Page 31 of Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely
I chew on my lip, a little nervous. I want this to go better than the last time she had revealed one of her secrets to me.
This is a death locket. For someone who was sacrificed. It’s you, isn’t it?
Sila holds my gaze, deathly still. I notice her shoulders do not rise and fall. She does not eat. She does not sleep. Her skin is as cold as ice. We were both more complicated than we looked, it seemed.
“It is,” she says slowly. Cautiously.
Then… how? How is it possible?
The silence stretches out between us.
Please. I want to know.
Sila blinks slowly. “How lovely it would be to hear you say that aloud,” she murmurs. Her fingers run idly along the edge ofthe box. “Your people have stories of dark spirits. Ghastly things that haunt the halls of the Citadel and bring sickness and famine in their wake. You also have tales of a ghoulish woman cast down by the Dawn King. I think these days you tell it that she wished to cover the world in darkness, but she was slain by the Dawn King and cast into her own shadows. When I was a girl, there was more to it. The woman was the Dawn King’s queen then, and he cast her out into her own Court, a pale imitation of the Suntide Court— reflecting the sun’s brilliance as the moon does. It was necessary to keep the balance. Words I am sure you have heard before.”
I had. Almost once a year, as the warmer months drew on and sickness took hold, or when the earth withheld her bounty. Blood will always correct the balance. That is what they say.
Sila is silent for a long moment.
“I went to the altar willingly. I had lost much that was dear to me, and I did not wish to lose anymore. At the time, I thought it was an honour. Now it was so long ago that I’m not sure what to make of it. I drank the poison, and the Dawn King bled me over the altar.” Sila tips her head back and in the low light, I can see the faintest line, usually hidden, running from ear to ear across her throat. She tips her head back down, and her lovely face is unreadable. “It was not so bad. Until I awoke in the Evenfall Court.”
The Queen’s court?
Sila smiles, a teacher pleased at her students' progress. “Exactly so,” she says, her brows creasing together as she continues. “I cannot recall the queen’s words exactly, only that I believe when the stories spoke of casting her out, they meant she was the first to be sacrificed on the altar. Through whatever bargain she and I struck, I was reborn as I am. As one of her wraith-like shadows. What remains of my first body still rests in the catacombs, in truth. She remade me anew.”
Then… how did you come to be in the Suntide Court?
“Did you not guess yet?”
You were sent to kill me… but I am not the first?
“Yes,” breathes Sila. “I am her eyes and ears in the Suntide Court, because my queen still has a grudge to settle with the man who murdered her. I have been here for centuries now. I have watched other wraiths fade, heard the stories change, seen Librarians born and been there when they died, but I persist and so she uses me to fulfil her wishes, to play her game.”
The light in Sila’s eyes is bright, fervent. It would be easy to believe her delusional, but I would be ignoring the evidence of my eyes. A bargain that shouldn’t have taken, struck. A true fae that lives on by the grace of a dead queen. A locket to mark the death of a woman who was once beloved.
But you let me live.
Because this is still the part that does not make sense to me.
Her expression softens again. “Of course I did. How could I not? It’s been a long, long time since I have cared whether someone lived or died. I do not wish to see you dead, Lorel.” She pauses, head tipping to one side, features suddenly impossibly sharp. “Shit.”
Sila’s hand snaps out and grabs my wrist, pulling me up harshly from the chair. My knee catches and I curse silently as she drags me to her bedroom and shoves me through the door. “Don’t move. Stay quiet— well, don’t knock nothing over.” Her brows knit together for a moment. “Did you tidy— ? Oh, never mind.” She pulls the doors shut fast, leaving me sprawled on the floor, still trying to catch up.
Then I hear what Sila must have heard. The metallic ringing of metal on metal that I would associate with the Barracks, not the Library. There is a sharp, heavy knock at the door. Two solid thumps that seem intended to let anyone on the other side know that the caller is being polite. Heavy enough to prove that if theywanted to, the door wouldn’t stand between them for very long. I pull myself up to lean against the bedroom door, where an ancient keyhole gives me a clear view of the centre of the room.
Sila must be sitting at her desk. She makes no sound to acknowledge her visitor.
Two more thuds threaten the integrity of Sila’s door and Sila clicks her tongue, impatient.
“I’m sure you know how to use a door, Vika, so use it,” she says, sounding tired already. There’s a rough laugh from the other side of the door before it opens. The woman who steps through gives all the appearance of someone in a very cheerful mood. It only makes her more terrifying.
I thought Sila was tall. I thought Sila was strong. This woman— Vika— makes Sila look like one of the Dawn King’s most delicate courtiers. Her dark curly hair is cropped short, her eyebrows as dark and thick as Sila’s. The planes of her face are as sharp and hard as she looks. The smile on her face is genuine, but incapable, I think, of being anything but cruel. Everything about her screams violence and every sensible bone in my body is screaming for me to get as far away from her as possible. She turns her back to my hiding spot, and the emblem of the Dawnbound is splashed across it. She’s not wearing a weapon, and I suspect it’s becausesheis the weapon.
“Is this all the welcome I get?” says Vika, kicking the door shut. “I return from a gruelling year at the Dawn King’s watch tower and you can’t even look up from your books for me?” Vika stands in the only vacant space in the middle of the rug. “Fuck’s sake Sila, this is a mess.”
“No one asked you,” says Sila. I can’t see her from the keyhole. Vika sighs dramatically and does a turn about the room. I duck down, out of sight of the keyhole and try not to move. I do not want to be seen by her.Siladoes not want me to be seen by her. “Have you returned all this way just to interrupt me?”
“Of course I did,” says Vika, cheerfully. “Given the complete lack of a challenge in this insipid cesspit. By the queen Sila, do you know how many of these idiots I’ve watched kill themselves out there?”
