Shadowblack

by Sebastien de Castell

  ‘Come on, kid. One more try.’

  Fine. But this time you’re in for a surprise.

  The problem was that I kept trying to play by her rules, but she had the advantage of all her training and experience, so I decided it was time to cheat. As I got to my feet, I scooped up a handful of sand. When I made my run for her this time, I held out my left hand as if I was going to make a grab for her, but at the last second I threw the sand from my other hand right at her face. It’s going to work this time, I thought. The instant the sand hit her, she’d be thrown off and I could then push her with my other hand. Not hard of course, just a light touch to show I’d outsmarted her.

  I was so focused on her movements that I saw every detail play out before me. The sand flew from my outstretched hand towards her face, but somehow she was already leaning back as if her phantom partner were dipping her as part of the dance. The sand went right over her head with barely a grain touching her cheek. I was still trying to figure out how that was possible when I felt her hand take mine as she turned. I hadn’t even realised how off balance I was from tossing the sand and now she was using that against me.

  As I went tumbling again, I caught a glimpse of her face. She was smiling. It wasn’t a mean-spirited smile or the grim smirk of someone engaged in combat even as an exercise. I wasn’t an enemy or even a student to her. Ferius really was just dancing with me, no different than we had been before.

  I was still marvelling at this when I landed flat on my back a few feet away. I had no clue how she’d beaten me, so I leaned up on my elbows and just watched her. She made it look so easy, so effortless. I would have felt incredibly stupid if it weren’t for the sight of Reichis a few yards away, standing up on his hind legs and awkwardly mimicking Ferius’s movements. When he caught me staring he went down on all fours and his fur rose up in deep black hackles with blood-red stripes. ‘What? What? I wasn’t doing anything. You tell anyone about this and I’ll—’

  ‘Who the hell would I tell?’ I asked. Reichis is remarkably vain, considering he sometimes likes to keep bits of rabbit meat in his cheeks just in case he gets hungry later. ‘Better settle down or your fur might go pink again.’

  He glanced down at his coat worriedly, but then grinned, evidently happy at the fearsome colours he’d taken on.

  ‘Well, kid?’ Ferius asked. ‘You believe me now?’

  I got back on my feet and nodded. There was no doubt this dancing of hers could be useful in a fight, and that meant it was a skill I had to master.

  Ferius stopped and gave me an odd look. She sighed. ‘You’re still not getting it.’

  ‘What do you mean? I’m not—’

  ‘You can’t learn the ways of the dance until you find the joy in it.’

  Joy. How much joy was I supposed to have out here in the borderlands with my life in danger at every turn? Everything I’d ever known was hundreds of miles away. There was no place for me in this rugged frontier any more than there was among my own people. I was alone, and probably would be for the rest of my life.

  Ferius gestured for me to join her. I did, and once again found myself in the uncomfortable half-embrace of the chadelle. ‘I need you to listen to me, Kellen.’

  I nodded.

  ‘This isn’t fighting. It’s not something you push at or try to control like you do with your Jan’Tep magic. Don’t try to find it; let it find you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Just be open to it. I’m not your opponent, I’m not your lover, I’m not even a woman.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘Nope. I’m just another body, moving freely in the warm night air.’ She tilted me back a bit. ‘Look up at that sky.’

  I tilted my head back and gazed at the stars. You couldn’t see them half so well in the city of my birth, where glow-glass lanterns cast a dim gleam over everything, but here, it was as if the sky itself was no more than a foot above me, like I could just reach up and poke it with my finger.

  ‘This desert,’ Ferius said. ‘Right now. Here. It’s the most beautiful place on earth, isn’t it?’

  It was. I don’t know how or why, but somehow we were standing on the most beautiful spot I’d ever been. It wasn’t like it was my first night out in the borderlands. This was different though. I couldn’t stop staring up at those stars. It was as if they were moving now, rotating above me, dancing themselves to sleep.

