Chapter
Fifteen
Malyr Past, Tidestone Dungeons
eys clanked.
Hinges squeaked.K “Asker isn’t coming to save us, Malyr. He might be dead for all we know. We have to escape on our own before the strength of our gifts fades further.” Harlen sat beside me on the hard damp ground, his clothes torn to shreds, his legs skinnier than even mine and bruised black from the cane. “You have to use your shadows. Do you hear me?”
Footsteps thudded.
Water splashed.
“When the jailor comes again, I’ll spit in his face and make sure I get the first beating,” my brother continued. “You have to suffocate him before he alerts the guards, Malyr. We’ll take the keys and fight our way outside. The moment we see the light, we shift with each other’s help. Shift and fly as far away from this place as possible, do you understand me? Malyr?” A shove to my shoulder where I lay on the filthy ground, eyes fixed on that small drain hole at the bottom of the wall. “Are you even listening!?”
Not water.
Vinegar.
The sour tang of it climbed into my nostrils until my mind dizzied and my empty stomach turned, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the sounds the acid always brought with it—deep grunts, high-pitched screams, curses.
“A turd in your teeth!” the girl in the cell beside us shouted. “Touch me, and I’ll bite that rancid piece of meat between your legs clean off! No! Get away from me or I’ll fucking kill y—”
Slap. “Foul-mouthed little bitch. Tie her down over the crate.”
Feet dragged.
Chains clinked.
“Goddess curse you bastards and put pox all over your yard! No! No!” Shouts turned into panicked, miserable yelps, piercing whatever hadn’t gone numb inside my chest yet. “I can’t do it. I swear, I can’t remove the shadows! No! No—augh!”
“Maybe you can’t give us Valtaris, deathweaver, but you still have plenty else to give us instead.
Hold her legs. Keep her from bucking.”
Wood moaned.
The jailor, too, grunting like a beast to the hurried rhythm of skin slapping against skin. It almost overwhelmed the girl’s heaving, stuttering breaths. The oomphs he ripped from deep in her chest as he hurt her, robbed her of her curses. Left the girl behind with nothing but pained whimpers.
Her name was Lorn.
She’d told me through the hole shortly after Lord Brisden had caught us somewhere along the border of Vhaerya and thrown us into the dungeons. Into a small square of a cell with packed stone, tight weaves of forged iron, and the flames of a faraway oil lamp. No window, no food, no water— save for whatever dripped from the ceiling.
“Stop! I beg you,” Lorn pleaded through her hoarse, staggered exhales. “Goddess, damn your souls!”
Another man chuckled. “Hissing and snarling like the animal she is. I lik’em like that.”
“Because you’re damn goat fuckers! All of you!”
“Shut your mouth, Raven whore!” Another slap, then the jailor grunted louder, deeper. “That’s what you are. A filthy whore. Nothing but a hole to get us some relief, so my lads here don’t go bothering the honest women up there.”
The degree of humiliation overwhelmed all conscious thought, stunning my mind where I stared into the blackness that lay beyond the hole in the wall. Out. I needed out of this wretched nightmare.
“Malyr, I’m begging you…” Harlen crouched to stare at me from red-rimmed eyes, his breath rancid, his face unrecognizable with how gaunt it had gotten over however long we’d been here.
Weeks? Months? He no longer looked like a man grown, but a boy. “You’ve been like this for too long now. I need you to get out of your head. Need you to use your shadows.”
Use my shadows.
Agony punctured through my heart, making me bleed into my chest until it filled with the pressure of a thousand souls on my conscience. Torment was all that existed within me, spiked with guilt and shame. My shadows had killed them. No, I had killed them. Had killed them all.
And I would kill again.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Malyr, you have to—”
“No.” My head wouldn’t stop its frantic shaking as Harlen’s face blurred into nothing but sharp
bone, smudged skin, and valleys shadowed by starvation. “I killed them. Oh, goddess… I killed our parents.”
“We don’t need your regret, Malyr. We need your shadows.”
“N-no,” I stammered as they crept and crawled at my core. “You cannot make me. You cannot—”
“Malyr.”
“—make me.”
“Stop crying.”
“You cannot make me.”
“I said stop—goddess damn you, Malyr!” Slap. His palm hit my cheek, making the top of my head hit the stone with enough force, nausea welled in my stomach. “We are going to die if you don’t use your shadows. Is that what you want, hmm? Mother and Father aren’t enough; you have to make sure
what’s left fades away in here, too?”
Naya!
Mother’s voice screamed at the back of my crumbling mind. Saliva pooled beneath my tongue. A gag tied my throat shut until, with a heave, I retched nothing but yellow slobbery strings of bile onto the damp, dark stone.
“Fuck, I’m sorry. Malyr, I just…” Harlen shoved his naked foot under my cheek, lifting my face from my vomit while his fingers brushed the tousled, greasy strands from my face. “I don’t want to
die. Not here… not like this.”
But didn’t he understand?
He would die either way.
