The Shattered Sun

by Rachel Dunne

  Anddyr tugged gently with the arm around Aro’s shoulders and the younger man obligingly walked forward. Aro was still a muttering, twitching mess, and he was only getting worse, his bad spells coming more and more frequently. Anddyr knew from personal experience that he would get much worse before he could get better—after forcefully weaning himself off the skura, Anddyr felt as though he were finally on the upswing of his own downward spiral, but that had been a process of nearly a month, during which he’d very nearly killed himself or the others multiple times entirely by mistake. The loss of control was the true issue of the detoxification process; a mage without his carefully instilled control was a danger to anyone unlucky enough to be nearby. Aro hadn’t reached truly dangerous levels yet . . . but it was only a matter of time.

  Anddyr looked up at the star-dotted sky, always dark now, save when the moon deigned to make an appearance. Those were happy hours, the closest thing they had to a sun anymore. But the moon was smaller, darker, each time it visited. Anddyr worried that the moon was vanishing like the sun had, just at a much slower rate. None of their group could remember how full the moon had been before the start of the Long Night, or how full it should be. All they could do was hope that once it disappeared, it would grow slowly back as it always had.

  “Stop.”

  Her voice brought him up short, and his arm around Aro’s shoulders was as good a restraint as a guide. Rora had stopped and, squinting, Anddyr could see why: their leader had stopped. It was a statement that applied to the moment—where he seemed to have simply chosen to sit down among the waving stalks—as well as to his general state of mind since the rise of the Twins. Joros had stopped. Stopped thinking, stopped leading, stopped speaking. He had become a walking, breathing corpse.

  Joros spent much of his time trudging along either far ahead of or far behind the rest of them, so quiet Anddyr wouldn’t have known he was there if not for the sound of his footsteps. He stopped and started on his own whims, leaving the rest to follow his example or leave him behind.

  Somewhere inside his working-or-not mind, Joros had decided that it was time to stop, and there was no arguing with that either. He was sitting amid the waving grass, staring just as vacantly as ever, and Anddyr knew from the three previous attempts that there would be no moving him. Rora could only shout so much at a slab of stone.

  “We’re done for now,” Rora said. She said it as though it had been her choice, rather than an inarguable fact beyond her control. This was the fourth time they’d stopped since leaving the seething hill behind—the fourth time she’d had a halt imposed on her. She grew unhappier each time.

  Anddyr could understand it. She’d had a bad time of things at the hill. She’d been offered up as sacrifice to the gods whose very existence made most of the world want to kill her, she’d watched her brother poisoned, she’d perhaps felt the brush of the newly freed goddess Sororra against the edge of her existence, and her brother had betrayed her in some way Anddyr couldn’t understand but that seemed to have cut to her core. Things hadn’t been going particularly well for her, and so, in the logical part of his brain that bubbled up every so often, Anddyr could see why she was so angry and so sad . . . and he didn’t think Cappo Joros was helping with her mood at all.

  Anddyr knew she blamed the cappo for her brother’s condition at least as much as she blamed Anddyr himself, but the issue with Joros was that he refused to be antagonized, refused to let her make him a target of her rage. He seemed to have locked himself inside his own mind, and Anddyr knew how dangerous that could be.

  Anddyr carefully patted down a section of the tickling grasses, and lay down in such a way that they wouldn’t be able to get to his elbows. He had to admit he was grateful for the rest—Rora set a grueling, unforgiving pace. They all wanted to be away from the hills and the Twins as quickly as possible, and Rora seemed determined to make it happen at superhuman speeds. Anddyr, though, was only a regular human, and a poor excuse for one at that. He was tired.

  As Anddyr drifted off to sleep, wrapped around the miserable knot of his guilt, the only sound was Aro’s low muttering. Anddyr couldn’t make out the words, didn’t really want to—he didn’t want to know what horrors his actions had put into the younger man’s waking nightmare. He didn’t want to listen, but as sleep finally claimed him, he could make out two words, repeated endlessly, not quite Aro’s voice but a constant stream of the words, Find me. Find me. Find me . . .

  It’s a tower. Anddyr knows that, somehow. A spire that hangs in the air, built from clouds, floating like a puff of down on the wind, but its wall feels solid against his back. It might even be real.

