The Potioneer (Shadeborn Book 3) (32 page)

Lily opened the front passenger door of the blacked-out car, but lingered before getting in. She covered one ear as a precaution against residual songspinning, but she wanted very much to see the master at his work. Salem raised his hands to the eager crowd with newfound energy, and he hummed a few bars of a pleasant little tune, resulting in tremendous applause. Lily found herself clapping too, vaguely aware that the edge of his songspinner magic was floating in her mind.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to a clear a path,” Salem directed, “your beloved Theatre Imaginique is taking a season abroad. Clear the way now, and go about your humdrum little lives.”

Despite the barb in his words, the human crowd applauded again. Then, they turned on their heels and left on Salem’s persuasive orders. The showman spun on the spot to face Lily, and he beamed with a smile that reached all the way to the depths of his sparkling cobalt eyes. Lily gave him a nod, then glanced back to see the eager faces of the troupe poking out of windows and canvas flaps all down the line of vehicles.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Salem demanded with glee. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

End Of Book Three

There now follows a preview from:

Volume Four

of the Shadeborn series, which once more delves into the past to explore the legends and beasts Lily will face in The World Of The Wish, Shadeborn Volume Five.

Volume Four consists of two separate stories:
The Seer And The Prince
– which explores the truth behind Lawrence’s voodoo heritage – and
The Shadow Of Light
– which recounts the full gruesome glory of the villainous Glassman.

Brethren Of The Coast

Storms battered the raging coast until the tall palms bent double, succumbing to the awesome force of the dark hurricane. Rain slid in a wild spew from the long leaves, carrying like an airborne stream until the wind changed, and the water came crashing onto the roof of the cabin. Inside the small wooden hut, the only one of its kind on this stretch of coastline, there was screaming. They were not the kind of screams that one imagines in stories, those piercing yelps of fright that once sounded, vanish into oblivion. These screams had longevity. Their pain was so intense than even when the screaming lulled, the men outside the hut could still hear it ringing in their ears.

“She’s louder than the storm!” said an Englishman gruffly.

He bared his silver cutlass to the storm clouds overhead, as if he might be able to fence them off, should they descend any closer to his party’s position. The Englishman was the senior officer of the gathering, or at least, he had been before he’d deserted His Majesty’s fleet. England was a mess, with civil war and political radicalism tearing the country apart, and it was not a place the Englishman ever intended to return to. He’d thought the life of a buccaneer would be heady and carefree. It
had
been, until he and his crew had landed their little boat at Tortuga.

This dark part of the world was largely ungoverned by law, and full of local people with strange, tribal traditions. The cabin where the Englishman stood watch contained four of these dark-skinned savages, three men and one woman. It was the woman who was screaming, and she’d been screaming from the very moment the storm began to gather overhead. It seemed to the Englishman that every time her yelps of pain grew in volume, the thunder gave a louder rumble in the heavens. That was a ridiculous notion to hold in one’s mind, yet the idea stuck with him as he gripped his weapon all the tighter.

The door to the cabin gave a creak and a bang, and lightning filled the sky with a white sheet of power that blinded all concerned for a long moment. When the Englishman could see again, his eyes fell upon a figure who had exited the cabin. Walter, his second in command, held his wide buccaneer’s hat in his hands, with rain streaking his face to make it look tearstained.

“I was right, Sir,” Walter called over the weather, “the native woman’s in childbirth. The head of the baby is crowning as we speak.”

Though Walter had been trained as a navy doctor, the art of birthing children was something he had never needed an education in. This was evident in the way his fingers shook where they crushed his hat into a whole new shape. The whites of his eyes were eerily prominent as he cast a look back towards the little wooden structure.

“That’s one less slave to sell in Italy if she dies in labour,” the Englishman groused. “Get back in there and help things along.”

Walter balked, and the sky roared with thunder behind him. The woman in the cabin screamed again, and the Englishman’s stomach turned in on itself.

“Please, Sir,” Walter added with a squeamish shudder. “The menfolk in there won’t let me near her.”

Walter had both a cutlass and a pistol at his disposal, but the timid fool had never had occasion to use them in service with the King’s Ships. The Englishman, now captain to a band of mutineers, had only bullied Walter into following him because he thought a medical man would be useful to the band. Now, the Englishman wasn’t so sure of that. He gritted his teeth, looking out into the wild, rain-swept night, then raised his sword and gave a gruff nod.

