Cavan walks carefully around the Pollaxes’ property, the first time he’s left the house alone. The sun is bright, which makes it easier, but he’s still hesitant. He hates his lack of confidence, the strangeness of it all.
Though he has to admit it’s pretty. He’s at the edge of the Pollaxes’ orchard, and the colors are brighter than in Zyss, the shadows softer. It smells prettier, sounds prettier, even feels prettier, as though beauty is a blanket wrapped around his skin.
It isn’t home, though.
He sweeps this thought aside, squinting at the shadow ahead. A whirling purple shadow with what appears to be a sword.
It pauses mid-parry. “Aren’t you the Pollaxes’ foster? How do you move around so well?”
The voice is a little deep for a girl’s, but melodious like some kind of horn. Cavan has been introduced to many people over the past four days, but he’s sure he’s never been introduced to this voice.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“Tirene. I live on the next estate. Answer my question.”
Lady Pollax has bragged that the king’s counsellor is their neighbor. If Tirene is his daughter, it explains why she knows about him. “I can see a little,” he says, deciding not to mention how many times he’s stumbled in the past few days. “What are you doing with that sword?”
“Practicing,” she says like he’s a dunce. “I’ll be seventeen soon. They’re letting girls into the Border Guard now, did you know?”
Father had spoken of it once, a diatribe about the downfall of the kingdom. “I heard,” he says.
“I think I’ll get in. I practice here every day.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” he says, backing away.
“You can stay if you want.” She goes back to parrying and thrusting. “There’s a bench in front of you.”
He only sees it because she mentions it. He hesitates, and then sits, watching her. She’s fast. Her form is unconventional, too many unnecessary flourishes and swoops, but the more he watches, the more he realizes this will make her a formidable opponent. She’s unpredictable, a lightning bolt with a sword. He gets caught up in watching her swooping shadow, pretending he’s her opponent and planning his next move.
She pauses again mid-swing, and he can hear the scowl in her voice. “Who are you?”
A voice from behind Cavan says, “Begging your pardon. The Pollaxes’ tutor, m’lady.”
Cavan has met the Pollaxes’ tutor, an older man with a reedy voice. The voice behind him now is deep and young. “You’re not the tutor,” he says, turning.
“I’m his son, Enver. I help tutor the daughters. You’re the foster, aren’t you?”
Cavan nods while Tirene says, “What are you doing here?”
“Just looking for a pleasant spot to read, m’lady.”
“Never mind ‘m’lady.’ It’s Tirene. What book is that?”
“A story about the Battle of Jullenna.”
“Well, go on and read it,” she says, flopping to the ground in a way Cavan finds amusing compared to her graceful swordsmanship.
“Aloud?” Enver asks.
“Read,” Tirene commands, like she’s the queen.
Enver has a pleasant voice, and it brings just the right excitement to the story. Cavan listens to the tale of a young soldier proving himself in battle, and he watches Tirene fidget in the grass as though she’s fighting the battle herself.
When Enver finishes, Tirene springs up again. “You have any more stories like that?”
“The whole book is tales from the war.”
“Read another,” Tirene says and gets up, fighting the air again.
The next story is about a foster who chooses to fight alongside the son of his foster family. Cavan does not think he will ever want to do anything with the young Pollax boys, who spent their first meeting waving their fists toward his face in an attempt to see how blind he was while their mother silently attempted to stop them.
“I’ve never understood fostering,” Enver says when the story ends. “I mean, I see the general idea—trading children to foster peace amongst the provinces—but it seems like there should be an easier way. One that doesn’t involve sending your children to be raised by strangers. The Pollaxes’ second son got fostered out at five!”
Cavan doesn’t attempt to explain. How noble families are willing to sacrifice a son or two if it means an improvement in fortune, an alliance through marriage down the road, or simply a place to dump an unwanted child. Until recently, he hadn’t understood it himself. In truth he still doesn’t, though he knows all about it now. It’s not something he wants to talk about.
So he says, “It’s just the way of things,” and leaves it at that.
They are a trio after that, gathering each day in the late afternoon at the edge of the orchard, Tirene with her
sword, Enver with a book, Cavan just himself. Useless. Worthless.
