Alchemy & Ashes (The Shadowbound Duet #1)

Chapter One

The knife at my throat needs sharpening.

Its jagged edge bites into my skin as a man closes in behind me. This is the desperate blade of a man who owns no better weapon. This is the blade of a man who has no better option.

This is the blade of a man who will kill me.

Footsteps crunch on dry dirt as other attackers approach my sister and our Guardian. They’re arguing about what broke the carriage wheel. They don’t hear them coming.

I don’t cry out to warn them. I don’t need to.

The man reeks of blood and sweat and death. This isn’t his first ambush. This may not even be his first ambush today.

But it will be his last.

“Scream, and I’ll kill you,” he whispers, his voice as harsh as the desert that surrounds us. He kicks at the bend behind my knees, intending me to walk forward but nearly knocking me off my balance. My throat stings as the knife, dull though it may be, draws blood.

The man is forcing me into the shadow of our carriage, and I suppose I ought to be afraid of what he intends to do to me there. Nothing good happens in the shadows. Not for most people.

I, however, am not most people.

The second I leave the light, I draw on the power within me and deepen the shadow to the black of a moonless night. The sun is strong overhead in this blighted land, but it holds no power in the impenetrable darkness I’ve created.

The man lowers his knife in confusion.

I spin back towards the carriage, putting distance between us.

I can see him clearly, even in the darkness.

It’s the gift of the shadow-born, those whose magic settled into the lowest elemental school.

We’re reviled by some and feared by most, all because we know what lurks in the dark while others can only wonder.

What lurks in the dark is always men, men like this one.

He’s tall and bone thin, so thin that I can barely see his eyes in their deep hollows even with my gift. But it’s the state of his arms that draws my attention. They’re covered in twisted scars, jagged lines that reach to the knife in his hand.

I know those scars. This man is an ash-harvester. All of them end up with scars like this eventually.

This man is one of our people.

These lands were once ours as well. The Machair Wastes were once the Machair Plains, a flat and fertile land east of the mountains House Verran calls home.

They were the pride of old Nithyria. I remember watching waves of wind travel through fields of grain from up on the hilltop of Avaris as a child, an ocean of gold.

Five years ago, those same fields ran red with blood.

And then, just before the war was over, God-King Aurelian destroyed them.

Stripped them and scoured them with magic, tainted them with poison.

They say it will take one hundred years for the rain to wash it from the soil.

But it won’t matter even if it does. With the fields laid bare, the dunes of the great Serath Desert blew in on the wind, and the land was lost forever.

Even the vultures don’t come here.

The road we’re on was built on a dry riverbed.

It’s the shortest path through the Wastes, and the only one that’s even remotely safe.

It’s patrolled in the north by our people and in the south by the Selarans, but with the Great Festival of the Gods on the horizon, God-King Ronan’s patrols must have been too preoccupied to clear out the few people desperate or depraved enough to remain here.

My sister Adria will have some choice words about that, no doubt, once she finishes barbecuing our other attackers. Judging by the smell of smoke and burning flesh, they’re already medium well.

Silently, I draw my sword. My blade is deadly sharp, of course, and nearly as long as I am tall. It’s not a sword for the battlefield. It’s the sword of a lady, a sword meant for dueling in the defense of honor.

It’s more than my honor that I’m defending.

“Where are you, bitch?” the man spits at me.

He’s close, and I really ought to end this.

It won’t take much, just a quick thrust of my blade.

There are several places on his body that would do.

Larus made me drill on the dummies in the castle courtyard until my blisters had blisters.

Heart. Kidney. Lung. And yes, throat. An especially good spot to strike an armored opponent.

This man wears no armor, and I’d be better served to thrust at his abdomen, but there’s a kind of poetry in stabbing him in the throat after he scratched mine.

I should do it. Just lean forward a little and pierce an artery. He’ll be dead in seconds.

He’s literally right here. I’m so close, I barely need to lean.

Here’s the thing though: I’ve never killed someone.

