A Tempest of Shadows Read online

  It said specifically that I was not to touch him or watch him sleep and that I must be clothed appropriately and confine myself to the left side of the mattress. I would also be given a separate blanket and was not permitted to touch his blanket.

  His dinner preparation was equally strange and pedantic. He required plain, tasteless foods, without spice or adornment. Grains, pulses, legumes, and vegetables. Boiled or raw. No meat.

  I left his dinner tray on his small dining table and set mine on the floor, as instructed. Calder disappeared as I sat there with the Scholar, and I knew that he was going to the marketplace of the Citadel’s forecourt. He wasn’t going to suffer through the lentil and rice porridge—he had told me as much while watching me cook it.

  I imagined the stalls in the marketplace and what they would be selling. Pastries filled with rich beef gravy and stewed vegetables. Salted soda bread. Short baguettes with sar cheese baked into the tops. Frozen fruit and cream in wax-paper cups. Crushed ice with cherry syrup dribbling from the frosted tops. My stomach grumbled loudly, and I quickly shoved another spoonful of porridge into my mouth. The Scholar hadn’t spoken to me since he presented me with the list, and he didn’t seem inclined to speak to me now. He didn’t even seem to realise I was there as he sat up straight in his chair, his eyes on the open window overlooking the Vilwood. I had prepared the dining area exactly as he had instructed—a candle set in the centre of the dining table, scented with mild spearmint; the shade drawn up, the window bare. His tray had been set at the correct place on the table, facing the window. His cutlery the correct distance from his plate, a cloth napkin folded exactly perpendicular to his cutlery.

  And yet, he didn’t eat.

  He stared, unmoving, his eyes slightly unfocussed. The Sinn power was not an obvious one. It didn’t happen in a burst of violence. It couldn’t be spoken in the eerie voice of premonition. It didn’t seductively tug at something in the pit of your stomach or whisper to the spirit inside you. It was silent, internal, detached. I had heard that the Sinn could build entire worlds inside their heads: worlds comprised of memories or predictions. Some of them were trained to work with the Sentinels as Sinn Scouts—where they could walk through every possible battle scenario inside their minds until an optimal outcome was decided. I had heard of Sinn who could walk through memory worlds inside their minds, where everything they had ever seen or heard was stored. I had heard of men and women who had become trapped inside their own minds, preferring their powerful imaginations to the real world.

  I didn’t blame them.

  I closed my eyes, trying to imagine a better place. My mind drifted off to the thought of food, again. I imagined a warm, sweet pastry filling my palm. A treat I had only tasted once before in my life. I pulled a spoonful of porridge to my lips and imagined the burst of stewed berries as it hit my tongue, mixing with a flaky, buttery pastry shell. Joy rushed through me, my stomach tightening in anticipation.

  There was no spoon in my hand anymore. I was standing in the marketplace of the Citadel’s forecourt. Calder was beside me, his teeth tearing into a pastry of his own, his mismatched eyes fixed with an eagle-like intensity toward the entrance gates. He seemed deep in thought, but eventually glanced to his side as I moaned around the last bite, his attention cutting to me.

  He brow furrowed. “He let you take a break?”

  “I…” I started before dropping my pastry, my eyes widening in shock. “I can speak?”

  Of course I could speak. I was inside my own imagination. Calder’s boots snapped against the ground as he rounded on me, gripping my chin.

  “You can speak?” he demanded.

  My imagination.

  I was inside my imagination.

  I lost my grip on the fantasy, Calder’s face wavering out of focus. His eyes widened in alarm, glancing around as though his vision also wavered. I fell back into my body with a hard, jarring movement that actually seemed to rattle my bones. The spoonful of porridge dropped out of my hand, clanging against the bowl. The Scholar turned, his violet eyes flashing a warning before he was out of his chair, pulling me up by my arm. His face lowered, his nose near my temple.

  “You used your magic again.” His voice was husky, as though he had just woken up. Was he smelling me? “What did you do?”