  At the tower’s center there’s a boy staring into a mirror, but no—he’s facing a girl whose face matches his. The boy’s is softer, but the girl’s has smile lines. A lot of grimacing can carve those same lines into a face, though. Anddyr knows their faces, can name them even, factual as reciting to a professor: Etarro and Avorra. He knows he should feel something, looking at them, but he doesn’t. He’s shaped out of cloud and air, too, just like the skytower.

  The twins are talking, and as Anddyr watches, the boy lifts his left arm. At the end of it, his hand flops like a useless piece of meat. “You said it would work,” the boy says, accusation and hurt in his voice, both barely held in check. “You said it would be like it was before.”

  “It did work, Brother! Just look.” She spreads both her working hands, though they only encompass the inside of the floating tower. “Look at all we’ve done. And this is only the beginning . . .”

  The boy drops his arm, shoulders hunching. At his side, one hand curls into a fist, though the other doesn’t so much as twitch. “I see it. I see how you have everything you’ve ever wanted.”

  “Everything we’ve always wanted.”

  “I never wanted this!” The outburst shakes the stone at Anddyr’s back, makes the skytower tremble and waver. “I only wanted to shape, and now even that has been taken from me—”

  “They’ll pay,” the girl interrupts, fierce as a mother cat. “All of them, I swear it. Our Parents will pay for all they’ve done, and their people will, too. They’re all guilty, all of them, and soon they’ll learn. Soon they’ll know.”

  Softly, quiet as clouds, the boy whispers, “I only want to shape.” He wraps his working hand around the useless one, looks away from his sister, and his eyes find Anddyr. He sees the surprise grow in those eyes, sees the outrage forming on the girl’s face, her mouth shaping a curse—he sees all these as facts, as a historian at the center of a war, careless of the surrounding danger. He observes this, and he observes when the clouds swallow the girl, dragging her down through the floor of the skytower, soundless. He observes the confusion in the boy’s eyes, and the war raging within him.

  The boy stands in front of Anddyr sudden as blinking, and his eyes are different. Younger. More human. “Find me,” he breathes, and he raises his left hand, the one that didn’t work, and in it now is clutched a stuffed horse. That had been Anddyr’s stuffed horse, which he’d loved beyond all reason. Her name is Sooty. “Find me.” The boy’s hand is wrapped around her, bone and muscle working beneath flesh. He holds her toward Anddyr, the toy closing the space between them, and Anddyr reaches, too. “Find me . . .” His hand touches the boy’s, and the shock that springs between them makes the skytower crumble, clouds swirling away to wisps, and he plummets through the open air, down and down and down . . .

  Anddyr woke flailing and choking, clawing his way up through the ground that had swallowed him. A hand grabbed his shoulder and yanked, and Anddyr sucked in air as he stared up at stars, grateful just to be alive, grateful he wasn’t trapped beneath the earth like the Twins had been.

  “Fecking idiot,” Rora muttered at him, and Anddyr was, for the first time, grateful for the darkness of the Long Night—it hid his burning cheeks as he realized he hadn’t been swallowed by the earth, only sleeping on his stomach with his face pressed to the ground.

  The d
ream almost slipped away from him in a sleepy haze of shame, but with another gasp of air, Anddyr grabbed on to the edges of the retreating dream, and pulled it back.

  “Etarro,” he blurted.

  Rora glared at him, along with two other half-asleep sets of eyes. “Shut up about him,” she said. Anddyr didn’t realize he’d been talking about the boy, apparently often enough that it had started to prick at Rora.

  “No, he’s . . . he’s not gone. He’s still there, still fighting.”

  “Sounds like you shouldn’t’ve stopped taking your medicine,” she said, and since she knew very well now how the mage-enslaving drug skura worked, that cut especially deep. The guilt and self-hatred threatened to overwhelm Anddyr once more, but he clung to the dream. It had been more than a dream, he could feel that in his bones.

  Anddyr crawled clumsily toward Cappo Joros, and went rifling through the pockets of his robe. Any other time, he never would have done such a thing, not even when gripped by the deepest madness, but he was desperate to prove himself right—no, not even that, he was desperate to prove that Etarro still lived, that he could be saved . . .

