by Rachel Dunne
Anddyr watches, and is watched in turn.
“Who are you?” Fratarro asks, and there is no animosity in his voice—only curiosity.
“How are you here?” Sororra asks, and hers is full of venom and fear.
Anddyr opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes out. He is as ephemeral as a cloud, silent and shapeless; looking down at himself, he has no hands, no legs, no body—he is distilled down to his essence. The skytower surrounds him, ringing and wringing, insubstantial and solid. He wants to ask if they are dreaming, too—if gods sleep, and if this is where they come when they sleep. He wants to ask if this makes him a god, too.
“You should not be here,” Sororra says, and her words surround him like a blizzard. He has no body to shiver, but the cold goes deeper than skin, deeper than bone, deeper than soul. “You do not belong here. You should not be able to find us.”
“For so long,” Fratarro murmurs, “we wanted only to be found.”
“This is not the same.” There is fire in Sororra’s eyes, and there is ice, and there is no mercy. “Leave,” she says, and the skytower opens beneath Anddyr, and he is falling.
And a voice calls after him, a screaming whisper that both is and is not Fratarro’s voice: “Find me. You promised . . .”
Anddyr startled awake to the sound of thundering feet, a slamming door, and a creaking ladder. Blinking back sleep, he raised his head to stare through the barrier at the children streaming down the ladder to fill their place in the cellar, all full of quiet excitement and expectation.
Anddyr scrubbed his face with his hands. The Fallen must have been moving in greater numbers from the south, for so many of them to happen to pass by the estate, and that didn’t exactly paint a pleasant picture of the pack’s future on the estate. They’d done well enough so far, but one day they’d lure in a group that would overpower them, or a mage whose reflexes were quicker than Aro’s, or—
Or they would face a group of the Fallen without a mage of their own.
Anddyr gaped at the settling children, shocked by the stupidity of their guardians. Without Aro to give them the advantage, without Joros to push them—Anddyr had thought the pack would settle into the quiet, peaceful lives they seemed to have always wanted. He’d thought they would hunker down and simply try to survive the Long Night, as they’d managed to survive every other messy thing in their lives.
But perhaps he’d been too idealistic. He’d heard Aro and Rora talk about their pack. They were like dogs indeed: faithful, and ruthless, and never ones to back down once they’d gotten the smell of blood.
He wanted to shout at them that they should know better, but the children didn’t know better, and the adults who should were all beyond the cellar door, being unspeakably foolish.
And more importantly—to Anddyr at least, in this new bubble of a life—Peressey was beginning to moan. She was one of the newest of his flock of mages, and she was having a particularly hard time adjusting to both her new surroundings and her skura withdrawal. Because he couldn’t do anything about the pack, and because it would make his own life exponentially more unpleasant if he didn’t, he went to deal with Peressey.
She had pressed herself into a corner made by the cellar wall and the magical barrier, her face jammed against the corner so tightly it had flattened the tip of her nose as she pawed at the ground before the barrier, as though trying to dig her way free. She was digging with her magic, too, though—a frantic, groping search for any weakness in the barrier. Every new mage always searched for a weakness and, when that failed, would try to batter it down. It never worked, though. The shield always held.
Still blinking sleep from his eyes, Anddyr sat down next to her—not touching, because touch could be a dangerous thing in the throes of madness, but near enough that she could see and hear him. “It’s all right,” Anddyr said. He tried to be pleasant-sounding, but he was no miracle worker. The best he could manage, sometimes, was a tone that at least wasn’t actively hostile, that didn’t betray his bone-deep exhaustion. “Peressey, we are safe. We are secure.” The children beyond the barrier were staring and snickering, making mocking mewling noises. Anddyr didn’t give them the satisfaction of glaring. “We are strong. We have each other.”
Above, there were footsteps, and screams.
Peressey wailed, slapping at the barrier and wincing with each slap. Anddyr winced, too—it was like a toothache twinge, sharp and brief, but the memory lingered. They all felt each blow, now that the barrier was linked to them, siphoning their power away to fuel itself. Anddyr remembered the ruthless glee he’d felt at seeing Aro twitch and wince whenever one of the mages had attacked the barrier; he could sympathize with something, without feeling bad for it.
