Chapter 2:

  A Second Chance

  The woman stood before the Umbrus Jury, dressed in black silk. A veil covered her face. She held out a piece of parchment.

  “Help me,” she begged.

  The Umbrus Jury looked down at her from their long bench. They rose as one. “Responsibility does not indicate fault.” Their voices rolled like thunder and the ground shook. They vanished in a cloud of mist, and then Felix appeared, standing in their place.

  “Help me,” she begged again.

  Something dripped from the parchment in her hands.

  Felix shook his head. “War is confusion and disorder. I will not judge a man for decisions that are made in such chaos. It is not a mark of his true character.”

  He vanished as well. The woman wailed and the parchment dripped again. Ean blinked and she was suddenly in front of him. He could see what she was holding now-—a letter. The words on the page were blurred like the ink wasn’t set. It gleamed red.

  “Help me!” she insisted.

  There was something wrong with her voice. It was too deep, too resonant. Shadows leeched off of her. A cold wind blew from underneath her veil. It sent a shiver down his spine.

  “I can’t,” Ean said. He tried to step back but his feet were frozen in place. “I’m not a shadow-walker, not yet.”

  “Don’t you know who I am? What power I have? I can make you a shadow-walker.”

  His breath caught. Could she really?

  “I am of a noble family. I can appoint whoever I wish to any guild in Eastmere. You need not take the trials. Just help me.”

  She held out the bleeding letter. The shadows gathered behind her, an ominous cloud of portent, but Ean couldn’t help himself. He wanted to be a shadow-walker more than anything. He reached out and took the letter. Blood gushed from the page, as if it was suddenly undammed. It spilled over his hands in warm, thick rivulets and pooled on the floor. The puddle grew quickly, lapping over his feet, still stuck fast to the stone.

  The woman laughed, cruel and cold, and then yanked back her veil. The wrong face stared up at him. She was too young to be the Countess, too pale, too pretty. He recognized her face dawning horror.

  His mother’s green eyes filled with tears. “How could you?”

  Ean staggered back, his feet suddenly unfrozen. His mother reached for him, the black silk dress transforming into black feathers. They rippled away as an arrow shot from behind her—shot through her—and punched into his chest. The force of it rocked him back. The pain came second, hot and sharp and burning.

  “You can do this, Ean,” Felix said.

  Ean was suddenly on the training fields, the bloody letter still clutched in his hands. Felix stood twenty paces away. Another arrow was already nocked on his bow.

  “Remember to breathe.”

  Ean threw out a blood-stained hand. “No, wait!”

  The arrow shot towards him.

  Ean’s eyes snapped open and, for one moment, he was sure he was dead. He could feel the arrow buried in his chest. He could smell the blood. He could taste it in the back of his mouth, bitter-salt and copper-tang. But he wasn’t dead. He was staring up at a stone ceiling cast in heavy shadow. A narrow window, high on the wall, let in the faint, gray light of early dawn.

  He turned his head to survey his surroundings and realized he was in a cell. The walls, floor, and ceiling were gray rock, their surfaces rough and uneven. The door was barred iron. He could see nothing out of it but a narrow stone hallway. He got up carefully, remembering the Mage’s spell, and checked his body for damage. His back ached, his head pounded, and his ankle was sore, but he was otherwise unharmed. He’d been stripped of his weapons and uniform and dressed in sackcloth garments. They smelled of must and ash. His feet were bare and freezing. There was a pile of dirty hay in the corner with a blanket tossed over it, a poor excuse for bedding. It smelled of excrement. There was a bucket beside it. It’d been recently emptied but not cleaned. It, too, smelled of refuse.

  He walked to the window, a narrow crack in the wall partially blocked by two iron bars. He could see nothing outside but a sliver of gray sky. He remembered the Mage’s instruction to take him to the Tower. He knew it to be a turret on the far side of the palace, close to the cliffs. It was where political prisoners were kept before their trials and executions. They bore charges of embezzlement, sedition, espionage, and treason. He realized that, in his attempt to assassinate the Prince, he now numbered among them.

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  He was going to be executed.

  His legs went weak. He quickly sat on the stone floor, fear washing over him and stuttering his heart. He’d known that his mission was risky. He’d known that failure meant death. But he had thought it would be the immediate sort—an arrow in the back or a sword in his chest, painful, but over quickly. He hadn’t thought it’d be this slow torture—locked in a cell with nothing but his grim fate awaiting him.

  His chest tightened. The familiar sense of fear returned, an ice-cold ocean that churned in his gut. It’d been a constant presence, a haunting specter, for the past three years as he’d desperately tried to catch an arrow. He’d trained, long and hard, but it hadn’t been enough. Last month, the Countess’s offer had seemed to be a stroke of luck, a chance to cheat death by skipping the trials completely. But fate had found him anyways. He was still going to die, not from an arrow this time, but from the executioner’s axe. He could almost feel it, the blade sharp against his neck.

