Shadow Mage Page 6

  Ugh. Sunshine. Why can’t these people do things at night like normal pariahs of society?

  Sarai slunk out of bed, grabbed her smallest dagger from her bedside table and strapped it to her upper thigh before padding across the carpet to the door. She flattened herself against the wall, gingerly turned the knob, and pulled the handle, letting the door swing in a few inches.

  “Goodmorni—” The bright voice cut off. “Er, hello?”

  Sarai edged a step closer. The profile of a girl came into view. She was tall, and her long wavy brown hair was a strange riot of color. Like a nest made by a bird that obsessively collected brightly colored threads, weaving them through the hair. Then she caught sight of what the girl was wearing.

  What the…

  She wore some kind of… skintight body suit. It was bright pink, with yellow and silver accents.

  The girl scanned the room, her brows furrowing, and she finally turned, her eyes landing on Sarai.

  “Oh! There you are!” she said brightly. “Good morning!” She extended a hand. “I’m Agnes.”

  “Sarai,” Sarai said darkly.

  The girl’s smile faded, but only slightly.

  “This is Payl.” She stepped to the side to reveal a very small, waifish girl with large, thick glasses. She wore a shapeless white dress, and her long white hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was currently holding one of the threads trailing down out of Agnes’ hair, and she immediately stepped back behind her and out of sight.

  “Hi,” Sarai said. There was no answer from the tiny girl, but Agnes’ smile widened.

  “Finn sent us. To take you to your first class.”

  “Great.” Sarai moved back into the room, keeping one eye on the two girls. “I’ll get dressed.”

  Agnes’ eyes went to Sarai’s damp bag slumped on the rug.

  “Is that all you came with?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oooh, you should let me make you something, then. I’ve been working on new kinds of fabrics.”

  Sarai glanced again at the body suit. Agnes grinned and twirled.

  “Isn’t it great? I mean, I’ll make you something more normal, if you want. But look at this.” She pinched a bit of the material, pulled it away from her thigh, and let it snap back into place. “So stretchy. The key is, you make the thread in little bouncy spirals, like springs, and they pull back into one another when you let go.”

  Sarai looked a little closer. Maybe not bad for climbing. Then she imagined Jeremy seeing her in something like that. It was basically like you were naked, only a different color. She blushed.

  Agnes caught the expression. “We’ll give you a second to change.” She took Payl’s hand and pulled her out of the room, slamming the door behind them.

  Sarai quickly tugged on a clean dark tunic, readjusted her necklaces, strapped on two more blades, and went out to join them.

  Payl immediately moved around to the far side of Agnes so that Sarai couldn’t see her.

  “So…where’s the class?” Sarai asked.

  Agnes tossed her hair. “Oh, we’re not going there.” She grinned, and Sarai’s eyebrows lifted.

  “Come on,” Agnes said, starting off down the hall, body suit moving silently with her, Payl keeping pace like a bright white shadow.

  Sarai felt a surprising stab of envy for the way the suit moved with her. No way. No. I could never wear that. She looked down at her own dark clothing and noticed her pant leg was fluttering weirdly. She frowned, bent down, and smoothed it flat with the palm of her hand. It lay still for a few seconds, then began fluttering again. That’s weird.

  “So, where are you from?” Agnes asked brightly.

  Not the interrogation stage already. What happened to politely leaving people alone? “Westwend.”

  “I’m from way up in the Iron Mountains. Payl here’s from Montvale, of course.”

  Of course? Why of course?

  Agnes glanced at her. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Were you a mage for years before coming here? Did people know?”

  Sarai kept her face expressionless. “No one knew.” Stick to the truth, and as little of it as possible.

  “Did they find out? Is that why you’re here?”

  “No.”

  Agnes was silent for several seconds, but when Sarai didn’t elaborate, she stopped her questioning.

  They went up a flight of stone stairs and through a door, breaking out into the sunlit garden. Everything was still wet from the rain the night before, and Sarai squinted in the bright, sparkling light.

