The Shadowhand Covenant (2 page)

The Dowager set her papers aside. “You do understand why I couldn't join you at the service, don't you, Jaxter?” she asked delicately.

“Of course,” I said. “It's for the best that you stayed away. Everyone understands. Besides, it's all over now.”

The Dowager gazed out the window at Vengekeep. Last night's snow had painted the walls surrounding the town-state, making them hard to see against the blanket of white that covered the valley. “That must have been very difficult for you.”

I shook my head and grinned. “Nah. Not really. I'm starved. You ready to eat?”

When the Dowager and I arrived at Ma and Da's house, we found Da dancing jubilantly around the kitchen, making a show of dropping chopped vegetables into a boiling kettle and singing a silly jingle about par-Goblins. Ma knelt near the fireplace to check on the two plump gekbeaks roasting on the spit. Aubrin sat curled up in a large, plush chair in the corner, scribbling furiously into her black leather journal.

My sister had turned eleven last month and had taken a
sudden interest in writing. Now, whenever I saw her, she was holding a small leather-bound book, scribbling away. As I walked past, I snatched playfully at her journal. She pulled it to her chest with a smile and wagged a finger at me.

“It's not time,” she said. That's what she always said when someone tried to read her journal. No one knew why.

Ma swept across the room to take the Dowager's fur. “Dowager Soranna,” Ma cooed, bowing respectfully, “we are honored to have you in our home.”

“Please,” the Dowager said, her head lilting side to side, “call me Annestra. I think it's a perfectly lovely name. The problem with having a lovely name and being a member of the royal family is that no one ever uses your lovely name.”

“Annestra it is,” Ma said as Da stepped forward to shake the Dowager's hand and show her to the dinner table.

I answered a knock at the door and nearly fell over as Callie burst into the house, threw her arms around me, and wailed, “Oh, Jaxter! The pain! The loss! However will you get by?”

“Be respectful,” I warned, pushing her gently away. “This is a house of mourning.”

Callie giggled. She'd changed from her funeral dress
back into the gray robes she was required to wear as Talian's apprentice mage. She gave me a mock curtsy. “I thought my performance was brilliant.”

“This morning, yes,” I said. “But you were a bit over the top just now.”

Ma pulled the gekbeaks from the fire just as Aubrin brought bowls full of boiled vegetables to the table. Once we all took our seats, Da poured ashwine for the adults, while Aubrin, Callie, and I helped ourselves to glasses of mangmilk. Ma struck her glass with a fork and stood, raising her arm in a toast.

“To Nanni!” she said. “May she rest in peace!”

We all raised our glasses and repeated, “To Nanni!”

Just then, we heard a creak as the back door in the kitchen opened. Turning, we watched a hooded figure carrying a large cloth sack waddle in. The sack dropped with a metallic crash as the figure pulled back the hood to reveal Nanni, grinning widely.

“You didn't start without me, did you?”

“The difference between a good lie and a great lie is six years in gaol.”

—Graydin Grimjinx, sole perpetrator of the Second Aviard Nestvault Pillage

O
nce everyone had a full plate, Da explained.

“It's an old thieving tradition,” he boasted to the Dowager, who was eyeing Nanni's loot bag with a great deal of discomfort. “When you decide to retire, you fake your death, have your accomplices throw a big funeral, and then rob the houses of the mourners as they cry over your grave.”

The Dowager nodded nervously. I'd explained all this to her when I first got the letter from Da three weeks ago, announcing Nanni's imminent funeral. The Dowager's
mischievous side had agreed to accompany me back to Vengekeep so I could take part, but the side of her that remained very aware she was the High Laird's sister kept her from enjoying the festivities fully. No telling what people might do if they believed she was in on the deception.

“Of course, it's a very old custom. Not many practice it these days,” Ma said sweetly, as if trying to comfort the Dowager.

Da raised his cup to Nanni again. “But how could we say no to giving Nanni such a fine send-off?”

The Dowager managed a weak smile. “So,” she said, after steeling herself with a swallow of ashwine, “you're retiring. How lovely. Where will you go?”

Nanni, who'd been rooting around in the bag of stuff she'd just nicked, almost missed the question. “Hrm? Oh, yes. Time to rest these weary bones. I've found a lovely cottage in Angel Cove. Nice little seaside town just south of Vesta.” She pulled an elegant copper candelabrum from her bag and all us Grimjinxes oohed with envy. “This should just about cover the down payment.”

The Dowager choked on her ashwine. She knew our family code meant that we never stole from the poor. But theft was
still theft. Officially, the Dowager disapproved of my family's shady history. Unofficially, she was fascinated by the guile that went into planning and executing criminal activities.

Granted, those activities had decreased sharply in the past months. After Ma had accidentally woven a tapestry from fateskein that nearly destroyed Vengekeep, our family decided to go easy on the heists and try a new adventure: being normal.

None of us was very good at it, but at least we gave it a shot.

Nowadays, Ma and Da tried to earn an honest living, with Da serving as Vengekeep's Protectorate and Ma making dolls in the phydollotry shop. Still, the par-Goblins always said, “An unused tool is a rusty tool.” With Da in a position to make sure that any sort of substantial charges would go away, my family indulged in just enough thieving to stay at the top of their game.

But the Dowager was clearly torn between showing her admiration and being offended at the very idea of dining with thieves. So, she chose a halfway point: total denial.

“I'm sure you'll enjoy retirement,” the Dowager said, poking at her food with her fork.

“Retirement beats living like a fugitive,” Nanni said, raising her glass in the air.

“Yes,” Ma said softly, “I imagine that's how the Sarosans are feeling these days.”

I looked up sharply at Ma, but her eyes were already down on her plate. She'd promised she wouldn't talk politics while the Dowager was here. But Ma being Ma, she couldn't resist a gentle challenge.