Still, it’s his favorite part of the day. Most of Enver’s stories are about war and battles, and their predictability is soothing. The young soldier triumphs and is rewarded, or the old one fights his last battle bravely, sacrificing himself for comrades or kingdom.
One day, however, Enver reads a story of a young soldier who, faced with impossible odds and a terrible wound, quietly travels to another realm, one full of inhabitants who couldn’t quite find their way in the kingdom. It is called the Shadowland, and Cavan perks his ears because isn’t that where he lives, surrounded by shadows?
It ends with the young man uncertain whether he’ll return to his kingdom now that he is healed. Tirene puts her sword down and complains, “I don’t understand. Was he dead?”
“Maybe,” Enver says.
Cavan thinks the Shadowland is not death but keeps his mouth shut, because who is he to say?
“It’s too confusing,” Tirene says.
Now Cavan speaks. “Every story can’t be heroic sacrifices or miraculous wins. You know battle is probably nothing like the stories, right?”
Enver laughs. “I know the difference between stories and reality, I just prefer the former.”
So does Cavan, frankly, but he can’t imagine a story that he will ever be the hero of.
When Enver speaks again, his tone is grave. “My whole life hasn’t been books and stories. I’ve only been a tutor this past year.”
“And before that?” Cavan finally asks, because Enver’s pause is begging him to.
“I was training to be a healer at the Restorative Core. It was a great honor. My father arranged it.”
“But it wasn’t what you wanted?” Cavan asks. Tirene has gone back to fighting, but Cavan knows she’s listening, the same way she always does when Enver tells a story.
“Oh, it was. Very much. I loved it at first. The learning. The knowledge that I would be someone who helped ….”
This time Cavan lets the silence stretch. Enver will go on when he’s ready.
“After two years is when they let you see … the Core’s true nature. The basement cells, where they do their most noble work.”
Cavan thinks he can see the word “noble” clawing through the shadows, red and prickly.
“They told us it was for the greater good. That we could find cures so others wouldn’t suffer.”
Cavan knows they take dead bodies to the Restorative Core. Noblemen are buried; everyone else is studied. Dissected. Disposed of. “The corpses upset you?”
Enver gives a rattling laugh. “No. The living bodies upset me.”
“The … living?”
“They kept … afflicted people in the cells. All sorts. Fever addled, demented, crippled. They’d been assigned there, told there might be cures. There weren’t cures. They were specimens. We prodded and cut and dosed, not to cure them but to satisfy our curiosity. Eventually, they died. Eventually, we killed them.”
Enver’s words are shadow arms threatening to choke him. Cavan can picture it: the dank cells, the afflicted being torn apart, begging for mercy.
“I left,” Enver says, and he sounds like he’s choking, too. “I couldn’t … do that. The master healers and my father were angry. They said I showed such promise.” He laughs that rattling laugh again. “What does that say about me, showing promise for that?”
“It doesn’t say anything about you,” Cavan says. “It says something about them.”
“Maybe,” says Enver doubtfully. “But anyhow, being a soldier can’t be as bad as being an apprentice healer. If I kill as a soldier, leastwise it’s a fair fight.”
Cavan nods because he knows Enver needs him to.
Tirene has been fighting with the ferocity of a storm, and now she stops, pointing her sword at Enver. “You’re always reading all those stories, but have you ever held a sword?”
Cavan knows that not acknowledging Enver’s story is Tirene’s way of being kind. He hopes Enver knows that, too.
“I’ve held a sword,” Enver answers too quickly.
“Have you ever fought with a sword?”
Silence this time.
“Would you like to learn?” she asks with a little girl’s excitement.
Enver goes to stand beside her. Cavan has never realized how tall Enver is, a rangy shadow of gangling limbs. Or maybe it’s just that Tirene is small, though she never seems it. Even now, dwarfed by Enver, she doesn’t seem it.
Tirene gives Enver a sword and stands behind him, positioning his hands and feet in a way that makes Cavan think of Father. He shuts his eyes against the memory, but that only makes it worse. He can always see more clearly with his eyes closed.
Father gave him his first toy sword when he was Aed’s age, but he didn’t teach him to use it until after the fever, until after the world was reduced to shadows.
Swordplay was all shadows. The most graceful of shadows. Father moved first for him, then with him in a way that was both comforting and clumsy.
