The Wounded Shadow

  © 2018 by Patrick W. Carr

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961599

  ISBN 978-1-4412-6548-7

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by LOOK Design Studio

  Author represented by The Steve Laube Agency

  To Jesse Tidyman, James (Whit) Campbell, MacKenzie Sample, and Stephen Graham

  That you would be so generous with your time and so extravagant in your friendship is amazing, and I can’t help but be humbled by it. I’ve loved working with you more than I can possibly communicate . . . but that won’t keep me from trying.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Map

  The Exordium of the Liturgy

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Patrick Carr

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  Chapter 1

  Ealdor emerged from the shadows to palpable silence—the lines of his face and the iron-gray stubble of his beard familiar, and his gaze intense enough to see through walls. The Vigil members and our guards held their breath, as if the simple act of breathing might unbind the image of the Fayit and destroy him. I took a step toward my friend—nothing more than an image in my mind but real nonetheless—and extended my arm. He stepped forward to greet me, his right arm extended as well, a prelude to the gripping of forearms.

  I followed the motion . . . and froze. I knew Ealdor wasn’t really there, that what I always saw in his presence was nothing more than the power of the Fayit touching my mind and creating the familiar illusions of contact, but in the past Ealdor’s illusions had been perfect, indistinguishable from the corporeal interactions with other, more common beings.

  But not now.

  His gaze followed mine, tracking down the length of his sleeve until he came to the bare skin of his forearm and hand.

  His skin wavered like mist. I could see the stone of the floor and walls through him. Horror and anger chased each other across his expression, neither of them finding purchase until he withdrew his arm from the gesture of greeting and curled his fingers into an evanescent fist that he held in front of his face. “No, not now!” He growled the words in a voice that hummed with power, and I stepped back.

  I’d never seen Ealdor angry. More, I’d rarely seen him don an emotion other than the contented peace that took turns calming and infuriating me. But for all the resonant power that thrummed in his voice, his hand and arm refused to solidify. In defiance of his command, ethereal insubstantiality took him, turned the entirety of his appearance to mist.

  He straightened, raising his clenched hands. “Here is what you must do,” he said. But his face twisted as if torturers I couldn’t see worked to ensure his silence. “To defeat the Darkwater . . .”

  A spasm twisted his face, and he shook his head. Screams of pain tore their way from his throat as he yelled in a language I couldn’t understand. He dropped his arms, his face etched with tears and enough sorrow to fill uncounted centuries. He shook his head in surrender.

  “Ealdor!” I screamed. “Wait. I don’t understand.”

  Then he disappeared.

  I turned, seeking knowledge or solace from Gael or Bolt or one of the Vigil, but no one spoke past the shock of having seen the Fayit. Pellin and Toria sat openmouthed and gaping. I would have been tempted to gloat, but something with Ealdor had gone terribly wrong. Too many thoughts filled my head, and the walls within my mind threatened to collapse. I needed space to think.

  Rising, I pushed through the chairs and, without waiting to see if anyone would follow, made my way into the sultry afternoon air. Moist breezes off the southern sea warmed my skin, but cold filled my heart. Peripherally, I noted that Gael, Bolt, and Rory shadowed me.

  “I need to think.” A memory of an inn in Bunard where I’d always been welcomed thawed a bit of the ice in my heart. I looked to Bolt. “Is there a place like Braben’s here?”

  He nodded and set our path toward the center of Edring.

  Chapter 2

  Pellin sat at the table, waiting for the sounds of Dura’s departure to fade, holding himself still against the reeve’s possible return. Across from him, Toria and Fess maintained the same posture. After a few moments, Custos and Volsk rose with mumbled farewells to make their return to the library in Cynestol. But Toria and Fess remained—their gazes avoiding his but watching him all the same.

  Pellin sighed and pushed his chair back in preparation for his departure.

  “You didn’t tell him,” Toria Deel said.

  Still seated, he stopped to answer the accusation, wishing she’d been more specific. “No, I thought it best not to.”

  Toria nodded without indicating agreement. “Eldest, I fail to understand the logic of this needless deception.”

  No. Definitely not agreement. “Needless? I think not.” He chose his next words with care. Toria had yet to confirm his suspicions about Ealdor’s visitation, and he would not allow his shock and wonder to betray him. “Lord Dura, despite his strengths, is still a question to us,” he said, turning the conversation from Ealdor’s unexpected reality and instruction, to Dura’s vault.

  Surprising him, Toria turned to her apprentice. “And what do you think, Fess?”

  “Me?”

  In another time Pellin might have smiled.

