Silverglen: A Young Adult Epic Fantasy Novel

by E. A. Burnett

  The flame of hope in Ember’s chest snuffed out. She looked at Kitt with a solemn heart. He seemed frozen and stiff to her. A man who knew he would die. A man who believed he deserved it.

  Lord Thurstun continued, his eyes on Kitt. “According to our current laws, we might burn you at the stake. Or we could behead you and any other shapeshifters who dare act the way you have acted. Such behavior is what began the long, gruesome rebellion. Do you wish to start another one?”

  Ember gave Kitt a pleading look, but his stolid gaze remained on Lord Thurstun.

  “No, your lordship.” His throat worked. “I wish for peace between my kind and yours.”

  Lord Thurstun seemed somehow satisfied, and looked at Ember. “For you, we do not believe such a severe punishment is deserved for acts of self-defense.”

  Having said this, Lord Thurstun sighed, and the others in the Council seemed to relax a bit in their chairs.

  "Your fate shall be this. Convince the faction to return to Lach—" he raised a hand before Ember could speak. "We will adjust the laws according to your wishes, with the exception of one thing. Your mother informed us of this new spell, and that it could be used safely to keep shapeshifters in human form. You must understand that in order to give criminal shapeshifters the same just punishment that we give criminal wizards, we must have a way to constrain their violence. For wizards, we remove a hand or two. For shapeshifters, we can use a spell that keeps them from shifting. You both have one now, do you not?”

  “Yes,” Ember said in a hoarse voice. Were it not for the strange way her hand would have to bend, she could likely undo her own.

  “Very good. You will remain spell-bound and guarded for a year. Because of his violet history, Kitt will remain spell-bound and guarded for the remainder of his life, or until we see that he has improved his behavior and attitude toward wizards.”

  Ember forced a lump down her throat. This would kill him, as surely as him being hung.

  Lord Thurstun wasn’t finished. “Both of you will assist with the establishment of a shapeshifter school. We will draw up our own wishes in a document, to guide the teaching process. The school will be located at Kitt’s holding, once the new laws are in place. We expect only your best behavior, to avoid a reassessment of your judgements."

  Lord Thurstun fell silent. The Council looked resolute.

  Breathless, Ember stood and curtsied as deeply as she could manage. She glimpsed Kitt’s ashen face. "Thank you, Council, for your decision."

  chapter fourty-three

  By the time twilight crept up from the east and swallowed the feet of the mountains, they had released all the animals from Arundel and Fletch's dungeon room and buried those that had died.

  The bear was the last to go.

  "Do you think he remembers being human?" Ember asked Kitt as they watched the bear amble down the knoll where they sat on a moss-covered log.

  "No," Kitt replied, leaning his elbows on his knees.

  The bear made its way around a sycamore and nosed a sunberry shrub.

  Ember's throat constricted. I wish I had known him, she wanted to tell Kitt, but it seemed selfish of her to talk about her own wishes when so much lay between them.

  She smoothed the deer-hide dress over her thighs. "I know I can't expect you to ever forgive me, but I'm sorry I lied to you about who I was. I wish I had done things differently. Maybe people wouldn't have gotten hurt that way—"

  "You can't go back, Ember," Kitt said, shrugging his shoulders. "There's no point in regretting what you've already done. We all learned from what happened." Kitt paused, watching as the bear disappeared behind a boulder and reappeared on the other side of it. "And as for forgiveness, you should only worry about getting it from yourself."

  Ember frowned as the darkness wrung her chest. Forgiveness. Was it possible? She found it hard to believe the memories would fade, that at some point they would stop replaying in her mind. She had killed two people, quite relentlessly. And she would have done it the same had she been put there again. Ember wondered if Kitt felt that way about the wizard he had killed. The one he castrated and consumed.

  Power through killing. But she understood now that the power had been necessary. A power of defense and survival. Without it, others would have had power over her, and she couldn’t let that happen. Not then, and not now.

  "Does the darkness ever go away?" she asked.

