Shadow Magic (32 page)

T
hey made a miserable camp. Neither boy could get a fire going, even with Thorn using his woodcraft, and K’leef trying with his magic.

K’leef stared at the damp pile of unlit twigs. “We’ve got food, haven’t we?”

“Yeah. I packed sausages—a string of twelve, and each one a feast. Then I managed to smuggle out half a chicken and six of Mary’s spice buns. A bag of apples and even a few oranges.”

“Excellent. Take it out, I’m famished.”

Thorn sighed. It was deep and it was despairing. “It was all in the saddlebags of Gabriel’s horse.”

K’leef groaned. “So what was Thunder carrying?”

Thorn handed over a soggy parcel. “See for yourself.”

K’leef opened it up, revealing a lump of hard cheese and a waterlogged loaf, now reduced to mulch.

K’leef stared at it. He sniffed. “I want to go home. Really very badly.”

So both sat there, shivering, and shared the cheese.

“I hate this country,” Thorn declared. “Why would anyone want to live here? There’s no sun. It’s always drizzling. The earth is so stony you can’t grow nothing but weeds, and…and…”

“Everyone’s out to kill us?” suggested K’leef.

“I was going to say it’s too cold, but thanks for reminding me about the death sentences hanging over us.”

The trees swayed in the cold wind. Bats awoke for their night hunt. They gathered in the air above the two boys, swelling one moment, then dispersing as they chased flying insects and small animals scurrying in the undergrowth.

“And bats. I hate them most of all.” Thorn tried to swat one, but it darted away. “If I never see another bat again, it’ll be too soon. What sort of country breeds bats, anyway? They ain’t no use to no one.”

“Thorn…” K’leef’s attention had drifted upward.

“What?”

More and more bats spilled out of their nests. The sky was black with them, an immense mass of fluttering leathery wings and shrieking mouths. They streamed into a swirling cloud, excited and expectant.

An inhuman, ear-piercing cry swept across the treetops.

Thorn’s heart jumped ten feet. “It’s not possible….”

A vast winged shape, trailed by an endless stream of bats, covered the crescent moon and plunged their camp into total darkness for a fraction of a moment as it flew over.

But Thorn had seen it clearly enough.

Hades! He leaped onto Thunder, not bothering with a saddle or bridle.

“Hey, Thorn, wait!” shouted K’leef, but Thorn didn’t stop. He had to follow the giant bat before it was out of sight.

They galloped through the dense woods, Thunder weaving his way between the trees and under their branches while Thorn searched the sky.

Suddenly, Thunder neighed and slammed in his hooves. He skidded, plowing a deep furrow through the earth as a high-pitched scream erupted in front of them. He stopped a foot away from crushing a small girl dressed in a threadbare shift with a blanket over her scrawny shoulders.

Thorn stared. He knew her. “Maggie?”

She pulled a tangle of hair from her face and squinted. “My dad isn’t giving you no refund, if that’s what you’re after.”

“What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at Port Charon by now?”

She shrugged. “My dad don’t want to pay the toll to cross the bridge. So he’s gonna arrange boats to take him across. On the cheap.”

“Where’s your dad?” asked Thorn, almost laughing at Maximilian’s penny-pinching.

She pointed. “There.”

Thorn dismounted and stumbled forward. Light shone through the trees, and he could hear voices singing.

A camp sprawled across three or four clearings. There were wagons hidden among the trees, and tents had been pitched within ditches and up against boulders. A fire dominated the largest clearing and there feasted the roaming folk, maybe two dozen of them. Three iron spits turned over the flames, each skewering a fat-sizzling piglet, and black iron pots steamed on the burning wood.

Max, the zoo owner, danced around the fire, laughing and waving a bottle. Thorn ran up in front of him. “That man who looked after your animals, where is he?”

Max stopped and stared, drunk and bleary-eyed. He blinked as he searched his memory for faces. “No refunds!”

“I don’t care about refunds! How many fingers did he have?”

Max blew a loud raspberry. “Fingers?”

It was hopeless. Thorn wouldn’t get anything out of him until he was sober, and that wasn’t going to be anytime soon.

Thorn searched every face in the crowd. He didn’t recognize anyone.

