Shift of Shadow and Soul (SoulShifter Book 1) Page 8

  Sy hadn’t seen Corentine yet, but the General had been pleased with his offer to officiate. For now though, he handed the scroll of family names to Tag and ducked into the tent for a mug of cool water. Standing in the shade, he scanned the line again, finally spotting her.

  She stood quietly, not talking to anyone around her. Two small children hovered nearby, playing games as they waited.

  For a second Sy’s heart stilled, thinking perhaps she had been caught before. Then he peered more carefully at the children, and he realized they were far too old to be hers. He was a little ashamed at the relief that washed over him. A growing part of him had begun to hope that if Corentine were caught, it would be by himself alone.

  Finally she approached.

  “Name?” Tag said, glancing at her, then back to the General’s tent.

  “Corentine Ashaden, daughter of Sorenta,” she answered. “And Kashar,” she added, as though reluctant to name her father.

  Sy’s head snapped up at her answer, and his eyes studied the proud line of her shoulders. “Kashar the Deserter?” he asked, receiving a glare from Tag. His stomach rolled, thinking of what taunts and injustices she must have endured with such a disreputable father.

  But Corentine kept her eyes down, nodding as she pointed to the children. “And Penna and Kosh, also children of Sorenta and Kashar.” Her voice was resigned, and Sy pondered a man who was steadfast enough to father children with the same woman, so many summers apart, yet would abandon his people for Riata.

  He swallowed his water the wrong way as he glanced again at the children and realized they were twins. An extremely rare occurrence in Weshen - a sign of blessings from the Mirror Magi.

  “Don’t forget sister of Jyesh the Banished,” a girl’s voice rang out nearby, clear even over Sy’s coughing. Corentine swung around, and for a moment Sy feared she might punch the girl. Nerves strumming, he struggled to remember stories of Jyesh, but the name was only a shadow in his mind.

  Still, if her brother had been banished, then it was more than just Corentine. Her bloodline must have powerful magic. Sy struggled to hide his growing excitement, afraid she would see the grin tugging at his lips.

  “Here is your portion, then,” Tag said, his voice low and weary. His glance lingered on the small girl and boy as he dumped parcels in the barrow, barely filling it. With a quick elbow, Tag slyly knocked an extra sack into the barrow, and Sy turned away to hide another smile.

  Tag made a mark on his list. “Wait,” he said as she turned to go. “You are missing Tellen, daughter of Nollen and Bagesh?”

  Corentine gasped a little, the sound ragged as she inhaled deeply. “I will always miss her. She died in childbirth two days ago.”

  Then she swung the barrow so forcefully it nearly tipped and stalked away from the crowds of watching women. Tag glanced at Sy in distress, his embarrassment at having caused her pain evident on his open face. He made another mark on the list, then handed it toward Sy.

  But Sy no longer felt excited about Corentine’s magic, and he regretted ever being eager to help with this charade.

  He simply turned on his heel and pushed away into the crowds. Other than the hunts themselves, he’d never taken the time to notice before how truly unfair Weshen practices had grown since the Separation. Once fierce hunters as well, the women were now trapped here. They had little game to hunt. Barely enough land to farm.

  They had grown soft and submissive, all in the name of protection from the Restless King.

  And then the men came each summer on the pretense of rebuilding the Weshen race with the humiliation of the hunts. The men presumed to offer the women a year’s worth of food, but those with shamed families were denied their equal portions. Kashar had deserted his General. Jyesh had been sent to die on the MagiSea.

  Yet the ones left behind suffered the most.

  Sy picked his way along the rocks, glaring into the brightness of the MagiSea. Magic surrounded them, and it had even touched his blood and her family’s. But it remained just a whisper of what they would need.

  For too many years now, the Mirror Magi had only taunted Weshen with a promise of bounty.

  General Ashemon had watched the exchange from the darkened shadows of a nearby tent. The girl was indeed who he had suspected, her family was exactly as Tagsha had reported, and he was extremely interested in Syashin’s reaction to her misfortunes.

