The shadows know your name were the words ringing in Rora’s head as she jerked up to sitting, throat so thick it felt like she’d swallowed her tongue. Sometimes, when she didn’t sleep well or when she slept too deep, she had bad dreams about being trapped in a cell under a mountain, because a cellar wasn’t all that different from a cell. And when she dreamed of the cell, sometimes she dreamed of a woman on the other side of the bars, a woman with no eyes who whispered, “I am the shadows, and I know your name,” as black smoke crawled from her blood-dripping hands to slide choking down Rora’s throat.
Yes, she remembered that voice. And even though she was usually bad with names, she remembered the name, too: Neira. My name, freely given. She’d only talked to the woman once, but when someone tried to kill you, those kinds of memories stuck.
“What have you learned about shadows?” Neira asked as Rora twisted to face her, and she was almost spookier’n she’d been under the mountain. She was lit up from behind by witchfire, her face made of deep shadows. Except when she grinned, and the witchfire shone off blood on her teeth and lips.
Rora stared at Neira, and Neira stared back—didn’t have eyes, but Rora could feel her staring—and Rora counted her heartbeats up to five before she opened her mouth and bellowed, “Tare!”
Neira’s smile slipped a little, and her hands curled where they rested flat against the not-wall. She pressed her tongue forward, against the split in her lip, and blood welled up from it.
And all of the witches started to scream.
All at once, sudden as a punch, the witches all sounded like they were being killed. They acted like it, too—Anddyr doubled over holding his stomach, another one writhed around on the ground, another grabbed at his head like it might burst. “Shit,” Rora said. “Shit, shit—Tare!” She didn’t know if she’d be able to hear it over all the screaming, but it didn’t sound like there were any footsteps up above, didn’t sound like anyone coming to find out what all the screaming was about, didn’t sound like anyone caring—
“I’m glad I found you,” Neira said calmly, not seeming bothered by the screaming, or by the blood flowing freely over her lip and down her chin. “It hasn’t been easy . . . you’ve learned how to hide—or, perhaps, someone’s learned how to hide you.” Neira kept one hand pressed against the not-wall, but she moved the other one, stretched it out unlooking toward Anddyr, who was nearest to her. She curled her fingers into a fist and Anddyr doubled over violently, his head slamming against the floor and his whole body going limp. Neira’s empty eye sockets were still fixed on Rora. “There’s so much we need to talk about.”
Rora yanked at her chains, even though she’d done it a thousand times and the metal was sunk deep into the wall. She moved back, away from Neira and the not-wall and toward the cellar door as far as the chains would allow, but it wasn’t far enough. The manacle bit deep into the base of her hand, catching under skin, grinding against her thumb, but her hand still wouldn’t fit through. “Tare,” she shouted again, her voice cracking like a boy’s.
She saw Anddyr lift his head up, bleeding from a scrape on his cheek, and stare at Neira. “No,” he croaked, reaching for her with a shaking hand. He managed to twist his fingers into his witch-shapes. But nothing happened at all, and he looked as horrified by it as Rora felt.
Another of the witches, his eyes full of fury and madness, made shapes of his own in Neira’s direction, and his fingers lit up with witchfire. Neira pressed both hands back to the not-wall, and the witchfire fizzled out before it hit her. That witch fell over on his face, and then didn’t move at all. None of the other witches were moving anymore either, their screaming stopped, so the only sound was Rora’s heartbeat in her ears—
Neira smiled wider, and the not-wall flickered, and then it wasn’t there anymore. Neira stood up, her robe trailing around her feet, her hands hanging at her sides. That smile was still on her face, blood still dripping from her lip, as she took a step toward Rora.
Rora felt like a kid again, trapped and scared and hopeless, only this time she didn’t have a dagger to shove into her captor’s heart. This time she didn’t have anything. This time she didn’t even have her brother.
Tears poked at her eyes, stupid, weak tears, but she couldn’t do anything, and she was gonna die here, alone, because the family she’d come back for didn’t even care about her enough to check on why she was screaming, because the brother she’d always done everything for had left her. Neira walked toward her, blurred by tears, and Rora thought how she’d seen a cat chew its own leg off once because it couldn’t get unstuck. Thought about how, if she had a dagger right now, she might not’ve used it to throw at Neira but might’ve used it to chop her own hand off instead, or maybe the manacle would do that for her, cutting and twisting around the base of her hand, stretched back behind her as she strained toward the ladder and the cellar door. She gave another bone-straining yank and, amazingly, felt something—her hand, slick with her own blood, slid just a little farther through the manacle.