Foolish, clever boy, he thought at his absent student. Aro had always defied definition—useless and brave, charming and desperate, cunning and thoughtless, cocksure and fearful. Anddyr still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to survive without any training; most fledgling mages, left to their own devices, were very literally consumed by their uncontrolled power. Aro had somehow taught himself enough control to keep himself from burning, but he had no finesse. Though, for as clunky as Aro’s siphoning barrier was, there was no arguing that it was perhaps the greatest magical innovation Anddyr had seen—he hadn’t even known it was possible to draw on another’s powers, to use someone else’s magic to power his own spells. Such a thing would never have occurred to him, bound and trained by the strictures of the masters of the Academy. He would never have thought . . .
A long wail came from above, core-deep. Below, it was echoed by Peressey.
“We are secure,” Anddyr muttered absently to her. For all his innovation, Aro still lacked control—he had kept his power from burning him alive so far. Anddyr had his doubts that the boy could maintain that level of control forever, especially since his control when using his power was so slippery. “We are strong.” It didn’t matter, though, not anymore—Aro was gone. He was Joros’s problem now, for good and for ill . . . for both of them. “We have each other.”
The cellar door opened, and they dragged down a wailing mage.
She was in worse condition than most of the captured mages: her long hair was a tangled mess, covering all of her face except her wailing mouth and its split lip; and beneath her stained robe, she looked absolutely skeletal. Anddyr felt his stomach lurch with disgust and pity at the sight of her, but he tried to bury both emotions—in moments, she would be counted among his growing flock. She would need him.
The pack was triumphant, singing their own praises, an orgy of self-congratulation. Some boasted that they’d never needed “that traitor Aro anyway,” and Anddyr observed with a keen curiosity the way Tare’s jaw tightened whenever one of her people said such a thing, the way her eyes flickered over to Rora after. That was something new. Rora, no less despondent than she’d been since her brother’s leaving, didn’t react to the words, and didn’t seem to notice Tare’s looks. Regardless, they all left Rora herself in peace, whether for pity or boredom or forgetfulness. She was allowed to stare at her wall, the only movement her thumb rubbing at the place where the manacle pressed against the inside of her wrist.
Skit and Badden came forward with the wailing mage and, with little ceremony, pushed her through the barrier. It was no different than it had been when the barrier had been Aro’s—the same spell, the same quirks, just no longer powered by him. The new mage went sprawling, still wailing, and Skit and Badden turned away—no longer their problem.
Anddyr sighed and caught Travin’s gaze. His second was shaking, not in a good place of his own, but his bad was significantly better than anyone else’s, and even at his worst he knew his duty. Travin made his way to Peressey’s side, to soothe her now-rising panic, so that Anddyr could tend to the new mage and try to calm her before she threw all the others into fits.
The new mage had rolled to her knees before the barrier and clawed at the solid air, wailing, “Why? Why? Why?” at the retreating bac
ks of the pack as they made their way out of the cellar.
“It’s all right,” Anddyr said. A flat statement, probably not as comforting as it should have been, but by God he was tired. “My name is Anddyr. I’m here to help you.”
“Why?” she wailed at the barrier. “Why?”
Because I’m even more unlucky than you are, he thought, but didn’t dare say. “It can be a hard adjustment to make. I’m sure you’re scared.”
“Why?” She smacked her face against the barrier, and though her wild hair likely cushioned some of the blow, Anddyr winced in sympathy as much as in actual pain. “Why? W—” Her wailing stopped suddenly, her palms and forehead pressed against the barrier, and through her tangled hair Anddyr saw her split lips curve into a smile. “Oh,” she said, and she began to laugh. “Oh, that’s clever.”
Anddyr scooted away from her without really meaning to. Her laughter sent a chill snaking through him: laughing was not uncommon among his flock of mages, roiling head-smacking laughter and desperate giggles and laughs that were half tears—but this was none of that. Her laughter sounded . . . genuine. Sane. It did not sound like the laughter of a person who had been wailing inconsolably and clawing at air a moment before.
