Shapeshifters (2 page)

I
TOOK A DEEP BREATH TO STEADY MY NERVES
and narrowly avoided retching from the sharp, well-known stench that surrounded me.

The smell of hot avian blood spattered on the stones, and cool serpiente blood that seemed ready to dissolve the skin off my hands if I touched it. The smell of burned hair and feathers and skin of the dead smoldered in the fire of a dropped lantern. Only the fall of rain all the night before had kept that fire from spreading through the clearing to the woods.

From the forest to my left, I heard the desperate, strangled cry of a man in pain.

I started to move toward the sound, but when I took a step through the trees in his direction, I came upon a sight that made my knees
buckle, my breath freezing as I fell to the familiar body.

Golden hair, so like my own, was swept across the boy's eyes, closed forever now but so clear in my mind. His skin was gray in the morning light, covered with a light spray of dew. My younger brother, my only brother, was dead.

Like our sister and our father years ago, like our aunts and uncles and too many friends, Xavier Shardae was forever grounded. I stared at his still form, willing him to take a breath and open eyes whose color would mirror my own. I willed myself to wake up from this nightmare.

I could not be the last.
The last child of Nacola Shardae, who was all the family I had left now.

I wanted to scream and weep, but a hawk does not cry, especially here on the battlefield, in the midst of the dead and surrounded only by her guards. She does not scream or beat the ground and curse the sky.

Among my kind, tears were considered a disgrace to the dead and shame among the living.

Avian reserve.
It kept the heart from breaking with each new death. It kept the warriors fighting a war no one could win. It kept me standing when I had nothing to stand for but bloodshed.

I could not cry for my brother, though I wanted to.

I pushed the sounds away, forcing my lips not
to tremble. Only one heavy breath escaped me, wanting to be a sigh. I lifted my dry eyes to the guards who stood about me protectively in the woods.

“Take him home,” I ordered, my voice wavering a bit despite my resolve.

“Shardae, you should come home, too.”

I turned to Andreios, the captain of the most elite flight in the avian army, and took in the worried expression in his soft brown eyes. The crow had been my friend for years before he had been my guard, and I began to nod assent to his words.

Another cry from the woods made me freeze. I started toward it, but Andreios caught my arm just above the elbow. “Not that one, milady.”

Normally I would have trusted his judgment without question, but not here on the battlefield. I had been walking these bloody fields whenever I could ever since I was twelve; I could not avert my eyes when we were in the middle of this chaos and someone was pleading, with what was probably his last breath, for help. “And why not, Andreios?”

The crow knew he was in trouble the instant I addressed him by his full name instead of his childhood nickname of Rei, but he kept on my heels as I stepped around the slain bodies and closer to the voice. The rest of his flight fell back, out of sight in their second forms—crows and
ravens, mostly. They would take my brother home only when it did not mean leaving me alone here.

“Dani.” In return, I knew Rei was serious when he lapsed into the informal and used
my
nickname, Dani, instead of a respectful title or my surname, Shardae. Even when we were alone, Rei rarely called me Danica. It was an entreaty to our lifelong friendship when he used that nickname where someone else could hear it, and so I paused to listen. “That's Gregory Cobriana. You don't want his blood on your hands.”

For a moment the name meant nothing to me. With his hair streaked with blood and his expression a mask of pain, Gregory Cobriana could have been anyone's brother, husband or son. But then I recognized the stark black hair against his fair skin, the onyx signet ring on his left hand and, as he looked up, the deep garnet eyes that were a trademark of the Cobriana line, just as molten gold eyes were characteristic of my own family.

I did not have the energy to rage. Every emotion I had was cloaked in the shield of reserve I had learned since I was a chick.

Evidently the serpiente prince recognized me as well, for his pleas caught in his throat, and his eyes closed.

I stepped toward him and heard a flutter of movement as my guards moved closer, ready to intervene if the fallen man was a threat.

With all his various scratches and minor injuries, it was hard to tell where the worst of the damage was. I saw a broken leg, possibly a broken arm; either of those he could heal from.

What would I do if that was the worst? If he was hurt, but not too hurt to survive? This was the man who had led the soldiers that had killed my brother and his guards. Would I turn my back so the Royal Flight could finish what all these fallen fighters had not?

For a moment I thought of taking my knife and putting it in his heart or slitting his throat myself and ending the life this creature still held while my brother lay dead.

Despite my guards' protest, I went again to my knees, this time beside the enemy. I looked at that pale face and tried to summon the fury I needed.

His eyes fluttered open and met mine. A muddy shade of red, Gregory Cobriana's eyes were filled with pain, sorrow and fear. The fear struck me the most. This
boy
looked a couple of years younger than I was, too young to deserve this horror, too young to die.

Bile rose in my throat. I loved my brother, but I could not murder his killer. I could not look into the eyes of a boy terrified of death and shaking from pain and feel hatred. This was a life: serpiente, yes, but still a
life;
who was I to steal it?

