The Festival of Night’s Return
The shadowcallers arrived the night before the Festival of Night’s Return. They were true shadowcallers from Pangolais, not the white druids who usually came, and Isiem gathered with the other village children to watch them ride into the square.
He had seen shadowcallers before, of course. They visited Crosspine every fifth year, as they did all the little villages, to test children for the gift of magic. But Isiem had been only six the last time they’d come, too young to attract their notice, and he barely remembered anything from that visit. This year he was eleven, old enough to stand their test, and excitement warred with nervousness in his belly.
His mother hadn’t wanted him to go, Isiem knew, but she hadn’t had the power to say no. The shadowcallers were, somehow, beyond his mother’s word. That made them even more fascinating … and more frightening, too.
Wide-eyed, he watched as the shadowcallers came down from their horses. There were two men and a woman, all on black geldings draped in dark stones and silver. The horses were strange ones; their manes and tails seemed to flow off into shadow, and their hooves made no splashes on the rain-muddied roads.
Their riders were stranger still. All three were tall and thin, pale as ghosts in the moonlight. They wore deep gray robes, cut tight around the body but wide below the waist, with loose, billowing sleeves from the elbows down. Silver chains circled their throats and silver rings glimmered on their fingers, each one set with a smooth black stone.
The taller of the two men was the most unsettling of the trio. A circlet of spiked chains wrapped around his brow, starred with beads of dried blood like so many small gems. His long black hair was matted with blood; it hung to his shoulders in ropy dreadlocks, crusted with the residue of his self-mortification.
“M-m-may I take your horses?” Belero asked, hurrying from his home. Crosspine was too small to have a proper inn, let alone a hostler to look after guests’ horses, but Belero had one of the largest houses in the village and, since his children had been carried off by plague, often rented his spare rooms to travelers. He knew horses as well as anyone in the village did, but these silent animals had him visibly unsettled.
The three shadowcallers exchanged a glance and a smile. Their smiles were unkind, Isiem thought; even from this distance, he could sense their cruel amusement. It made him uneasy. He slipped away from the other children, retreating to the doorway of his own home.
“You may,” the woman said. She handed her reins to Belero. The others followed suit, although the shorter man removed something from his panniers first. It was a round object slightly bigger than Isiem’s head, and it was swaddled in black velvet that looked unimaginably soft. He cradled it tenderly to his chest as the shadowcallers followed Belero to his home.
The object fascinated Isiem. He felt an ineffable pull toward it, as though whatever lay beneath that swathing velvet was a lodestone that drew upon his soul. He took an uncertain step forward, wondering if he might be able to peek at the thing without causing trouble, and jumped when a hand fell upon his shoulder.
It was his mother’s. He hadn’t heard her open the door, so enthralled had he been.
“Come inside,” she said, pulling him in. The door closed behind him with a thump. “Don’t go back out tonight.”
Isiem nodded, slightly dazed but obedient. The magnetic pull had vanished. Although he still wanted to see what the shadowcaller kept under that velvet wrapping, his mother’s fear, and his memory of their malice, held him back.
Thinking of their smiles made him remember something he’d wondered earlier. “Why did they laugh at Belero?”
She beckoned for him to sit next to her chair by the fire. When he did, she stroked his head, holding him close as if he’d just escaped some great danger. “Because their horses aren’t real. They’re shadow and magic; they never needed tending. In a few hours they’ll vanish, and Belero will have fed and watered empty stalls.”
“Does Belero know that?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did he do it?”
“Because he knows, as we all do, that their contempt is what keeps this village safe. If we’re stupid yokels who can’t tell false horses from real ones, then surely we don’t know enough to evade their other sorceries. Ignorance is safety.” She pinched his chin, turning his head so that his eyes met hers. It hurt, but there was such intensity—such raw fear—on his mother’s face that Isiem bit back his protest. “Do you understand me? Ignorance is safety. And nothing they offer you, nothing they promise, is real. It’s all shadows and lies, like their horses.”
Isiem nodded, as much as he could. “I understand,” he said, although he didn’t.
“Good.” She held him a moment longer, searching his eyes, and then let go. “They will test you tomorrow. Remember what I told you.”
“I will.” He paused. “My father had magic, didn’t he?”
“He did.” She sighed and lifted her darning basket into her lap. “Go to bed, Isiem. Don’t wake Theron.”
“I won’t.”
He didn’t sleep, though. He lay in the darkness, next to his younger brother’s snores, and listened to his mother pray.
