Siege of Shadows

by Sarah Raughley

“It would make it easier for me to lead you. I am always trying to lead you, Maia. To the right memory. To the right path.” Her blade tilted up and I could feel the added pressure against my skin. “You can trust me.”

  Finally, Natalya withdrew her sword and walked off to the side, letting the blade’s tip trail the water.

  “You just said I trust too easily.”

  “You do.” Natalya pointed once more at my neck with her sword, but said nothing. I touched the steel brace, confused for just a moment before I snapped out of it. It was a trick. I couldn’t let her distract me.

  “That’s why I don’t believe you,” I said, my chest tight.

  “About what?”

  “About Rhys.”

  “He killed me. Do you believe that, Maia?”

  The question I couldn’t escape, ghosting my every step, screaming at me from within every time I stared into his dark eyes. Rhys’s secrets frightened me. But the dizzying feeling of meeting his gaze and the thrill of his touch was too real, as real as Natalya’s will to live again. It didn’t matter what I reasoned. It was what I felt, the way my heart clenched as his tears fell. He wasn’t bad. I knew that. I believed it. The boy who fought beside me, protected me, teased me, laughed with me. That was the Rhys I was sure of. The only Rhys I wanted.

  And so I decided.

  “No,” I whispered finally. “I don’t believe that.” My voice had started to rise dangerously, but when I saw the glint of readiness in Natalya’s eyes, I held myself back. “Rhys is too kind, too gentle. He’s not a murderer.”

  “He is kind,” Natalya said, looking up at the sunless, cloudless sky. “He’s too gentle, I agree. His heart is pure. And also . . .” Her scar-covered hand gripped the hilt of her sword more tightly than before. “He is a murderer.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I repeated. I couldn’t hide the strain in my voice.

  “I can never lie to you, Maia.” It was strange. Her grin felt as menacing as it did sincere. How was it possible? This woman I had once worshipped . . . that my sister, June, had once adored. The noble warrior. Looking at her smile now, I felt like retching.

  No. I really did feel like retching. My body was beginning to buckle and bend. It was too difficult being here. It took too much energy, too much willpower. Every second I was here in the mist, I could feel my mind breaking down. I could feel something hooking me from the inside, pulling me back out.

  “If you do not believe me, I will give you a sign of goodwill.” Shutting her eyes, Natalya lowered her head. “Naomi.”

  “What?”

  “Naomi will know. But, Maia . . .” A breeze swept over the strands of her short black hair as she looked at me. The nobility, the fierceness etched into her face, was as powerful in death it was in life. “Your enemies are all around you,” she said. “Are you really not aware?”

  “Maia!”

  It was Belle. I’d fallen over and now was actually retching. Belle and Pastor Charles helped me back up to my feet.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know that when Natalya was here, it was also an intense experience for her. Especially the last time she came.” He shook his head. “I don’t envy the burden you Effigies bear.”

  “What do you mean? What happened when Natalya came?” asked Belle as she propped my arm around her shoulder.

  “Oh, she was just . . . distraught about many things. She never clearly mentioned why. She referred to a girl called Alice.”

  “Alice . . .” Wiping my mouth, I lifted my head.

  “She asked me about Emilia Farlow’s writings, about the leader of the traveling sect. Mentioned a man named Baldric.”

  “Baldric. Who is that?” Belle asked. “She never mentioned him before.”

  “I don’t know. She never explained. She said so much—too many things to remember. But one thing I do remember clearly is the symbol she drew. She asked me if I recognized it, but I couldn’t help her.”

  “Do you still have her drawing?” Belle asked.

  “I can get it from my office.”

  After we returned to the main hall of the church, we only had to wait a few minutes before Pastor Charles returned with a torn piece of notepaper. Though my head was still swimming and my body still languid from scrying, I rose to my feet anyway, fast, holding the back of the pew for support as I stared at the picture of a bright, flickering flame.

  “She didn’t know what it was herself,” said Charles. “She told me that she’d seen a glimpse of it while scrying into an earlier Effigy’s memories: Marian, she called her.”

