Court of Shadows
“No, I suppose you will just take out that little journal of yours and scribble away,” he teased. He signaled to the innkeep’s daughter, who blew a strand of sweaty hair out of her face and wandered over. Khent spoke to her gently, politely, and at once I saw the change in her—she was obviously grateful to have two quieter, calmer customers. He gave her a coin at the outset, and that pleased her, too.
“Why do you write in that thing so much? One book not enough for you to carry?”
“I don’t know,” I said, gazing into the fire. “I just want to remember that I did any of this, that I . . . that I mattered. At first it was just a daily log of what had transpired, but now it feels like more than that. I don’t want this story, my story—our story—to just disappear. We have seen terrible and wonderful things, and those sights should be recorded.”
Khent nodded, grinning at the girl as she returned with two foaming cups of beer. She blushed under his attentions, and it was not difficult to understand why.
“Well, your penmanship is a disaster,” he said when she was gone. “What sort of scribe taught you? A blind one?”
“It isn’t a disaster,” I shot back, defensive. “Nobody can read it. It’s a language of my own. Shorthand. All of these curiosities and secrets should be kept, but they are not for all eyes.”
His eyebrows rose at that, and his dark purple eyes glimmered over the cup of his beer. “Not bad, Bennu. You’re full of surprises.”
“As are you, my friend.” The beer was not cold but it did taste wonderful, enough to wash out the salty residue in my mouth leftover from the sea. “What are those marks on your arms? Where did you come from? You have the look of a nobleman’s son and you do not sound like anyone I know in my village. You speak perfect Greek. What sort of scribe taught you?”
He gave that strange wild laugh again and sipped his beer. “I like you, Bennu the Runner, I like you very much. And to your question—it was a royal scribe who taught me, and that is all you must know for now.”
We remained at the inn for two nights, two blissfully uneventful, restful nights. Khent still slept fitfully, but that did not bother me. In fact, I was glad to have someone so watchful at my side. The book I carried attracted bad luck like honey attracted flies, and his vigilance afforded me better sleep. We hard hardly left the inn at all, which let me carry the bag less, and my shoulder began to heal. But we could not stay forever, which became obvious on the third morning, when I woke from night terrors, pink spittle rushing from my lips.
Khent saw it, for he always woke well before me, and at once he donned his traveling cloak. “It is time we moved on,” he said solemnly.
“What does it mean?” I asked, climbing regretfully out of the blankets and cleaning my chin on a basin rag. “I have seen it before. The girls who sent me on this journey, they were praying by the book and had visions. . . .”
“It’s Mother speaking to you,” he said, and handed me my cloak. “It means we need to leave.”
And leave we did, by the north gate, hitching a ride with a wealthy goatherd who allowed us to ride on his cart for the hillier, more treacherous stretches leading from the city. My feet were glad for the goatherd, but he could only take us into the countryside, a place greener than I had ever seen before, with rocky hills dotted with fluffy sheep and grazing goats. We sheltered that night in an abandoned herder’s shack shaded by tall pines. It was strange to be so far from home, to look out onto grassy hills and not the familiar serpentine rushing of the Nile.
Khent retrieved bundles of grass from the shallow woods behind us and helped me pile them into bundles for sleeping. Then he made a small fire outside the shack, and we sat and watched the stars emerge, each of us munching on goat cheese given to us by the helpful herder. A shape appeared in the sky as we ate, a winding thing that slithered its way in front of the stars, higher than a bird might fly but not by much. It was massive, black, with faint stripes of yellow and red. I gasped and pointed, mouth full, watching it glide effortlessly.
“A Sky Snake,” Khent said, grinning. “A good omen; my heart is glad to see it. We will follow it, and soon; we should leave while we still have the cover of dark.”
I huddled under my cloak and tried to sleep, but the hillside soon grew cold, too cold for our meager fire to banish, and I felt vulnerable, the rickety old shack offering a clear view of us curled up inside. I do not think I slept until I heard the song.
