‘I don’t understand,’ Seneira said. ‘I got the fever too, but it passed after a day, and the … attacks didn’t start till weeks later.’
A sudden convulsion took the boy, his back arching as if someone had attached a chain to his belly and was suddenly yanking it up. His eyelids opened unnaturally wide, and oozing black tendrils filled the whites of his eyes. Seneira gave a cry and reached down to hold on to him while he shook and his arms flailed. When one of his hands caught in her hair, his fingers curled around and he began tearing at it. I ran over and grabbed his wrist, struggling to hold it in place so he wouldn’t rip the hair from her head. ‘Let him go,’ Seneira said, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘You’re hurting him.’
‘I’m not,’ I insisted, only to see the skin of his wrist looking red and cracked beneath my fingers.
Ferius grabbed part of the sheet and quickly wrapped it around her hand before taking hold of Tyne’s forearm, holding on to him without having to squeeze into his flesh. I let go and stepped back. A second later the boy collapsed, sweat pouring from his forehead, a vein on the side of his neck pulsing far too fast.
‘Senny?’ he asked after a moment. ‘Is that you?’
It was as if he’d no recollection of the past several minutes. Seneira leaned down and smiled at him through her tears. ‘It’s me, runt. When are you going to get out of that bed and clean your room?’
‘I feel bad, Senny,’ he said.
‘It’s just a cold. In a few days you’ll be right as rain and we’ll go kiting together.’
The boy’s eyes began to clear, though the irises were still black. ‘You went away.’
‘Just for a while. I’m back now, and I’m going to make sure you get healthy.’ She smoothed his damp hair from his forehead. ‘Nothing and nobody is going to stop us from making you better, you got that, runt?’
‘You went away,’ Tyne repeated, then closed his eyes as he whispered, ‘You shouldn’t have come back, Senny. That’s what they wanted.’
19
Sleep
We couldn’t get anything more out of Tyne that night, but in all likelihood his ominous warning was little more than the product of a fevered mind feeding him nightmares no child should have to endure. It didn’t stop me from being completely creeped out, however.
‘You okay, kid?’ Ferius asked.
There were only two chairs in the room – which we’d left to Seneira and her father so they could sit on either side of Tyne’s bed, each of them holding one of the boy’s hands even as their eyes were focused on each other, on their relief at being together and the guilt that both clearly felt but neither deserved. Ferius and I sat on the floor, leaning against the hospital room’s cold wall. I didn’t particularly like the way my Argosi mentor was looking at me. ‘Why are you asking?’
She gave a shrug, and for the third time started to reach into her waistcoat for a smoking reed only to remember it probably wasn’t a good idea to smoke so close to a sick child. ‘It’s all right to be scared,’ she said, dropping her hand into her lap. ‘You’re tired. You haven’t slept in a proper bed in months. You’ve got your own people chasing you and the rest of the world ready to join in anytime they find out you’ve got the shadowblack.’ A slight smirk came to her face as she gestured towards Seneira and said, more quietly, ‘And now you meet this girl and she’s got all kinds of problems, but anyone can see you fancy her anyway and you ain’t sure how to—’
‘Ferius?’ I interrupted. ‘Would you do something for me? Something important.’
‘Yeah, kid?’
‘Promise to never, ever give me romantic advice?’
Ferius chuckled. ‘Afraid I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
She reached out a hand and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Because anyone can see you’re terrible at romance, kid.’
Reichis peeked his head up from a cabinet drawer he’d wormed his way into. ‘The Argosi’s right, Kellen; your mating technique needs a lot of work.’
‘Go back to stealing medical supplies,’ I told him, which was probably a mistake since I’d already had to get into a heated argument with him to keep him from taking one of the scalpels because it was ‘shiny and pretty’. Reichis running around with a razor-sharp blade in his mouth was a problem the world didn’t need.
‘When is Rosie coming back?’ I asked, mostly to keep Ferius and Reichis from fixating on the subjects I’d prefer be left alone. The other Argosi had made some vague noises about searching for signs of more victims of the shadowblack and then left the rest of us to share in Seneira’s misery.
