Dragonshadow

by Elle Katharine White

  “Thank you.” Now that she’d mentioned it, I did feel a little queasy. The smell of the butcher’s stall was more pervasive than I’d thought. I plucked a leaf and stuck it under my tongue as I wandered through the rest of the market, tucking the remaining stalks in the pages of my sketchbook. The leaf crumbled in my mouth, stale and tasting of burnt clover, but the herb hadn’t lost its virtue and the queasiness lessened in minutes. I hoped it’d be as effective while flying. After all I’d done to avoid getting left behind, I wasn’t about to let my weak stomach serve as Alastair’s excuse to turn us around.

  Only one corner of the market escaped the cloud that hung over the rest of the city. The clank of metal and the roar of a forge drew me like a fox to a marshlight, and I followed the sound to the edge of the market where a squat stone building overlooked the river. A man sat in the shade of the doorway sharpening his knife. His whetstone stopped halfway down his blade as I approached. “Looking for something, miss?”

  “Is this the lithosmith’s shop?”

  “Aye, finest in Harborough Hatch.” He bent his head again to his task, the stone rasping smoothly along the steel. “You got business with the master?”

  Through a chink in the door I caught a familiar flash of blond hair and wondered what the lady of Hatch House was doing in a lithosmith’s shop.

  “Miss? You coming or going?”

  There was one way to find out. “Coming, I think,” I said and went inside.

  It was a larger shop than the one in Trollhedge. Dark wood paneled the walls and glass-covered cases lined in velvet filled the room. Heartstones of all shades and sizes glittered in the lamplight, some by themselves, some in rich settings of silver or copper. The blond woman at the far side of the shop turned at the sound of the door. It was not Lady Hatch.

  “Lady Daired!” Margrey leapt down from the stool where she’d stood, a feather duster in one hand, a small four-faced statuette in the other. There was a thud from a back room and she dropped the statuette on the stool. She looked around wildly. “Milady, what are you doing here?”

  “I’m sorry, I thought you were Lady Hatch—”

  A curtain swished on the other side of the shop and a man in the dark tunic and leather jerkin of a lithosmith emerged from the back room. “Lady Daired!” he cried. “I did hear right, didn’t I?”

  “Aye, sir,” I said, puzzled by Margrey’s intensified look of alarm.

  “Well! If this isn’t good fortune I don’t know what is.” He swept into a bow. “Erik Tully, master of the Hatch Ford lithosmiths and your humble servant. To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “Sorry for intruding,” I said. “I . . . just needed to step in out of the sun for a moment.”

  He turned. “Margrey, fetch Lady Daired some water.”

  She jerked as if slapped, her eyes wide. “Master?”

  “Now, please.”

  “That’s not necessary,” I started to say, but Margrey rushed from the room before I could stop her. “Thank you, sir, but I’m fine.”

  It was a lie. The queasiness had returned, and this time the beggar’s balm couldn’t soothe it. Margrey’s expression stuck in my mind, gnawing a warning. A prickling started up the back of my neck as the lithosmith set the statuette on the ground and pulled out the stool by the mantelpiece.

  Why did I come in here again?

  “Here, my lady. Rest.”

  I stayed standing. Something about him was wrong. The closer he came the more I felt it. His clothes weren’t merely black; they drank the light, leaching color from everything around him. Looking at them made my head ache. My eyes slid off that woven absence like oil from water. His posture felt wrong too. He walked with a slight hunch, shoulders raised on either side of his head as if trying to protect it.

  I edged back. “Thank you, sir, but I should be going.”

  “But you’ve only just arrived!”

  “My . . . husband’s expecting me,” I said firmly and turned to the door.

  “Ah, yes, the famous Lord Daired. We’ve heard that family name so much of late, you know. If you must go, you must,” he said, sounding crestfallen, “only—forgive me, I should like to give you something before you leave.”

  “Yes?”

  “Merely a trifle, of course. A token, really.”

  I paused on the threshold. “What is it?”

  “A greeting from an old friend.” The room behind me shuddered. Laughter started at the very edges of my perception, silvery and shrill, like a knife vibrating in the soul-space between silence and screaming. “The Minister of the Ledger sends his regards,” he said.

