Shadow's Son (3 page)

As she brushed past Fenrik, their family steward, she shed her jacket and
the new hat she'd bought. He collected her garments with his usual aplomb.

"Welcome home, mistress. I trust your excursion was pleasant."

"Marvelous! Is Father upstairs? I must see him right away. I have
amazing news! Anastasia is to be married this Yeartide Day and to such a
dashing man. His name escapes me at the moment, but he's very tall and
handsome. Did I mention he was an officer in the Sacred Brotherhood?"

"No, mistress. But-"

She flew past him without waiting for another word. Father would be
ensconced in his study with his books and papers. Retired from his government post for four years, he still maintained his connections in political circles, a thing for which she was especially grateful. Someday those
connections would net her a smart match like Anastasia had just made.

Josey paused on her way to the stairs. An unfamiliar overcoat hung
from the brass rack on the wall.

"Fenrik, who visits with my father?"

"A man from the palace, milady."

"From the palace?" She raced up the wide marble steps.

"He does not wish to be disturbed."

Of course Father would want to see her straightaway. A visitor from
the palace could only mean one thing. Her father was finally making a
match for her hand, and to a man from an outstanding family. Her heart
was ready to burst from her chest. Just to think, she and Anastasia could
both be married by this time next year.

A curtseying maid passed on her way to the study. Josey paused for a
moment at the door. She couldn't remember it ever being closed. She
glanced down the hall. The chambermaid was gone. On an impulse, she
pressed her ear against the wooden panels. The voices of two men murmured on the other side. A tendril of guilt knotted in her belly, but she
didn't pull away. If this visitor was here to discuss her matrimonial
options, it concerned her more than anyone. But she couldn't make out
what was being said. She wished they would speak up.

The voices ceased and Josey jumped back as the door opened. She
smoothed the front of her dress and did her best to look as if she had just
arrived. The guest was a tall gentleman, younger than she imagined. A
sigil of crossed keys was emblazoned on the breast of his gray mantle,
which he wore over a suit of the same color. He had a sallow face with a
nervous look about him, a look that amplified Josey's anxiety. Had their
discussion not gone well? Had Father not offered an adequate dowry? She
was bursting with questions. The man bent in a stiff bow before striding
past her to the stairs.

Josey peeked inside. Her father sat at his perennially cluttered desk
with a hand pressed to his forehead. The light from an open window illuminated his pate, bald save for a halo of sparse white hair around the crown.
He would be sixty-two this winter. She remembered how strong and tall he
had looked when she was a child. Now, he spent most of his time in this
study, surrounded by the trappings of his former power. The room was
stuffy and warm, but he kept a blanket wrapped around his legs.

He straightened when he saw her. " Josey I didn't hear you return. How
was your shopping? Did you find Anastasia well? I want to hear everything."

"Father." She entered and sat in the leather chair beside his desk.
"Who was that man? Fenrik said he came from the palace."

He reached out to take her hand. His fingers were thin and cold.

"His father was a friend of mine. In younger days, the two of us were
powerful men. Members of the Court vied for our attention and would give
much for our patronage, but now he's dead and buried and I am an old man."

"You are still a great man. I just had this notion your visitor was
calling about something ... more auspicious."

"Ah." He placed a finger alongside his nose. "You thought he came
with a betrothal offer."

She tried to blush, but it was a trick she'd never mastered. "It was
silly of me. I'm only seventeen, I know."

"Seventeen and as lovely as a rose in bloom. I wish I had such an offer,
Josey. Sadly, the news is not so gay. There are rumors of strange troubles
in the north. Banditry and worse. Envoys have gone missing and things
are deteriorating here in Othir. How would a voyage suit you?"

His question caught her off guard. "Suit me? Father, I can't leave
Othir. Anastasia is to be married. That's what I've come to tell you. She's
asked me to be her maiden of honor."

"I'm quite serious, Josephine. The political tide is shifting faster than
I anticipated. I had hoped we could weather the storm, but I fear it's not
safe anymore."

"Not safe? Why not?"

He eased back in his chair, suddenly looking old and feeble. "Affairs
on the Capitoline are in disarray"

Father still used old-fashioned terms like the Capitoline, even though
the Nimean Empire had died out ages ago and everyone else had taken to
calling it Celestial Hill.

"There is unrest in the streets," he continued. "And the prelate's
ability to contain it grows weaker. Just the other day, a man was killed
not three blocks from our doorstep. Suffice it to say I wish you to adjourn
to a safer location until these problems pass."

"I was out the whole afternoon and I didn't see anything amiss. The
city is as calm as a summer day. Anyway, Anastasia is my best friend. I
can't miss her wedding, Father. Not for anything."

"Josey, my dear. I promised your mother I would always see to your
well-being. And I act from my own selfish desires. I couldn't bear to see
you come to harm. You possess the key to my heart."

She placed a hand on her bosom. Under the lace fronting of her dress,
the cool hardness of a pendant pressed against her skin. She knelt before
him and folded her hands on his lap.

"Mother wasn't afraid of anything. She wouldn't want me to leave
your side."

He brushed a rogue curl from her face. The corners of his eyes drooped
amid folds of wrinkles. "She would want you to trust my judgment and
obey my wishes. Please, Josey, pack your things. I have arranged for a ship."

"Father, please!"

"No, Josey. My mind is adamant on this. You will go to Navarre and
remain there until I send for you. The new exarch is a good man and as
trustworthy as we'll find in times such as these. He will see you safe-"

Josey jumped to her feet, her entire body trembling. "I won't go! You
cannot make me."

"It is settled. Chide me no more on this subject, Daughter."