‘Who knows?’ Ferius said by way of reply. ‘The path of thorns and roses tends to lead away from personal entanglements.’
‘Wait … you mean she might have left for good? Just like that? Without even a goodbye?’
‘Goodbyes ain’t the Argosi way, kid.’
For some reason that sent a cold chill through me, and I wondered if one day I might wake up and find Ferius gone without so much as a word or a note. I was searching for a way to press her on that point that wouldn’t make me sound like a needy child, when Seneira startled me. I hadn’t even noticed her standing there.
‘We’re going to stay with Tyne tonight,’ she said. ‘You can sleep at the house if you want.’
Ferius gave me a raised eyebrow – her way of scolding me for being unobservant. ‘We’re fine right here for now. Go on back to your brother.’
Tyne had been falling in and out of consciousness for hours, his body convulsing uncontrollably every time one of the shadowblack seizures came upon him. Seneira and her father would hang on to the boy as if he were a fish on a line being yanked away by some unseen figure holding the pole. Seneira nodded and started to turn away, but then stopped. ‘Are you …? Will you be leaving town now that you’ve helped Rosie bring me home?’
Something softened in Ferius’s expression, and when she spoke next it was with a more formal tone than I was used to from her. ‘Rest easy, little sister. This is a weight too great even for a pair of shoulders as strong as yours. We will walk this road with you a while longer.’
‘Thank you,’ Seneira said. She gave us a grateful smile before returning to her brother’s bedside.
‘You sounded like Rosie just then,’ I observed.
Ferius reached into her waistcoat for a fourth time, then stopped herself and patted at the pocket as if that had been her intention all along. ‘Don’t talk nonsense, kid.’
‘You did. Usually you talk like a drunken Daroman shepherd, but right there you spoke just like Rosie does.’
I waited for another denial, but none came.
‘First thing you learn travelling the long roads, kid: language is as much in the way you speak as the words you choose.’
I thought about that. Most of the time, Ferius doesn’t really want people to know what she’s thinking – heck, sometimes I think she doesn’t even want people to take her seriously – so she uses that frontier drawl of hers. But here she’d wanted Seneira to feel safe, to feel protected. Rosie had been the one keeping her from harm until now, so Ferius had spoken the way she would – the way in which Seneira could most easily believe it.
‘You know, you make even simple things complicated,’ I said.
Ferius smiled. ‘Path of the Wild Daisy, kid.’
She pulled out one of her decks and dealt us out eight cards each, telling me the rules of a new game as she did. We played a few hands. I’d glance over at Seneira and her father every once in a while, then pay attention to the game again. After a while I heard Reichis snoring, passed out inside one of the drawers. It didn’t seem like much time had passed, but at one point when I looked over, I saw Seneira and Beren slumped over on each side of Tyne’s bed.
Figuring it was my turn to deal, I reached over to get the deck from Ferius, but the cards were strewn across the floor between us. I was going to chide her for dropping them, but her eyes were closed. That was unusual. Ferius never went to sle
ep until she’d secured whatever place we were holed up in, whether by setting traps around a campsite or barring entrances when we were indoors. I considered jostling her awake, but my own eyes were so heavy I could barely keep them open.
Wait, I thought. My eyes are already closed. Why can’t I open them?
There were, of course, any number of plausible explanations why I might be falling asleep. I was exhausted, bored and hadn’t eaten in ages. But there was one particularly good reason for me to remain conscious: my utter terror of being attacked again.
Wake up, I told myself. The command had no effect. Something was preventing me from opening my eyes.
Fear. Reach for the fear.
I gave free rein to all my worst terrors of being killed in my sleep – visions I usually worked very hard to ignore. A cold sweat came over me, pushing through the somnolence as the overwhelming desire to flee fought against the urge to sleep. I’m not sure what it says about me that I can make myself so terrified that I was able to wake when Ferius, ever watchful, couldn’t. My eyes finally blinked open, and that’s when I saw him.