I turned my head, wiping my mouth on the tatters of my tunic before I looked up at him, my chest
heavy. “I will kill you.”
“No, Malyr, that’s not true.”
“Don’t make me kill you. Please.” What did I have left but my brother? I’d destroyed it all. Our family, our city, our kingdom. “I cannot lose you, too. Please don’t make me. Harlen… please.”
“Malyr, look at me.” He clasped my face between his hands, lifting my gaze to his. “It was a terrible accident, but an accident just the same. If I remain close by your side, like it was in Valtaris, your shadows will do me no harm. I know this.”
“No.” He couldn’t know that. Couldn’t be certain. “They are not my shadows. They’re stolen.
Stolen all those centuries ago.”
“Nothing but folktales, Malyr,” he said. “I’d rather die in my brother’s shadows than at the hand of our enemy. I trust in you. All you have to do is trust in your—” Movement through the small holes between the weave of iron bars caught his gaze. “He’ll come down again soon. We must be prepared.”
My fingers searched for the amulet around my neck. Empty. Nothing. Lord Brisden had taken it from me—the one thing that had once offered me hope in times of darkness. The one thing I’d
promised to protect with my life.
Father was right, I was worthless.
“Malyr,” Harlen said. “I will do this. The question is, are you with me, brother? Will you weave your shadows?”
I fought down another wave of nausea. I didn’t want to do this. Didn’t dare confront my shadows.
But how could I deny my brother after what I’d cost us? How could I remain nothing but a disappointment?
I wiped a few tears from my eyes, gaze wandering to the drain hole. “What about her?”
“She’s been here even longer than us.” Harlen released my face and sighed. “I doubt she can still shift.”
But what if she could, this girl behind the hole who’d told me stories of home, offering a sliver of light in this endless dark? I couldn’t just leave her. That was not right.
“Lorn?” I inched closer, peeking through the hole. “Lorn? Can you hear me? Talk to me.”
Something shuffled in the darkness until two bloodied, trembling fingertips poked through the gap in the stone. “Malyr…”
My shoulders tensed. Her voice sounded so different now, empty and depleted. Void of life.
“Harlen and I will escape.” I stroked my fingertips over hers, sensing the slippery blood from whatever wounds they’d left on her this time. “Can you still shift into your ravens?”
She swallowed her little cries the way she always did after the men left, trying to give them no
voice. “I… I cannot.”
“What if you focus very hard—”
“Malyr… I cannot shift anymore without help.”
I looked up at Harlen.
He shook his head. “It’s been a while since you managed a conscious shift. I think neither of us is still strong enough to do it on our own, Malyr. We’ll have to hold hands once we make it out of here and pray our primals do the rest, and that only works in pairs of two.”
“We cannot leave her behind.”
Harlen tortured his upper lip. “This might very well be our last chance at escape, Malyr. We
cannot jeopardize it for this girl.”
“But—”
“Malyr,” Lorn’s voice came through the hole as her fingers slipped away from beneath mine. “Go.
There’s nothing left of me worth saving. Just promise me you will, should you ever come back and find my body, burn me so my ashes can drift forever on the wind.”
Tears once more collected behind my eyes, running salty down my throat. “I give you that promise.”
“I can hear a key turning in the door up there.” Harlen rose, making his way to the iron bars. “He left it open, I’m certain. I hear the wind howling through the gap. The goddess is giving us this chance! He’s coming back down here. Malyr, cower in the corner and don’t look at him. Don’t do anything until he starts beating me. I’ll tell you when.”
Heart beating fast, I did as I was told, focusing on the shadows that writhed within me. They lashed at my insides, each crack a demand for violence, bloodshed, death. What if they killed Harlen?
Lorn?
Hinges once more creaked as the jailor stepped inside, a heavyset man with no neck but arms as big as oak branches, his brown hair cropped short. He made a show of how slowly he closed the iron door, a flogging whip tied to the left of his belt, the bloody cane dangling on the other side.
“Ah, lads, the things four months with only scat and rats for meals do to your lot. Where are your birds now, hmm?” The door fell into its lock, sending a strike of dread through me. “Lord Brisden is a… merciful man. All he wants are those damn shadows gone around that cursed city of yours, and the two princes can die old between some whore’s legs in exile.”
Harlen tried to spit at the man, only for the little he managed to produce to cling to his bottom lip instead. “You’ll never get Valtaris!”
The man lifted his arm and struck Harlen straight across the face, making him wobble back on his twiggy legs and crash with his back against the stone wall. He pulled the whip from his belt, letting
the strikes pelt down on my brother’s chest until it shredded his shirt and welted his stomach.
Harlen grunted in pain as he collapsed forward to the ground, but three words made it through his tortured groans in Old Vhaer. “Gran den skygga…”
Free your shadows.
My heart pounded as I rose onto my shaky legs, communing with my anoa. Black tendrils rummaged through my innards, squeezing the blood from them. They snaked around my ribcage, stringing my bones tight until they ached, threatening to crack into a million pieces and me right along
with it.
