Dagger's Edge (Shadow series) (2 page)

Jael felt comfortable with Aunt Shadow, a rare sensation. Donya often called Shadow in when her unpredictable daughter became too much for her or asked uncomfortable questions. Shadow never flinched from a question, nor dissembled, nor talked around it, nor bothered overmuch with politeness and tact. Jael could speak plainly and frankly to the older elf about what bothered her and expect an equally frank answer in return, whether the subject was sex, death, Shadow’s own personal life, or what the peasants were saying about her. If there was a question Shadow couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, she said as much, and that was that. But she never refused to listen. Shadow even took Jael along when she gambled, and if she lost, she’d shrug and grin the same familiar grin, laugh, “It’s only coin,” and proceed to lift the winner’s purse on the way out anyway.

When Jael had first complained that she seemed to be a bone of contention to everyone in Allanmere, including her own parents, and couldn’t seem to do anything to her parents’ or instructors’ satisfaction, Shadow had pulled out a dagger and held it out, one sharp edge upright, over the table.

“See this?” Shadow said, touching the sharp edge gingerly. “Humans on the one side, elves always on the other. You can walk the dagger’s edge if your balance is good, but you’re likely to cut your feet in the walking. Allanmere tries to live on the dagger’s edge, and so do you, Jael. Right now you’re just feeling a little sore in the feet, that’s all.”

It had become their private joke, Jael’s sore feet.

One day Jael learned that Shadow was well over five hundred years old, and asked the elf why her hair was so much shorter than that of their mutual friend Aubry, the Guildmaster of the Guild of Thieves, who hadn’t even passed his first century. Shadow had been silent for a moment, and Jael wondered if she’d asked a bad question, but Shadow had grinned the same sideways grin when she answered.

“Well, little sapling,” she said, “his hair’s longer because it’s never been cut off. I cut my hair off not too long before you were born, and it’ll take a good many years to grow out

completely again.”

“Why did you cut it off?” Jael asked.

“I cut it off and gave it to a god,” Shadow said. “At least, I think it was a god.”

“Why?”

Shadow shrugged. “To swap for a cure for the Crimson Plague. You
already
know about the plague,
don’t
you?”

“But the histories say Mother and Father brought back the cure,” Jael argued.

“Well, they did, they did,” Shadow said amiably. “But not without help. Mist had a part in it, too, and so did I. Get your mother to tell you the story someday.”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Jael said practically.

Shadow chuckled.

“Sorry, sapling,” she said. “I think that one is your mother’s story to tell, not mine.”

But Donya had only blanched and changed the subject when Jael asked for the story. Certain questions, Jael had learned, elicited that reaction from her mother—why did Jael look the way she did, how had Donya and Argent gotten married, why had Jael been born without a twin, something unheard of in human-elven pairings.

Once she had confided in her mother that she sometimes felt so stifled in the city, as if nothing would satisfy her until she ran so far and so fast that the world fell away under her. To her dismay, Donya had gone white and hurriedly turned away, but that evening had come to Jael’s room, face taut and hands trembling, and quietly walked with her daughter out to the castle lawn and dismissed every guard on the grounds.

“Go on,” Donya told her, her voice hoarse. “Run as far as you can, as fast as ever you can, and then come back here to me.”

Jael had been puzzled and not a little frightened by her mother’s intensity, but she had obeyed, running there in the moonlight, her bare feet pounding through the grass until her breath boomed hollowly and pain stitched up her side, and when she could run no more, she staggered back to her mother, who looked tired but relieved, and Donya folded her daughter into her arms with a ragged sigh.

“Feel better now?” Donya murmured, and Jael, with no breath to spare, simply nodded.

“So do I,” Donya said strangely, bending to kiss Jael’s rumpled hair. “Let’s go back inside now.”

“So what’re you daydreaming about, little acorn?” Shadow said, squeezing the last of the water out of her hair.

“I heard one of Mother’s mages talking about me,” Jael said. “He said they’re calling me Jaellyn the Cursed in the city now. Last I heard it was just Jaellyn the Unlucky, and that was bad enough.”

“I wouldn’t take that too seriously,” Shadow comforted her. “Lady Ria, the wife of Sharl II, they called her Ria the Fey. For a while they were calling your own mother Donya the Sharp-Edged, which you could take a couple of ways if you like. For some reason humans seem to think it’s necessary to give rulers kind of doubtful nicknames.”