  “You are one of the Vigil,” Toria said. “It is possession of the gift, not the longevity of it, th
at entitles you to speak your mind.”

  He shook his head, and the unruly thatch of blond hair atop it shifted in response. “I have no opinion to offer . . . yet.”

  Toria’s face mirrored Pellin’s own surprise.

  “I don’t have centuries or even decades of experience to draw upon.” Fess shrugged. “If you are asking me about Willet, he was known to us in the urchins for years before he became a lord and then one of the Vigil. That’s my polite way of saying I’ve known him longer than you have. He has a way of seeing to the heart of people, imagining himself as that person, and then reacting the way they would.”

  “Undoubtedly, he has a very strong talent for others,” Pellin said. Grateful for the opportunity to steer the conversation away from Ealdor and his improbable message, he waved his hand in a circular motion. “Please. Continue.”

  “Lady Bronwyn said as much while we were traveling together. I think, somewhere deep down inside, Willet knew what it was like for us in the urchins. That’s why he helped us so much. The church fathers called it a gift of empathy.”

  Pellin gave Fess an indulgent smile. “I’ve read them. Many of the church’s early clerics were expansive in their theological speculations. There’s no mention of any such gift in the Exordium of the liturgy.”

  Fess met his gaze, steady, without looking away. “And is Aer bound by the Exordium?”

  “That stroke was well laid,” Pellin said. Toria’s expression might have held a tinge of frustration, as if the conversation had failed to answer her deeper questions. He put his hands on the table and rose. “Now, if you will excuse me, the events of the day have left me fatigued.”

  Allta followed him out of the huge dining hall and to his quarters, stepping in and bolting the door, despite the fact they had seen no sign of dwimor in Edring. Instead of preparing for bed, Pellin took a seat at the small table in the anteroom, pausing to pour a glass of a full-bodied wine currently in favor in the south.

  “Eldest?”

  Pellin nodded toward the door. “I think I’m expecting a guest, Allta—at least one, but possibly two.” He lifted the wine and let a sip flow over his tongue, picking up hints of dark berry through the oak. Allta took a seat opposite him without questioning further. A half hour later someone knocked, firm but spaced, indicating neither frustration nor haste.

  “Two, it would seem,” Pellin said. “Allta, please admit Toria Deel and Fess and then rebolt the door.”

  Toria entered with Fess behind her, his eyes scanning the room for threats in the way of the guards. The past few days training with Allta had only hardened the boy’s detachment from his former good humor. Strange that Fess seemed to prefer his role as guard over that as one of the Vigil.

  Pellin rose and poured each of them a glass of wine. When Fess made no move to join the two of them at the table, he nodded to Allta. “We are guarded and the door is sturdy, Fess.”

  The youngest member of the Vigil sat before taking a single sip from the glass in front of him, no more.

  “I can understand why you didn’t speak of certain matters in the hall, when all were present,” Toria said without preamble, “but why the continued reticence? I waited for you to speak to this matter, Eldest. Why did you not? Ealdor spoke to you, didn’t he? He told us to—”

  “Stop!” Pellin held up a hand. “I didn’t speak of it because Ealdor didn’t,” he said. “Dura’s reaction made it plain that he heard nothing in the Fayit’s cry except a wail of pain and frustration. In the moment Ealdor screamed his instructions, we heard something Dura did not. Do you think this was by accident?”

  Toria favored him with one slow inclination of her head. “But how does that imply that Ealdor did not mean for us to share that knowledge with one another?”

  There—she’d asked the question he’d hoped she wouldn’t. “I can only say that some intuition guides me.” He held up his hand to forestall her rebuttal. “There is wisdom in such a course, Toria Deel. If any of us are taken, we would be unable to betray the others.”

  Her hair—dark as pitch, like most of those from Elania—waved with the force of her disagreement. “Eldest, should we be so quick to trust this Fayit? We know nothing of him except what we’ve gleaned from Dura’s memories. Memories, I hasten to add, that we believed were the product of Dura’s tortured mind before today.”

  Instead of answering her objection, he addressed the fact behind her presence in his quarters. “You each received instruction, did you not? And unless I miss my guess, the two of you received the same direction.”

  They exchanged a glance that might have meant anything, but Pellin’s intuition told him this wouldn’t be the first conversation they’d had about Ealdor’s appearance.

  “Yes,” they said in unison.

  “Then we have our separate tasks,” Pellin said. “Allta, Mark, and I will leave tomorrow.” He pulled the green scrying stone from his pocket. After Bronwyn died, they’d given her stone—a duplicate of Pellin’s and one of four—to Fess. The Chief of Servants in far Collum held the fourth and final stone, leaving Dura without access to immediate communication. Not for the first time, Pellin questioned the wisdom of that decision. “Contact me if you must, but without undermining the Fayit’s intention.”

