Darkhaven Read online

  Lifting her chin, she started down the slope towards the seventh gate, and Arkannen.

  Myrren was awoken from an uneasy dream by the sudden clangour of bells. With a gasp, he sat bolt upright, tilting his head in search of the sound. It wasn’t the temples in the city; it was nearer and louder, an erratic jangling that cut right through him. The old warning bell, proclaiming disaster.

  Ayla.

  The thought sent him stumbling out of bed, to push aside the heavy curtain that barely stirred in the breeze from the open window. A relieved sigh escaped him at the glimmer of daylight on the horizon. The new day had begun; Ayla ought to be well away by now. The noise must be because the Helm had discovered her escape. He should speak to his father before they did, confess what he’d done. The idea made him more nervous than a grown man had any right to be, but better that than be discovered in a lie.

  He turned away from the window, then wavered as dizziness swept over him. It hardly felt as if he’d slept at all. No doubt part of him had been awake all night, fretting about Ayla, hoping she was safe. He knew how much it meant to her to be able to Change; he couldn’t bear the idea that she might be denied her gift for good. If he could Change, he would hate to be locked up more than anything … but he pushed that thought aside. Some things were too sour to linger over.

  With the prospective visit to his father in mind, he dressed with especial care. Florentyn would never look on him with approval, but at least he could present the appearance of a true Changer child. So he put on his best pair of breeches, a snowy white shirt, a black coat slashed with inky dark blue the exact shade of his eyes – all the while rehearsing what he was going to tell his father. Excuses and explanations wouldn’t be acceptable, he knew that. He’d just have to state the facts and take the consequences.

  ‘My lord Myrren!’ The knock at his door came just as he was pulling on his boots, startling all his carefully planned words out of his head like so many butterflies. Why had anyone come to him? It was his father who should be informed of Ayla’s escape.

  Unless Florentyn had learned of his part in the matter, and sent the Helm to arrest him in her place …

  In two quick strides, he was at the door and yanking it open; better to pull the splinter than to let it fester. The Helmsman on the other side was pale, his forehead glistening with a sheen of sweat. Myrren’s guts clenched in painful anticipation. Perhaps it wasn’t Ayla’s escape that had set the warning bell ringing. Perhaps it was something far worse.

  ‘My lord,’ the man said again, staring through Myrren as if seeing a series of images sent straight from his darkest nightmares. ‘Your father.’ He passed a shaking hand over his face, then took a deep breath and looked Myrren in the eye. ‘He’s dead.’

  TWO

  The first thing they must have seen when they broke down Florentyn Nightshade’s door was the blood. Spattered across the walls, pooling on the polished wooden floorboards, dyeing the sheets to deep crimson: it didn’t seem possible for all that blood to have come from a single man. Not that there was much left in him. He lay sprawled on his back, bleached to bone white like driftwood left too long in the sun. The only colour in him was the night-dark hair that proclaimed his lineage, and the gaping hole where his throat had been.

  Myrren stopped just inside the door, pressing the back of one hand to his mouth in a vain attempt to suppress the bile rising in his throat. The thick, metallic odour in the room was horribly familiar, but for a moment he couldn’t place it – and then when he did, he wished he hadn’t. It was the smell of the slaughterhouse.

  He turned his head, searching the faces of the three or four Helmsmen crowding the doorway behind him.

  ‘Where is Captain Travers?’ he asked stupidly, as if that were the most important question. But he wanted Travers to be there. Travers was in charge of the Helm, and the Helm had clearly failed in their duty.

  ‘Called away to the cells, my lord,’ one of the men said – which reminded Myrren all over again of Ayla. No doubt Travers was currently learning of her escape. Yet now all Myrren’s anguish over that seemed trivial and irrelevant.

  ‘Then you tell me, please,’ he said. ‘W-what happened?’

  ‘We don’t know, my lord.’ Myrren couldn’t put a name to the speaker; the watching Helmsmen were all alike with fear. ‘A maidservant tried to deliver his breakfast, but found the door locked. She knocked and got no answer. And then …’ He swallowed. ‘And then she noticed the smell.’

