I studied it. An anonymous tip off had informed policiers that the eminent Shadow Kameron Elwood fabricated evidence in many of his cases. When all the documentation seized from his apartments had been categorized, it became clear that nearly half of his cases had been tampered with in some way. An innocent man had been falsely imprisoned for the past ten years due to erroneous information presented in court by Elwood.
“Couple above, I hope we didn’t miss any documentation about us,” Drystan said.
“Me too.” I looked back at the newspaper. “Ten years.”
“I know. This man was a…” Cyan called him something so rude in Temri my eyes nearly popped out of my skull.
We kept reading. Shadow Elwood protested that the documentation had been falsely planted by two people in an active case. Naturally, there was no documentation of any such cases found at his premises. We breathed sighs of relief. Reporters contacted the alleged employers, who said they never hired the services of Shadow Elwood.
I smirked. If Cyan and I were the active cases mentioned, then Styx would sooner freeze over before my parents, the Lord and Lady Laurus, would ever admit to hiring a Shadow with such a taint upon his name.
The Shadow claimed this case was the root of his downfall. Authorities were listening to his claims but disinclined to comment further. Shadow Elwood was being held in the Snakewood Prison, awaiting further justice. I wondered if they had housed him with anyone he ever investigated.
I looked up when I finished reading. “So it worked?” I didn’t feel any better.
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?” Drystan’s eyes, conversely, glowed with triumph.
“There’s still the second client or a second Shadow to worry about, though,” I said.
“What’s this?” Cyan asked.
“We found it in his notes. Elwood sensed he was being watched.”
Cyan gave a low whistle, resting her head on her hands. “More problems.” She paused. “I’ve been hoping you two would tell me, but it seems I must ask. When you went to Elwood’s,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “did you find anything about me?”
I was tempted to lie, to say we had not found anything, that the Shadow had not been hunting her or us at all. That would probably have been the wiser thing to do.
“Follow me,” I said instead and made my way from the main theatre.
I felt Drystan and Cyan’s eyes on my back as we entered the gloomy hallway. My foot kicked a loose mosaic, sending it skittering into the darkness.
We went to the loft and I pulled her file from where I had hidden it under the mattress. Her sharp eyes saw the second file underneath. I ignored the questions in her eyes and slid my own story from sight.
“He
was
following me.” Her voice was flat with surprise. She cradled the files and perched on my bed. “You could have pretended you never found anything,” she said, head bowed, hands curled loosely around the brown paper of the folder.
“That’s true enough.”
Her head rose. “So why didn’t you?”
I turned the words over in my mind before I uttered them. “You live here. You work with us. You knew who we were and you said nothing. You’ve trusted us, or I believe that you have. The least I can do is offer the same courtesy.”
She ran a fingertip over the front of the folder. “Thank you.”
I said nothing. She opened the folder and read. Drystan kept trying to catch my eye, but I would not meet it. Yes, it was perhaps foolhardy to trust her so readily. But I had lost Aenea through lies. And I did not think I trusted the wrong person. She was on the run, like me. Like us. I could find out what a Shai was from elsewhere, but the best way to hear it was from her own lips.
She closed the file.
“Well,” she said. “You read it, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Before I could lose my nerve, I asked, “What’s a Shai?”
“Hogwash, that’s what.” She fed the papers to the banked coals of the fireplace, where they smoked, blackened, and then curled.
I almost threw Iphigenia Laurus’ file onto the coals as well, but I was certain that some of his notes were written in code. I did not want to miss anything.
“How’d he find us?” Cyan asked. “It’s a big city.”
Drystan and I exchanged a look. Maybe she’d know how to work it. I retrieved the Mirror of Moirai from where it remained in Drystan’s pack. We explained to her what it was and turned it on.