  Very slowly, I lowered the latch. My other hand felt for my dagger. I couldn’t bring myself to turn around. “What did you say?”

  “So you do remember! He thought you might. Well, he hoped you might. You were one of the few to see him as he is, he told me, and I think it rather endeared you to him. We do get so tired of hiding sometimes, you know.”

  My tongue felt thick and wooden, my throat dry as sand. “Who are you?”

  “A servant.”

  “Of whom?”

  “Someone who will be very pleased to hear me tell of this meeting. Unlike some of my brothers, you see, I am a very useful servant. Did you get the minister’s gift?”

  “How do you know about that?” I whispered.

  “It’s common knowledge that Garhadi ale is a favorite of your husband’s, isn’t it? My friend hoped he would enjoy it.”

  “I . . . got rid of it.”

  “Oh, that is a pity. He’ll be disappointed.”

  I squared my chin to the door. “Good.”

  “There she is!” Tully said. “‘Lady Aliza, clever and brave.’ For all the rest of his doggerel the ‘Charissong’ bard got that part right. I can see why the minister remembered you.”

  I spun around, but the lithosmith was no longer standing by the mantel.

  “So tell me,” he said in my ear, “have you felt it?”

  I sprang away, smacking my elbow against the nearest heartstone casket. My arm throbbed. “Stay back!”

  Tully pulled a key from his pocket and smiled. It was nothing like the minister’s grin, that knife shard in the dark, teasing out riddles and dancing with false fire. This smile was far too human—and much worse. “I have no wish to harm you,” he said as he locked the door. “Not yet, at least. That would quite defeat the purpose.” Again I reached for my knife, but the sheath was empty. He held up my dagger. “Tut, tut. A Daired shouldn’t be so careless with a blade. But of course, you’re no Daired. For all your fine titles, not a drop of Fireborn blood runs in those veins.”

  I had to swallow twice before I could speak. “What do you want?”

  “Your answer will do. Have you felt it? I must know.”

  “Felt what?”

  “The war that is coming.”

  “It did come.” My voice shook. “The war is over.”

  “Over? Over? Oh, you poor, naive thing! The war has only just begun.”

  “No. The Greater Lindworm is dead.” My voice caught as flames danced again in the dark places of memory. “I watched it die. I watched it burn.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You disappoint me, Lady Daired. Yes, the Worm is dead. A clever person would wonder why it woke in the first place.”

  “Revenge,” I said, and cast around for an escape route. The poker by the fireplace caught my eye. “The Riders killed its spawn.”

  “Ah, but what woke the Lesser Lindworm?”

  I opened my mouth, but no answer came out. In truth, I had no answer.

  He smiled again. “So you don’t know? Well, it doesn’t matter. War is coming. Even now the Oldkind choose sides, and sooner or later you and your people will join them. What choice my master offers is this: stand aside and live—or fight us and die. There is no—”

  “Fight,” I said before he could finish. “We’ll fight. Whoever you are, and whoever you work for, we will fight you. Every Arlean, from the Drakaina down to
the last hobgoblin.”

  “Courage without sense is stupidity, child. If you knew who you stood against, you would bend your knee today.”

  I edged toward the fireplace. “Then why don’t you tell me?”

  “The Tekari sense it. Idar too, even some Shani. They have sensed it for years, though most do not know its name, and those who do dare not speak it.”

  Just a few more steps. “But you do?”

  “I am a messenger. I speak what I am given, and I am not given to revealing things my master wishes to keep hidden.”

  “You won’t win.”

  “Don’t you understand?” He closed the distance between us. “The war is won already! Your kingdom is weak. My brothers and I have spent a long time making it so.” He laughed. Scales and talons raked my soul. “Little debts all around the kingdom, little favors, ensnaring the desperate, fomenting the discontents, encouraging the restless, gathering allies from the darkest of your Arlean legends. We feed the embers of the fire that will consume the very heart of your people. There are many ways to win a war, dear false Daired. One might say our master’s victory here is merely a matter of settling accounts.”