  Myrren nodded. ‘So she sent for you. I see.’

  His gaze settled briefly on his father’s body, then shied away again. It was a good thing he hadn’t eaten this morning; as it was, the scant contents of his stomach were rapidly congealing into something cold and nauseous.

  ‘Did – did anyone try to revive him?’ It was another stupid question, given the state of the body, but it had to be asked.

  ‘I checked his pulse,’ a different man said. His striped sleeve was stained with a rust-dark smear, as though he had wiped his bloody hand on it. ‘But there was nothing …’

  ‘No. Indeed.’ Myrren could hear his own voice becoming ever more clipped and precise, a counterbalance for the tumult of emotion inside him. ‘So, then – so –’

  ‘We’ve had the physician to him, my lord.’ One of the Helm came to his aid. ‘He thinks it happened between seventh and eighth bell yesterday.’

  Seventh bell … A presentiment formed at the edge of Myrren’s thoughts, but he pushed it away.

  ‘So someone broke into Darkhaven last night,’ he said. ‘Crept to my father’s room, picked the lock, then relocked the door behind him after doing his murderous business – all without being seen by any of you?’

  ‘No, my lord,’ the Helmsman said. ‘He couldn’t have left through the door. Not with it locked from the inside.’ He hesitated, glancing at his fellows, then added, ‘We found this on the floor by the bed.’

  Automatically, Myrren held out his hand to take what was being passed to him: a black disc, shiny, ever so slightly concave. It felt cool and hard, like something made from metal. An armour link, perhaps, or a scale from a Hydra – though no Hydra had been seen in the Nightshade line for generations. One side was still encrusted with a dull residue of blood.

  Slipping the disc into his pocket, Myrren looked over at the splintered door and saw that the man was right: the key still dangled from the now-useless lock. It wasn’t possible that anyone could have left that way. His presentiment growing stronger, he scanned the room, trying to look beyond the gore. The scuffling feet of the Helm had obscured any prints the intruder might have left, but across the room a window was open, the shutters banging in the breeze. Whoever had done this must have entered and departed through it: a window set in a sheer stone wall, five storeys from the ground. No man alive could have scaled that wall.

  No man could have done it … but a Changer could.

  Myrren closed his eyes as the sick knowledge lodged itself in his throat. He couldn’t bring himself to speak it aloud in case he made it true. Instead, he stood there in his murdered father’s bedroom and listened to the whispers of the men in the doorway.

  ‘Must have been a wild animal, come in through the window.’

  ‘Or an assassin, sent from Sol Kardis or Parovia. I heard as how a Kardise assassin can climb any wall, however steep, and fit through any gap, however narrow.’

  ‘Idiots! This is the old Firedrake we’re talking about. You think any man or beast coulda got the better of him?’

  The talk went on, growing wilder and wilder. Because they were right: Florentyn in creature form had been well-nigh indestructible, and even as a man he’d been more powerful than most. Changers weren’t quite human; they were stronger, faster, better. Even ambushed in sleep, Florentyn would have been able to fight off a mere wild animal or knife-wielding assassin. Yet what other possibilities were there? Everyone knew Myrren had been born without the gift, and Ayla … well, Ayla was locked in prison, accused of attacking a p
riestess.

  Or at least, she would have been if Myrren hadn’t let her out the night before.

  It was with a sense of inevitability that he heard a new voice, cutting through the others in the sharp tones of command.

  ‘My lord!’

  He turned to see Owen Travers, Captain of the Helm, making his way past the ranks of suddenly silent men. The captain’s words dropped like pebbles into the still pool of the room, sending ripples in all directions.

  ‘My lord, I regret to inform you that your sister Ayla is missing.’ Travers spared a single withering glance for his underlings. ‘She must have escaped last night, but it wasn’t until the second bell that any of the lackwits in my employ noticed she was gone.’