  Kitt exhaled, and those moss-green eyes turned to her. "No. It stays with you. Becomes a part of you. Once you accept that, it's easier to bear."

  Ember looked away and picked up a stick to whittle with her thumb nail. She scowled at the bracelet on her arm, hating the vulnerability it brought with it.

  "And anyways," Kitt continued, his tone growing lighter. "I suspected you were not who you said you were. You didn't act much like a kitchen scullion. Or a washerwoman."

  "Really? I suppose I don't know enough bawdy jokes."

  "I get enough of those from Jinni." Kitt said, smiling. The silver streak along his temple glinted.

  Ember wondered, not for the first time, what Kitt's relationship with Jinni was. Friends? Or more than friends?

  "I met your cousin Eawart some time ago," Ember said. "He's rather fond of the estate. He invited me to come visit."

  Kitt turned suspicious eyes on her. "A visit?" A glint of amusement, and a flash of something dark. "You aren't going to accept his hand, are you?"

  Ember thought of her mother, and Finn. "Why not? He seems nice enough. And he's a good dancer." She couldn't stop herself from smiling, even if she was half-serious in her consideration.

  "Because he doesn't know you're a shifter. Or at least, he didn't mention it when I spoke to him last night."

  "Oh." Ember supposed she didn't need to marry anyways, now that she was to help Kitt with the school. Her mother could come live with her, if Kitt allowed it. She glanced at him, wondering, and caught him watching her. Heat rose up her face. "I am glad you are better. I think you impressed the Council with your negotiations."

  "I don't care about impressing the Council." Tart words. The normal Kitt. "I care about the future of shifters in this country."

  "I know." A pause. "Why did you come after me when I left for the wizard camp?"

  Kitt studied his bracelet. "When Seabird told me about you, all I could feel was anger. I wanted to follow you so I could kill every one of the wizards you found. He tried to stop me." Kitt gave a hollow chuckle. "The anger made everything hazy. I felt it toward everything and everyone, and by the time I got to the wizard camp..."

  The bear pawed the ground beneath a walnut tree.

  "After a while," Kitt continued, "I got lost. The anger blinded everything but my animal instincts. I don't know if I would've stopped if those knives hadn't hit me."

  Gregory's knives. Ember swallowed.

  "Being in that cage hadn't helped with the anger," Kitt said. "I've never wanted to kill that wizard more. But then it was the both of us who were in trouble. And now it’s this." He held out his cuffed wrist. “A part of me is glad for it.”

  Ember wondered how much he remembered, or whether he had seen everything. Whether he had noticed that she fought and killed for him. Him and all the other shifters. She wasn't ready yet, to ask him, or to talk too much about what happened.

  His distant gaze watched the bear, but his eyes shone with something she knew too well. He seemed rigid and cold beneath that gaze, pale as death and as isolated as a stone in an ocean.

  As isolated and vulnerable as she herself felt.

  Ember wanted to hug him, to shift into a cat and curl up in his lap, to assure him that everything would be alright. She wanted to erase the sadness in his eyes, to let him know that she would find a way to undo their spells. To tell him that she, too, would be trying to forgive herself.

  Instead, she found herself reaching out to him, taking his face into her hands, pulling him close so that she could rest her lips on that silver temple.

  He came a
live beneath her. Slipped his arms around her and moved his lips over hers.

  Sweet lips and a heat that curled into her.

  "Ember," he whispered. "I'm glad you're here."

  And it really was her, for once, stripped of all her silly, stupid lies. She was Ember Pitkin, a wizard-shifter. And she loved this man who kissed her, and who wanted her.

  "You mean you don't want to kill me anymore?" she teased.

  "I admit I was too judging of wizards before," he said, though his light words belied the sadness and guilt lingering in his gaze. His lips quirked. "The Council wasn't all bad, and your mother was kind to me."

  `"You met my mother?"

