Shift of Shadow and Soul (SoulShifter Book 1) Read online

  “Be careful with Amden,” the girl said, her voice even and liquid, her eyes meeting Resh’s eyes without the expected deference. “She sometimes bites, and you wouldn’t want to lose something important.”

  Tag’s guffaws echoed after the girl as she swished away before being dismissed, spilling more wine than she carried. Sy stared at her retreating form a few seconds too long, mesmerized by a dark tattoo snaking seductively up her leg.

  Even Resh was uncharacteristically dumb with surprise at her daring, and his new girl was red with anger. Sy only hoped his little brother didn’t get the fool idea to chase this girl at the next hunt. This could be the first girl he’d seen who was more than Resh could handle.

  That alone would have made her noticeable. But this morning, Sy had thought he remembered the girl, and now he was sure. There should have been no reason for any of the girls to fear being caught, yet she always ran as though her life depended on it.

  It seemed neither of them wanted to hunt like they were expected to, and Sy wanted to know why.

  Resh reappeared then from behind his drained mug, eyes narrowed in calculating anger. His new girl brushed her fingers lightly across his chest, hopeful, but he merely pushed her hand away.

  “What is that girl’s name? I want her name!” Resh demanded.

  “It’s just Corentine,” the girl giggled. “She’s simple. Don’t waste another thought on her.” Her fingers finally found a place that distracted him, and Sy stood, turning away from his younger brother and his latest conquest.

  He carried his mug away from the noise and smoke to the water’s empty edge. The silvery moonlight spread over him, soothing his jumbled thoughts. He sat heavily in the loose sand, watching the shimmer of the sea’s rippling waves.

  “Tagsha tells me you are again without a girl.”

  Sy scrambled to rise, just as his father bent his knees to squat beside him. The General’s large hand pushed his older son back to the sand, and not gently.

  “Syashin…” Ashemon began, then stopped.

  “I’m sorry, Father. I did hunt, but the girl escaped me among the rocks.” Although he knew his failure would anger the General, Sy knew a refusal to complete the hunt would be worse.

  “How could a simple young girl escape you? Your fighting skills are unparalleled among our young men. You can track a MagiCreature over any terrain and slay it with a mere longknife.” The General shifted his weight and his tactics. “Perhaps you do not wish for sons?”

  His question startled Sy from his glower. He rarely wasted thoughts on the purpose for the hunts, generally thinking only of the ridiculous customs his people had been reduced to since the Separation and the Sacrifice.

  “Reshra is a year younger than you, and he already has one son to claim later.”

  “Resh isn’t concerned with sons!” Sy’s words were harsher than he had intended, but his father only chuckled.

  “True, and that brings me to my other concern. Some of the young men hunt because they wish for the honor of sons and the improvement of our people. But many also hunt because they hunger for the girls. Yet, my eldest son does not hunt for either of these.” He paused to sift a handful of the glittering sand, pearl-white under the stars.

  “What do you hunger for, Syashin?”

  Sy took too long in answering, and his father rose, never a patient man.

  “This is your last summer, Sy. You will hunt, as I have said. And you will sire a child. Or your First Son rights and title will pass to Reshra. You owe me that much.”

  Ashemon was gone before the bitter words could filter through Sy’s ears and stab the beat from his heart. His vision narrowed to a single grain of sand, and he felt his chest turn to stone. His father had never been a kind man, but he had also never threatened Sy in this way before.

  A pounding on the sand jarred his focus back to the moonlit beach, and he looked up just as the same girl flew past, fleeing as though she still ran for her life. Corentine.

  Without volition, Sy’s muscles constricted and he was on his feet, tearing after her in the dark. If she sensed him, she ignored it as she entered the same rocks where he had nearly lost her this morning.

  And he lost her tonight, the chokecherry wine and his father’s words slowing his movements to the crawl of despair. She vanished into a crevice and Sy sank to his knees amongst the sandy rocks, his breathing jagged.