A sob burst out of Rora. She twisted her hand more, pulled at it more, the manacle scraping up skin and she was sure she’d feel a bone pop out any second—
Rora lurched forward as the manacle passed the thickest part of her hand, and she was free.
Neira was almost to her, but Rora scrabbled to the ladder, shimmying up it like a squirrel, and held on to the rungs with only her toes so that she could pound against the cellar door with both fists, screaming sounds that didn’t even sound like words anymore.
“Rora,” a voice said, disapproving as a parent, and a hand grabbed the back of her shirt to pull her down from the ladder.
Like a cat again, Rora met Neira with nails and teeth, the only weapons she had. Neira met her with the boiling black smoke, her magic that wasn’t anything like the witch-magic Rora knew. The smoke was like a weight around her legs, pressing and dragging, making her knees want to buckle, but Rora fought it. She got a punch to Neira’s rib cage, left three long scratches along one of her arms, and then Neira caught her wrist—the one she’d dragged out of the manacle. Even the grabbing hurt, but Neira’s fingers were like ice. Cold spread down Rora’s arm, and her head spun in that way it did if you stood up too sudden, and her knees finally buckled under the smoke.
“Last time,” Neira said, still holding on to Rora’s wrist, “you left before we had the chance to speak more. I don’t blame you—Raturo isn’t the most welcoming place.” The smoke crawled up Rora’s sides, snaking around her chest and pinning her other arm to her side, the smoke answering to the dance of Neira’s free hand. “But there’s so much you don’t know—so much you need to know. You won’t be any use otherwise.”
Rora remembered the last time it’d been like this, when Neira’d trapped her with her eyes while her smoke had snuck down Rora’s throat, sour and choking. She tipped her head back, straining as much as she could away from the weird, wrong magic, but she couldn’t get away from her own body. Her voice like a gasp, Rora asked, “What are you?” If this was how she was to die, at least she deserved to know what killed her.
Neira smiled, and gave the same answer she’d given the first time Rora’d asked that question. “I am the shadows.” She’d said they’d meet again, but Rora hadn’t given her a bit of thought, had tried her damnedest to forget everything that’d happened inside the mountain—the same way she’d tried to forget the first man she’d killed, who’d whispered, The shadows know you, and they will follow you to the ends of the earth. Tried to forget it in the same way she’d tried to forget she was a twin, because if you pretended long enough that something wasn’t real, it’d stop seeming real. And so she’d tried hard to forget Neira, deep inside the ice-cold mountain, telling her to remember how far a shadow can stretch. If you didn’t remember something, it couldn’t find its way into your dreams and wake you up in a cold sweat with a scream so big it couldn’t find its way out.
Neira made a noise, and her fingers loosened just a little around Rora’s wrist. Not by much, but it was enough for a little of the cold to seep away, enough for a little of the deadweight to fade out of Rora’s limbs, enough for the smoke to loosen its hold, too. And Rora’d always lived her life by taking little chances when they were given.
Rora twisted her hand in Neira’s grip, same way she’d twisted inside the manacle, only this time she grabbed on to Neira’s wrist in turn. She dug in her nails, and felt her fingers go slippery with blood. Neira made another noise, but before her fingers tightened back up, before she could pull back whatever spell’d slipped for just a second, Rora swung up her other arm fast and hard. And when her forearm slammed into Neira’s, she heard a wet pop. Neira’s fingers fell away from her wrist like worms. Neira screamed, and the smoke boiled away, and Rora surged to her feet.
She saw, in the second she had to see anything else, Anddyr tangled up around Neira’s feet. The distraction Rora’d needed to get free. Good enough—he was a witch with a lot of uses. Rora threw herself forward with a little jump so that she could get her arm up high enough, so that when she hit Neira she could hook her arm around the taller woman’s neck. Her weight pushed Neira backward, pushed her stumbling against Anddyr, and she started to fall. Rora wrapped her arm tighter around Neira’s neck, got her other arm up so she could hold on to her own wrist, pull her arm tight as tight could be, choking Neira as they crashed to the ground together.
