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MANUSCRIPT / ACT I

CH. ONE / THE POACHER’S PUNISHMENT

          She was bound to die, that doe, venturing off on her own, and it was only luck Surrie got her first. With wonder and gratitude Surrie of Inverisk pulled her arrow from the deer’s heart. By the spirit of the she-wolf, she was going to live after all.

          It was spring in the heights of Savaska. The creak of cracking ice boomed across the mountains, where Surrie was little more than a blur of red hair amid the evergreens. In the forest smothered in snow, the first hopeful patches of black soil had appeared. In her twenty years she had never become so desperate to see spring.

            It shouldn’t have come to this. She should have spent the thaw curled up in her croft, whittling carved animals for the village children. She should have steeped tea for two—no, three—while the paint dried on buckskin canvases. But it had come to this, and the past fortnight had seen her eat little more than boiled bark and broth rendered from mouse bones.

          Surrie pressed her forehead to the doe’s, curling her fingers behind the great soft ears, and kissed the fur between the dark eyes. This doe, this lovely, scrawny beauty, was the only deer Surrie had harvested in three moon cycles. In better times she would have painted it, marveled at its grace, but today her arrow had skewered its heart like a needle through cloth.

          She was a poacher, no way around it. Over the years Surrie had decided that laws were for people who didn’t scrape to scrounge one more mouthful and one more twig for the fire so they wouldn’t die starved and frozen in their sleep. Her lips, numb with cold, mouthed a prayer of thankfulness. As she cradled the doe’s forehead against her own, she prayed for its forgiveness, and thought she felt it granted.

          In a blaze of cold silver, she unsheathed her faithful knife, slicing the deer’s belly open from breast to udder. Steam curled warm and pungent from the body, and Surrie leaned toward the warmth, basking in the promise of life. It was stupid, but over the furnace of the doe’s belly, it was hard not to dream, just a little bit, about the bows she could carve and the leather she could work with a larder comfortably stocked with grain and medicine. But she’d abandoned those dreams the day she learned to hate, so like every other time she caught herself fantasizing, she snapped back to reality. Dreams died, rats got into the pantry, and fires burned into chaff, but her blades never failed her.

          A branch snapped.

          Surrie’s eyes flashed. Panther? No—too loud. A bear, wakened by the spring sun? She shifted. A wayward panther she could run off, but a bear…

          Then she marked it: the low hum of voices.

          Human voices.

          Oh, fuck.

          Her stomach swooped like a bird of prey and the breath iced in her lungs. Surrie forced her body low and pulled the hood of her cloak over the red hair that stood out like a brushfire. Forcing herself to breathe evenly, she peered over the deer.

          Some twenty-five horselengths off, half-hidden by the evergreens, two men rode grey horses down a trail. Through a break in the trees Surrie marked their cloaks, black as pooled ink and studded with cold silver like stars in winter midnight. An icy stone dropped into her stomach.

          Living Shadows.

          It couldn’t be. It was the eve of the full moon. The Living Shadows were supposed to be holed up in Inverisk, preparing to escort the harvest south. If they saw her here, now, with this poached doe…

          When she was fifteen, they’d left her back blotched with bruises the size of paving stones after catching her with a poached fox. At sixteen, it had been ten lashes with the bullwhip. These four years later she still fancied she saw angry red weals raised parallel along her spine. Forget bears, forget even winter. Cruelty was a human specialty.

          Surrie pressed herself into the hard snow and shivered, but not for cold. For one unimaginable second, her right hand twitched toward her bow, as if to load an arrow of its own accord. She balled that rebellious hand into a useless fist. Patience, she told herself. Patience.

          Seconds stretched into eternity. Surrie watched with bated breath as the Living Shadows vanished into the woods. She breathed with dizzy relief. Safe. Until they made another pass.

          With fresh urgency she hauled out the deer’s organs—the slippery liver, the lungs, the large, carmine heart—and rolled the hide off, spooling grey intestines onto the snow. With weather this cold the meat would keep overnight, so she could return the next morning to retrieve what she couldn’t carry today. But then, if there were any bears blinking awake from hibernation, they would be on the carcass by midnight.

          Her hands slowed. Was it worth risking a bear mauling?

          She hadn’t feared it until recently. Full stomach aside, she missed her father’s burr of a voice and the wine-dark eyes that crinkled when he smiled. Sometimes when the wind lagged in the gully she hallucinated wiry dark hair snagged amid the lichens.

          Rowan always said she was no good at letting go.

          You’re doing it again, she hissed at herself.

