Dark the Night Descending (The Paderborn Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  “You may,” the eallawif said eventually. Her voice was as silky as her song, and Arran sighed with helpless longing just to hear it.

  He ducked through the curtain and kept his head bowed as he presented his gifts: the pot of cream, the bread, and a long, sparking string of cut glass beads, a star-shaped charm plated with thin silver catching the dim sun as he laid the necklace on the ground. “For your pleasure, mistress,” he said, kneeling on the ground and waiting to see if the offerings were acceptable.

  A ghosting of silk was his answer as the eallawif came to inspect the bounty. Arran could see the hem of her robe, as thin as a sunbeam and as light as air. He didn’t dare look towards her face before being given her approval. He hardly knew if he would risk it afterwards, either.

  “You have pleased me,” she said, twining the beads around her fingers as she returned to her seat. “Rise. Tell me your desire.”

  Arran took a deep breath and stood, glancing up at her as she perched on a throne made of burned timber bound together with fraying rope. She was just as beautiful as he thought she would be, and twice as cold. Her features could have been chiseled from ice, they were so sharp and pale. The sacrifice would mean nothing to her, since she was a hollow thing and she lacked a heart, but he would have gladly frozen to death for the chance to gaze into her eyes forever.

  The eallawif were eternal, soulless and deathless, and their only delight seemed to be in collecting on debts unpaid. Men would ask for glory, for gold, for love, or for forgetting, and the eallawif would give it to them – for a fee. Once a bargain was struck, she would keep to it in the face of any hell, no matter who had to die for the sins of the supplicant. Humans were fickle and unpredictable, and they often failed their masters, leaving the eallawif with plenty opportunities for their merrymaking.

  Arran had little intention of providing the eallawif with the chance to make sport of him, but entering into such a contract always had its risks. The eallawif’s favor could not be bought with cream and cheap ornaments alone. There was always a price, and it was always just a little more than the petitioner could afford. However, there was no one else who would be able to resist whatever means the neneckt decided to employ in order to regain their trinket. An eallawif was discretion itself, and that was just what Arran needed at the moment, no matter what the cost.

  “Mistress, I implore thee,” he said, repeating the traditional request. “Take possession of this and keep it safe from harm.” He laid the container on the ground in front of him and waited for her to stand again and take it, but she didn’t move an inch.

  “I will not have this,” she told him sternly.

  “Would it please you to tell me why not?” he asked carefully.

  “It is cursed.”

  “It is?”

  “Do you not know what you carry, child?” she asked, leaning forward slightly.

  “No, Mistress. I only know I nearly died for it. It is a neneckt thing.”

  “It is not,” she replied, finally standing and picking it up. She opened the lid and held out her hand, pouring the water onto the floor until the gem slid into her palm. “It is Siheldi, and it is very, very dangerous.”

  Arran took a step backwards without realizing it. The fact that the neneckt wanted it was bad enough. But if the Siheldi came after him – if the Siheldi came and he didn’t even have the protection of his pendant – then he was finished. He wouldn’t see another dawn.

  “Please take it,” he said. “Please.”

  “And what will you give me in return for such a burden?” she asked.

  Anything, he almost said, but she would keep him to that word. “What do you desire, Mistress?”

  She smiled as she looked at him, considering. “You have few things dear enough to you, Arran Swinn,” she said after a while. “A wanderer and a man of fortune. You have no creed and no love. All you have is heartache, hidden so deeply away. There is enough of that in my possession already.”

  “That’s not true. I have – there are things that matter to me. There are a lot of things.”

  “Poor boy,” she said softly, shaking her head. She reached out and touched the cut on his head, which tingled under her finger like she had run an icicle over it. She smiled a little more and trailed her fingertips down his face and under his chin like he was a child to be cooed at, and stopped when her hand was resting on the hollow of his throat. “I will take this.”

  “What?”

  “Your luck.”

  “I don’t – I don’t understand, ma’am.”

  “The amulet you lost. It has your luck in it. That is what matters to you.”

  “But it’s gone,” he protested, voicing only the first of many objections that came into his mind. “It’s on the bottom of the sea. Lost forever.”

  She shook her head slowly, amusement in her brilliantly blue eyes.

  “It isn’t?”

  “I will keep this,” she said, closing her hand around the stone, “and you will bring me your pendant. And if you don’t,” she added, leaning very, very close to him until her lips just brushed his, “I will take the rest of you. Down to the very last drop. Do we have a bargain?”

  Arran closed his eyes as her cool breath washed over him, breathing in her intoxicating scent of hellebore and wintergreen. It had been a long time since he had been so close to a woman – a real woman, he reminded himself, discounting Elargwyd’s distasteful embrace – and never one so very fine. She could kill him with that breath of hers, and she would do so if he failed her.

  But what choice did he have? If he kept the gemstone and the Siheldi or the neneckt came for him, they would take it and leave him a corpse. If the eallawif held it, then he was the only one on heaven or earth that could regain possession of it from her…as long as he could find his pendant.