  “This way,” Agnes said, moving into the garden. “Like I said, I’m from the Iron Mountains. They hate magic there, and I mean hate it. Like regular mage burnings. It was horrible. When I found out I was one, I tried to run. They found out, tried to kill me, but I escaped.” Her voice hardened. “Then I got here, and I was so excited. A place to be accepted, to be a mage. It was great. For like a day.” She rolled her eyes. “Then I go to my first class, and it’s like, oh let’s sit around and braid each other’s hair and make friendship bracelets and knit.” She glanced at Sarai again. “I know you don’t want to use your magic, Finn told us. And I get it. Half of us won’t for at least a month when we get here.”

  I’ll be gone long before then.

  “Everyone thinks thread mages are useless. That we just sit around and make like, tapestries and stuff.” She shook her head. “That was the worst. I’m finally like, yay I can use all these magic powers, but everyone else is like ‘oh, you’re a thread mage?’” She grimaced. “And they’re all like, lighting things on fire and making hats of precious gemstones and sitting in their ice palaces and growing crops and talking to animals, and I’m like, great, turns out I’m the most pointless type of mage, you know?”

  Sarai nodded vaguely. At least she was talking now and not interrogating.

  “Anyway, I’m not going to let you have that same experience.” Her face was set, her jaw jutting in determination. “We’re not pointless, and we’re not here to make clothes.” She said the word with a great deal of bitterness, but then her whole demeanor shifted. “Not that clothes aren’t fun,” she said brightly, twirling, her thread-filled hair whirling out around her. Payl tensed and moved away.

  “Sorry, Payl, it’s OK,” Agnes said, taking the girl’s hand.

  They were making their way up the stairs to the battlements now. Far below, great towering trees stretched out, the canopy of the forest like a draped, green skirt of the Table.

  “Anyway,” Agnes said. “Thread mages aren’t pointless. And we’re not here to knit a bunch of stupid tapestries.” She placed her hands on the stone wall and looked out.

  She glanced at Sarai. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s fine. You don’t have to. And you don’t have to do magic. There’s plenty of us that don’t. But… look, most people are pretty nice here. Even despite the stupid thread mage thing. Like, that’s super annoying. But aside from that everyone’s really nice. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. A lot of us have done really bad things.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “And not even always on accident, either.” She lifted her eyebrows and nodded, glancing at Payl, who was picking at a bit of lichen on the battlements. “I’ll stop asking you all these questions. You clearly don’t want to talk. But seriously, we’re nice.” She plastered on a large, fake smile, then dropped it. Sarai bit back a laugh, in spite of herself, but her smile quickly faded as she remembered why she was here.

  I’m here to assassinate your head teacher. I’m not a mage, I’m not one of you.

  Agnes let out a quick sigh. “OK, sorry, end of advice giving. I hate it when people give me advice, don’t you?”

  Sarai nodded before thinking about it, and Agnes laughed.

  “OK. Time for fun stuff then.”

  She turned back to the battlements, clenched her fists, pushed them together, and drew them apart. A thick rope ap
peared, lengths and lengths of it spiraling out of her hands.

  Now that would be useful.

  Agnes pulled an iron grappling hook out of a bag at her side and tied it to one end. “I could do this without the hook, but it definitely makes it easier. Earth mages won’t stop giving me crap about it, though.”

  She whirled the hook around her head and launched it out into the forest, where it snagged on the branch of a tree twenty feet out and about ten feet below the level of the Table. Wrinkling her nose in concentration, she stared at the hook. Sarai followed her gaze and saw extra threads weaving their way around it, securing it. Agnes handed the loose end of the rope to Payl, who affixed a thin thread to it and handed it back, paying out more thread as she did.

  Agnes handed the end of the rope to Sarai and gestured to the edge.

  “Want to go first?”

  Interesting way to try to kill me.

  “Or I can. We do this all the time. Right, Payl?”