She prayed quietly, as she always did, in a soft breathless whisper with her head bowed over her basket. “Starry Lady, Winged Dreamer, hear me and help me tonight. Keep my children safe on the morrow. Keep the darklings’ mirror blind. The night is yours, Desna, Starsong … don’t let the pale prince reach through it tomorrow. Don’t let him take my boys. Please. Please…”
Her voice quavered and broke. Isiem saw the shape of her shoulders, silhouetted by the fire, hunch under the weight of helpless sobs.
His mother cried as quietly as she’d prayed, but the sound of it followed him into sleep.
* * *
Despite the unsettling events of the night before, Isiem woke early on Festival morning. He scrubbed his teeth hastily with charcoal and cold tea, helped his brother dress, and put on his own best clothes for the occasion. Then, without waiting to see whether Theron followed, he darted out to the village square.
Already it was bustling. The true festival wouldn’t begin until nightfall—no proper Kuthite ritual was conducted in daylight—but, while Isiem couldn’t deny the spectacle of the nighttime celebrations, he had always preferred the lighter moments of the day.
One of the men hoisted his little daughter onto his shoulders so that she could put the finishing touches on the effigy of Shelyn, the goddess of beauty. At sunset, the effigy would be set ablaze to burn through the night. The girl draped her garland of late-blooming flowers carefully over the effigy’s brow, earning a pat of approval from her father. Other children were putting cedar splints and bundles of dried herbs at the base of the wooden goddess, ensuring the night fire’s smoke would smell sweet.
Isiem thought it was a pity that something so pretty had to be burned, but he had to admit there was something awe-inspiring about the pillar of flame that took the effigy every year. This year’s was larger than ever, and more elaborately painted; the shadowcallers would surely be impressed by Crosspine’s piety when they saw it.
On the other side of the village square, boys were outlining the penitents’ path with a scattering of blood-red maple leaves. At midnight, when the Festival of Night’s Return reached its climax, the young people of the village would walk that path, stripped bare to the waist and flagellating themselves with whips as they prayed for Zon-Kuthon to guide them through the darkness and the winter that was coming. The more fervent worshipers—or, Isiem thought, the ones who most wanted to impress everyone with their toughness and tolerance for pain—would use spiked chains, as the clerics in Pangolais were said to, instead of braided horsehide.
The passing of the penitents marked the end of the ritual. Afterward, the young people disappeared. A few left to tend their injuries, but more went off to couple. Isiem had watched them do it every year of his young life, and while he did not fully understand what drove them, he knew on some wordless level that the intensity of the experience, however brutal, awoke some dark passion in its participants.
That was a long while off, though, and there was a full day of Festival to enjoy before then. Isiem spotted Ascaros, one of his friends, walking alongside a donkey-cart of early apples and sweet yellow squashes that his mother was bringing into the village to sell.
Ascaros was two years younger than Isiem, and lately Isiem had begun feeling that his friend was too occupied with babyish things for them to remain as close as they’d been, but any distance between them was forgotten in the excitement of Festival day.
“Isiem!” Ascaros waved with childish enthusiasm. He was a slight boy, almost girlish, with curly brown hair that his mother let grow until it fell past his shoulders. “Are you planning to stand for the magic test?”
Isiem balked, embarrassed by his friend’s ignorance. “It’s not a choice,” he said, joining the younger boy beside the wagon. “You have to stand for the test. Everyone does.”
Ascaros shrugged, unfazed by his error. “I hope they pick me. I’m going to be a great wizard—a Midnight Guard like my aunt.”
Isiem fought the urge to roll his eyes. He’d heard Ascaros brag about his never-seen aunt a thousand times. All the children had.
“If your aunt’s a Midnight Guard,” he asked, also for the thousandth time, “why are you still swilling pig-bone soup in Crosspine?”
Ascaros shrugged again. He opened his mouth, readying some ridiculous excuse, but closed it again at a glance from his mother. “Maybe I just like it here,” he said lamely.
Isiem laughed, unable to help himself, and an instant later Ascaros laughed too. Snatching an apple from the cart, Ascaros tossed it at the older boy’s head, then ran off. Isiem caught the apple and gave chase half-heartedly. After a few steps he stopped, feigning great interest in eating the fruit rather than making a fool of himself in front of the whole village.
Already the Festival was beginning. Belero and the other village men wore fanciful costumes, disguising themselves as blue-spotted pigs, horned Chelish devils, and buffoons with harlequined hats and long pointed boots. The women wore silver and white, braiding white flowers into their hair and around their waists if they couldn’t afford full Festival dresses. They drank and danced and played games of skill or chance, and even Isiem’s mother was caught up in their joy.
