Spellkeeper

by Courtney Privett

  Hael rested her hand on Adina's knee. “What did she write to you?”

  “She wrote out part of the Augury. 'Silver and gold unite, unbreakable, and gold runs through the veins of the child born upon the autumn winds. As chaos descends upon carved peaks and moonbeams, the gold beneath becomes the gold above and the Auric Harbinger discovers a purpose. Together and in isolation, the children of the future will rise. Autumn's Child, of blood both common and noble, draws light from the fires of the old world to create the new.' Those are two separate verses she's put together. Then she goes on to tell me that she can't be the Moonlight Guardian's heir because I am and she's destined for something else. She asks me to leave the sanctuary and join her. She called me by name, my real name and not the one elven tradition gave me.”

  “This confuses me,” Hael said.

  “It certainly is confusing.” Adina pulled her sleeve over her thumb and erased the slateboard. “She's in love with Tessen Lim and has been since before she brought him here. Even when his ability took over and his behavior became strange, she loved him. There is a phrase in the Augury that says something like, 'Gold is his dragon and silver are his hands.' That's about a character called the Soulseer. An empath. He's mentioned elsewhere as the father of Autumn's Child, whose mother is a child of silver from noble birth. Silverwind is the title Kai and Kemi shared as the youngest children of the High King and his primary consort. I think she wants to make Tessen her own consort, and I know her love for him is genuine but she's also trying to fulfill a prophesy that is unlikely to actually be a prophesy.”

  “How does the story end?” Hael asked. She didn't understand many of Adina's words, but she did understand the worry in her tone.

  Adina shook her head and stared down at the letter. “I don't know. Kai didn't know, either. Kemi is the one who found the book, and she ripped out the second half and burned it before we could read it.” She laced her fingers behind her neck and inhaled deeply. “I knew when she left that she never intended to return here. For all her flaws and strange ideas, she's a good person. She's also a trusting one. She believed it when Mom told her that our father killed our older sister, Lyliana, because she fell in love with a human. And for some reason I don't understand, Father let her continue believing it. He never laid a hand on Lyliana. I think my mother might have. Lyliana was her heir, and my mother holds sacred that not only does the Moonlight Guardian need to be female of body, but also a pure-blooded elf. Lyliana fell in love with a human named Garren Hyrrian, a scout in the Moonlight Regiment. She was carrying his child when he died during a mission. Mother took her to one of the moon temples to give birth, but neither she nor the child returned alive. Lyliana was cremated on the family pyre in Anthora, but I don't know what happened to her baby. No one would admit she had been pregnant. Mother told the rest of her children that Father had Lyliana executed for treason because she had an affair with a human, and my sister's death was manipulated into a warning about the necessity of keeping the Lightborn and Zephyrain lines purely elven.”

  “Tessen isn't an elf.” Hael looked toward the window. The light outside was fading. Soon it would be night and she would need to tell her people they were leaving. “He is human, isn't he?”

  “He likely has some elven ancestry since most Satlans do, but he is human.” Adina rubbed her sleeve over the slateboard again, removing the remaining white residue. “I was never close with Lyliana. She was twenty-nine and I was fourteen when she died. There was a break of ten years between Kalantor, the youngest of my parents' first six children, and me. My mother didn't want to have any more children after my father grew his dragon wings, but apparently I was an accident and my father didn't want me to be lonely so he convinced her to have another child. That ended up being twins, their second set of twins. Kai and Kemi. Lyliana was from my parents' first set, and Lyndarian has never recovered from her death. Kemi told me that he's still mean, nothing but mean, and he was the worst bully out of all my brothers. Nyx, Kal, and Nellantor were awful, but nowhere near as cruel as Lyndarian. Liantor told me he wasn't always like that, but he lost a wife, then a child, then Lyliana's death broke him completely. I miss Liantor. There are twenty-two years between us, and I always felt like he was more of an extra father than a brother to me.”