          Surrie shook herself. She stowed her bow and quiver, bundled her the deer meat into her hunting pack, and wiped her fingers clean on the snow. She knew the path home like she knew her own body. The broken bridge over the curve in the creek, the sundry boulders where copper snakes sunned themselves midmorning. The landmarks etched into the atlas of her mind guided her until the snow turned to rock at the surly cliffs that loomed over the village.

          She paused on the ledge, drinking in the familiar sight. Inverisk in springtime was a watercolor come to life, a patchwork of crofts pitched across a lush oxbow valley midmelt. Banners emblazoned with bluebirds hung from shopfronts with steep, sloping roofs that siphoned off snow. Most of the villagers bustling through the muddy lanes below were redheaded like her, pinpricks of color as they trundled toward the butcher or baker or tanner.

          But her heart jolted as she scanned the village for its familiar color and found it awash in silver and black. Living Shadows swarmed about the village like a mass of ants. She swallowed the bile rising in her throat. It was a fool’s errand to venture into that hive of Living Shadows with poached meat on her shoulder.

          But that was fine. She knew more than one road to her destination.

         The sun had nearly sunk by the time she slipped out of the woods and onto the steps of a timber trading post. A weather-beaten sign hung crooked on the door, and though Surrie had never learned to read, she knew what the sign read: Inverisk Trading Outpost.

         She pushed the door open with one foot and welcomed the heat of the hearth washing over her bare face. The familiar room—the squeaking hinges, the musky furs, the third creaking floorboard—eased some of the malcontent she had been nursing since spying the Living Shadows. And there he was, at the back of the post, at his usual perch by that decrepit oak table. Brown-haired, brown-eyed Rowan.

          They’d known each other since birth. Their families had traded wild game for goods, celebrated harvests and midsummers, until only she and he were left. It was only in the dead of night, when sleep scorned her and she stared into the velvet darkness in the rafters above her bed, that she could admit she needed him more than he needed her.

          Without looking up, and with that lopsided smile, Rowan said, “So you didn’t freeze.”

        Warm affection snuffed out the last grief and irritation. “Don’t be too disappointed.” Surrie glanced at the shuttered windows, grinning like a fox fresh from the henhouse. “The game was running today.”

          He arched a brow. After all, the most she’d brought in over the last moon were starving rabbits scarcely more than a mouthful of hair. But when he peered into her rucksack, he whistled with obvious appreciation. “Decent bit of winter fat on that. Is it for you or me?”

          “I’ll give you a quarter for three stone of frozen vegetables.”

          “Oh, dummy, the cold’s frozen your wits.”

          “You said yourself there’s a lot of fat.” She lifted a cut of backstrap from the bag, flaunting the milky webbing. “You haven’t seen that kind of cut since before the rut. Besides,” she added conspiratorially, “the Living Shadows would beat me if they knew.”

          “That is not my problem,” he said, even though they both knew otherwise. “I’ll do it for two stone.”

          “Two and a half.”

          “Two and a quarter.”

          She raised a bottle of ale on the table. “That’s the spirit.”

          He stretched and walked to the icebox at the back of the post. “That’ll be a copper piece a sip, Surrie lass.”

          But she didn’t pay, as they both knew she would. This place was as familiar as her bedroom. Bottles of whisky by the fire distorted her reflection, red hair and grey eyes magnified by the curving glass, her skin neither particularly dark nor light. Above the hearth was that map, another sight familiar from the cradle. The Empire of Linnea. In the northeast corner Surrie recognized her haggard, arc-shaped country of Savaska. Somewhere near the heart was Inverisk and the mountains of home. To the north lay the Exiles, the glacier fields where the Living Shadows sometimes marched criminals to freeze to death, and to the south, thick borders outlined the borders of unknowable countries.

           Rowan must have seen her staring. “You thinking about him?”

           Surrie shrugged. “No more than usual.”

          Her father had been the first immigrant to Inverisk in living memory. He had never talked about his native Castanea, the only kingdom to border theirs, and with good reason; the rumors that clawed their way up to Inverisk whispered of caged slaves left in the sleet and children traded like goats. The invented memory of him beaten and starving had made her weep as a child.

           Rowan dropped a cloth sack on the table and sat down. “There’s your vegetables, Surrie lass. Make sure you give me good cuts.”

          She portioned thick slabs onto the table. “That’s about a quarter. Don’t give me that look, I gave you the liver.” As she shoveled the vegetables into the pack, she said, “You’ve seen the fuss in Inverisk? More Living Shadows out than people.”

          “Could be they’re all off to beat someone.”

          “Or pitch them off a cliff.”