  The boy had grown to care for her, and that could be made useful.

  He gathered a string of prayer beads from his altar and fastened the tent flap securely. Refusing his best friend and his son as they pleaded for the lives of slaves weighed heavily on his heart. If only the magic were to return in full, like the tide overturning the pebbles on the beach, his hands would not be so tied, or his choices so absolute.

  His people may not be quite ready to face the Restless King again, but Ashemon knew they simply wouldn’t remain the same race for another generation. Too many of the old ways had been lost already. Weshen was growing soft, and one day, their safety would be breached.

  The answer could lie in the combined bloodlines of Syashin and Corentine. Her family may have been troubled in recent generations, but the Ashadens had once been some of the most powerful of the Weshen shifters. It was time to pray more insistently to the Mirror Magi for relief from this Sacrifice.

  The Restless King would never rest. The crown of Riata was nearly complete, and Weshen was the jewel he had sought his entire life.

  Coren knelt in the water-cooled sand, thankfully alone, her knees dipped into a tide pool, her shoulders shaking with rage and sorrow. How could Amden have been so cruel as to bring up Jyesh? As if her fragmented family weren’t already getting a reduced portion for her father’s desertion.

  Then the guard who had asked if she missed Tellen. It had been innocent, but it had nearly broken her on the spot.

  Of course, Coren had broken and healed so many times. She would heal again, and she would be stronger for it. She had made it to the house in a state of numbness, left Penna and Kosh to sort the supplies and run without thinking, ending up in the shallow waters just beyond the cove of the Mirror Magi.

  Nothing was ever enough, she thought again, and everything is always too much.

  She fisted her fingers in her eyes, pressing back the hot tears. The wind brought relief in cooler air from the green and blue MagiSea, and she felt the sand seem to twist and writhe beside her as her chest heaved and the water lapped at her skin. Finally the heat lifted from her face and she pulled her hands away, calmer and emptier.

  It was easier that way, to be empty.

  Coren bent closer to the pool, reaching to cup the water and wash the tears from her face.

  But instead of her own reflection, Penna stared back at her from the water. She gasped and fell backward, the rocks digging into her palms as she caught herself. A few seconds passed before she bent to look again, her heart pounding in her ears.

  Not Penna - Corentine. Younger. As a girl of ten or so. The year her life had shattered into pieces so small they had never quite fit back together.

  She scrubbed her eyes with the seawater, ignoring the burn of the salt. She looked again and saw the same thing. Her body began to shake for a new reason. Why couldn’t she see herself in the water, as she should be?

  Was this shifter magic, too? It was nothing like pulling salt from water, as she’d seen Maren do. Nothing like what Jyesh had done, pulling a man apart, bit by bit.

  Then the air around her seemed to shimmer and undulate, as though its actual movements had become visible. Coren watched the water, mouth gaping open, as the reflected girl shifted back to her usual appearance. Had she imagined it all, then?

  Coren felt her stomach flip, and the nausea began to rise.

  Several handfuls of sand sifted to the earth around her, forming miniature dunes in the tide pool, as though the breeze had been holding them aloft while it waited for her to notice.

  Then a rock fell and clattered somewhe
re behind her and she jerked upright, scanning the coast and tree-lined path to the village, half expecting to see the Vespa back to hunt her.

  Instead, Syashin stepped from the tall brush, coming slowly onto the crystalline sand as if afraid to startle her. Again, Coren was struck with how he moved like a true hunter, sleek and silent. Stalking. She backed up instinctively, but her feet sunk into the wet sand of a tide pool, the cave walls at her back.

  She had nowhere left to go. Perhaps she should just surrender and have it done and become like all the other girls on the island.

  “I’m not going to touch you,” he said, his face drawn in anger. Or maybe disappointment - it was difficult to understand his lowered brows and sea-dark eyes. He stood several feet away though, waiting, demonstrating the truth of his claim. “I just want to talk to you.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she blurted. Despite her despairing thoughts of a few seconds before, she didn’t even want to talk to him.