  The girl nodded, her gaze fixed straight ahead.

  Sarai didn’t have time to respond before Agnes shrugged, grabbed the end of the rope, and stepped off the battlements. Sarai leaned over the edge, her jaw dropping as she watched the girl rapidly picking up speed, her skintight suit whizzing through the air, a blur of bright pink.

  Whoa.

  She reached the bottom of her arc, hit the treeline, and disappeared into the undergrowth. A minute later, the line went slack, and Payl began, without speaking, to pull on the small thread. Hand over hand, she pulled the rope back in, and Sarai helped her heave it up over the edge.

  Are you seriously doing this? Jeremy asked. You’re going to die, you know that, right? She thinks you’re a mage.

  Sarai shook her head. A thread mage. She thinks I’m a thread mage who doesn’t use my powers. A thread mage’d die just as easily as anyone else. Sarai glanced down at the ground. What was that, a hundred feet down? Yep, no way I’m passing this up.

  She took the rope from Payl, who started to say something, but Sarai gripped it tightly, wrapped her legs around it, and stepped off the edge.

  Holy—Her stomach dropped out from inside her, her throat closing as she plummeted straight for the ground. She wasn’t sure if she was screaming or laughing. Possibly both.

  She plummeted for what fell like forever. Just when she thought she might go crazy, or that she had gone crazy, the rope went taut. It jerked hard and was nearly pulled out of her hands. She slipped almost a foot down, then got her grip back, her palms on fire, and pulled into a smooth swing. The wind blasted her, bringing tears to her eyes as she swept down down down, and then back up, into the darkness of the forest, and up another fifty feet.

  Agnes was standing on a large, smooth branch, and she grabbed her, pulling her up and holding her steady until she got her feet under her.

  My face feels weird. She realized she was grinning, tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes and running down her cheeks.

  “Whoa.” She laughed, gasping. She looked at Agnes, who had a superior, knowing sort of grin on her face.

  “Awesome, right?”

  “Uh, yeah.” She took a deep breath, trying to tighten her face, but the smile kept coming back.

  Moments later, Payl appeared, swinging silently onto the branch with them. She tied the rope to a hook.

  “All right, come on,” Agnes said. She grabbed the end of another rope that Sarai hadn’t noticed before, and stepped off the branch, swinging off into the forest.

  They followed a series of small swings deep into the forest, until they came to a rope ladder that led up to a sort of platform made of netting.

  “Welcome to our secret lair,” Agnes said, heaving herself up onto it and giving a few bounces.

  Payl went to a corner, where a large, poofy chair was tied to the webbing. She settled into it, sinking out of sight.

  You just met me and you’re taking me to your secret lair?

  Agnes gestured to the surrounding trees. The branches were rubbed smooth, bits of ropes dangled everywhere.

  “I’m working on being able to throw rope and tie it at the same time, while falling. I’m not quite there, but close. Those wind mages think they’re so great, flying all over the place. Well, we can too.”

  Sarai examined the setup. Pretty cool, actually. For a brief moment, she wished that she were in fact just a thread mage who refused to do magic.

  Focus, Sarai. Remember what you’re here for.

  “So, what can you tell me about… how all this works?” she asked. I don’t even know enough to ask a good question. And I’ve got two weeks to learn enough to kill this guy.

  Agnes brightened. “That’s more like it. What do you want to know?”

  Sarai bounced thoughtfully on the netting. “Where does magic come from?”

  Agnes twirled some rope and lobbed it towards a nearby tree branch. It wrapped partway around and then fell.

  She shrugged. “It was always here. Originally it was this spirit energy inside everything. Then Morthil, half human-half ael, split magic into six pieces so that it was something humans could work with.”

  Sarai cocked an eyebrow. “Generous of him,” she said drily.

  “Oh no,” Agnes said, sending another rope flying. “No, he only did that so he could enslave us, suck the power out of us, make himself stronger.”