          “The Inverisk welcome.” Rowan took a sip from the bottle of ale. “Listen, I heard the villages up north are paying triple for beaver fur. Once the ice breaks up by the dam on the River Isk, you ought—”

          The door opened with a thud and a blast of icy air plunged into the outpost. Surrie glanced over her shoulder, irritated at the interruption, just in time to see two Living Shadows brush the snow off their shoulders.

          Icy fingers snapped like a mousetrap around her heart. She flung her cloak over the table, hiding the poached meat with a poorly feigned stretch. So long as she didn’t draw attention to her poached prize, the Living Shadows shouldn’t take notice.

          She hoped.

          She looked back as the Living Shadows brushed off the last of the snow. Surrie recognized one as a local captain but felt a shock when she saw the other.

          The second Living Shadow would have been remarkable just for being a stranger in Inverisk, but Surrie had never seen a Living Shadow stray from the standard black and silver garb. A burgundy sash draped from his left shoulder to his waist like a gash from neck to pelvis. The tunic and breeches were crisp and new, and judging by its mesmerizing shimmer, the trim might have been real silver. He didn’t look Savaskan at all—his yellow hair was cropped short, and his face was round and milk-white, smooth as a boy’s.

          Rowan bowed. “The usual rolls of parchment, sir?”

          Rowan hid his alarm well. She felt like a mouse at the mercy of a cave lion, all her spite and rage smothered by animal fear.

          “On the contrary,” the captain said, eyes strangely alight. “I am ending a foxhunt. Keeping well, redhead?”

          Surrie wasn’t sure whether to acknowledge or ignore him and compromised with a stiff nod. She almost failed to smother the impulse to fling the window open and scramble out like a rat fleeing a burning building.

          Then the stranger’s gloved hand reached for her cloak.

          Surrie’s stomach curdled as if he’d punched her. He knew. He knew. How?

          The captain brushed the cloak to the floor, the poached meat wet and warm on the table. His voice was all contempt. “You are so easy to track.”

          Surrie shut her eyes. The ghost of old bruises tingled her spine. They would beat her until her bones broke, and worse, they would confiscate the meat—

          “The goods aren’t hers,” Rowan said. “She was buying.”

          Bless you. If she escaped this without a beating, she would give him the ermine fur she had hidden under her floorboards, she would scrub out the fireplace come summer—

          The stranger lifted a cut of meat from the bottom of the stack on the table. “Not her kill?”

          Despite herself Surrie glanced up. The flaxen stranger’s voice was flavored with an unknown accent, all round vowels and clipped consonants. He was either born much further north, or much further south.

          No matter. She gave her head a pathetic little jerk.

          “Curious, then,” the stranger said, peeling something from the cut, “to find this.”

          Between his gloved thumb and forefinger, the firelight glimmered off a strand of red hair.

          “Everyone in Iverisk has red—” Surrie started.

         Pain seared across her jaw like spit from the fire as the stranger backhanded her. Alongside the pain burst lifelong hatred, sharpened now by desperation to keep the lifegiving venison. But these were Living Shadows, authority of authorities, and she was a mouse before lions.  

          “You’ve caught a fish,” the stranger said in his odd voice. “How will you fry it?”

          “Poachers like this one, we beat them in the village square,” said the captain.

          “Stockades?” the foreigner said. “Bullwhips?”

          “Horsewhips. And the young bucks rough them up.”

          Surrie breathed through her nose. She might endure anything from a few paltry lashes to a quarter hour of the whip. Her spine rippled with dreadful anticipation. Rowan wouldn’t let her starve while she recovered, though she’d owe him through summer. As for the doe, maybe he could retrieve the grist she left behind

          She realized the Living Shadows had gone silent. They were watching her.

          “Look at that face. She’s not afraid of you.” The foreigner was looking at her as though she were a clod of sheep manure smeared on his dress boots. “You have to be stricter with these people. In Angel’s Envy, we’d take her right hand, the sneak thief.”

          Surrie, calculating how much she could leech off Rowan without use of one leg (I’ll have to scrub the damn fireplace early), startled. Take her hand?

          Ice formed hard in her stomach. She needed both hands to draw the bowstring. Without her bow she would starve. Pain was a good teacher—impermanent except in memory—but mutilation? Mutilation severe enough to kill?

          The words tumbled out of her mouth without her permission. “That’s not the poacher’s punishment.”

          The Living Shadows swapped a glance. Too late she heard the panic that bled into her voice and realized it was like sugar to them, a fun new way to play with their food.

          Orange light reflected off a knife as the captain drew it from his belt. “So be it.”

          The bottom dropped out of Surrie’s stomach. “Over a doe?”

          Not murder or horse theft or arson? Not a crown-antlered elk or sabre-fanged cat, but a common deer? A doe?

