Shadow Queen - By Deborah Kalin Page 0,74

details of the previous night as best I remembered them. I sat eastward of the fire, roughly four feet away from it, and I stared into its depths until I slid onto the ground and into sleep.

I woke stiff and cold and aching, a crick in my neck and my left leg and foot numb. The disappointment at my failure was as sharp as blood in my mouth. It took three more nights, three more failed attempts, before I once again forged the link.

The terrain had forced us further west than Roshi would have liked, and she worried about the Ilthean army. Increasingly, the look she turned on me was tight-lipped and pinch-eyed. Fear was edging her ever closer to confronting me, to blaming me for our detour. I kept my mouth shut and avoided her eye; the longer I could postpone an argument, the closer I drew to the army.

When I slept that night, the fire was waiting for me. Once again I followed the trail, the link between my fire and his which brought me through the darkness and into his hearth.

This time he stood with his back to me. My vision of him had barely focused before he turned and looked into the fire, his gaze striking through the depths of the flames to find me. ‘Matilde. I’ve a present for you.’

Prepared for the struggle to speak, I willed myself to overcome it. My heartbeat pounded in my ears and strained my brow until I feared the skin might burst. But still I produced no sound.

Dieter gave me a puzzled look. ‘Are you trying to speak, Matte? Is that why you keep gaping at me?’ he said, regarding me more closely, amusement making his eyes sparkle from their shadowed depths. ‘Ah, I see. This is Roshi’s doing.’

Hope flared bright in me.

‘Didn’t she teach you how to talk?’ he said, his laughter dashing my hopes like a slap of cold water. ‘Rash, Matte, spying on me when you don’t know your arcana. I could turn them against you.’

At a flick of his fingers the flames soared bright and hot. Sweat burst from my skin and I whimpered – but I doubt he heard it.

He let the flames die back and I sucked in a great lungful of cool air. A figure lurked behind him, seated on the couch.

‘I warned you, Matilde,’ said Dieter, all his mirth chased away like clouds scattered before a curling wind. ‘Do you remember? One wrong move, I said.’

A chill stopped the breath in my lungs. One wrong move against me, and I’ll finish what I started at Aestival.

‘I was prepared to simply let it go,’ he said, then paused, reconsidering. ‘Actually, no. I wasn’t. But I was prepared to wait. I had more pressing concerns, after all, than to chase a runaway. Except now you’re in my fireplace, plotting against me once more.’

He held up a small glass vial and tipped it left to right. The dark fluid inside left faint pink smears on the glass as it moved. My blood.

‘I found the perfect use for it,’ he said, then looked over his shoulder, lifting one hand in a summoning gesture. The figure behind him rose and stepped forward, brown head twisted to keep heavy-lidded eyes fixed on Dieter at all times.

At first I thought it a man, a great, beautiful man, with skin as dark as the loam and eyes black and bright as sloes. But no hair marred the sweep of his head, not even eyebrows. In their place he had heavy ridges, as if shaped by a careful thumb. He wore black trews and one of Dieter’s white shirts, unlaced at the throat. His feet were bare.

‘Well?’ Dieter raised an eyebrow in challenge. ‘How do you like him?’

The flames and the panic had confused my vision. The stranger’s skin wasn’t completely unmarred: his brow bore three marks as familiar as the hollows of my heart, inked in black that sparked with red and blue and green highlights. I remembered the gritty, slick taste of the bloodstones as Dieter scribed those same symbols on my own brow.

Emet.

The stranger was a construct. Not a girl bound by the rules of one, this was a true golem. A creature made of clay and arcana and – I swallowed, hard – blood. My blood.

‘I’ve named him Clay,’ said Dieter, his grin wolf-like. ‘He has only the one task, Matte: to find you.’

Clay swung his head to stare into the fire too, and his eyes