Forest of Souls

by Lori M. Lee

  But not guaranteed. The idea of him getting away is intolerable. Even worse, I can do nothing about it.

  Ahead, sunlight narrows to bright flecks stippling the forest floor. The ground began to incline some time ago, indicating how closely our path hugs the outskirts of the Coral Mountains. My thoughts grow darker the farther we travel. I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this.

  “Are you injured?” he asks abruptly.

  My shoulders bunch. “I’m fine, Your Highness.”

  “There’s a tightness about your neck every time your drake jostles you,” he says. I wonder at why he’s paying such close attention. He probably knows I still plan to escape. “You hide it well.”

  I’ve been consciously keeping my expression as impassive as possible. He must be especially skilled at reading faces. I don’t appease his concern, whether real or calculated, and he doesn’t press me further.

  After what feels like hours, he glances over his shoulder and shares a look with his Blades that I can’t decipher. A moment later, our path turns, making a sharp descent. I can’t help the sudden catch of my breath. I jerk on Yandor’s reins, coming to a stop. Instantly, two Blades circle forward to close me in.

  I know this place, although I’ve only been here once before. Even the surrounding wilderness can’t mask the pungent smell of the prison and the reek of misery. Spread out below us is the Valley of Cranes.

  “Why are we here?” I ask quietly. Anything louder and I worry he’ll hear the high note of my voice. “I thought you were taking us back to Vos Talwyn.”

  He reaches out to grip my reins. “My sister doesn’t allow shamanborn into the capital except for one reason.”

  Public execution. My dread grows, heightened by Saengo’s apprehension, which I can’t shut out. Her emotions transform from heat into flame, trying to scorch away my own. It’s oppressive, and I want to snap at her to stop it, but I don’t know that she even realizes what she’s doing.

  I lower my chin and close my eyes, breathing deep. Again this creeping panic sits in me as comfortably as a bed of nails. Kendara’s voice rings in my head. “Discipline always. Stay your hand. Play your role.” I release a slow, steady breath.

  “You will have to remain here for questioning.” Prince Meilek sounds irritatingly reasonable. “And until we determine what happened at the teahouse.”

  Play my role. Very well. I can do that. For now. Let him believe he’s gained my trust. Once he hands me over to someone else, maybe I can devise a proper escape. I lift my chin and nod curtly to indicate I won’t fight. Prince Meilek releases my reins.

  Nestled at the feet of two mountains and enclosed by steep cliffs, the prison camp is supposed to be inescapable. We’ll see about that.

  From this vantage point, the valley spreads out before us. Tiny cabins squat in rows on the far end of the grounds. The earth is dry and sparse, packed down by the feet of hundreds of prisoners, possibly thousands. Distant figures push carts in and out of a hole in the mountainside. Working alone or in clusters, they haul lumber from the forests, water from the stream that trickles through, and rocks cleared from the mines. Everything from the buildings to the people is coated in tawny dust.

  Uncertainty digs talons into my stomach, but I force myself to keep looking. The only bits of liveliness in the whole place are the gardens beside the cabins, rows of sowed earth that have just begun to sprout. A low stone wall forms the base of the prison’s enclosure. Above that, thick iron bars rise to twice my height.

  Prince Meilek leads us toward a drab-looking building with a large gate, outside of which I’m horrified to find the party Saengo and I abandoned yesterday. The hatchlets are already lined up, their satchels at their backs. The wyverns haven’t mounted their drakes yet, still clustered behind the now empty wagon and Officit Boldis. Beside him is a guard dressed in the dark green and silver uniform of the Evewynian Royal Army, but they’ve abandoned their conversation in favor of gawking at our arrival.

  Upon recognizing me, Officit Boldis’s surprise transforms into smug satisfaction. The urge to kick him in the face almost wins out against my better judgment. Anyway, the satisfaction is ultimately mine when I pass him on my drake and he meets my changed eyes. His ruddy face pales, and his mouth drops open.