He realized later that Father never really expected him to learn, not properly. Then one morning Father found him parrying with a sapling in the yard, and called, “Let me give you some real competition, son,” in a voice that Cavan still clutched in his memory because there was such pride in it.
He was no longer an extension of Father after that. They moved from wooden swords to metal, the blades dulled so they wouldn’t cause any real harm though there were bruises given on both sides.
Everyone who saw him fight marveled. He knew this was mostly due to his infirmity, but he also knew he had skill. Father said the cardinal rule of swordsmanship was caution, but Cavan disagreed. It was never worrying about anything but your next move.
He had limits, of course. He needed a clear day and an opponent in vibrant clothing. In an actual battle he’d be rubbish—too many distractions, too many competing shadows—so his skill had no practical purpose. He was just a nearly blind boy with a blunted sword.
But when he parried with Father, he didn’t have to think about that. He could just fight.
He opens his eyes when Tirene starts complaining that Enver isn’t moving correctly.
“I’m doing what you told me!” Enver protests, and Cavan agrees with them both. Enver is following Tirene’s lead, but he looks all wrong.
“You’re trying to make him move like you, but he’s bigger than you,” Cavan says. “You have to teach him to react his own way.”
“What do you know?” Tirene says, though not unkindly.
Cavan gets up. “Give me your sword and watch,” he tells Enver.
Enver obeys, but Tirene protests. “What are you doing?”
“Putting on a demonstration,” he says, getting a feel for the sword and then checking that the tip is blunt enough not to hurt Tirene if he gets wild. Though he guesses Tirene can more than hold her own. “Shall we spar?”
“You’re jesting!”
“I’m not half bad,” he says, though he’s not sure if that’s true compared to her. He wants badly to find out. “And I think Enver needs to see how to defend, rather than be told.”
The doubt rolls off Tirene in sickly yellow waves, but she raises her sword. “If you’re certain.”
“Certain,” he says, touching his blade to hers, and then they’re fighting. Or rather, he’s fighting; Tirene is barely trying.
He knocks the sword out of her shadowy arm, and she splutters as Enver chuckles. “Full on, or don’t bother,” Cavan chides, and he can feel the air around her change, doubt and hesitation replaced by competitiveness.
They go at it. Tirene is still holding back a little, but so is he; they don’t want to overwhelm Enver. Nevertheless, it’s a battle, both of them exerting, flying about, the swords extensions of themselves.
All the afternoons of watching Tirene practice are what save him. She is talented and unpredictable, but he knows her, knows her flairs and feints as she makes them, can mirror them back and come up with a few of his own.
He’s not sure how long they battle, a dance of limbs and metal, until Tirene catches him on the neck and he falls, the wind knocked out of him.
“I’m sorry!” Tirene says, a blur hovering above him.
His neck smarts but it’s nothing compared to the joy of these past minutes. “I’m fine.”
She helps him to his feet, and he grins as he gropes for his sword. “Again?” he asks her. “Or is it Enver’s turn?”
“It is definitely not Enver’s turn,” Enver says. “Enver is full of awe for both of you, but no closer to actually understanding how to do that.”
“Guess we’ll have to slow down,” Cavan says, still smiling.
Tirene hasn’t raised her sword. “You’re not actually blind, are you?”
Cavan laughs. “I can’t tell you a thing about your appearance except that you’re wearing red.”
“Then how can you fight like that?”
“Instinct. Practice. Shadows. Shall we get on with our demonstration?”
They go through their moves at half speed, pausing to explain to Enver and answer his questions. The bruise on Cavan’s neck pulses, and he enjoys how alive it makes him feel.
Eventually he gives Enver back the sword, and allows himself to feel a little pride when Enver manages to parry against Tirene. At the end of the lesson, Cavan and Tirene spar again, and he doesn’t even care that he loses.
“I don’t think I know you at all,” Tirene says afterwards.
He doesn’t think he knows himself, either, and it is a surprisingly nice feeling.
Cavan loses track of how long he’s been in Solestair, as if the days themselves are shadows. He accompanies Enver to his classroom with the Pollax girls during the day and helps when he can, listening to and correcting the girls’ recitations.
Late afternoons are for the orchard and Tirene. Enver is improving in his swordsmanship, and he and Tirene discuss the future in bright tones. Enver will receive his army assignment come spring, and Tirene is sure she’ll be appointed to the Border Guard. Cavan will be seventeen by then as well, but he does not join in their conversations. He will not receive an army appointment no matter how many times he bests Enver in the orchard.