  The next hunt would be eight days from now. He knew he must protect his First Son rights from Resh’s destructive ways, even if it meant compromising what he’d always done.

  Resh watched his father return from the beach, where he knew Sy had gone to drink alone. He narrowed his eyes, ignoring the girl draped across his lap.

  It was no surprise to any of the men that Sy had no girl tonight. His brother hunted neither girls nor boys, only MagiCreatures and talismans.

  So what could have the General looking so exceptionally fierce?

  “Is it time to go back to your tent?” the girl murmured, nuzzling against his neck. Resh finished his drink and stood abruptly, nearly dumping her in the sand.

  “Lead the way,” he laughed, mostly forgetting his father, and fixing her in a hungry stare. “I’m sure you’ve been to the men’s camp before.”

  She glared, but pulled herself tall, pushing out her lips and her breasts. “Just so you know, I always lead.”

  He showed his teeth and pushed ahead of her on the path, knowing she would follow and suddenly not caring if she did. The summer months were a deserved respite from hunting creatures and the creeping fear that hung over Weshen City and most of Riata, but tonight Resh felt dulled and bored with the narrowness of their lives.

  His ancestors had died under the hand of the Restless King, yes, but they had also possessed things worth dying for.

  This, this holding. This waiting. It simmered in his blood stronger than any liquor or lust ever had.

  Coren was nearly home before she realized she hadn’t brought any treats for the twins. They would understand, of course, but that knowledge only forced her frustration higher.

  They were too young to have to understand. She was all they had now, but they deserved so much more. If only Sorenta had left them all with more - more explanation for her cryptic orders surrounding the hunts, more information on their tarnished family history, or more instruction for her few stolen Sulit spells.

  Coren paused outside the small house a few moments, breathing deeply of the still night air, pushing each worry into the darkness where she hoped they would stay. Inside, she slid into bed and closed her eyes, pausing to count the soft breathing of three people. Tellen moaned in her sleep, likely sweaty and uncomfortable.

  Thoughts swirled through Coren’s head, rising and falling in a tide of images. She had learned nothing of value tonight, and nearly got caught doing it. Tellen’s warning had served as a harbinger.

  Right after arriving, she was cornered by a man too old to hunt, but not too old for sport. Coren had pushed away the panic and endured his greasy fingers and grating laugh long enough to hear there were two sons of the General and more than a dozen new sons of Weshen at the hunts this year, and several of them were from families important enough to merit ankle rings.

  Exactly what Tellen had already known. No real gain.

  As her thoughts finally slowed and drifted with fatigue, she remembered the solitary boy on the beach, chasing her drunkenly. Had he worn ankle rings?

  The blurred image found its way into her dreams, keeping her from a satisfying sleep.

  Chapter 2

  In the morning, Penna climbed into Coren’s bed, her warm body adding to the sweat of the tousled sheets. Glad to be interrupted from her strange dreams, Coren slid her palm across the girl’s hair, then cupped her rounded cheek. Penna smiled and moved to hold her sister’s hand. Their mother had died eleven months after the twins’ birth, and Coren had tried to fill her void ever since.

  But it could never be the same. Not for any of them.

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nbsp; Shutting those thoughts away, Coren pushed out of bed and tied her long hair back. Tellen was in the main room making eggs, fresh from their midnight chickens. Kosh sat next to the firestove, whittling an arrow with his bone-handled longknife.

  “Did you learn anything?” he asked. Coren ruffled his hair, and he quickly smoothed it back, huffing.

  “There are several new hunters. And the General’s two sons.” She turned to Tellen. “But I did see Amden. She was drunk and draped all over some boy’s lap.”

  Tellen snorted. “Typical. Always chasing the boys, instead of letting them chase her.” She paused in her cooking to rub her stomach.

  “Are you having any pains?” Coren asked, her eyes sharp on her cousin’s face.

  “Not now. But I think the baby will come soon. Perhaps even before the next hunt.”

  The family ate in silence until Kosh and Penna rose to leave for the children’s school, and Tellen gathered her robe to visit the bathing pool. She might relax there for nearly an hour, her belly buoyant in the cool water.

