Adlai stumbled and dropped the wooden box; it clattered to the tiled floor and pieces of gold spilled out.
“How could you do that?” Adlai looked around her uncle’s living room, blinking but not really believing she was there. He’d taken her from the market. Had Penna still been watching them? How would she explain vanishing like that? “I never told my friend about my shadow!”
Her uncle regarded her. “It was my shadow that was seen. I told you I make false trails for trappers. My description is known to them. If anyone from the market says what they’ve seen, it will result in trappers combing the area for our hideout. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
“Nothing more?” She felt sick. If trappers thought there were shadow casters to hunt in Libra they would find . . .
Erikys. Where was he now? They had to go back; she couldn’t be here.
Her shadow slipped out, feeling over the scattered treasures, all she had left of her father.
But they were hers. She didn’t need to steal them. What she needed was her shadow to take her back to the market.
She closed her eyes and listened for the voice, but it wasn’t there. She couldn’t sense Manni and her shadow felt weak in comparison.
Yet she had to do it. Adlai forced the image of the desert market into her mind, bare of tents, with the city walls in sight and a crowd of people following the path toward them. She needed to be one of that crowd.
Heat rushed over her skin and she opened her eyes, thinking for a moment that she had done it.
There were faint wisps of smoke drifting from her shadow. So very faint and gone in the next moment.
No.
“Going to Libra wasn’t just reckless, Adlai, it was stupid,” her uncle said. “And stupidity is a weakness that no amount of power can save you from.”
Her hands shook as she called her shadow back. Useless, unreliable thing that it was. It couldn’t even take her out of this room, out of this house that was her uncles and not hers. Never hers.
* * *
She waited for her uncle to go to bed. The rooms were dark with dim moonlight slipping in through the windows, and when she stayed very still outside his door, she could hear his steady breathing.
He’d found her in the market. He’d known where she’d gone and with whom. The only way that was possible was if his shadow was like hers and the god of Death had whispered to him as he whispered to her.
But her uncle wouldn’t tell her this. Just as she hadn’t told him that she heard Manni as well. They didn’t trust each other. And they never would, not after today. Not only had her uncle revealed their shadow powers to Penna, but he’d flat out refused to listen to her about Erikys. He wouldn’t help her, not freely, but maybe if she could understand what he was up to, she’d have some leverage over him.
She came to the locked door. Her body was heavy with tiredness, but Erikys could be hurt or worse right now. She couldn’t be weak, and she couldn’t waste another moment.
Adlai bent down. Using a couple of hairpins, she began fiddling with the door’s lock. She hadn’t picked a lock in a long while. Several minutes passed, each one swollen with her frustrated breaths and clumsier fingers. She couldn’t get the concentration she needed. A hairpin slipped from her grip and dropped to the floor. She picked it up again and forced her breathing to calm. It helped when she stopped trying to listen for her uncle and focused instead on the little clicks from the keyhole and the scratching of her pins as she wiggled them just so.
Finally, the lock gave way. She grabbed the handle and pushed it open.
* * *
Adlai expected the room to be dark but it wasn’t, not entirely. Blue, green, and yellow light came from tall crystals that had been smoothed out and placed in the sconces usually fit for torches. The light they cast softened the space, giving the blackness the feel of a warm night’s sky. There were even twinkling stars. Adlai had come into the room to see what secrets her uncle had, but instead found her eyes drawn to the ceiling, where hundreds of small glass balls hung and bounced more light around the room. It was indoor starlight.
Whatever this room was, it was a beautiful space. A private space. Her stomach twisted at the thought that she was about to see something she would regret. She took a step back, hesitating, and then something made her freeze in place. An awareness of suddenly not being alone.
Her uncle was awake, was her immediate thought. And yet it wasn’t a sound that had alerted her. The room was perfectly still and silent, only she wasn’t alone.
She turned to a large armchair positioned near the window. The curtains were drawn and the armchair engulfed the figure so it wasn’t at all obvious that anyone was sitting there. Only a quick glance of light had shown Adlai the shape of a person. A tingling sensation ran down her neck like cold sweat.
