Anddyr watches, and is watched in turn.
“Who are you?” Fratarro asks, and there is no animosity in his voice—only curiosity.
“How are you here?” Sororra asks, and hers is full of venom and fear.
Anddyr opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes out. He is as ephemeral as a cloud, silent and shapeless; looking down at himself, he has no hands, no legs, no body—he is distilled down to his essence. The skytower surrounds him, ringing and wringing, insubstantial and solid. He wants to ask if they are dreaming, too—if gods sleep, and if this is where they come when they sleep. He wants to ask if this makes him a god, too.
“You should not be here,” Sororra says, and her words surround him like a blizzard. He has no body to shiver, but the cold goes deeper than skin, deeper than bone, deeper than soul. “You do not belong here. You should not be able to find us.”
“For so long,” Fratarro murmurs, “we wanted only to be found.”
“This is not the same.” There is fire in Sororra’s eyes, and there is ice, and there is no mercy. “Leave,” she says, and the skytower opens beneath Anddyr, and he is falling.
And a voice calls after him, a screaming whisper that both is and is not Fratarro’s voice: “Find me. You promised . . .”
Anddyr startled awake to the sound of thundering feet, a slamming door, and a creaking ladder. Blinking back sleep, he raised his head to stare through the barrier at the children streaming down the ladder to fill their place in the cellar, all full of quiet excitement and expectation.
Anddyr scrubbed his face with his hands. The Fallen must have been moving in greater numbers from the south, for so many of them to happen to pass by the estate, and that didn’t exactly paint a pleasant picture of the pack’s future on the estate. They’d done well enough so far, but one day they’d lure in a group that would overpower them, or a mage whose reflexes were quicker than Aro’s, or—
Or they would face a group of the Fallen without a mage of their own.
Anddyr gaped at the settling children, shocked by the stupidity of their guardians. Without Aro to give them the advantage, without Joros to push them—Anddyr had thought the pack would settle into the quiet, peaceful lives they seemed to have always wanted. He’d thought they would hunker down and simply try to survive the Long Night, as they’d managed to survive every other messy thing in their lives.
But perhaps he’d been too idealistic. He’d heard Aro and Rora talk about their pack. They were like dogs indeed: faithful, and ruthless, and never ones to back down once they’d gotten the smell of blood.
He wanted to shout at them that they should know better, but the children didn’t know better, and the adults who should were all beyond the cellar door, being unspeakably foolish.
And more importantly—to Anddyr at least, in this new bubble of a life—Peressey was beginning to moan. She was one of the newest of his flock of mages, and she was having a particularly hard time adjusting to both her new surroundings and her skura withdrawal. Because he couldn’t do anything about the pack, and because it would make his own life exponentially more unpleasant if he didn’t, he went to deal with Peressey.
She had pressed herself into a corner made by the cellar wall and the magical barrier, her face jammed against the corner so tightly it had flattened the tip of her nose as she pawed at the ground before the barrier, as though trying to dig her way free. She was digging with her magic, too, though—a frantic, groping search for any weakness in the barrier. Every new mage always searched for a weakness and, when that failed, would try to batter it down. It never worked, though. The shield always held.
Still blinking sleep from his eyes, Anddyr sat down next to her—not touching, because touch could be a dangerous thing in the throes of madness, but near enough that she could see and hear him. “It’s all right,” Anddyr said. He tried to be pleasant-sounding, but he was no miracle worker. The best he could manage, sometimes, was a tone that at least wasn’t actively hostile, that didn’t betray his bone-deep exhaustion. “Peressey, we are safe. We are secure.” The children beyond the barrier were staring and snickering, making mocking mewling noises. Anddyr didn’t give them the satisfaction of glaring. “We are strong. We have each other.”
Above, there were footsteps, and screams.
Peressey wailed, slapping at the barrier and wincing with each slap. Anddyr winced, too—it was like a toothache twinge, sharp and brief, but the memory lingered. They all felt each blow, now that the barrier was linked to them, siphoning their power away to fuel itself. Anddyr remembered the ruthless glee he’d felt at seeing Aro twitch and wince whenever one of the mages had attacked the barrier; he could sympathize with something, without feeling bad for it.
