Reign of Shadows (2 page)

S
EVERAL HOURS AFTER
Perla and Sivo retired for the night, I crept through the darkness down the winding stairs leading to the bottom of the tower. The rabbit's scream echoed faintly in my ears as I made my way, a reminder of what awaited me on the Outside. I didn't push the memory away. I clung to it, letting it keep me vigilant.

I had accompanied Sivo enough times that I didn't need to feel my way in the dark as I descended. I didn't need to skim my hands along the dank walls, where moss and bracken grew between the cracks. I knew where to place my feet. I knew the precise moment to duck at the low threshold. I knew where to
squat in the circular room, where to clasp the latch that led into the antechamber and to another door—this one on the ground floor.

Closing the door to the antechamber behind me, I disrobed in the cold, inhaling the moist, moldy air. My fingers trembled slightly as I unlaced the ties at the front of my bodice and stripped off my gown, my uneven breath a whisper in the chill. Everything had to go, right down to the ribbons in my artfully plaited hair and the slippers on my feet. Perla insisted on the ribbons as though we were still at court, where things like coiffed hair held meaning. Instead of here, where there was only the passing of days. Existing and not living. Fresh resolution swept through me.

I hung my garments on the peg near the door, my bare skin puckering to gooseflesh. I donned the appropriate attire, always left in this room that smelled of bracken and earth. It was a precaution. Dwellers possessed an excellent sense of smell and we didn't want the aromas of the tower—baked bread, crushed mint and leaves, and beeswax candle—that clung to our everyday clothes attracting them. My hands found my outdoor wear easily. I reached past Sivo's bigger garments hanging on the peg next to mine. Thanks to Perla, mine were less worn than his, the doeskin jacket not as soft as Sivo's. Tonight they would see some use.

My palms skimmed over the supple leather of my snug trousers. The fabric was ripe and well seasoned. Sivo had seen to that, rubbing and dragging the clothes through leaves and dirt until they smelled as pungent as loamy earth.

I plucked a satchel from where it hung on another peg and
then picked my weapons from an array on the shelf. A knife for my boot. A sword and scabbard at my waist.

A distant, almost imperceptible sound pulled me up. Angling my head, I listened, picking out the noise. It wasn't from within the tower. Sivo wasn't awake. This sound floated from Outside. I heard it almost every day from my perch on the balcony. One of them was moving about. Perhaps more.

I stepped closer and touched a palm to the solid stone wall. Several inches thick, it was sturdy and reliable. It kept us in and them out. And yet Perla still worried. Always she worried.

I listened longer. I was good at listening. Waiting. Knowing when to move. Sivo said it was my gift. The thick, cloying dark made picking out sounds easier. Sounds and smells lingered, never seeming to dissipate.

After a few moments, I decided it was only one creature dragging its feet over leaves. Its tread was a steady staccato of shuffling thuds. I could count them one after another. A beat hovered between each footfall with no other overlapping of footsteps.

The dweller breathed in that way they did with deep saws of wet, fizzing breath passing through the feelers squirming at its mouth.

I waited for it to pass and move deeper into the forest. Satisfied that it was too far now to hear me when I emerged, I unbolted the door in the floor. There was only one visible entrance to the tower. The most obvious way in and out. We rarely used it in case anyone was ever watching the tower and waiting to see someone
emerge. Another one of Sivo's precautions.

Clutching the metal hoop in my fingers, I swung the door open, grateful for the silence of the well-oiled hinges. I descended into the tunnel, mindful of the slippery moss as I secured the door over my head, making certain it was shut firmly.

Lowering my hands, I turned, grinding the heels of my soft-soled boots into the slick stone floor. I hastened through the tunnel beneath the tower, slowing as I neared the end. Lifting my hands, I sought the dangling latch for the secret door above. Seizing it, I climbed up the few footholds in the rock wall, and waited in the dripping dark, listening for any nearby sound.

After several moments of silence, I unbolted and pushed open the door, sliding out into the night. I eased the hidden door, flush with the forest floor, shut and covered it back up with leaves and dirt.

Rising, I inhaled a freeing breath. Life buzzed all around me. No tower walls hemmed me in. A murder of crows squawked, tearing through the air with wildly flapping wings. Frogs croaked. A monkey scampered in a tree above, jumping from limb to limb, clicking its tongue down at me. Blood-swollen insects buzzed and chirped. One of them whizzed past me, its wiry legs brushing my shoulder. Perla thought they carried disease, but they never bit us. They were so fat and well fed from feeding off the dwellers. We were paltry temptations.

The wind rustled through branches and leaves, lifting the tiny hairs that framed my face. There was no time to savor it though. I needed to be back before Sivo and Perla woke.

