The Rival Read online

  Rocaanism, the state religion, was tied to her father's family. Her father was a direct descendant of the Roca, God's first representative on the Isle. Rocaanism was also deadly to her mother's people, the Fey. Some believed that the union of the Fey and the Roca's descendent polluted the blood, and resulted in Arianna's brother Sebastian. Many believed that Sebastian was dumb. He wasn't dumb, but he was slow. Rapid movement — and rapid thought — seemed impossible for him.

  She sat on the piled cushions of the window seat and tilted her hand toward the sun. Then she frowned. A stain discolored the skin over the cut. It looked as if she had spilled Solanda's root tea on her hand. Everyone would know that Arianna was covering up the blemish instead of having found some way to spell it away.

  She clenched her fist and felt the skin pull. The cream dried hard. Her skin would have felt like caked mud by the end of the evening. She would have to go to the ceremony, witches' wart and all.

  Then the hair rose on the back of her neck. Someone was watching her. She didn't move, but pretended to study her hand. The birds had stopped singing. The scent of roses was overpowering, like it was when the gardener was working with the flowers.

  Someone was in the garden.

  Slowly she tilted her head and looked down.

  Sunlight dappled across the flowers. The roses spotted the green with color, red, pink, white and yellow. Pansies littered the ground with purple. The oaks, maples and pines were still; there was no wind. The garden, her father's pride and joy, the place she had spent most of her childhood, appeared empty.

  Then she caught a flash of movement near the bird bath. She squinted. The bath was clear, the water smooth. The shade of the nearby oak trees covered the marble inlay, making it look gray. No birds were in the trees, none were overhead, and clearly none had been in the water, moments before.

  She leaned back, and scrubbed her hand with the sleeve of her dressing gown, keeping her gaze on the garden below. Then a tree branch rustled, but she forced herself not to turn her head. Instead she watched, as seemingly preoccupied with cleaning as she could be when she was in her cat form. After a moment, her patience was rewarded.

  A man stepped out of the small copse of trees near the bird bath. Not a man, exactly, more a boy.

  A teenage boy.

  Her brother, Sebastian.

  This time, she did turn her head. Sebastian was supposed to be in his rooms, dressing for his coming of age ceremony. It took him longer to dress than it took anyone else because he insisted on doing it himself.

  She placed her palms on the window seat cushions and leaned out. "Sebastian!" she yelled. "You're supposed to be inside!"

  He looked up, and her breath caught in her throat. For the first time in his life, Sebastian's eyes were filled with a quick intelligence. They were blue pools of flashing light. That was odd. Sebastian's eyes had never looked blue before. They were a stone gray.

  His dark hair was mussed, as it always was, hiding his faintly pointed ears. The exotic features of his face — his dark skin, his swooping eyebrows, his small nose — blended perfectly with the slight roundness their father had given to his bone structure. For the first time in his life, Sebastian looked integrated, whole, not like something slapped together from mismatched pieces of clay.

  He made a small panicked noise in the back of his throat, a noise that echoed in the silence of the garden, and disappeared into the trees.

  "Sebastian!" she called again, but he didn't come to her like he usually did. Something was wrong. And her internal sense warned her that if she ran down the steps, through the halls, and into the garden, he would be gone.

  So she slipped out of her gown and Shifted. Her bones compacted and lightened. Her arms stretched out, the fingers melded into tips, and feathers sprouted all over her body. Her mouth stretched into a beak, and her vision changed as her eyes moved to the side of her head.

  This was her robin form, one of two dozen Shapes she had never told Solanda about. Shape-Shifters were supposed to have only one alternate form — Solanda could only turn into a small tabby cat — but so far Arianna had experienced no limitations. She could Shift into anything she chose, as long as she practiced the form in advance. She had been playing at her robin form since she was six years old.

  The change happened within a heartbeat. She hopped to the edge of the window and flew. The air currents ruffled her feathers and she felt the warm kiss of freedom. She longed to rise with the wind and explore the city of Jahn, looking for food, looking for other birds, but she quelled the instinct, landing instead on the edge of the bird bath.