The mage reached up to push her tangled hair back from her face, and the creeping snake in Anddyr’s gut reared back and sank venom into his core. She had no eyes.
As she gazed with her empty sockets through the barrier, the mage’s smile widened, and she said, “Hello, Rora. I thought I might find you here. What have you learned about shadows?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The shadows know your name were the words ringing in Rora’s head as she jerked up to sitting, throat so thick it felt like she’d swallowed her tongue. Sometimes, when she didn’t sleep well or when she slept too deep, she had bad dreams about being trapped in a cell under a mountain, because a cellar wasn’t all that different from a cell. And when she dreamed of the cell, sometimes she dreamed of a woman on the other side of the bars, a woman with no eyes who whispered, “I am the shadows, and I know your name,” as black smoke crawled from her blood-dripping hands to slide choking down Rora’s throat.
Yes, she remembered that voice. And even though she was usually bad with names, she remembered the name, too: Neira. My name, freely given. She’d only talked to the woman once, but when someone tried to kill you, those kinds of memories stuck.
“What have you learned about shadows?” Neira asked as Rora twisted to face her, and she was almost spookier’n she’d been under the mountain. She was lit up from behind by witchfire, her face made of deep shadows. Except when she grinned, and the witchfire shone off blood on her teeth and lips.
Rora stared at Neira, and Neira stared back—didn’t have eyes, but Rora could feel her staring—and Rora counted her heartbeats up to five before she opened her mouth and bellowed, “Tare!”
Neira’s smile slipped a little, and her hands curled where they rested flat against the not-wall. She pressed her tongue forward, against the split in her lip, and blood welled up from it.
And all of the witches started to scream.
All at once, sudden as a punch, the witches all sounded like they were being killed. They acted like it, too—Anddyr doubled over holding his stomach, another one writhed around on the ground, another grabbed at his head like it might burst. “Shit,” Rora said. “Shit, shit—Tare!” She didn’t know if she’d be able to hear it over all the screaming, but it didn’t sound like there were any footsteps up above, didn’t sound like anyone coming to find out what all the screaming was about, didn’t sound like anyone caring—
“I’m glad I found you,” Neira said calmly, not seeming bothered by the screaming, or by the blood flowing freely over her lip and down her chin. “It hasn’t been easy . . . you’ve learned how to hide—or, perhaps, someone’s learned how to hide you.” Neira kept one hand pressed against the not-wall, but she moved the other one, stretched it out unlooking toward Anddyr, who was nearest to her. She curled her fingers into a fist and Anddyr doubled over violently, his head slamming against the floor and his whole body going limp. Neira’s empty eye sockets were still fixed on Rora. “There’s so much we need to talk about.”
Rora yanked at her chains, even though she’d done it a thousand times and the metal was sunk deep into the wall. She moved back, away from Neira and the not-wall and toward the cellar door as far as the chains would allow, but it wasn’t far enough. The manacle bit deep into the base of her hand, catching under skin, grinding against her thumb, but her hand still wouldn’t fit through. “Tare,” she shouted again, her voice cracking like a boy’s.
She saw Anddyr lift his head up, bleeding from a scrape on his cheek, and stare at Neira. “No,” he croaked, reaching for her with a shaking hand. He managed to twist his fingers into his witch-shapes. But nothing happened at all, and he looked as horrified by it as Rora felt.
Another of the witches, his eyes full of fury and madness, made shapes of his own in Neira’s direction, and his fingers lit up with witchfire. Neira pressed both hands back to the not-wall, and the witchfire fizzled out before it hit her. That witch fell over on his face, and then didn’t move at all. None of the other witches were moving anymore either, their screaming stopped, so the only sound was Rora’s heartbeat in her ears—
Neira smiled wider, and the not-wall flickered, and then it wasn’t there anymore. Neira stood up, her robe trailing around her feet, her hands hanging at her sides. That smile was still on her face, blood still dripping from her lip, as she took a step toward Rora.
Rora felt like a kid again, trapped and scared and hopeless, only this time she didn’t have a dagger to shove into her captor’s heart. This time she didn’t have anything. This time she didn’t even have her brother.