Rora’s elbow hit the ground first and took all their weight combined, or at least that was what it felt like—a sharp pain that made her whole arm go numb, but Rora didn’t let go. She held on to her numb arm, using it like a garrote around Neira’s neck. Neira clawed one-handed at Rora’s shoulder and made fish-gasping noises in her ear, but Rora could feel the fight going out of her. Still, she had sharp nails, and they clawed through Rora’s shirt, through her skin, drawing blood and sending the cold racing through her.
There was movement down by her legs—Anddyr, where she’d used him as a tripping block, screaming his magic-words and sobbing when they didn’t work, screaming them louder and louder, and Neira wheezed a laugh in Rora’s ear. “So,” she rasped, “weak.”
Then there were hands on Rora, grabbing her still-numb shoulder, pulling her away until she couldn’t keep her grip round Neira’s neck anymore. “No,” she shouted, “please,” but she was hauled up, thrown over a shoulder, driving hard into her gut, and when she twisted her head Neira was growing smaller—still sprawled, Anddyr wrapped around her legs, the black smoke beginning to rise—
Rora’s head cleared the cellar door, and bodies blurred past her down the ladder, fists and knives all full of anger, ready to kill. And a painfully familiar voice directly above Rora shouted to them, “Kill them all.” And Tare, carrying her, kept carrying her farther away.
“No,” Rora croaked, but her voice was nothing under all the shouting. She pounded her good hand against Tare’s back, but the older woman acted like she didn’t even notice. “No!” Rora twisted her hips, kicked her legs, and like a fish she slid out of Tare’s arm. She knew how to fall, Tare herself had taught Rora how to fall, so she didn’t land on her head but the courtyard hit her hard in the back. She flailed around, even more like a fish, and scrambled back for the cellar door, dragging in enough air to bellow down into the cellar, “No!”
And they listened to her. For some gods-be-damned reason, they listened to her.
Or maybe it was only that Tare was right behind her, and took a harder look this time. At all the witches sprawled unmoving, except for Neira, who was sitting now, her not-broke arm raised and fingers drawing shapes in the air; and Anddyr, who was sobbing as he tried to fight her down with his hands, Anddyr who’d probably never had to fight with his hands in all his life. “It’s her,” Rora croaked, and wheezed a delirious laugh at herself when she tried to point with her numb arm. Maybe it was broken, broke as bad as she’d broke Neira’s.
Maybe Tare believed her. Or maybe Tare just wanted some quiet and some stillness to get this giant mess all sorted out. Either way, she pushed past Rora and waded back into the cellar. Her hands moved, too, like the witches’ but different, making words too fast for Rora’s blurry eyes and fuzzy mind to follow. But the knives in the cellar saw, and they closed in with her.
Some grabbed Anddyr, twisting his arms and his hands even though he wasn’t doing any magic, couldn’t. Neira’d done something to all the witches, somehow. They pressed his face hard into the ground and sat on him while the others went for Neira.
Neira grinned at them, big white teeth under her empty eyes, and she raised both her arms up. The broken one flopped in that way that made Rora want to puke. Neira didn’t fight when they grabbed her arms, didn’t scream when they twisted the broken one, didn’t call up any of her black smoke, didn’t stop smiling for even a second. Tare glanced over her shoulder, eyes flicking to the cellar door, where Rora was close to pitching in with how far over she was leaning. Then Tare lifted up her dagger, and brought the hilt smashing down against Neira’s skull, and finally her smile faded. The knives who’d held her let her fall to the floor.
Relief hit Rora harder’n Neira had, chasing all the blood-pounding terror out of her, so sudden that she almost did fall right through the cellar door as her whole body sagged. She was crying, but she wasn’t sure if she had been for a while, or if that was new.
Rora rolled away from the door, sprawling onto her back. Her arm was still numb, and her shoulders and chest and face ached from all the places Neira’d hit her, but she could almost ignore all that. There were stars above her. It felt like a whole lifetime since she’d seen stars.
Rora turned her head at the sound coming up the ladder: Tare’s head poked up and stopped, even with Rora’s. Then she took another few rungs to put herself that little bit higher. She reached out to grab a twisting handful of Rora’s hair. “What in all the bloody fecking hells happened here?”
Rora laughed, and cried, and told her.