In truth Cavan has no idea where he’ll be come spring. Fosterings are supposed to end at seventeen, when the boys are old enough to enter the army. Once upon a time he dreamed of the Zyssian command he would lead. Now the future is as shadowy as everything else in life, except these shadows are denser. Menacing.
He tries not to think of home, but it lurks every time he shuts his eyes. Are his sisters asking about him? Have the little boys forgotten him yet? Likely his parents don’t mention him. He doesn’t blame any of them, though: not Father for arranging his exile or Mam for allowing it. Not Aed, future Lord of Zyss, or the twins, whose arrival sealed his fate; they are Father’s insurance should anything befall Aed.
He wished he hadn’t eavesdropped. He can still hear their voices in his head, much as he wants to forget. Father telling Mam about Cavan’s fostering. Mam protesting, saying it wasn’t right, Cavan being their firstborn, and Father interrupting.
“Nothing’s ever right, Marrin! It’s not right he got the fever, not right he lost his sight. But it happened, and this must happen, too. How could he ever be Lord of Zyss? The lord has to be someone the whole province can trust above all else, be held equal to the king! Cavan couldn’t even manage to judge a provincial fair let alone lead a regiment into battle.”
Father’s words haunt him now as he watches Tirene thrash Enver amidst both their laughter. They both have exciting futures, and he has a void.
Enver lays his sword down in defeat and calls to Cavan, “Give her some competition!”
So Cavan shuts away the future, picks up the sword, and has at it.
It’s rare for Cavan to go to the orchard without Enver, but as a mild Solestair winter begins to hint at spring, Enver goes home for a few days to see his mam. It is the day before the army assignment letters, and Cavan reaches the orchard to find Tirene pacing.
“Did I ever tell you about my father’s lists?” she asks, and her voice sounds as flighty as her body, as though it may burst. “His endless lists every spring? He made me think they were a game when I was small, let me pick ….”
“Let you pick what?” Cavan asks. He has never heard this particular tone in Tirene’s voice, and it scares him.
“The names!” she says, and something breaks in her voice. “The names of the boys who went to the Northern front. He would give me a list of names, and I would pick all the ugly sounding ones, and he would praise me.”
Her anguish creeps into him, and he tries not to think of the horror of it. “Not your fault,” he says.
“But I had a hand in it. He made me have a hand in it! I killed those boys.”
“You didn’t kill anyone,” he insists, knowing she won’t believe him.
“He’s made his lists again. He doesn’t ask me for help anymore, but I looked anyway.” Her pacing becomes more frenzied. “Everyone thinks it’s the king with all the power. And they don’t mind, because no one questions a king. But really it’s my father. The fosterings, the placements, the arrangements. They all go through him, because the king can’t be bothered. We’re all Father’s puppets, and nobody even realizes.”
“Does it matter if it’s your father or the king?” he asks. “There’s always someone in charge, and it’s never us.”
She whirls about. “How can you just accept that?”
“It’s the way of things,” he says, because it is.
“Enver’s name is on the list for the Northern front.” She hurls the words at him so they blot out the sun.
“Oh,” he says, mouth gaping helplessly.
Her shadow rages around him. “You know he’ll be proud to go. He’ll think he’s the hero of some story.”
Cavan thinks Enver is not that simple, but he remembers Enver’s eagerness to be a soldier because it will be a fair fight. Will his mind change with the odds against him? Likely not. Likely not at all.
“Couldn’t you talk to your father?” he asks, not liking how small his voice sounds.
Tirene laughs a hysterical, humorless laugh. “My father doesn’t listen to me anymore. Two years ago, I begged him not to send our stable boy to the Northern front. He made me deliver the letter with the king’s seal myself. That’s the kind of man my father is.”
He tries to absorb the horror of this, tries to think of some kind of solution. He can’t.
So he asks, “Did you make the Border Guard?”
“Yes.” Her voice is dull.
“Congratulations.”
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” she says.
He wants to tell her it does. It should. But he knows the words will be hollow, so he stays silent.