Had he been wrong? Was this just a wild-goose chase? Maybe it hadn’t been his dad after all.

Then Hades came.

He flung out his wings as he settled down into a clearing beside a single, crudely painted wagon with a big wolfish dog sitting at its steps.

Thorn approached. He pushed past a web of branches and brittle twigs, unable to take his eyes off the giant bat.

A man came out of the wagon. He scratched the big dog between the ears and approached Hades, who sniffed loudly and opened his jaws.

Thorn stopped. Hades had never let anyone but him get that close.

The man tossed up a skinned rabbit. Hades snapped it out of the air and gulped it down. The man stroked the bat’s cheek, and Hades replied with a growl of pleasure. The man had only three fingers.

Thorn entered the clearing, his mouth so dry he could barely speak. “That’s my bat.”

The man turned to face him.

A pair of bright green eyes met Thorn’s. Green eyes identical to his own. The face broke into a smile, then a grin as the eyes dampened with the promise of tears. The nose was slanted to one side and a scar crossed from jaw to temple. When Thorn had last seen that scar, it had been fresh, livid and red, but now it was pale and cold.

Without saying anything more, Thorn walked up and embraced his dad.

“Y
ou’ve grown. Someone’s been feeding you well,” said Thorn’s dad when they finally pulled apart. Then he winced. “Sorry, son. That’s a stupid thing to say. I’ve thought so hard about what I was gonna say when I got back home—had it all ready in here.” He tapped his chest. “Now, when I see you, it’s all gone.”

“It don’t matter,” said Thorn. “I’m sorry, Dad. Sorry I let you down. I should have done more.”

“Let me down?”

Thorn felt a lump in his throat. “When them guards came. It was me who killed that deer. I tried to find you, honest I did. I looked and looked, but you weren’t nowhere and then—”

“Hush, boy.” His father took Thorn’s chin so they were eye to eye. “You found me, a thousand miles from home, I don’t know how. I’m proud of you, Thorn. You’re a better son than a man like me deserves.”

“Don’t say that, Dad.”

A few minutes later, they sat inside the small wagon, enjoying hot rice and beans from a bowl, Thorn dry in borrowed clothes. The room contained a few belongings Thorn recognized. A hooded cloak made by his mom, and the belt embroidered by his sister Ivy. A longbow rested on the bed, and up against the door stood a quiver of arrows, fletched with white goose feathers.

Hades waited outside with his face at the window. He’d hissed at Thorn at first, and there had been a moment, brief but intense, when Thorn had thought the monster was going to attack him, angry at having been abandoned. But once Thorn gave the bat’s furry chin a tug, Hades had nuzzled him, then snapped his fangs and demanded another ready-skinned rabbit.

“I thought he was dead,” said Thorn.

His dad smiled. “You’ll have to ask Max about that. Someone sold the bat to him, with the warning that he couldn’t stay around Castle Gloom. Apparently the beast was in trouble.”

“So that’s why you left early. I almost missed you.” It must have been Pan. Instead of killing Hades as Duke Solar wanted, he had merely sold him, probably for another box of junk. For once, Thorn was pleased about something Pan had done.

Thorn studied his dad. His hair had more white in it than yellow now, and his skin was more deeply wrinkled—and scarred—than he remembered. He wore a beard, wiry with gray. No wonder Lily hadn’t spotted the family similarities at first—they were well hidden.

There was a knock and in came a big roaming man. He had to bend down to get in and his gold earrings twinkled as bright as his eyes in the candlelight. The beard on him was thick and decorated with gold rings. He dragged a boy along behind him. “We found this one. He with you?”

K’leef stumbled in, huffing and puffing. “Thanks for waiting, Thorn. Remind me to abandon you in a dark, spooky, zombie-infested forest one day.”

Thorn’s dad nodded. “Thanks, Treader.”

Thorn pushed over a stool. “Sorry, I thought you was right behind me.”

“I wasn’t. Is that beans?” K’leef took the bowl from Thorn’s hand and stuffed four big spoonfuls into his mouth in as many seconds. “So this is your father?”

Thorn slapped him on the back. “Dad, this is K’leef. He’s my mate.”

“Call me Vyne.” Thorn’s dad stood up and shook K’leef’s hand. “We met at the fair, didn’t we? You were with that pretty girl.”

