Sisters of Shadow and Light Read online

  But it’s not her.

  It’s roaring, blinding, deafening.

  Who I am.

  Who am I?

  ELEVEN

  Mother allowed Sami to bring me a large pitcher of water, one loaf of bread that first morning, and then … nothing. I’d expected her or Mother to come later that night with a meal, as she’d done when I’d been locked in my room for trying to enter the Hall of Miracles, but no other meal arrived. After dinnertime came and went without a knock at the door, I began to regret consuming the bread and water so hastily earlier in the day.

  I crawled into bed shortly after the last of the sunlight was absorbed into the cloaking darkness of the coming night. Sleep was slow in coming, partially because of my unsatisfied belly and partially because of the onslaught of thoughts careening through my mind. Halvor, the Paladin, the hedge, Inara’s unknown powers … too many questions and not nearly enough answers to allow me rest.

  Still, I eventually drifted into an unsettled sleep, tossing and waking repeatedly until I sat up to a bleary dawn, subdued by clouds heavy and low with rain. Muffled noises came from the room next to mine, where Inara was probably waking, waiting for me to unlock her door and come in to help her change and braid her hair.

  The sharp clench of pain that spasmed through my empty stomach had nothing to do with hunger. I rolled over to bury my sudden tears in my pillow, soaking it with my guilt and remorse. I’d known it was a risk … but I’d been so desperate—so willing to do whatever it took to get the answers that had been kept from me for so long. And now she was suffering alongside me from the consequences. But … I told myself it had been worth it: Halvor had given me a possible key to unlocking my sister’s mind, a tiny serving of hope that I could free her from the roar for longer periods of time. Even with the punishment, even being forced away from Inara … I couldn’t regret what I’d done. Mother wouldn’t leave me in my room forever, and once I got out, I would start experimenting—I would find a way to help my sister.

  No one came for hours. We’d had rough winters with little food, especially when I was very young and Inara wasn’t good at helping grow our food all through those dismal months yet, but I’d never gone this long without anything before. I was hungry in a way that went beyond my stomach, leeching through my entire body, a burning, aching need to eat that was painful in its intensity.

  Finally late in the morning the lock scraped back and the door eeked open. I lowered the book of fairy tales that I’d read hundreds, if not thousands of times, and glanced up. Mother slipped through the small opening (did she think I was standing there waiting to knock her over and try to escape?) and set a tray down on the dresser nearest the door. Her eyes flickered to me then away, to the cup of water and plate with sliced fruit on it.

  “Should I expect anything else later or had I better ration that for the day?” A strange, heady anger seized me, filling the aching hole in my belly with anger—with fury. A fury to match Mother’s. Inara was out there somewhere, still lost in the roar, and I was locked away, holding a possible key to her freedom and unable to use it.

  I was ready for her to snap back or ignore me and shut the door, slamming the lock back in place. Instead, she stared at the meager food she’d brought me silently and when she finally lifted her chin and met my defiant gaze, it wasn’t anger, or even irritation on her face … it was something else, something … worse. It was a look that, until then, I’d only seen in memory. The expression shadowing her features as she stood across my room melded with her face from the night Inara was born, separated by years’ worth of wrinkles and scowls, but it was the same. It was … fear?

  “You have to learn, Zuhra,” she finally spoke, quiet but fervent. “Do you think I want to do this to you? Do you think it makes me happy?”

  I stared, stunned speechless.

  There was a pregnant pause, heavy with so many things unsaid, unknown … but then she sucked in a breath and, as if the air she drew in had reinflated her flagging strength, her shoulders rose back into her normal domineering posture. It was only after she straightened that I realized she’d been hunched in on herself slightly before. “Like that hedge out there, some things are better left alone.” She reached out to touch the edge of the tray, but she didn’t glance back down at the food again. “This is all you will get for the day. You have to learn,” she repeated, the normal steel returning to her voice, and then she turned on her heel and left, shutting the door behind her, the lock slamming back into place with a resounding snick.

