The Shattered Dark

After a minute of shuffling through the piles, Kavok looks up.

“Come in,” he says.

Carefully, I step over the threshold. I feel the atmosphere change when I do. It’s dryer and cooler than the corridor. “I thought humans weren’t allowed in here?”

He shrugs. “New ruler, new rules. Ah, yes. Sixteen hundred ninety-one years ago—our years, not yours. That’s the earliest mention I’ve come across. It corresponds with…”

He begins describing some kind of agricultural process, but I’m only half listening because I’m trying to figure out what reference he’s referring to. I haven’t spoken to him in months. He might have an impeccable memory, but I don’t. I can’t even remember the topic of our last conver—

Oh.

“You found a reference to a shadow-reader?” I ask.

“Yes!” He looks up from the huge book in front of him and grins. “It’s 350 years earlier than Faem thought.”

Faem, I think, was the previous archivist. The silver in Kavok’s eyes practically sparkles. His giddiness makes him seem even younger than he already looks. If he was human, I’d guess him to be in his midtwenties, so that means he’s probably pushing fifty, still a relatively young age for a fae. His hair is blond, just a few shades darker than Aren’s—most likely because he locks himself in here all day, every day—and it’s just long enough to be frazzled.

In short, he’s the geekiest fae I know. I keep expecting him to push wire-framed glasses up on his nose.

“What does it say about the shadow-reader?” I ask, interrupting his lecture on agricultural practices.

“Oh, yes.” He clears his throat. “It doesn’t say this is the first shadow-reader, and I can’t validate the text’s authority, but it appears that there is little difference between his abilities and yours. The shadows only told him where a fae exited the In-Between, not where he entered it, and he, too, had to draw what he saw and name the nearest city or region out loud. But then, we come to a small discrepancy.”

“Discrepancy?” I move closer to his desk, but he closes the text and rises.

“Not with your abilities,” he says. “With ours. According to the author, only a few fae were able to fissure to the locations the shadow-reader mapped and named.”

Now, that’s interesting.

“Is it something fae learned to do over time?” I ask.

“It’s implied that the fae who could follow the maps had more…er, more contact with humans.” Kavok doesn’t meet my eyes.

“Sex?”

He lifts a shoulder, says almost apologetically, “It’s implied.”

Everyone who has the ability to fissure can make it to the locations I sketch, and since most of those fae would rather not touch a human at all, sex definitely doesn’t have anything to do with it.

“That’s all I’ve discovered,” Kavok says. “I found the reference a few weeks ago, but you were…Well, you were…”

“Things were different then,” I say, hiding a smile. It’s almost cute, how easily flustered he is. “I’m looking for Naito.”

He seems grateful for the change of subject. “Of course. He’s there.”

He points to an alcove that splits off from the main room.

After he takes a seat at his desk, I walk toward the alcove he indicated, and there, sitting at a table heaped with papers, books, and a few boxes, sits Naito.

He doesn’t notice me. He’s staring at whatever is in front of him. His left hand is clenched in his black hair, helping to hold his head up, and his forehead is creased. He’s wearing the same jeans and white T-shirt I saw him in a few days ago, and his shoulders are rounded and slumped. Oddly, though, he looks better than he did before. I can’t quite put my finger on why. Maybe it’s the lack of anger in his expression. Maybe it’s the amount of concentration, of focus, in the way his eyes move back and forth, reading, I presume. Or maybe it’s just the fact that he’s not demanding someone fissure him back to Earth so he can murder his father.

“Hey,” I say when I reach his table.

“Hey,” he responds without looking up. I wait a moment then, when he still doesn’t glance away from what he’s reading, I pull out the chair across from him and sit.

My gaze sweeps across the table.

“You can read this?” Everything is written in a jumble of symbols and marks. I can speak Fae fairly well now, but even if I had years to study, I don’t think I’d ever be able to make sense of their written language.

“Kelia is teaching me,” Naito says.

I bite my lower lip, unable to ignore the fact that he’s still talking about her in the present tense. “Naito—”

“I understand enough to get by,” he says. His tone is firm, now, and his eyes have hardened.

Everyone’s been tiptoeing around Naito these past two weeks. I don’t want to make him hurt any more than he already does, but I think it’s time someone convinces him that he’ll never see Kelia again. She’s well and truly gone.

I ignore the way my throat burns when I swallow, then say, “Kelia would want—”

“To be with me,” he interrupts again. There’s steel in his voice. It’s as if he’s daring me to claim otherwise. Before I can do just that, he turns the book in front of him around so that it’s right side up for me.

“Banek’tan,” he says, pointing to a jumble of tiny lines.

The word sounds familiar—I’m pretty sure it’s a type of magic—but I say, “I can’t read that.”

He raises his eyes to meet mine. “It means ‘one who retrieves the departed.’ A banek’tan can bring Kelia back.”

Really?

I stare down at the book as an almost giddy feeling takes over me. A banek’tan could undo so much. With one’s help, Naito and Kelia can be together again. They can have their happy ending, and we could bring back the innocent fae who were caught up in this war: the merchants who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, the families who were burned inside their homes in Brykeld, the swordsmen on both sides of the war who were only following orders.

We could bring back the fae I inadvertently killed in Belecha.

We could resurrect Sethan.

But just as quickly as those hopes appear, they vanish. What the hell am I thinking? If that magic existed, Lena would have already tried to bring her brother back from the ether. And someone would have tried to bring back the king.

I close my eyes as a rush of pity flows through me. It’s tinged with pain, and it takes everything in me to keep it locked down tight. I swallow, trying to loosen a tight and raw throat, then, carefully, I ask, “Is that an extinct magic?”

Naito’s gaze doesn’t waver. It’s almost as if he’s waiting for the pity or skepticism to reach my face, but after a handful of heartbeats, some of the tension leaves his shoulders. “These documents are filled with references to banek’tan. And some of them are recent. This one”—he grabs a loose parchment from one of his stacks—“is only twenty years old. A false-blood’s bond-mate was killed. She came back.”

I bite the inside of my cheek and watch as he picks up another paper.