Chapter 10: The Moors

  On the third night after their escape from Northpoint, Ean finally stopped looking over his shoulder for a horde of angry villagers. Satisfied they weren’t being pursued, he sat down by the fire, kicked his feet out, and exhaled. He glanced at the others, wondering if they felt the same sense of relief. They’d been snappish and churlish since their flight from the village. Surely they’d relax now that they were safe.

  But their sour mood continued through the evening. Asali and Chadwick were brusque as they made dinner; Roarke grumbled as he tended to the horses. Flora lit a fire twice as large as it needed to be. Even Leo was pensive and withdrawn. It was Prince’s expression that made Ean realize that the sullenness of camp wasn’t due to fear; it was anger. Ean was traveling with high-ranking members of the court of Eastmere—a kingdom meant to be a bastion of civilization and progress, inhabited by men and women of honor and valor. It wasn’t supposed to shelter a village full of murderers. Northpoint had injured the party’s national pride. Ean wondered how long it would take them to recover.

  He pulled up his sleeve and peeled back a corner of the bandage on his arm. The cut was healing nicely. Flora hadn’t needed to stitch it; she’d just used a tacky gum to hold the skin together. She saw him picking at the bandage and wordlessly knelt beside him. She removed the dressing and examined the cut, twisting his arm in the firelight. She retrieved a salve from her medical bag and dabbed it on. Her fingers shook. The salve stung.

  She’d been quiet around him ever since they’d left the village. She’d tended to his arm when they’d stopped to make camp, and she’d done a good job of it, but she’d been quick to leave afterwards. She was scared, which Ean thought was strange. She’d single-handedly burned down an entire village. She was far more powerful than he was.

  “Are you scared of me again?” Ean whispered. She didn’t say anything, but her mouth tightened. He sighed. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Only because you don’t have a contract on me.”

  “Why would I have a contract on you?”

  “You took one on Leo and he hasn’t hurt anyone.” She glopped on the next bit of salve with more force than necessary and Ean yelped, more in surprise than actual pain. The rest of the party looked over.

  “How many people did you kill?” Flora asked, her voice sharp.

  “At the village?” Ean shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you know,” Asali said, cutting in. “A shadow-walker always knows.”

  He shook his head. “We track numbers during a fight, yes, but we don’t tally them up at the end of the day.”

  “How many?” Flora repeated.

  He didn’t know why it was important, but he counted them to end the conversation. “Two in our room. Two in the hall. Five at the tavern. One in the alley. Two on the way out of town.”

  “Twelve.” Flora said the number like a curse. “Twelve dead and you only have a cut on your arm.” She snapped the lid on her salve and pressed another dressing over his arm. Her hands were still trembling.

  He couldn’t understand her distress. “We were fighting for our lives.”

  “Twelve, in one night,” Flora said. “How many people have you killed over your whole life?”

  He couldn’t answer that. It was a number he’d never cared to add up. His silence spoke for him. Flora let out a high-pitched laugh choked with distress. She grabbed the bandage and began re-wrapping it over the dressing, her fingers pulling too tight. Ean hissed in pain. She didn’t apologize.

  He stood and grabbed the bandage from her. “Thank you for your assistance. I’ve got it from here.”

  He took two steps away before her voice stopped him. “Do you care that you’re a killer? That you’ve killed fathers and mothers and children?”

  Ean turned back, his temper starting to flare. “Are you really crying for those villagers? They murdered innocent people. And you burned their village down.”

  “It’s not the village. It’s everyone else you’ve killed. Did they all deserve to die?”

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  “Most of them, yes.”

  “Most of them,” she repeated, unconvinced.

  Ean jerked his head at Leo. “All except him, yeah.”

  “And you get to decide that?” she asked, voice rising. “You get to pick who lives and who dies?”

  “Yes.”

  Chadwick spoke up, his voice full of condemnation. “You don’t have the right to make that decision.”

  Ean stepped towards him, insistent. “Yes, I do. I’m not a sell-sword or a mercenary or a sadist. I’m a shadow-walker. Do any of you even know what that means?”

  They didn’t. He could see it in their faces, their judgmental, disapproving faces. The anger they’d stewed in for the past three days had finally found a convenient outlet, and they were making no attempt to hide their disgust. They thought he was an unfeeling killer, a cruel executioner.

  Roarke, though, he knew what it meant to be a shadow-walker. Ean could tell because when he looked in the ex-general’s direction, he couldn’t meet his gaze.