  I grin, relishing his shock. At least until my gaze passes over the hatchlets and their accompanying wyverns. They’ve noticed my eyes as well, and their expressions are a chilling reminder of how things have changed. They shrink away in fear and revulsion. I’m relieved when Prince Meilek leads me inside the building.

  We enter a large courtyard. At the opposite end sits a closed iron gate topped with spikes—the only entrance into the prison. Through it, the grounds are a filthy brown stretch, the mountains a beautiful but jarring backdrop. The shamanborn shamble about their work, wearing their exhaustion like weights around their necks.

  They’re a reminder of what happens when the queen decides you’re an enemy. My stomach turns in dismay.

  Prince Meilek pulls his dragule to a stop in the courtyard and dismounts. Warily, I do the same. Instantly, two guards are at my side, securing my wrists in iron shackles that wedge the troll bone into my skin. I clench my jaw and suffer the restraints in silence. My only consolation is that Prince Meilek cuts them off with a look when they attempt to do the same to Saengo.

  “How long are we to stay here?” Saengo asks, her misery evident even without our connection. But with it, I’m being dragged underwater, chains wrapped around my ankles.

  “Until I can address the matter with the queen. Although Sirscha will need to remain here, I should be able to relocate you to Vos Talwyn soon.”

  She sucks in her breath, eyes darting from me to the Blades as she wages some internal war. Then she scowls and pushes her drake forward before dismounting at my side. “I won’t leave her.”

  “That isn’t your decision to make,” Prince Meilek says, that edge returning to his voice.

  Her anger builds inside her, a storm gathering size, speed, and devastation. I’ve always known that she presented a front, that her deference and obedience in the Company was as much an act as mine. But to feel it there, the great depth of her resentment colliding and breaking against me, makes me realize how much she’s kept hidden.

  I raise my hands. The links in my shackles clank together as I place one palm on her chest, directly over the scar that rests above her heart. “It’ll be fine.” I wring every drop of conviction I have into the words so that she might believe me. “You’ll have your father’s influence to protect you.”

  Saengo pulls me into a hug. I squeeze my eyes shut as we clutch each other, surrounded by the scents of dust, smoke, and despair. The deluge of her emotions crashes into me, rushing into my throat and clogging my lungs. I try to focus instead on her arms around me, sucking in air to remind myself that I can, in fact, breathe.

  “Come on,” I say thickly. “You’re not going anywhere yet. Pull yourself together, Phang.”

  One of the Blades places a hand on her shoulder, forcing us to part. Two other Blades flank me as they lead me toward the back of the building. Already, the reach of Saengo’s candle flame grows faint. I’m ashamed that a part of me is relieved to be alone with my own emotions.

  SIX

  My cell is a small metal room with a barred door and nothing else, save for old scorch marks that indicate a firewender had been kept here once.

  When I grow tired of sitting, I prowl the narrow space between walls. My wrist shackles attach to a chain in the floor, which doesn’t allow me to move more than a few paces in any direction. I tug irritably at them. Despite Prince Meilek’s reassurances, these chains are proof he’s equally wary of me.

  I’m not even sure he has any intention of taking my case to the queen or if I’m to be left here until the fight has been bled from me through hard labor and starvation. I grit my teeth. I won’t allow that. I’ll escape well before that can happen.

  If I focus, I still sense Saen
go’s presence nearby, a candle in the dark. It’s unsettling, but given the circumstances, also reassuring. She’s my only anchor in all this.

  The irony is that I loathed her at first. We met in our first year at the Prince’s Company, when we were eleven. She’d kept to herself and hardly spoke to anyone. I assumed she thought herself better than the rest of us. One day, after I’d bested Jonyah at swords, he cornered me in the armory. He would have broken my arm if Saengo hadn’t intervened. Jonyah was a bully, but Saengo was the heir to his House, and he knew his place.

  After that, Saengo always chose me for her sparring partner. I was suspicious at first, but she never seemed to resent losing. Instead, she liked that I fought her as an equal, and I liked that she treated me like one. In the years to come, I would learn that the only thing she truly resented was that she, too, knew her place. And she wanted nothing to do with it.

