Taken By Shadows (The Four Corner Crowns #1)
Chapter one
All fae are born with magic in their blood … except me.
In the early morning snow-lit light, my sister poured bitter tea into a clay mug. The steam rose like tendrils of wyvern smoke after their fires had died, curling into the air. Sometimes, I wished wyverns were more than just creatures in the pages of my books.
My hands crowded the mug, syphoning its warmth, but there was little that could dispel the biting cold in the Western Corner in the early spring.
Even with the hearth crackling in the heart of the damp wooden cabin, my bones didn’t kindle any heat.
Leathers were not the most practical for heat retention, but they were better for climbing.
I wore long sleeves, even in summer. I always felt the need to cover the scar on my wrist, just at the delicate skin where my veins ran blue like freezing rivers.
The raised crescent was pale and always cold to the touch, no matter the layers or fires around me.
Leesha’s face was stern as she poured herself a mug of the acetous tea, a mix of nettles, herbs, and local flowers.
She liked an infusion of crushed local flora and said it calmed her stomach in the first trimester.
I couldn’t stand the burn in my throat from the tea, but I sipped with a tight smile.
“Every time you go out there, I worry you won’t come back, Imogen.
” Leesha’s wide eyes were ringed with a sorrow she didn’t know how to express.
Neither of us knew how to show affection.
Leesha’s father hadn’t reared us like that.
But we cared in our own way. Every time I ventured into the peaks of the Banes, Leesha would remind me to bring more flowers for her herbalist remedies and tea.
And each time I returned, I would place a small bundle of silver posies in the vase on the table.
Her hands were steady on the cup. She didn’t fidget.
At only nineteen, she was my junior by five years and had more clarity of where her life was going than I feared I ever would.
Her dark eyes, like oak and earth, always seemed grounded on her petite face, in constant contrast to my star-bright violet eyes, which shone with wildfire.
Her hair was pinned neatly in a soft, swirling bun at the base of her neck, showing her rounded ears.
My pale hair hung in cascading waves, save for the braid at my temple.
The pointed tips of my ears poked through the flaxen strands like mountain peaks through clouds.
I had given up on hiding the points of my ears; anyone with eyes could see it was more than my ears that made me different.
Even my hair stood out; golden to everyone else’s dark Western hair.
It had been years—too many for living memory—since magic flowed in the Western Corner. Fort Gorrim in the freezing waste beyond the Banes was now in ruins. There was no magic here now, so in that way I fit in. But outsiders were rarely welcomed, and differences were unendurable.
“I’ll be fine. Same as always.” I didn’t lift my eyes to meet Leesha’s.
“You don’t have to go, you know.” Her words were soft as she stirred her tea over and over, looking down into the vortex. I knew she wasn’t talking about hiking into the mountains today.
My eyes lifted to the swell of her belly that stopped her from sitting right at the table.
“I do. You don’t—You’ve other things to concern yourself with.
Jon. You both need the space.” I had hoped to do this with more clarity, but I was unnerved by how difficult it was to face this.
It had played on my mind for years, wondering what lay out there beyond this tiny village.
But everything shifted this past summer.
Leaving Shadowfall was the right thing to do. For me. For Leesha. For the baby.
I wanted to do it. I had to. I didn’t belong here.
But here was all I’d ever known, save for the short trips to the trading town of Craven’s Rook.
I had only ever escaped the mountains and trees that caged Shadowfall through my books.
Books I had painstakingly collected and curated over the years.
They expanded my world through their pages and ink: stories and fables, lore and history.
Leesha’s lips flattened into a thin line, but her soft features resembled a mother’s.
It was odd to see our roles reversed. When her mother passed giving birth to her, I had not been given a choice.
Leesha’s father, Lyne, hadn’t been abnormally cruel.
He was cold like the permafrost that dug into the ground here, but he had hardened like a callus when his wife, Ellen, passed.
He worked in his forge tirelessly after that, and the walls of the house grew quiet.
