Shadowblack Read online

  Ferius set her hand of cards down on her lap. ‘A body don’t get lost unless it gets too fixed on one destination, sister.’

  The other woman gave a soft snort that managed to convey an ocean’s worth of derision as she nodded towards me. ‘Is this how you teach him the Argosi tenets? By turning them into country sayings and amusing anecdotes?’

  ‘You think if I say them fancier it’ll make some kind of difference?’

  ‘From what I’ve seen of your student, I doubt it will make any difference at all. He used magic when he shouldn’t have, drawing the Jan’Tep mages right to this area and risking my charge’s life in the process. Then he panicked in the fight, and all of you would have died had I not been there to save you. Were he to live a hundred years I doubt you’d make an Argosi out of him.’

  Reichis pawed at my leg. ‘Hey, Kellen, I think that Argosi bitch just insulted you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I whispered back. ‘I don’t think she likes me much.’

  ‘She likes you just fine,’ Ferius said. I always forget how good her hearing is. ‘Rosie’s just trying to distract me so I won’t figure out that she’s been holding back a card this whole time.’

  A hint of a smile crept over the other Argosi’s features. ‘And you seem to think you can goad me into ignoring the fact that you’re obviously holding back one of your own.’

  ‘What, this old thing?’ Ferius flicked her wrist and a card appeared between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Must’ve fallen into my sleeve when I was shufflin’ the deck.’

  She handed the card to the other woman, who examined it for a long time before turning it over and dropping it to the ground. It was one of Ferius’s discordance cards – the one she’d painted to look like me, the one with the word ‘Spellslinger’ written at the bottom. ‘You’ve given it the right image, but the wrong name. That’s the difference between you and me, sister. You follow the path of sentiment rather than enlightenment.’

  ‘Yeah? Why don’t you enlighten me then?’

  The other Argosi held a card in the palm of her hand. She flipped her hand over once … twice … on the third time the card was face down. Even I could see from the back that it wasn’t the same card that had been there a second ago. ‘This is the sign we must follow now.’

  Ferius started to reach for it, but then pulled her hand back. ‘The difference between you and me, sister, is that I’ve never needed to pretend to see the wind in order to know which way it’s blowin’.’ She called over to Seneira. ‘Hey, little miss. How about you come on over here for a proper introduction?’

  Seneira complied, standing up and swinging her stick in wide arcs as she slowly approached them. I followed along, nervous that exhaustion and the uneven ground might lead to a fall – though absolutely determined not to repeat my previous disastrous attempt at chivalry. Ferius watched me with a raised eyebrow and asked, ‘You really buying the whole blind thing, kid? Thought you were sharper than that.’

  ‘What? You mean she’s—’

  ‘Blind people get real good at making their way through the world – they don’t stumble around the way she does. They find themselves a proper cane, not some broken stick they picked up off the ground.’ To the Argosi she said, ‘You told a falsehood a minute ago, sister. It wasn’t Kellen who drew the bounty hunters here; it was the girl they wanted. You brought this trouble to us.’

  Seneira stopped a few feet away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean for anyone else to get hurt because of me.’ Tears began to appear at the bottom edge of the cloth covering her eyes, sliding down her cheeks.

  ‘Ain’t nobody’s fault exactly,’ Ferius said, slapping a hand against the bandages covering her ribs. ‘I don’t reckon you asked for this trouble any more than Kellen did.’ She nodded to Seneira. ‘You can go ahead and take that silly blindfold off now, girl.’

  ‘Wait … What’s going on here?’ I asked.

  Ferius reached over, plucked the card from the other Argosi’s hand and sent it spinning high up into the air at the same time as Seneira untied the knot holding the cloth around her head. Just as the blindfold came loose, the card landed at my feet, face up. It depicted a girl with black marks twisting around her right eye. When I looked up, I found myself staring into Seneira’s green eyes and found those same markings.

  ‘Told you I wasn’t blind,’ she said, letting the strip of cloth fall to the ground. ‘I just couldn’t see.’

