Shadow Born (The Shadow Accords Book 3)

by D. K. Holmberg

  One of the men snickered—probably the older one, she decided. They likely thought they would be able to take the silvers off of her. Carth had no intention of letting them win more than a single round.

  “Girl!”

  Carth turned slowly, making a show of annoyance. “Yeah?”

  “Maybe we were too quick.” His gaze darted around the tavern. “This kind of place gets all different kinds, you know? Most of the time they don’t really want to dice.”

  “What do they want?” Carth asked.

  The two men glanced at each other and the older one shook his head. A surge of nausea washed over her. She knew exactly what they hoped she would have approached them for.

  “Doesn’t matter. Do you really want to dice?”

  She glanced back to Guya. “Well, my father might not want me to.”

  They looked past her and to Guya. The coloring of the older one faded a little, and he gripped the dice more tightly than he had before.

  “What do you say, Father? Can I play?”

  Guya blinked before nodding and waving a hand, falling into the role more quickly than she would have expected from him. “I’m going to sit here and have some ale,” he said.

  Carth flipped him a silver, which he caught out of the air, before turning back to the men. She pulled a seat up and set the single silver on the table. It was enough to buy in, but might not be enough to stay in.

  The two men each set a coin out and joined hers.

  “Northern rules?” Carth asked, scooping the dice and shaking them.

  The older man’s mouth pinched and a worry line creased his brow. The younger man nodded quickly. “Northern rules are fine. Not much different than southern anyway.”

  Carth wasn’t really sure how different they would have been, but needed to know which way to influence the dice when she played. Northern rules involved dicing toward a specific score and let the dicer exclude a single die if it didn’t play well with the intended roll. It made it a game of chance, but left an element of skill to it as well. In Nyaesh, many preferred dicing to other games simply because there was an element of chance rather than giving one person who was most skilled the opportunity to outplay everyone else.

  Carth had diced often enough, though she’d used it as a way to bide her time, not because of any real interest in the game. None of the games played in the Lyre had ever drawn her attention. They didn’t have the same challenges she sought, not like what she’d found with Tsatsun. Strange that she would cross the sea to discover a game that she would find not only enjoyable, but also useful in helping her to devise different strategies.

  She rolled the dice, and they went skittering across the table. As they did, she linked the shadows to the five and six, forcing them both to come face up. “Looks like a lucky way to start,” she said.

  The other men grabbed the dice, and each took a turn.

  They played until she became the first to fifty.

  Carth scooped the coins off the table and into her pocket.

  She started to stand, but both men placed another silver onto the table. “You’re only playing one?” the younger man asked.

  She shrugged. “You boys aren’t all that talkative. Thought I might find a table where they were.”

  The older man chuckled. “What kind of things would you like us talking about that won’t offend you?”

  “I’m the daughter of the captain of the Goth Spald, one of the fastest ships on the sea. I think I’ve heard it all before. Not much you’re going to say that will offend.”

  The men shook their heads. The younger man scooped the dice and shook them more vigorously than necessary before tossing them across the table. They came up three and five. Not a bad roll, but not a good way to start.

  Carth looked around her, partly wishing that she could play cards at the other table, or maybe even find out what the men in the far corner were doing, but that meant that she would have to draw their attention. Dicing might be a way to get them to notice her, and at least get them interested in letting her join them.

  “You going to play?”

  Carth realized that both had tossed for their turn and now waited on her.

  She grinned and scooped the dice. Now that she’d won the first round, she didn’t have the same need to force the dice to land in any particular way, at least not until it got a little farther along in the gaming.

  Her toss came up two sixes. A good toss, and one that risked angering them, especially if she happened to have too much luck. So far she hadn’t, but she had to mix it up a little. She shrugged and tipped her head. “Lucky toss.”

  “You seem to have a few of those.”

  “More than you, at least, Rosh.” The younger man leaned back from the table as he picked up the dice again. “Can’t accuse the girl of cheating. It’s our dice, you fool!”

  Rosh narrowed his eyes to slits. “Not saying she cheats, you dummy. Saying she has luck. Better than you at least, Pade.”

  Pade shrugged. “It’s not all about the way you toss the dice, though, is it? There’s something to be said about how you use it.” He shifted on his chair and rolled the dice again. They came up a pair of ones. “Bah! Watcher’s Eyes. Maybe it is bad luck when it comes to me.”

  Rosh grinned. “Damn right.” He shook out his dice and they came up one and three. “Not much better for me, I’m afraid.”

  “Luck don’t matter soon,” Pade said. Rosh shot him a hard look and Pade only shrugged. “It won’t and you know it.”

  Carth watched the interaction between them and forced a smile. “You have some insight about something that can get you past luck?”

  Rosh shook his head. “Balgar knows there ain’t nothing that gets a man beyond luck, girl.”