  * * *

  By afternoon, when the fruit and water had both been gone for hours, I called out a few times, but then resolutely closed my mouth, refusing to give my mother the satisfaction. I’d tried to control myself, to leave some for later, but the hunger and thirst were insatiable and before I knew it, both were gone.

  I sat by my window and stared outside, longing to be anywhere but there. It started raining in the morning and continued unabated throughout the day, a steady drizzle coating my window in droplets that ran rivulets down the glass to pool at the base. Gray and green, sky and plant—my only views. My vision blurred from looking so long at the damp earth, the puddles of water dotting the courtyard and soaking the bases of the grove of trees I could just see the edge of if I pressed the side of my face to the glass … and of course the hedge. Always, always, the hedge.

  Mother was wrong. She had to be. Looking for answers, trying to figure out who my father was, who his people were—and what that made me and Inara—wasn’t like touching the hedge. Books didn’t attack with poisonous thorns. The citadel didn’t pose any threat. Even the hedge had never hurt any of us, only those trying to get past it. Knowledge wasn’t dangerous … it couldn’t be.

  I watched for Inara, hoped to see her wander through her gardens at some point, perhaps with Sami at her side, despite the rain. But if she ever did exit the citadel, it wasn’t anywhere within my view.

  When night came once more I silently climbed back into my bed, even though my belly ached and staring at the drizzle all day had only made my thirst that much worse. I lay beneath the cool, smooth sheets, listening for any bit of sound, any hint of Inara in the room next to me … but the citadel was so quiet that my ears began to throb from the weight of the silence.

  It took hours for me to fall into an unsettled sleep, only to jerk awake what felt like moments later. A door slamming—that’s what had woken me. But which one?

  Inara.

  The vestiges of sleep still had claws of disorientation embedded in my mind, muddling my thoughts as I flung off my covers. I tried to shake it off and rushed to the door, grabbing for the handle, only to find it immobile in my hand. Locked.

  Muffled sounds came from outside the door I couldn’t open, a jumble of voices, barely audible over the thundering of my blood in my ears. Clarity slammed back in a rush of memory. I was locked in my room. I couldn’t get out to make sure it wasn’t—

  “Inara!”

  That shout from the hallway—all terror and urgency—was like having a fist shove past my skin and bone and grab my heart. The shriek and crash, thud, thud that followed crushed it entirely.

  “Inara!” I screamed, grabbing the handle and yanking on it again and again, though I knew it was locked, knew I couldn’t open the door. “Someone let me out! Please, let me out! Nara!”

  I’d never been so frantic—so helpless—in my life. Had she fallen? Was it the stairs? Oh, please, don’t let it be the stairs!

  The voices were far away now, little more than a low, urgent hum, underscored by a soft, distant sound that might have been crying.

  “Someone! Please! Is she all right? Please!” I slammed my hands against the door, over and over. I shouted until my throat was raw, until I tasted blood and my voice flayed itself out of use.

  But no one came.

  No one answered.

  And all too soon, the low murmur of voices was gone, leaving only silence.

  A door opening. A shout. Inara. T
he stairs. That scream … that thud.

  I sank to the hard, cold floor, pressing the heels of my bruised hands to my eyes, my entire body shaking. Minutes bled into hours, until I was as chilled as the stones beneath me, my body rigid with stillness—from a terror so all-encompassing, so heavy, I’d curled into a ball beneath it, hadn’t moved again, my cheek on the ground, my arm outstretched so that my fingers were pressed as far as they could go beneath the tiny crack of space below my door. At one point I thought I heard footsteps in the hallway and weakly rasped out, “Is she all right? Is Nara okay?” But if someone was there, they didn’t respond, neither did the footsteps sound again, leaving me to wonder if it had been my imagination to begin with. My need for someone to come was so intense, it conjured the sounds of deliverance from nothing.

