Page 2 of Taken By Shadows

I ignored them.

The shale pathways of the Banes were treacherous in the spring. In the winter. And even in the summer and autumn. There was no safe time to climb these ridges. But I needed to be here. I had found the key to my liberty lay in these hills.

Tacking my fingers with rosin, I looked to the lavender-grey cliff face before me. The Banes were impassable for most and avoided by everyone else. Stories of what lay beyond the highest peaks, the wastes to the Western tip, kept people away, even if the harsh conditions didn’t.

But I had found a reason to come back here time and time again. It had been a pure fluke that I’d happened upon the first shard of adamyte when I had been foraging in the foothills. And I was the only one who climbed this high. Adamyte was valuable and my window to the wider world. So I climbed the sheer crags and scaled the rough outcrops until I found the milky white crystal shafts. The higher you climbed, the larger the crystals.

This high up, the air was thin and wrapped in snares of chilled clouds. Hardy silver flowers still grew from the barren cliffs, bobbing and swaying in the mountain air. If they could survive here, so could I.

My fingertips were numb by the time I trudged back to the house. The shingled roof of the house I grew up in was covered in packed snow from the long winter refusing to pass the watch to spring. The thick wooden panels that made up the walls of the little building were warped and bowed in places. Having the forest on the edge of Shadowfall meant most buildings were made of wood rather than stone. Convenient for building, bad for withstanding the harsh winters this far into the mountains.

Mercifully, the fire was constantly glowing in the hearth.

Leesha had busied herself with peeling carrots, and the smell of rosemary and warm thyme filled the small room. Maybe I should have begun to distance myself from this place, but instead, I sat in the common area for warmth, my feet tucked under me, and the pages of my book flipped open to the well-worn divots in the book spine.

I had been seven when I acquired my first book from a trader who happened upon Shadowfall. He’d gotten lost in a snowstorm and taken shelter in the trees only to find himself on the wrong side of the thicket when the snow cleared. I think he’d taken pity on me; the only child sitting alone, braiding her own hair instead of helping others with theirs. The book was old even then, its pages ragged and yellowed. But the stories were alive with colours and tales of imagined wonders I had never even dreamt of. I had offered him payment—a few pretty pebbles and a shiny button Ellen had lost from one of her dresses years before—but he’d just smiled and pressed the book into my hands.

Reading it now, even years later, my skin still tingled with the thrill of the stories of wyverns and their blue fire. Sea serpents that slept for hundreds of years on the ocean beds. Vicious land drakes. Fae witches and spells, even greater than fae magic.

And every time I read the stories, a tiny well of something rippled inside of me—an empty well, gasping for water. Fae could wield magic like people wove fabric or sang music into existence. It was created from deep within a person. But fae witches could grow magic like a seed, singing it into a full forest.

I had bought more books over time and found recounting history far more practical than wyverns and fae witches. Legends and history were threads woven together in pages, not reality.

The door swung open to the night air where Jon stood, his gangly form covered in heavy snowflakes. He tamped his boots on the hardwood floor twice, dislodging the icy packs from the soles before kissing his wife.

Leesha’s face was wan when she kissed him, and I knew the look was because of me. I hadn’t meant to cause her worry, but my leaving was draining her thoughts.

“Perhaps now isn’t the best time to leave,” Jon offered me as he looked at Leesha. Whether he felt that or was just echoing the thoughts Leesha had, I wasn’t sure. He was a quiet man whose compass pointed towards practicality. But his one weakness was Leesha.

I lifted my head and flipped the book closed.

“The Four Corners are not a safe place to travel alone.” Jon turned to me, shucking off his coat and leaving the brace of rabbits on the table for dinner. As the son of a butcher, he had always been able to provide food for us, for Leesha. He was a good hunter too. But I did wonder how Jon had any knowledge of the Four Corners and what went on beyond Shadowfall. It had taken more than some persuading to get Jon to even leave his family home and move in with Leesha once they were married, so leaving Shadowfall was a dream he and I did not share.

“I’m sure the soldiers of the North and Eastern Corners have better things to do than recruit someone like me,” I tried to joke. But Jon’s face hardened at the mention of the last two real seats of power in the Corners.

“They don’t just recruit, Imogen.” His eyes flattened. “People go missing. Not everyone is friendly to—” He paused, as he always did, when he had to speak about my heritage. “To people like you,” he settled on. I repressed a comment about how no one was friendly to people “like me.”

He meant well. My books on the Two-Hundred-Year War were somewhat outdated, but the scars of the conflict still clung to the land even after two centuries and its people despite its end some twenty years ago. Somewhere as rural as Shadowfall had been largely unscathed, but superstitions and stories travelled like wildfire. Fae and humans had fought alongside each other and fought each other. The war wasn’t about race, but power. But it had left humans wary of fae. And new scars had rooted in the Four Corners that left a divide between fae and humans. The irony was, I was no more a threat to humans than they were to themselves.

“I plan to travel to the Southern Corner.” I tried to direct the conversation away from worry, for Leesha’s sake. “I’ll travel the coastal regions first.” I pulled at the shard of shell around my neck. I would follow the rivers south, to the warmer Corners.

A flicker of a smile flashed over Jon’s gaunt face, a candle flame wavering in a breeze. “Sure, sure,” he murmured as he allowed his eyes to drop to the floor.

I offered a weak smile of my own as I moved to help Leesha with the stew.

Whether any of us believed I could find what I was looking for beyond the confines of Shadowfall, I had ignored the call to leave for long enough.

I just had one person left to speak to.

Tomorrow. I would do it tomorrow.

The emerald green water font in the village square was possibly the brightest thing in the drab village. It was laced with frozen pearls of water that dripped like beads on a string to the unpaved ground beneath.

This was the meeting point Bray and I had always used. I shifted on my feet as I waited. I hated that even now, even after twenty-four years of being here, the townsfolk of Shadowfall still regarded me like I had arrived yesterday. Bray had always been kinder to me than most. He didn’t laugh or throw stones, and he somehow managed to straddle the friendships of the people of Shadowfall and me. Leesha and Jon had had a hard enough time being associated with the fae outsider until they’d gotten married. As though settling down together heralded the end of my presence in the small village. And I supposed it was true.

I was leaving. I just had to tell Bray.

I didn’t belong here. I felt it in the bones of the trees around me as they caged me to this place. I heard it in the whispers of the villagers who passed me, in the side glances at my pale hair and violet eyes. The elders of the town were no better than the children. They swayed between ignoring their offspring when they hounded me to outright encouraging them to avoid me, lest I wield my magic on them.