  I shrugged, alarm thrumming through me. He pulled back, examining my features, that simmering rage a little closer to the surface of his eyes than I was comfortable with.

  “Go and make the sleep elixir,” he demanded, setting me sharply down. “Take this mess with you.”

  I didn’t need telling twice as I hurriedly packed his tray and my own onto a cart and rushed it toward the cages. None of them were available, but the Scholar was no longer in sight, so I sat back against the cart to wait, pulling my shaking legs in against my chest. When the cage arrived at the top floor, Calder was in it.

  “Where are you going?” he asked, a strange look in his eye.

  The apothecary, I tried to say, but my fantasy had been just that. A fantasy. My voice fled away, the words never manifesting into sound, and I tried to keep the disappointment off my face as I pulled the cart into the cage and showed Calder the list, pointing to the apothecary task. He was quiet as we travelled down, and he took the cart from me as we reached the kitchens. There was a steward man at the basin when we passed out into the courtyard, where the washing station was.

  “Please leave it there,” he told us, motioning to a line of carts behind him.

  We returned to the cage and went back up to the thirteenth level, which was different again to the other levels. We stepped into a dimly lit waiting room, where an older Obelisk servant sat behind a high desk, a ledger open before him. He peered over the pages at us, his faded blue eyes fixing on my hair for a moment before sliding to the Weaver’s mark on my left cheek and then to the mor-svjake.

  “You are the Tempest?” His tone was unfriendly, and he spoke my Fated name as if it were poison, as if the very energy behind the word made him sick.

  I nodded.

  “Very well.” He noted something in his ledger. “You may only touch what your master has given you permission to touch. Enter through this door.” He motioned to his left.

  I ducked through the door. Calder stalked my steps, closing it behind him. Before I had even taken a step, he grabbed my hand and dragged me past several shelves of boxes, crates, and bottles. On the other side of the apothecary, the shelves made way for a workstation that backed onto one of the only windows on the entire level. The evening light flowed gently through, touching on the faded cushions of the bench beneath the window. Calder dropped my hand as he reached the middle of the workspace, high benches wrapping around us, a patched rug underfoot.

  “You pulled me into your mind,” he accused quietly, his face ducked to mine, his eyes resolute and sharply analysing. “That’s a Sinn ability that not many Sinn can master. And yesterday…” His voice dropped even further, his head turning to the side so that the words barely reached me, his eyes hidden. “You used an Eloi ability. I knew what you were trying to do—I’ve seen an Eloi do it before. Once. So I gave you the incantation … and it worked. You extracted something from that collar and bound it to another object.”

  I shook my head. I almost killed myself. I wanted to communicate that point, but was stopped by the realisation that he was right. I had used the Vold magic and the Sinn magic and the Eloi magic.

  In fact, I had used the Eloi magic several times—the first time to break the collar’s hold on me. I had sensed the ability again as I was placed in manacles. I could see inside the object to the energy that lay beneath the surface and understood how to overpower it. I had seen inside myself to where my own weakness was. I had felt it, fluttering and flopping and failing as I almost died. I had felt Calder’s magic as he saved me.

  Those intangible things, those impossible senses belonged to the spirit magic.

  I … was an Eloi.

  A silent, laughing snort travelled thr
ough me, and I extracted myself from Calder’s grip, edging past the desks to the window seat, where I sat heavily. I couldn’t believe it. There had to be another explanation. Calder followed, but stood off to the side of the seat. Though he was giving me space, the intensity of his eyes crowded me, and I found myself looking away from the sharp gold of one eye to the sharper blue of the other, unsure where to focus. I closed my eyes, trying to take us back to the marketplace, back to the taste of hot berries, but the images wouldn’t conjure. I slapped the palm of my hand against the seat, frustrated, my eyes opening again.

  “I think I know what you are,” Calder said, his tone disbelieving, growing fainter with his next words. “I think I know what we are.”

  He fell down into the seat beside me, but couldn’t seem to look at me anymore. He shook his head, letting it fall into his hands.

