Without a shadow, p.8
Without a Shadow, page 8
“You okay?” Erikys asked.
After walking for so long, and after experiencing such a day, all Adlai wanted to do was lie down and sleep. Forget food. She wished she had a soft, warm blanket to curl up in.
“Could we rest for a bit?” she asked. Her voice came out scratchy after so much silence.
“Sure.” He looked around with a raised brow. “Think there’ll be a hotel nearby?”
He had his jacket fully fastened, the fabric at the front covering the lower half of his face so she couldn’t tell if he was trying to joke or simply pointing out how foolish this whole journey was. The fact that she didn’t know how much more desert they’d have to walk through didn’t help. If only they could see something on the horizon: a building, smoke, something to be walking toward rather than staring up at the damn crown constellation.
She hated looking up at those seven stars. It was like she was walking on a plank with her eyes closed and eventually her feet would step on air, just as eventually the night would end and her guide would disappear.
“Okay, so we’ll make camp where we want,” he said, distracting her from her darker thoughts. “We shouldn’t rest for too long though. Stars are kind of a night thing.”
“I know, I’m just . . .” She pulled the fabric of her hood up as well and wrapped her arms around her chest. “Today has been a lot. You’re not meeting me at my best.”
“You mean you don’t have a habit of wandering into the desert at night?”
“No, funnily enough I don’t have the least experience in any of this,” she said. “I’ve never even built a fire before.”
Erikys was silent for a moment and she wondered how many times since they’d left Libra he’d regretted following her.
“Well, we have wood, so we can try for one,” he said finally. “I used to go camping when I was a kid. I doubt making a fire has changed since then.”
Erikys had brought the empty crate from the wagon and he began breaking it apart. She watched him from the corners of her eyes. His arm muscles flexed under his jacket and she wondered about how and where exactly he’d been raised. He can’t have been just a thief. Thieves needed quick hands, not muscle.
Adlai sat down as Erikys got sparks kindling from some broken pieces of wood. The flames became larger and brighter and she thought how impossibly stupid it would have been to be alone in the middle of the desert. A rush of warmth came over her, not just from the fire, but at finding herself not alone.
“Something on your mind?” he asked.
Her eyes were fixed on a gold anklet hanging off Erikys’s left foot. There was a black gem attached to it that looked like a cheap trinket from Izel’s stall. The jewel was clouded, and she could see the chain’s gold paintwork flaking off to show the copper underneath.
Conscious that she was still staring, she nodded to it. “Nice anklet,” she said.
“Thinking of stealing it?” He said it jokingly, but there was something uncomfortable in the way he sat down and covered the space between them with the remains of the crate. Perhaps someone important to him had given him the anklet. Someone he’d rather be sitting under the stars with right now.
Stars were made for spilling secrets—for saying the things you didn’t dare to under the harsh glare of the sun. How many nights had she stayed up late whispering nonsense and dreams with Penna?
“Can I tell you something?” her voice was almost a whisper. “It’s going to sound crazy.”
“Crazier than where we are right now?” he asked.
“A lot more.” She took a deep breath. Erikys’s face was bathed in firelight as a harsh gust of wind blew, shaking everything but his eyes from her. She let the words out.
“I think I died today.”
He didn’t dismiss her or laugh. His steady gaze took her at her word, and it was like looking up at the night sky, as though she could spill all her secrets to this boy.
“You mean you had a near-death experience?”
“No,” she said. “I really died.”
His eyebrows arched. “So . . . this is your afterlife? Running from the city guard and hiding out in the desert with a stranger? Which god did you piss off to get my company?”
She sighed, the magic of the moment lost. He didn’t believe her, of course.
“I’m not dead now,” she said. As if that was the insane part that needed clarifying. “Dying and coming back hasn’t happened to you then?”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Adlai didn’t answer. Erikys frowned suddenly. “Is that why you were covered in blood earlier? Did someone hurt you?”
“It was a knife. He had a knife. I felt . . . I died and then I . . . went somewhere.”
Erikys was very still, like he was holding in his breath.
“I know I sound crazy. But so does having a shadow that can steal. Or maybe it really was just a dream and I’m leading us to our deaths by acting on it. We could get bitten or stung, or we could run out of rations before we realize there’s nothing out here, and by then it’ll be too late to turn back.”
Just saying it made her want to turn back. Despite the fear that gripped her heart when she thought of the desert market, she couldn’t only link it to danger. It was a place of excitement too. Endless opportunities. Her father had made her feel as though the world was hers for the taking, that she could slip anything she wanted into her shadow.
There was nothing to take out here.
“Adlai.” He said her name with such force that she came back to herself. “It’s all right. Just tell me exactly what happened today. From the moment you screamed thief at me and ran into the crowd.”
“You won’t believe me.”
Erikys turned to her. He was an arm’s length away, a distance the open desert had made seem natural and necessary, but with the fire crackling between them it now felt a degree too intimate.
