Shadowborn Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Praise for the Novels of Alison Sinclair

  Lightborn

  “[An] engaging mix of chaos, angst, and manners . . . including genuine surprises.”

  —Locus

  “This story world is highly complex and certainly unique. . . . Readers should find the plot and players fascinating. . . . What will the imaginative Alison Sinclair come up with next?”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  Darkborn

  “Alison Sinclair’s unique world of two societies, mortally divided by sunrise and sunset, provides a fascinating backdrop for a fast-paced thriller of politics and intrigue. Delightful!”

  —National bestselling author Carol Berg

  “Alison Sinclair’s Darkborn plays like a sweeping historical novel in a teeming preindustrial city whose residents are divided into those who can only tolerate light and those who can only exist in darkness. A sprawling cast of characters argue and scheme and practice magic in secret—until a calamitous chain of events reveals the whole city to be under siege from a mysterious and ruthless enemy. Despite swift action, broad conspiracies, and monumental life-and-death stakes, the heart of the book is a delicately rendered love triangle that tracks the human cost of any grand adventure. I can’t wait to read the next book about these complex and engaging characters.”

  —National bestselling author Sharon Shinn

  “[A] wonderful read, with an intriguing setting populated by appealing and memorable characters.”

  —Lane Robins, author of Kings and Assassins

  “Intriguing paranormal romance.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Sinclair’s descriptions are vivid. . . . The magical world building and great characterization make this the kind of book you hate to see end.”

  —Romantic Times

  “A complex book with many layers. . . . The best part of the book is the characters and their relationships with each other.”

  —The Book Smugglers

  Books by Alison Sinclair

  Darkborn

  Lightborn

  Shadowborn

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, June 2011

  Copyright © Alison Sinclair, 2011

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Sinclair, Alison, 1959–

  Shadowborn/Alison Sinclair.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51561-7

  I. Title.

  PR9199.3.S5324S53 2011

  813’.54—dc22 2011003185

  Set in Garamond

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  Author’s Note

  Darkborn concluded with Telmaine, Balthasar, and Ishmael beginning separate journeys. Lightborn tells the story of Telmaine’s return to Minhorne to face further Shadowborn intrigue and the consequences of her own and others’ secrets. Shadowborn begins with Balthasar and Ishmael on their mission to the Borders to avert a Shadowborn invasion, and continues the story past the end of Lightborn, to its conclusion.

  One

  Ishmael

  These riders are good, Ishmael di Studier thought, ruefully. Otherwise he would have heard them before they were almost on him, even on the pleated and twisting old post road. And then he would have been behind the wall on the far side of the field, well out of range of sonn, rather than crouched in a dip behind a boundary marker a mere twenty yards from the road, impersonating a rock. The riders—however many there were—were traveling with muffled hooves and carefully wrapped metalwork, on horses trained to be silent and easy in darkness. They had crept up on him. His inability to tell their numbers—six? eight?—was testament to their quality.

  If they were friends, he knew how they would be riding: in two staggered lines, spacing precisely maintained, each one listening and casting sonn to his or her own side. It was an order and discipline he had developed with them. They might well be friends, since the ducal order to raise the Borders for possible invasion should have the entire Stranhorne troop turned out on alert for Shadowborn. Perhaps even with instructions to find him as well.

  But they might also be enemies, search parties ordered out on the archduke’s warrant for his arrest. Worst of all, they could be soldiers from Minhorne, sent to the Borders on that same warrant. Ish had no doubt that the warrant had included instructions that he was to be brought back unharmed; equally, he had no certainty that those instructions would be followed, not for a fugitive charged with a lady’s murder and sorcery.

  He sensed diffused sonn, scattered back from the tall grass and tares around him, and thought rocklike thoughts. Midnight damp seeped through his steadying knee and a painful cramp settled in his calf muscles. He dared not shift his weight. The riders would have hearing as acute as his own, and some of the veteran border troopers had intuition that seemed akin to magic. And if his profile broke that of the marker, a bowed spine did not echo like stone.

  A horse stamped and blew, and despite himself, he twitched. He could have sworn that he made no sound, but a woman’s voice carried clearly through the night. “Ishmael, is that you there?”

/>   He knew the voice; a held breath went out of him in a sigh. “Yes,” he said. “I’m here.”

  Gloved hand on the boundary marker, he pushed himself up. He had hiked and jogged upwards of thirty-five miles in the latter part of the previous night and the earlier part of this one, carrying a pack and weapons, and he was no longer twenty, as his knees were informing him. A little stiffly, he made his way back to the party on the road.

  The woman on one of the two lead horses grinned triumphantly down at him. “I thought I caught a movement. You’re slipping, Ishmael.” She was not that much past twenty herself, a leggy young woman, long hair braided and wound around a broad brow, features too marked and mouth too wide and mobile for conventional beauty. She wore a practical jacket and a divided riding skirt, had a rifle slung over her shoulder, a revolver and a knife at her hip, and another knife in a boot sheath. Hers was hardly the typical attire of an heiress, even in the Borders, but she was a delight to sonn, nonetheless. He returned her grin with one of his own. “You’re good, Lavender—you’re all of you good—and y’well know it.”

  Smiles widened around him. He did not recognize any of the six men and one woman with her, but they’d all know him by reputation as Ishmael di Studier, Baron Strumheller, hunter of Shadowborn, and mage. For all he was no longer most of these things.