  Hael took the slateboard from Adina and set it aside. “I was my parents' firstborn. There were others after me. Sometimes one, sometimes twins. Uldru have a lot of twins. My parents weren't allowed to keep any of their other children except for Elan. The others were traded to other hives that wanted to breed Uldru with hair and skin like mine, and I don't know what happened to them. I only knew sometimes my mother nursed babies that weren't hers, babies who came from other hives in exchange for my siblings. Maybe only one or two of my lost siblings has reached breeding maturity, and the others are children if they still live. My parents are dead now, eaten by Varaku who are also dead. They died because they defended me when the Varaku meant to skin me alive and turn my flesh into the golden leather they wanted so much they couldn't allow a golden Uldru born etten to live any more. My parents gave me the time I needed to plan and organize the revolt that destroyed the hive and brought us here. Now I only have Elan and he has become as much my son as my brother. I promised our parents I would try to keep him from dying. I'll never have any children of my own, so I take care of him and he'll have his own free-born children and he'll live to be ancient.”

  “You're a good sister,” Adina said, her voice hoarse. She startled as Ragan let himself out of the cellar and exited the house.

  “You should be a good sister, too. I think you should go to Kemi like she wants and care for her like I care for Elan. She needs you. Help her make good choices so she lives to be ancient.”

  Adina leaned over her knees and embraced Hael. “I want to stay with you. I know our lives and experiences up until now have been so incredibly different, but for some reason I feel like you understand me better than anyone else. I'm afraid I've made my first friend only to lose her.”

  “Why do you think you're losing me?” Hael asked, confused.

  “Aren't you joining with the Sungate Uldru?”

  “Yes, but we're not staying at Sungate,” Hael said. She inhaled the floral scent of Adina's hair as she kissed her cheek. “If Juna's Uldru want to join mine, I intend to take them somewhere else. We need to be our own people, but we're not ready. We still need some help learning about this world so it doesn't kill us outright. That's why I want to go with you to Kemi, and I think Rin and Ragan intended to join her after Sungate too, since she has their families with her. All of you are strong and you know things we don't. You can teach us what we need to be fully free.”

  Adina regarded her with curiosity. “You think we should take two hundred Uldru to Kemi?”

  “No. I think I should take two hundred Uldru to the people who have helped us and who can teach us what we need at a place that is safe. My people will follow me because they haven't learned how to live without following, and I think Juna will make it so his Uldru follow me, too. They need us and we need them if we are going to survive.” Faint starlight appeared through the crack in the curtains. Across the house, the floorboards creaked as Elan woke for the night. It was time to speak to the others, but Adina's embrace was so comfortable she didn't want to move. “I don't know how to get there. I need help with that. From you and the others, and maybe from the orcs Rin says are her friends. One night, then another, and we'll get where we are meant to be. And you'll be with me, because you're my first best friend, too.”

  Part 3

  Beginnings

  24

  Shan

  A gurgle of flowing water and a steady thump of metal striking stone reverberated through Shan's nightmares. He couldn't move or open his eyes, only listen while his numb body continued to sleep. There was a fungal tang to the heavy air, and a lingering botanical scent like one might find absorbed into the walls of an abandoned florist shop. He felt no pain, no sensation at
all except a vague chill. It was almost welcome, considering the last thing he remembered was lying on the floor of his washroom with a raging headache.

  He listened and slowly eased into awareness. It was so quiet here, quiet and still. The running water might have been a stream or small river, but the echoes told him it was underground and so was he. The thump was harder to identify. Maybe someone was mining, but the rhythm never varied and he heard no other sounds that made him think there could be a person nearby. No breathing noises, no shuffling feet, no clearing of a throat . . . nothing. Wherever he was, he was alone.

  And he was bored.

  His numb body refused to respond to even the simplest commands and his mind wouldn't allow him to slip back into sleep. If he focused on the sounds they became torturous tick-tocks that gathered in his throat and pushed his heart lower into his gut with each beat. If he focused on the scents he was left with memories of the underground and a need to scream that couldn't be satisfied. He had no voice, no sense of touch, no vision, only scents and sounds and a mind scrambling to forget he'd once been abandoned underground to die.