  His face was smoothly professional, but the slight flare of his nostrils spoke of excitement. He recognised, just as well as Myrren, the implications of the night’s events. The Helm couldn’t be expected to protect the Nightshade line from itself. Here, finally, was indubitable proof that Ayla was dangerous – that a half-blood Changer was something to be deplored.

  Guilt flooding through him, Myrren bowed his head. He couldn’t look at his father’s drained corpse. As talk burst out again in the doorway, louder and more vehement than before, he addressed Florentyn in a whisper no-one but the two of them could possibly hear.

  ‘I’m sorry, Father. This is all my fault.’

  Later that morning, as news of Florentyn’s death spread out from the tower, through the rings of Arkannen and into the country beyond, Myrren sat in his room and stared at the contents of his cupped hands: a small black disc, stained with blood. If he hadn’t been born with that one unforgivable, fundamental flaw then maybe his father would still be alive.

  They did spring up in the royal line from time to time, children without the ability to Change. Usually they were younger siblings, able to be kept out of sight. They were sent off as ambassadors to the Ingal States or Sol Kardis, or given command of a merchant train: important tasks, but tasks that kept them away from the city and away from Darkhaven. With Myrren, however, it hadn’t been that simple. He was his father’s heir, the only child of his first marriage. It had been a source of great shame to Florentyn that he couldn’t hide his Changeless child away – and it was that shame, in the end, that led him to disinherit Myrren and give his half-Nightshade daughter the throne instead.

  Still, it couldn’t have been an easy decision to make. An ungifted child of the blood or a half-blood child with the gift: neither was the heir Florentyn would have chosen to succeed him. And Ayla’s refusal had only exacerbated the situation. Myrren had accepted his disinheritance with the vague despondent feeling that it was what he deserved, but Ayla had been outraged on his behalf. The fighting had raged for weeks, two strong wills colliding in an explosion of fury, while Myrren stayed quiet in the background. He had told Ayla from the start that he was willing to abide by his father’s choice, but she hadn’t listened. She, just like Florentyn, was determined to get her own way.

  And then she had been accused of a mindless attack, an assault on a priestess of the sixth ring. Myrren hadn’t believed it, not for a moment. He’d thought the priestess must have been mistaken – that Florentyn was using the tale as an excuse to punish Ayla for her disobedience. As a result, he’d seen no alternative but to let her out. She was a Changer. She wasn’t meant to be caged. She’d made it very clear that she’d rather die than be locked up forever.

  So would Myrren, for that matter.

  Yet now, he wasn’t so sure he’d done the right thing. He had released his sister, and on the very same night their father had been killed. Whether or not it was coincidence, one thing was certain: he needed to find her again. But how? If she was guilty then sending out a public message would only drive her further into hiding. He needed to find her and question her, in secret, before Travers and the Helm could get to her. He needed to learn the truth.

  Myrren turned the bloodstained disc over and over in his fingers. His father was dead, unable to attest to what he’d experienced in the last moments of his life. Yet there was another possible witness: the priestess who’d made the original accusation against Ayla. Myrren couldn’t believe that Arkannen was home to two rogue Changer creatures, so if her story was true then she was the only living person who had seen his father’s killer. He would go to her, and perhaps she would lead him to what he sought.

  Perhaps she would lead him to Ayla.

  ‘There’s a man here to see you, Sister.’ The acolyte dropped a curtsey, then looked up with wide eyes. ‘It’s the old Changer’s son.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Serenna rose from her chair by the window, trying not to wince as her feet touched the floor. It had been weeks, but her right ankle in its brace still ached. She was lucky they’d been able to rebuild the shattered bone at all.

  The child fidgeted in the doorway as Serenna took a shawl from her armoire and wrapped it around her shoulders. She had been expecting this visit. Official word from the Helm stated only that Florentyn had died without warning, but rumour was happy to supply far more in the way of detail. It said he’d been murdered by a Changer, perhaps the same creature that had attacked her. And if that was true, the inhabitants of Darkhaven were bound to have questions for her.

  ‘Show him into the little room off the west walk,’ she told the acolyte. ‘I will follow.’