  She cocked her head and looked into the trees. The long cool shadows hid nothing. She could see the smooth tree trunks, the sloping branches, the carefully tended grass.

  Sebastian wasn't quick enough to hide from her.

  Was he?

  "Sebastian!" she called again. "If you're not dressed when Dad comes for you, he'll be really mad."

  No answer. The strangeness made her stretch her wings, then tuck them back against her side. Sebastian always answered her, and he hated displeasing their father. Normally just the sound of her voice would have made him appear.

  "Sebastian!"

  She took one small, mad hop, then nearly lost her balance. She put a spindly leg out to steady herself and tottered over the water for a moment before she remembered her wings. She opened them and flew into the trees, landing on a maple branch. A jay landed above her and cawed at her; he thought she was too close to the bath and he wanted to use it.

  Another robin landed on a nearby oak tree. That was confirmation enough. She would circle the garden and the courtyard to make certain, but she already knew what she would find.

  Sebastian was gone.

  He had disappeared in less time than it normally took him to move his arm.

  Maybe he had finally come into his powers.

  Maybe all the abilities he was supposed to have as a mixed Fey had been dormant all these years.

  Or maybe something had gone wrong.

  No matter what, he would be terrified. Change always frightened Sebastian. He would need her.

  She wouldn't rest until she found him.

  THREE

  Gift huddled in the hole near the stone fence. He was breathing through his mouth, as quietly as he could. Sweat ran off his nose and dripped on the ground, making dark spots in the dirt. She would fly above him. He knew she would. One thing he had learned about Arianna over the years was that she was brilliant.

  And she had seen him.

  She thought he was Sebastian, and he supposed in a way he was. Gift was the baby born to Jewel and Nicholas, Arianna's older brother, but he had been stolen by his grandfather when he was only days old. Sebastian was the changeling that had been left in Gift's place.

  Birds returned to the garden. Their shadows passed along the ground, their cries echoing overhead. They couldn't see him. Maybe Arianna wouldn't either. He could only hope. He didn't know what she would do when she saw him. He was wearing Fey clothes, and he wouldn't be able to explain that. And the clothes were only the beginning. Even though he and Sebastian looked alike, they were not identical. In fact, the only things they had in common were their strange beginning, Gift's birth family, and the mental Link between them.

  And maybe their future.

  He shuddered despite the afternoon's heat. The Vision still weighed heavily on him. He had been a Visionary since he was a little boy — unheard of in the history of the Fey — and none of his Visions had scared him like this one.

  Except the one in which he saw his mother die.

  He swallowed. A robin circled overhead, coming lower, and lower, its head cocking from side to side as it descended. Despite being raised by the Fey, he had never gotten used to animals and birds speaking with human voices. When that robin had called out Sebastian's name, Gift had jumped in alarm. He had nearly tripped in his mad dash to his hiding place.

  He couldn't let her find him. She would want exp
lanations, and then she would drag him to their father to show the poor man that the boy he thought was his son was really a stone.

  Or maybe she wouldn't. She loved Sebastian despite his faults. She was his best friend and his protector.

  She might see Gift as a threat. She had never been to Shadowlands, the artificial home of the Fey. She had never been around Fey, except for Solanda and a few others. She thought like an Islander, not like a warrior, and that, he suspected, would hurt her when the time came.

  Although she had not been in his Vision.

  Which led him to believe that the Vision might be about him.

  The robin circled lower and finally landed on top of the stone fence. If he tilted his head slightly, he could see the tips of her claws, her feathered breast, and the underside of her beak. The beak had a strange white mark at the base, like a birthmark.

  The bird was Arianna, then, and she was directly above him. If he so much as moved, she would see him. His throat tickled with a sudden urge to cough. His body wanted to give him away. He wanted to talk to his sister for once, as half-breed to half-breed. But now was not the time.