  Somehow, I drifted off at some point. When I startled awake again, still curled into a ball on the frigid stone floor, morning had dawned, even darker than the previous, the sky a tumult of charcoal clouds tumbling through a sea of ink. The rain had stopped for the time being, but in its place distant thunder growled across the heavens and the window whined beneath a barrage of wind that whipped the orchard branches into a frenzied dance below.

  I forced myself to sit up, my body frozen and muscles rigid. The ache in my belly had grown teeth, becoming a serrated, constant pain. I’d never realized it was possible to feel so hollowed out, my insides shredded, burning with the need for both answers and sustenance.

  What had happened to Inara?

  I made myself crawl back to my bed, and curled back up in my sheets, shivering violently from my night on the floor. The heat snap had broken with the onslaught of storms, and the citadel had soaked up the rain greedily, the stones cooling and the air turning humid and chilled, feeling even colder than normal after the intense heat wave.

  Sleep was my only escape from the hunger and terror; but at first it eluded me, and the rare times I did drift off, I startled awake from sweat-soaked nightmares, my sheets twisted around my damp body. As the morning slowly passed without a sound outside my door, I drifted from dark dream to dark awakening back to dark dreams once more. By the time my walls were washed honey-gold by the afternoon sun, my tongue was swollen in my mouth, dry as bone. My head throbbed, but the vein at the base of my throat fluttered thinly against my fingers; my heart was a panicked butterfly caged within my chest.

  Nara. Nara. Nara. Each desperate pulse beat out her name beneath my skin.

  I tried to shove my panic away, rejecting it, but the only other thing to grasp onto instead was a growing anger. The emptiness within me, carved out from fear and hunger, was ample room for my fury to unfurl, for it to take the teeth in my belly and the fire in my throat and claim them, turning them from Mother’s tools of penitence into my weapons of defiance.

  To leave me locked in my room when Inara had somehow gotten out and been hurt was extreme, even for her. I’d known it was a huge risk to spend the night alone in the library with Halvor, when she’d meted out severe punishments in the past for minor crimes in comparison—sneaking a book to my room, trying to open a forbidden door. But if her goal was to break my will … she would soon learn just what a terrible mistake she had made. As the hunger pains turned to spasms, and my mind replayed scenario after possible scenario of what had happened to Inara in horrifying detail, I stared up at the swimming white canopy of my bed and let the fury build within me.

  Never again would she have the power to lock me away, to keep me from my sister.

  Never again.

  It became my mantra, it became the lifeblood the rage within me fed upon, a beast that I had no desire to tether or tame. And as soon as this punishment ended—as soon as I could devise a way—I would unleash it on her and escape this place. And I would take Inara with me. Somehow—some way, despite the king’s edict. We could hide, we would find a way to survive. This couldn’t be all that my life was destined for; these walls and this room and that hedge, always the hedge.

  Inara had to be all right; whatever had happened last night, she would recover and I would be released from my room eventually, and together, we would find a way to escape.

  Halvor’s words rang in my ears, a distant and uncertain promise. Perhaps Inara had far more power than I’d thought. Maybe if I could get her to tap into it her mind would clear—for good.

  And I knew just the plant to try it out on.

  * * *

  The sound of the lock moving snapped me from my half-conscious delirium to full awareness in less than a pulse of my heart. I flung myself to my feet in one swift movement as the door opened, but was hit by a wave of dizziness and had to sink back down on my bed.

  “Zuhra! Good heavens, child, what’s wrong?”

  Sami rushed in the room, haphazardly plunking a tray of food down on her way, then hurrying to my side. She brushed her soft, cool hand across my forehead.

  Her eyes widened. “You’re burning up! I can go make you some tea—and here, there’s—”

  I grabbed her arm when she turned to bustle away again and yanked, forcing her back to my side. “Where’s Inara? What happened to my sister?” The questions came out a snarl and she flinched back, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Something had happened to her, and Sami was one of the ones who hadn’t let me out to be with her—to help her.

  “Oh dear, did you hear that last night? I told your mother we had best check on you, but we—”

  “What. Happened,” I bit out, my fingers tightening around her fleshy arm.