“Lead the way then.”

The Englishman had expected to smell blood upon arrival in the dark little hut, and the scent that greeted his nose was yet more foul than he could have imagined. Something was definitely burning, and something else smelled as though it had been dead for quite some time, and amongst those two distinctly unpleasant aromas, there was something so sweet that it caught in the Englishman’s throat. The heady, sickly scent of flowers made the bile rise up from the buccaneer’s gut, and one look at the state of the woman in childbirth brought him to empty his innards right there in the doorway.

“Ha!” A voice called from the three native men gathered around the woman. “It is a sign! You, white man! You stay where you are!”

The Englishman gathered his senses well enough to know that he had just been given an order by a dark-skinned savage. This didn’t sit well with him, and nor did the fact that none of the party of natives seemed remotely concerned that they had been captured and sequestered in the cabin to be whisked away and sold into slavery. In point of fact, it appeared that the tribesmen had been prepared for such an event. The smell of death and burning was coming from assorted animal innards and scattered ashes, which had been placed around the room at certain strategic points. They had even brought some kind of paint to mark symbols on the cabin floor.

“You speak English, savages, so listen well.” The Englishman spoke hoarsely, for his throat was burning with the violent expulsion of his gut. “You’re going to let my doctor aid the woman in her struggle. A dead slave’s no use to us.”

Two of the tribesmen looked to the one who had spoken before. He was taller than the others, with written markings all over his coconut-coloured skin, and he was also in possession of a scroll, which he studied very carefully. A crackle of lightning shot past the hut’s door and the tribal scholar watched it for a moment, before referring again to his mysterious text.

“Yes, it is time,” he concluded. “Bring the doctor forward!”

Again, the words came as an order, and the Englishman almost wanted to cut the beastly savage through with his sword just to teach him a lesson. What stopped him doing just that was Walter, who crossed his path to embark on the perilous pathway between the screaming woman’s kicking legs. Walter got a sound boot to the face on his way in, but once he was in position, the young doctor’s shaking hands began to guide the baby’s head from its mother’s body.

The superior commander found that he had no stomach for childbirth, and he turned away from the bloody mess that Walter was dealing with, shielding his vision by the clever placement of his cutlass. In its shining reflection, the Englishman saw the rangy beast he had become since leaving the Royal service, and the shaggy sight of his bedraggled features did nothing to assuage his rage. The tribal men were watching Walter’s progress with interest and whispering to one another as they continued to consult their scroll.

“Not long, Patience,” said the tribesman in the centre.

He patted the sweat-soaked brow of the woman, who had quietened down a little now that she was being given aid to set the child free to the world. The Englishman thought that the storm had receded a little too, but he tried not to dwell on the idea. He watched as the woman, Patience, raised a hand to her carer with affection that only a loving partner could possess.

“Orence, he is here,” she said with straining breaths. “One more push, and-”

The woman screamed a final time, as the lightning and thunder shook the cabin’s flimsy walls. She was right about that being her last push, for a moment later there was a sound of hellishly high-pitched crying, and Walter was gasping and beaming with delight.

“Look, Sir! I did it,” the doctor breathed in amazement. “He’s healthy, and he’s most certainly a boy!”

The tribesmen nodded amongst themselves, and Patience gave a tired smile.

“As it is written,” Orence said, and he kissed the woman’s brow where he had caressed it.

“You, white man!” The native scholar barked as the thunder died in the heavens. “You will let us go now. This child is sacred, and must be brought to our elders. You have served your purpose in our prophecy.”

“Served
you
?” the Englishman asked, his anger exacerbated.

With strength renewed, he pounded across the small cabin to Walter, who was still holding the child. The Englishman took the dark little baby by one leg, dangling him so that he cried and bellowed with tiny, straining lungs. Patience’s eyes widened, their dark spheres brimming with tears, but Orence held her shoulders to stop her rising from the place where she lay. The scholar and his second approached the Englishman, one still clutching his scroll with fervent determination. The other man looked wild in the dark little hut, but the mutinous buccaneer who held the baby knew that his own spirit was wilder. He had murdered his captain before the mutiny, after all. Sin stuck to his skin like the wash of sticky salt from the cruel sea.