  “Marian,” I whispered. The girl both Nick and Alice were really after. The girl inside me.

  Belle took the paper. “I’ve seen this before . . . haven’t I?” She searched the ink as if she’d find her answers there.

  Yes, we had. It took me a minute to remember, but this was the same symbol I’d seen in the desert hideout. A symbol connected to Marian. Another clue into who she was. I looked around at the shadows scrawled against the wall.

  The secrets of the world.

  16

  THE SYMBOL DIDN’T COME UP in any online searches, and cross-checking it against Deoscali writings at the Sect’s library turned up nothing. Belle tried a second time to crack the flash drive we’d taken from Philip, thinking it’d hold clues to the hideout we’d found him in, but she just didn’t have the skills to get through its encryption. Nevertheless, she was sure she’d seen the symbol somewhere else, not just in the hideout. She simply couldn’t remember where.

  Three days of searching yielded nothing, and by Thursday evening, I had a whole new problem to deal with: namely, Blackwell’s fund-raiser. I, along with a few personnel from the London facility, were to join him in putting on a show for a host of select dignitaries at his estate near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. I guess I just had to accept that part of my job description as an Effigy entailed grinning like a trained monkey in front of the cameras.

  By the time my Sect van pulled up to the nearly two hundred acres of parkland, ours was only one of a long list of expensive cars lined up along the lengthy driveway. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Blackwell’s estate looked like a little palace perched on a high plateau overlooking the river, its rustic stone architecture and dark arches haunted by the French Renaissance. The pamphlet they handed us after we walked through the red-iron-rimmed double doors told us that the estate used to be a British king’s country home before the Blackwell family bought it in the nineteenth century with the riches they’d accumulated through their rail and shipping empires.

  “They seriously just handed me a pamphlet about the damn house.” I rolled my eyes, trying not to make my uncomfortable tug at my frilly yellow dress too obvious. It was Lake’s dress, which she’d managed to stuff me inside while screaming at her agent over the phone because the TVCAs were just around the corner and the single she’d recorded back in February had yet to see the light of day. It was because of her Herculean effort, and her arsenal of makeup and hair combs, that I looked halfway camera ready.

  And, my, were there a lot of cameras.

  Blackwell had let the photographers and reporters into the mansion, and they were certainly working. Flashes of light nearly blinded me as they snapped pictures of the important-looking men and women from different countries who drank wine under the high, arched ceiling.

  So many dignitaries. So much power and wealth in one tiny space. Some individuals I recognized, and some I didn’t. I thought I could just slip by them unseen like a trick of the light. What I wasn’t prepared for were their eyes on me as I passed by, their hands reaching out to me and pulling me into their circle to say something, anything. To me. A British member of parliament, a Ghanaian diplomat, an Australian media tycoon. Congratulating me on successfully completed missions, asking me about our plan to take back Saul.

  One asked me how school was going. This was insane.

  I held my little black cross-body bag closer to me. “I’m being homeschooled right now,”
I explained with a nervous smile to a Mexican consul general stationed in Ottawa. Sibyl had hired an instructor to come in once or twice a week and, not surprisingly, I’d learned even less than when I was struggling to stay awake in Ashford High. “Th-thanks for asking, sir. . . .”

  “My daughter is a big fan. Would you mind?”

  Before I’d even decided on an answer, he whipped out his phone and snapped a picture of us both. I didn’t even want to know what kind of bizarre shape my mouth had contorted into.

  “Everyone, please,” said someone by the door, presumably working for Blackwell. “If you’ll follow us into the reception hall, Mr. Blackwell would like to give his welcome.”

  The reception hall was majestic with a high vaulted ceiling held in place by white marble columns. The tapestries stretching across the eggshell-white walls looked hundreds of years old. Some admired them, drinks in hand, while photographers snapped their photos. Busts of philosophers were perched atop dark oak tables, tucked into corners. That’s where the servants stayed with their trays of food and drinks. The man by the grand piano at the head of the room was also sitting idly, waiting for word to continue his performance.