  “She’s fine, Zuhra. She got hurt, but now she’s just—”

  My brain turned off after the words “she got hurt”; I released Sami and jumped to my feet, only to be hit by a wave of dizziness again and stumble forward.

  “You need to sit down, Zuhra. Your sister is fine. I promise. But you have a fever—you need to rest.” Sami was the one to grab my arm this time and push me gently—but firmly—back to my bed. I was shocked to find myself so weak that she was able to do it; I couldn’t fight back even though I wanted nothing more than to shove past her and rush to Inara’s room. A wave of cold crashed over me; suddenly I was shivering so violently she was able to press me back to sitting on my bed and pull some of my blankets over me.

  A fever?

  No. I couldn’t be sick. I had to get to Inara. I had to get to my sister.

  I must have spoken out loud because Sami responded softly, lifting my legs back onto the bed and tucking my sheets around me as I continued to shake, “I told you, she is fine now. I will bring her to you. Will that help? Then you can see for yourself.”

  I nodded, my vision swimming. “Yes,” I whispered. “Please let me see her.”

  “I’ll go get her, but then you must eat something and you must stay in bed.”

  I nodded again, as Sami hurried over to the tray that teetered half on, half off the table where she’d set it so haphazardly to retrieve a piece of toasted bread, muttering to herself under her breath. “I told her this was a bad idea … I warned her not to do this…”

  When she reached my side again with the toasted bread, she handed it to me. “Here, nibble on this, but go slowly.”

  I took the rare treat with trembling fingers, still fighting off the chills that I realized now were from the fever. “Please, go get Inara. I’ll stay in bed, I promise.” I took a nibble to prove to her that I meant it.

  When she left I lifted the bread to my mouth to take another bite. Though my hunger was barely satiated, I forced myself to go slower than my mind wished, all too aware of how unsettled my stomach still felt. As I slowly chewed and swallowed, a hundred different scenarios played out in my mind of what had happened to Inara. No matter how I tried to repeat the words “she’s fine” to myself, I couldn’t stop the fear that quickened my heartbeat—and an even greater increase of anger at Mother. It can’t have been that bad, if Sami can bring her to me.

  But the attempt to reassure myself fell flat. Any injury to Inara was unacceptable. How had they for
gotten to make sure she was safe? The shouts from last night—the crash and the crying—scraped through my memory like claws on stone. Had she tried to get outside by herself and hurt herself in some way? Surely if I hadn’t been locked in here, no harm would have come to her.

  Another dark mark to lay at my mother’s feet, to fuel the monster of fury within me, to assuage any guilt I might have still harbored from my hope to somehow escape this place and leave Mother behind us. There had to be a way. And I wouldn’t stop searching, not even if it took months … or years. Though Halvor’s revelation about the death decree complicated things, I knew I could protect my sister somehow—especially if I wasn’t worried about being locked in my room.

  I’d spent a lifetime telling myself that Mother loved me, that she even loved Inara in her own troubled way … that she struggled to show it, to express it, because of the constant reminder we represented of the hurt inflicted on her by Adelric all those years ago.

  But as I lifted the crisped bread to my mouth, shaken that such a ridiculously small movement had become difficult, I realized perhaps I’d been wrong.

  A soft knock came at the door, but when Sami didn’t open it right away, I called out, “Enter!” wondering why she didn’t just do so on her own. She knew I couldn’t get out of bed—had forced me to stay there, in fact—and that I was desperately eager to see Inara.

  But then the door opened and the bread I held dropped to my lap.

  “Hullo, Zuhra,” Halvor Roskery said, his hands shoved into the pockets of his trousers. “Are you sure it’s all right if I come in?”

  TWELVE

  I stared uncomprehendingly for a beat and then realized he’d asked a question. “Oh—yes. Of course, come in,” I managed over the clamor of other questions in my mind: How are you still here? Didn’t the hedge let you out? Where have you been the last two days?