  The next morning, Pellin, Eldest of the Vigil, and perhaps the last who would ever hold the title, rode between Mark and Allta. They avoided the chaos of Cynestol by taking the port road around the city. Soon they would board ship and for the seventh time in his life, Pellin would step upon the southern continent, the birthplace of man. Only this time he wouldn’t be there to keep the fragile tie intact between the northern church and its southern counterpart but to try to answer the unanswerable.

  Mark shook his head as he gazed west toward the incomprehensible sprawl that constituted the largest city on the northern continent, Cynestol. “There’s a lost opportunity, if ever there was one,” the urchin said.

  Pellin was almost sure the mournful tone of the boy’s voice was an affectation. Almost. “What opportunity is that?”

  Mark looked at him in surprise. “Why the war, of course. With your position and my skills we could steal half the treasury with no one the wiser. I could live like a king for the rest of my life without ever having to orchestrate another con.”

  Weeks earlier, Pellin would have turned on his apprentice in disgust and offered some sort of remonstrance. That was before. He paused a moment to consider that thought. Before what, exactly? Before Bronwyn had thrown his objections to apprenticing the urchins back in his face? Or was it before Mark had stymied his theology with his experience and indifference? No. It had been just after that. Outside the doomed village of Broga, Mark had sprinted off to save Pellin and Allta from a throng of broken villagers, each with a vault, all screaming for their blood.

  Such sacrifice demanded forbearance. Instead of worrying over the boy’s larcenous instincts, Pellin allowed himself a measure of amusement. “Should we turn the horses and make for Cynestol?”

  Mark looked at him, his young face already too skilled at hiding his thoughts for Pellin to pick up any indication of what he truly felt. Then a grin snuck up the sides. “No, Eldest. It’s more fun to steal the money than it is to spend it, and that kind of wealth draws all sorts of unwelcome attention,” he said without irony. “I think my conning days are probably behind me.”

  Pellin smiled. “Don’t be too sure. The world changes, and the mission of the Vigil will have to change with it. In the past, we’ve considered ourselves almost military in function. It may be that your skills will be what are required in the future.”

  “Truly?” Mark asked.

  He nodded. “I’d be a fool to deny the possibility.”

  At that, Mark settled himself on horseback and proceeded to doze. Allta pulled his mount closer. “That was well done, Eldest.”

  He blinked. “What?”

  Allta pointed to his sleeping apprentice. “Offering the boy encouragement instead of berating him for want
ing to steal. I don’t think Cesla or Elwin could have done it any better and probably not as well.”

  Two things about that startled Pellin. How could he be startled after seven hundred years? First, that Allta would expend the necessary verbiage to tell him, and second, that he seemed to think such an inconsequential bit of conversation would be important. Perhaps Cesla and Elwin’s skill with people wasn’t connected to their gift. Maybe it was simply a way of encouraging people that could be learned.

  “Custos is right,” he said to his guard. “There are things that can’t be learned from books.”

  Allta nodded, but his glance strayed to the shining domes of the city. “When we left I assumed that we were headed to Cynestol to speak with the Archbishop.”

  Pellin shook his head. “No. I meant what I said. I have no intention of coming close enough to Vyne to allow him to ‘protect’ me. We’ll be going a bit farther south.”

  Allta pursed his lips. “The only place farther south is Port City.”

  He didn’t answer his guard’s implied question at first. In truth, he would have preferred delaying the discussion until they were at sea. As a Vigil guard, Allta had sworn his life to protect him, but as Pellin had already learned, that oath could turn the guard’s obedience on its head.

  “You mean to go to the southern continent?”

  He sighed. “There’s no help for it, my friend. The command of the Fayit leaves little room for doubt.” At the look of consternation on Allta’s face, he sighed and reined in. Allta stopped and faced him, and Mark’s horse, chosen on the basis of its herd instinct, walked a few steps farther before, curious, it turned and came back. Pellin shook his apprentice. “Wake up, Mark. I have news to give you.”

  His apprentice pulled himself upright and took a moment to express his disappointment that the landscape had changed so little since he’d fallen asleep. “What news, Eldest?”

  “Our purpose,” Pellin said. “You’ll need to know it in case I fall and my gift passes to you.”

  He wasn’t sure whose objection came to him first, but he cut his hand through the air and Allta and Mark gave him silence. “I do not mean for you to shoulder my task, Mark, but the purpose behind it must be passed on to what remains of the Vigil.”