Page 6 of Shardless
Approaching the edge of the lake, the man squinted. “Taly Caro?! I thought that looked like you falling from the sky. Shards bless… When I checked the forecast this morning, it didn’t say anything about raining humans. The weather here on Tempris gets stranger every year.”
Taly did her best to wave as she let go of the piece of driftwood and started to swim to shore. “Syn,” she said when she was close enough for her toes to touch the bottom. The man laughed as he waded out to meet her. “You beautiful fey bastard. I owe you one.” Slipping when her boot hit a particularly slick patch of rocks, she struggled toregain her footing as the water dragged at her sodden clothing. Her shoulder-length hair was tangled and matted as it clung to her neck.
“What the hell are you doing out here, girlie? Did that cheap bastard you call a landlord break your plumbing again with his so-called repairs? You know, if you’d wanted a bath so badly, I’d have given you a few coins for the bathhouse. All you needed to do was ask.” Syn was still chuckling to himself as he wrapped an arm around her waist, practically lifting her off her feet as he helped her back to shore. Taly couldn’t help but feel guilty about the line of water that now marked him from the waist down. Even though his worn leather boots were far from new, he’d likely be walking around with wet shoes for the rest of the day.
Taly gave him her best glare. “Despite Jay’s continued failure to fix my shower, my hygiene is impeccable, thank you very much.” Peeling off a dark canvas coat that was almost two sizes too large for her, she shivered when the chill air greeted her bare arms, making her pale skin prickle. Although it was still cold enough to be distinctly uncomfortable, maybe even dangerous for a human under the right circumstances, a wet coat wasn’t doing her any favors.
Scowling, Taly kicked at a piece of junk that was half-buried in the mud. The object was rusty and jagged, and although she had no idea what it was supposed to be, she knew enough to see that it was worthless.
“No, I’m out in this hellhole this morning because I took some bad advice,” she said, gazing out over the lake and letting her eyes trace the flat violet-and-gold crystal planes that loomed in the distance. The Ios Gate was just one of the manydimensional gates peppered across the island of Tempris. No longer functional, what had once been a shining edifice swirling with glistening eddies of aether was now nothing more than a dark wall of stone. “I heard that a new wave of scrap came through the Ios Gate last night, but, unfortunately for me, the site was already picked clean before I got here. I even searched the cliffs behind the gate since I’ve heard that stuff sometimes falls through in that area, but I didn’t find anything good. Just a bunch of trash and a really cranky wyvern.”
Syn clapped a hand to her shoulder, and she followed him as he began to push his way through the dense underbrush of the forest. Bright streaks of warm, buttery sunlight sliced through the trees, illuminating the overgrown forest path. Although it was almost spring, some of the winter frost still stubbornly clung to the ground.
It was a short walk back to the main road, and a skinny piebald mare hitched to a plain wooden wagon was waiting patiently on the recently repaired cobbled pavement. Syn drew back the tarp covering his wares and pulled out an old blanket.
“Well, I’m not surprised you didn’t find anything,” he said, taking her coat and then wrapping the blanket around her shoulders. Taly’s teeth had started to chatter, and all she could do was nod in thanks. “The Fire Guild came out last night. Given how close it is to Ryme, they’re always quick to jump on Ios. No salvager worth their salt ever bothers coming out to Lake Reginea.”
“Yeah, I figured that out the hard way,” Taly managed to say between shivers as she accepted a thermos of coffee that Syn had produced frombeside the driver’s seat. The brew tasted old and weak, but it was warm and made her almost feel alive again.
Syn smiled and shook his head. “Well, you’ll know from now on. Sometimes I forget that you’ve only been at this a year. You learn a lot quicker than most salvagers I come across.” Crouching down, he began dabbing at the scrape on her knee with a cloth soaked in blood wood, a plant native to Tempris that produced a small amount of earth aether in its sap. The salve burned, but the flesh was already starting to mend itself as the healing magic soaked into her skin.
“Thank you, Syn. I know blood wood’s not easy to come by right now. I’ll pay you for that as soon as I’m able.”
