Book One – Chapter 18

He stood awkwardly by the wall, wings pressed so tightly against himself they ached, while the shaman sat on a stool beside the selder’s bed. The orange glow of the orblight covered her tall frame into warm shadows that promised compassion, but carried none. They were deceiving, like a glimpse of sunshine might suggest comfort on the peak of a deadly glacier.

Her outline bled into the wall and spilled over the selder’s body. She leaned close, her long fingers drifting over the symbols etched into his back. At first Yu thought her claws pressed into the skin, but on closer look, he saw that the slim tips shifted but a barb’s breadth above the fur. She never made contact.

Yu shifted on his talons. His throat was dry, and the click of his swallow too loud in his own skull. He wanted to be anywhere else.

“I really don’t know how to help people,” he rasped. “So … I mean, I better go and do the dinner thing.”

As he forced the words out, the mask lifted and tilted toward him. The shift was minute, silent, with no change in posture, no rustle of robes. And as Yu looked onto the mask now, and it looked back at him, he realised that it was the only part of her that did not take in the orange light. Within the greys that were her hair and scales, it remained of the purest white, unaffected by the warmth that filled the room, as if someone had cut out a piece of the world and left it blank.

Yu stared into the blank nothing, and the room narrowed to nothing but the mask and him. And then it spoke.

“Now, what did you hear?”

The whisper did not reach his ears so much as pierce them. Yu felt the words burrow and breach through; cold scratches in his skull. His chest seized. For a heartbeat, every thought but one froze. She knows. She knows I know.