Only as I recoiled did I see the wound on his stomach, where a knife had dragged itself raggedly across the soft flesh, one of the most painful of mortal blows. The attacker must have been killed before he could finish the deed.

Perhaps my brother had held the knife. Had he lain dying alone like this afterward?

I felt a sob choke my throat and couldn't stop it. Gregory Cobriana was the enemy, but here on the battlefield he was just another brother to another sister, fallen on the field. I could not cry for my own brother; he would not want me to. But I found myself crying for this hated stranger and the endless slaughter that I had almost contributed to.

I spun on Rei. “This is why this stupid war goes on. Because even when he's dying, you can only feel your hate,” I spat, too quietly for the serpiente prince to hear me.

“If I was in this man's place, I would pray for someone to kneel by my side,” I continued. “And I wouldn't care if that person was Zane Cobriana himself.”

Rei knelt awkwardly beside me. For a moment, his hand touched my hand, unexpectedly. His gaze met mine, and I heard him sigh quietly with understanding.

I turned back to the serpiente. “I'm here; don't fret,” I said as I smoothed black hair from Gregory's face.

His eyes filled with tears and he muttered something that sounded like “Thank you.” Then he looked straight up at me and said, “End it. Please.”

These words made me wince. I had been thinking the same thing just moments before, but even though I knew he was asking me to stop the pain, I did not want mine to be the hand that ended another's life.

“Dani?” Rei asked worriedly when a tear fell from my eyes onto Gregory's hand.

I shook my head and wrapped my hand around Gregory's cool one. The muscles tightened, and then he was gripping my hand like it was his last anchor to earth.

When I drew the knife from my waist, Rei caught my wrist and shook his head.

Quietly, so Gregory could not hear, I argued, “It could take him hours to die like this.”

“Let the hours pass,” Rei answered, though I could see the muscles in his jaw tighten. “Serpiente believe in mercy killing, but not when it's the other side who does it. Not when it's the heir to the Tuuli Thea who ends the life of one of their two surviving princes.”

We sat in the field most of the day, until Gregory's grip on my hand loosened and his ragged breathing froze.

As I had often done for dying avian soldiers, I sang to pass the time, and to distract him from
the pain. The songs were about freedom. They were about children, able to play and sing and dance without worrying that they would be harmed.

The song I loved most of all, though, was the one my mother used to sing to me when I was a child, before I had been given round-the-clock nurses, maids, servants and guards. It was from long before my mother had become a distant queen with too much dignity to show affection even to her last remaining daughter. I would have given up all the pampering and all the respect I had earned those past few years if I could have climbed into her arms and gone back to a time when I was still too young to understand that my father, my sister and now my brother had been butchered in this war, which had been going on so long nobody could tell anymore what it was about or who had started it.

I had heard of avians and serpiente who had lived five hundred years or more, but no one did that now. Not in a time when both sides slaughtered each other so frequently, and so efficiently.

The only male child left to inherit the serpiente throne was Zane Cobriana, a creature whose name was rarely mentioned in polite avian society, and if he died … hopefully the murderous royal house of the serpiente would die with him. Yet now that Gregory Cobriana, the youngest and last brother of our greatest enemy, was
dead in front of me, I could not be grateful for the loss. All I could do was sing gently the old childhood lullaby called “Hawksong” that my mother had sung to me long ago.

B
Y THE TIME
I found sleep that night, back in the Hawk's Keep, my throat was tight with too many tears unshed, screams unuttered and prayers whose words I could never seem to find.

M
Y MOTHER
, L
ADY
N
ACOLA
S
HARDAE, WAS
like a bronze statue as she watched the pyre consume yet another of her children on Mourner's Rock. Firelight gave a copper cast to her fair skin, matching the gold of her hair and her dry eyes.

Earlier the Royal Flight had been present; they had flown the body here and built the pyre. But as the fire snapped in its last moments, only the family of the deceased remained. It made brutally plain how few of us were left.

My mother and I held silent vigil until the last ember had turned gray and the wind had whipped the ashes into the sky.

When the silence was broken, my mother's words were even and clear, betraying none of the
pain or anger that she must have felt. “Shardae, you're not to go back to the fields,” she commanded. “I know your view on the subject. I also know you will be queen in barely a month. Your people need you.”

Among avians, the heir traditionally became queen when she carried her first child. That did not seem a likely occurrence for me anytime soon, but my mother had decided it was time for power to change hands despite tradition.

“Yes, Mother.”

I had been preparing to take the throne ever since my older sister died when I was ten, but my mother had rarely approved of my methods. I knew going to the fields was dangerous, as was visiting anyone outside the heavily defended Hawk's Keep, but how could I rule my people if I refused to leave the safety of my home? I could not know them if I never faced the world they lived in, and that included the spattered blood of the fields.

For now, I held my tongue. This was not the time to argue.

 

M
Y MOTHER LEFT
before I did. When she shifted form and spread her wings, a black cloud seemed to rise from the cliffs above us, half a dozen ravens and crows guarding her even here.