  Left to herself, Coren cleaned the dishes, mulling over the day’s coming work. She couldn’t quite shake the unexplainable feeling, left over from her dreams, that everything was about to change. She had dreamed of her little family and their village resting on the edge of a great cliff, rather than in the heart of the crescent-shaped island. The women’s houses had seemed weightless, cared for by none.

  In her dream, she had watched from the clouds, knowing that a single breath of unexpected wind could push them all into the MagiSea.

  Restless and impatient to run, she dressed for hunting in loose pants banded at the ankle and a sleeveless wrap tunic, coiling her whip around her bare arm.

  It was risky for Coren - from a family as disgraced as the Ashadens - to keep such a weapon, but it was all she had left to remind her of the warrior her mother should have become, if not for the Restless King.

  Once, she had spied Sorenta chanting strange words as she wove several coarse, black hairs into the leather braid, and even now those hairs glistened when the whip was wet with blood. Although the carved handle still enclosed a defunct talisman, Coren believed it was no longer truly a Weshen weapon, but a Sulit one.

  Sorenta may have lost her shifter magic in the Sacrifice, but Coren knew she’d had more than memories left from her childhood in Riata’s StarsHelm Palace, where Sulit witches had once mingled with Weshen nobility and Riatan princes.

  Tucked in the back of Coren’s mind was a solitary spell to falsify pregnancy, which Sorenta had made her memorize at the end of the dark summer when Kosh and Penna were born, just weeks before Sorenta had taken her other spells and stories with her to the bottom of the MagiSea.

  Coren’s eighteen years and her family’s mistakes had taught her to depend only on herself.

  Before leaving the village borders, Coren paused at the bathing pool, watching Tellen doze in the morning light, her head resting on a pile of clothing, the outline of her swollen belly pale beneath the spring water. A few other girls stumbled toward the pool, eyes puffed from drink and late hours with their hunters.

  Coren turned quickly without meeting their gazes. Although many were happy to trade for the meat she hunted, she kept few friends in the village.

  Breaking into a brisk run, she cleared the rocks and lower cliffs easily, soon entering the wide openness of the upper plain. This was the only place she felt truly free, unshackled from her tiny, tedious life.

  Here the blue-green palmpress grasses were tall, their feathery plumes nearly to her waist in places, and she could see the green-tinged MagiSea shimmering in all directions. Weshen City was barely a smudge across the water - a day’s journey north by boat, she’d heard.

  Beyond the city were the misty, magic-infused NeverCross Mountains, which protected Weshen City from the Restless King by cliffs more treacherous than his armies. But north of the mountains, they said, the kingdom of Riata had claimed nearly everything.

  Coren often wondered what Weshen City looked like, and what waited beyond the mountains. There was no longer a reason for a Weshen woman to travel to any of those places, and none had for dozens of years. That freedom was something their mothers didn’t remember, and their grandmothers never discussed.

  But that freedom had existed once, so Coren idly hoped it might again.

  The summer sun burned her skin with purpose as Coren wove silently through the grass. Her whip snapped the neck of a rockrabbit as it munched, barely drawing blood from the golden fur. A pair of plump groundbirds fell next, and she placed their bodies gently into her game sack, judging that she had about five pounds of meat.

  She needed more. Tellen’s baby would need so many things that only a trade could bring.

  Coren’s village duty required ten pounds of fresh meat per week; any more was hers to keep or trade. But there were very few large animals on the island, so hunting took time and patience that most of the women didn’t have. Most preferred to farm or fish.

  The flat leather braid of the whip grew less brown and more silver with each stroke of death, and Coren knew she needed to let it rest - needed to let the residue of blood drain away again to deactivate whatever spell rested there still. Otherwise, the blood would pull at the whip, snaking it into higher arcs and sharper cuts and faster kills.

  She coiled the whip around her arm, satisfied with its familiar suctioning to her skin. The Sacrifice may protect them, but it had also made them vulnerable in a much more insidious way.