Too soon the day was done. After a perfunctory prayer to Zon-Kuthon, Belero set a torch to the effigy of Shelyn, and the villagers gathered in a circle to watch it burn. Isiem stood with them, feeling a great solemnity as the red heat washed over his face and the night grew chill at his back. Parents held children, courting couples held each other, and all Crosspine bade summer farewell. The long nights were coming, as they had in ages past. Beauty could not save them; it was weak, and it died with the cold. Only the Midnight Lord could protect his people from the hostile dark.
Into that silence, punctuated by the snap of burning timber, the shadowcallers came.
Isiem hadn’t seen them at all during the day. They’d taken no part in the festivities. Like all the other shades of the Uskwood, it seemed, they emerged with the stars.
The tall man with the circlet of chains came first, trailed on either side by his companions. In his hands was the object that had entranced Isiem the previous night, but now its velvet cloak had been pulled back and it lay revealed to the villagers’ wondering eyes.
It was a shallow disc of opaque black stone, perhaps obsidian or onyx, polished to a reflective sheen. The shadowcaller held it reverently, even fearfully; he kept his head high, and never glanced down at the object in his hands.
At the end of the penitents’ path he stopped. With crimson leaves rustling at the hem of his robes, he turned to address the villagers. “Who will look into the nightglass? Who will come forth to be tested?”
Slowly the village children formed a line. Some needed a push from their parents to step forward. A few were struggling not to cry. Ascaros came confidently, without hesitation … and yet, Isiem noticed, the boy measured his paces so that he entered the line after Isiem himself did.
“Worried the glass might eat you?” he whispered.
“Hardly,” Ascaros murmured in reply. His large brown eyes stayed fixed on the black mirror. “Just didn’t want to show you up by going first. Wouldn’t be fair, forcing you to follow a great wizard.”
“I’m grateful,” Isiem said, and then the line began moving, and they stopped talking.
One by one, the children of Crosspine looked into the shadowcaller’s ebon bowl. Some gazed at it with fear, some with respect, some with desire … but whatever they hoped to see, or the shadowcallers hoped to see in them, they did not find it. One by one, they were dismissed.
Long before he was ready, it was Isiem’s turn. He pressed his sweaty palms together and came forward.
“Look into the nightglass,” the tall shadowcaller said. “Tell us what you see.”
Isiem nodded, swallowed, and looked.
The nightglass was … glass. And yet it was not. Darkness pooled in its center, melding with the smooth black sides so that he couldn’t tell empty air from stone. At the edges, the nightglass was thin and translucent, delicate as a gray dragonfly’s wing. Along the sides, between center and edge, reflected starlight stretched into shimmering silver arcs, distorted by the mirror’s curve.
In the spaces between those blurred lines of starlight, something small and indistinct moved. Isiem caught his breath, wondering if he’d imagined it … but when he looked again, his doubt vanished, along with his awareness of who he was and where he stood.
It was as if the nightglass swelled somehow, or he himself shrank, so that instead of being a boy looking at a piece of polished stone no larger than his head, he was a mouse confronted with an enormous black doorway. The starlight was almost gone, muted to glimmerings of gray that danced about the doorway’s edges. Darkness stretched beyond it, and that darkness was alive.
No, Isiem realized, not really alive. It moved. He saw faces shifting in the dark—ravenous, misshapen faces, with hollow eye sockets that sagged below their noses and wrinkled mouths full of fangs—but there was no life in them. Not truly. It was hunger that animated them. Hunger, and envy, and a desire to consume his life so that they could fuel some brief semblance of their own.
At first there was only one, and he wasn’t sure of that one. But soon others joined it, forming a mob at the door. They strained at him, reaching out with fingerless hands and licking at their lipless mouths, but they could not come through. Not unless he opened the way for them. Isiem understood that instinctively, as one understood the logic of fairytales or dreams: the darkness could not come into his world, his home, without an invitation.
That is so, the shadow-creatures whispered in voices that he heard without hearing. Summon us, and we will serve you. There is so much we can give. Power. Wealth. Eternal life, eternal youth. Magic.
No, Isiem thought. He wanted to say it aloud—he wanted to shout it, and flee—but his limbs and his jaws remained stubbornly locked. I don’t want anything you can give me.
You are foolish to refuse, the shadows said. Foolish, foolish child.
Isiem didn’t answer. He focused entirely on pulling away from them, and from this strange never-world inside the mirror. It was hard, as taxing as forcing his way through waist-deep snow against a brutal headwind … but he did it, and came back to himself with a start.
Cold sweat plastered his shirt to his chest. He was heaving for breath, so winded he could scarcely stand upright. The pale moonlight was so bright it seemed blinding.
The female shadowcaller leaned toward him. Her eyes were completely black from lid to lid. They had no whites, no pupils or irises. Isiem had never been close enough to notice before. He wished he wasn’t close enough now.