          “Keep whining and you’ll lose your tongue,” the foreigner said. To his fellow he said, “Make them examples.”

          “‘Them’?” Rowan repeated.

          The foreigner gestured to the pack full of vegetables. “The left hand is guilty as the right.”

         Surrie’s eyes fixated on the knife point the captain directed at her while the rest of the world went grey. “That’s not the punishment for poaching,” she repeated, her breath hitching in her throat. “I’ll take the beating, I will.”

          The firelight flickered over the blade as though the steel were alive. Said the foreigner, “That’s the problem.”

          Tn the time it took to blink, the captain seized and pinned Surrie’s right wrist against the desk, blue veins face-up like little rivers. It was as if time had slowed as Surrie watched the knife blade sail toward her flesh.

          In a spasm of panic Surrie threw her weight against the captain, and his knife, knocked just off course, sailed wide. With an exquisite pain like fire, the blade bit clean through the skin and flesh and bone, severing Surrie’s thumb at the base.

          The chunk of flesh fell a finger’s length from her hand. Numbly Surrie stared at the nugget of her severed flesh. Blood surged like floodwater from her hand, the pain a bestial howl. The outline of her severed thumb burned itself into Surrie’s memory like a cattle brand. Her throat was too tight to scream.

          The captain muttered and retightened his grip. Once more he raised the knife. She foresaw her future in a flash: her right hand, green with infection, blood poisoning creeping up her wrist. Her pantry, too empty for even a mouse. Dead before summertime.

          Without thinking she drove her knee into the captain’s groin and wrenched her wrist free. He sank to his knees, blade clattering to the floor. Primal panic spurred her to snatch her bow from the ground and fit an arrow from the quiver on her hip. A suffocating heat pressed close around her, shock coming on fast, as she scrambled to put distance between them.

          The captain regained his feet, swearing. Surrie, seeing more red than a bull, trained the arrow tip between his brows. She felt the pulse in her mangled hand thundering as though it was the beating center of her body. The right side of her face was slick with fresh blood from the hand drawing the bowstring back.

           “Lower your bow, you mongrel Savaskan thief,” the foreign Living Shadow said, irritated, “by command of the Order of Living Shadows.”

          But Surrie held steady. This caged and cornered wolf would die biting, for her and for every other man and woman the Living Shadows pushed past the brink. Her pulse throbbed to the point of bursting in the hand cradling the bowstring against her face. Out of the corner of her eye Rowan sat rigid and white-faced as if willing himself out of existence. She wished him success.

           Surrie opened her mouth to say if you agree to beating when the captain lunged. Unthinking, and with of twenty years’ worth of simmering hate and abject terror finally boiling over, she fired the arrow.

          A spray of red. Flecks of blood rained as the arrow impaled the captain’s palm all the way through to the feathered fletching.

          For years Surrie had imagined how it would feel to strike a Living Shadow—empowering, liberating—but now that the captain was recoiling before her, she felt only dread greater than any before. The captain gasped like wounded bull, cradling his maimed hand, and retreated beside the foreigner—

          The foreigner. The derision in those colorless eyes pulled Surrie back to reason. With mounting horror she watched the captain pull her arrow through with a muted scream. She had committed the unforgivable sin, and if she had crossed the line before, she was as good as dead now.

          She forgot how to breathe. The foreigner, his baleful face inhumanly emotionless, plucked a silver knife from the four holstered at his belt. Surrie slid another arrow onto the bowstring. But her hands were clumsy with shock, and the notch at the end of the arrow kept slipping past the waxy bowstring. Her fingers were greased with sweat—no, blood—her eyes caught on the red wreckage of her thumb, ragged and gory. The slick on her face could be sweat or blood—

            The crash of shattering glass. Surrie’s eyes flashed up. Rowan, gripping the neck of his bottle of ale, stood over the stranger, who had collapsed on the floor with glass in his hair.

          Her heart ticked three times before she understood. Surrie’s eyes snapped to the captain cradling his bloody hand by the door. The captain, someone she’d suffered the whole of her twenty years, who’d beaten her when she was still half a child and sent her father on his final hunt, was incapacitated. An easy target. And she was already beyond forgiveness.

          Not even sure it was her doing, Surrie nocked the arrow with the familiar click.

          The captain kicked the door open and vanished.

          The hearth fire guttered as cold air plunged into the outpost, goose-pimpling her arms and freezing the lather of sweat to her body. Clarity crashed back with the force of an avalanche. The arrow landed on the floor with a clatter.

          I shot a Living Shadow.

          I shot a Living Shadow.