It was quiet at first, haunting, a mother’s lullaby turning sour at the edges. Sad. The woman who sang it sounded like she was in mourning. But it was beautiful, and for a while I rested as if inside it, comforted by its soft, winding verses. Then listening to it in dreams was not enough, and I woke up, refreshed. I could not say how much time had passed, but the moon was out and full again, almost garish as it hung shining in the sky.
The Sky Snake was gone, but the song had come, and so I climbed out from under my cloak and stood. It seemed wrong to leave the satchel, for it was mine to protect, so I hoisted it onto my shoulder and winced from the pain, then shook off the discomfort and went in search of the song. I felt compelled to find it, called to it like a gull called to the sea. It drifted out from the shallow forest, and in I went, feeling the pine boughs brush against my cheeks as I blindly searched, using my ears and not my eyes to go by.
The song grew louder. It had words yet it did not, or I did not understand the words; they folded in on themselves. And then the woman would sing a note, a high note, one that plucked at my heart, stirring a longing there that almost brought me to tears. Why was she so sad? I had to find her.
A tiny brook wound its way through the trees, and my feet splashed in it, the water leading me to a large, rounded rock, and there she sat. I had never seen a woman so beautiful in all my life. She was dark-skinned and plump, with wide, catlike eyes, and she wore nothing but black hair that fell like a shroud and pooled around her feet. Her knees were drawn up to her chest as she combed her fingers through that hair and sang, her lips shining as if painted with gold.
“Are you lost?” I asked.
“No.” She broke off the song with a giggle, those dark, pretty eyes fixed on me. “Are you?”
She beckoned me closer and I went, certainly in love. I had never wanted to hold a person so much, to feel their body pressed close, to know their touch, their scent. . . . Her eyes had sunk hooks into mine and I easily scaled the boulder she sat on, feeling a strange, silky tendril snaking along my legs. I dropped the satchel. What did the book matter when this being existed?
“What is your name?” I asked, desperate. “I must know it.”
With one finger under my chin she smiled, showing me three sets of pointed teeth. That was beautiful, too, and just the brush of her fingertip felt as if it could cure me of all ills. “Talai,” she cooed, “but you will only live to say it once.”
Her long black hair had wrapped around my ankles. I could feel it tightening there, holding me, and then more of it slithered across my arms and up to my shoulders, trapping me like a silken black web.
“Talai,” I repeated, but her spell was beginning to break. The too-tight hold of her hair around my legs and arms shocked me back to myself and I struggled, yanking my limbs this way and that. She only smiled wider in the face of my panic and tears, moonlight sparkling on her many, many teeth.
She began to pull me closer, closer, and nothing I did ended her steely grip. Out of the corner of my eye I saw another snaking tendril of hair wrap around my satchel and pick it up. It was out of my reach, and I screamed, hoping that Khent in his vigilance would wake and bring help. I had failed us both with my foolishness, and now this creature had the book. . . .
Her breath, foul and sharp, washed over me. I gagged and closed my eyes, unwilling to watch the horror of her face coming near. That huge, devouring mouth was on me, sealing to my face like a leech, unbearably sharp teeth tearing into my skin. She was silencing me, silencing me forever, though still I screamed and screamed into her throat.
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The forest floor shook under us, and for a moment I felt reprieve. The creature froze, the lightest, stinging kiss of its teeth prickling against my flesh. I could not breathe the hot sour air in its mouth, but at least it had been distracted by the noise. Then the clamor came again, and again, trees around us swaying as if knocked about by a giant. From behind came an ear-rending scream, a canine shriek as if a hundred jackals howled in unison.
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
Footsteps. What greater terror had come to finish me and this monster off together? I went limp in the creature’s grasp, crying harder as the boulder under us trembled, threatening to dislodge and send us tumbling to the ground. But I did not tumble—in fact, I was lifted, not by the unnatural hairs of the singing creature but by hands, massive ones, strong and almost human.