  There it is.

  “How long does magic last?” Maybe she could find the person or thing who created the oath stone. Get to them, and maybe the magic would stop working.

  “Depends. Strong magic, or things made accidentally, with shadow, those can last practically indefinitely.”

  “Even once the mage has died?”

  Agnes glanced at her. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  Agnes looked like she didn’t quite believe her but had decided not to press the issue.

  “Anything that gets rid of magic?”

  “Copper.”

  “Why?”

  Agnes shrugged again. “No idea. It just does. Never let them get copper manacles on you.” Her face went tense for a second, but she shook it off.

  “So… copper anywhere near a mage and they stop being able to use their powers?”

  Now Agnes turned and gave her a long look. “You have an enemy or something?”

  “No, just…”

  “Also, you keep saying ‘they’ to refer to mages.”

  Shit.

  Subterfuge is clearly not your strong suit, Jeremy said, and she could hear the laughter in his voice.

  Maybe not, but I have what I need. Chop him up, put the pieces in different copper boxes. I’ll have to do some research, maybe make some tests, but it’s a start.

  “It’s OK,” Agnes went on. “I get it. But… you should be careful.”

  Sarai tried to keep her face expressionless as she waited for Agnes to explain what it was that she understood.

  “If you don’t use your magic, it can still… well, I mentioned the shadow. Do you know anything about it?”

  Sarai shook her head.

  “It’s the undercurrent of all the other types of magic. It… connects them, and it’s connected to the unconscious of every mage. So, be careful. Even if you don’t choose to use magic, if you’re not aware of it, your shadow will anyway.”

  Oh. Sarai nearly let out a sigh of relief. She still thinks I’m a mage in denial.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Agnes gave her a long look, and Sarai wondered how long she was going to be able to keep this up.

  7

  Illiam

  The morning of his sixteenth birthday, Illiam woke up with the sure and certain knowledge that some magical destiny had opened up inside of him. A magical path that only he could walk. He rolled over in his bed, staring at his hands, willing something to happen. He waited for the spark of flame, or a gush of water, or a swirling current of air, but nothing came. It didn’t matter. He knew there was something. Something important and irrevocable
.

  He threw back his covers and slipped out his bedroom window into the cold air of dawn. He took the trail to the outskirts of town, across the alpine meadows heavy with dew, to the small encampment by the river.

  Trash littered the path down the embankment, but Illiam ignored it, his eyes focused on the sagging burlap tent pitched next to the stream.

  “Um, excuse me? Hello?” Illiam called out, clasping his hands behind his back and shifting from foot to foot.

  After several long seconds, a disgruntled face poked out. An older woman with tangled grey hair and a heavily lined face frowned at him.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “Then don’t.”

  She pulled her head back inside. Illiam bounced on the balls of his feet for a few seconds, glancing around.

  I should come back later. I should let her sleep. He chewed his lip. He’d been waiting his entire life for this moment, and now he needed to know. He picked at his homespun tunic, then clasped his hands behind his back again. He looked back up the trail, then back at the tent. Finally, he sat on the ground, trying to breathe very quietly.

  “I can hear you out there.”

  Illiam didn’t move. It was probably a ploy.

  “Also, I can hear you not leaving, you know.”

  Illiam considered attempting to fake the sound of leaving footsteps.

  The head poked out again.

  “Whatever you want, I’m charging you triple for bothering me.”

  “Oh,” Illiam said straightening. “I don’t want to buy anything, I just have some questions to ask—”

  She glared at him. The ground beneath him turned to ice and began to lift.

  “Oh, whoa, wha—” He scrambled onto his hands and knees, feeling himself slipping sideways towards the river. He grasped at the ice, but it was slick and wet, and he shot off the side. For a moment he flew through the air, saw the rushing water coming up to meet him, then with a splash he cannonballed into the icy water. The cold drove all thought from his mind. He flailed against the freezing current, the water dragging at his heavy clothes.