  “No, it’s impossible,” he muttered. “But I felt it when I touched you. I mean … I felt them. The others.”

  I grabbed his shoulder. You heard them too? He jerked away from me, his head snapping up.

  “I saw something the first time I touched you. Two girls. I saw one of them dead, and I felt my heart breaking … but it wasn’t my heart, not exactly. I saw one of them a second time. I heard her laugh, and I spoke to her in a voice that wasn’t mine.” He looked up to the roof, as though he could see through each of the layers to the veined stormstone ceiling as the dying sun bled through. There was a dark and angry expression on his face. For the first time, his careful mask slipped away, and I gasped at what lay beneath.

  He was pain and anger dragged over violent memory, a sharp scrape of reality that grated against me as I witnessed it. Every tensed muscle of his form was straining with reluctance, his legs taut, on the verge of forcing him into flight. His teeth were clenched together, and when he hung his head again, his words were forced out between them.

  “I saw a third woman, as well. Not a fantasy. Not a vision. A woman I used to know. Seven years ago.” His breath shuddered, his entire torso vibrating. I had never seen a man in so much pain, like he had been hiding a fatal wound all this time but now the blood ran through his clothes, revealing him for the dying man he was.

  “I saw her on the day of her kongelig ceremony, the day she turned eighteen. Alina.” He stood, the gold in his left eye intensifying somehow, a dark, crackling energy seeping out from his body and rolling over me with the stifling weight of a heavy wave, pushing me down. “The day we both turned eighteen.”

  The hairs along my arms spiked up, adrenaline pulsing through my blood as I stood, taking a careful, measured step away from him.

  “I didn’t want to believe it,” he seethed, measuring my step backward with an unconscious step forward. “I didn’t think it was possible. Even when I touched you, even when I saw them, when I saw her. I couldn’t accept it. I can’t accept it. I can’t go through this again. It was supposed to end with her.”

  He was losing it, his energy oppressive and hot. I heard the drumming again, that strange sound of a distant army cresting a far-off mountain, the gritty taste of soil on my tongue and the heavy jarring of the earth beneath so many frenzied mounts jolting my knees. The drumming intensified, filling my ears and clouding my vision.

  I willed myself to calm down, willed my shadows to stay locked up where they couldn’t hurt anybody. I took another step back, trying to fight off Calder’s energy. He was frightening me. I closed my eyes again, desperation turning to power. I needed to draw him into my imagination again. I needed my voice, because his voice wasn’t making any sense.

  I grappled for a detail that I could focus on, like the taste of the pastry, but each word and concept seemed to slip away from me, hiding behind a cloying mist. Perhaps it reminded me of the mists over the bank of Lake Enke, because there was no other reason for those waters to swim into my memory. I could feel it all—the crisp air, the cloying fog, the sinking bed of pebbles underfoot. The sun had disappeared, casting a greyish pallor over the mountains across the lake. The cold drifted along my arms before digging into my skin and wrapping around my bones, freezing me in place.

  “Where are we?” Calder asked from behind me.

  I spun around, water sloshing at my ankles. “Lake E—” I started, before swallowing hard. Behind him, there was nothing. Only an endless grey sky, dotted with shy, emerging stars. The other side of the bank dropped off into nothing, several of the pebbles dislodging and tumbling over the side as the water shifted them. There was no sound of them dropping below. The landscape shifted as I stared, the rock wall building itself up brick by brick, the road carving through the earth that rose from nowhere. Sectorian Hill curved up from the road, reaching up to the horizon, but the houses that usually dotted the hill were missing. There were no carts on the road, no horsemen passing by. There were no Skjebre by the lake or children running up from the water to return home. There was no sign of life whatsoever.

  “I … don’t know,” I replied. “Somewhere in my mind.”

  “Nice trick.” His voice had returned to its usual expressionless tone, though there was a dark edge to it now, his temper hovering close. “I wonder how long you can maintain it before you collapse in the real world.”

  “What were you talking about in there?” I demanded, spurred by the knowledge that I was on borrowed time.