“Maybe I
am
cursed,” Jael sighed. “Everything I do seems to go wrong. And when I’m around, everything anybody else does goes wrong, too.”

“Now, now, nothing’s gone wrong when you were with me,” Shadow chided.

“What about when you took me along to watch when you did that moneychanger and the roof fell through with you on it?” Jael countered.

“Well, that wasn’t the bad luck,” Shadow laughed. “The bad luck was your mother finding out about it.”

“
I
don’t think it’s funny,” Jael said crossly. The one thing that sometimes troubled her about Aunt Shadow was the elf’s occasionally overconsistent levity.

“Neither did Donya,” Shadow admitted. “Sorry, sproutling, just trying to make you feel better. But you know, Jael, that couldn’t have been your fault anyway. Lirtik just got cheap and let the waterproofing spell lapse on the roof, and the supports just rotted out.” Shadow chuckled. “You know, in the confusion, I
still
got a pretty good haul out of that.”

“Most of which Mother and Father made you spend paying for Lirtik’s healer and a new roof,” Jael reminded her. “And you got off easy. I was confined to my rooms for a month.”

“That’s not the point,” Shadow said patiently. “The point is that you aren’t single-handedly responsible for all the bad luck in Allanmere, although I admit sometimes it looks like you’ve got hold of Fortune’s left hand and won’t let go. I’d feel sorry for you, but it looks like you’ve got that pretty well taken care of yourself. Lend me some clean clothes, and let’s go find your parents before the twins are done with their lessons.”

In this, however, as usual, Jael’s bad luck prevailed; as soon as Shadow wrapped a towel around herself and they stepped into the corridor, Jael and Shadow all but collided

with Mera and Markus, sweaty and grimy from their sword practice but their energy unabated.

“Shadow! Shadow!” Mera shrieked, throwing her arms around the elf; Markus followed suit, enveloping Shadow in a tangle of smelly hugs. Although the twins were only ten years old, sturdy, dark-haired Mera was already as tall as Jael, and a head taller than Shadow. Markus, slender and graceful like Argent, his silver hair tucked back behind delicately pointed ears, was only a little shorter and twice as bouncy.

“Where did you go? Where have you been?” Mera cried, whirling Shadow around and around until the elf retreated to put the wall at her back.

“It’s been more than a year,” Markus added. “Why have you stayed away so long? Have you brought us back anything nice?”

“I’ve been all sorts of places,” Shadow said patiently, “and I’ve been gone a long time because those places were so far away, mostly down around the south coast. And yes, I brought you something, but you aren’t going to get it until you let me get back to my pack in Jael’s room.”

No sooner were the words out of Shadow’s mouth than the twins all but carried her down the hall to Jael’s quarters, Jael trailing exasperatedly behind.

The twins did not quite dare to pass the door—Jael had made it clear, Donya and Argent supporting her, that her room was off limits on pain of death or dismemberment—but they bounced and chattered impatiently until Shadow rummaged through her pack and produced a pouch of sweets and a pair of cunningly carved bone flutes. Mera and Markus shouted with delight and vanished down the hall, loud and mismatched notes already echoing off the stone.

“Nobody in the castle will thank you for giving them those,” Jael said wryly. “They make enough racket as it is.”

“I didn’t think about that,” Shadow admitted. “I thought if they took an interest in music it might settle them down a little. Come to think of it, I’ve got something in here for you, too.” She rummaged through the pack and tossed a small pouch to Jael.

Jael opened the pouch and examined the contents interestedly. It contained nothing but a number of polished pieces of black volcanic glass, cut into different unusual shapes.

“It’s a game,” Shadow told her. “The pieces fit together in many different ways, but if you fit them together the right way, they make a perfect cube.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jael admitted, already trying to fit some of the pieces together. It was far more difficult than it had looked originally. “Where did you find it?”

“I found this in a mage’s shop,” Shadow said. “The mage said it was to train young initiates in patience and concentration. I was there selling a potion I’d come into possession of, and this little bauble just seemed to say, ‘Buy me for Jaellyn.’ So I did, and thankfully it had been a good day in the market. I thought it might cheer you up someday when you were a little”—Shadow chuckled— “sore in the feet.”

“Oh, Aunt Shadow, it’s a wonderful gift,” Jael said, grinning to acknowledge the joke. “And maybe it’ll teach me concentration and patience, too, eh?”