  At least she had a sense of where they were from. Balgar wasn’t one of the northern gods, but not one of the southern gods either. She’d heard of him, but mostly because Balgar was known as an island god of fire.

  Which island would they be from? The entire coast of the northern continents was ringed by small volcanic islands. Most weren’t livable, but there were a few large enough, though they were the exception. All of the islands were far enough from the mainland that they were difficult to reach, and then there were rough rocks all around them that made navigating into shore difficult.

  “Sounds like you have something planned,” she said.

  “Only because Pade is too dumb to keep his mouth shut.” Rosh shot him a hard glare before turning back to Carth. “Let’s be done with this game, why don’t we?”

  They played the game out, and Carth won, even without needing to use her abilities. As she did, she watched the other two men. She’d been thinking that she would need to find another group to gather more information, and she still might, but the offhanded comment made her wonder if there might be more here than she had realized. If nothing else, it intrigued her.

  The other two got up, leaving a stack of silver in front of her, before they headed to the door. The men in the back of the tavern watched them leave, and Carth sat there, curious about whether there was something more that she was missing, all while feeling that she had still failed at the one thing she needed to accomplish.

  19

  “I thought you said you were going to get us a ride?” Guya crossed his muscular arms over his chest and stared at the water. What did he see when he peered into the darkness? As long as Carth held on to the connection to the shadows, she was able to see through the darkness and could count the ships out in the sea, but would the captain manage the same?

  “That’s the plan.”

  “You gambled and that was it.”

  She’d already been over what they needed to do, but Guya remained uncertain. Carth should have kept him out of the tavern when she’d gone to gamble. He’d not only seen her steal from the men at the table, but also observed the way she’d interacted with the others. She hadn’t managed to shake him so that she could follow them, so she had been forced to bring h
im with her.

  They were down by the dock. That much he could see, even if he couldn’t see much else, not through the night, and not without pulling on the shadows with much more strength.

  “That wasn’t it. I discovered something while I was in there.”

  “What did you discover?”

  “I don’t know yet. They’re hiding something. That much I can tell. When I figure out what it is…”

  She’d what? Would she be able to use that to force the men to bring them back to the north or would she be able to buy their way back north? She didn’t know.

  “You said that before, but all you heard was a comment about luck.”

  Carth nodded, letting the shadows ease away from her. That had been what she’d heard, though she didn’t have a good way of knowing what it meant. Luck could mean so many different things, but their comment seemed to have a distinct intent. That was what she hoped mattered.

  Then there was the way the other men had watched them leave. Carth hadn’t managed to follow them either. In some ways, it was like playing a game of Tsatsun with too many players on the board. Somehow, she had to get enough extra information to figure out what her move would be.

  “You’re a sailor, what do you know about luck?” Carth asked him.

  Guya grunted. “Sailors make their own luck.”

  Carth nodded. “That’s my concern.”

  They moved forward, fading into the darkness. She held on to the shadows as long as she could, concealing both herself and Guya, but not so much that he would realize she did anything. Moving with the shadows remained more difficult than standing still, but she had gained the trick of releasing it briefly, long enough to slip forward and then away again. Doing it that way, she managed to hold the concealment, though it was not perfect.

  When she had more time, she would have to work on holding it while moving. There had to be a way. At times, it almost seemed as if she could flow with the shadows, but other times, when she attempted to do so, she failed, falling back and away from them.

  “What do you think we’ll find down here?” Guya whispered and ducked his head, as if he could mask his massive frame. It still surprised her that Talun had gotten the upper hand on the much larger man, but she suspected he had some ability with the light which would have augmented what he could do, much like the shadows—and the A’ras flame—augmented what she could do.

  “I think we need to learn what they’re hiding.”

  “They could be smugglers,” Guya said. “Not slavers.”

  “Not saying they’re slavers.”

  She hadn’t considered the possibility that they could be smugglers. That would explain what they’d said about needing luck, but there weren’t many restrictions here on what could be shipped—other than slaves—so smuggling didn’t have the same appeal as it might in the south.

  They reached the shore, and the steady lapping of water along the rocks attempted to soothe her, but she held on to her vigilance, letting her heart race steadily so that she could keep her edge. With it racing like that, she might even be able to reach for the A’ras flame, though she usually needed to be under more stress to succeed.

  Creeping forward, Carth pulled on the shadows, letting them wrap around them a little more. It created something like a fog that she could work with. Guya might notice, but then she had admitted that she was connected to the shadows, so it probably didn’t matter what she did with them now. It might even convince him that he should listen to her.

  Voices drifted to them from one of the nearby ships.

  It was a wide-bottomed ship, nothing like the Goth Spald, and she motioned to Guya to follow her as she led them down the dock. He stayed close to her, and with the shadows around her, his breath was regular and loud in her ears.