  “We have a bargain,” he said, and she laughed like the trill of spring birds as she pressed her mouth against his, letting him kiss her as she twined her fingers in his. In her satisfaction, she let drop her coldness, and the soft hollow of her mouth was warm and welcoming as she pressed her slim form against him.

  It was the most wonderful thing that had happened to him for a very long while, and he hardly even noticed that her hand was creeping up his arm, inching towards the soft flesh of the underside, until a sharp, sharp pain engulfed him, and he pushed her away with a startled yelp.

  “What the hell was that?” he cried, pushing up his sleeve to look at the spot, still stinging. Embossed on his skin was a perfect picture of a rose inscribed in a circle as big as the bottom of a mug. It was drawn in what looked like black ink, with no redness or signs of injury, but he couldn’t rub it away. “What is this?”

  “So you don’t forget me,” she said solemnly, touching the mark to stop the burning with her unnatural chill. “You have until the moon comes round again.”

  “A month? But how am I –”

  “We have a bargain,” she said simply, and he closed his mouth. It wasn’t her concern how he did it. It would only matter if he couldn’t.

  “Yes, Mistress. I understand. Thank you.”

  “Go now,” she said, turning away. “You have little time to lose.”

  Arran couldn’t help but hold his arm to his chest like it was broken as he made his way back to the dockyard. It didn’t hurt, but it just felt strange, and he kept tugging down his cuff to make sure that the mark was completely covered.

  He had forgotten about that. It served a dual purpose, as far as he remembered: firstly, to warn off any other eallawif from a soul already claimed, and secondly, to throb like fury if he even so much as thought about abandoning the task he had been given by his new mistress.

  Despite the discomfort of the thought, he was feeling relieved. He might have gotten the better end of the deal, in fact. The eallawif had as good as told him that the pendant could be found. It must have washed out of the storeroom with Elargwyd’s corpse during the flood.

  It certainly wasn’t still on the Tort
oise. He had scoured every inch of the ship three times over to make sure. It might be a challenge to find it among the sands and shoals of the Bay of Burlera, but all he had to do was enlist the help of a neneckt who knew nothing about Elargwyd or her scheming, and pay it to dive down into the ocean and collect his prize. They could smell the iron, after all. Elargwyd herself had told him that. It would be simple.

  It was with lighter steps that he retraced his path back to the civilized parts of the town. He did intend to return to his childhood home for supper, as he had promised, but a quick stop back at the dockyard turned into a busy afternoon consulting with Durville, the shipwrights, and the carpenter, who was becoming more and more stubbornly protective of his reputation as the newcomers shook their heads at the extent of the damage and probed at his emergency work.

  It would take two weeks just to get her barely floating, they told him, and a month and a half to do the job well enough to make a longer journey feasible. He didn’t have that kind of time, but neither did he have the luxury of telling Durville why he was scowling so fiercely at the estimate.

  “Do it right,” he said eventually. He wasn’t going to take the ship into the middle of the Bay for a hunting expedition with only a temporary patch to hold the gaping hole, anyway. He could make alternate arrangements for himself, and would simply have to hope that the crew of the Tortoise stayed available for him when the ship was seaworthy again.

  “I’m not sure we have the coin for this,” Durville said to him quietly as the yard clerk started to draw up the final list of expenses.

  “I’ll cover it. Has anyone come to get those crates?”

  “Not yet. Those thousand pounds from Roydin would go a mighty way towards footing the bill, though.”

  “I’m not sure we can count on it. Listen, I have to go for a few hours,” he said, glancing up at the sun. “Don’t let anyone take those boxes unless I’m here, all right? Send someone to get me if you need to,” he added, stealing a scrap of paper from the clerk to write down his mother’s address.

  “All right. What do I do with this lot?” Durville asked, nodding at the hands, most of whom already had their bags on their shoulders, eager to be rid of the ill-fated vessel.

  “Whatever they want. The ones who wish to leave will be paid in full for the journey,” Arran said, raising his voice so the men could hear. “The rest will be paid quarter-rate during docking, as is tradition. They’ll be free to take other city work in the meantime as long as they’re here when I need them.”

  “Fair enough,” Durville said as the crew muttered or nodded their agreement. “Let’s get this sorted.”

  Arran watched the process for a few minutes to make sure the men stayed orderly. About half of them opted to take their money and seek a better opportunity, but he was encouraged to see that the other half were willing to make their mark on the list that bound them to the ship, promising to come back when they were ready to set sail.

  They were mostly the hands with middling experience, too stoic to be scared off by the fluke storm, but not valuable enough to get a better position on another boat. They would be the senior watch when the Tortoise set off again, with senior pay, and that came with enough perks to make them stick around.

  Durville didn’t really need his assistance, and after he had thanked and shaken the hand of each man who was not returning, Arran left for his mother’s house again. He hoped supper wouldn’t take too long – he wanted to get back to the ship before sundown. If she kept talking until it got dark and dangerous to be out of doors, he would be forced to stay with her by default. The charm of his old room wore a little thin when it came to actually sleeping there.