To be fair, news about the Sarosan plight dominated conversations everywhere you went in the Provinces. And like many people, Ma had been following the story with great interest. A month earlier, the High Laird had ordered that everyone belonging to the nomadic tribe submit themselves for interrogation. No explanations, just a demand for compliance.

The Sarosans were peace-loving people. Some of their leaders sought an audience with the High Laird to discuss the problem. They were promptly arrested and a royal decree named all Sarosans as enemies of the state, to be arrested on sight. The remaining nomads had scattered and now lived in hiding. Some law-advocates had pressed the High Laird's court for an explanation. But the High Laird refused to
justify his orders, and as a result, there was unrest throughout the Provinces. Everyone feared they would be the next ones asked to surrender for interrogation.

“Ma . . . ,” I said quietly.

But Ma just smiled and passed a plate of steamed vaxis root around. “I'm only saying that it's very strange, given that no formal charges have been brought against the Sarosans. The worst they've ever done is bore people by roaming around, preaching against the use of magic. And if being boring is a crime, they should have locked Castellan Jorn up years ago.”

Privately, the Dowager had no problems criticizing her brother and his often erratic policies. When the High Laird ordered the arrest of the Sarosans, she ranted to me for hours over how foolish it all was. But here, she put on her best “head of state” face. She squared her shoulders and said, “I'm sure all our thoughts are with the Sarosans and the High Laird as well.”

“So, Callie,” I said, quickly changing the subject, “you're looking very smart in your apprentice robes. I imagine Talian's got you casting all sorts of spells by now.”

Callie harrumphed. “Hardly. I can't get a spellsphere
until I'm sixteen, and I hear it takes a year just to learn how to speak the magical tongue properly.” Then she beamed. “But Talian says our lessons are going well. He might let me try casting a simple glamour next week.”

Everyone raised their glasses to Callie.

I nudged her with my elbow. “Maybe before the Dowager and I go back to Redvalor, you can give us a tour of Talian's place.”

Callie stiffened. “Actually . . . I have to leave right after dinner. Talian and I are being evacuated by the Palatinate tonight.”

Everyone's face went from pride in Callie to looks of severe discomfort. Leave it to me to try to steer the conversation away from politics, only to land right back in the thick of the mess again.

The Palatinate, the body that governed the use of magic in the Five Provinces, had announced earlier this week that they believed the anti-magic Sarosans were a threat because they refused to turn themselves in. For their own protection, all mages had been ordered to report to the Palatinate palace in Tarana Province until the “Sarosan menace” had been dealt with.

“Yes, a lot of people are upset about these evacuations,” Ma said, doing a terrible job of sounding innocent. “I'm no law-advocate—”

“And bless you for that,” Nanni muttered.

“—but I believe the High Laird's Law states that all citizens are entitled to the benefits of magic. That's why every town-state is assigned a mage. To assist, to protect . . . Some might interpret the Palatinate's order as defying the High Laird's Law.”

Well, at least she wasn't attacking the High Laird.

“Except I'm pretty sure the High Laird approved their plan,” she continued.

So much for not attacking the High Laird.

“It's true, Allia, that none of us here are law-advocates,” the Dowager said slowly.

“Bless us all!” Nanni cried out. I think she may have had one too many glasses of ashwine.

“And maybe as such,” the Dowager continued, “it's best if we left legal interpretation to them and found more pleasant topics of conversation.”

“Dessert!” Da said quickly and loudly. “Anyone for dessert? I made burnwillow crumble. Nanni's favorite.”

It wasn't time for dessert. In fact, we'd all barely touched the food on our plates. I offered a silent prayer to any deity willing to listen that someone would change the subject.

“So what are you and the Dowager working on at Redvalor Castle?”

I should have been more specific in my prayer about which subjects were off-limits.

Aubrin, sensing how tense I'd become, was doing her best to get us off politics. But asking about life at Redvalor Castle only made my neck muscles tense up more.

I'd written letters to my family, bragging about all the research the Dowager and I were doing, all the discoveries we'd made. For all they knew, I was doing exactly what I'd always wanted.

The fact was that the past six months at Redvalor Castle hadn't been nearly as wonderful as I'd led my family to believe.

They'd hardly been any kind of wonderful, actually.

At the start, I'd approached my studies with enthusiasm. We spent weeks in the Dowager's greenhouse, cataloging the rare, magic-resistant plants she'd rescued from extinction. But then, we'd moved on to topics I was less excited about.
Like the migratory patterns and eating habits of vessapedes. Who needs to know that?

Apparently, the Dowager.

We spent three months crawling around underground, tromping through vessapede warrens and studying their lives. For the record, vessapede lives consist mainly of burrowing tunnels and eating.

Their food of choice? Faces. Yes, faces. No one knows why, exactly. That was what the Dowager wanted to find out. And since the maggot-like giants were basically mindless animals, you couldn't just go up and ask them why they ate faces. Try that and you soon wouldn't have anything to ask with!

It was toward the end of our time among the vessapedes that the Dowager and I began arguing. We bickered about everything. It got so bad at one point that we communicated only by passing notes back and forth, using her majordomo, Oxric, as a courier.

It may seem disrespectful, but I had been raised by my parents to question everything and everyone. I'm sure the Dowager wasn't used to being questioned. As her apprentice, I should have been more obedient. But I wanted to study
plants. Or the stars. Or anything that didn't end with running and screaming.

By the time we got the letter about Nanni's “funeral,” we'd both been suspecting that maybe this apprenticeship wasn't working. We'd agreed to take the trip to Vengekeep, cool down, and then see if we really wanted to continue working together. Now, facing the family who thought I was having the time of my life, that was all very hard to admit.