  He had to find Sebastian, and then he had to think of a way to protect them both.

  The Vision had been a simple one, and unusually clear. Visions were usually impressions, fleeting images, puzzles to be put together. This one was an entire event, and he saw it two ways, which terrified him more.

  In the first, he was standing in front of a Fey he had never seen before. They appeared to be in the Islander palace, in a large room. The room had a lot of Fey guards. Behind them, the walls were covered with spears. A throne rested on a dais, but no one sat on the throne. On the wall behind it was a crest: two swords crossed over a heart.

  He had never been there before, but he recognized the crest. It belonged to his father's family.

  The Fey was a man with the leathered skin of a fighter. His eyes were dark and empty, his hands gnarled with age. He had the look of Gift's long-dead grandfather. He was staring at Gift, hands out, eyes bright, as if Gift were an oddity, almost a religious curiosity.

  Then Gift felt a sharp shattering pain in his back. The Fey man yelled — his words blurring as his face blurred, as the room blurred, and then the Vision disappeared into darkness.

  The second Vision was somehow more disturbing, even though it felt impersonal. He wasn't in his body. He floated above it, as if he were looking through a spy hole, or were a spider on the ceiling. His body stood below, taller than the strange Fey man. His body was exactly the same age it was now; it belonged to a teenager, not a full-grown Fey. The man and Gift's body stood close together. Fey guards circled the room. Two guarded the door. The Fey carried no weapons, but some of them looked like Foot Soldiers, with slender deadly knife-sharp fingers.

  No one seemed to see him.

  The older Fey wasn't speaking. He was examining Gift's body as if it were a precious and rare commodity. The body — and Gift — were studying the man in return.

  Then someone in a hooded cloak slipped through the door. The Fey guards stepped aside, and the old man didn't see the intruder. A gloved hand holding a long knife, appeared from inside the cloak, and with two quick steps, the intruder had crossed the room, and shoved the knife into the body's back.

  Gift was screaming, but he couldn't get inside the body. The old man was yelling, the door was open, and the intruder was gone.

  The body lay on the floor, eyes wide, blood trailing from the corner of the mouth. It coughed once, then its breath wheezed through its throat. The wheeze ended in a sigh, and all the life disappeared from the face.

  Gift's face.

  And then the Vision ended.

  Two versions of his own death. One from inside his body — where he felt the final death-blow — and one from out. The Visions had started almost a month before. Finally — yesterday — he went to the Shaman as she had taught him to do with difficult Visions long ago. She had looked at him with compassion.

  Did you know that each Visionary sees his own death? she had asked.

  He nodded. He also knew that the death Vision could be changed. He had seen his own death as a boy — when his real mother died, he should have died with her — but his friend Coulter had changed the path of that Vision.

  So this is mine? he asked.

  She shook her head. Two Visions, two paths. In the second, you do not die. Someone else does.

  Sebastian did. Sebastian, good innocent and childlike. Sebastian, the golem who should not live and did. Sebastian, whom Gift loved like a brother. Sebastian, who had so much of Gift inside of him that Gift wasn't certain if one could survive without the other.

  How do I stop it? Gift asked.

  You must change the path.

  But how?

  The Shaman shrugged. I have not seen this path. We cannot compare. The future is too murky. Everything is changing now. By next week, our lives will have a different meaning.

  Try as he might, he could not get her to explain that last. The job of a Shaman was to safeguard her people. And sometimes, safeguarding her people meant keeping their leaders in darkness.

  Overhead, the robin sighed. Gift resisted the urge to look up. His arms were cramping, and his neck ached. She had to leave sometime soon. She had some sort of ceremony to go to, something Sebastian had tried to explain during the last Link. But Gift's understanding of Islander rituals was poor at best, and he hadn't understood this one at all.

  "By the Powers, Sebastian," Arianna said. "You'll get us both in trouble."