  I reached down to pick up the card, the discordance that the Argosi woman had painted because she believed it signified a force that could change the course of history. I saw now the word she’d written at the bottom of the card.

  ‘Shadowblack’.

  The way of the Argosi is the way of wind.

  There are many winds that travel across the land: winds of change, winds of sorrow, winds of joy, winds of war. To know the truth of the world, an Argosi must listen to these winds, awaken to their touch upon the skin and follow every discordance, for any one of them could grow into a hurricane that could change the course of history. It is for this reason that the arrival of an Argosi is sometimes seen as … troubling.

  10

  Diplomacy

  ‘Tell me again why you’ve got us escorting Seneira all the way back to Teleidos?’ I asked, pulling on the reins in an effort to nudge my horse back on the path. He had a bad habit of drifting off the road for no particular reason – a character trait he shared with Ferius. ‘And don’t start up with that nonsense about “following the wind” again. That’s not an answer.’

  Ferius angled her frontier hat forward to keep the sun out of her eyes. ‘Sure it is, kid. It’s just not the one you’re looking for.’ She shot me a warning look. ‘So how about you take my advice and leave it alone?’

  I glanced back to where Rosie and Seneira rode a little ways behind us, just out of earshot. ‘But she’s not even Jan’Tep. How could she have the shadowblack?’

  ‘First of all, kid, quit talking as if you Jan’Tep were a race. You’re just a bunch of magically inclined folk who came to this continent searching for the kind of power that had faded from your own lands.’ She reached out a finger and flicked my cheek. ‘Different skin colours, different faces, eyes, noses … you’re like a big bowl of beggar’s stew.’

  That got my back up. ‘That “beggar’s stew” you’re talking about happens to produce the finest mages on the continent, who just happen to live in the most beautiful cities in the world.’

  Ferius snorted. ‘That sure would impress me if your people had actually built those cities.’

  She had a point. Why was I sticking up for the Jan’Tep? My ancestors had started a war with the Mahdek, massacred their people and stolen their cities, all so they could take control of the oases that gave us our magic. There probably weren’t a hundred full-blooded Mahdek left in the world.

  Ferius was one of them.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  I whispered, ‘Because you’re Mahdek.’

  ‘I’m Argosi, kid. Mahdek blood is something I was born with. The path of the wild daisy is what I chose.’

  Reichis, lying on his back between the front of the saddle and the horse’s neck, staring up at the cloudless sky wistfully, decided to chime in. ‘Squirrel-cat blood is what I was born with,’ he said. ‘And the path of the wild squirrel cat is what I choose. Why overcomplicate things?’

  When I translated for Ferius, she chuckled. ‘Well, well, squirrel-cat philosophy, right there in a nutshell.’ She tipped her hat to him. Reichis loved that and mimed the gesture back at her.

  I felt oddly left out. In some ways Ferius and Reichis had more in common with each other than either did with me: they’d both chosen a path for themselves. They were … something. Me? I’d made a grand total of one important decision in my life: to walk away from my people, and I was starting to think that that had been a mistake. Outlaws are nobodies, with no families, no friends and no real purpose. Calling yourself
one is just a faster way of describing all the things you don’t have.

  ‘You all right, kid?’ Ferius asked.

  ‘Just great.’ I tried to shake off my morose thoughts and turn my attention back to the question that Ferius had – yet again – managed to dodge. ‘Regardless of whether or not the Jan’Tep are a race, the shadowblack only manifests among mages. Seneira swears she isn’t one, so either she’s lying or—’

  ‘Leave it alone, kid.’

  ‘No!’ I realised I’d shouted and glanced back to see if Rosie and Seneira had noticed. Fortunately they both seemed pretty intent on ignoring me. ‘I’m the one with a price on my head, not you. Seneira’s got bounty hunters after her and they won’t hesitate to kill me too, so I at least deserve to know why you’ve got us riding into even more danger than usual.’