I hung back a bit, hesitating on the black rock and repeating over and over the words
No time for tears.
I knew there would be no energy left for living if I grieved too deeply for each loss, but each funeral was harder to turn from than the last.

Eventually, I forced the creeping sorrow back, until I knew I could stay composed when I faced my people, with no trace of anxiety on my face or grief or anger in my eyes.

As I lingered, a single crow detached from the rock above me. He circled once before returning to his post, assured that I was still here, standing strong.

There was nothing left to do.

As I shifted my tired human form into one with powerful wings and golden-brown feathers, I let out a shriek. Fury, pain, fear; they dissolved into the sky as I pushed myself beyond them with every smack of my wings against the air.

 

I
T WAS LATE
when I returned to the Hawk's Keep, the tower that housed what was left of my family, the highest-ranking soldiers and the most prominent artisans, merchants and speakers of the avian court.

With my mother's command, the seven floors of the Keep had changed from my safe home to my prison. Instead of being a refuge from the blood and pain, the walls were suddenly a trap keeping me from reality.

With Andreios standing near in case of trouble that never occurred inside, I lingered on the first floor, fifteen feet above the ground-level courtyards and training grounds. I watched the last of the merchants pack up their belongings, some grateful to have rooms in the higher levels of the Keep, but most wary of the world they would be returning to when they left here.

Market lasted from dawn to dusk. Merchants and storytellers would gather on this floor, along with common people, and during the day the Tuuli Thea and her heirs—her only heir, now—would go among them and listen for complaints. The artisans had nearly been strangled out of avian society by the war, but my mother had started encouraging the ones who remained to show their wares. The avian market was famous for its craftsmanship, and losing those arts completely would have been tragic.

Along with crafts, custom weapons and other fine luxuries, stories and gossip could be found at the market. This was where merchants, farmers and anyone else who did not fight heard all the details.

I had seen enough serpiente soldiers fallen beside our own over the years, and now, with the image of Gregory Cobriana branded into my mind, I was reminded once again that they were just as mortal as my own kind. However, fear
makes all enemies more dangerous, and the stories told in the marketplace on this night were as sickening as ever.

Parents lamented their dead children. One young man broke down in tears, a display of emotion quite unseemly in avian society, as he recalled his father's death. Gossip traveled like a river: how the serpiente fought like the demons that legends said they had taken their power from, how their eyes could kill you if you looked into them long enough, how …

I tried to stop listening.

My people greeted me with polite words, just as they had the day before. Another hawk child was dead, along with a dozen of the Royal Flight, a score of Ravens—another flight, just below my personal guards in rank—and eighteen common soldiers who had joined the fray when they saw their prince fall. So many dead, and nothing had changed.

“Milady?”

I turned toward the merchant who had spoken, a metalsmith of good reputation. “Can I help you?”

He was wringing his hands, but stopped as soon as I spoke, his gaze dropping. When he looked up again, his face was composed. He held out a package carefully wrapped in soft leather, placing it on the counter for me to see. “My pair bond was among the Ravens who fell yesterday.
I had been working on this for her, but if milady Shardae would wear it, I would be honored.”

The gift he offered was a slender boot knife, etched with simple yet beautiful symbols of faith and luck.

I accepted the blade, hoping I would never need it, but saying aloud, “It is lovely. I'm sure your pair bond would appreciate that it is not going to waste.”

The merchant replied, “Perhaps it might protect you when you go out again.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you, milady.”

I turned from him with a sigh that I was careful not to let him hear. It was already too late for either side to win; this war needed to
stop.
Whatever the cost.

If only I knew how to end it.

“Shardae?”

I knew the young woman who approached me now from when we had both been children. Eleanor Lyssia was an eternal romantic, with grand dreams that I wished I could make come true. The last time I had heard from her had been a few years before, when she had just been apprenticed by a seamstress.

My smile was genuine as I greeted her warmly. “Eleanor, good evening. What brings you to the Keep?”

“I'm finally allowed to sell my work in the
market,” she returned brightly. “I was in charge of the shop today.” The smile she wore faded to a somber expression. “I wanted to tell you … I heard what happened yesterday. With Gregory Cobriana.” She shook her head. “I know none of this is proper to say, but I like to think we were friends when we were children?” I nodded, and she continued, “When I heard what had happened, it gave me hope. If the heir to the throne can put aside the past and just comfort a dying man … perhaps anything is possible.”

She looked away, suddenly awkward.

“Thank you, Eleanor.” The prospect made me want to laugh and to cry; I settled on a tired smile. I did meet her gaze; I hoped she saw my gratitude. “Fly with grace.”

“You as well, milady.”

We parted ways, and now Andreios moved to my side. As always, he knew when I needed to escape. His presence would dissuade anyone else from approaching before I could do so. I wondered if he had heard Eleanor's words, but we did not speak before we both shifted form to fly above the market to the higher levels of the Keep.

Andreios stopped at the fifth floor, where his flight was quartered; I continued to the sixth. I passed the door to my brother's rooms and whispered a final goodbye before I entered my own.