  As the child sped off on her errand, Serenna picked up her slender walking cane from the corner where it was propped. She didn’t like to use it; it spoke of weakness, and of age. She worried that people would look at her, a girl in her twenties, and see a crone hunched over a stick. But such thoughts were arrant vanity, unbefitting a woman in her position, and so she forced herself to use the cane whenever she needed to walk more than a few steps around the temple – particularly if she had visitors. Aside from the spiritual good it did her, there was no denying that having something to lean on eased the throbbing ache in her foot.

  She made her slow way out of the priestesses’ quarters and along the west walk to the room where the man was waiting. He turned as she entered, giving her a short bow that was carefully calculated to convey both respect and authority. Calculated was the right word, she decided. Everything about him was controlled: the straight-backed stance, the impassive expression, the slight tilt of the head as he regarded her. If he felt any emotion, it was held in check behind a sober face and a steady hand.

  ‘Sister Serenna.’ He touched his fingers to hers in greeting. ‘I am Myrren Nightshade, overlord of Darkhaven.’

  She looked up into his dark blue eyes. It must be difficult being born without the family gift. Everyone had always referred to Florentyn as the old Changer; with Myrren, they mumbled and stammered before settling on the old Changer’s son. It was as though his lack of power left him without identity, a bare shadow of his Firedrake father.

  ‘My lord Myrren,’ she said, offering him a calm smile. ‘I was sorry to hear of your father’s death.’

  ‘Were you?’ The blue eyes assessed her. ‘You were, perhaps, the only one outside Darkhaven. Most people seem to believe that without a Changer to rule them –’ his voice didn’t alter, remaining cool and even, but his teeth showed briefly in a grimace – ‘the more stringent laws of Mirrorvale need no longer be kept.’

  Serenna revised her first impression; beneath the man’s solemn demeanour lay something altogether fiercer. ‘But surely the Helm –’

  ‘The Helm are men, and restricted largely to Darkhaven. A creature of power …’ Myrren’s shoulders lifted in a rueful shrug. ‘My father the Firedrake could travel from here to the Kardise border within the space of a day. Nothing keeps people honest like the fear of a fire-breathing lizard turning up on their doorstep.’

  His self-possession was absolute, but Serenna caught the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. Next moment it was gone, and he was regarding her gravely.

  ‘Sister Serenna … I expect you have some idea why I’m here.’

  She
nodded. ‘You believe the creature that attacked me may be the same one that killed your father.’

  ‘Rumour has wings in this city.’ Myrren’s voice was dry. ‘Then I daresay you’re also aware that my half-sister Ayla is the only Changer still living, in Arkannen or anywhere else.’

  ‘Is it possible there could be another?’ Serenna asked. He shook his head.

  ‘The gift has never appeared outside our bloodline. Ayla and I are the only living Nightshades.’

  ‘Forgive me.’ She watched his face carefully. ‘But … is it possible you’re not?’

  He froze, staring at her, then released his breath in something that wasn’t quite a laugh. ‘You have interesting ideas for a priestess.’

  She was quiet, and after a moment he went on.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it’s possible. But if Florentyn did have another child, it must have been before I was born. My mother died giving birth to me, and it didn’t take long after that for him to meet and wed his second wife. He was … devoted to her, to Ayla’s mother, in a way he never was to his own kin. I don’t think he would have looked at another woman once he had her.’

  ‘She died too, though, didn’t she? Five years ago. Perhaps after that …’

  ‘No.’ Myrren’s response was swift. ‘The child would be too young. The gift doesn’t manifest itself before the age of fourteen. No, if there was another child, he or she must be older than me. A full-grown adult by now.’ A frown disturbed the composed gravity of his face. ‘I’d like to believe it. Better that than Ayla …’

  ‘Tell me,’ Serenna said, ‘what is it that Ayla Changes into?’

  ‘I have no name for it.’ He sighed. ‘My grandfather was a Phoenix, swift and bright. And his mother’s sister was a Unicorn, loyal and fierce. Ayla … she is neither one nor the other. She Changes into a golden horse, with a spiral horn and wings like flame.’