucination. But that was impossible. Dead things didn’t come to life. And why had no one else seen it? Heard it? A cat that size couldn’t simply vanish.
Tahki limped cautiously back to his room. This castle wasn’t safe. Something was after him. Only him. He needed to tell someone, to get help. Whatever was happening to him, whatever this dark thing was that hunted and tormented him, he knew he couldn’t ignore it any longer.
Chapter 11
“IF YOU keep scratching, it won’t heal,” Sornjia said.
Tahki scratched the clawmark on his chest. The wound had swollen and pushed up red skin in three lines. He sat in Sornjia’s room, if it could be called a room. The air tasted stale in the small space, like too much breath filled it. Sornjia didn’t complain, not about the rickety bed that moaned like a dying dog every time you shifted your weight, or the musty odor of boiled clams from downstairs, or the unsettling old lady noises Gale’s body produced on an all-seafood diet. But Sornjia was too much like their father. He took every unsavory situation as a humbling experience.
“So what are you going to do?” Sornjia said.
Tahki scratched at his wound. “I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked for your help.”
He had told Sornjia everything last night: the dark shape in his room, the water, the black gates, Zinc, the cat. Sornjia hadn’t ridiculed him, but that didn’t make Tahki feel any better. He wanted his brother to tell him he was being paranoid, that it was all in his head, that he should see a doctor. But Sornjia had listened, both sympathetic and patient, never once calling his sanity into question.
Sornjia sat beside him. “You won’t like what I have to say.”
“How do you know?”
“You want me to say it’s anxiety or something logical, something you can contain and control.”
“Maybe it is.”
Sornjia pointed at the marks on his chest. “Those don’t look like a manifestation of an overworked imagination.”
Tahki reached for his shirt and tugged it over his head. “Fine. What do you think happened?”
Sornjia curled his fingers into his palm. “I feel like a sparrow’s wings are fluttering just under my eyelids.”
“Sornjia.”
“I have a confession to make,” Sornjia said. “But you can’t be angry.”
“What kind of confession?”
Sornjia reached under his pillow and pulled out a handful of blue paper. Tahki stared at the paper. “It came a few days ago,” Sornjia said. “Gale brought back a stack of letters from Edgewater. I found it before she sorted through the pile.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The encounter with Dyraien might have been avoided if Sornjia had told him about the document papers.
“I couldn’t leave you alone,” Sornjia said. “The castle, I think it’s afraid of you.”
Tahki sat on his hands so he wouldn’t scratch. Though he should have been furious at Sornjia, it was nice to have someone to talk to, even if that someone spouted crazy theories.
“The castle isn’t alive,” Tahki said.
“Didn’t you always say you wanted to give your drawings life? That you treat architecture like a living, breathing thing?”
“It’s just an expression. Besides, I’m the victim here. That thing attacked me. Not the other way around.”
“How big did you say the cat was?”
“It was the size of a sandbull, only slender.”
“Right,” Sornjia said. “And you just happened to get away because you’re such a great fighter?”
Tahki frowned. “What do you mean?”
“If a creature that size wants to kill you, it will kill you.”
“It did try to kill me.”
“It barely scratched you.”
“I thought you said you believed me.”
“I do. But I think you’re interpreting the events wrong. I think the castle is trying to tell you something, and you need to listen.”
Tahki flopped back and the bed moaned. The cat had been real. He couldn’t deny that. Did that mean the water had been real as well? Or the dark thing in his room? Had the cat visited him the first night?
“I think you should tell Rye,” Sornjia said.
“Why would I do that?”
“You trust him.”
“Which is exactly why I shouldn’t tell him. He’ll think I’m crazy.”
“He helped you with Zinc. Why wouldn’t he help you with these encounters as well?”
“Because Zinc is real. But these encounters? I’m not sure what they are. No one else has seen them or heard them or been bitten by them.”
“Which is all the more reason to tell Rye,” Sornjia said. “Trust is something that situates itself inside you and ties all your muscles and bones together. It’s a feeling of wholeness, a feeling of control even when you have none. He’ll listen to you, Tahki. He’ll believe you.”