  Luckily Joros was half asleep and slow to react. By the time he growled and began to turn away, Anddyr had already found what he was looking for, pulled the smooth stone out of the cappo’s pocket—

  It was like a punch to both his mind and his body. He could tell, in a very disconnected way, that he went tumbling over backward to land on his back with all the air exploding out of his chest, but that was the smaller of the two concerns. Dark flames blossomed before his eyes and tore through his mind, a wildfire made of starlight, and it scorched everything it touched. There was nothing it didn’t touch. Anddyr’s world narrowed to the pain of its burning, and he could see nothing but the flickering flames, hear nothing but their roar in his ears, and there was a tug like a child at a sleeve, an inexorable pull south—

  His fingers released the seekstone, or one of the others knocked it from his hand—Anddyr didn’t know or care which, he only knew that he could breathe again, and see, and think. Still, he lay there for a while longer, reeling. The world seemed to spin around him, or perhaps he spun around it, and his stomach churned.

  “What in all the hells was that?” Aro’s voice, high and nervous. He reached for the seekstone and Anddyr lurched upright, knocking the younger man’s hand away. Aro looked back at him with the saddest eyes.

  Anddyr ran his shaking hands through his hair, trying to pull back any composure he might have left. Even if he’d ruined the man’s life, Aro was still his pupil. Even if Aro’s sanity now faded like a tide, he could still learn. “What do seekstones do?” Anddyr asked in his best, calmest teacher’s voice.

  “They let you see out of someone else’s eyes.” Aro’s tone suggested that he expected it to be a trick question, that he was bracing for the blow of a wrong answer.

  “And what else?”

  “Give you a . . . a directional pull on where the other person is, so you can—”

  “Enough with the witch-talk,” Rora growled. “What’d it fecking do?”

  It was incredibly hard, but Anddyr ignored her and spoke only to Aro. “Exactly. And this seekstone”—he pointed to the one sitting so innocently at his side—“is attuned to Etarro.” He waited for that to sink in, but three blank expressions told him it wasn’t going to. Gently, he prompted, “Etarro, who is . . . ?”

  “Dead,” Joros said flatly. It was the first word he’d said in hours, if not days.

  Anddyr winced, but ignored that, too. He fixed his gaze on Aro, willing him to think through the answer. Aro looked between the others, curled his shoulders up to his ears, and made a timid guess: “Dead?”

  “Not dead.” Anddyr sighed. “He’s host to Fratarro, his mind and body usurped by a god. When I touched the seekstone, I touched Fratarro’s mind, saw through the eyes of a god. That’s . . . not something any person is made to withstand. It burned me . . .”

  Joros snorted, and with a corner of his robe wrapped around his hand, he reached out to grab the seekstone and drop it back into his pocket. “You think because you saw through Fratarro’s eyes when you touched Etarro’s seekstone, that means Etarro is still alive? Sounds rather like the opposite, to me.”

  Anddyr opened his mouth to argue, and stopped. The only argument he had was the dream, which had felt more real than a dream, but was even now starting to fade, the urgency and surety drifting away like wisps of cloud. The cappo was right—the seekstone didn’t prove anything aside from Etarro’s body still being to the south. A few seconds of touching Fratarro’s mind had nearly burned away Anddyr’s own mind—how could he expect that Etarro would be able to withstand constantly sharing his body and mind with a god?

  With all of them awake now, there was no reason not to keep moving on—as far as the others were concerned, the sooner they could be away from the Plains, the better. But Anddyr hung back, staring south, staring back the way they’d come. He could still feel that pull, that insistent tug, and no matter how often he told himself it had just been a dream and nothing more, he couldn’t forget Etarro whispering, Find me, as he’d clutched the stuffed horse that had belonged to both of them. He couldn’t help wondering what he’d find if he were to go back to the hill where the Twins had risen to steal the bodies of the children that had been provided for them. Would he find only a boy with an ancient god’s eyes, or—worse—would he be able to see the trapped boy’s eyes behind the god’s?

  Chapter Two

  There was a tension to the darkness. A feeling like a held breath, like a narrowed eye. A waiting, watching and impatient and still as a startled hare. A silence, but one that begged for an end.

