Shadow Born (The Shadow Accords Book 3)

by D. K. Holmberg

  All she needed was a way to get beyond the light, and beyond the cold. If she could do that, she would be able to reach for her magic.

  The temperature in the room dropped. Light flared.

  Carth abandoned any thought of trying to reach for her magics and decided instead that she would have to do this without any power, somehow managing to get past a man strong enough to use light and cold to counter her shadow and fire magic.

  He stood, practically daring her to attack, all while the cold and the bright light pressed on her.

  She almost kicked at him, thinking that if she could just knock him down, she could get past him, but she refrained.

  Playing Tsatsun with him, even though she’d only done it a few times, had taught her something of how he thought. He could shift tactics quickly and seemed prepared for anything she could throw at him—which was why she suspected he had prepared for the possibility she might attack. Ras would have some way of countering her.

  Attacking him like this wouldn’t work.

  Like playing the game, she would have to outthink him. He might know Tsatsun, but she would find a way to get free.

  It started by surprising him.

  She sat.

  Ras watched her, making no effort to attack.

  Carth reached for the fallen Tsatsun board and set it in front of her. With her foot, she pulled the pieces back toward her and began setting up the game board.

  “What are you doing?” Ras asked.

  She couldn’t read anything in his tone, but that wasn’t the point of what she had done.

  She had been predictable, and Ras had taken advantage of that fact. To escape him, she would have to become less predictable and find a way that would let her get beyond what he expected.

  “I’m playing Tsatsun. Would you like to play?”

  “I thought you said you don’t want to play.”

  Carth shrugged, making her first move. She slid one of the Helduns forward. Using the piece like that was a soft move, one that she knew from playing against herself would not lead anywhere, but there was one way that she’d discovered the Heldun pieces were useful: as a distraction. Playing against herself, she knew what she intended, but it was possible that Ras would not.

  She waited for Ras to join her, but he only stood, peering at her with his arms crossed.

  Carth turned the board and began making another move. This time, she played a stronger approach, one she thought would appeal to Ras.

  Spinning the board back, she moved again, this time deliberately choosing one of the warrior pieces so that Ras would think she intended a different strategy. As she turned the board another time, she hesitated.

  Had he been playing her?

  Watching how she played Tsatsun might give him insight into the way she thought, just as she had decided it would give her insight into the way he thought. Worse, the fact that she played against herself gave him plenty of opportunity to see how she would react.

  She noted him still watching her.

  Carth moved another piece, this time sliding one of the pyramids toward the other side of the game board. She did it with no strategy in mind, only wanting to move the piece.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that Ras frowned slightly.

  She spun the board. What she needed to do was somehow get him to think she played the way he would play, while really she did nothing more than move the pieces around. She needed to prevent him from discovering anything more about the way she played, or the way she would think when confronted with strategy. If she didn’t, he would always know how she would react.

  Carth made another move, this one clearly careless.

  Ras turned and left her alone.

  As he did, the cold didn’t shift, and the brightness to the light remained.

  She decided that was a sign of his disappointment.

  Maybe feigning carelessness wasn’t the right technique either.

  What she needed was convince him that she thought differently than she did. If he watched, as she suspected he did, she needed to convince him she would think one way, when really she would be thinking another. That would be the only way to surprise him. And seeing how quickly he was able to shift directions, she doubted it would buy her much time. Maybe enough to slip past his barriers, but not much more than that.

  Carth turned her attention to the board, this time focusing on playing, taking an approach that ran counter to the way she would normally play.

  The first moves were difficult. She had to get herself into a different mindset, but the longer she did it, the easier it became. Carth focused, trying to ignore the pain of the cold, and how the light burned through her, not sure she succeeded as well as she would have liked.

  9

  A surprising thing happened as a result of Carth’s playing with a different mindset. The more she played using that strategy, the easier it became to slip into someone else’s role, playing as if she were anyone other than herself. She tried playing as if she were an aggressive player, then someone who was meeker, and then she began trying to play as people she knew, trying to envision how Jhon might move around the board, thinking of ways to counter him, or Tessa, or even Invar.

  Invar’s mindset was the hardest for her to place herself into. The A’ras master had been a mystery to her while she had been in Nyaesh, and she didn’t know that she had ever really known what he was thinking, so for her to play like him required her to think through the way he might approach the game. First he would try to obtain as much information as possible, then he would try to manipulate the other side, force them to outplay themselves. Strangely, it was more fun playing as Invar than as others.

  She continued, each time trying to shift her way of thinking, trying to find an approach that would distract Ras when he played her next.

  Days stretched out. Carth lost track of the time.