  He pulled his knees to his chest and dug his hands into his hair. Tears spilled from his clenched-shut eyes. He cried from rage, cursing the cruel trick fate had played on him. He cried from despair at the pointless misery of his existence. He cried from fear and tried to bargain with silent and unfeeling gods. And finally, when it seemed his tears would never dry, he wept in sorrow for himself. He’d never see Felix again. He’d never see his friends again. He’d never return to Haven and spar on the training fields. He’d never graduate. His life was over, and he was only twenty. He cried, silently and bitterly, until it seemed years had passed, until there were no more tears, no fear or sorrow left inside of him, only an empty hollowness that throbbed with each beat of his heart.

  He heard rustling and movement in the cells beside him as the other prisoners began to wake, but the stone walls between them hid them from view. They hid Ean in turn, and he was grateful for the privacy. He wiped his face and listened to them mutter curses at the cold. Some called out to each other—and then to him. They’d seen him dragged in last evening. They wanted to know who he was and what he’d done. More than that, they wanted news of the outside world. What was the state of the kingdom? Were they at war with Westenvale yet? Had Gellert Rhodes won the tourney last week? Some of the prisoners had bet their rations on it.

  Ean ignored them in favor of testing the bars on the door. When they held firm, he turned to the window. It was too small for an escape route, and the wall it was carved out of was three feet thick. The sun, now fully risen, cast a beam on the far edge of the stone. He tried to sneak a few fingers through the bars to feel its warmth. He had long fingers. When he was a child, his mother said they were perfect for the lyre. As he’d grown older, they’d been perfect for scaling walls, picking locks, and wielding knives. But even with long fingers, he couldn’t reach the sun.

  He sat down and listened to the chatter around him until breakfast was served. The guard that came through the hall carried shallow basins of water and porridge. Only water was slid under his door. They weren’t going to waste food on a dead man.

  He drank the water and wiped the last drops with his shirt. He scrubbed the wet cloth over his face, the small act refocusing his mind. He could not stop an execution. He might have a chance at escape when he was brought out to die, but that was unlikely. Odds were, he’d be dead soon. All he had left was the present moment.

  He waited for the specter of fear to return but his tears seemed to have exorcised it, for now, at least. In its place was a grim acceptance. He got to his feet. He knew how he wanted to spend his last day.

  He pulled off his prison shirt, folded it neatly, and stepped into the middle of the cell. It wasn’t spacious, but it was large enough for his needs. He drew in a breath and launched into Sun Dance.

  Sun Dance was the first of the shadow-dances, and the most deceptive. To an untrained observer, it looked simple. The footwork was basic and linear in path, like the sun traveling through the sky; the punches and kicks were direct, no feigned blows or embellishments. It was a dance of stamina and defense. Its power came from the perfect balance of strength and speed.

  But Ean had lost his balance. He could feel it in his strikes—first too weak, then too strong as he overcompensated. He rushed the steps in the beginning and dragged towards the end. He finished the dance, frustrated with his performance, and went straight into Fire Dance, its offensive partner. Fire Dance added onto the footwork, creating a more complex pattern across the floor, and the striking was faster.

  He cycled through all twenty-four dances before collapsing onto the floor, his muscles twitching and chest heaving, but it felt strangely restorative to overtax his body instead of his mind. And it was comforting to perform the steps he’d been practicing these past twelve years. The exercise had warmed his body, and the cold stone felt pleasing against his skin. He closed his eyes and drifted.

  He roused late in the afternoon as an argument erupted around him. His cellmates were cursing at each other, vile and vicious. They took pleasure in weaponizing each other’s crimes. They mocked the carelessness that had landed them in the Tower and listed the ways they might be put to death. Many of them were still awaiting their trials. If they were found guilty, they’d be executed publicly, hung on the gallows over the gates of Balucia at mid-day. The common folk would gather to watch. If the criminals were of noble birth or particularly infamous, their executions would become a day-long event with men, women, and children traveling into the city for the spectacle.

  Ean wouldn’t earn such a crowd, and for that, he was grateful. A shadow-walker caught during an unsanctioned assassination attempt could be put to death, but it would create public outrage. Shadow-walkers were an ancient guild, one that operated outside of the monarchy. They were revered and feared throughout the kingdom. It would be better to execute him at night. His body could be returned to the shadow-walkers for a private burial, and no one would be the wiser.

  He supposed there was a poetic irony to his demise: an apprentice so afraid of death that he tried to cheat his way out of the trials, only to find death waiting for him on the executioner’s block. He would have enjoyed the story more if it had been written in verse, not experience.

  Dinner came, but again, he was only given water. Death would be soon now. He thought of Felix, waiting for him to return, and wished he had said goodbye.