The Shattered Sun

by Rachel Dunne

  So he held Vatri’s gaze, and he said, “I had always hoped it wouldn’t come to that. But if it had, if the choice had been between the world and their lives . . . then yes. I would have done it.”

  She nodded, and had the grace not to look surprised at being given the truth.

  Edro seemed to sense that Vatri had the answers she’d wanted. He clapped his hands together and said, “You’ve given us plenty to talk about. Will you now give us the time to discuss your offer?”

  “Of course,” Joros said. It wasn’t really a request—to refuse them the chance to discuss him and his words would be as good as demanding they refuse his alliance—but Edro had clearly had some experience in etiquette or minor politics.

  “Deslan will see that you’re made comfortable. We’ll speak again when we have an answer.”

  Joros stood, Harin a heartbeat behind him, and together they pulled the still-frowning Aro to his feet. Joros was pushing the boy toward the tent’s exit when a voice rumbled, “What is wrong with him?”

  Joros twisted around to face the Northman. “He’s sick,” he said easily.

  “He’s a mage,” Vatri corrected, scowling. “He wasn’t in such poor shape the last time I saw him. He’s clearly been given the same drug as the other mages we’ve seen.” Her eyes, fixed on Joros, were full of all the judgment he’d expect from a priestess. At Joros’s side, Harin went stiff.

  “It is true?” Scal asked.

  Joros popped his jaw again and chose his words carefully. “An unfortunate mistake. I’ve been working with him, to help his recovery.”

  Scal said nothing more, and Joros ushered his people out of the tent. He wanted to think the suspicion in Harin’s eyes was only imagined, but of all the pack with him, she had enough of a brain that she might begin to see the cracks in the story he’d told. He’d have to make sure to talk with Harin, smooth over the lies.

  The group of Vatri’s people that they’d left outside had formed a loose ring around the tent, a respectful distance away but close enough to respond if called for. Joros’s people were peppered among them, and all talking animatedly. It was the first time they’d looked anything like happy since leaving the estate. They’d found other peasants who were passionate about their cause—likely down on their luck, simple folk who carried weapons they knew how to use to great effect. The pack were practically at home.

  “Deslan?” Joros called, and it was the handsome woman with the longbow who turned at the name. She strolled over to him, bow slung around her shoulder. She looked less mistrustful than she had before, which was a mark in the right column. “They’ll likely be talking awhile in there. Edro said you’d be able to see to our comfort as we wait.”

  She snorted. “’Course he did. I’m no steward . . .” She shook herself, and forced a smile at Joros. Even forced, it was a pleasant smile. “Right. I can find you food and a fire, at least. You lot,” she said to the rest of her people, “stay here. The rest of you, come on with me.”

  As she led them through the camp, Joros tossed idle questions at her about the methods of the Nightbreaker’s people, trying to separate the truth from all the legends he’d heard along the way. She answered everything willingly enough, and when she accidentally called Edro “little lordling,” she blushed very charmingly. Joros replied with some offhand, scathing remark that made her laugh, and when she caught him eyeing her significantly, she only smiled.

  She commandeered a campfire for them, informing its two occupants they’d now be sharing space, and they shuffled around willingly enough. Food would be brought around soon, Deslan promised, and by then the three likely would have come to some agreement. “I’ll come back and fetch you when they’re ready to talk again,” she said.

  Joros reached out and gripped her upper arm, and both her eyebrows shot up. “Why don’t you stay,” he said with his most charming smile. “Surely you need to eat as well, and I’m sure any meal would be made more palatable by your presence.”

  She laughed, and her eyes gleamed, and she opened her mouth to agree—

  “Joros?” a wispy voice said, tugging at his sleeve. “Can . . . can we talk?”

  Joros ground his teeth in frustration while not letting his smile slip or his attention waver from Deslan. Still, the moment had shattered. She smiled again, ruefully this time, and said, “We’ve both got business. The food’s good enough—plenty palatable on its own. I’ll be back when they’re ready to talk with you.” She gently shook off his hand, and disappeared back into the camp.