My feet moved swiftly toward the stream where the berries grew. Even if I hadn't made the walk several times with Sivo by my side, my nose and ears could guide me through the press of perpetual blackness. I had learned how to use the wind currents, how to listen and feel the airflow change and alter given the location of objects. The world had its own voice and I listened to it.

I heard the swift burble of the stream before I smelled the crisp water. I risked moving a little faster, knowing that the sound of running water helped mask any sound I inadvertently made.

I stepped from the tree line up to the stream and squatted along the pebbly ground and drank greedily. Icy water dribbled down my chin and throat. I swiped at it with my hand as I sank back on my heels, listening as a fish splashed close to the surface.

Aside from the rain catch we rigged atop the tower, the only water we had was what Sivo carried back in buckets. It was a laborious and dangerous process.

Rising, I dried my hands on my jacket and moved to the boonberry bushes. I flipped open the flap to my satchel and began plucking berries, stuffing a few into my mouth as I worked, letting the dark, tart flavor burst on my tongue. My bag was almost full when I heard the anguished shout. I felt it like a vibration through me.

I ceased to chew. That very human scream was close. My mind raced, mentally mapping the area, seeing so vividly what I couldn't see in darkness. The stream. The tower. The direction in which the shout originated.

With a sinking sensation, I realized the reason for the shout.
It was one of several traps Sivo left out to catch game. Sometimes he caught a dweller and finished it off. One less to plague the land.

I flinched as another agonized shout stretched long over the air. A person was out there and in trouble because of us. My stomach muscles convulsed. I didn't even know this faceless individual, but I wanted to grab him, shake him, slam a hand over his mouth, and command him to silence. He couldn't have lived this long and not known the importance of silence. Sivo's voice whispered through me, ordering me to turn my back and come home.

Listening to that imaginary voice, I dropped the flap on my satchel and turned for the tower, my footfalls just short of a run over the spongy ground.

And then I heard the first dweller.

It was a signal cry, beckoning forth more of its brethren. Long and keening, sharp and discordant as no human could make. The eerie call ground through me like nails on glass. My heart seized and then kicked into a full sprint. Where there was one dweller—

An answering call followed, then two more in fast succession. I counted rapidly in my head. Four dwellers.

Inhaling, I searched for the sound of them, trying to determine how close they were. Weaving through clawing vines and trees, I listened, tasting the air for copper. The blood of the dead always drenched dwellers. They were coming. The air was already thicker with a layer of loam and copper over the forest's usual odor of rotting vegetation.

I pulled my sword free as I ran, flexing my sweating palm around the aged leather hilt. The wind thinned, the current shifting, blocked by a large object ahead. The tower.

I recognized the slope of the ground beneath my feet as I neared home. I was going to make it. Elation bubbled up inside my chest. The cold hand of fear began to loosen and slip free.

Then another cry came. Longer, plaintive and hungry. Ice shot down my spine. That made five.

I was almost home, but for the person caught in the trap, fear was just beginning.

I stopped a few feet from the hidden door. My chest heaved from my run, blood surging hotly through my veins. Sivo's and Perla's voices whispered in my head, urging me to uncover the secret door and dive inside the tunnel so that I survived.

I shook my head. There had to be more to life than hiding and counting the days until your last breath. There had to be more than looking away when someone lost his life. There had to be . . . more.

Adjusting my grip on the hilt of my sword, I turned from the tower and plunged back into the woods.

I
FLUNG THE
iron trap to the ground with a curse. Bits of Madoc's flesh stuck in its angry, bloodstained teeth. Dagne whimpered and jerked to the side even though the trap was in no danger of hitting her. She reached out and lightly touched her brother's arm.

Her huge eyes settled on me. “You can fix it, yes?”

A huff of disbelief escaped me as I squinted down at Madoc's ruined leg. I couldn't see much, and not just because of the dark. Blood covered his shin, soaking the shredded fabric of his trouser leg. He would have been better off if the trap had snapped his neck.

“You can carry him, right?” She nodded, as though expecting that I would agree.

Absolutely. I could carry a thirteen-year-old boy and fight off dwellers simultaneously.

I looked up as though I could find a way out of this in the tight canopy of vines and branches overhead. A glimpse of moon winked down between leaves, mocking me.

Dropping my gaze, I focused on the bedraggled boy and girl at my feet. Fat, blood-engorged insects swarmed around them in the feeble moonlight. Garbed in grimy clothes, faces streaked with dirt, they reeked of fear and rot, blending perfectly with their surroundings.

“It's going to be fine, Madoc. We have Fowler. He'll take care of you.” She patted her brother's shoulder and lifted her gaze to me again. “Right?” She was bobbing her head again, willing me to promise her lies. “Fowler?”

She was tenacious like an old hunting dog I once had. The hound would fetch the pheasant, but getting him to drop the bird from his teeth was another matter entirely. Eventually my father killed him, having no patience for such willfulness. He would have had no patience for Dagne or her brother. The fact that I did would have disgusted him.