  How long had she been here? Weeks, she suspected. The food never changed, and the bright light never shifted, never getting any dimmer so that she could easily sleep. Nor did the cold ease up, though she had long ago become accustomed to it, and it no longer bothered her as it had when she’d first found herself trapped here.

  The time between meals she spent playing the game, approaching each side as if she were someone else. There were two people she knew well enough to slip into their roles, but she had so far chosen not to do so.

  One evening, after her tray of dried bread and smoked meat had been passed through the light barrier—Carth hadn’t even seen whether it was Ras who sent it through to her or someone else—she decided it was time for her to play as her parents.

  She set the board up and began as her mother, knowing her father would have deferred the first move to her. Settling into her mother’s role was difficult. She had known her mother well, but there were parts of her that Carth had never really known. She had been an herbalist, but she must have been something more as well, something Carth never fully understood.

  Her mother would have been bold, but not too bold. She would have prepared for potential dangers, and she would not have sacrificed herself unnecessarily. Thinking through it in those terms helped her decide how to play as her mother.

  Thinking about how her father would have approached the game was trickier. She had known him to be somewhat deceptive. That was a part of all the games they had once played. But he would also have risked himself in ways that her mother would not. Knowing that he must have had a connection to the shadows helped her know other things about him, and remembering the way he would make it to the rooftops and then watch from above, Carth knew her father would want to see how things played out before making any real moves.

  Her parents were similar in many ways, she decided as she played. Both preferred to have as much information as they could before they acted, holding their positions so that they could gather information and then move into an attack.

  It didn’t surprise her that her mother struck first, just as it didn’t surprise her t
hat it seemed her father would have let her mother strike first. Her father would not only let her mother make the first attack, Carth thought, he would also let her think it had been her idea to do so.

  The game played out differently than others she had played. As she continued, as she got into the mind of each of her parents, she found herself missing them more than she had in months. When her mother forced her father into a corner, she could practically hear the cry of celebration her mother would have made, just as she could practically see the wry hint of a smile on her father’s face.

  When he played, slipping his pieces around so that he came in from the sides of the board, she envisioned the way he would have moved, and thought of the way he had demonstrated similar techniques to her.

  The game played out closely, but in the end her father won. She wasn’t surprised he would end up on the winning side, nor was she surprised that her mother would have been frustrated at losing, but would have done so graciously.

  She sat back, taking a deep breath, noting a stream of wetness down her cheek. When had she cried? Had it been when she had imagined her parents sitting on either side of the board, or when she’d imagined seeing her father’s face as he played, the same gleam in his eyes that he’d once had when she had learned to follow him?

  Carth left the pieces in place, preferring to leave them as they were.

  Ras entered the cell sometime later the next day. Carth had set the board up to play again, but hadn’t begun moving the pieces yet. She hadn’t decided who she would play as this time. When Ras appeared, she didn’t bother standing. It didn’t matter, and she didn’t want him to think she would threaten him, not if she intended to outsmart him.

  “You have resumed your play.”

  “You’ve been watching.”

  Carth didn’t know if he had been, but had figured that he would. It made the most sense, especially if he intended to know how she thought and what strategies she might use.

  “I watch.”

  “You want to know how I’ll play. How I’ll respond.”

  Letting him know she knew was part of her strategy. Ras had to know she understood what he intended.

  “Tsatsun reveals much about a person, I have found. You discover how one thinks, what one values, how one would respond when challenged. These are things that interest me.”

  “So that you can enslave more girls?”

  His eyes twitched. The effect was slight, barely more than a hint of a reaction, but enough that Carth wondered whether she had read the situation correctly. Hadn’t he been there when the girl was attacked? Didn’t he want to take her like the others?

  Only, Carth hadn’t seen anything since she’d been with Ras that would make her think he wanted to use her in that way. He made it clear that he studied her, but that was it. Studying and what those other men had in mind were different.

  “Perhaps you have learned less than I realized,” Ras said.

  “If you didn’t want to capture that girl, then why were you there?”

  Had he come for the men?

  There was another possibility, one that worried her: he could have been coming for Carth.

  Their ship had been in the port for several weeks, long enough to draw attention. Odian was dangerous, wasn’t that what Jhon and Tessa had both made clear? But they hadn’t made clear why. She had assumed the city was dangerous for the same reasons that other cities were dangerous, but maybe there was more to it.

  Had Jhon known about Ras?

  Carth had spent so long struggling with her capture, with the game that Ras had given her as a distraction, that she hadn’t spent nearly enough time thinking about why he had been there in the first place.

  Maybe the reverse was true. Maybe Jhon had hoped she’d capture Ras.

  Worse, she didn’t know how to determine which it was.

