She rode standing. The magic that propelled the boat did not extend to drying the seats, and she didn’t like using her own here where the House might notice. And the House would notice. The House noticed everything.
The darkness thickened before her and resolved itself into the House of Shadows. Low and secret, it sat on the water like a toad, crouching upon an island made of bones and misery, hulked atop a place that should have never been. That place had been her home from the day she was given to pay someone else’s price until the day she had grown powerful enough to open its doors and walk out of them.
Sydney hated it.
The boat fetched up against its steps, and Sydney went inside.
Cold. The kind of cold that seeped up through the soles of her shoes and sank into her bones until they ached. She could use no magic the House didn’t permit while she was inside its doors, not without fighting the House for the privilege, and she had learned long ago that it would deny her comfort. It had become a matter of pride not to ask. Back straight, head up, she refused to let herself shiver. No weakness.
She would give the House nothing it did not take, and it had taken enough already.
Dim lights flickered on the walls. Fireflies underwater, luminescence below glass. The only sound the muted echo of her footsteps.
The House could have brought her to Shara directly. Could have arranged itself so that she stepped into a warm, well-lit room. Could have done any number of things to make Sydney’s life easier.
Of course, it could also hold her here, behind its doors, rearranging itself like a labyrinth until she dropped dead of exhaustion, could open its floors over an oubliette and seal her in it, could offer any number of other fatal unpleasantries. It could make her walk past the rooms where magic was extracted from the less-lucky residents of the House, the ones who would be used up and cast aside, who would never leave. Could make her listen to the screams, the sounds made by throats torn raw, the pleading. Could bring the scents of blood and fear to her nose. Could force her to stand and watch, to see and feel again what she had been made to endure.
Her earliest memories were of those rooms. Phantom scars ghosted across her skin. Echoes of past screams rose in her throat.
She swallowed hard. A long walk in the cold dark was nothing.
“You’re late.” Shara’s voice appeared before the light did. The light was a watery blue, cold enough to burn, making the shadows knife-edged. The House was in a mood tonight.
Sydney said nothing. No matter that she had lit the matches at precisely the appointed time, no matter that it was the House’s mood that had made her late. This was neither the time nor the place for small talk.
“I trust you haven’t failed in any other ways today.” Shara’s face as marble-cold as her voice. Fish-belly pale from having lived her whole life in Shadows, she wore her hair as long and tangled as a medieval sorceress and a dress that might have been woven from the shadows she ruled. Her eyes bright blue, lights in the darkness. Sydney had never once heard her speak kindness. “What do you have to report?”
“As you instructed, I am contracted to a House for the duration of this Turning,” Sydney said. There was a plan, and this was its beginning.
“Which House?” Shara walked closer, her shadow elongating behind her. It flickered in the changing light, but it was smooth at its edges. Whole.
“Laurent Beauchamps.” Sydney’s hands ached, and she could feel frost gathering in her hair. Shara, of course, looked perfectly comfortable.
“A candidate House. Interesting choice.”
Sydney held her silence. If Shara wanted a disagreement, to scold Sydney for one thing or another, she would make that clear soon enough. But without a reason, Sydney did not want to say anything she would come to regret. There were secrets that needed to be kept, even here.
Especially here.
“Very well. Continue to proceed as we discussed. There’s nothing else at this time.”
Sydney turned on her heel.
“Except, of course, the contract.” Shara’s voice sly and pleased, almost happy for the first time in the conversation.
Except. Of course.
Long before she had contracted herself to Laurent to help him win legitimacy in the eyes of the Unseen World by founding a House, Sydney had been contracted by the House of Shadows. It made no matter that she had not entered into that contract voluntarily. The House kept careful records of debts. She was a long way from paying hers.
On a table by Shara, a pen, the contract, and a knife, bone-handled. Its blade as dark as shadow, its edge as sharp and fine as truth.
Shara picked up the knife. She gathered Sydney’s shadow into her hand. The sensation was the crawling of skin, her flesh rising into goose bumps, but she felt it inside, like needing to shudder and vomit all at once.
Shara sliced, cutting away enough to curl into the barrel of the pen to use as ink. The cut was the flaying of an already raw nerve, salt in a wound, fire on her soul. It was nothing that had not happened before and nothing that would not happen again, and it was that—that ever and ongoing debt—that was the worst of it.
Sydney forced her mind to blankness and, once again, signed her name. As she re-signed her name every time she was summoned here, as she would again and again until she had balanced the weighted scales and was free. Shadows would decide when that was—Sydney couldn’t even count the days.
The day that she had first signed that contract, she had thought the ritual would become easier, that the pain would grow less. She had been wrong. At least she had learned to keep her hand steady, she thought, as the tears that had broken through her lashes froze on her skin.
“You will be called for again when you are required, and you will not be late,” Shara said. “That will be all.”
Sydney did not look back as she left. The House opened immediately to the outside, to the half-flooded boat that had carried her across the water. She stood, hands clenched so hard her nails pierced her skin, focusing only on those bright, sharp cuts, not on the fresh and weeping wound in her shadow, not on anything but the wood and water beneath her feet, the night air against her skin, until she fetched up on the far shore, until the boat faded back into night and shadow.
Then, as she walked, she let her own plans fill her head. The ones that began in the same place as those of Shadows but ended somewhere far different.
? ? ?
Deep inside the belly of the House of Shadows, Grace Valentine lay in the cold, in the dark, and waited for the blood on her hands to dry. She flexed her fingers, wincing as some of the unhealed cuts reopened.