I’ve never even hurt someone, not on purpose. Not with a real weapon. The war was over before my magic settled, and so I spent an entire lifetime training for nothing. I’ve barely set foot beyond our lands. I’ve never fought a bandit or a highwayman or an Orsan raider.

I’ve never even gotten into a tavern brawl.

“Don’t worry,” Larus would say as he’d take the dull point of my training blade to the gut. “The killing blow will come to you. When you’re on the battlefield, your survival instinct won’t let you fail.”

This was a battlefield once. I feel the moves I’ve practiced a thousand times in my muscles, feel the twitch of anticipation before the strike.

But my survival instinct seems to be somewhere else.

On the other side of the carriage, Adria cries out. For a moment, I worry, but I can hear frustration in the grunts that follow, not pain. She’ll win, of course. She always does.

I’m just glad she isn’t here to see me hesitate.

I’m going to stab him. I’m just going to do it before he turns behind the carriage and makes things tougher for Adria and Larus. I don’t need to think about it anymore. His back is to me now, and he won’t even see it coming.

I step forward, and the road falls out underneath me.

Earth magic, the second-lowest school. The man must have it. It must be how they managed the ambush. They waited until the other carriages in our caravan had crossed over the hill and then sent the ground up into our carriage’s wheels.

It won’t be long before the other carriages return for us.

They’re our escort, accompanying Adria, the head of House Verran, and me, the second in line for the title after our brother, on our trip to the capital.

Our attackers are lucky that our brother Seth stayed behind in Kalla.

Though a year younger than Adria, he’s just as formidable as she is.

And about a million times more formidable than me. I’m about to fall on my own sword.

I cry out, fighting for my balance, and the blade-wielder spins towards my voice. He deftly navigates the crumbling sand and dirt beneath us as he makes his way to me.

I thrust my sword forward to counter my fall, and he blindly runs right into it.

Oh, shit.

The brutal steel cuts through him like butter. The handle reverberates in my hand as the blade passes through layer after layer of flesh and muscle.

It’s exactly what needed to happen. What I should have done of my own accord.

And it makes me feel sick.

I need to focus. I’m not going to throw up.

This is fine. It’s just a training exercise, and this man is a particularly juicy dummy.

He’s not a person with feelings and hopes and dreams. He’s not someone’s child, someone’s lover, someone’s friend.

His life isn’t draining through the gaping wound I’m about to leave in his chest. I need to focus and withdraw the sword or risk it getting stuck.

It's harder to remove the blade than I thought it would be, but I manage it. He surprises me by grabbing at it, lunging around blindly in the dark as he chokes and gasps, the blood filling his punctured lung. I should probably stab him again. But he’s getting further from me, pulled away by the sinking ground, and I have another problem to deal with: there’s a screaming woman running around the carriage.

She crouches into the shadows, unaware of my presence. Her hair and tattered dress are smoldering from Adria’s flames. “Please!” she shouts. “I surrender. I surrender!”

It could be a trick. She could be trying to ambush Adria and Larus when they come to find her.

I should kill her. Before she has the chance to kill them, I should kill her.

She’s young, I realize as she turns towards me, sensing something off about the shadow. My same age: twenty-one, maybe a few years older at most.

What is she doing out here?

She’s scared. I see it in the shake of her leg, the way she curls her shoulder away from my unnatural darkness. I see it in the prayer she whispers to Vayla. Help me, lady of light. Protect me. She’s terrified, just like I am.

“Step forward,” I tell her, the point of my blade inches from her back, hidden by shadow. I’m glad she can’t see it shaking. “Hands up.”

She jumps out of her skin at my voice, but she does as I command, stepping back into the light. “Please,” she says again. “We were told to. They paid us. We had no choice. We hadn’t eaten in a week.”

“Who paid you?” I lift the shadows. The effort of the magic is weighing on me, draining me in the way only magic can do. And with the man on the ground dying—he’s dying. Oh, gods. I’ve killed him—and this woman willing to talk, it’s a waste of energy.