  He shrugged and kicked at the sand few feet away, evidently not going anywhere. “I’m sorry about the rations. Tagsha was just following the rules.”

  Coren narrowed her eyes. “I’m used to it. And he didn’t know about Tellen.” She was relieved that her voice didn’t shake when she spoke, not even Tellen’s name.

  “Still. I’d like to help. Somehow.” He seemed very uncertain, like he had no idea why he was here or what to say. That made two of them. He wasn’t supposed to seek her outside of the hunts, and Coren wished he would just leave.

  “Look, I’m fine. I’ve been taking care of my family for years. Jyesh was banished when I was eight, Kashar deserted when I was nine, and my mother died when I was ten. I can handle it. Thank you, though,” she added when she saw the stricken look he wore at her list of small tragedies.

  She stepped out of the tide pool, bending to brush sand from her bare legs.

  When she straightened, he was mere inches from her. His hands clasped her shoulders, lightning fast, and she struggled to twist free of him, adrenaline spiking through her.

  She would fight him if he tried to force her, but she knew he was much stronger.

  “I know what you are,” he whispered then, his breath hot on her cheeks. Coren stopped moving, not even gathering air. Her heart pounded and her vision tunneled to his face.

  Had he seen her younger form, too? What did he think she was? Sulit witch or Weshen shifter?

  His eyes were storm-dark and so, so close. He was beauty and terror and confusion all in one. “I know what you are, because I’m one too,” he continued.

  She startled at the unexpected admission, her body jerking against his.

  “One what?” she whispered, unwilling to give up a single, damning word.

  He released her shoulders, one finger at a time, as though testing her decision to stand or run. But he didn’t step back. Instead he filled the small space between them with his cupped fingers. His thumbs brushed her stomach and he lifted his eyes to hers, then nodded down at his hands.

  She followed his glance, and it was as though her entire world tilted and began the agonizing slide off the cliff of her dreams.

  If this were real, then all of it was…Maren, Jyesh, Sorenta, herself.

  The air held invisible and stagnant in his palms began to shimmer and glow, then a small pile of sand began to appear, a few grains at a time, flowing into his fingers from the wind. Soon his hands were overfilled with the pale granules. She gasped as he slipped his fingers from beneath the pile, and the grains hovered weightlessly in the small basin between their bodies before slipping toward the earth again. She felt their small patter on her bare toes.

  “I can SourceShift,” he said, his blue eyes lifting again to hold hers like the sand in his palm, and she felt a similar sense of weightlessness, just before anger began to slide in like the hot summer sun breaking from behind a bank of clouds.

  Maren may claim to trust the General, but his own son had shifter magic, and none of the women had been told.

  “You cannot deny me what I saw,” he continued when she remained silent, his voice low and dangerous. “You have shifter magic too, Corentine.”

  “Show me again,” she managed, biting at each word as it left her lips. If he was using shifter magic…then probably he was the one who had called the Vespa to the island. The General’s First Son was putting her whole world in danger.

  He held his hands before him and the water behind her began to lap gently at the rocks, as though the tide were coming in. Then she saw a narrow stream of water hovering by her left elbow, and another at her right. They joined and circled her body for an instant - a thin but solid ring of water at her waist.

  She raised one hand and trailed a finger in its reality, her anger distracted by how this power held every beauty she’d imagined magic to be, and more. Her brain thrilled at the possibility that shifter magic might return to the Weshen people in her lifetime. The Restless King could be beaten. The women could leave the island. The hunts would never bind her brother and sister.

  Then he called the water to him, forming it into a palm-sized sphere, which rested in one hand. The other hand spread across the sphere, pulling white crystals to its surface.

  “Salt,” he said, not looking up at her.