Foolish, clever boy, he thought at his absent student. Aro had always defied definition—useless and brave, charming and desperate, cunning and thoughtless, cocksure and fearful. Anddyr still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to survive without any training; most fledgling mages, left to their own devices, were very literally consumed by their uncontrolled power. Aro had somehow taught himself enough control to keep himself from burning, but he had no finesse. Though, for as clunky as Aro’s siphoning barrier was, there was no arguing that it was perhaps the greatest magical innovation Anddyr had seen—he hadn’t even known it was possible to draw on another’s powers, to use someone else’s magic to power his own spells. Such a thing would never have occurred to him, bound and trained by the strictures of the masters of the Academy. He would never have thought . . .
A long wail came from above, core-deep. Below, it was echoed by Peressey.
“We are secure,” Anddyr muttered absently to her. For all his innovation, Aro still lacked control—he had kept his power from burning him alive so far. Anddyr had his doubts that the boy could maintain that level of control forever, especially since his control when using his power was so slippery. “We are strong.” It didn’t matter, though, not anymore—Aro was gone. He was Joros’s problem now, for good and for ill . . . for both of them. “We have each other.”
The cellar door opened, and they dragged down a wailing mage.
She was in worse condition than most of the captured mages: her long hair was a tangled mess, covering all of her face except her wailing mouth and its split lip; and beneath her stained robe, she looked absolutely skeletal. Anddyr felt his stomach lurch with disgust and pity at the sight of her, but he tried to bury both emotions—in moments, she would be counted among his growing flock. She would need him.
The pack was triumphant, singing their own praises, an orgy of self-congratulation. Some boasted that they’d never needed “that traitor Aro anyway,” and Anddyr observed with a keen curiosity the way Tare’s jaw tightened whenever one of her people said such a thing, the way her eyes flickered over to Rora after. That was something new. Rora, no less despondent than she’d been since her brother’s leaving, didn’t react to the words, and didn’t seem to notice Tare’s looks. Regardless, they all left Rora herself in peace, whether for pity or boredom or forgetfulness. She was allowed to stare at her wall, the only movement her thumb rubbing at the place where the manacle pressed against the inside of her wrist.
Skit and Badden came forward with the wailing mage and, with little ceremony, pushed her through the barrier. It was no different than it had been when the barrier had been Aro’s—the same spell, the same quirks, just no longer powered by him. The new mage went sprawling, still wailing, and Skit and Badden turned away—no longer their problem.
Anddyr sighed and caught Travin’s gaze. His second was shaking, not in a good place of his own, but his bad was significantly better than anyone else’s, and even at his worst he knew his duty. Travin made his way to Peressey’s side, to soothe her now-rising panic, so that Anddyr could tend to the new mage and try to calm her before she threw all the others into fits.
The new mage had rolled to her knees before the barrier and clawed at the solid air, wailing, “Why? Why? Why?” at the retreating backs of the pack as they made their way out of the cellar.
“It’s all right,” Anddyr said. A flat statement, probably not as comforting as it should have been, but by God he was tired. “My name is Anddyr. I’m here to help you.”
“Why?” she wailed at the barrier. “Why?”
Because I’m even more unlucky than you are, he thought, but didn’t dare say. “It can be a hard adjustment to make. I’m sure you’re scared.”
“Why?” She smacked her face against the barrier, and though her wild hair likely cushioned some of the blow, Anddyr winced in sympathy as much as in actual pain. “Why? W—” Her wailing stopped suddenly, her palms and forehead pressed against the barrier, and through her tangled hair Anddyr saw her split lips curve into a smile. “Oh,” she said, and she began to laugh. “Oh, that’s clever.”
Anddyr scooted away from her without really meaning to. Her laughter sent a chill snaking through him: laughing was not uncommon among his flock of mages, roiling head-smacking laughter and desperate giggles and laughs that were half tears—but this was none of that. Her laughter sounded . . . genuine. Sane. It did not sound like the laughter of a person who had been wailing inconsolably and clawing at air a moment before.
The mage reached up to push her tangled hair back from her face, and the creeping snake in Anddyr’s gut reared back and sank venom into his core. She had no eyes.
As she gazed with her empty sockets through the barrier, the mage’s smile widened, and she said, “Hello, Rora. I thought I might find you here. What have you learned about shadows?”