Drystan and I had spent hours trying to puzzle it out. We knew that we’d both touched it enough that it would probably be able to find us. Sometimes, I almost felt as if I could puzzle out the strange Alder characters, but then they eluded me. At one point, something that looked like a stylized map appeared on the screen, but we had no idea what to do from there. Even if the second client or Shadow was somehow stored in the mirror, we did not know how to locate him through the Vestige artifact. Again, Anisa would know, perhaps, but I wanted to see if we could somehow discover its secrets ourselves, first. I wouldn’t put it past her to bring up results and then lie to me about what they were.
Cyan frowned at the mirror, touching it at random. She managed to pull up the map. “It’s Ellada,” she said. She made the area that was now Imachara bigger. Over the centuries, it had somehow mirrored the layout of the capital, and we could see its tangled streets as if we were birds flying overhead. But after a few more attempts, she gave up in defeat as well, and I put it back into the pack with a sigh. I’d hide it somewhere else later.
“Well, at least we have it, versus someone else. I wonder if we’re safe now,” she said.
“For a time, perhaps,” Drystan said. “If we really don’t want to be found, we should probably go take up in a tiny fishing village somewhere.”
Or out of Ellada. Like we planned. Though was that still the plan? Drystan and I hadn’t discussed it in ages. It seemed more a nebulous possibility than a decided future.
“Where we’d instantly be the “new strangers” in town?”
“There is that. Safety in numbers.” He ran his hand through his blonde hair.
“You two know why I left.” She gestured at the flames. “Why was Elwood looking for you?”
I shot a glance at Drystan. He raised an eyebrow. “Tell her your side if you like, but leave me out of it. You’re a nice enough girl, Cyan, but my secrets are my own.”
With that, he left. By the stiff way he held his shoulders, I could tell he was upset. There was a rightness to what I was doing. Like it had already happened and I was going through the motions like an automaton.
“My name is not Sam,” I said.
She said nothing.
“For the last few months, I’ve gone by the name Micah. But that’s not my name, either. Or at least not the one I was given.” I slid the papers out from under the mattress. “If I show you this, will you tell me what a Shai is?”
She pressed her lips together, pulling her hair over her shoulders and twisting it into a thick dark rope. “I’ll do better than that. I’ll show you.”
The silence hung between us.
Drystan had “borrowed” the Augur from Maske without his knowledge. Why, I wasn’t sure. He could be a bit of a magpie for shiny things. He’d give it back – but he wanted to prove he could take it without his old mentor noticing. Using my newly acquired sleight of hand, I had taken it from the bedside table and turned it on while she wasn’t looking. The mechanical beetle rested in my pocket, silent as could be. She told the truth. I turned it off.
I passed her the folder. She opened it and read, trailing her fingers down the vertical columns of script.
Her eyebrows rose, but she said nothing until she read the entire thing.
“You’re a girl?” she said, and she looked at me like Drystan had the night I told him on the Sicion pier. She was trying to see the woman in me. I met her gaze steadily.
“Not quite. Or rather, not only.”
Her brow furrowed.
I took a deep breath and decided to tell her.
“I’m both.”
Her eyes widened. “Really?”
“Really.”
“We had someone of both genders in the circus,” she said.
My mouth fell open. “Are they still there?”
“No. They left not long after they joined, but I don’t know why.”
“Was that person in the freakshow?”
She hesitated, then nodded.
I bit my lips. “I never was. I didn’t tell anyone in the circus what I was. Not until the very end.”
“So Amon knows?”
“He does.” I licked my lips. “Do you… care?”
“Why should I care?”
I smiled from ear to ear. I almost felt like crying.
Her fingers toyed with a corner of the paper. “That must have been difficult for you. Raised as a girl, then to leave everything that you’ve known, to have to change who you are… hide who you are again…”
“I haven’t thought of it quite like that. I’m still who I was before. But freer, despite all that’s happened.”
She smiled. “Perhaps I should switch my skirts for trousers.”
“And cut off all that hair? That’d be a tragedy.” I pulled out a strand of my shorn locks. “I still miss my long hair, sometimes.” And I did. Though I most definitely did not miss corsets and hated the one I still wore.
She clutched her hair protectively and laughed. “True.” The smile faded. “Thank you for telling me. I promise you that it’ll go no further.” She passed the file back to me.
