Page 44 of The Shadowbound and the False God

Something omnipresent, something universal. She thought of natural forces, like gravity. Or time—time was something that belonged just as much to the collective as it did to the individual. The time Aisling had was different from the time Kael had, or Rodney, or any one of her friends on Brook Isle, and yet it was something that belonged to each of them. Time fit the rest of the lines, too—at least partly. Time was discarnate; time couldn’t be outrun.

But time wasn’t corporeal, nor could it be hidden. This wasn’t quite a square peg into a round hole; more like a round peg that was just slightly too large for the round hole. Just slightly off from perfect.

“I may be hidden, but never outrun.” Aisling said the line aloud and let the wind carry the words away. This part of the riddle seemed the simplest to answer and sparked a hundred new ideas. She considered the most obvious: secrets. Everyone had secrets—she’d racked up a fair few of her own in just the last handful of months. Many of them—most of them, really—she wished desperately she could outrun.

Before those secrets could get too loud and drown out the riddle, she stood and began to pace the length of the ledge. She examined each static bridge as she passed, ignoring her leering friends and instead pausing to touch all six anchor posts. Theyfelt tangible, made of real wood. Real rope. They didn’t budge when she pressed on them. Of course, it wouldn’t have been so easy. The illusion, if there was one, wouldn’t be apparent until the middle of the bridge. Once she’d gone too far to turn back. Far enough that she’d be confident she’d chosen correctly, sufficiently comfortable that she’d stop paying attention, until her foot broke through a false board and she plunged down into the—

“Stop,”Aisling scolded herself before her anxiety could spike. That line of thinking wouldn’t get her anywhere.

As her frustration grew, she did her best to relax. She stopped pacing to take in the scenery again. It was beautiful, if a bit dizzying: the sharp drop of those vertiginous cliffs into the depths below. She was glad for the light of the moon to illuminate it all; the stars alone wouldn’t have shone bright enough here.

“Discarnate yet corporeal,” she murmured to herself. She was stuck on that part:corporeal. Each of the solutions she’d come up with so far had been undone by that word alone. She resumed pacing, eyes cast downward, lining up her heels with her toes as though walking a tightrope. The answer had to be something that existed without a physical form yet had a presence as though it did.

A flicker of motion caught Aisling’s eye and she shifted to look, the movement startling her out of her musings. In the time it took to turn her head, she braced herself to see Yalde standing there, or Kael, or some other threatening figure. But she’d only caught the movement of her own shadow as the moonlight cast it against the cliffside.

She stopped dead as a spark of realization dawned.Shadows.

They were everywhere, part of everything. Depending on the way the light refracted, one single object might throw dozens of them.

Aisling’s heartbeat quickened with hope as she stared at her dark double on the rock face. It was intangible, had no substance of its own, but it was the mirror image of her own body. Corporeal wasn’t a reference to physicality; rather, to appearance.

“Shadows,” she whispered, testing the word on her tongue. Her own seemed to pulse with life, almost as though encouraging her. Shadows could hide in darkness, but always existed where there was light. They were inescapable, permanently attached to their source. Her mind replayed the riddle again and again, each line fitting her conclusion more perfectly than the last.

Her conviction solidified; she knew she was right. The answer was shadows.It had to be.

“It’s shadows!” she called out into the emptiness, called out to Yalde. “The answer—it’s shadows.” But he didn’t respond, either aloud or in her head. If she wanted confirmation, the only way she’d get it was by using the answer to escape. To choose the correct bridge.

She wasted no time attempting to study her friends and whether or not they cast shadows across the wooden slats they balanced on. They weren’t there; they weren’t real. Lida’s might be darker, perhaps, but Seb’s longer. Jackson’s shadow might fall in a different form entirely. Aisling was sure,positive,whatever she observed would only be an attempt to lead her astray.

Ignoring the way every part of her ached when she moved, Aisling ran instead to the ledge, stopping just short.The false bridges wouldn’t cast shadows. She peered down into the canyon’s depths. She squinted, cocked her head this way and that. But it was too deep, too vast. A fine mist had settled in the lowest points of the crevasse. She couldn’t see the bottom, not from this high up. She couldn’t even be sure it hada bottom.