She swallowed and stepped closer. There was no point in hiding—this person, whoever they were, had surely noticed her. They had probably heard her fiddling with the lock and seen her the moment she came inside.
But the figure didn’t move.
“H-hello?”
No answer.
Adlai’s heart raced with a sudden feeling of dread. She wished the light was brighter, or that she’d chosen her sneaking for daytime, when everything would have been clearer.
A few feet away the crystal light caught on hair, turning it a shocking blue. The person was a woman. Familiar, even. Then Adlai saw that the blue wasn’t a trick of the light, it was the woman’s hair color. She recognized the sharp profile of the woman’s face—regal and serene. It was Yaxine. Yaxine was slumped in the armchair and looking as though she was merely sleeping.
Only Adlai knew she was dead.
Her uncle had been keeping his dead wife’s body in the room next to his.
A wave of nausea hit her and she turned away from that far too peaceful face. She gagged, wanting to throw up, but something was missing. Yaxine, she knew, had been dead for some time, and yet her corpse . . .
Although Adlai was sick to her stomach there wasn’t a decaying-corpse smell to trigger her. She forced herself to look again—maybe it wasn’t Yaxine, or maybe she wasn’t dead anymore and really was sleeping. Adlai had come back from the dead; perhaps Yaxine had too.
She touched one of the woman’s hands, noticing then that she was resting them over something soft in her lap. Her skin was cold and didn’t respond. Adlai reached up and held shaking fingers to the woman’s face: she wasn’t breathing.
It was her. It was Yaxine, and she was dead.
She should go. Adlai should leave her uncle’s place and go somewhere safe. Yaxine had been wrong to tell her to come here, but why, why had she lied?
She stood in the room for too long, questions spilling over her as interchangeable as the colored light. Why was her uncle keeping his wife in here? Why did she look like she’d died only moments ago? Was she frozen somehow? Between life and death? Was this how her parents would be?
She didn’t hear her uncle get out of bed. She only heard him as he entered the hallway, and by then it was too late. He’d seen the door open, and then her standing inside.
Another question rolled over her as she met her uncle’s eyes . . .
If trappers didn’t take the body, how did his wife really die?
* * *
Luth had been mad at her before—furious, even. But now he wore a different expression. Shock passed over his face fleetingly and then settled on something colder. Fear. He walked the length of the hallway without meeting her gaze, and when he came into the room, he looked around it as though checking that everything was just where it should be.
He checked his dead wife last. His breathing calmed as his gaze settled on her, the panic and shock eased from his expression as if she’d woken up and smiled at him, telling him that all was well.
He was still looking at her lifeless face when he addressed Adlai.
“This room, I believe, was locked.”
“You’re going to lecture me on invading your privacy when your wife’s corpse is sitting there?” His voice might be calm but hers wasn’t; she could hear the tremble of it and wished she could make it something fierce, something to cover up the fear she had standing in this eerily lit room.
“It isn’t just my privacy you’ve invaded. I wouldn’t mind it so much if it was just mine,” he said, and now he did look at Adlai. The green crystal light flickered over his face and turned it deathly pale. She looked away quickly, hating herself for her cowardice.
She was afraid of her uncle, she realized. She thought she might have been afraid of him since the first moment she’d met him. Power radiated off him.
“Did you come in here because I called you weak? Stupid, even? Was it spite for that?” He didn’t wait for her response, and she couldn’t have answered him if she’d tried. Her throat was tight and trapped in all her words.
Luth closed the distance between them, and now there was no light on his face. Just darkness. “You thought to get back at me, did you? I must be a terrible disappointment to you, Adlai, for you to want to hurt me like this.”
Hurt him? Adlai shook her head. “You pretend as though family is so important to you, but you’re a liar. Trappers didn’t murder your wife as you say. You killed her. You’re not some victim.” A wild idea came to her. “Who else have you killed and blamed on Arbil? Did my mother really die by their hands? Did my father?”
“Enough!” Luth’s voice rose over hers. “Do you hear yourself, child?”
She flinched as he moved a hand up, but he covered his face with it and backed away from her. “I suppose I killed you in the market as well?” His breath shuddered out. “This is what you think of me? I should have spent more time with you. Yaxine told me to.”