  ‘You’re not Kellen, son of Ke’heops,’ Ferius said. ‘You’re not the Jan’Tep outcast. You’re a free spirit, not a single chain binding you.’

  I was barely paying attention to her words, but the meaning came through nonetheless. I hadn’t felt anything like this in a long time. The closest sensation I could think of was the way a spell felt when you had it all perfectly in your mind, held motionless until the words came out of your mouth, and in that instant you let go of it completely.

  ‘I think I’m ready to dance now,’ I said. But when I looked back at Ferius I saw the landscape moving around us. We were already dancing, and probably had been for a while.

  Very slowly, Ferius brought us to a stop. ‘Here endeth the lesson, kid,’ she said for the second time that night.

  ‘But we only just started. I only just got the—’

  Ferius let go of my hand and gestured towards the fire. ‘Look.’

  The flames had almost completely died out now, the wood mostly ash. Reichis was curled up into a ball sleeping next to it, his fur having settled into a dusky brown colour that matched the ground.

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘A while,’ Ferius replied gently. ‘But now we need to stop. Time to let the dance go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there are bad things happening out there to good people, and even those of us who follow the path of the wild daisy have to travel in darkness sometimes.’

  35

  The Numbness

  I had no idea what time it was when we got back, but I fell onto my bed without even removing my clothes. For one blissful hour I slept like the dead, only to be woken by a stabbing pain in my left eye, accompanied by horrific visions that made me reach for my powders. Fortunately Reichis bit me before I got to them. ‘Wake up, Kellen!’ he chittered. ‘You’re sleep— What do you call it when someone tries to perform a spell in their sleep? Sleepcasting?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, pressing the heel of my hand into my left eye. Ancestors, but it hurt. Suddenly I felt another pain, this time on my other hand, which now sported the marks of squirrel cat teeth. ‘What the hell?’

  Reichis looked up at me. ‘I thought maybe if I bit you it would take your mind off the pain in your eye. Did it work?’

  I shook my head and got up from the bed, stumbling towards the door of the room. Everywhere I looked I saw blood, and the woodgrain of the walls seemed to twist and contort itself as if something were trying to claw its way through.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Reichis asked.

  ‘Outside …’ I said, barely able to speak. ‘Got to get outside.’

  I heard him jump down from the bed to follow me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Stay here.’

  I think he might have been a bit hurt by that.

  By the time I made my way out to the back garden, the pain had started to ease and the visions began to subside. The trees looked like trees rather than twisting, grinding monsters struggling to free themselves of the bonds at their feet. The sky was black rather than red, and the smooth pebbles beneath my feet felt soft and welcoming instead of like a field of razor blades. I was so relieved that it took me a moment to realise I wasn’t alone.

  ‘You too, huh?’ Seneira asked.

  She was crouching down next to a patch of blue and yellow flowers, hugging her knees and rocking back and forth.

  ‘Bad?’ she asked.

  I nodded. ‘You?’

  ‘Yeah, pretty bad.’

  I sat down beside her and leaned back on my elbows, looking up at the sky to make sure the stars were still stars and not t
housands of angry bees coming to sting me. I felt exhausted – one more gift the shadowblack brought with it.

  ‘You know the worst part?’ Seneira asked. ‘It’s not even the pain, or the voices – though those make me want to scream until I can drown them out. But the worst part is that, when it’s all over, I can’t feel anything any more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She gave a small shrug and shook her head. ‘I feel nothing. I’m not happy. I’m not sad. When I think about my friends or my father, or even Tyne, it’s like … it’s like they’re strangers, like I don’t even have a family.’ She turned to looked at me. ‘Does that happen to you?’

  I didn’t answer, mostly because I couldn’t. I never felt like I had a family any more, so how could I could tell if the shadowblack made it any worse?