Tears poked at her eyes, stupid, weak tears, but she couldn’t do anything, and she was gonna die here, alone, because the family she’d come back for didn’t even care about her enough to check on why she was screaming, because the brother she’d always done everything for had left her. Neira walked toward her, blurred by tears, and Rora thought how she’d seen a cat chew its own leg off once because it couldn’t get unstuck. Thought about how, if she had a dagger right now, she might not’ve used it to throw at Neira but might’ve used it to chop her own hand off instead, or maybe the manacle would do that for her, cutting and twisting around the base of her hand, stretched back behind her as she strained toward the ladder and the cellar door. She gave another bone-straining yank and, amazingly, felt something—her hand, slick with her own blood, slid just a little farther through the manacle.
A sob burst out of Rora. She twisted her hand more, pulled at it more, the manacle scraping up skin and she was sure she’d feel a bone pop out any second—
Rora lurched forward as the manacle passed the thickest part of her hand, and she was free.
Neira was almost to her, but Rora scrabbled to the ladder, shimmying up it like a squirrel, and held on to the rungs with only her toes so that she could pound against the cellar door with both fists, screaming sounds that didn’t even sound like words anymore.
“Rora,” a voice said, disapproving as a parent, and a hand grabbed the back of her shirt to pull her down from the ladder.
Like a cat again, Rora met Neira with nails and teeth, the only weapons she had. Neira met her with the boiling black smoke, her magic that wasn’t anything like the witch-magic Rora knew. The smoke was like a weight around her legs, pressing and dragging, making her knees want to buckle, but Rora fought it. She got a punch to Neira’s rib cage, left three long scratches along one of her arms, and then Neira caught her wrist—the one she’d dragged out of the manacle. Even the grabbing hurt, but Neira’s fingers were like ice. Cold spread down Rora’s arm, and her head spun in that way it did if you stood up too sudden, and her knees finally buckled under the smoke.
“Last time,” Neira said, still holding on to Rora’s wrist, “you left before we had the chance to speak more.
I don’t blame you—Raturo isn’t the most welcoming place.” The smoke crawled up Rora’s sides, snaking around her chest and pinning her other arm to her side, the smoke answering to the dance of Neira’s free hand. “But there’s so much you don’t know—so much you need to know. You won’t be any use otherwise.”
Rora remembered the last time it’d been like this, when Neira’d trapped her with her eyes while her smoke had snuck down Rora’s throat, sour and choking. She tipped her head back, straining as much as she could away from the weird, wrong magic, but she couldn’t get away from her own body. Her voice like a gasp, Rora asked, “What are you?” If this was how she was to die, at least she deserved to know what killed her.
Neira smiled, and gave the same answer she’d given the first time Rora’d asked that question. “I am the shadows.” She’d said they’d meet again, but Rora hadn’t given her a bit of thought, had tried her damnedest to forget everything that’d happened inside the mountain—the same way she’d tried to forget the first man she’d killed, who’d whispered, The shadows know you, and they will follow you to the ends of the earth. Tried to forget it in the same way she’d tried to forget she was a twin, because if you pretended long enough that something wasn’t real, it’d stop seeming real. And so she’d tried hard to forget Neira, deep inside the ice-cold mountain, telling her to remember how far a shadow can stretch. If you didn’t remember something, it couldn’t find its way into your dreams and wake you up in a cold sweat with a scream so big it couldn’t find its way out.
Neira made a noise, and her fingers loosened just a little around Rora’s wrist. Not by much, but it was enough for a little of the cold to seep away, enough for a little of the deadweight to fade out of Rora’s limbs, enough for the smoke to loosen its hold, too. And Rora’d always lived her life by taking little chances when they were given.
Rora twisted her hand in Neira’s grip, same way she’d twisted inside the manacle, only this time she grabbed on to Neira’s wrist in turn. She dug in her nails, and felt her fingers go slippery with blood. Neira made another noise, but before her fingers tightened back up, before she could pull back whatever spell’d slipped for just a second, Rora swung up her other arm fast and hard. And when her forearm slammed into Neira’s, she heard a wet pop. Neira’s fingers fell away from her wrist like worms. Neira screamed, and the smoke boiled away, and Rora surged to her feet.