  Coren nodded tightly as she watched a pile of white salt grains appear in his other palm. Just as with Maren’s tea, the water grew a tiny bit clearer. He dusted the salt into a nearby shell and cupped his hands around the sphere. Some of the water broke free and trickled through his fingers.

  Then he stood and reached his cupped hands cautiously toward her lips. Growing more excited as she imagined how her life could change if the magic had returned, Coren bent her mouth to his fingers and tasted the water.

  Fresh.

  She looked up at him, fixing her wide gaze on his sea-dark eyes, and his hands jerked away from her mouth, the remaining water spilling to the sand at their feet.

  “That’s kind of like what you did to the Vespa, isn’t it?” he prompted, staring at the droplets left on his fingers. “You took it apart, separating its organs and skin and feathers into separate sources. It vanished because you dissolved it into air and bone dust and droplets of blood.”

  “I had no idea what I was doing,” she warned. “I know nothing of shifter magic. Or any other kind,” she added, in case he might try to accuse her of using Sulit spells.

  But even as she spoke, a gruesome memory Coren had worked hard to repress shoved back into her mind and her knees faltered. Syashin moved like lightning, catching her shoulders and helping her sink to the cave floor next to him. She slumped against the wall, breathing thinly. As much as she knew she needed him to keep her secrets and keep her safe from banishment, he should know what and who he was really sharing his ideas with.

  “My brother…Jyesh. Everyone thought it was Sulit magic, but what you just described is exactly like what he did. But he did it to a man.” That sort of power seemed so different from the pretty spheres of water and neat piles of salt, and she wanted none of its destructive power. Not here on the island, where there were too many precious, fragile things she cared for.

  Syashin sucked in a strangled breath and ducked down to look directly into her eyes. “That was your brother? I…I always thought that was more of a legend.”

  Coren shook her head firmly, trying to numb herself again to that horrific memory of watching a screaming man dissolve into air and bone dust and droplets of blood. She had often wished it were only a nightmare or myth.

  Jyesh had been just a few days past eight when he had done that. Eight years old, when the men came to take him to the mainland. Instead he had been banished.

  The youngest ever. And the only since.

  “He was my twin,” she whispered.

  “Twin?” Sy managed. A curse of disbelief hung in the air between them as he stared at her, eyes flickering back to the statue of the Mirror Magi. “And your siblings are also twins? Your family is blessed by the Magi.”
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br />   “My family is cursed!” she cried, her voice echoing off the walls of the cave. The water behind them churned and frothed with the incoming tide. “Magic has brought nothing but pain to my family!”

  She clamped her lips shut around the rage that threatened to escape her. A few beats of silence granted her the space she needed to calm her emotion, although she could still sense his shock from her revelation.

  “Tell me what else you know,” she said, softening her tone as much as possible.

  He sighed and leaned back against the smooth cave wall. “Shifting uses mirrored abilities. I can shift the salt from the water, which is a weak version of what you did to the Vespa - disintegration. I can also join the sources again, which is called fusion.”

  She nodded, although the words were not familiar. The opposites made sense in their mirrored religion. The magic could take sources apart or put them back together. If only life were so easy.

  “Some can also shift their appearance into another version of themselves,” he continued carefully, watching her. A shiver danced over her shoulders despite the warmth of the sun. Surely he had seen her younger form, then. “And there were once Weshen who could take other forms. But nearly all the practical knowledge has been lost. Weshen believe the magic is gone, but that’s true only in Weshen City and Weshen Isle. In Riata, there are still those who practice, although being caught with shifter magic is a sentence of slavery or death.”

  His voice had grown bitter toward the end of the brief lesson, and she wondered what he had seen on his travels. But there was a different, much more important question on her mind.

  “So the magic is returning. What does the General have to say?” she asked, and his face paled. He was silent a beat too long, and her heart sank in her chest, beating instead in the pit of her belly, telling her to run and run and run, far away from this First Son.

  “I’m the only shifter in Weshen City, and I’ve told my father nothing.” Sy’s gaze was distant.