  The not-so-subtly intimidating men and women standing at attention by entrances and around corners—they must have been Blackwell’s security. They looked Sect-like in their shades and black suits, but they probably worked here full-time. Every once in a while, I saw them tilt their heads and open their mouths as if speaking to an invisible friend, so I knew they were probably communicating to each other through their inner earpieces. I guess with this many powerful people in one room, security had to be vigilant.

  “Maia, you’re here.”

  My heels halted against the marble floor. Brendan slipped out from the crowd and strode toward me in his finely cut Italian suit, his hair slicked into a preppy style, almost Rockwellian in its celebration of the cheesy fifties aesthetic.

  “Hopefully not for long,” I mumbled, wrapping my naked arms around my chest. “Hi, by the way,” I added more loudly.

  That, he heard. “Good to see you. Uh—are you okay?”

  My neck was chafing from Dot’s neck-band. Lake had given me a white crochet band to wear around it, and it worked pretty well against the steel. But the back of my neck was still burning, and since I was too afraid to take the collar off, I tried to rub it against the skin. Hence, Brendan’s quizzical look.

  “I’m okay,” I answered, wincing. “This place is really something, isn’t it?”

  At the center of the room was a tall, white stone statue of a naked woman, her long hair wrapped around her body like robes, holding what looked like a white pearl high above her head. Blackwell certainly didn’t skimp on extravagance.

  “Well, now that you’re here, there are a few people I want you to see—” Brendan started, but he was cut off by Blackwell’s booming baritone voice reverberating down the room through the sound system in the walls.

  “Everyone. I want to welcome you and thank you for coming as my guests this evening.”

  It was fitting for a man of Blackwell’s means and ego that he would be addressing us from above. Though there were a few patrons on the first steps of the spiraling, kingly staircase off to the side, only Blackwell stood on the second floor above us, casting his gaze down at us from behind the gilt bronze and wrought-iron railings. His long, thick black hair draped over his white suit in lavish curls, and a row of rings climbed several of his fingers, catching the light of the nineteenth-century chandelier dangling high above him.

  Blackwell didn’t need a microphone, but he seemed to enjoy speaking into one. “This estate, as you may have read in your pamphlets, was purchased by my great-great-grandfather Bartholomäus Blackwell II more than a century ago. Since then, our doors have always been open for our colleagues in the Sect and our esteemed friends around the world. It has been our family pursuit to contribute our wealth, resources, and connections toward the higher purpose of ridding mankind of the mysterious demons plaguing us. And indeed, we have taken this duty seriously from the moment we were appointed to the high position of Council representative: a position of responsibility I, Bartholomäus Blackwell VI, take just as seriously as my predecessors did.”

  As Blackwell continued with his speech, Brendan scoffed next to me. “That’s not what my father tells me.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked in a whisper so none of Blackwell’s “esteemed friends” could hear us trash-talking him.

  “Once the Sect got out from under the control of the British Crown and established itself as an independent agency, Blackwell II bribed and blackmailed his way into a prominent position—or at least as prominent a position as they were willing to give him.”

  How had Director Prince put it? Ah yes, the “ceremonial crust on the Sect’s toe.” It was good to know his oldest son shared his naked disdain.

  “That’s not part of the official canon, of course, but the relationship between the Blackwell family and the Sect certainly isn’t as harmonious as Blackwell’s trying to paint it. But the Sect benefits from his huge amount of wealth and resources. And I suppose he benefits from nepotism.”

  “Like your dad helping you snag Sibyl’s job after the Council kicked her out?”

  Brendan’s ears flushed red, but before he could stutter a coherent response, the room broke out into applause. I hadn’t even heard the rest of what Blackwell had to say, but it probably didn’t matter anyway. He was rich and powerful, and so were the people here. It was a language they understood even without words.

  I wondered how it felt to inherit so much wealth and power. Blackwell looked foreboding, looming high above us, framed, perhaps fittingly, by the large, golden-rimmed acrylic painting on the wall behind him: a painting of a medieval knight standing atop a mountain of bodies, sword tipped against the head of a pleading skeleton. A man conquering death.