  Joros rounded on Aro and nearly thumped the boy. “What do you want?”

  “I . . .” He had the grace to cower. “Can we talk? Alone? There’s . . .” His hands flailed, as if he could pluck the right words out of the sky.

  With a growl and a terse nod, Joros turned to the two who’d originally claimed the campfire. “Will we get shot if we go into the trees?”

  “Sentries are mostly looking out,” one said, “so’s long as you don’t go too far, there’s nothing to fear.”

  Joros could have thanked the man, but he was frustrated and ungrateful and looking forward now to beating his mage in private. He stomped into the trees, Aro trailing in his wake. Every tree looked much like the others, and so he chose one at random to stop beside, once there was a screen of trees between them and the fire. “What?” he demanded.

  Shoulders hunched, Aro stared at his feet, but Joros could hear his words clearly enough: “You said you would’ve killed us.”

  Joros stood by that decision even more in this moment—hells, he almost wished it had come to that. “To spare the world this mess, yes, I would have killed you, your sister, and scores more. What of it?”

  “You keep us around. Me and Rora. You’re always so careful about it. You . . . you still think there’s a chance you’ll have to use us like that, don’t you?”

  Maybe his sister wasn’t the only one who’d gotten a touch of cleverness, but as Joros wasn’t feeling particularly charitable, any cleverness Aro had was rather like a candleflame that burned incandescently for one breath before dying. “The future could bring any manner of things. I try to be prepared for most of them.”

  “There’s something else you said, a while ago. I remember it.” Aro looked up, and there was still madness hovering in the boy’s eyes, but there was clarity, too. “You said, ‘Destroy one, and you destroy them both.’ You said that, didn’t you?”

  Joros frowned, pushing his frustration down a touch. This was not at all the direction he had expected this conversation to go. “I did say that.”

  “Then . . . if it comes to it . . . I’ve got a favor to ask you . . .”

  And he asked, and Joros—partly because of his frustration and partly because he simply could—agreed. When they returned to the camp, Joros saw horror and grief and green sickness written across the boy’s face, but he didn’t say, No, wait, I take it back, don’t. He kept his lips together, even when some of the camp folk delivered around bowls of half-palatable food. Aro simply stared into the fire.

  When the meal was done, Joros turned his back to the fire, staring through the camp the way they’d come. He didn’t fidget, but he was very close to standing up and pacing when he finally heard someone approaching through the darkness. He plastered a smile on his face as he stood up, but it wasn’t Deslan who stepped into the ring of their campfire’s light. It was the Northman, and Joros was even gladder that he’d stood.

  “You’ve decided?” he asked Scal. His stomach gave a twist—likely the food not sitting well; he wasn’t nervous, he didn’t get nervous. There was only one possible answer they could give. They were fools if they didn’t, and he had no interest in working with fools.

  “Yes,” Scal said, and he took long agonizing moments to look from Joros to the eager faces of all his people, and to Aro, who hadn’t moved, who still nursed his bowl of gruel and stared into the fire. Finally he turned back to Joros. “We will help you,” he said, and his eyes slipped back to Aro halfway thr
ough the sentence.

  Joros grinned, and shouted that there must be alcohol somewhere in this camp, and altogether they managed to turn up a few bottles of cheap wine and a barrel of mead that didn’t taste like pure poison. They made do. The camp celebrated the new alliance long into the night, and somewhere in the darkness Joros found Deslan for a celebration of a more private sort. His plan—any plan—would likely see her and all the others dead before it was done, but she wasn’t dead yet. And there were things worth celebrating.

  Chapter Thirty

  When she got to the bottom of the ladder and turned around, Rora saw that Neira was playing with the corpses, and that was just too much.

  Rora hadn’t liked the witches, had hated every minute she was stuck with them, but bleeding hells—they’d been people, people she’d got to know. She could recognize the look in Peressey’s eye that meant she was about to start spewing fire, knew that when Soris started crying the best thing to calm him was singing, had heard Travin describe all the different kinds of plants in the Highlands so many times she’d probably be able to name them all on sight. They were people, and she’d known them, and Neira was busy cutting all their eyes out.