He was tall – well, taller than me anyway. The light shed from the lantern over the bed was enough for me to make out the swarthy, weather-worn look of his handsome features. The intruder wore black leather riding trousers with heavy boots and spurs. His shirt was soft white linen and a bracelet made from some kind of glistening black stone beads adorned his left wrist. On his head he wore a black Daroman frontier hat, which at first looked just like Ferius’s, but then I noticed something odd: symbols etched in silver travelled all the way around the band above the brim. Glyphs. The kinds of magical motifs I recognised because I’d been around them most of my life. That’s when I noticed that the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, and that there were three faded tattooed bands on each of his forearms.
Jan’Tep, I thought, as the last vestiges of whatever sleep spell he’d used faded away and I rose to my feet.
‘Hello there, Kellen of the house of Ke,’ he said, his hands loose at his sides, ready to cast another spell. ‘Imagine finding you here.’
20
The Visitor
I still had about a dozen of Ferius’s steel cards, so my first move was to yank one from my trouser pocket to fling at this new enemy. Thanks to a lack of practice, I managed to tear the cloth and then cut my own finger from gripping the card incorrectly.
‘Whoa there, kid,’ the Jan’Tep said, his hands already forming the somatic shape for an ember blast. With his sleeves rolled up, the faded tattooed band for ember on his right forearm began to glow. I didn’t quite recognise the spell – it didn’t look like fire or lightning – but most ember magic involves some kind of energy. And pain.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw something sail past me and hit the intruder in the face. It turned out to be Ferius’s hat. It didn’t do any damage, of course, but at least it broke his line of sight.
‘What’s goin’ on, kid?’ she asked, shaking her head furiously to wake herself up.
‘Silk magic,’ I said, tossing the steel cards at him but still too groggy for any of them to strike their targets with enough force to do any good.
‘Actually, it’s not a silk, just breath magic with a hint of—’
The intruder’s words were cut off by Reichis leaping from inside the cabinet drawer onto the back of the mage’s shoulders, immediately going for his neck. I ducked down low and threw myself at the man’s legs, grabbing them as hard as I could and sending him tipping back to where he crashed into an examination table. He managed to throw Reichis off even as he freed one foot and kicked me hard in the side. I rolled with the momentum, making it hard for him to target me with his spell, and giving me the chance to free my hands to pull powder from the pouches at my belt so I could blast him back.
‘What’s happening?’ Seneira demanded, stumbling towards us from her brother’s bedside.
A clacking sound got my attention. Ferius had something in her hand that I hadn’t seen before: a short metal tube about eight inches long. She flicked her wrist and suddenly another tube slid out in extension, and another, and another. It was now over two feet long. One end was at the intruder’s neck. ‘Now I know me and the kid might seem like trouble, but trust me, fella, you don’t want to dance with the squirrel cat.’
The mage looked up to see Reichis now perched on the top of a glass medicine cabinet, his fur a perfect blood red, no stripes at all, looking very much as if he was trying to decide whether to tear out the man’s throat first or his eyes. He let out a snarl for good measure.
The intruder’s smile never left his face. ‘Well now, haven’t you all got a fine little circus act going? Even got yourself a performing animal.’
Reichis growled. ‘I’m definitely eating his eyeballs. The rest of you can fight over his ears.’
The mage set his eyes on me. ‘What do you reckon, Kellen, son of Ke’heops? You think your Argosi friend can get to me with her steel rod or that squirrel cat can reach me with its claws before I get off one good spell on the lot of you?’
‘A question for another day,’ Rosie said, rising up behind him, the glint of a short, sharp needle attached to one fingernail which she lightly pressed to the side of his throat. ‘For now it would seem introductions are in order. I am the Path of Thorns and Roses.’
‘Glad you decided to join us,’ Ferius said.
The man stayed very, very still as he asked, ‘Path of Thorns and Roses, eh? I’m guessing that needle would be the thorn part.’
‘One of them,’ Rosie replied, then leaned close to whisper almost intimately into the man’s ear. ‘I see no need to show you the rest, do you?’
Very slowly the intruder put up his hands. ‘Okay, folks, let’s nobody do anything reckless. After all, I was invited.’