  Maybe he could pretend he wasn't locked within his own mind. With no pain to distract him, it wasn't as difficult as he expected. He had no idea what position his body was in, so he decided he was on his side in his own bed with Marita nestled in his arms. There was no comfort or warmth to be found in the facsimile of her, only memory. He summoned every detail of her—the fine little wisps of auburn hair that escaped her hairline, the abstract freckling on her shoulders, the way she sometimes drew a deep breath and held it as she slept. He imagined running his fingers along the soft skin of her side to the familiar curve of her hip and felt...

  Nothing.

  This was as unbearable as the memories of the underground. The facsimile of her was nothing but an echo. It wasn't her and he couldn't convince himself otherwise, so it brought him anguish instead of comfort.

  Maybe something more distant would be better.

  The running water became a downpour and the thump was nothing more than the wind knocking a shutter into the wall of his childhood home. The musty smell was just a factor of a rare Jadeshire winter storm, and the flowers were ones Tessen had picked for their mother but had been left forgotten too long in their vase.

  He was in a pillow nest within a blanket tent, his head on his mother's lap. She stroked his hair as she read to him from a book of myths. Tessen was there, too, sitting upright along Rin's other side. He was a child and so was Shan, and nothing could hurt them as long as they were shielded by their mother.

  This projection of naïve innocence was almost as bad as the Marita facsimile. The kind and gentle world of his childhood had never existed. It was only an illusion, and its comfort was fleeting. Rin did her best to protect her children from the cruelty of the real world, but in the end it didn't matter. Little by little the fog of childhood burned away to reveal the truth, and neither Shan nor Tessen could withstand the inferno before them without breaking. Their mother didn't fail them, she just wasn't enough when their world came crashing down.

  Trying to distract his mind was only making the situation worse. But what else could he do when his mind was all he had? Walk his way through mathematical tables? Compose poetry he'd forget before he had the chance to write it down? Imagine revenge upon everyone who had ever hurt him?

  Everything was pointless and his patience was waning. Couldn't move, couldn't see, couldn't scream, and a mind of shattered memories and singed regrets wasn't anywhere he wanted to be forced to stay.

  Maybe he shouldn't have killed all those Jarrah. It wasn't intentional, but they still died. No one could teach him the Seven Stars ritual so he had to learn it himself, and his mistakes while learning it had consequences. He didn't kill any of the Nightshadow children, just the adults, but still it pained him to think about it. At least they didn't suffer. They were asleep, and then they were dead, and that was it. He wouldn't have continued trying to perfect the spell if they had felt anything.

  A single face hovered next to his memories, the sandy-haired, dark-eyed elf who became the only adult Nightshadow to survive Shan's purge. He hadn't intended to spare Radamar, but something about the way the man protected his tiny daughter with no regard to his own safety made him reconsider his original intent. The shadows whispered to Shan that his cousin had been just as brutalized by Ranalae as he was, and he decided not to leave Radamar impaled on a post in the center of Jadeshire with the artifacts and crimes of the Jarrah scattered about him. Instead, he let Radamar take his daughter to safety, then stripped him of his magic and left him to wander the desert alone.

  Shan didn't know what became of Radamar, but that abandonment was probably enough to kill him. Maybe it was crueler than what befell their kin. Lingering, confused, helpless death instead of an instant slip into the void. He must be somewhere in the desert now, a scattered skeleton picked clean by vultures and bleached by the southern sun. At least the little girl was safe. Not one of the Nightshadow children had been harmed beyond the pain of becoming orphans deposited in lands far beyond the Crimson Realm.

  Run, run, little mind, right into this trap. What if the world retaliated and came to balance in such a way that his own child would find itself an orphan in a faraway realm? What if that retaliation meant Shan was not outright killed, but like Radamar was stripped of everything he was and left to die alone in a forsaken desert? If that was going to happen, he hoped it happened early, before the child had time to make memories of him. He hoped Radamar's daughter was young enough when they were separated that she wouldn't remember how he cried when he let her go.