Then I was tossed aside, ripped out of one creature’s grasp and thrown by another’s. I rolled onto the springy grass of the forest and panted, flipping onto my back and scuttling into the cover of the trees. The thing that had saved me was taller than the tallest man, covered in mottled gray-and-black fur with a stripe down its back and large, pointed ears. Blessed earth, it was impossible to believe my eyes, but I had seen such a thing before, hundreds, thousands of times—it was Anubis himself, not stone but flesh. Stranger still, its shoulders and arms, muscled like a man’s, had faint markings beneath the fur. Khent’s markings.
Talai shrieked at it, hissing, standing on top of the boulder fearlessly and flinging herself at it teeth-first. The jackal creature—Khent, or so I hoped, for I did not want to be its next target—caught Talai easily by her throat and squeezed, wringing a wet, gagging cry from her. He slammed her into the boulder, and though she was stunned, she quickly gained her feet and backed away, toward the trees, hissing and spitting, her neck already blackened with bruising.
Anubis reborn gave chase, following after the woman as she dashed into the darkness. I heard a terrible roar and another scream, and then the sounds of their battling grew fainter and fainter, until at last I was alone with the quiet bubbling of the brook. Bleeding, terrified, I climbed to my feet and scrambled after the satchel, lifting it with both hands and limping back toward the herder’s shack.
I found it in splinters, nothing but our cloaks left among the shards.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“I need you to skip to the end.”
Mr. Morningside paged through my latest translation, a piece of iced lemon cake in front of him, which he diligently ate in between appraisals of my work.
“This is all fine, excellent, really, but I must know where it ends,” he said, slapping the packet of papers down onto the desk in front of me. My eyes hurt from squinting in the candlelight for so long, and my fingertips were stained with ink. I sat back and stared numbly at the journal, my head swirling with questions. “Where do they go?” Mr. Morningside added. “Where do they stop? Find that and translate it. The rest,” he said, flicking his brows and stabbing his dessert, “is just icing on the cake, my dear.”
I glared up at him, annoyed by his cheery demeanor.
“My father is here, did you know that?” I asked, crossing my arms over my middle. “You never wrote to him. . . .”
“I was planning on it.”
“You never wrote to him.” I scoffed and looked away from him, choosing to stare instead into the blue flames in the library’s fireplace. “I can’t believe this.”
“Which part?” he asked, finishing the cake and licking the crumbs from his fingers.
“All of it.” I gave up, piling my forearms on the desk and resting my forehead on them.
Mr. Morningside gave me a patronizing pat on the shoulder and stood from where he had been perched on the desk. “You wanted him here and now he’s here, Louisa. I really don’t see the problem. Do you want me to try talking to him?”
“No,” I mumbled. “You will only make it worse.”
“That’s harsh.” He paced in front of the desk; I could hear his riding boots pitter-pattering across the rug. “Is this going to be too much of a distraction for you? It does not matter how persuasive the shepherd finds those journal entries—at some point you will be asked to speak and I need you at your best.”
I dragged my head up off the table and gave him my most hollow-eyed stare. “Do I look like I am at my best?”
No longer pacing, Mr. Morningside tucked his knuckles under his chin and said, “Very well. I see now that I have been pushing you too hard. The Court cannot long be detained, but what would you need?”
“A day,” I replied after a moment’s consideration. “Just . . . one day to sort things out with my father and finish this work for you. A day without tasks from Mrs. Haylam or having to attend your bizarre trial. A day like that and I may feel . . .” Better? Human? Normal? What would I feel? “Ready.”
He nodded and danced quickly toward the desk, smacking it with his palm. “A day I can grant you. Tomorrow is yours, Louisa; do with it what you will.” This bargain seemed to please him, or at least satisfy him, and Mr. Morningside brushed by me with a whistle, walking briskly toward the door that led out to the endless corridor and his office. “Oh! And you have one less thing to worry about,” he said as he opened the door.
“What do you mean?” I twisted in my chair to face him.
“I know who killed Amelia.”
That made me sit up straighter. “Was it Finch? Sparrow?”
“Sparrow? Ha! No, dear girl, it was Mary. Ah well, Amelia was going to depart us anyway; now we must just decide what to do with the rest of them. . . .”