  I backed into the stool on the hearth. My bag fell from my shoulder, spilling loaves of bardsbread and beggar’s balm onto the stones and knocking the poker from its place next to the fireplace. Tully’s smile split his face like an unscabbed wound.

  “You’ll soon see, my lady. You and all your people. There’s nowhere left to run.”

  I drew up my last ounce of courage. “All right,” I said, looking him full in the face. “I’ve answered your question. What else do you want from me?”

  His eyes sparkled—and changed. Yellow boiled through the blue of his irises, bubbling up in shades of sulfur. His jerkin writhed with a life of its own, sending out coils of darkness that swelled around him and over him and through him . . .

  Mikla save us.

  Two voices spoke from his mouth: one bitter and human, one shrill and smooth, seething with hatred just below the surface. He raised my knife. “You carry something of great value to my master, Lady Daired, and the brotherhood has—”

  Floorboards creaked behind him and Tully paused to look over his shoulder. I stooped and felt around blindly behind me. My hand closed over the stone statuette.

  “Margrey?” Tully’s human voice said. “What are you doing?”

  “Sorry, Master,” she said.

  “No! Don’t you da—”

  I brought the statuette crashing down on his head.

  Nothing happened.

  I lifted the statuette again—and Tully collapsed. Margrey stood behind him, a glass bottle raised above her head. She leapt out of the way as he hit the ground and began to writhe. Roiling tendrils of darkness licked along his back, flailing like disembodied spider’s legs before sinking back into his chest. He went still.

  I clutched at the edge of the fireplace, staring at the body at our feet. Thell. Oh Thell. “Margrey—I didn’t mean—he was—”

  “Ghast-ridden. I know.” She seized my arm. “He won’t stay down long.”

  I looked at the figure on the floor. His chest didn’t move.

  “He’s not dead,” she said. “That creature won’t let him get away so easily. Hurry! You shouldn’t be here.”

  There was a pounding at the door. “Master Tully? Everything all right?” the guard asked, and Margrey went rigid. “Master Tully?” The door shook as he tried to open it, but the lock held firm. “Sir?” The guard swore. “I’m getting the Watch, sir!”

  “Quickly!” Margrey said in my ear. “There’s a window in the back. Come on!”

  I glanced one last time at the dreadful thing on the hearth and ran after her.

  The back room was cramped and littered with stone chips, the air hot and smoky from the fire blazing next to the window. Margrey clambered onto the workbench and set to work on the window bolts. “Hope you don’t mind climbing, milady.”

  “Margrey, stop! Shouldn’t we wait for the Watch?”

  She shook her head as the first bolt shot free. “Master Tully and his Vesh own the Watch. You won’t get help from them.”

  “Then the magistrate—”

  “The magistrate don’t see anything he’s not paid to see, and the Vesh pay him lots.” The last bolt slid loose. “Listen, please. I don’t know what the master wants with you, but if it woke that creature inside him it won’t be good. Best chance you have now is to get back to your dragon.” She balanced on the windowsill and offered me her hand. “Coming?”

  Shouts sounded in the front room, and the door shuddered as someone kicked it. I took her hand.

  The lithosmith shop bordered the riverbank. We dropped from the window into a tangle of waterweed. Mud sucked at my feet, dragging me toward the river, but Margrey took me by the elbow and hauled me to higher ground. Something crashed inside the shop. We dodged behind the corner just as a woman thrust her head out of the window.

  “Search the market, and send someone up to watch Hatch House,” the woman said to one of the guards inside. “Lord Hatch don’t hear about this, understand?”

  “That’s the captain of the Watch,” Margrey said in my ear and pointed to the crumbling façade of the next building over. “Bakery. Over there. Quick!”

  We slipped and slid along the bank to the abandoned bakery, Margrey trailing after me to smooth away our footprints in the mud. There was an empty outbuilding close to the river, and we crouched inside as men and women of the Watch poured from the front of the lithosmith shop. Some headed back east toward Hatch House, some spread out into the market. Two stayed to guard the door, and only then did I realize I’d left my dagger inside, clutched in Tully’s death grip. “Can we get past them?” I whispered.