          Her heart rioted in her temples. A poached doe was an animal. A poached doe was property. But the blood of a Living Shadow? Of two Living Shadows? A Living Shadow she’d meant, however briefly, however insanely, to slay? The mountains would crumble on themselves before the Living Shadows forgave it. They would douse her in oil and freeze her whole on the glacier fields. No, no, it would be here, in Inverisk, in view of her neighbors. An axe through the neck, a basket to catch her head. No, they’d bleed her, or tie her by the neck to a horse and send it galloping, or saw off hands and feet and let her blood water the soil until her veins caved in on themselves.

            She staunched her mangled thumb against her tunic in the hope that the pain would keep her sane. She pointed with her chin to the foreigner.

            “Is…he dead?”

          Rowan was the color of sour milk. Gingerly he pressed two fingers to the Living Shadow’s neck.

          “He’s alive.”

           “Thank the wolf spirit,” Surrie breathed. The knot in her chest loosened by a thread. Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be the death penalty.

           But she couldn’t bring herself to believe it. Not with that pale-faced foreigner. If he wanted her hand for a doe, what would he demand for this—whole arms and legs? Either way it amounted to death by infection. She picked up her arrow and ran her fingers down the turkey feather fletching, seeking comfort, eyes shut.

          When she opened her eyes, they alit on the map. Serpentine borders. Blue rivers, unknowable forests, a distant sea.

          “Rowan,” she said.

          Rowan was cradling himself and staring at the unconscious foreigner. “You think they’ll send us to the Exiles.”

          She chewed her lip. “No.”

          He drummed his fingers against his arm like a flurry of pheasant wings. “It’s either that or a gallows–”

          “Papa was from Castanea.”

          “What has Eras got—oh,” Rowan said. His fingers stilled. “Surrie lass. We can’t go south.”

          She fidgeted. She knew nothing about her father’s country except that he fled it, and even faced with the Living Shadows of Inverisk, he’d never returned. A poor prospect, but…

          “They’ll kill us, Rowan,” Surrie said. “They’ll make a show of it in the morning and leave us to die from the wounds. But if we run right now—”

          “The hounds will smell us out.”

          “You have spice for our boots. And the snow will slow the horses”

          “Your pa left the south—”

          “At least he had legs!” Surrie erupted. “Which might be more than we can say!” She was keenly aware she used her right hand to point to his ledger when she said, “Traders come from the south. My father grew up there. Somewhere down there, there’s life!”

          “And famines, and thieves,” Rowan said, scowling and pacing like a caged lion. “And… and maybe no Living Shadows.”

          He paused. She almost saw the thoughts flashing behind his eyes.

          It was a gamble. Her father’s land could be a nightmare beyond this one. But it was a chance.

          She willed Rowan to agree, but he was looking elsewhere. She followed his gaze to the stairs that led to the rooms he had grown up in. Her own home waited empty on the banks of the creek, littered with the relics of her family. The mere idea of leaving made her want to scream until her body rent in two. But if she stayed…

          “You’re going,” said Rowan, “aren’t you?”

          She saw no other future. “Are you coming?”

          Rowan hesitated.

          For one agonizing moment, Surrie felt sure he would say no. Rowan, the last precious bud adjacent to her withered family tree, was going to leave her to her fate, and her abandonment would be complete.

          But no sooner had she thought it than Rowan’s shoulders fell. “What kind of question is that?” he said. “We’ll take everything we can carry.”

          Together they stuffed a pair of goatskin packs so full they could hardly cord shut: medicine and gauze, loaves of grainy bread, spears of goat jerky, flint and old parchment for kindling on top of the fresh deer and vegetables, plus vials of sage for scenting their boots. Surrie skirted the foreigner as though he were a bear liable to wake and made her way to the door, where the cold night burned her lungs. Behind her the firelight guttered and vanished, plunging her into pitchlike dark.

          Surrie suddenly thought of her father’s boots at the foot of her bed and the woodcarving tools she’d been foolish to dream of mastering. She knew the trail back to Inverisk without seeing it, all the handholds and divots in the trail. Could she ever return?

          She gritted her teeth. The captain would alert the constable as soon as he reached Inverisk. A convoy of Living Shadows would arrive within the hour, were probably already on their way, iron cuffs in hand. She had to kill the pain of parting, and she had to do it now.

          Next to her, Rowan’s eyes flickered in the dark. Rowan, at least, did not deserve to join his family in the ground. She would live long enough to save him, to protect the terminal bud of her pseudo-family tree.

          She laced her fingers with his and took the first step. “I’ll keep us alive,” she said, more to herself than Rowan. “Will you follow me?”

          “All right, Surrie lass,” Rowan said heavily. They may be lost, but she was not alone. “Impress me.”