“For your instructors’ sake, I hope so,” Shadow agreed. “Now hide it away before the twins see it, and find me those clothes, will you?”

Jael’s tunic and trousers were too big for Shadow, of course, but not unmanageably so, and Shadow did not look too absurd with the sleeves and trousers rolled up.

“Now I’m going to talk to your parents,” Shadow said, giving Jael’s shoulder a squeeze. “I don’t imagine they’ll want you there, so I won’t take you with me. See if you can find someone to clean my clothes, will you, and when we’re done, you can join us for supper and I’ll have a few new stories to tell you.”

“Yes, Aunt Shadow.” Jael sighed and sat down on the bed.

Shadow paused in the doorway, then turned back.

“And don’t let your mother catch you on the walls,” Shadow said sternly, belying her tone with a grin and a wink. “Yes, Aunt Shadow,” Jael said solemnly, stifling an answering grin.

As soon as Shadow was gone, Jael slipped back out the hidden door to the castle grounds. At the west end of the north wall was another hidden
door, this one opening to a
stairway. The stairway took Jael to the second level of the castle; another passageway took her to the uppermost walk, and Jael quickly slipped out onto the parapets.

From the upper parapets Jael could easily work her way down to the balcony of an empty room on the third floor of the castle. Jael had used that balcony many times before; she took the knotted rope from its hiding place at the bottom of a huge stone urn, tied one end to the base of that same urn for anchoring, and slid down the rope to the second-floor parapets. From there she had only to edge quietly to her listening spot, a comfortable niche outside her parents’ sitting-room window. From here Jael could carefully, if rather awkwardly, twist around to peer through the ivy framing the window so that she had a reasonably full view of the room.

High Lady Donya, still robed in her surcoat for council, was fussing while she poured Shadow a mug of wine.

“Sorry you were worried, Doe,” Shadow said, leaning back in her chair to put her feet up on the table. “But it takes time to find merchant caravans coming north.”

“You could have taken a boat,” Donya said exasperatedly. “The Brightwater joins up with the Wirrilind not far south, and that flows straight down to the south coast. You could’ve been back here in less than two weeks.”

“Boats.” Shadow grimaced. “Fortune blight the leaky things. If elves were meant to float around on the water they’d have webbed feet like a duck.”

“Well, I was worried!” Donya scolded. “And I would certainly think that in an emergency you’d—”

“All right, Doe,” Shadow said mildly, but Jael and Donya both knew that particular tone; it meant that Shadow wasn’t in the mood to take much more.

“I’m sorry.” Donya sighed raggedly. “I had a rough time in council this afternoon. Argent’s still there, talking to a few people separately.” She opened her jewel box and took out a ring, handing it to Shadow. “Here’s the signet back.”

Shadow shook her head as she slipped the ring back onto one slender finger.

“Didn’t realize what a lead rope I was tying around my neck when I agreed to keep this with me,” she said wryly. “Do you know what I was doing when this thing vanished off my finger?”

“I can imagine,” Donya said, chuckling.

“So tell me,” Shadow said, gulping her wine, “did I hopefully miss the crisis, or did my getting dragged out of my lover’s very arms have anything to do with your nasty council session, and maybe why you didn’t send Jael to the forest this summer?”

Donya shook her head amusedly.

“Gods, Shady, I suppose you know all about the temple, too?”

Jael’s ears twitched. That must be the Temple of Baaros; that particular temple figured prominently in many of Mother and Father’s late-night discussions, when they didn’t concern Jael herself.

“Temple?” Shadow asked, raising her black eyebrows. “Don’t tell me the sprout’s gone and joined one of those strange new celibate sects, and the elves are so disgusted they won’t let her visit?”

“Oh, Shady, don’t be ridiculous,” Donya chided. “No, the Temple of Baaros doesn’t have anything to do with Jaellyn— not directly, that is.”

“Well, start from the beginning, then,” Shadow said resignedly. “There’s plenty of wine. But try not to make it too long; I’ve had nothing but a bite or two, and I’m starving.”

“The Temple of Baaros opened not long after you left last year,” Donya told her. “I didn’t think anything of it at first— just another mercantile sect, god of profitable trade, you know the type. But it’s becoming a problem. The High Priest, An-karas, has been preaching that elves are soulless creatures, descended from the union of demons and animals.”