  Coren breathed deeply of the salt air and rolled her eyes to the sky. Weshen women had once been the fiercest of hunters alongside their men but were now reduced to giggling girls on the beach, hoping for nothing more from life than a nice boy to honor them with a son. Their warrior lives had been taken and reduced - their focus now on survival and petty struggles.

  The tall grass beckoned and she lay back, closing her eyes to the bright sunlight as the slender leaves wove together above her. For a few moments, all was bearable. The sound of distant waves on the beach. The slight movement of air upon air. The heady, green scent of the cloverhearts crushed beneath her back.

  And then a scream interrupted everything. Not a human noise - a creature. Not a creature she’d ever heard, and not far away, somewhere in the wispy clouds above her.

  She scanned the visible strips of blue sky, fingertips tingling on the handle of her whip as she willed her body to be still, or risk detection.

  The shadow passed over her before the creature, and Coren stayed motionless, eyes wide in horror. This was a bird she had never seen - if it actually was a bird. Four wings spread lazily, spanning twice as wide as her own body length, followed by a fat, pearl-feathered belly, then scrawny legs ending in sharply-curved golden claws that trailed along the tips of the palmpress grass. A strange scent drifted down to her hiding spot - acrid and nearly metallic, like a knife blade twisting through rancid meat. Another scream floated down between the blades of grass, fading as the bird flew on.

  More minutes passed than Coren’s pride wished to admit as fear shook its way through her body. She knew this was no ordinary island bird. It could only be a MagiCreature.

  Indisputable logic argued back: MagiCreatures never came to Weshen Isle. The creatures had always sought strong shifter magic. With the magic gone, the men were able to stay all summer on the island, on hiatus from their bloodied Riatan battles or bounty hunts for MagiCreatures and lost talismans.

  But logic faded away as the image of the creature settled in her mind like a stone.

  Inch by inch, Coren rose, hearing and seeing nothing more of the strange creature. Her courage built and soon she was racing back to the house, intent on one thing: her father’s book.

  Sy had been walking the northern beaches for nearly an hour without seeing a soul, and the quiet smoothed over his mind like a salve. Weshen Isle was beautiful, but he hadn’t missed it. He hadn’t been here for two summers - not since the first and only hunt he’d participated in.
/>   Until yesterday, of course.

  Now he was in his last summer, and his father was forcing him to hunt.

  The men’s taunts began to echo in his brain with each step. Words they used when they thought no-one was around to hear. But Sy was always around. He was better at hiding and listening, better at tracking and interpreting, better at hunting everything except girls. He always knew what the men said, though he rarely cared.

  What sort of First Son would snub Weshen tradition like this?

  How is he a Paladin already? If he can’t catch a girl, surely he can’t catch a MagiCreature.

  The whole family’s a waste. No wonder the Mirror Magi still keep the Sacrifice.

  He stomped his feet into the sand, watching the water spike in controlled daggers around his knees, the shape dissolving as he blinked it away.

  Maybe he cared a little.

  But of course the Sacrifice hadn’t been lifted, regardless of his father’s leadership or how many babies were born each year. His teacher Damren had pointed to so many signs that the Weshen people still hadn’t learned what they were meant to learn. Damren criticized how they eschewed love for lust, separating men to the city and women to the island, all in the hopes of keeping the women safe.

  But Weshen women had never needed to be safe before the Sacrifice. They were once warriors, right alongside the men. They fought with their weapons, their fists, and their magic.

  They died, but they also lived.

  Unlike most Weshen, Damren didn’t believe the magic was simply waiting for the population to grow. She maintained it would only return when they allowed love to return. To Sy it seemed an impossible puzzle. Which of the two must return first, if both were so tightly tied together? For him, the magic had returned first. But why hadn’t it returned to anyone else?

  Although his thoughts still tumbled like pebbles in the ocean, something from Sy’s lifetime of training alerted him to a nearby presence. He swiveled just as Resh stepped onto the beach from a grassy path leading back to the men’s camp.