“I grew up on a farm,” he said. “My father and his father and his father before him were all farmers, so that was what I was supposed to be. But I never wanted that. Sometimes I would dream about telling my friends about my shadow. Showing off, really, and proving I wasn’t just some farm boy. But something always held me back. The fear of seeming crazy, maybe, or of them thinking something was wrong with me. It isn’t natural, you understand?” He looked across at her. “Look, I know I was joking around before, but if you’re serious, I’ll listen.”
So Adlai told him. She told him all about the boy from the market who she’d stolen suraci metal from. How the boy had found her by the fountain, put his hand on the ground and pulled her shadow toward him. What that had felt like: seeing her shadow sinking into his watch. Then his face inches from her. A sharp pain from his knife as he buried it in her neck. How warm her blood was in her mouth as panic filled her lungs and her breath came out in painful, hot bursts. Like her life was being squeezed out of her. She was stabbed, but as she died, it was as though her own body had been strangling her.
Erikys was turned away from her, yet she could see his expression clear in the firelight. He looked like he was going to be sick. The flames spluttered in the silence.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was thick and he suddenly seemed very different from the cocksure boy from the cell, the one who’d swiped the keys from the guard as he’d winked at her.
She frowned. “You didn’t do anything. And I’m fine now. That’s the other part I haven’t told you about yet. Where I was when I woke up.”
When she was done describing the shadow world, meeting Yaxine and repeating most of what the woman had said to her, Erikys still looked queasy.
“You brought yourself back the same way you pull an object from your shadow?”
She shook her head. “It was more like my shadow brought me back.”
“But you said your shadow was stolen. How did you get it back from the boy in the market?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly.
“Didn’t the woman know? The one you met in that shadow world?”
Adlai shrugged. “She didn’t believe it had been taken from me. I guess she was right about that. I have my shadow and I’m here. I’m alive.”
“Yes.” Erikys was looking at her strangely. Of course he was. She was crazy: what she was saying was crazy.
“And that woman, Yaxine, she told you there are more of . . . of us out here?” Erikys asked, not quite meeting her eyes. Probably he was beginning to understand that her reason for being in the desert was based on a near-death experience.
“She said to follow the king’s constellation and I’d find them.”
Adlai didn’t add that Yaxine had told her she had an uncle. That still felt too strange to her. She’d been without family for so long, and she knew he wouldn’t understand that point. Erikys still had a family.
“Your family will be worried about you, won’t they?” she asked.
“I doubt it,” he said. “My parents have enough going on right now with the farm, and they have my brother to help out. He’s younger but far more responsible,” he added at Adlai’s questioning gaze. “They’re all used to me not being around. It’s better that way. What about yours?”
Adlai put on the face she was used to projecting whenever someone asked about her parents. The one that made her look as though she was mildly interested in the topic but not enough to elaborate. It helped to think of her mother more than her father in these instances, as she had no memories of her that could hurt.
“Orphan,” she said. “I don’t remember my mother. She died when I was three. My father raised me until he . . .” She swallowed, unsure of the word. Unsure of everything about what had happened to her father. He hadn’t abandoned her; she knew that now. But how had he died? The last time she’d seen him had played out in her mind over and over again; it was an itch, a wound she ripped open every time, but no matter how hard she scratched, it never healed.
They’d both been asleep in the little apartment they’d rented over the top of a shoemaker’s shop. She remembered the leathery smell and how the sound of little hammers, like rainfall, used to wake her up every morning.
But that night she was woken up by something else. Voices and footsteps out in the hall. Then her father came inside her room. She’d been so sleepy, she couldn’t remember how he had looked at her, or what he had said. She just remembered looking past him and hearing strangers at their door.
Sometimes she thought she’d imagined the strangers. When she was feeling really low, her mind whispered to her that he’d simply left. It explained why she couldn’t remember anything else of that night. Her father had been standing in her doorway and she hadn’t even looked at him properly, hadn’t even tried to listen to him, she’d been so focused on the other voices and footsteps. Imaginary or real. Blackness was all she remembered after that, and when she next heard the little hammers at work, her father was gone.
“I was ten when I was brought to the orphanage,” she said finally.
“I’m sorry,” he said. They were both quiet for a moment, the only sound the crack of wood being added to the flames.
“It wasn’t all bad. Pen is like a sister to me.”
“For what it’s worth,” he said, leaning back on his arms, “you were right not to let her come. There’s no way I would have let my brother come either.”
She nodded. If there was one thing she was glad about right now, it was that she hadn’t dragged Penna into this. She’d be safe in their attic room right now, warm in her bed.
Adlai wrapped her arms around herself. It was growing colder in the desert, as if the moon radiated ice the same way the sun radiated heat.
“Doesn’t your brother have a shadow though?” she asked. “If he uses it in public—”
“He doesn’t have one.” Erikys had an edge to his voice. She frowned and he swallowed hard before adding, “He almost died last winter. A harmless cough that turned into a fever we couldn’t stop.” He sat up straight, messy curls falling over his eyes. “Every day we waited for it to break but it wouldn’t leave him. I’d watch him sweat in that bed, his eyes not seeing me, and wherever his mind went, it felt like he was taking me there with him. Like I was dying in that room.”