“Sir, please,” Walter said shakily, but he was hushed by fear a moment later.

“A baby is no use to a slave,” the Englishman seethed with venom. He let his cutlass drop to the ground, and used that other hand to take hold of the baby’s neck.

“You seek to kill a newborn child?” the tribal scholar asked. “Why, white man?”

“The same reason anyone ever kills anyone,” the Englishman replied. “To show that I am capable of powerful things.”

“Then do it,” said the second native. He still bore that wild look, though it was laced with a wicked kind of curiosity that the Englishman did not understand. The second man was looking from the baby, who had stopped crying, to the man who would murder him with great interest.

“Don’t think that I won’t,” the commander raged.

“Then prove it,” said the scholar.

The Englishman tightened his grip on the newborn’s neck, trying not to look at the frail, blood-soaked form in his hands. His stomach wrenched itself again and, though his insides shook violently at the thought of what he might have to do, the Englishman was determined not to show a hint of worry on his exterior. These tribal types were baiting him, and he would not give in to their trickery. His pride was more important than the life of any savage.

“Go ahead,” said Orence, his voice echoing darkly from the corner of the cabin.

Only Patience did not speak. She was the one who truly feared what the Englishman would do – her saucer-wide eyes told him that much – and she was the one who would suffer if her tribesmen’s goading reached its bitter conclusion.

“Very well,” the Englishman said simply.

Patience cried out in the same moment that the buccaneer snapped the child’s neck. It was as easy as culling a rabbit for supper, so long as the Englishman didn’t really think about what he was doing, and the crack mixed with a belated flash of lightning that swam through the tension of the room. Patience shook with horror as the baby’s body dropped to the markings on the floor, but the three tribesmen were calm and quiet as ever. The Englishman expected thunder to follow the lightning flash. He waited several moments, but none came.

“Walter, you’ll clean up the woman and ready the slaves for our ship,” the commander ordered. “It looks as though the storm is-”

The last word of the Englishman’s sentence never left his lips, for the noise that escaped him was a horrified gasp. Walter, who had never used a sword for more than decoration in his life, had lifted the Englishman’s cutlass from the cabin floor, and driven it straight through the commander’s chest. Breath escaped the Englishman in stunted gasps, and his death was slower and far more shocking than the one he had just delivered to the infant on the ground. He clambered for the sword wildly to try and pull the blade from his chest, but all he saw were his own terrified eyes in the metal’s reflection.

Then, he saw nothing at all.

“I’m sorry,” Walter said, and it was unclear if he was speaking to the dead officer on the ground, or to the natives beyond him. “I’m just so sorry.”

There was silence for a moment, in that room where life and death were so close to one another, then two things happened at once. The thunder made a belated rumble overhead which shook Walter’s tears to cascade from his eyes.

And the baby cried.

“Ha,” whispered the scholar of the natives. He looked at his scroll, and smiled. “As it is written.”

Orence was the one to approach the baby, and Walter watched with horror and wonder as the man picked up the infant, now wriggling and cawing for attention again. Walter was certain that he’d seen the child die – the sound of its tiny neck cracking would haunt his dreams ever after – yet that same child now opened its eyes to the dark, stormy world of blood and death around it. Orence took the child to Patience, who clasped it to her bosom with fervent protectiveness. She looked as though she would never let the baby go again.

“Tell me, doctor,” the scholar said gently, “your captain here. What was his name?”

Walter’s lips trembled, and he made the mistake of looking at the body of the dead Englishman for a moment too long before he spoke.

“He was Lawrence,” Walter stammered, “Lawrence… Seward.”

The scholar took a stick of something black from his pocket and handed both the stick and scroll to Walter.

“Write it down,” he instructed.

“But why?” Walter said, choked by his own tears. “What’s happening here? I don’t understand.”

“This must be the name of the newborn child,” Patience said gently from her corner. “The legend of our people decrees it.”

Walter took the scroll and the stick, and walked slowly to the corner where Patience held the baby. There was no evidence that the child’s throat had ever been handled. He was pristine, a perfect and impossible miracle. Slowly, and with shaking hands, Walter managed to write the name of the child on the bottom of the scroll. When he had handed the paper back to the scholar, the doctor leaned ever closer to the fascinating child who had cheated death on that wild and stormy night.