  "She was there when I awoke. She reminded me of how to eat, how to think again. And you, Ember," he added as the sea-foam flecks in his eyes took on a peculiar heat. "You are reminding me of how to be human."

  They held each other, and for the first time since Arundel’s death, the darkness inside her didn't strangle her heart. For the first time, she felt the past might be bearable after all.

  Below them, the bear melded into the forest.

  a note to readers

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  READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEEK OF ISLE OF WINGS, A COMPANION NOVEL TO SILVERGLEN!

  ISLE OF WINGS (Excerpt)

  E.A. BURNETT

  1

  ROANA

  She had forgotten to leave Nan a note.

  A little message would have sufficed, one on a blue-winged skipper—sorry Nan, for leaving—or a longer one on a spangled tiger moth—I had to leave. Everyone here blames me for my parent's deaths. For Pia's death. Something terrible happened to me and I can't stay—

  But somehow, she had forgotten to leave a message, and now, huddled in a tiny wooden crate waiting to leave for the mainland, she finally remembered and could do nothing about it.

  Roana bit her lip until it smarted, breath catching in the warm and cloistered air of the container. It was too late to go back now. She had spent her meager savings to pay the crate-maker, had bargained with a street rat to pose as a merchant and deliver her to the trading galley, and had made arrangements with the captain to deliver "baskets." That had cost her two dozen frogs, caught fresh the night before in the lagoon, and a sack of squaroot dug in secret from her family garden. She had labored and planned for months to get to this moment, and would ruin any chance of escape from the island if she made changes. Nan would just have to accept her disappearance and—

  Boots shuffled around her, and suddenly her crate was hefted upward by the porters who loaded goods onto the ships. For a few breathless moments she teetered on the edge of a void, clumsily hauled by men's arms, and gasped as the crate jolted down. A flush of blue paint appeared between the crate slats. Finally, she was aboard the trading galley. Tension eased slightly from her cramped shoulders.

  "That's one hell of a crate of baskets," one of the porters remarked in Ikish, the language of Ekesia that was spoken commonly on the Isle of Wings.

  Another man snorted, and Roana caught a glimpse of well-oiled boots and baggy trousers. "Smugglers abound," he said with a heavy Zarian accent, his vowels wide and loose. "Who knows what goods have been hidden in there?"

  Roana barely dared to breathe.

  "Quite a risk smuggling anything aboard Xetsa's ships," muttered the first man thoughtfully.

  "Unless Xetsa knows about it already. Chances are, she does."

  "Do you think Lorne is in on it?"

  The Zarian chortled. "Lorne is only in one thing at the moment."

  "Oh, you mean his water girl?"

  A pair of boots came close to the crate, twisted as the Zarian man sat down on it. Roana cringed when the wood creaked with the weight of him inches above her head.

  The Zarian spoke just above her. "I don't think she'll be working for him much longer."

  The first man's voice was filled with irony as he said, "That might work in Lorne's favor. He'll be free to do what he wishes once she's out of his employ."

  "You mean Xetsa's employ," the Zarian pointed out, fingers tapping against the wood. He smelled of sweat and dirt and—

  She covered her nose, trying not to gag on what could only be gas from a partially digested meal of—what was that, broccoli? Fish?

  "What?" The Zarian asked, shifting above her.

  Alarmed, Roana peered through the slats, and caught the first man squinting at her crate, almost as if he could see her. She froze.

  He shook his head. "Nothing, I..." His hand went to his nose. "Wings, Basel, that was awful! What've you been eating, man?"

  The one above her laughed. "Only the best food on the isle. Made myself a nice fish curry—"

  Woof! WOOF! WOOF WOOF!!

  Ferocious barking resounded over the deck, and boots scrambled as the Zarian dove off the crate.

  No, no, no! Roana swore as a great mutt of a dog shoved its nose up against the crate, nostrils flaring as it picked up on Roana's familiar scent. Go away, Jip!

  She had left her dog at home, locked inside, to avoid this very thing, but of course the stupid girl had gotten out and somehow found her. Roana glared at the dog, digging nails into her palms as the boots came tromping back.