Cheeks wet with tears, she dashed from the study, brushing past
Fenrik in the hallway loaded with wrapped bundles from the carriage. She
slammed the door to her room and stood at the foot of the feather bed,
hands clenched at her sides. How could he be so cruel? Why couldn't he
see that she couldn't leave? They needed each other. She had no other
family. Only him, and now he was sending her away. What would she tell
Anastasia?

Josey took deep breaths and composed herself. Tears wouldn't get her
anywhere. She sat down at her dressing table and began to brush her hair
with short, hard strokes. She needed to think, to devise some argument to
sway her father. She had to convince him to let her stay. She had to.

Raging flames painted the night sky in hues of orange and gold, and threw
shadows across the yard of the villa where the tall bodies sprawled. Caim peered
through the wooden slats of the fence.

"We have to go," a voice whispered behind him.

Caim wanted to turn away, but his limbs had turned to stone. The frigid
wind flogged his small body. The cold slid through his veins like ice water. There
was blood on his hands. He wiped them on his shirt, but they wouldn't come clean.

The world shimmered and he was standing in the yard. A large man slumped
at his feet. Strings of red-black blood ran from the wound in his chest. A tremor
ran through Caim as the corpse opened its eyes, black spheres without irises or
whites. A whisper issued from blue-tinged lips.

`Justice .... my son. "

Caim opened his eyes and was greeted by a razor-sharp moonbeam that
pierced through the slats of the window shutters. A cool breeze flitted over his chest as the last vestiges of the dream-the images of fire and
death-sifted through his mental grasp. He settled back into the fabric of
the cot under him and stared at the ceiling, debating whether to get up
or try to fall back asleep for another hour.

With a sigh he threw back the woolen blankets and dropped to his
chest on the cold floorboards. His muscles stretched and contracted
through a routine of exercises: push-ups, stomach tighteners, lunges, and
handstands. Thirty minutes later he was sweating freely. After splashing
his face with water from a chipped clay pitcher, he stood before his only
extravagance, a full-length cheval glass in a bronze stand. Hard eyes
stared back at him from the wavy depths of the mirror, chips of granite
set in deep cavities beneath his thick, black brows. He ran his hands across
his torso, examining the damage; a few scrapes and cuts, broken skin at
his elbows and the backs of his hands, but all in all he was in better shape
than he probably deserved. Fragments of the dream scudded through his
mind. The words of his father's ghost haunted him. Justice. Had it been
served in Ostergoth?

He pulled a clean chiton and breeches from his footlocker and went out
into the kitchen. The rest of his apartment lacked for furniture: a plain table
stood with a single chair, a coldbox and small brick oven in the kitchen, and
a pantry. The living area was bare except for a wide mat and assorted pieces
of exercise equipment, sand-filled bags suspended from the ceiling. A charcoal etching of a lighthouse drawn by a street artist hung on the wall in a
plain wooden frame. In the picture, black frothing waves battered at the
rocky base of the lighthouse as its beacon shone bravely in the face of the
storm. Tiny lights flickered in the distance. They made him think of Kit.

He put on a pair of scuffed leather boots and wondered where she was.
Kit came and went as she pleased. Sometimes he wouldn't see her for days,
and other times he couldn't get rid of her. He didn't know what Kit was,
not exactly. When he was a boy he had thought of her as an imaginary
friend, but as he grew older and she did not leave, he began to suspect
something else. No one else had invisible friends who tagged after them.
But she was real. She knew things he didn't, things he couldn't know.
Countless times she'd warned him of danger before it materialized.

His ability to meld with the shadows was another mystery. He had
always been good at going about unnoticed, even as a boy, but where did the power come from? Had he been born with it or was he cursed? More
trouble than anything, it was another quirk of a past he remembered only
in murky fragments. Maybe he didn't want to.

Caim strapped on his knives and covered them with a fustian cloak as
he went to the door, its olive green paint peeling away in strips to reveal
the slab of old wormwood underneath. He peered down the hallway in
both directions. As he secured the door's rusty latch, a small, pale face
stared up at him from across the hall. He had seen the girl a few times
before, playing alone in the hallway at odd hours. Her wheat-colored hair
hung down across her thin shoulders in tangled skeins. She couldn't have
been older than six, or maybe seven. Angry voices echoed from beyond the
door beside her. Caim walked away.

He descended a flight of creaking stairs and passed through the dirty
foyer. The tenement building might have been a stately manor house in
its former days before the neighborhood took a turn for the worse. Still,
he liked its location and found the current owner's policy of studied indifference toward his tenants convenient. As long as the rent was paid on
time, the old geezer never asked questions.

As Caim reached the street, a stench assaulted him like a wet sock full
of rotten eggs, a combination of sea air and human refuse that clogged his
head and clung to the back of his palate. It was worse in the summer.

The ancient stone buildings of Low Town, once the heart of the city
according to the local salts, were stained with centuries of weather, soot,
and foul air. Over the years, the inner city had grown upward as well as
outward. Buildings four and five stories tall hung precariously over the
narrow streets. With the defeat of the pirates of the Stormcatcher Islands
fifty or so years back and the subsequent expansion of trade on the Midland Sea, those with the means to capitalize on the sudden influx of new
goods left the neighborhood to build bigger homes on the hills above the
Processional. So High Town was born, eventually to become the glowing
jewel of Othir. Things had only gotten worse for the Low Towners in
recent years, such as increased taxes to pay for distant wars and expensive
public works like the new cathedral under construction in the city center,
and food shortages. The poorest families were put out on the street by
landlords feeling the pinch. He saw them every day, begging on the main
thoroughfares, selling their children in back alleys.