  ‘I pinched myself,’ Seneira went on, showing me her wrist. It was too dark for me to see if there was a bruise there or not. ‘Really hard, just to see if I felt it.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No. I mean, I felt the pain, but it just didn’t seem to matter.’

  ‘How long does it last?’ I asked. ‘The not feeling anything, I mean.’

  She lay back beside me. ‘An hour maybe. Sometimes more. Even then I don’t … Life just seems … dulled somehow, like I can’t see colours the way I used to. Food tastes … okay, I guess.’ She took my hand and made my fingers brush against her palm. ‘Even this. I feel it, but it’s like it’s happening to someone else.’

  The sound of squirrel-cat paws padding against the floor from inside the house reached my ears just before Reichis’s fuzzy face appeared at the back door. ‘Kiss her,’ he said.

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Forget what?’ Seneira asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She glanced over to where Reichis sat on his haunches on the back step. ‘Oh, your … business partner.’

  ‘Kiss her, Kellen,’ the squirrel cat chittered, sniffing at the air. ‘I’m not kidding this time. Some part of her wants you to.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing, he just …’ A thought occurred to me.

  I got back to my feet and extended a hand down towards her. She took it and I pulled her up. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  I took her right hand in my left, and put my other hand around to the small of her back. ‘Dancing.’

  ‘Dancing?’

  I nodded, then realised I should probably have asked before grabbing at her. ‘Do you …?’

  She shrugged. ‘Can’t hurt, I suppose.’

  We had no music, and I’m pretty sure I am, by any standard, a terrible dancer – a fact Reichis seemed exceedingly comfortable pointing out repeatedly, despite his own preposterous-looking attempts. Somehow, though, as Seneira and I spun and stepped across the back garden over the next few minutes, I felt something change in her. At first I thought she was stiffening, becoming uncomfortable, but when I went to stop, she shook her head and started pulling me along. I realised then that I’d only thought she’d been tensing up because, for the first few minutes, she’d been almost lifeless. Now she seemed alive again, moving with a kind of purpose and determination as if the two of us were going into battle together. It wasn’t happiness, but rather a kind of staunch resolve to feel happy.

  After a while she changed again, seeming lighter, freer. Sometimes we’d lose the rhythm and either she’d stumble or I’d step on her feet, and when it happened she’d laugh and we’d start again. I’m not sure how long we danced for, but the first blush of dawn was appearing on the horizon when she stopped, and abruptly pulled me into a hug that she held for a long time. ‘Thank you, Kellen,’ she said, then let go of me and ran back into the house.

  I stood there by myself, until Reichis came over to me and asked, ‘Walking the path of the wild daisy, are we?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I replied. ‘A step or two, anyway.’

  36

  The Warded House

  I slept through the morning and afternoon, dreaming of dancing. At first my mind conjured joyous visions, but when the music stopped, Seneira wasn’t there and I saw myself standing all alone in the desert, and wondered if that, too, might be an aspect of the path of the wild daisy.

  I awoke in pain again, though this time the source wasn’t my left eye; it was the palm of my right hand. When I looked down, I saw a slightly raised circular area about a half-inch in diameter, right in the centre of my palm, as if a coin had been embedded under the skin and someone had attached a string to it and was tugging at it. I rose out of bed, jostling Reichis, who swore several times before returning to the snoring cacophony he calls ‘napping’.

  The raised area on my palm still pulled. When I followed the tugging sensation, it led me to the window. After a few seconds of moving around the room and discerning the different sensations, I had a theory about what was happening. I put on my clothes and headed down the stairs and out the door.

  The tugging led me away from Seneira’s house and down the street, through alleyways and across a bridge. After about ten minutes of this, I found the source of the pull: Dexan Videris was waiting for me, sitting on a bench in the middle of a small public garden.

  ‘Thought you said you’d find me,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘This is easier.’

  I looked down at the skin on my palm. ‘You did something to me. Yesterday when we shook hands, you pressed some kind of charm into my palm.’