She shuffled to the left, so she was standing in front of the center bridge, Lida’s bridge, the toes of her shoes mere inches from the step down onto the first plank. Perhaps the solution wasn’t the bridges’ shadows, but that her own wouldn’t cast onto the illusory ones. The real bridge would hold her shadow, as it would her weight.

Except her shadow was cast in the wrong direction.

Aisling looked behind her once more to where it was splayed on the cliffside, and that rush of confidence ebbed away as her heart sank. The moon was in the wrong place. She couldn’t recall where it had been in the sky when she’d first opened her eyes and found herself there on the outcropping, but maybe it had moved. She wondered desolately if she’d missed her window. Yalde said she had time, but maybe he’d underestimated just how much of it she’d use up trying to solve the riddle.

Tears pricked the corners of her eyes and she wiped them away with her sleeve. Just as she had felt when she was very first told of the prophecy—told that she alone would be the catalyst to end a centuries-long war—Aisling felt utterly inadequate. Now that she’d solved the riddle, the answer seemed so painfully obvious. She should have gotten it quicker. It shouldn’t have taken her so long that the moon itself had passed her by.

She allowed herself a few minutes of self-loathing, of self-pity. Those feelings wouldn’t do her any good, but they were too vicious to squash down until she let them wane on their own.

Think like the Fae.She’d escaped the flames without the answer; she could find some other loophole here. Fae games were rife with those.

Aisling raked her fingers back through the knots in her hair and twisted it under the collar of her sweater, out of her face. Yalde had said there were four arenas. The first had been wildfire, hotter and more vicious than any she’d seen before. This—Aisling looked again at the bridges and another gust ofwind made her flinch. Wind.Air.Four arenas, four elements. The first had been fire. This one had to be air.

The way the wind blew, those bridges should have been swinging wildly. Yet the entire time she’d been staring at them, they’d remained undisturbed. They hadn’t moved an inch, even with the weight of her friends walking across. Aisling glanced around for something to throw and her attention snagged on a shard of stone that glinted brightly, reflecting the moonlight. She picked it up, testing its weight in her hand. There was only one. Even with the perfect throw, with perfect aim, she could try only one bridge.

Aisling remembered a version of this problem from school. In that version, there were three doors; behind one was the prize. The first choice couldn’t be anything but random, a one-in-three shot. But if her first throw revealed one of the false bridges, there would be a statistical advantage in switching her pick, increasing her odds to two in three. Except in that scenario, there was a game show host doing the revealing, and in the end she might have won a prize, rather than her freedom.

She inched closer to Lida’s bridge and studied the other two. Mentally, she marked Seb’s bridge as her pick for the real one. There was no rhyme or reason to her choice other than the arbitrary thought that Kael was left-handed. The mirror-like rock she balanced on her palm would act as the game show host; the center bridge, the first door. Aisling crouched down and brought her arm back. She launched it underhand, aiming for the point in the middle of the canyon where Lida stood still wearing that absent grin.

But the stone was too small, too light. Before it could either land on or fall through the wooden planks, it was caught by a sudden, strong gust of wind and sent careening off into the depths. Aisling screamed loudly in frustration. That sound wasstolen away by the wind, too, as were the angry tears that followed.

Once again, Aisling allowed herself the space to feel: the anger, the disappointment, the hopelessness. She rode the wave they brought until they ebbed and her focus returned.

The wind had blown straight through that bridge to catch the stone. Setting her jaw, Aisling pushed herself to her feet and wrapped a hand around one of the anchor posts. She tugged on it once, then again for good measure. It was solid and sturdy. Aisling tightened her grip and slowly, carefully leaned out over the ledge. The wind howled up from the chasm, lashing at her savagely and nearly knocking her off-balance. Her knuckles were white on the post as she stretched out her other hand as far over the bridge as she could. Cold air hit her palm as it passed straight through the planks.

Quickly, Aisling hauled herself back up and ran to Jackson’s bridge on the right. She repeated the same steps: grip, lean, reach. She found the same results on this bridge as she had the first. Then again, on the leftmost bridge.

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