I grew up to take care of my baby sister.
“I know you want to leave. I know you want answers.” Leesha paused, her hand cradling the folds of her skirts. “But what if they are answers you don’t like?”
I had thought of that possibility many times.
I had always wondered why I’d been abandoned.
Left with strangers, humans. Not even fae.
All Lyne and Ellen had ever said was that the gold they’d gotten for my care had long since run out.
I was left on the doorstep of this same ramshackle cottage on the forest’s edge, the tips of my ears raw red from the cold.
I gripped the worn-out shell pendant around my neck, the ridges of the carving smooth from where my fingers worried the delicate, shimmering surface. What ice grew in their veins that they could leave a baby with strangers with no thought for my future?
Leesha stood as I contemplated her words. “This”—she took the pendant in her delicate fingers—“is only part of who you are. Part of you belongs here.”
She let the shell flake fall from her fingers, and it caught the light like a stray moonbeam. It was just part of the mystery of where I’d come from.
Something like pain and joy mingled in my chest at hearing her words. Maybe she believed them, but no part of me could resonate with her.
“I don’t leave for another few days,” I tried to assuage her worries as I stood. A knot had formed in my chest, and I thought it might crush the air from me. I wanted answers. I wanted to find somewhere I belonged.
The decades of being treated like I wasn’t welcome, like I was a demon they kept trying to cast out, were enough to harden anyone. This wasn’t home, it was just where I’d grown up.
Home was somewhere else, somewhere across the Four Corners. And something was tugging inside of me that it was time to find it. My bones sang to leave this place—a bard’s call to revel in the music.
Just a few more days. Then I’d be gone. Off on a grand adventure pulled from the pages of my books, to untangle the questions that burned in me.
I tugged the wolf pelt around my shoulders once I was outside. The cottage was on the edge of the village, its slanting form abutted the murky forest.
To get to the Banes, I had to cross through the town centre. I could avoid it if I picked through the edge of the tree line, but with the frost still clinging to the ground, I clenched my jaw and made for the village proper.
I tried to make myself as small as possible as I trudged the frozen muck walkways. But the looks, the glances of distaste, of disdain, landed on me regardless.
I ignored them.
The shale pathways of the Banes were treacherous in the spring. In the winter. And even in the summer and autumn. There was no safe time to climb these ridges. But I needed to be here. I had found the key to my liberty lay in these hills.
Tacking my fingers with rosin, I looked to the lavender-grey cliff face before me. The Banes were impassable for most and avoided by everyone else. Stories of what lay beyond the highest peaks, the wastes to the Western tip, kept people away, even if the harsh conditions didn’t.
But I had found a reason to come back here time and time again.
It had been a pure fluke that I’d happened upon the first shard of adamyte when I had been foraging in the foothills.
And I was the only one who climbed this high.
Adamyte was valuable and my window to the wider world.
So I climbed the sheer crags and scaled the rough outcrops until I found the milky white crystal shafts.
The higher you climbed, the larger the crystals.
This high up, the air was thin and wrapped in snares of chilled clouds. Hardy silver flowers still grew from the barren cliffs, bobbing and swaying in the mountain air. If they could survive here, so could I.
My fingertips were numb by the time I trudged back to the house.
The shingled roof of the house I grew up in was covered in packed snow from the long winter refusing to pass the watch to spring.
The thick wooden panels that made up the walls of the little building were warped and bowed in places.
Having the forest on the edge of Shadowfall meant most buildings were made of wood rather than stone.
Convenient for building, bad for withstanding the harsh winters this far into the mountains.
Mercifully, the fire was constantly glowing in the hearth.
Leesha had busied herself with peeling carrots, and the smell of rosemary and warm thyme filled the small room.
Maybe I should have begun to distance myself from this place, but instead, I sat in the common area for warmth, my feet tucked under me, and the pages of my book flipped open to the well-worn divots in the book spine.