“That’s right. With Lily.”

“As in Lilith Shadow?”

Thorn’s stomach rolled. He had to ask the question, yet he was afraid of the answer. “Where have you been, Dad?”

Vyne chewed the end of his mustache. “Listen, son. I want you to know something. I did things I ain’t proud of. I guess I need to live with that.”

“I don’t care.”

“Don’t lie to your old man, Thorn.”

What should he do? He’d just found his dad, and he didn’t want anything to spoil their reunion. But he needed to know.

“The Shadow family…” Thorn swallowed hard, but the words were already hanging in the air. “Did you kill them?”

Vyne didn’t say anything for a long while. Instead he searched Thorn’s face, as though judging if his son could handle the answer. Then, finally, he spoke. “Banditry’s a dirty business, son. Very dirty.”

“What happened?”

Vyne stood up. He paced to the doorway and looked out across the camp. Was he afraid to meet Thorn’s eyes? Eventually he turned and picked up his longbow. He plucked the bowstring with his thumb, his brow creased with unease. “I’d soldiered in the past and I knew there was work here, what with the Shadows and Solars having been at war since the beginning of time. Turns out I was wrong.” He laughed. “Lord Shadow and the duke were at peace! If not exactly peace, the borders were quiet. What was a man to do? I was all for going home, but then I got an offer. Of a day’s work. An ambush.”

“Someone hired you to attack Lord Shadow?” said K’leef.

“I didn’t know who the target was going to be, and I wouldn’t call it an attack exactly. I was hired along with five others, all hard, dangerous men. You show up with six armed men and any fella will give you what you want. No need for violence. The threat’s enough. Still, it shames me to think I’d fallen to robbing men who’d done me no harm.” Dad looked weary. “But I’d been away from home too long to come back empty-handed.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered to me. It wouldn’t have mattered to any of us. We just wanted you back,” said Thorn.

“It would have mattered to
me
, son. A man who can’t provide for his family ain’t much of a man.”

“But something went wrong?” pressed K’leef.

“The man who’d hired us wanted to come along. He told us a merchant owed him money and would take the road through Spindlewood with a strongbox filled with gold. I thought it was too good to be true, but I was desperate—we all were. We cut down a tree to block the road and waited.”

Thorn’s heart quickened.

“The moment we stopped the carriage, I knew something was wrong. The sky went dark and the trees shivered. I swear, ice grew from the branches.”

“Magic,” said K’leef.

“Our employer just gestured at the carriage and it burst into flame. Black flames, I tell you. The whole thing went up just like that, carriage and horses. We was hiding a hundred yards away, but the heat shriveled the leaves all around us. You could smell the stink of burning flesh. And the screams…they’ll haunt me forever.”

Thorn swallowed. It was almost too hideous to take in.

His dad shook his head. “That’s no way to die. If you have to kill a man, it should be sword against sword, face-to-face. Give him a fighting chance. You meet him on a battlefield, and that’s how it is. This was pure evil. I ran down to the carriage, quick as I could. The boy and the woman were dead, but the man still lived.”

“You saw Lord Shadow?” asked Thorn, eyes widening.

“Yes, I did.” Vyne frowned. “Blackened, burned, his skin…well, you can imagine. He didn’t have no business still breathing. I reckon it was just sheer stubbornness. I dragged him free and did my best to beat out the flames, but it was sorcery—the fire ate him no matter what I did.” He looked at Thorn, his eyes wet. “I tried, son, believe me, I tried.”

Lily’s father. Thorn ached, thinking how she must have felt when she learned the horrible truth. How she must still feel. He’d gotten his dad back, and it was as if Thorn’s life was starting all over again, but Lily would have to bear that emptiness forever.

His dad grimaced. “The others were afraid of what they’d done. But that didn’t stop them from looting the wreckage once the black flames finally died out. I wanted no part of it. I gave Lord Shadow some water. I don’t know if it helped at all. Then the other man came, the one who’d hired us.” He closed his eyes. “Lord Shadow raised his hand and spoke. ‘Pain,’ he said. At least that’s what it sounded like. Then our employer kneeled down, took Lord Shadow in his arms, and slid a dagger into his chest.”