Tahki pulled a pillow over his face and let out a muffled groan. “I’m not involving Rye.” He threw the pillow on the bed. “And don’t you try to involve him, either. He’s not some merchant I upset in the market you need to apologize to on my behalf. Pretending to be me here could get us both killed.”
Sornjia bowed his head. “If that’s how you feel, I’ll leave it be. But we can’t ignore what’s been happening to you. Dyraien is hiding something. I sensed something inside him when he came to the house, something unsteady, like he and I teetered on a thin piece of wood, trying to balance the other’s weight. Maybe he has something to do with the strange encounters.”
Tahki knew Dyraien wasn’t telling him everything about the purpose of the castle, but it made no sense to bring Tahki here just to torment him. “Dyraien gave me my freedom. Where would I be if he hadn’t hired me?”
“He has control over you, over the castle, over the people in the castle. And when people like that lose control, they become dangerous.”
“Dyraien isn’t dangerous.”
“He’s a prince about to lose his country. There isn’t anything more dangerous than a person about to lose something.”
A metal pot banged against the wall downstairs. “Make yourselves useful and set the table,” Gale’s raspy voice called.
They stood up at the same time. “What should I do, Sornjia? I can’t tell Rye. I’ve caused him enough trouble.”
“You need to find out what Dyraien is keeping behind those black gates.”
Before Tahki could reply, Sornjia skipped out of the room. Tahki followed his brother downstairs into the kitchen. Gale had set out a plate of clams and a large bowl of rice.
“Too busy to help with lunch?” she asked.
Sornjia smiled. “Tahki is having nightmares.”
Gale snorted. “Problems of entitled children are never problems.”
Tahki picked at a clam. “You don’t have anything else?”
“I have an old shoe you can suck on,” Gale said. She stuck a glob of clam in her mouth and chewed in circles, the way a gingoat chews hay.
“Thank you for lunch,” Sornjia said. He took a heaping pile of rice but left the clams. Apparently clams had feelings too and weren’t on his list of things he could eat. Tahki was surprised he ate anything at all. Sornjia had said once that plants could talk and water could feel, like the entire world was a sentient thing.
Tahki rolled the clam in circles around his plate.
Gale sighed. “If
you don’t like it, you can fish in the river. Every year around this time the blue-headed trout make their way to the ocean. It’s easy catching.”
“I don’t fish,” Tahki said.
“Too good for that too?”
“He’s afraid of water,” Sornjia said.
“What a silly thing to fear.”
“Our mother threw him in a lake when he was five,” Sornjia said. “He almost drowned.”
Tahki’s pulse thumped in his throat. Sornjia had said it so casually, like it was nothing. Like the worst night of his life made for casual table conversation. Gale regarded Tahki curiously.
“You make her sound like a monster,” Tahki said. “She saved my life.”
Sornjia gave Gale a sad smile. “The palace caught fire. Father and I got out, but Mother and Tahki were trapped inside. She picked him up and threw him out the window into the lake below, but the fire was too fast. She couldn’t get out.”
The events played through Tahki’s head in the same order they always did: drawing with his mother, the thick smell of ash, the burst of heat, the screams, the trembling arms that wrapped around him, the fall, the cold, the struggle for air, the blackness. He’d read once that people only remember a small portion of a memory, but Tahki would remember the fear he had felt that night for the rest of his life. His father had called it a miracle when Gotem rescued him. A one in a million chance that Gotem had seen Tahki plunge. Sornjia said it hadn’t been luck or chance, that Gotem had known. But if Gotem had known, why not stop the fire? Why not save his mother? Fortune-telling was a cheap trick used on the weak-minded. No one could know the future, just like no one could change the past.
Tahki glanced at Gale, expecting mockery.
“I’m sorry,” Gale said. For the first time since meeting her, he saw something akin to pity in the hard lines of her face. Before Tahki could reply, a loud knock rattled the door. Sornjia scooted into his room without being told. Tahki wondered who it could be. Dyraien or Rye wouldn’t knock, and no one was supposed to know about the location of the castle. Except Zinc. And possibly Zinc’s people. And maybe half of Edgewater for all he knew.