  Or maybe it was better if she did remember how her father fought to keep her safe. Either way, the father was certainly dead now and the daughter was being raised as something other than a Nightshadow. She wouldn't become a Jarrah, and neither would her young kin committed to similar fates.

  It was cold now, uncomfortably so, and a sharp pain stung his heart to spread through his veins. That was something, he supposed. Maybe whatever spell he was under would soon wear off and he could at least find out what kind of place he'd been abandoned in.

  But it didn't wear off. The sharp sting was just a sharp sting, and the chill just a chill. Nothing else changed. He tried to hold his breath, but was he even breathing? He couldn't feel his lungs, and if his heart was beating he couldn't hear it.

  Wait. Maybe he could. Maybe that continuous thump was his heart and not some distant and persistent miner. Was he hearing the sound wrong? What was the river, then? The blood in his veins? Maybe his own heart was all he'd been hearing, that torturous thump and gurgling drone. If so, he was even more locked away than he thought, and his only remaining sense was of smell. Unless that was nothing but a hallucination, a faint memory drawn from the time vaults of his mind. Maybe it was his own scent, a residue left by his too-brief dragonbind.

  This was worse than conjuring images of the people he loved. He knew he wasn't dreaming, so this was awareness with nothing to be aware of. What good was a mind when nothing existed beyond? This was torture, a cruelty so different from anything he'd felt before that all he could do was silently cry and silently scream.

  What was this? Why? Was it a spell, or had some accident befallen him and rendered him entombed? Had his headache been something other than a headache, perhaps a stroke or aneurysm that now prevented his body and brain from connecting? Did he still have a body? Was he dead and this was the hellish afterlife that followed?

  Alone in the darkness, deprived of all exterior senses, and unable to coax his mind to sleep or to enter any form of sustained escape, he slid into despair. The only thing left for him to do was futile and imaginary. He stared into the black nothing, listened to the clang of his own heart and the roar of his own blood, let the crumbling scent of old flowers settle as a shroud around his intangible mind...

  ...and screamed.

  MEMORIES SWIRLED AROUND him, little vortexes ripping apart the never-ending
black.

  There was newborn Alon, fussy in his arms and smelling of sweet vanilla and fresh milk. He was pale and fragile, with wispy black curls and Ragan's blue Faeline eyes. Tessen shied away and wouldn't hold their new brother, but ten year old Shan never wanted to let him go. Even when he rooted, even when he cried, Shan wanted to keep him close. He'd sit next to their mother as she nursed and Ragan as he cuddled so he could touch the baby's foot and kiss the delicate skin of his brow.

  There was Arlan, the first person he ever kissed. Shan was twelve and Arlan was a beautiful Satlan boy from the Sandstone Realm. He was visiting his cousins in Jadeshire and Shan fell in love with him. He tasted of fresh dates and adolescent dreams, but he was a fleeting dream who returned to his home within a week of that one sweet and uncertain kiss.

  A new vortex swept away the memory of his first kiss and replaced it with Ragan sobbing into Alon's stuffed doll while Rin curled into a weeping ball next to him. They both carried the sickly sweet stench of illness and barely acknowledged fourteen year old Shan's intrusion. He lay behind his mother on the bed and embraced her, but he knew nothing he did would bring her any comfort. It wouldn't comfort him, either, but he needed to be close to someone and Tessen had disappeared into his loft to cry alone. Their grief over Alon never relented, it only changed into the constant knowledge that something significant had been ripped from their lives and could never be replaced. Alon should have just celebrated his ninth birthday, but instead he was five years dead. And so was Calen, the baby Rin and Ragan lost a couple months after Alon. They said the same illness that killed Alon had hurt Calen's development and caused his premature birth. Shan and Tessen hadn't been allowed to see him. He was born and died during the night, and was taken away before they woke.