  Ean took another step forward and stared the party down. “When a shadow-walker is hired to kill someone, sometimes there are children present. Sometimes there is no remaining family to take that child in. Rather than leaving the child to die in the streets, the shadow-walker can take that child and make him an apprentice. That is the only way someone becomes a shadow-walker. So, when I say I have the right to decide who lives and who dies, it is because I understand the cost of my actions. I have paid that cost. I paid it when I was eight years old, and my mother was killed in front of me by my teacher.”

  He took in a breath, ready to say more, ready to deride their hostile assumptions and utter lack of understanding, but his anger died out as quickly as it had come. A tired resignation slipped into its place. Why should he defend himself? Their opinions of him were set, and no explanation would change them. And why should it? He was here to be a bodyguard, nothing more. He turned on his heel and walked away.

  He wished the night was colder, so they would be forced to use the tent they’d stolen from town. He wanted solitude, but the only privacy he found was in the shadows on the outskirts of camp. He wrapped his arm and hunkered down until the others turned in for the night. Only then did he return to his bedroll.

  He lay on his side, his back to the group, and tried not to let his thoughts drift too much. It wasn’t possible. Flora had asked how many people he had killed, and his brain had started to count without his permission, from his first kill to the most recent deaths. Craven’s death, the boy who would have been a killer, weighed the heaviest tonight. He knew it had been unavoidable. He didn’t regret his actions, but sometimes… sometimes in the quiet of night, when there was no one to witness his wretched self-pity, he regretted his fate.

  Sleep was slow to come, and when it did, he dreamt of his mother and the day she died. She’d sat at the vanity, preparing for a large performance that evening. She wore a new dress for the occasion, black with gold embroidery and feathers across the shoulders that gave the impression of wings. A dark shadow had slipped through the window. She’d spotted it in the mirror, and her face had gone pale at the uniform. She had lunged for Ean, hands outstretched, urging him to run, but her fear had frozen him in place.

  Felix had grabbed her from behind. He’d whispered something in her ear and her eyes had slipped closed. She’d let out a shuddering breath, almost a sigh, and then the knife had pierced through the back of her neck. A quick, painless death.

  But then the dream twisted away from memory. In the dream, her eyes opened. Blood gurgled from her lips, a fountain of it. Ean ran to her, trying to help, but there was a knife in his hands, a bloody knife, the same knife that had stabbed through her neck.

  Ean started awake, a horrified shout on his lips but no sound escaped. He pushed himself up and staggered away from camp. His hands shook; his heart pounded in his chest. He knew what it was, a delayed stress response from the fight at the village, but the knowledge did nothing to abate the panic. He grabbed a nearby tree, fingers curling into the rough bark, then keeled over and vomited. Only bile came up, burning his throat and leaving a sour taste in his mouth. He heaved twice more before his stomach settled. He spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He felt weak and trembly, like he did after his first couple of kills. He pulled in a shuddering breath, held it, then released it slowly, forcing the terror out with the exhale. There was nothing to fear now.

  He returned to camp and dropped down close to the fire, trying to rid his body of the shakes. He ignored Leo who was sitting up on watch. Leo did not ignore him.

  “Have I ever told you about my mother?” he asked.

  Ean frowned at him. Why would he have?

  Leo started talking without any additional prompting. He described his mother like a summer day, all sunlight and gentle breeze. Ean listened and could see her clearly in his mind. Soft eyes. A kind smile. He felt his tension ease as Leo spoke. The shaking stopped and he moved back to a more comfortable distance from the fire. When Leo finally fell silent, Ean described his mother like a starlit evening, breathtaking and sparkling.

  “I didn’t see my mother die,” Leo said, pulling his knees to his chest. “I sometimes wish I had been there to say goodbye.”

  Ean shook his head. “It’s better that you didn’t. You don’t want that to be your final memory of her.”

  “I think about it though. I’ve been in skirmishes with Westenvale; I’ve seen men die. I know enough of death to know how she must have felt. In pain. Frightened. Alone.”

  Ean didn’t know what to say to that or how to give any sort of comfort. The silence grew, heavy and pained, so he looked up and pointed at a collection of stars. “What constellation is that one?”

  Leo tipped his head back. “Gwenyth, the Sailor.” He told a story Ean was only vaguely familiar with. A legendary sailor. Her lover, the kidnapped Elven princess. A sail made from the clouds themselves. Ean stayed up with him until he roused Roarke for the next watch. This time, when he fell back asleep, there weren’t any dreams.