Syn waved her off. “I don’t want your coin, Taly. If you want to repay me, just tell me how you managed to get that wyvern so riled. They don’t usually mess with humans—or anything without magic for that matter. What those beasts are after is aether. Any kind they can find.” Giving her a wink, he added, “Except water aether, of course. Even though I have no doubt that wyvern would’ve loved to drain my blood, it would’ve had to get wet to do it.”
Taly leaned against the cart, sipping at the thermos. “I wish I had a good story for you, but all I did was stumble into its nest.”
“I’ve never heard of a wyvern nesting south of Litor.” Syn rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “But then again, stranger things have happened when the Aion Gate was charging.”
Taly nodded in agreement, pulling at the edges of the blanket. The Aion Gate was one of the only two remaining gates on the island that stillfunctioned. In the wake of the Schism, the great disaster that had resulted in the closing of every gate on the island of Tempris, the Gate Watchers had been formed to repair and oversee the gates. However, with their limited resources, they could only focus on the two interdimensional bridges that had been deemedessential—the Seren Gate, which led to the fey mainland of Lycia, and the much larger, far more temperamental Aion Gate.
“I was reading that Aion’s charging cycle is going to be pretty bad this time around,” she said. “On the one hand, the Gate Watchers think that they’ll be able to hold the connection to the mortal realm a little bit longer than in past cycles.”
“That’ll be good for trade,” Syn remarked.
“True,” Taly said with a sigh. “But that also means the aether is going to be fluctuating far more erratically than it usually does in the months leading up to the Aion Gate connection. The magical creatures will be even more rabid and difficult to contain than usual.”
“I guess we know why the Marquess has been so keen on repairing the wards on the roads as of late.” Syn glanced back at the nearly invisible veil of magic that shimmered just beyond the tree line. “Can’t have the mainland travelers comin’ face-to-face with any beasties, now can we? They might accidentally scuff their shoes.”
Turning back to her, he added, “By the way, I’m headed to Ryme. It’s not far, but you’re welcome to ride with me.”
Taly bobbed her head, still shivering underneath the blanket. “Thank you, Syn. I’d like that.”
Syn gave her a kind smile as he pushed back his hair, revealing the pointed tips of his ears.Even though he had too much human blood in his lineage to be considered anything more than a lowborn, he was still fey. His body could still absorb and refine aether, a trait that granted him both immortality and the ability to perform magic. From what Taly knew of him, he came from a fairly prominent family of blacksmiths back on the fey mainland, but he had never told her just how he had fallen into salvaging. And she had never asked. If he had given up a nice, stable life in favor of picking through junk and refuse on an impoverished little island on the outer edge of the Fey Imperium, then he probably wasn’t too keen on rehashing whatever had driven him to leave all that behind.
To that point, she could relate. The set of circumstances that had led her to abandon her old life for one that left her scrambling for enough coin just to buy bread on any given day weren’t pleasant.
“Boy!”
Taly jumped when Syn banged his hand against the side of the cart.
“Yes, uncle, I’m coming,” came a surly reply. A lowborn man whose age she couldn’t quite place emerged from the woods. Since most fey stopped aging after reaching 30, this “boy” could’ve been 30, 130, or even 1,030. His hair was dark and greasy, and his eyes were black, carrying only a trace of that strange, fey brightness that made the highborn nobility seem as though they were lit from within. Even though his face was impassive, his full lips turned down at the corners, giving him a permanent sneer. “What’s with the shardless?” he groused.
Taly grimaced.Shardless.The word the feyused to describe those without magic—those lower than the lowborn.
“Watch your language, Calo,” Syn snapped. His expression hardened. “Your father didn’t raise you to talk to people that way.”
Assuming that the boy had been suitably chastened, Syn stepped off the road and began weaving through the trees as he made his way back into the forest. “I just need a few more minutes, and then we can get going,” he called back. “Yoru said he dropped a crate of supplies somewhere around here—asked me to pick it up for him.”