The next day he and Tirene wait for Enver. Cavan fingers the letter in his own pocket, thick parchment with the King’s raised seal that Lady Pollax read for him this morning in the same sing-song voice her daughters use in lessons. Cavan’s not sure whether Father is behind it, or what role Tirene’s father may have played. Either way, it clearly wasn’t part of the lists Tirene saw.
When Enver comes, his greeting reveals nothing. Tirene has to ask if he’s received his letter.
“To the Northern front, yes,” Enver says calmly, as though he’s been invited to tea.
Tirene explodes. “You can’t seriously be … accepting of this? Enver! Cavan, tell him.”
He doesn’t think he’ll be much help, but he senses Tirene needs him to be. “Are you going?” he asks Enver.
“I’ve been ordered. What else can I do?”
“Not go!” Tirene yells.
“Do you want to go?” Cavan persists.
This time Enver pauses.
“Exactly!” Tirene snaps, jumping into the silence. “You know you don’t want to.”
“I don’t particularly want to die,” says Enver. “But someone has to survive, right?”
“No! You know no one survives the Northern front! The Alwaquims always defend their border ruthlessly, and they win! How many stories have you read about the Northern front! You know!”
“Yet the king keeps sending an army every year. He believes there’s a chance we’ll win.” Enver’s voice is insistent, pleading. Cavan knows he needs his stories, his hope.
“Don’t be stupid,” Tirene says ruthlessly.
When Enver finally speaks, his voice thick. “Going is the honorable thing.”
“Forget honorable! Alive is better than honorable! Of all the idiotic ….” She loses her words.
Cavan tries to find his. “She has a point.”
“I know. I’m not stupid. I … what else can I do? Refuse, and be executed? I might as well die a hero.” He pauses, and when he speaks again Cavan can hear the sad smile in his voice. “After all, my swordsmanship is improving.”
“You’re not even as good as Cavan, and he’s blind!”
“Well,” Enver says, like this is inconsequential. Maybe it is. Maybe all those stories really have turned his brain, or maybe it’s just life itself, what happened at the Restorative Core and now this, telling him he doesn’t deserve to live until he knows it in his bones.
You can’t change a mind like that. Tirene can talk herself blue, but it won’t be enough.
“I’ll go with you,” Cavan finds himself saying.
“What?” Enver asks.
“I’ll go with you. If you run, or if you go to the Northern front. I’m coming, too.”
“Cav …,” Enver says, and Tirene is twirling again, an angry blur of red skirts.
“What?” Cavan says, gaining confidence. “If you can do it, so can I. I’ll be an even bigger hero than you. Hardly anyone volunteers for the Northern front. Bet they write a poem about me.”
“You are not helping!” Tirene says.
“They won’t let you go,” Enver insists.
“They will.” He’s not actually certain, but he isn’t going to mention the parchment in his pocket. “I’m just as worthless as you.”
Cavan goes to the orchard that night. He is surefooted even in the dark. Solestair still isn’t home, though. He doesn’t have a home.
He sits on the bench and isn’t surprised when he hears Enver say his name.
“I don’t know what to do,” Enver says. He says it as a fact, not as a plea for help, so Cavan only fingers the parchment in his pocket.
“I’ve done bad things,” Enver says. “At the Core. Maybe I deserve this.”
“No.”
“You don’t know. There was … a girl. Fever blind like you. I ….”
“You didn’t know any better,” Cavan says.
“I did! The first few times I didn’t, it’s true. I clung to the belief that I might help them, that it was worth the risk to try. But with her … I knew, but I was too scared to say anything against the masters. They had me remove one of her eyes, and … go poking around through the socket. The master told me I could try to remedy the problem, give her back the sight in her other eye. I knew I couldn’t … I knew, but I persisted. Brought bits of her brain out while she shrieked gibberish … even if I had restored her vision, she wouldn’t
have been able to tell me … that was no cure … that was ….”
Enver sobs, and Cavan wants to vomit. He is that girl being tortured in the basement cell, not only sightless but voiceless as well.
He shoves the parchment at Enver, and Enver takes it, still crying. “What’s this?”
Cavan has forgotten that it is dark, that at the moment Enver is blind, too. “My invitation to the Restorative Core.”