  ‘It’s just temporary,’ he said. ‘Should fade away on its own in a couple of days.’

  ‘Nice trick,’ I said, wondering how it worked.

  Dexan grinned. ‘Just one of the many skills I have to impart to you, my young apprentice.’

  ‘Dexan, I …’

  The grin faded. ‘You’re not coming?’ He rose up from the bench. ‘Damn it, Kellen, this is a good offer!’

  ‘I know it is,’ I said, keenly aware of how much better my life would be if he could help me ward off the shadowblack attacks, teach me more tricks and ways to survive in the borderlands. The problem, though, was that I couldn’t bring myself to abandon Seneira. Who was going to help with her attacks?

  ‘Ah, hell,’ Dexan said, seeing my expression. ‘I can tell from that dumb look on your face that nobody ever taught you the third rule of spellslinging.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Never let love make you stupid.’

  ‘Is there a kind of love that doesn’t make you stupid?’ I asked.

  Dexan chuckled. ‘Guess not.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘All right. Listen, kid, if you’re going to try to help that girl, there’s something you should probably know.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  He looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m breaking my own rule here, but that kid, Revian? The guy that girl you’re all nutty over is actually supposed to be with?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Stay away from him. More importantly, stay away from his family.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’re up to something big.’ He nodded towards the north end of town. ‘That mansion they live in, up on the hill? After Ler’danet tried to end you and me, I decided to go see if I could put a little hurt on them back, only that place is surrounded with some of the most powerful wards I’ve ever seen. Somebody like you or me ends up in there? Our magic won’t be worth spit. I doubt even Ler’danet or the other house mage can cast spells in there.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean—’

  ‘Come on, kid, don’t be dumb. Nobody in the borderlands buys that much protection against mages when they’ve already got their own working for them, unless they’ve got a real reason to worry about magic.’

  ‘So you think they’re the target?’

  Dexan shook his head. ‘No, don’t you get it? I think they’re the ones that hired whoever put the shadowblack on the girl and her brother, only they figured they wouldn’t have to pay since they were protected, so now whoever did the girl infected her fiancé too, bec
ause that was the only way to force the parents to pay up.’

  ‘But then …’ I grabbed at his arm. ‘You could help us. If we find out who they hired, we can—’

  Dexan shrugged me off. ‘I told you before, kid, never mess with another spellslinger’s livelihood. Especially if they’re more powerful than you; it tends to get you killed.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But what if … if I find a way to deal with whoever cast the curse, will you stay and remove the shadowblack from Seneira and her brother … and Revian too?’

  Dexan looked uncertain, then glanced at the setting sun. ‘I’ll make you a deal, kid. I’ve still got some packing to do, so if you can get this mess sorted out before tomorrow night, I’ll stick around and help the girl and whoever else I can.’ He stuck out his hand. ‘Deal?’

  I started to shake his hand, and to ask, ‘Okay, but how will I find you if—’

  The sudden sharp sensation in my palm answered the question.

  ‘Just follow the pain in your hand, kid,’ Dexan said as he walked away. ‘It’s like I always say: love hurts.’

  By the time I got to Seneira’s house, everything had changed. Rosie was back, and for once she and Ferius didn’t look like they were about to kill each other. Apparently she had followed the trail of other victims and discovered something none of us expected.

  ‘This isn’t the first time the Seven Sands has seen an unexplained outbreak of the shadowblack,’ Rosie explained. ‘It’s been happening for several years, here and there, rarely in the same town or village. Always far enough apart to keep anyone from looking too closely.’

  ‘Until now,’ I said.

  Ferius nodded. ‘The question is, why?’ She looked over at me. ‘You trust this Dexan fella? The oldest scam in history is to make somebody sick and then offer the cure.’

  ‘Well, I never trusted him,’ Reichis said, coming down the stairs with some kind of silver ring stuck around one paw.

  ‘That belongs to me,’ Rosie said.