  Scal was not good at filling a silence. He never had been. Words came slow to his lips, slow as falling snow, and they were so easy to swallow. He was a man made of silences, made of all the words that he had never said. And so the quiet dark wrapped around him, familiar and foreign both. An old cloak, a favorite, that no longer fit as it had. A tune, so close to one he knew, but with notes that jarred like nails. He was a man used to silences, but this one fit poorly.

  Silence, too, walked at his side. Vatri, wrapped tight in her yellow robe, was as quiet as when she searched for meaning in a fire. Eyes fixed, unblinking, waiting to hear the Parents speak. But she could not read the darkness like a fire. The Parents would not speak their voices into the Long Night. Still, though, her silence held. Her eyes held, looking anywhere but at Scal. He did not know how to ask her to speak, how to ask her to fill their silence.

  Between them the makeshift torch. Not a torch at all, but a sword that burned with soundless fire when Scal’s hand touched it. It gave them a pool of light in the darkness, making the dark grass sea dance with shadows. The tall grass that brushed against the burning sword came away unburned. Untouched, by the quiet fire. The sword filled the space between Scal and Vatri, filled it with enough light that it could hide the shadows between them. That it could hide how deep that chasm ran, and how wide.

  Scal thought, again, of reaching across that space. He had thought it often in their walking. Of reaching out to touch her arm, her shoulder, her face seamed by old scars and new worries.

  But the sword was in his hand, and there was the light. The sword changed when he held it—grew flames from the touch of one hand, and ice from the other. Powers she had given him, though she said she simply worked the will of the Parents. He was the man she had made him. The sword burned, when he touched it. He did not know if she would burn, too.

  His hand stayed on the sword. Tight, and unfeeling.

  She had not reached across the space either.

  The edge of the light from his sword touched against something taller than the grass. Sudden, a thing that did not belong. Scal shifted his grip, angled the sword, ready to strike. Vatri faltered, stumbled, and unthinking Scal reached with his other hand to pull her behind him. The tall thing did not move. Scal stepped forward, feet sure upon the ground, and stil
l the other did not move.

  “Tree,” Vatri breathed behind him. Her fingers touched his arm, a calming gesture. “It’s a tree.” A breathy laugh escaped her, as surprising a sound as any. Her fingers were warm through the thin fabric of his shirt.

  “It is a tree,” he agreed. Said the words, useless as they were, so the silence would not swallow them back down.

  Vatri laughed again, still softly, as though scared the world would shatter like the silence if she were too loud. “Like children spooking at shadows . . .” She shook her head, shook the laughter away. “We’re close to Fiatera, then. Once the moon comes up, we might be able to see Mount Raturo, see how much we’ll have to adjust our path. Here . . .” Her fingers pulled at his arm, pulled him forward closer to the tree. It was a small one, but the light from his sword showed taller trees behind it, and many of them, stretching away into the darkness. The edge of the Forest Voro, that stretched along the southern border of Fiatera.

  Vatri’s fingers slipped from his arm. She looked at Scal, and he could not tell if the space between them was smaller or larger. She said, “We should stay outside the trees until moonrise. It will be harder to tell where we’re going otherwise. We . . .” She blinked. Looked away, and he could not tell whether she was looking to something else or looking away from him. “It’s been too long since we had a proper rest.”

  “Yes,” Scal said. Voice like a croak. Hoping she would keep talking. He did not know how to keep a silence at bay. Of all the things that made him, he was a fighter, but silence was not a thing that he could fight.

  She was facing away, and he could not see whether her eyes were on the distance or on him. “I’ll . . . gather some wood.” The sentence started a question, ended harder. A statement. A sureness. “A fire will be fine. There’s no one else around to see it.”

  Scal kept his lips closed. Kept his silence. He did not want to argue, not now that they were speaking. Did not want to tell her that if they had come this far, there was no reason others could not have come as far in as much time. Did not want to say that there could be black-robed priests moving through the Long Night behind them, hidden in the darkness, hidden in the pool of black that stretched beyond the sword’s glow. Did not want to scare away her certainty or her words. Instead, he said, “I will help.”