‘Invited?’ I asked. ‘You tried to—’
‘Dexan?’ Beren Thrane asked, walking groggily towards us. ‘Dexan Videris?’
‘One and the same,’ the man said, adding a light chuckle to his answer as if this was all some big misunderstanding. ‘Mind asking these folks to stand down?’
Beren looked aghast at the rest of us as if we’d been the cause of the commotion. ‘Please, all of you, let him go. This man is here at my urging.’
Dexan snorted. ‘If you call hiring four Daroman ex-marshals to drag a man out of his favourite saloon “urging”.’ He let his hands drop back to his side and added, ‘Those fellas are fine, in case you’re wondering, Mister Thrane. Didn’t seem right to kill a man just for doin’ what he must to make a living.’ To the rest of us he said, ‘Sorry about that sleep spell, by the way. Wasn’t sure what kind of situation I was walking into. Frankly I’m kind of surprised it worked. I’ve never been too good with slumber magic.’
The spell had been weak enough that it probably shouldn’t have worked, only we’d all been so exhausted that we hadn’t been able to resist. If the intruder had turned out to be the silk mage we’d fought a week ago, we’d all be dead.
‘You’re Jan’Tep?’ Seneira asked Dexan. ‘One of Kellen’s people?’
‘Same country, different clan.’ He tipped his hat to her. ‘Dexan Videris, ma’am. I guess I should say that, strictly speaking, neither Kellen nor I are really Jan’Tep any more.’
‘You’re an outcast?’ I asked.
‘Spellslinger,’ he said proudly. ‘I’m guessing you’re one too, judging by the way your hands keep twitchin’ for those pouches at your side.’
Reichis sniffed. ‘He’s a liar. He already knew you were a spellslinger, Kellen.’
‘You gonna let that critter bite me?’ Dexan asked Beren Thrane.
The headmaster, apparently having remembered this was his son’s hospital room, and, in fact, his Academy, decided to take control. ‘Right, now listen here. You, son, Kellen, I don’t know what’s in those pouches, but you drop your hands by your sides.’ He turned to Ferius. ‘And you, my lady, if you’d be so k—’
‘I’m no lady,’
she corrected him.
Reichis rolled his eyes. ‘Ugh. This again.’
Beren took it in his stride however. I guess it must come with dealing with people from all over the continent. ‘Forgive me, madam, I meant no offence, but now I must ask that both you and the Path of Thorns and Roses remove your respective weapons from my guest’s throat.’
Ferius did, and slapped a palm against one end of the metal stick, sending the cylinders sliding back inside each other. Rosie removed her hand and when I looked again, the needle was gone.
Beren turned a wary eye to where Reichis was perched on the cabinet. ‘You as well, master squirrel cat.’ The headmaster glanced over at me. ‘Does he understand what people say?’
‘When it suits him. Reichis, you can come down now.’
The squirrel cat did his usual showing off, leaping up and spreading his limbs so he could glide down the few feet to land on my shoulder. His fur changed to a mix of brown and orange, with just enough red in his stripes to remind everyone he might decide to turn violent at any time.
Beren now turned his attention to Dexan. ‘And you, Master Videris, if you could—’
‘Mister,’ he said. ‘Master means something else to folks like me.’
‘Great,’ Reichis muttered. ‘Now they’re both doing it.’
‘Mister Videris,’ Beren said, raising his voice to again try to take command, ‘if you wouldn’t mind explaining what happened here? You seem to have taken great pains to incite my daughter’s friends.’
The other spellslinger gave a chuckle as if this had all been a night’s fun for him. ‘It’s simple, Beren. Kellen here’s a wanted man on account of … well, first rule of being a spellslinger is never to mess with another mage’s business so I’ll let him tell you himself if that’s what he chooses.’ He hesitated for a second. ‘I will say that nothing he’s being pursued for is his fault.’
That was kind of him, I thought. Only … how does he know?
‘When I came in and said his name and house,’ Dexan went on, ‘well, he saw that I was also Jan’Tep, so he must’ve figured I was a hextracker come to get him.’
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