  ‘Fine. You remember back in that town when those folks saw the shadowblack around your eye and they all reckoned you had some sort of “demon plague”?’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s just superstitious nonsense. There’s no such thing as a—’

  Ferius gave me a sharp look. ‘Is that so? You really figure four months outside your own lands is enough to make you an expert on what can and what can’t become an epidemic?’

  There was a tension in her face, and in the tone of her voice, that was at odds with her usual glib demeanour. A thought occurred to me that made my guts go cold. ‘You’ve seen a mage plague before, haven’t you?’

  She wouldn’t meet my eye, but stared straight ahead at the road in front of us. ‘Yeah, kid. I’ve seen a plague. Can’t say for certain whether it spread through magic or infection or something else, but people had a name for it: the Red Scream. And it was just as bad as it sounds. Until it got dealt with.’

  ‘Dealt with how?’

  Ferius glanced back at Rosie, and the two of them shared a look that didn’t seem friendly at all. ‘Ask me some other time, kid.’

  I might have pressed her on the subject, but at that precise moment my eyes landed on Seneira for just a second. Apparently it was a second too long. ‘Are you staring again?’ She glowered.

  Usually it takes people at least a full day to decide they dislike me, but Seneira clearly hadn’t wanted to wait that long. She seemed perpetually convinced that I was either leering or making fun of her. Usually it was neither. I just wasn’t used to being around someone my own age any more. It didn’t help that she was pretty either – way too pretty for me to be relaxed around her. Ferius said this might be a sign that I was developing a mental disorder and suggested I let her know if and when I noticed any additional symptoms.

  But my discomfort around Seneira wasn’t simply my usual awkwardness or even the fact that just talking to her made me feel oddly guilty about Nephenia. The real reason I was so troubled by Seneira was the markings around her eyes, so much like mine that even though it hurt to look at them, I couldn’t stop myself.

  ‘I could give you some of my mesdet paste,’ I said, reaching back into my saddlebag. ‘You could cover up the markings so you wouldn’t need to wear that blindfold every time we pass through a village.’

  She rolled her eyes – she did that a lot. ‘Of course! Paste! Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, maybe because I did, of course.’

  ‘So why—’

  ‘It burns, that’s why. Whenever I try to put paste on it, the skin starts to feel like it’s on fire.’

  I nodded. It never felt completely comfortable to cover over the markings, but it wasn’t that bad. But Seneira, despite her plain clothing, looked and talked like she came from money. Probably she’d never had much hardship in her life before. Of course, neither had I until recently. ‘Maybe you’re just not used to it. Just try a little.’

  ‘“Just try a little”?’

  ‘I have seen the effects,’ Rosie said, her voice calm as a warm breeze. ‘They are … uncomfortable to behold. The child’s shadowblack seems to seethe when anything is applied to it, and the pain is clearly considerable.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Seneira said.

  ‘Though I confess she is unpleasant even at the best of times.’

  ‘Maybe if you hadn’t kidnapped m—’

  ‘Rescued,’ Rosie corrected.

  ‘Wait,’ I asked, turning to look at Seneira, suddenly concerned this situation wasn’t at all what I’d thought. ‘You said you were with her of your own free will.’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ she replied, though her attitude seemed to soften towards me just a bit. ‘I got into some trouble, and …’ she hesitated, then smiled evilly as she said, ‘Rosie, helped me out.’

  Rosie frowned. ‘That’s not my name. I am the Path of Thorns and—’

  Seneira cut her off. ‘No normal person refers to themselves as “the path” of anything, so we can either go with Rosie or you can tell me your real name.’

  The Argosi opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. Finally she gave in. ‘I suppose “Rosie” is as good as anything else.’ She grimaced at Ferius, clearly blaming her for the nickname.

  ‘Heh heh,’ Reichis sniggered. ‘I like having these two around. It’s fun.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Seneira went on, ‘I was being pursued by those insane Jan’Tep you met and Rosie fought them off. Then they kept coming and I knew I couldn’t make it on my own. She offered to help protect me, only now she won’t take me where I want to go.’