I dragged my hands through my hair, fingers curling in strands that had grown long in the last year. I tugged hard as though ripping them from my scalp would give some relief. A gust of breath expelled from me. Against my better judgment, I'd let the siblings tag along with me and now I'd pay for it. It
wouldn't have been so bad if they possessed an ounce of stealth. My mouth twisted into a grimace. They were dead weight pulling me down with them.

I could have slipped away. I'd considered it. But I stuck it out, telling myself that it was just until the next village. I'd leave them there. Perhaps it was that I didn't want to be like my father, that I was determined not to be, that kept me from abandoning them.

I glanced around, peering into the dark, gauging if any of the shadows were more than shadows. If the shapes sifting around me in the inky air moved with purpose. If we were already being hunted. I stared hard, straining my eyes in a world gone cold with relentless night.

“Fowler, do you—”

“Quiet,” I rasped, looking behind me into the yawning stretch of night, straining to hear beyond the sounds of buzzing insects and a far-off scream of a tree monkey.

I sniffed, detecting the smoke of peat fire somewhere nearby. I thought I had noticed it earlier and dismissed it. Where there's fire, there were usually people, and people didn't live in these woods.

It was several hours until midlight—that gloomy haze of hour when the barest amount of light filtered out from where the sun hid behind the moon. The only time during the day when the earth was free from dark dwellers. But even then there was tension, a fine edge of panic so sharp it could cut glass. A choking urgency to outrace time and hurry before the murky light vanished and they returned.

Dagne started weeping—a small, piteous sound like a mewling kitten fighting for its last breath. She wrapped her thin arms around her brother's chest and struggled to haul him to his feet. He cried out and I flinched at the sound that seemed to echo around us. “Are you going to help me?”

I held up a hand for her to be quiet, cocking my head to the side and listening to a forest that had fallen suddenly too quiet.

“We should never have come this way,” Dagne complained. “I told you this forest is cursed.”

I had heard the tales as a boy, but didn't care, assuming the Black Woods would be less populated. And where there were less people there were less of them. “I don't recall inviting you to join me.”

“Just go before they come. Leave me,” Madoc whispered.

I let out a breath. It was tempting. He'd screamed when the trap snapped on his leg, and again when I pried the steel teeth from his ankle. A swarm of dwellers was probably en route to us. Even if we did escape, what were the odds that we would do so unscathed? It only took one bite for infection to set in. One drop of toxin would make you so sick that even if you didn't die, you couldn't function. Couldn't run.

We all froze at the first cry. Now there was no doubt. They were coming.

Other dwellers chimed in. The eerie cries bounced off one another from every direction. It wasn't the first time I heard them, but the sounds they made were no less terrifying. Monkeys went wild in the trees, jumping and rattling vines and branches,
safe in their perches, but no less agitated.

A strangled sob spilled from Dagne. She clutched her brother closer. “I'm not leaving you!”

In a sudden surge of energy, Madoc shoved his sister at me and I caught her. The effort made him lose his balance and he fell back to the ground. “Take her! I can't go on.”

Dagne was fragile in my arms, as easy to snap as dried kindling. She was only sixteen, but she felt smaller. She reminded me of Bethan with her slight stature and eyes big like a wounded animal's. I couldn't protect her. I couldn't be responsible for another life.

I wouldn't be.

I glanced down again at Madoc's crushed leg. He was right. He wasn't going anywhere.

“Fowler.” He bit out my name. “Take her and go. I—I'll delay them.”

Delay them. He meant they would be too busy slaughtering him to come after us. Dagne choked out a little cry, understanding his meaning, too. I nodded once and tightened my grip on her arm, tugging on her to follow me. She struggled, pleading, and I knew, despite my nod, this wasn't going to work. Not with her. Not with me. Not together.

A twig snapped.

I released Dagne and shoved her behind me. Yanking an arrow from the quiver at my back, I swung my bow into position. Blood pumped fast and hard in my veins. I drew my string and lined up my arrow in one fluid move, pulling back until my
curled fingertips brushed my cheek. As effortless as breathing.

Body braced, I rotated on the balls of my feet, my gaze scanning the area. The moon's glow relieved the black pall of night to a deep plum. I marked the darker motionless shapes of trees and shrubs easily, searching for the slightest movement.

My nostrils flared. The usual odors were there. The ripe, loamy odor of the outdoors infused everything. But an underlying whiff of something else mingled there, too, ribboning through the familiar. The source was faintly mint, a little peppery, like the black tea grown in the hills of Relhok. It wasn't a dweller but something else. Someone else.

The new arrival stepped cautiously forward from the thick press of trees and low-hanging branches, moving slowly.

I peered through the gloom at his face. Not a him. A her. A girl.

Her eyes gleamed darkly in a pale, dirt-free face. The clean face gave me pause, instantly telling me she had a shelter nearby. A safe place.