The woman’s eyes flash with fear as she sees me and then terror as she sees the man on the ground. She backs away from my sword. “I don’t know,” she says. “I never saw them. I told Marcus it wasn’t the right carriage. Too nice, I said. Please.”

I shouldn’t listen to her. She’s probably lying, probably just trying to save herself. I should just take her out like Larus and Adria have taken out all the others.

Why can’t I do this?

Gods, and they think I’m going to be an assassin. I can’t kill a couple of nameless bandits in the Machair Wastes, let alone God-King Ronan III, ruler of Selara.

Thankfully, I’m just Plan B. Plan A has finished the barbecue and has moved on to the dessert: helping me.

The woman cowers against the carriage as my sister, a fiery blonde champion of death and destruction, arrives.

Adria doesn’t panic. She doesn’t even lose her footing on the churned-up patch of road.

Adria is everything I am not, and I don’t just mean the hair.

(Mine is brown like our mother’s was.) No matter how hard I train, I can never seem to put muscle on my small frame, but Adria is seemingly made of muscle alone.

She’s wearing the same leather armor that I am, but where it hangs awkwardly over my curves, it seems to fit her like a glove.

Adria was trained by Larus just as I was, but no matter how many times I’ve practiced with my sword, my moves are clumsy and easy to read.

Adria is the embodiment of Kerensa’s grace and Sai’s fury.

Adria doesn’t hesitate. Adria doesn’t second-guess herself. She approaches the gasping man, the man I stabbed. A man named Marcus. And she puts him out of his misery with a clean, powerful thrust of her sword to his neck.

I gag as I watch his blood pour out into the sand beyond the road, turning my head and hoping she doesn’t notice.

I’m ashamed that I left him in that state. I should have finished him. What she did to him was a mercy.

Then she turns to face the woman who surrendered.

“Please,” says the woman.

There’s a glint in Adria’s eyes. A flame appears at the end of the index finger of her sword hand.

Tiny, precise, no larger than a candle’s.

Her fire isn’t the wild wind of the forest fire, the fires that burn the trees to make the ash that harvesters like the dead man—Marcus—sweep up to give to Selara.

No, her flame is like an arrow. I’ve seen it before, once.

Not long after the war, when the Orsa thought they’d take what little we had left.

The black, smoldering holes between their dead eyes.

I shudder at the memory. I can’t let her do this.

“She surrendered,” I say as I lower my sword, trying to conceal my shaking hand. “She knows something about the ambush.”

Adria pauses, frowning. Something unreadable flickers across her face. There’s a chance here. She’s curious. “Go on,” she says.

The woman stammers now, far more frightened than when it was just the two of us. “It’s—it’s like I said. There was a man who paid us. Marcus met him.”

“So you’ve never seen this man?” asks Adria.

“N-no,” says the woman. “But I could find him, maybe. He said to take out the carriages. Said there would be food in it, and coin for us if we did it—”

“Kill her,” says Adria.

“What? Me?” I expected Adria to ignore me. I expected my plea for the woman’s life to fail. But I didn’t think she’d make me do it.

“No, Sylvie. I was talking to her,” she says, glaring at me. “I mean, I might as well have been. She could have killed you ten times over by now.”

She could have, but she didn’t. How could I kill her?

This woman is our prisoner. It’s one thing to kill the man who attacked me.

I was defending myself, and Adria killing him was a mercy I was too weak to grant him.

But this woman is innocent. She may have been involved in the attack, but she didn’t hurt us.

“She said she could find the man who hired them.”

“We don’t need her to know who sent them. It’s Ronan, Sylvie. It’s always Ronan.”

The God-King of Selara. The man who invited us, the children of the failed rebellion, to the Great Festival. The man who killed our father.

The man we’re going to kill.

“If you let her live, she’s going to run right back to him. Kill her.”

Adria is right. I know she’s right. I knew it the moment I saw her.

If Ronan hired her, if he hired these people to kill us, we can’t let them live. We can’t take the chance that they’ll come for us again. We can’t take the chance that they’ll come for our people.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She’s young, like me. She’s frightened, like me.

The woman cowers back as I lift my sword.