  ‘The child ran away from home,’ Rosie explained.

  ‘I’m sixteen! When you’re sixteen it’s not called “running away”, it’s called, “going where you want to go”.’

  ‘Which you are free to do, but I am going north, to your city. So if you want my protection, that’s where you’ll go as well.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said to Rosie. ‘If Seneira doesn’t want to go home, why are you going there?’

  It was Seneira who replied. Whatever goodwill I’d bought myself by my concern that she might be a prisoner had evidently been spent. ‘How thick are you? I’m neither Jan’Tep nor am I a student of magic, but somehow I caught the shadowblack.’ She pointed to Rosie and Ferius. ‘These two weirdos are Argosi, which means anything strange happens in the world and they feel a burning need to go paint a card about it. Obviously they think the markings mean something.’

  ‘They do mean something,’ Rosie insisted.

  ‘They might,’ Ferius countered.

  The two of them exchanged a look that seemed significant but meant nothing to me. Evidently I knew as little about the Argosi as I did about everything else in the world outside my home.

  Having had enough of Seneira’s disdain, I decided to change the subject. Ferius says that a good way to make people like you is to get them to talk about themselves. I know – it doesn’t make sense to me either. Wouldn’t someone want to hear about your good qualities in order to form a favourable opinion of you? Still, every once in a while she’s onto something, so I asked Seneira, ‘If you aren’t studying to be a mage, what are you studying?’

  It took a few seconds before she gave me an answer, and once she did, I understood her hesitation. ‘I’m going to be a diplomat.’

  It took a long time for Reichis to stop laughing.

  11

  The Face in the Sand

  We stayed away from populated settlements as much as we could during that next week. Even when Seneira and I covered up our markings, even when nothing untoward happened, the people we encountered seemed uncomfortable around us. It was as if some small part of them could sense the shadowblack in their midst, like a breeze that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.

  Avoiding towns suited me fine, since I wasn’t exactly getting along with strangers lately. The only problem was it meant sleeping out in the desert every night, and the novelty of that experience wears off pretty quickly; hard ground, cold weather, occasional sandstorms, and the feeling of being exposed to a mean and angry world. It annoyed me no end that Seneira – whom I liked to think of as a privileged little princess – seemed
to handle the outdoors better than I did.

  ‘You’re staring again,’ she said, not even bothering to open her eyes from where she lay on her bedroll near the campfire. How did she do that?

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, Kellen,’ Reichis chittered, ‘ask her if she—’

  ‘Don’t start.’

  The presence of a human female my age – and specifically my awkwardness around her – was a source of endless amusement for the squirrel cat. He’d suggest various elaborate mating rituals that I should perform for Seneira, insisting these were practised by ‘reputable cultures’ around the world, but which I was pretty sure he was inventing by himself. When I pointed out that there was already a girl I was interested in, he’d remind me that my chances of ever seeing Nephenia again during my almost certainly short life were slim to none.

  ‘Well, you’re even more boring than usual,’ he said, then hopped down from my shoulder and wandered off into the darkness. ‘I’m going to go murder something.’

  ‘It’s called hunting, you know.’

  ‘Not the way I do it.’

  I lay back down for the third time that night and tried to get some sleep. It only took a minute of shifting around uncomfortably to figure out that wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t just the hard ground or the cold night air that bothered me – I felt a constant buzzing at the back of my skull that made me anxious all the time. Ever since that silk mage had shown me the spell warrant, I couldn’t close my eyes without wondering who might be coming for me next.

  What made it worse was that I couldn’t talk to Ferius about my fears now that Rosie and Seneira were around. When we’d first left my homeland, whenever I got restless at night, Ferius would just start talking out of the blue, making up some story or going on about this plant or that insect and how strange it was that they’d got to this place and this time. But now she spent every night sitting across from Rosie, the two of them playing cards, hardly ever saying a word. Even that made me nervous.