  And then she took off, stubby wings outstretched. She had a grace, even in flight, that marked her as Fey. Fey were so different from other races. The Islanders, Gift knew, regarded the half-breeds as something less, as not quite worthy. But the Fey, the Fey knew that half-breeds were stronger, that the magick flowed pure in undiluted blood. The Shaman had once told him she thought it a cultural imperative for the Fey to continue conquering. They had to move on, to find the purity that gave their power its ferocious strength.

  But she spoke as if she disliked the Fey desire to conquer. She spoke as if she had used the idea as a way to understand the warrior culture.

  Gift was a half-breed. He had Visions younger than any Fey, and he had built a Shadowlands without practice, by simply holding his grandfather's creation together. His Links were fine and strong, and he could travel along them with no effort at all.

  Arianna Shifted into more than one form, unheard of among the Fey. He didn't know what her other talents were. He wasn't sure he wanted to find out.

  But they were the only two half-breeds on the Island. The Fey still hadn't co-mingled with the Islanders. Most of the Fey still lived in Shadowlands, hiding in their protective Fey-made fort for nearly two decades now, sorry in defeat.

  The Shaman said the Fey had never been like that before.

  She warned that when the Black King came, he would slaughter them all for behavior unworthy of a warrior.

  All except Gift, whom he could not slaughter, because Gift was of his own blood. If the Black King's family turned on itself, all of the Fey would dissolve into chaos and insanity. Gift and Arianna. They were safe. None of the other Fey were.

  He couldn't see her anymore. The birds were again chirruping in the garden. He stretched slowly, then eased out of the hole. He glanced up for good measure, and saw nothing but blue sky. Perhaps the garden wasn't the best way to go. It was the only way he knew for certain. But if he played this right, the guards would think he was Sebastian.

  Gift's heart was pounding against his chest. He had never gone into this palace before, not in his own body. He had only walked — Linked — with Sebastian, inside the golem's body, the case of stone.

  Gift didn't know what would happen if they caught him.

  But he had to try. He had to get Sebastian out of here, at least until he knew who the strange Fey was. The Vision had happened in the near future. And the only thing Gift could do to prevent his death and Sebastian's
was to keep them away from Islander buildings, away from the palace, away from the cities.

  He had to get Sebastian to Shadowlands.

  And he knew Sebastian couldn't get there on his own.

  FOUR

  Nicholas adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves. Lace fell over his wrists and onto the backs of his hands. He tugged the sleeve of his waistcoat to his wristbones, and made certain that nothing touched the lace. The ring Jewel gave him after the birth of Sebastian glinted on his left hand.

  He tucked the shirt into his pants, then pulled his boots out of the wardrobe. His dressing room was large, almost a room in itself. This suite had been filled with laughter once, when Jewel was alive. Hard to believe fifteen years had gone by. He still saw her in his dreams.

  And he still missed her, with a visceral ache. He had the children, of course. Sebastian, even though he was slow, was a model son, and Arianna looked like Jewel. The girl acted more like Solanda, though, imperious, proud, and too confident. Sometimes he wondered if he had done the right thing, letting Solanda act as a foster mother. But he didn't know how he could have done otherwise. Arianna was a special child, even for the Fey. She Shape-Shifted as she came out of the womb, and continued to do so at random during her first few years of life.

  He leaned against the dressing room door. He had asked to be alone this afternoon because he had known he would need it. Sebastian turned eighteen this week. Eighteen years since his birth, since he and Jewel realized that a single child wouldn't unite the two nations. Eighteen years since they learned, bitterly, and finally irrevocably, that uniting the Fey and the Islanders would take a lot of work, work that Nicholas hadn't been able to do alone.

  The Fey and Islanders had reached a silent truce since Jewel died, since her father died. Many of the Fey stayed in Shadowlands which was a magickal construct, an artificial and invisible place to hide. A few Fey lived on the Isle. Those that scattered throughout, though, were treated like pariahs much of the time, and often threatened with holy water. Holy water killed the Fey with a single touch — and the death was devastatingly horrible.