  “They be moving through here,” one of the voices said.

  “Nothing moving through here tonight, and with storms coming like they be, we should continue north.”

  Carth crept forward. North. That was what they needed if they were to follow Talun, but this ship… she made her way around it, eyeing the wood and noting that some of it had rotted and other sections had been painted to cover similar rot. What would it take for a ship to get into this sort of disrepair? How long would it have to have been at sea?

  “We won’t make it north, not with the weather shifting.”

  Carth glanced at Guya and pitched her voice low. “How come so many of you sailors seem to know about the weather?”

  He leaned toward her, his breath hot and smelling of the stale bread from the tavern. “You get to know the patterns in the sea, Anisa. When you spent enough time out at sea, you start to understand them.”

  “And do you think there’s something that’s moving in?”

  She looked at the sky, but she had no way of knowing whether storms were moving in. Wind gusted, and as she started paying some attention to it, she realized that it shifted at times, blowing first from the north and then from the south.

  “We’ve been running from storms since we left Asador,” Guya said. “These types of storms are pretty common in the summer. Not surprising that we’d come across them. They keep you in port for longer than you want, but other than that, you learn to stay away from them.” He shrugged and nodded to the ship. “They’re right, though.”

  “About what?”

  “Weather is shifting. Can you feel it? Wind is gusting more from the north, and it’s got a bit more of a bite to it than it did before. Winds like that mean the same thing, usually. Not much to do but hunker down.”

  “You were going to sail through it!”

  “Goth Spald is a fast ship. I could outrun most of the storm, especially as it hadn’t really hit us yet, but now that we’re starting to get that hint of the weather, I don’t think any of these ships will sail north right now.”

  Carth stared at the ships, feeling the way the wind whipped at her.

  She had started planning for all the different possibilities, and had thought of ways to get them back to the north, but all were predicated on their ability to get onto a ship. If that failed—or if the weather wouldn’t allow it—she didn’t know what she would do.

  It didn’t change what she needed to do.

  The girls were stuck on the Spald because she’d made the choice not to act.

  Somehow she had to get north, even if no other ships were sailing.

  The longer she thought about it, and the longer it had been since Talun had thrown Guya overboard, the more she felt certain that she had to do something. Moving the right pieces around the board was difficult, though, especially as she wasn’t even sure what move to make.

  She closed her eyes, thinking through her options, imagining everything that had happened as pieces on a Tsatsun board. When she did that, she placed herself and Guya as separate pieces on one side, and made Talun and the Goth Spald pieces of the Hjan. Stopping them was what she was really after.

  Which pieces would be the Stone?

  That was what she had to determine. How would she move her pieces around the board so that she could stop the Hjan? The game was more complex than she’d allowed herself to believe. Not only did she have to make the right move, but she had to assign the right pieces as well. If she didn’t, then anything she might do would be a mistake.

  “What are you doing?” Guya asked.

  Carth shook her head. “Trying to determine what the next step needs to be.”

  “I thought you had already decided that you were going to game your way onto one of these ships?”

  “That was before I knew the weather was something I had to account for.”

  “You’ve sailed before.” He watched her a moment, as if trying to determine whether she actually had sailed before. “So you know that the weather influences things more than almost anything else. A storm blows in, and you have to determine if it’s safe to move through it. A serious enough storm comes in, and you have to decide if you have time to get around it, or if you need
to hole up in port and ride it out until the next clear sky.”

  “What do you think about the storms you say are coming?”

  Guya shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ve been too long away from the ship for me to have a good sense. I get a better understanding when I’m watching the waves and when I can feel the wind on my cheeks. And note the different way the currents move. Out here… on land, I don’t have the same connection that I need to know.”

  “You can guess.”

  He nodded. “That’s all it would be.”

  “What about the other ships that come into port? You be able to get anything from them if you ask?”

  Guya shrugged. “Normally, but you’ve had me playing at being your father, and then sneaking along the docks with you. I haven’t had time to ask those questions.”

  Thunder rolled distantly. Carth could feel the changing energy in the air now as well. She didn’t need to be a sailor to know that the currents were shifting. And if she wasn’t careful, and if she didn’t act soon, she would be stuck here for the gods only knew how long without access to a ship, and then whatever the Hjan intended with those girls would already have happened.

  20

  Wind whipped around her with more force, throwing strands of black hair into her face so that she had to hold her hair back, gripping it so that it didn’t flutter too much into her eyes as she tried to part the shadows and see into the darkness.

  She stood tonight on the end of one of the docks, studying the winds. The port was crowded. Dozens of ships had arrived over the last day making the taverns crowded—and not the good kind. Each of them carried with them the same warning: storms were coming. None of the captains were willing to risk moving north until the storms passed, and given the fact that so many had come into port, she suspected that whatever came would be impressive.