  “Not now. Your dragon’s up at the house, inn’t she?”

  “She’s out hunting.”

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “With the magistrate.”

  Margrey risked a glance through the outbuilding’s grimy window. “That’ll be the next place the Watch goes. They’ll keep him there as long as they can while Tully looks for you.” She ducked as a barge passed on the far side of the river, its timbers groaning beneath the shouts of its crew and the answering shouts from the shore. Margrey cursed under her breath. “River’s out too. Boatswain and the Watch are thicker than—well, they are thieves.”

  Escape first, answers later. “What do we do?”

  “Hide. Most of the Watch only got a few hours’ search in ’em. If they think looking for you will make them miss their dinners, they’ll give up.”

  “And Tully?”

  “There are a few places I know he won’t look.” The clatter of boots on cobblestones faded and she peeked around the edge of the door. “C’mon.”

  Chapter 9

  Ghastradi

  The worm-eaten boards trembled beneath Margrey’s hand as she fumbled with the lock of a house near the northern edge of the city. I squeezed into the hollow of a doorway and surveyed the street. Rubbish packed the winding lane between the city’s outer berm and the foundations of the higher houses, making a twisted seam through the slum quarters of Hatch Ford. None of the Watch had followed us. For the twentieth time in the last hour I found myself thanking the gods for, among other things, Margrey’s uncanny knowledge of the city’s alleys.

  Before she could manage the lock, the door opened from the inside and a woman peered out. She was a broad, solid woman, not old, but with weary eyes and too many wrinkles for her age. A silver pendant in the shape of Janna’s beech leaf sigil hung on a chain around her neck. She gave Margrey a sour look. “You’re early.”

  “Trouble at the shop,” Margrey said. “Why did you lock the door? I told you not to.”

  “And leave us unprotected? In this quarter of the city?”

  Margrey grunted something under her breath and pushed past her.

  “The baby’s sleeping!” the woman whispered.

  “We’ll be quiet.
”

  The house had only three walls. The city berm formed the fourth, its sloping surface shored up with planks and bits of furniture. A peat fire smoldered on the hearth, coughing more smoke into the room than it did into the chimney. The older woman waved one hand to the propped-up plank that served as a table and lifted a kettle from its hook above the fire. “Sit if you like. Tea.” It wasn’t a request, simply a statement of existence. “Are you going to tell me what happened this time?” she asked as Margrey carried three battered mugs to the table. “And why you dragged this girl into it?”

  “Her name’s Aliza,” Margrey said before I could answer, and she shook her head with a frantic look before I could add Daired. “Aliza, my sister, Myrra.”

  Myrra brushed aside my unthinking curtsy. “Her mother on most days. What’s gone wrong today, Maggie?”

  “It’s Tully,” Margrey said. “The creature inside him woke up.”

  Myrra sighed deeply. “The creature you’ve imagined, you mean.”

  “For the last time, I didn’t imagine it! The ghast is real. I saw it today. So did Aliza.”

  The sisters turned to me. “It’s true. I think,” I said, sifting through my mental notes of the Chronicle of Foes. There hadn’t been much on ghasts beyond the obvious: yellow eyes and split voice, and even those entries had been faded almost beyond legibility. “Something had gotten ahold of him. There’s no other explanation.”

  She gave me a narrow-eyed look. “You saw this ghast thing?”

  “We saw a shadow—”

  “There,” Myrra interrupted. “That’s all it was.”

  “It went through him, Myrra. It moved with a mind of its own,” Margrey said. “And Tully—” A stirring sound came from beyond the curtained-off corner of the room, and the two looked up in alarm. When no cries followed, Margrey continued in a whisper. “He spoke with two voices.”

  “The ghastradi are old wives’ tales. Everyone knows that.”

  “Din’t you always say there’s truth under the surface of those stories?”

  “Didn’t. And perhaps I did, but this? Shadow monsters on your back, pulling your soul strings like a puppeteer? If there ever were such creatures, they died out in Arle centuries ago.” She sniffed. “You said Tully picked up that—whatever it is—months back. He—”