  Ras might have used the game to study her, but she had learned from him as well, hadn’t she? He didn’t do anything that would put himself in danger, so for him to have attacked her, he would have to have known what he was going to find, or at the least, what he was likely to find. He hadn’t seemed all that surprised to see her there, almost as if he’d expected someone of her abilities.

  What if someone on the ship had tipped him off that she was on board? What if she had been betrayed by those she had thought intended to take her to a place of safety, a place where she could study and learn and develop her abilities with the shadows?

  Carth pushed those thoughts away. That wasn’t likely. It would be as likely as Jhon betraying her and sending her to Ras.

  More likely was that she was now thinking the way Ras wanted her to think, questioning everything, forcing her to play his game.

  “You ask the right questions, but you take too long in getting to them,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you have been with me for the last month, yet you are only now coming to the questions you should have been asking from the beginning. That is the reason you were so easily defeated, shadow born. Had you questioned differently, and considered the answers differently, you would have come to your conclusion weeks ago.”

  “And what conclusion is that?”

  She hadn’t really come to any sort of conclusion. All she knew was that she had been captured, and that Ras so far had threatened her, but seemed to have no real interest in harming her.

  “That you still have much to learn.”

  “I’ve never questioned that I have much to learn.”

  “No? You would attack without understanding why you attack? That is a sign of someone who has not planned well. A prepared mind would not make such a mistake.”

  “And Tsatsun prepares your mind?”

  A hint of a smile pulled on his lips. Ras rarely showed any emotion. It was one of the more infuriating things about him, so when he did, she knew it was real.

  “Tsatsun, and other similar exercises.”

  She stared at the board. “This is not an exercise. It’s a game.”

  “Even games can teach much, don’t you think, shadow born of Ih-lash?”

  The cold of the room seemed to sink into her heart. How much did Ras know about her? About her people? Did he know about her parents? Did he know that they were gone? She wouldn’t put it past him to have discovered things that she thought to hide. With his abilities, with the magic that he possessed, anything was possible.

  “I think that games are games.”

  He smiled fully then and tipped his head toward the game board. “Sometimes they are nothing more than games. Other times, they are something else.”

  “Which is this?”

  Ras tapped his graying temple. “That is always the question, isn’t it?”

  10

  Carth lost track of how many days had passed since Ras had last visited. Enough that she’d had time to play Tsatsun as several other people, each time shifting her focus, trying to place herself within the mind of another. So far, she hadn’t found anyone who had managed to defeat her father. Invar had come close, but there was a rigid set of rules she followed when she played as him, and those rules made it difficult for him to defeat someone with a more flexible set of rules.

  It was days after she had last seen Ras when she decided that she would play as him.

  She didn’t know if she could mimic his style as well as she wanted, but it was time for her to slip into his mindset, and see if she could come up with a way to understand him better. Through her play as others, she had come to understand them better. Not only her parents—and learning how much she could discover of her parents by playing a game from their perspective had surprised her—but also those she had only recently met. Jhon, and Tessa, and Adam, and even Invar. There were others; Carth had played as friends from the A’ras, and even as some of the A’ras masters, but it had been easiest for her to put herself in the mindsets of those she knew best—or had known more recently.

  Ras should fall into that category as well. She h
ad even played against him, so she should have some idea how he would react to different moves, but he had been unpredictable when she played him, so she wasn’t entirely sure she could get into his frame of mind.

  If she could—and if she could play like him—it was possible she would be able to learn a key to beating him.

  That more than anything motivated her to attempt to play as him.

  Who would his opponent be?

  Carth considered the options. It would be interesting to see how her father would play against Ras, but she doubted he would win. Invar wouldn’t work either, and those were the two strongest players she could imagine. It left her with one option: herself.

  Carth would move first. Ras would have let her, she decided. He would have wanted to know what her opening move would be, so he could plan how to react.

  Carth thought about how she would open. There were many options, but she stuck with the simplest strategy, one that would let her see how Ras might play. It was something her father would have done, and a move that she had made often while playing with him.

  Switching to Ras’s perspective, she observed how Carth’s first move gave her a view of the board and decided to make a decisive open. Ras would play like that, at least until Carth revealed herself, then he would change his approach to match hers.

  They each moved, Carth playing conservatively, trying to give herself time to see how Ras would play, but when Carth played as Ras, she knew the key to what Carth did, and kept her at arm’s length, preventing her from using the Stone and pushing it.

  Neither side sacrificed their pieces easily.

  Then Carth made a mistake. Ras attacked, using her move against her. And the game was over.

  She sat back, shaking her head. Even when she played as Ras, she couldn’t beat him.

  The light shifted. It was subtle, barely more than a blink. Had she not been subjected to the brightness of the room for as long as she had, she might not have noticed. As it was, she recognized the change and knew immediately what it meant: Ras appeared.