“What did you see?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He forced the lie through numb lips. Ignorance is safety. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Nothing?” she echoed, disbelief clear in her voice.
“Nothing.” Isiem turned away from the penitent’s path, resisting the urge to flee outright. He tried to sound calm, even a little disappointed. “I’m sorry.”
She nodded brusquely, already dismissing him. Ascaros stepped up next, and Isiem hesitated, wanting to give his friend some warning or reassurance before he looked into that bowl. He couldn’t think of what to say, though, and he was afraid to attract the shadowcallers’ notice again. Instead he moved to the side and stopped, curious to see how Ascaros reacted.
It didn’t look nearly as dramatic as it felt. Ascaros just stood there, staring into the nightglass. His face was pale, but then he was always pale; his expression was rapt, but Isiem couldn’t tell how much of that was real and how much was his friend’s desperation to prove himself a wizard.
Then he saw that something was rising from the polished stone. Smoke, it seemed, or shadow … but it could not be smoke, for it coiled against the wind, and it could not be shadow, for there was nothing to cast it. Swiftly it spun upward, reaching for Ascaros’s face with gray tendrils. The boy remained motionless, his eyes starting from his head and his face drawn taut as he gazed through the unnatural smoke into the mirror.
“Such power,” the shorter man breathed. “Such potential. That he can not only see the shadows in the nightglass, but call them forth with no training at all…”
“But can he control them, or will they consume him?” the woman asked. Her silver necklaces clinked softly as she tilted her head, watching. “Power without control is worth less than nothing.”
The tendrils were snaking into Ascaros’s hair and curling along his face. Where they touched him, Isiem saw his friend’s skin blanch white and then go corpse-gray, while the smoke grew thicker and more solid. The russet brown of his hair, ordinarily touched with vibrant red, began to go gray too.
It was feeding on him. The shadow was stealing Ascaros’s life, hoping to create its own—but it wouldn’t succeed. It couldn’t. The shadowcallers would crush it before it got that far … and then his friend would have died for nothing.
And they were willing to let him die. Right here, in front of all the gathered villagers. Isiem saw that plainly. If Ascaros couldn’t wrest himself free, they would let the nightglass kill him.
He rushed forward, shoving Ascaros away from the mirror. The female shadowcaller snarled, drawing a hand back to strike him, but the tall one with the circlet of chains shook his head and she froze.
“Let him try,” he said. “I want to see what he does.”
Isiem scarcely heard the man. The shadows had let go of Ascaros, but only so they could twine around Isiem instead. They were cold, colder than the sharpest winter wind, and the same tingling burn followed their touch. He gasped, and with watering eyes stared into the mirror.
Once again the starlight blurred before him, and he had the eerie sense of space stretching, or his own reality shrinking, so that the nightglass engulfed him in its vastness and the old world fell away. The shadows had greater definition here: what seeped through the ebon doorway were not shapeless tendrils of smoke, but thin black fingers, impossibly long and triple-jointed. Each one was tipped with a fragment of bloody bone.
Release me, the gaunt face between those fingers hissed. Starlight whirled in its eyes, imitating the whites of human eyes. They were almost real. Almost sighted to the living world. Release me to feed. The bargain was struck. Release me, and my power will be yours.
No, Isiem thought back.
Then you will die. You do not have the strength to send me back.
That was true. Isiem had no idea how to close the mirror’s gate. He didn’t even know if it could be closed.
But there were other truths as well. You’ll die too, he thought, and then amended: or at least you won’t be free. I can’t stop you, but the wizards waiting here can, and they will not let you escape into the world. Go back, and return another time.
I am already here, the shadow-creature insisted, but Isiem felt its hesitation. Its tendrils, or fingers, unclenched their grip. They undulated in the air, darting toward the shadowcallers and retreating just as swiftly before making contact. Then they pulled back from the living world, back through the nightglass, back into the ebon doorway.
Quickly Isiem severed his connection to the magic. The nightglass’s distortions receded; the autumn night returned. Sound came back to him. Scent. Trembling, he closed his eyes. He smelled smoke from the burning effigy, heard distant laughter from late revelers and the relieved sobs of Ascaros’s mother.
“You will come with us,” one of the shadowcallers said. Isiem didn’t know which one. But he nodded shakily, surrendering to his fate. Of course they would take him now. He’d given up his pretended ignorance to save Ascaros. And although he was afraid of what that might mean for him, he had no regret about interrupting the shadowcallers’ test.
His mother was wrong, Isiem thought. Not everything they promised was shadows and lies. They promised death, too. And that was real.