  "What's wrong, girl?" the gentle voice of the first man spoke. Roana glimpsed a brown hand petting Jip's back. A moment later, a dark human eye peered through the cracks.

  Roana scowled at the eye as it seemed to register what was inside. Not baskets, but a person. Don't you dare speak a word, Roana thought at him, pouring all of her hostility into that single thought and wishing he could feel it.

  The man chuckled low, the sound barely audible beneath Jip's barking, and then cleared his throat. "It's just food in there, Basel," he said to the other man, sounding forcefully uninterested. He started to pull Jip away, and oddly, Jip complied. Her barking eased back to sharp whining.

  "Mmhmm," mused Basel. A second form, pale as could be, bent to the cracks, and Roana served him, too, a baleful look. But Basel only whistled, clearly unaffected by her expression. "I know I have bad sight, Iniko, but...that's no crate of baskets. Or food."

  "Are you sure?" Iniko asked.

  WOOF!

  "It's a girl."

  He must've been blind, because she was very obviously a nineteen-year-old woman, not a girl.

  WOOF-WOOF-WOOF!!

  "Is that what that was?" Iniko's tone turned light. "I could've swore I saw baskets of turnips."

  Roana grated her teeth. Why couldn't they just leave well enough alone? She squeezed her knees to her chest, willing the two to get distracted by something else, and for Jip to see a meaty leg of lamb and forget her completely.

  Basel, the pale one, chuckled, but then said in an undertone, "Should we tell him?"

  "Who?"

  "Lorne.”

  A pause, and Iniko replied, "I'm not sure that would—"

  "What's going on over here?" A voice shouted over Jip's noise, causing Roana to flinch.

  Basel and Iniko muttered a curse simultaneously. Jip's nails shredded the wooden deck boards as she struggled against Iniko's hold. The man who spoke came close to the crate, his heavy boots sending vibrations through her bones.

  "Lorne. The mutt seems taken with the crate," Iniko explained. "We think there might be some dried vegetables or meat in there."

  "It's marked as baskets," Lorne stated, rapping his knuckles on the top of the crate. "And anyways, you know as well as I do that food is only kept in sealed barrels."

&n
bsp; Roana cringed. Stupid crate-maker. He should have marked it as something heavier than woven baskets!

  The man shoved his fingers in the slats and lifted the crate so that it tilted onto its side. Roana strangled back a cry and clutched at the wood, digging in her hands and feet to stop herself from rocking forward.

  Lorne gasped from the weight, then ordered, "Let's open her up!"

  Jip barked in agreement, and Iniko released her so that she circled the crate, her wet nose pressing against the slats as she eagerly snuffled.

  Boots scuffed and there was a metallic clank.

  "What's the hold up?" Lorne said, agitated.

  "Perhaps it isn't my place to say, sir," said Iniko, "but what if it's some sort of precious cargo?"

  Lorne hesitated before responding. "You mean something Xetsa doesn't mean for us to know about?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "You're right. It isn't your place to worry about that." Lorne grunted as he dug the iron wedge under the lip of the crate lid. "She has a marker for special cargo—animals, shapeshifters, and the like—and it's not on here. Now help me get this thing open."

  Panicked, Roana grabbed the slender knife hidden inside of her boot and clenched it. The lid of the crate opened with a creak and a pop.

  Clenching her skirts, she grabbed the edge of the crate and swung herself out, landing nimbly with her knife pointed at the men. Jip, ever loyal—even if she was incredibly stubborn—gave a delighted yip and came to stand firm by her side, ears back in defense as she snarled at the men.

  Something twinged as the mutt pressed against her. How could she ever have thought to leave Jip behind?

  The cool harbor wind swept against Roana as she assessed the three men. Two of them were of similar height and build to each other, only one was very dark and the other strangely pale. The third man, whom she guessed was Lorne, was much older, with a rounded paunch and sun-beaten cheeks.