Next to him Enver turns to stone, and Cavan tries to find the words to revive him. “Maybe you killed that girl, though I don’t blame you for her death any more than I’ll blame whoever the poor apprentice is for mine. Maybe you think dying in the North absolves you, but it doesn’t. If you die, then I die, and the memory of that girl dies, and Tirene will be all alone.
“You want to redeem yourself? I’m your redemption. Forget about whether you want to save yourself. Save me.”
He knows it will work. He knows Enver because he knows himself, knows how badly he wants to save Enver.
Finally Enver says, “I’ve been doing some research. Looking in books. I found a few mentions of a ship that appears in Mercolm Harbor the night before army reporting day and disappears by morning.”
It isn’t much, but it’s something. “Where does it go?”
“I don’t know, but it always comes back the next year.”
“I don’t know,” Enver repeats. “But I know how stories work. If the passengers were killed or tortured or sent somewhere horrible, we’d hear about it, to keep other people from running. There’d be some epic about the ‘Coward’s Way’ or some such. But there’s not. It’s just a shadowy legend, some grand adventure.”
“The Shadowland?” Cavan suggests, liking the idea.
“Maybe. Anyhow, it’s better than getting annihilated by the Alwaquims or having a healing apprentice digging around your brain, eh?”
“Yes,” he says, and he knows they have saved each other.
They don’t talk much about the plan in the week that follows. They do tell Tirene, who asks, “What if the ship’s not there?”
“I guess we’ll swim,” Enver says, but Cavan hears the strain behind his jocularity.
“What if it goes someplace awful?”
“Worse than the Northern front?” Enver retorts, and Tirene stops asking questions.
Cavan realizes in that week that time is watery. It flows and hitches and pours and sometimes he seems to be sinking in it, but it continues on steadily toward the night of their departure.
The day before, Cavan goes to the orchard earlier than usual. Tirene is there with the swords, and they battle. Time turns into a steady rain, no end in sight, and he sees Tirene in the flashes of metal, the blur of purple, the dancing shadows. There are things he’d like to say to her, but he lets the sword do the talking.
When they are done—no winner, no loser, just a mutual winding down—she won’t let him put the sword down. “Take it, in case you need it. I had it sharpened for you.”
He puts a finger gently to the blade, frowning. “I could’ve hurt you.”
She laughs. “I’m too quick for you.”
“Thank you. For the sword. For ….” He wants to thank her for many things, but he’s not sure he can find the words.
“Don’t,” she says gruffly. “Just take care of yourself and Enver, all right?”
He nods. She dashes away before they can say goodbye, but maybe they already have.
He hefts the sword and fights the air, pretending he is Tirene. It makes him feel strong.
They leave in a heavy darkness, Cavan taking the lead because he is surefooted even as his heart trembles in his chest.
Eventually he’s aware of someone following them, quiet but audible. He halts Enver with his hand, and they stand still in the blackness until a voice behind them says, “Are we going to stand here all night or go to the harbor?”
“Tirene?” Cavan asks, more to inquire what she’s doing here than to confirm her identity. There’s no mistaking her voice.
“I can’t let you have this adventure without me.” Her voice is both light and urgent.
“What about the Border Guard?” Enver asks.
“They’ll have to do without me. This sounds more exciting.”
“We’re doing this because we don’t have a choice,” Cavan says. “You—”
“Have choices? Do I?” She is quiet but angry. “I’ll serve a year at most in the Border Guard, and then Father will arrange a marriage. Can you picture me a wife?”
He can’t. He can only picture Tirene dancing with her sword.
Maybe he and Enver aren’t the only ones who are doomed if they stay. Maybe they are not the only ones looking for redemption.
So they walk down the harbor road together, the darkness thick with promise, ’til Cavan can dimly see the harbor lights. “Is there a ship?”
“Yes,” Enver says, squeezing his arm. “Small, but beautiful.”
And he can see it then, too, an accumulation of shadows looming above the dock. His future. His redemption.
“Let’s go,” he says, and he knows it doesn’t matter where the ship takes them, to the Shadowlands or elsewhere. They will be together, and it will be home.
Valerie Hunter is a high school English teacher and a graduate student at Vermont College of Fine Art’s Writing for Children and Young Adults program. Her stories have appeared in magazines including Cicada, Cricket, and Inaccurate Realities, and in the YA anthologies Cleavage, Real Girls Don’t Rust, and Brave New Girls.