  At first, he thought he needn’t be worried. She welcomed him back cordially enough, although he wasn’t sure she even realized he had left, and turned to her cooking with few words as he sat at the table and rolled the edge of the cloth aimlessly between his fingers. At one point, she handed him some turnips and a knife, and they worked in silence until the meal came together. He set out the plates and they sat across the long, empty dining table from each other, his presence a special enough occasion to merit eating in the former common room, now mostly abandoned.

  “How is the ship, then?” she asked, filling his plate with the same soft mixture of cheap root vegetables and stubby, starchy brown rice that he remembered from every day of his youth. He knew she could afford better, but he also knew that the majority of the money he portioned out for her every month ended up in the church’s tithing box rather than with the butcher or baker.

  “It’ll be all right eventually. I might have to kidnap some children to sell so I can pay for it, but it’s not too bad.”

  “That’s not funny,” she admonished.

  “I was just kidding.”

  She shook her head. “God knows it happens enough without your jokes. The poor souls. It’s demons like those slave traders that make this horrible city what it is these days. May God forgive them, if he has the mercy. I know I wouldn’t.”

  “So I’ll probably be in town for a few days,” he continued quickly, trying to move on from the blunder. “But then I have to head down the coast.”

  “For what?”

  “I just need to fix something.”

  She glanced up at him for a moment, catching the odd tone in his voice, and was about to look back down at her plate like she always did when something caught her eye.

  “Where’s your pendant?” she asked sharply.

  “What? It’s – it’s with my things. I –”

  “Don’t you dare try to lie to me, young man,” she snapped, and his shoulders automatically hunched, anticipating a thwack from her wooden spoon even though she was sitting right in front of him with empty hands.

  “Mum, I didn’t – It wasn’t my fault. It just came off.”

  “Oh, your father will be so disappointed in you,” she said, shaking her head again, looking like she might cry.

  I think he’s probably disappointed enough in being dead, he thought, but he would never dare say such thing to her. “Someone took it,” he said instead. “I’m trying to get it back.”

  “One of your men? That Durville fellow?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. She had never liked him. His wooden foot tracked the mud onto her carpets, she always said, though Arran was always the one who took them to get cleaned and paid up the bill.

  “No. A passenger. She didn’t know what she was getting. I think.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yes. But – not…Mum, it wasn’t like that,” he said, trying to placate her as a scandalized look suddenly suffused her face. “Trust me.”

  Elspeth had always said that it wasn’t her business what Arran got up to when he wasn’t under her roof, but clearly that had never really been true.

  “She was a neneckt,” he told her, giving up on the possibility of getting out of the conversation unscathed. She was going to think the worst in any case. He might as well tell the truth. “She wanted the red iron in it.”

  Arran watched as her expression changed from pinched disapproval to slack-jawed horror. Even in his confusion, he marveled at how she managed to be so expressive and yet reveal so little of her true and addled thoughts.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered.

  “It’s all right. I won’t be in danger. I’ve a good ship this time. I’ll be fine.”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about,” she said, collecting herself a little.

  “Father won’t really know,” he told her carefully.

  “What? Don’t be stupid, boy. Of course he will. Your poor father died for that thing, God rest his soul,” she said, and Arran fought the urge to roll his eyes.

  “I know,” he said, trying to cut her off before she launched into the recitation again.

  He had heard the story a hundred times before. His mother had started her labor in the middle of the night, and there was no time to bring the midwife in Paderborn to their home in a nearby village. Desperate for help w
hen it became clear it was a breach birth, dangerous for both mother and child, Giles Swinn had loaded his wife into the oxcart and started on the journey into town, despite the danger.

  Beset by Siheldi and far from aid, his father had given up the amulet, tied it around Arran’s tiny, protruding foot to protect him, and led the hungry Siheldi away, sacrificing himself to save his wife and half-born child.

  The death had left Arran feeling guilty his entire life for entering the world at such an inopportune moment, making him more than half an orphan, and had so frightened and shocked his mother’s delicate mind that she had very nearly been committed to the mad house.

  The neighbors still whispered about the night she had locked herself in the cellar, leaving her infant wailing in his cot unattended, doing nothing but reciting prayers and sobbing into her shawl, a knife held trembling close to the skin of her wrist, too miserable to live and too afraid to defy the gods by taking her fate into her own hands, as the constables hurriedly tried to cut the bolts from the outside.

  The care of a physician, paid for by the parish, had helped her in the following months, and the attention of the local priest had led her to turn to the dubious comfort of religion to salve her wounded soul. Though her growing obsession with the doings of the church had turned her attention far away from her growing child, Arran had learned to be glad that his mother had been welcomed into a community of some kind, helping her to maintain a tenuous grip on reality despite the occasional lapse and a chronic lack of focused energy.

  She could behave more or less normally in company, these days, as long as no one mentioned the Siheldi. But she had never even been capable of recognizing, to his satisfaction, the grating damage she had inflicted upon her son with a childhood filled with the constant specter of damnation and shadows of blame for the loss of her husband.

  “No, Arran,” Elspeth replied, wiping at her eyes with the corner of her sleeve. “You don’t know anything about that night. I don’t know what you’re into these days with all your sneaking around, going off into the wild for months at a time, but now you’ve gotten yourself in more hot water than you can handle.”