  The longer I languish in this cell, the more certain I am that my window to sneak back into Vos Talwyn has closed. Queen Meilyr will be securing every entrance into the city, making it impossible to penetrate. I can’t rely on Kendara to speak for me, assuming she even would.

  Besides that, now that I’ve had time to consider the situation more fully, I realize I hadn’t thought about the ramifications of the attack for Evewyn as a whole. The queen’s treatment of the shamanborn might have sparked current tensions between the races, but the hostility goes back for centuries. Given this blatant attack by Nuvali shamans on Evewynian land, unless the Spider King can maintain the tenuous peace, this could very well mean war.

  My muscles tense with dread. Evewyn’s armies have always been a formidable force, even during times of peace. But would my fellow wyverns, who graduate within the month, truly be prepared? I’d wager the most violence they’ll expect to meet as soldiers is from local criminals, maybe a pirate or a sellsword. War is a wholly different beast.

  Without knowing what the shamans wanted, the queen might look to blame the whole Empire, the way she’d punished all shamanborn for what happened to her parents.

  However, if I were to discover the true purpose of the attack and present that information to the queen, it could both prevent a war and win me back my place with Kendara. If I were the queen’s Shadow, this would be information I’d need to acquire, anyway. What better way to prove myself?

  I groan and cover my face. What hope do I have of accomplishing any of that when I couldn’t even stop one shaman from hurting Saengo?

  A door opens down the hall, beyond my line of sight. Curses and profanities taint the air in a voice I recognize as Eyebrow Tattoos’s. A heartbeat later, the door slams shut with enough force that it reverberates through my cell. A girl limps into view, thin and disheveled, with an impressive red mark already darkening into a bruise across her cheek.

  The guard outside my door unlocks my cell and gestures for the girl to enter. His keys jangle as he locks it again after her. The girl sets down a basket filled with bundles of herbs tied with twine. When she straightens, her eyes are the vivid emerald of an earthwender.

  Those eyes linger on mine, narrowed slightly. An emotion passes over her face, too quick to name before she looks away. Seeing as she’s obviously a prisoner here as well, I don’t blame her for being guarded.

  “Are …” Something in the tremor of her quiet voice makes me wary. “Are you really—”

  “Five minutes,” the guard says, cutting her off.

  She flinches, lips compressed. Her question is forgotten as she steps closer. “Before he left, Prince Meilek asked me to tend to your injuries.”

  “You’re a healer?”

  “Of a sort.” She gestures to her basket. “I’m no light stitcher. And anyway, I don’t have a familiar anymore.” Her voice dips even lower, but bitterness saturates her words.

  Shamans can’t access their magic without familiars. Although I’ve never quite grasped how it works, I know that familiars begin as spirits, intangible and unable to communicate except through a medium, but only until they bond with a shaman. Then they become physical conduits, connecting shamans to their magic. I’ve no idea what any of it means for me.

  Once, familiars would have been as common a sight in Evewyn as shamanborn. When the Valley of Cranes was first transformed from a lush mountain refuge into a harsh prison, familiars were either killed or imprisoned separately from their shamans. But those familiars soon died off from the rot, a disease born of the Dead Wood. The disease, which affects only familiars and possesses no known cure, first appeared decades ago, and neither king nor Scholar has been able to offer an explanation for why.

  Whatever magic this earthwender possesses is inaccessible to her now. Part of me thinks I might understand the frustration of knowing what you’re capable of and never being able to embrace it. But I recognize the lie for what it is.

  I chose to restrain myself at the Company for the chance at something more. These shamanborn had no such choice. I haven’t known their suffering. I haven’t shared their loss.

  I nod at her bruising face. “I’m fine. You should take care of your own injuries first.”

  She ignores me, her hands brisk and efficient as they move from my arms to my torso and then my legs. I immediately stiffen, and she makes a small knowing sound.

  “I’ll need you to lower your pants,” she says.