Adlai had plenty more to say but he held up his hand again. “I didn’t kill my wife.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Will you believe your eyes? Look at this room. Look at her!” His voice shook. “She’s peaceful. She’s . . . she’s waiting.”
It was the crack in his voice that made Adlai hesitate. She did as he asked and looked again at Yaxine.
She was peaceful, not like a person who’d just discovered her husband was about to kill her. And then she spotted something else. She’d thought Yaxine’s hands held a pillow, but now she saw it was actually a toy. A soft gray rabbit with floppy ears.
Adlai took in the rest of the room, focusing on what the light glided past. There, against the wall and illuminated by the glow of the yellow crystal, she saw the unmistakable silhouette of a crib. There was other furniture as well, all small and child-sized. A box for toys, a little wardrobe . . . the rug at her feet was shaped as a cloud.
It was a nursery. When she realized that, she felt sick again. She turned back to her uncle, the fear gone and a growing sadness filling its place.
“What do you mean, she’s waiting?”
Luth stared around the room with dead eyes. He didn’t touch anything and his voice was weary when he spoke.
“Yax was pregnant when the trappers came.” He swallowed. “We were living in an even smaller community back then on the outskirts of Gem. Less than a dozen families, and we were careful, but still they found us.” He sighed. “Some of us stayed to fight them off. I begged Yaxine to go. Your father had already left with you. All the children were gone. She had to think of herself and our . . . our baby. But she wouldn’t leave without me.
“I should have just gone with her. Leena was fighting. Killing. She was so strong. We were outnumbered five to one and I remember seeing her cornered by eight of them and yet she seemed to be winning, she seemed to be in complete control of her power.
“Until she wasn’t.” He stopped. His breathing had become haggard. For a moment he looked entirely different. The cool, calm mask she was used to seeing was gone. Anger lit his face and warped his features. “Leena’s shadow reached out and pulled. We all felt it. Everyone that had stayed behind to fight the trappers—she pulled on our shadows, and she took them. I saw Yaxine’s ripped from her, while my sister’s shadow grew larger and larger. Just holding on to my own shadow took all of my effort. I could only watch as hers weaved through our enemies and our friends, making no distinction between them.”
For a long moment there was silence. Adlai felt as though she was standing in a grave she wanted desperately to climb out of, but she couldn’t leave. The eerie light flickered over the three of them.
Then she found her voice. “My mother killed Yaxine?”
It couldn’t be true. Adlai had met Yaxine. She hadn’t seemed angry when she’d spoken of her mother.
“Leena didn’t mean to do it,” he said, soft as a whisper. “I know that. She lost control.” His voice hardened: “But when I came to my senses, I didn’t hesitate. I took Yaxine in my shadow and I left my sister to the trappers that remained. How they overpowered her, I don’t know. Perhaps she was weakened by the effort. Or perhaps she realized what she’d done and let them take her.”
Adlai shuddered. “My father, did he know what she did?”
He looked at Adlai. “It devastated him the most. I suppose I could have lied and told everyone that it was Arbil. That it was trappers who killed our people and stole our shadows. In a way it was. But I wasn’t nearly so good at lying back then. When I came to this island I was grieving for my wife, my child, and my sister. For all the other lives we lost too.” Luth leaned back, bathed in the glassy light from above. He seemed a million years old. So tired of the weight on his shoulders. “It feels like the grieving never ends. We’re always losing someone.”
Adlai had known grief, but watching her uncle she wondered what it would feel like to be responsible for so many lives. To be targeted over and over again for just existing.
“Did my father really think I’d be safer in Libra?” she asked.
“He feared what your shadow might become. I think he hoped keeping you away from other shadow casters could better help you tame it. The truth is that although we argued, I was relieved when he left with you. It was one less responsibility. You see, it’s my job to protect the living and bring back the dead. Everyone in Arbil is waiting on me to find a miracle.”
Her uncle stared down at Yaxine. His voice turned quiet. “I go to her sometimes. To the shadow world. I tell her I’ll get her shadow back. I promise her the life we had before will come again. But I know our child is dead, and to go to Arbil will only lead to more death.”