  It pushed Rora right away from scared and into boiling mad.

  “Get away from them,” she snarled, and Neira’s eyeless face twisted toward her. Tare, coming down the ladder still, bumped into Rora, nudged her stumbling forward, but that was fine. Rora stamped the rest of the way to the not-wall. She dropped all the firewood and slammed her hands against the barrier, feeling the sting from her palms to her elbows. “Get away from them.”

  Neira raised her hands, bloody and sticky, one still holding the dagger, and she easily stepped away from the witch she’d been picking at. Travin, the second cellar-witch, who’d been down there almost as long as Rora’d been. There was curiosity written on Neira’s face, even without eyes.

  “Go sit over there,” Rora ordered, jerking her chin toward the space she’d been chained up for so long, the space they’d left Neira tied up in but she’d managed to get out of. Rora realized too late that Neira wouldn’t see the chin jerk—but the shadow-woman did go over to the spot. Lucky guess, Rora supposed. The cellar was small.

  Neira sat against the wall, folded her bloody hands in her lap, and waited.

  It was hard to hold on to the boiling anger, in the face of that. Rora sent a sorry look toward Travin, toward the other witches whose eyes Neira’d gotten to, but it wasn’t like they were doing any complaining or any forgiving. Rora picked up the firewood she’d dropped and, with Tare’s help, went about building the fire Neira’d asked for.

  There wasn’t too much of the cellar not taken up by the bubble, so they had to build the fire close to the barrier, and close enough to the open cellar door that the smoke could find its way out without filling the cellar too much. Rora and Tare sat on the other side of the fire, and with the way the flames moved and the way the smoke played with Neira’s witchlight, it almost seemed like the not-wall wasn’t there, like they were just three normal people sitting around a fire in the night.

  But Neira, at least, was a far way away from normal, and she proved it when the first thing she said was, “The sun is still there, you know.”

  Rora kept her mouth shut, but Tare barked out a laugh. “I told you this was stupid,” she said, and she had—she’d kept saying it as Rora filled her arms with firewood, kept saying it as she told some of her knives where they’d be if things went wrong, kept saying it even as they climbed back down the ladder. Rora made the hand sign for silence at her again, and was amazed—again—when Tare didn’t rip her throat out for it.

  “It is,” Neira said firmly, with the same calm confidence that Rora’d once seen in a madman explaining to a rock how rain fell up.

  Rora folded her hands in her lap and stared at Neira over the tips of the flames. She’d promised she’d listen, and she would.

  “If the sun was truly gone,” Neira went on, “think what the world would be like. Plants would die, and the animals who eat the plants would die. It would be cold—there would be a thousand winters, all at once. The world would collapse, and crumble, and wither away to nothing. That might even be what the Twins truly want—a fresh start, an unencumbered place upon which they can build their better world . . .” Neira lurched up to her feet, so sudden it made both Rora and Tare shift back, hands to daggers—but Neira stalked off, away from the fire, prowling along the not-wall. “You’ve been outside now. It’s spring. The snow has melted, crops are growing, and all the wildlife are doing their damnedest to see to the continuation of their species. The world goes on . . . just in darkness.”

  Rora frowned, because she’d never thought about it, but it did make sense that the sun being gone should’ve made things colder. It got colder at night, so the Long Night should’ve been cold. But she’d been wandering the estate with her new freedom, and she’d seen trees going green beyond the walls, she’d seen wildflowers someone had stuck all through the house for decoration, she’d seen baby birds clumsily learning how to fly. The world was getting warmer, not colder.

  Neira was pacing now—pacing at the barrier’s edge, pacing through the witches’ bodies. Her hands were moving inside the sleeves of her robe, but Rora couldn’t make out what she was doing. “If you throw a blanket over an apple,” Neira said, “you can’t see the apple anymore, but it still makes a noticeable lump. That’s all they’ve done. The sun is hidden, not gone. They lied.” She practically hissed the last bit, and that black smoke suddenly appeared and swelled out from around her feet, full of angry waves like reaching hands.