  I’m not used to having anyone else tend to my injuries, and I don’t know where to look as I untie the laces of my pants and push them down to my knees. I grimace at the sight of my thighs. The bruises are nearly black, haloed by billowing red and purple discoloration.

  She applies a thin paste I recognize as one meant to accelerate healing. I study the lines that form between her eyebrows and wonder at her age. She looks young. Maybe fourteen? Does she have family in the prison? Parents?

  “Did that oaf with the eyebrow tattoos do that to you?” I ask as she places her weight on her left leg and winces. “I should have broken his arms altogether.”

  “You’re the one who injured his hands?” A smile steals over the corners of her mouth.

  “I’m sorry you had to tend him.”

  She shrugs, and the smile fades into practiced indifference again. She wraps my thighs in clean bandages so the paste doesn’t stain my pants and then reaches inside her basket again. “Are you in pain at all?”

  “No.” I tug my pants back up over my drawers. I have a high pain tolerance. With daily doses from both the Company and Kendara, my relationship with pain is long and complicated.

  She pauses, as if to ensure I won’t change my mind, and then puts away the vial of pain reliever she’d withdrawn from her basket. From the courtyard come the sounds of drakes. There aren’t many, maybe two. Too few to be an arriving prisoner. I can only assume the shaman who hurt Saengo continues to elude capture. He cannot be allowed to escape.

  I add hunting him down to my list, even though it all feels so impossible. And yet, the fact that Saengo is alive is proof enough that I need to reconsider what impossible means.

  That’s something else I’ll have to deal with in the near future—what I did to her.

  But first I have to make sure I have a future at all.

  The girl arranges her medicinal herbs and vials into neat piles, her fingers long and gaunt. Her small nose is slightly crooked, like it was broken once and wasn’t set properly. Her tunic hangs off her thin frame, the hem frayed and torn in the back.

  And yet, as the girl glances up at me from behind the knots of her hair, I glimpse the defiance in her. Despite the vast difference in our experiences, I feel a kinship with this ragged healer.

  Back in the orphanage, the monks claimed I was a nuisance from the moment I arrived. I’d been two, with no possessions save the clothes on my back and my name on a card. Overindulged and disobedient, they said, incessantly crying for a mother who had abandoned me. In truth, I’m not sure why they didn’t throw me out. The scars on my body tell a very long story indeed.

  Children are meant to ob
ey those who raise them, but how can respect be born of abuse? Whatever manner of punishment the monks inflicted on me, they could not break me. I think, above everything else, that is why they hated me most.

  “Miss.” The shaman hangs her basket on the crook of her elbow. She’s giving me the same look she had when she entered—one of tremulous uncertainty. With a glance over her shoulder at the guard, she dampens her lips and asks, “Is it true?”

  She delivers the question in a quick whisper, as if the words are pebbles in her mouth, released quickly lest she choke.

  Before I can ask what she’s talking about, the guard abruptly straightens, drawing my eye. Then there’s no time for explanations because Prince Meilek steps into view. I lift an eyebrow. He’d initially left hours ago. The shaman shrinks back, clutching her basket the way my fingers grasp the troll bone.

  “Open this door and remove her restraints,” he orders the guard, who races to comply.

  The earthwender dips her head low to Prince Meilek, who thanks her for her help and then catches sight of her cheek. His eyes darken with anger.

  “I’ll speak to the guards,” he promises her. “Please see to your injuries.”

  She nods and then disappears from view. Once my shackles are removed, I rub the chafed skin of my wrists and follow Prince Meilek out into the courtyard. He wears the look of the captain again, and his manner tells me I’m not being freed. I spot Yandor saddled for our departure, but my belongings are still in his Blades’ possession.

  More guards appear with Saengo. I’m relieved to see her, but this only heightens my confusion. Her own relief trickles through our connection.

  “Where are we going?” I ask, fingers flexing at my sides. We’d already established I wouldn’t be returning to Vos Talwyn except for execution. Prince or no, if he thinks I’ll allow him to lead me to my death, he’s mistaken.