  He seemed to flinch at the sound of my voice. He turned away, his eyes directed to the top of Sectorian Hill before sliding off to the east.

  “Do you remember what I said about the Citadel statues?” he asked. “The guardians of the Wailing Crag?”

  I thought back to the figures he mentioned, and the atmosphere began to vibrate around us, the rocks slipping out from beneath us, water gushing through the holes that opened up in the ground. The mountains crumbled like castles of sand, the sky swallowing it all. Calder grabbed for me as we both began to slip downward, caught in the rush of rocks and water as the bank split open. He pulled me against his chest, his arms wrapping all the way around me, one large hand shielding the back of my head. We fell down and down, crashing through a barrier of water. The current was strong, immediately yanking us downstream as Calder set his hands on my arms and propelled me upwards. I wasn’t a strong swimmer, but I broke the surface and managed to get myself to the bank, where I grabbed hold of a tree branch. Calder surfaced a little further down, swimming to the bank, his arms slashing with strong, precise movements through the water. He pulled himself out without even consulting our surroundings, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on me. I pulled myself free of the water, using the spindly tree branch to leverage myself up. We weren’t at Lake Enke anymore. We were outside the Citadel, at the top of the hill where the rivers began to merge.

  Before us, looming and magnificent, were the statues cut from the edges of the Wailing Crag.

  “You’re going to burn yourself out,” Calder snapped angrily.

  “It was a mistake,” I shot back, my eyes on the statues. “I have no idea what happened. Tell me about them.” I pointed to the statues.

  “The Fjorn and the Blodsjel,” he sighed out, struggling to rein in his emotions.

  “There were three of them?” I recalled.

  “You tell me.” He cut his golden eye to me as he started to unwind the cloth that looped his shoulders, forming the Sentinel’s hood. He detached it from the armour that wrapped the lower half of his torso and then sat on the hill to wring it out. I glanced down at myself, realising that my new dress was soaked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, moving to sit next to him.

  He slipped his gloves off, tossing them to the grass, and then held his hand out to me. Confused, I placed my hand on his. Immediately, his fingers wrapped around mine, his grip tight. His blue eye darkened before he closed his eyes, his head hanging down.

  “How many of them do you see?” He sounded defeated.

  I was jolted by the sensation of his skin against mine, unsettled by the feeling that sank into me, like two magnetic pieces had just sn
apped together, strengthening their bond with complementary energy.

  It begins with us, a voice echoed, both familiar and unfamiliar, accompanied by a flash of green eyes open in wonder. The shock of it had me attempting to draw away from Calder, but his grip remained tight, almost bruising.

  It ends with us. Another voice this time. Darkly familiar. One eye dripping with gold, the other filled with grief.

  A wave of dizziness rocked through me, and I tried to pull away again, but Calder only reached for my other hand, capturing that too.

  “You must see it all this time,” he grated out, cutting though the images flashing over my eyes. “The memories don’t stick around forever. If you don’t watch them now, you’ll never see them.”

  I saw a man with green eyes, his face streaked with blood and grime, his arm cradled against his chest, a bloody stub where his right hand should have been.

  Ein, he cried out, and I saw the girl upon the ground. She had hair like spun silver, and eyes of a pale, pale blue. Those eyes stared sightlessly up at the sky, blood dribbling from her mouth as a wounded silver shadow clawed out of her chest, disintegrating as it hit the air, turning into flecks of ash on the breeze.

  I felt the change in the world as that girl died, like some great timepiece somewhere deep in the earth had just registered a new era of darkness. I felt that darkness begin somewhere, clawing up from the depths of nowhere in particular to reach our very real world.

  The green eyes turned to blue, stricken with fear, tainted in despair. Another man, crying over another woman as she writhed upon the ground, mist swirling the ground beneath her. Her skin was translucent. She seemed to exist partway between this world and the next. Something horrible was happening to her, some kind of ravishing of her spirit. A nightmare had its teeth in her soul, and I watched as she died in the mist, her silver shadow turning to swirls of ash.