  “There’s Director Prince with Senator Abrams of British Columbia,” Brendan said, pointing toward the other side of the room once the crowd had dispersed.

  I guess his father was one of the people he’d wanted me to see. I hadn’t even known he was coming. One would think he’d have better things to do, but then this was all about optics. Arthur Prince looked much bigger in person, taller and brawnier in his gray suit than any of his sons. The other man, Senator Abrams, was practically dwarfed by his size, though his girth more than made up for it.

  And next to them with a wineglass in hand . . .

  “Is that Tracy Ryan? That crazy senator from Florida?”

  Indeed it was, her pinched face unmistakable. She was tall too, but she looked like a scarecrow next to Prince. Her short brown hair bounced as she nodded good-bye to Senator Abrams after he answered his cell phone and left the two.

  “Good, there are cameras,” I heard Brendan say before he put his hand on my shoulder. “Maia, I want you to meet Senator Ryan and Director Prince Senior.”

  I blanched. “And say what?”

  “Exchange pleasantries. Let them know you’re working hard. We just need to appear to be getting along with the rest of the world here. It’s why you came, remember? Wait here.”

  As he walked up to the pair, I wondered what the threads would be like on the Doll Soldiers forum. Maybe the title would be, Maia Builds Bridges with Senator Tracy Ryan, with a set of pictures of me shaking hands with the woman widely known for her xenophobic, anti-immigration rhetoric and misogynistic policies straight out of the Baroque period. Of course, it would more likely be, Maia Selling Out to Political Trash, or, Self-Hating Daughter of an Immigrant Cosigns Racist. Or maybe, Maia Hangs with the Woman Who Once Suggested that She and Her Friends Be Locked Up and Tortured.

  I turned right around, the bag over my shoulder swinging by the chain, and almost ran straight into Rhys standing behind me in a gray suit tailored perfectly to his tall, lean body.

  “Maia. I . . .” He reached out to steady me. “I thought that was you. Your hair . . .” He pointed to his head, and m
y hand unconsciously went to my thick, curly hair. Still, I said nothing.

  He looked even better than he usually did. He filled his suit nicely, his physique sturdier than his brother’s, his proportions cruelly phenomenal. I swallowed my greeting. It slid down painfully.

  I’d already decided he couldn’t have killed Natalya, so I should have been more comfortable around him. I should have already sorted out the conflicted mess that were my emotions, but they were still in turmoil. Was it because of how I felt about him? Or was it the shadow of his secrets refusing to be put at ease? I couldn’t tell.

  His long lashes fluttered as he blinked nervously before steeling himself with a cough. He kept a little amiable smile strapped to his face like a shield, but it wouldn’t make me forget that night Vasily had picked him apart piece by piece from the inside with his words alone. Or the tears streaming down his cheekbones as he’d looked at me, ashamed.

  He waited for me to say something, but whatever I could say fell limp on my tongue. I hadn’t even known he’d be here. Are you okay, Rhys? I thought. I wanted to say at least that.

  “Your . . .” The word came out timid, unsure. “Your wrist seems okay now,” I said, pointing at his arm. His black wrist brace was noticeable, but his hand looked like it could move a lot more easily now.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The doctors did what they needed to. And I’ve been resting.”

  “That’s good,” I told him, and my little smile seemed to encourage him. His face brightened hopefully at the sight of it.

  “Maia,” he said finally, taking his chance. “I want to—”

  “Maia—and Aidan, nice of you to come.”

  Damn it, I’d stayed still too long. I turned to find Brendan walking up to us with Prince and Tracy Ryan in tow. Prince was formidable up close, but I could smell the judgment on him, feel the air of superiority. Once he reached me, he stared down at me without a word, picking me apart, sizing me up, trying to quantify my worth with nothing but the power of his glare.

  “Ms. Finley,” Prince said finally. “It’s good to see you in person.”