  Tare glanced over at Rora, but Rora didn’t take her eyes from the shadow-woman. She knew better than that. She didn’t look away, and she didn’t take her hand off her dagger. The plain but sturdy one, the one Tare’d given her.

  Neira kept pacing, her steps short and sharp, but the smoke settled around her. It didn’t go away—just died down and trailed after her. “Grumbling” was the word Rora thought of, without really knowing why. Neira almost seemed like she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone.

  Rora chewed the inside of her cheek, and finally cleared her throat. Neira’s head spun toward her like an owl. Rora said, all careful, “You think there’s some way I can help pull that blanket off the sun.”

  Little flutters shivered through the smoke at Neira’s feet, and the woman grinned. “Oh yes,” she said.

  Rora was starting to feel like this couldn’t end quick enough—the sooner Neira got through saying all the things she wanted to say, the sooner Rora could tell her to leave. The sooner Rora could find out if the shadow-woman had been telling the truth, or if she’d have to learn how to kill a witch.

  Thinking back on it, Rora realized Neira’d never actually promised to leave peacefully—just that Rora’d never see her again. Sitting there in the cellar, in front of a crazy woman who could make smoke out of blood, Rora realized just how many ways there were to take that.

  “Why?” Tare asked, before Rora could think through what to say. Rora was actually surprised she’d been quiet for so long—Tare was more used to giving information than listening to it. “Why would you want to bring the sun back? You’re . . . you’re one of them.”

  “You don’t know what I am.” Neira said it in such a flat, pleasant way, and that was what sent prickles crawling up Rora’s neck.

  Tare wasn’t put off by it. “Then what are you?”

  The black smoke writhed, stretching out from Neira to pool against the not-wall, and her grin suddenly looked much more like a skull’s smile. “I am vengeance, and I am salvation. I am a power that can shake the world. I am the shadows.”

  Rora swallowed, and her hand still hadn’t left her dagger, and she thought about pulling it even though she didn’t know what she’d do with it.

  Tare, though, just snorted. “Try that again, but without all the bullshit.”

  The smoke settled back again, no longer rising waves—but a bunch of it sta
yed pressed against the not-wall, and it’d shifted to loom directly in front of Tare. Like it was staring at her, even though Rora knew that was crazy. Neira’s smile turned into just a normal smile. “I do like you,” she said. “Your bluntness is . . . refreshing.”

  “Just say what it is you mean to say.”

  Neira made a soft, almost amused noise, and the smoke crept back from the not-wall, shrank and faded until it was just a shadow around her feet. Rora made a quick sign with her hand that she hoped Tare saw: Thanks.

  “I am one of the Fallen.” Neira spread her arms so the black robe billowed around her. “One of the truly faithful, one who saw the chance for the Twins to rise and did everything in my power to see it happen. But I have been lied to.” She started pacing again.

  Now that Rora had her heartbeat a little better under control, she could talk without feeling like it might turn into a scream. She asked, “Who lied?”

  “Who hasn’t?” Neira almost snapped it, but when Tare made a low growl, Neira laughed. “Yes, yes. Speak plainly. I am here now because the Twins themselves lied.” The smoke was starting to lash again, creeping out to flow over the bodies of the witches. “They promised to tear down the sun.” A wave of angry smoke filled her side of the cellar and crashed silently against the barrier. “More, they promised equality in the darkness. That no one should suffer because they were not good enough.”

  Rora swallowed, trying not to look at the smoke, because doing that reminded her of when she’d last seen Neira, inside Mount Raturo, and she’d felt that black smoke crawling over her skin. She tried to just look at Neira’s face, which—even without the eyes—showed the hurt under the anger. “So they lied,” Rora said, as evenly as she could.

  “As I said, the sun is still here.” Neira’s bitterness made the smoke swirl wildly.

  “And everyone’s not even.”