I inclined my head and waited.
“Alright. My end of the bargain. Close your eyes,” she said.
I obeyed.
“Think of your fondest memory and hold it close. Try and remember every detail.”
My mind scrabbled in circles. What was my fondest memory?
It came to me. My brother Cyril and I by the fireside one winter’s evening in the nursery. I was young, barely old enough to read. Five, six perhaps. Cyril, two years older, seemed so big and grown up. I was trying to read an old picture book of his, frowning and frustrated.
Cyril put down his own adventure book and came over and read me the story, pointing out each word on the page as he did so. It was the tale of
The Prince and the Owlish Man
. The artwork had been beautiful printed watercolor paintings swirled through with black ink lines. The owlish man looked like death himself and frightened me. But Cyril’s presence comforted me. I leaned back against his torso, his voice reverberating against my ribs as he read. I remembered the crackle of the flames and the smell of smoke and furniture polish. I almost sighed with longing. The scene was so real in my mind’s eye. I wished I could step back into it, when my greatest difficulty was not being able to puzzle out the words on the page.
“You’re remembering a boy. He’s close to you. A brother? Sandy hair. There’s a room with a marble fireplace. A painting of trees in a gilt frame. He’s reading to you.
Prince Mael and the Owlish Man
. You are warm and safe.”
I opened my eyes and stared at her in horror. I felt dizzy, and the room wobbled.
“How did you…?”
“I don’t know,” she said, tears swimming in her eyes. “I don’t know.”
“You can read anyone’s thoughts, all the time?” She could have learned so much from one careless thought…
She shook her head. “It takes a lot of concentration. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but other times it comes out of nowhere. I try not to intrude. I have learned that people think such terrible things. Things they perhaps do not truly believe or would not do…”
She trailed off, playing with the edge of the bed quilt, and I wondered whose thoughts she remembered. I tried to concentrate on her and see if I could read her mind. Maybe I could sense a flicker of an image – a tear falling down a woman’s cheek – but I could not be sure. I blinked, a headache throbbing at my temples, my stomach roiling with nausea.
“That’s why the Glamour didn’t work on you?” I said, quietly.
Cyan bent her head, silver dust from the Kymri Princess levitation falling to the floor. Her eyes were downcast, her fingers intertwined. She rubbed her thumb pads together. “You knew what you looked like. Both of you. That’s why it didn’t work.”
“And that’s why you were a fortuneteller in the circus.”
“Nay.” She shook her head. “I learned to read the tarot first, and nothing strange happened for years. But then a man came to have a reading and I had… a vision. My first one. What I saw didn’t make sense. The man gripped my hands so hard it hurt. He kept ordering me to tell him what I saw, over and over again. When I did, he nodded, threw some coins on the table, and left.”
“What did he look like?” I focused on her again, but saw and sensed nothing. I felt a surge of disappointment.
“I don’t remember what he looked like. When I try, his face is blurred, like the reflection in a puddle.” She shrugged. The wording of it mirrored how Anisa had described the second client of the Shadow. The same man?
“What did you see?”
“Flashes. Monsters. Chimaera. A woman with bat wings. A boy with a scaled face. Blue light. The sky on fire.” She shook her head. “Nonsense.”
“You have no idea who he was?”
She shook her head. “No. I asked around the circus, but no one else even saw him. After that, I started hearing or seeing things more often. I responded to others’ thoughts, thinking they spoke aloud. I learned who in the circus did not like me one bit. Or liked me too much. Sometimes, my dreams come true. Or my nightmares,” she whispered.
“Nightmares?”
She nodded. “The night before I left the circus I had a horrible dream. A circus accident. The animal trainer, Liam. Someone in the audience was going to frighten the lion. I told my mother I was going to go warn him. Plead for him to take the night off and not perform that day. My parents… they wouldn’t let me. Said it was only a dream or a dark spirit possessed me. They feared I was a Shai.
“I let them convince me it had all been in my head. They took me away from the circus, saying that a day in the city would do me good.”