It was too much. Too much.
“Malyr…” Harlen groaned where he clawed at the ground while the jailor kept pelting his strikes wherever they may land. “Skygga!”
Sweat broke across my forehead, running down along my temples in the same way my shadows veined across the ground toward the jailor. Or Harlen?
Memories of Mother ambushed my focus. How her jaws had gaped wide open. How my shadows had crept into her mouth, silencing her scream. The same shadows that flicked their black offshoots
toward my brother.
I will kill you.
Panic rose, pulling every tendon in my body tight as I curbed my shadows, wrestling them back into the confinement of my chest. I couldn’t kill him. Couldn’t risk it.
Harlen’s stare widened as he watched my shadows retreat. He lifted his head and looked at me.
Through the sharp bite of the whip gnawing at his back, he looked at me, showing me every shade of disappointment and contempt in his brown eyes.
He lifted his empty hand toward the jailor. At the next, he stabbed a shadowy dagger into the man’s groin, pulling himself up on it. He pulled out the dagger, letting crimson drip off the shadows before he plunged it into where the man’s neck should have been.
The big man let out a scream before his knees hit the ground, pressing both hands to the wound where Harlen’s shadows dissolved. “Guards! To hel—”
Harlen stabbed another shadow into the jailor’s chest, shoving him to fall on his back before he knelt beside the writhing, groaning body. “Malyr! The keys! My hands are slippery.”
Frozen, paralyzed, I stared at Harlen’s blood-soaked fingers where they pulled on the iron ring
attached to the man’s trousers.
“Malyr!”
With a start, I stumbled forward. Keys. Yes, I had to get the keys and open the door!
“Someone might have heard him. We have to hurry.” Harlen reached me the clanking iron ring.
“It’s the big rusty one.”
I fought past the violent shake in my fingers, letting the key stutter along the rusty lock for endless seconds before it finally slipped into the hole. At its turn, the lock sprung and hinges once more
squeaked as the door opened.
“Hurry, Malyr. Hurry!”
Exhaustion gnawed on my legs at each step, making them want to cave, but I followed Harlen along the damp corridor. Empty cells lined our left, and oil lamps hung from iron hooks to the right.
What if we couldn’t shift? Where would we even— Footsteps.
Just as Harlen approached the spindling stone stairs, a guard appeared from a corridor to the right. He stormed at my brother, slamming Harlen against the wall just as his hand reached for the
pommel of his sheathed sword.
“Alert!” he shouted and pulled his sword out, letting the blade hum its treacherous melody. “The Ravens are—”
On instinct, I grabbed his throat, watching my fingers go from filthy to pitch-black in the blink of an eye. My gift streamed out of me, painfully so, webbing across his face, seeping into his skin until it wrinkled like a rotting prune. Then, with a silent jerk, the guard collapsed at my feet, dead.
That heaviness in my chest intensified.
I’d killed him.
“Malyr,” Harlen’s voice echoed. “Hurry!”
I looked up, watching Harlen’s foot disappear from sight as he made his way up the stairs. “Wait for me!”
The moment I lifted my foot to step over the corpse, something hit the side of my head. Pain exploded above my ear, rippling through my skull. Everything around me spun. Stone. Fire. Blood.
Stone. Fire.
Blood.
Blood running down the jailor’s chest where a wound gaped and glistened behind a punctured shirt. His grin was the last thing I saw before his fist hit me straight in the face.
Bone cracked.
Tears welled.
My feet pulled out from underneath me as searing pain spread into my brain.
What happened? Where was Harlen?
“Catch the pathfinder!” The jailor’s shout mixed with the sound of my body dragging over the ground. Stone pulled on my hair. Something gripped my ankle. “Mmm, I knew you were a deathweaver. Felt it in my bones. You, boy, won me three silver coins.”
I fought to keep my eyes open, fading in and out of consciousness. “Harlen?”
“Your brother won’t get far. Don’t worry, we’ll bring him back to you.” A kick into my stomach sent me rolling over the stone. “Back into your cell where you belong.”
Bile welled from my throat, bitter and biting, collecting in my mouth only to drool from my parted lips and my nostrils. “Harlen?”
When no answer came, cold sweat doused my skin. Time slipped away, racing so fast, it turned me nauseous, or creeping at the excruciating pace of eternities. Pain held every fiber of my body in a tight grip, keeping me paralyzed on the ground for I didn’t know how long.
The brain-numbing screech of hinges caught my feeble focus, eyes going to a guard who held something draped over his arms. Four limbs, a body, and a head with long black hair that wobbled listlessly with the motion. Until he placed it on the ground before me, making me stare at Harlen’s black ink mark beneath his ear. A river of blood welled from his head, seeping into his abandoned eyes, turning them crimson.
“Here’s a meal for’ye, courtesy of the Lord Brisden.” With a chuckle, he turned and walked away.
“A feast fit for ye ravens, ye filthy carrion feeder. Kraa. Kraa.”