He made to close the door on that but I shot out of the chair, racing across the room toward him. “Mary?” I blurted. “But how is that possible?”
Mr. Morningside grinned and peered out from the crack in the door, just one bright yellow eye visible as he purred, “I don’t pretend to truly know even my oldest friends, Louisa, and neither should you.”
I was no longer certain of many things, but one thing I knew in my heart was that Mary could not be a killer. Nothing about her gentle aspect and goodness told me she was capable of turning Amelia Canny into a dried-up husk with liquefied eyeballs. Rather than freeing me of one concern, Mr. Morningside had simply added another to the growing pile.
Mary, a killer. Those three words rolled around in my skull all through that day, rattling ’round and ’round while I served Mason, his father, and Samuel Potts their luncheon, and while I helped Chijioke gather kindling from the edge of the woods, and while I sat, silent and stumped, all through our dinner. Mary did not join us; she now only had a little bit of broth in the morning and before bed, but otherwise kept to her room and rested. I did not see my father, either, though Poppy announced to us at supper that he knew marvelous much about flowers and had given her a thrilling lecture on dandelions and all their medicinal properties.
“How nice for you,” I had told her, dazed.
Mrs. Haylam shushed her, perhaps thinking I did not want to be bothered with stories of my father, which was true, but my real distraction centered around Mary. It didn’t make any sense. Why lash out at Amelia? They had probably not even met, and nothing I had ever learned about Mary or her abilities led me to believe she could murder someone in that horrible manner. I don’t pretend to truly know even my oldest friends. Was there wisdom in that? My eyes roamed the table, falling on first Mrs. Haylam, then Poppy, and finally Chijioke. I did not claim to know any of them intimately, but did I really know so little about the people in this place?
Whether I liked it or not, I had grown to trust Poppy and Chijioke, Chijioke in particular, and maybe that was a mistake. If Mary could suck the life out of a young woman and not say a word about it, then perhaps everyone else was just as changeable and unpredictable, too.
I retired to bed that night with my head stuffed full of uncomfortable questions. Now I dreaded the nighttime, convinced that each time I slept, some new, vivid nightmare awaited. But that night passed relatively peacefully, wit
h only vague dreams of a woman’s voice in the distance; she sounded scared and sad, but I never quite knew what she was trying to tell me. It was bliss to wake after a full night’s rest, and it cajoled me into believing the remainder of the day would unfold just as nicely. I dressed hurriedly and ran downstairs for a quick breakfast. There was still no sign of the Residents as I went.
Mrs. Haylam presented me a plate of back bacon and buttered bread with no commentary.
I sat at the table by myself, listening to Chijioke sing to himself a little tune as he shooed the horses in the barn, his distant song wending its way across the grass and into the kitchens through the open door. It was fixing to be a hot, hazy day, the house already resonant with sticky warmth.
“Is Chijioke going to town today?” I asked idly.
Mrs. Haylam scrubbed an old vase at the basin, her slim back to me. “The Breens are intent on going to Malton. They believe the sightings of Amelia there are promising.”
“Ah. And the Residents? Where are they? I’ve seen not a wisp of them lately.”
“I have dispatched them to the forest and surrounding pastures,” Mrs. Haylam explained, a little tartly. “They are ranging as far as my magicks allow, searching for your mysterious man wolf.”
I stopped midchew, remembering clearly the journal entry I had just finished for Mr. Morningside. Bennu’s description in his writings matched what I had seen almost exactly, and I was beginning to think we had encountered the same creature. My silence must have perturbed Mrs. Haylam, for she slowly turned at the waist, her good eye skewering me like a well-aimed arrow.
“Any more questions?” she murmured.
“It’s just odd,” I said, picking at my bacon and spinning my teacup while I gathered my thoughts. I was not supposed to discuss the work I was doing for Mr. Morningside, but obviously she knew I was up to something with him. Perhaps a vague gesture at the truth might suffice. “I’ve been doing a good deal of reading, you know, to try to learn more about this new world I live in. . . . Mr. Morningside’s books are rather instructive.”