Adlai tried to speak. To imagine what it would be like to watch someone you loved drifting away from you like that. It seemed an impossible weight.
“Healers?” she asked tentatively.
Erikys scorned. “No healer would help us without the proper coin. That’s why I started stealing in the market. Eventually I got enough to buy him the medicine. My parents thought it was a miracle. As if Descon himself had listen to their prayers and swooped in to stop his plague.”
“You saved him.”
Erikys shrugged. “I saved myself too. Now my brother will inherit the farm, and I’m free to do as I please.”
She sensed his shift and the lightness he forced into his tone. He was the carefree boy again.
“And right now, I think we should get moving,” he said. She didn’t disagree. Warm as the fire was, they couldn’t stay out in the desert all night. Wherever Yaxine had wanted her to go, Adlai had to find it.
Erikys grabbed their scant supplies. They began walking in silence, neither of them wanting to admit how dark and cold and hopeless their journey was turning out to be.
She was grateful when, a little later, he turned to her and she caught a playful gleam in his eyes. “So if your story about dying is true, that makes people like you and me immortal.”
She relaxed and found herself easily smiling. “I wouldn’t bet my life on that. One death is enough for me today,” she said. “So if a snake is drawn to us, remember to offer out your arm first.”
Erikys grinned as he shifted closer, their arms almost bumping as they matched each other’s pace. “I promise to protect you from snakes.”
“And scorpions.”
His face clouded over and she laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of scorpions but not snakes?” she asked, incredulous. “What does it matter if you can’t die anyway?”
“I don’t know if I can’t yet.”
But his words sounded faint as a prickling sensation climbed her skin. She stopped in her tracks, vaguely aware that Erikys hadn’t noticed anything. He was still smiling, his stride uninterrupted, calm.
Her shadow crawled out of her unbidden.
Can you smell them?
The voice was a growl. Her breathing hitched. It was the same voice she’d heard in the barrel. The same one as in the shadow world.
One, two, three.
“Adlai?” Now Erikys stopped, head tilted and a frown forming as he watched her shadow grow larger. “What are you—”
She shook her head, unable to speak. In the distance she registered movement coming toward them, but it wasn’t another person or an animal. It wasn’t a living thing at all.
10
UNCLE LOU
It was shadow. But not as she’d ever seen it before. The shadow was split into three, each part moving quickly and silently, rising from the ground as fire. Fire that was completely black and eating its way through the sands as it licked all the way up to the stars and blocked their guiding light.
Erikys turned. He saw what was heading their way and dropped down to a crouch, as if he could attack the flames or perhaps run from them. Like hers, his shadow leaped out in response to these strange, burning shadows.
Yet when the shadows reached them, the fire became smoke, and the smoke thinned out to reveal three very real, very not burned strangers. The smoke rolled off them and dropped like a weight to form their shadows. But even stationary, each of the shadows flickered, a layer of black trailing off them, as though at any moment they might burst back into flame.
You can only teach your shadow one trick. Her shadow could steal, but these . . . these had been fire, or something like it. Cold fear ran through her as she stared at the strangers.
One boy and two girls. A moment ago they had been running down the dunes as black flame; now they were awash with colors and gemstones. They were beautiful. One of the girls wore the kind of dress Penna would spend days making; it was all shades of blue with white gems draped over the sleeves and a hem like seafoam. The other girl was dressed more like the boy: both were in baggy trousers and silk tops with fine embroidered collars. Rich garments, not at all suited for walking through a desert. But of course they hadn’t walked anywhere.
“Adlai Bringer?” The boy spoke first. Tall, dark-skinned, and unnervingly handsome, he spoke with an accent she couldn’t place. Not Geman or Cantha, and certainly not Libran. “Your uncle said you would be alone.”
“Uncle?” Erikys stared at Adlai. She ignored him.
“Why didn’t he come?” The question came out sounding pathetic and she bit her lip. What did she care about a man she’d never met before?
The boy studied Erikys and Adlai, taking in their shadows and perhaps the exhaustion written across their faces. He turned to the others. “He won’t like this complication.”
“Another person isn’t a complication,” one of his companions answered. The one in the pretty dress. She had deep brown skin and thick dark hair that was braided and reached down to her hips. “Honestly, Kanwar, you do talk nonsense sometimes.”
Kanwar didn’t seem to agree and looked to their third companion. Her shadow was the one flickering the most, smoke like kindling meeting the air, and yet she was so ordinary to look at. Her hair was a dull brown that looked slept in, and she had tanned, freckled skin and flat features.
“He has a shadow,” the freckled girl said. “Lucky boy.” She laughed. “Without one, we’d be leaving you in the middle of the desert.”
“No, we wouldn’t,” the taller girl said sternly.