I lowered my bow a notch. Her arrival meant a chance for Madoc and his sister. I opened my mouth, but before words formed, an arrow whistled past my ear on a trajectory straight for the stranger.

The girl jerked to the side at the last possible moment, swiftly dodging the arrow. It vanished into the darkness. I whirled around, grabbing Dagne's bow from her bone-thin fingers.

She sputtered, “I need that—”

“You kill what needs killing.”

Dagne's eyes widened. “I thought she was a dweller!”

“Quickly. This way.” At the girl's voice, I turned. She stood in front of me, oddly composed. She motioned to Madoc on the ground. “Can you carry him?”

“Who are you?”

“Luna,” she answered, as though her name were explanation enough.

She angled her face, head cocking sideways. Listening the way animals did. “They're coming,” she announced in a voice as smooth as water-polished stones. “Too many to fight.”

Almost on cue, the familiar cry split the night. It sent off a cacophony of responses.

“We don't have much time.” She uttered this with such confidence, such knowing.

“Figure that out all by yourself, did you?” I slung my bow around my shoulder and leaned down. Wrapping an arm around Madoc's waist, I hauled him to his feet. He draped an arm around my shoulders, lips compressed so that only a small groan escaped.

“Keep up,” she said in that sleek-as-glass voice.

“You heard her. Keep up,” I ordered Dagne.

I propped up Madoc as we walked, his feet dragging over the ground. I grimaced at the rustle of leaves and crack of twigs in our wake.

The girl moved fast, cutting through the dark foliage.

I could hardly track her. And then I couldn't. She was gone like a flame snuffed out. One moment there. Gone the next.

I stopped and blinked, peering around with quick turns of my head.

The dwellers were on top of us, their musky scent everywhere. I couldn't use my bow while holding up Madoc, so I pulled the blade from my side with my free hand.

“Where did she go?” Dagne clasped my arm, shaking it, edging into hysterics.

My sword wobbled in front of me. “Let go,” I ordered, but it was too late.

A creature materialized in the night, its body near my height. No hair sprouted anywhere on the gray, dimpled body. Even though its flesh resembled molding clay, I knew its body was dense, composed of sinewy tissue not nearly as yielding as the tender flesh of a human. They were still vulnerable enough to a well-aimed arrow and a precise, strategically thrust blade, however. One simply had to get close enough.

Its mouth gaped wide, long feelers rising out of its face to taste the air and detect the presence of prey. The eyes were small, dark orbs that saw very little—if anything. But they hunted us just fine without sight, relying on their hearing and those feelers that vibrated like a nest of snakes, seeking us.

Dagne screamed.

The dweller lifted its chin, jerking its head to the side at the sound.

I dropped Madoc as the thing came at us, walking a direct line, its hairless head listing to the side as it assessed our movements.

Still in a panic, Dagne wouldn't release her grip on my sword arm. Cursing, I snatched the sword from my right hand with my left. The delay cost me. The dweller was on me before I could bring up my blade.

The stocky body slammed into me, solid as rock, and we went down. My sword flew from my hand. Wet, rotting breath panted in my face, a rancid gust on my cheek. The mouth yawned wide, revealing sharp, serrated teeth trying for a bite as its thin feelers shook and stretched for my face like hungry serpents, ready to release their toxin.

I shoved one hand at its thick throat, forcing distance between us. It lunged for my face. I dodged its mouth, turning my head and watching a drip of toxin narrowly miss my nose. I spotted my lost sword, just out of my reach.

Giving up on it, I located the dagger strapped at my thigh and yanked it free. With a grunt, I brought it up and sawed at the throat, pressing deep into thick, corded skin. The small eyes turned glassy, reminding me of an onyx-beaded necklace my mother had always worn.

Blood soaked me, pouring from the deepening slash in its neck. The creature fell limp on top of me.

Grunting, I flung off its weight and scrambled for my bow.

Dagne cried out. A thump behind me had me spinning, bow at the ready, arrow trained straight ahead and pointing directly into Luna's face.

She held a dagger, blood dripping from the blade. A dead dweller sprawled at her feet between us.

I lowered the bow a fraction. “You came back.”

Her eyes glinted in the dark. “I told you to follow.”

I huffed. “I can't move as fast as you when I'm carrying someone else.”

She turned her back on me and started moving ahead again. “More are coming. From the east. Hurry.”

I glanced to my left as if I could see them through the night. Almost in response to her words another keening cry stretched on the air, soon answered by another, then another.

Already her slight figure was hard to detect in the swallowing dark. Bending, I hauled Madoc up again. He was weaker than moments ago, a heavier burden.

With a sniffled whimper, Dagne fell in close behind me as I hastened after the girl. Ignoring my exhaustion, I kept moving, pushing ahead, one foot after the other.