Page 109
“None other but the infamous…”
“Shadow King.”
“The Shadow King.”
The name dropped into the buried chamber and seemed to take the warmth of the torches with it. None of us moved. Even Aster, who had a jest ready for the end of the world itself, said nothing at all.
I had heard the name before. Every child of Theïkós had. He was the story told to frighten us into our beds. The king of a realm no one dared chart on a map. A being so old and so terrible that the gods themselves were said to tread carefully in his presence.
A myth.
A bedtime cruelty.
Not a thing a sane man pinned his hopes upon while the woman he loved rotted from the heart outward two floors above his head.
“No.” The word came out flat and final. “You are speaking of a story, Theron. A ghost mothers use to keep their children from wandering.”
“I am speaking of a king, and you know it, Atlas.” Theron turned the empty box in his hands before setting it down upon the pedestal with great care, as though it were the only thing in the room worth handling gently. “One older than your royal line and mine combined. And the only creature in either world with the power to take back what has been put into your queen, because the darkness in her is his to command, whether he willed its making or not.”
“Then he will not help us.” I dragged my hand down my face. “And even if he could… even if he would, how in all the realms would we ever cross into his realm? They say no living thing passes its borders. That the very ground turns strangers away, and if the tales are true, not in a polite way.”
Death was never polite.
“They say a great many things,” he replied as something flickered at the corner of his mouth, that maddening half-smile he wore when the king knew more than anyone else in the room. “And most of them, for once, are true. The shadow lands do not suffer trespassers. Cross without the right blood in your veins, and it will not simply send you back. It drinks what you offer, and when it finds you wanting, it drinks the rest and keeps whatever is left at the threshold. A warning to the next fool who comes seeking. Only those whose blood it knows may come and go as they please, those born of the realm itself.” He paused, and the smile sharpened. “That is not entirely the whole of it, however.”
“Then speak the rest,” I snapped, my patience for this conversation diminishing by the second.
“Blood.” He let the word sit before continuing on, “The realm knows blood, Atlas… The blood of those who belong to it and the blood of kings. Royal ancestry, old and sovereign, it has always been willing to taste. A throne speaks to a throne, even across the dark.” I stared at him in shock.
I had spent my whole life believing the Shadow King a fable, and here stood another king speaking of him the way a man speaks of a neighbor he would rather not borrow from.
Aster folded his arms, and there it was, the dry edge I had known half my life. “On first-name terms, are we?” He tilted his head at Theron. “And how, exactly, do you imagine this master of myths is going to feel about four-armed strangers and an unconscious human strolling into the heart of his kingdom uninvited?”
“Leave that to me,” Theron said with admirable confidence. Yet, I was far from convinced.
“And that right there is precisely what worries me,” Aster muttered, and he wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Because I had stopped listening. The longer they spoke of doors, blood, and the legendary king of death and shadow, the further I drifted from the only thing that mattered. The cold certainty was rising in me that we were wasting what little time she had left chasing a shadow.
“This will never work,” I stated angrily, but was already moving, already at the foot of the stairs. “It is madness. I will not stake her life on a children’s story nor the word of a creature who bargains in half-truths and keeps his real price behind his teeth. I need a real answer. A viable one!” I took the steps two at a time, the dark of that chamber clawing at my back. “And I need to get back to her.”
I climbed out of the deep and the dark with the others on my heels, up through the cellars and the old kitchens and the long bright halls. I didn’t slow, didn’t speak, not until I had thrown open the doors of my own chambers and crossed to the bed.
To her.
Alexandra lay where I had left her, small against the dark sheets, and the sight of her stopped the breath in my chest the way it did every single time. She had not improved. I had known she would not, and still some fool part of me had hoped. The shadowed veins had crept further in the hour I had been gone. Now past her collarbone, reaching up the side of her throat in fine black branches. The rest of her skin had taken on a gray, clammy sheen that had no business on her beautiful face.
The others filed in behind me. I heard the door close, but I didn’t bother to turn around.
“It will work.” Theron’s voice came quiet but certain from somewhere near the hearth. “I am telling you, Atlas, it will work. He is the only one who can undo this. The only one strong enough to reach inside the darkness and pull it back out of her without killing her. He is, after all, the master of shadows and darkness itself. This…” I felt rather than saw him gesture toward her, “…is his to unmake.”
“And I am telling you it cannot be done.” I did not raise my voice. I had no voice left to raise. “You would have me carry her across two worlds, half-dead, to beg a favor of a king who has obviously never once in all his long ages lifted a finger for anyone but himself.”
“What other choice do you have?” Theron’s question was gentle, which was so much worse. “Look at her and then tell me you have a better one.”
I had none.
We both knew it.
“Besides.” Theron came to stand at the foot of the bed, and when I finally looked up, his green-blue eyes were fixed on Alexandra with an expression I could not name. “I have a feeling he will be very interested indeed to learn that someone has been abusing the power of his realm. Stealing his shadows. Wearing it like a stolen coat and releasing it on worlds that were never his to touch.”