  “Nicholas,” Lavender di Gautier said, “give him your horse, and mount up with Thalia. The two of you will be easier on a horse than the baron and I.” The youngest and lightest of the troop swung down and dutifully handed over the reins. Ishmael took a moment to free his rifle from his pack and strap his pack behind the trooper’s provisions. The horse tried to sidle; he cuffed it, growling at it for taking him for a novice.

  As he climbed into the saddle, she said over her shoulder, “You want we should head back, or finish the loop round the Pot?”

  Back would be to Stranhorne Manor, her family seat, and his destination since he had jumped off the southbound coastal train just before Stranhorne Crosstracks. The Pot was a small, perfectly round lake at the bottom of a steep-sided pit, immediately recognizable on any relief model. Almost certainly it had been made by magic.

  “Back,” he said, though not without thought. But after spending yesterday in the open, in a day-blind pitched in shadows, he would feel much happier with stout walls around him.

  “Come up by me.”

  His lips quirked with amusement at the confident command in her voice, even toward him. The others smoothly rearranged themselves as he eased his horse forward. They were good; neither the baron, her father, nor her twin sister would have allowed her out with anything else.

  “Are you all right?” she said in a low voice.

  “Aye,” he said. “I am now.”

  “We heard”—there was a slight tremor in her voice, despite herself—“we heard you were dead.”

  “Came closer to’t than I like, I’ll admit,” he said. He tried for an easy tone, but that near miss had probably cost him one of the most precious things he had. Two lives—especially those of Lady Telmaine and her daughter—should be a fair exchange for his lost magic, but if someone were to ask him outright, he could not honestly swear that he would not rather have died.

  She would never ask him, but she knew him well enough to hear something of it in his voice. “I suppose,” she said, “I’ll have to wait until Stranhorne to hear all of it. I presume that is where you were bound.”

  “Aye.”

  “Well, you’re safe now.”

  “That’s more your promise than th’truth,” he chided her. “For all it’s welcome.”

  “This warrant for your arrest—”

  Had her father told her both of the charges, or just the one? With the city broadsheets being delivered every night by train, she could not have remained ignorant for long. “False, both of them.”

  “I know they’re false,” she said with spirit. “I know you. Surely the archduke—surely Lord Vladimer—”

  The less said about the archduke’s attitude, the better. “Until Lady Tercelle’s true murderer is produced, suspicion will remain on me. And as to th’other”—he weighed what to say, given that he was not supposed to talk about this at all with her—“it’s for Lord Vladimer t’do the convincing of my innocence, since he was the one I supposedly ensorcelled. He’s a wily man, and it no doubt suits his purposes to have me leading this chase.”

  She made a disgusted noise but expressed no further opinion. “Then what about this ducal order? All it tells us is that the ducal order of six twenty-nine was suspended, allowing us to mobilize troops beyond our allotment to guard the Borders against threats. Who are we supposed t’be guarding against? We’ve not seen claw or hair of Shadowborn all this summer.”

  She showed her youth there, Ishmael thought, believing that quiet was good. He’d spent the summer in Strumheller as fidgety as a man in burlap britches. The Borders took their name because they abutted the boundary of several thousand square miles of uninhabited land, the Shadowlands. The mages who had laid the Curse that made the Darkborn had lived near the center of what was now the Shadowlands. Some residue of that, or other, terrible magic, had given rise to the Shadowborn, marauding monsters that were the Borders’ constant hazard.

  Ishmael had passed the better—or worse—part of twenty-five years fighting Shadowborn, first as a trooper for hire, then as a professional Shadowhunter, and ultimately as Baron Strumheller, organizing an integrated system of warning and defense that had about halved the casualties from Shadowborn incursions. In twenty-five years, he had never experienced a summer so ominously quiet.

  He had fretted and roamed and listened, but it had been Lord Vladimer Plantageter, the archduke’s brother and spymaster, who had raised the possibility that this might be a prelude to Shadowborn activity more organized and extensive than any they’d encountered before.

  “Here’s the short of it,” Ishmael said. “Th’archduke sent the ducal order on th’urging of Lord Vladimer. There’s been Shadowborn at work in th’city, Shadowborn with seemingly the wits of men, the gift of taking on the likeness of others, and an appetite for chaos.”

  He heard her catch her breath, though with admirable discipline, she did not turn her attention from the road ahead.

  “I’ll tell th’whole of it in Stranhorne, but these Shadowborn were nearly the death of Lord Vladimer—which was the second charge laid against me”—sorcery, the mere suspicion of which had landed him in prison—“and were th’death of upwards of a hundred and fifty Darkborn in the Rivermarch, when they set it alight during the day.” He had nearly been one of those, too, having escaped by a combination of experience, knowledge of the history of that old and none-too-salubrious district, and luck. He had been spending his luck prodigiously of late. “It’s likely”—indeed, he was certain of it—“that the Shadowborn had the doing of the murder that’s been laid at my feet, since Lady Tercelle herself had dealings with them.” Intimate dealings, which he would explain to all of them once they reached the manor. “Seems,” he said with grim amusement, “that I’m in no great favor with them.”

  “Ishmael—,” she said, and fell silent. He could almost hear the hum of her thought. He had first met Lavender and her sister riding with the Stranhorne border troop in boys’ disguises. The disguises had been done quite well, and the rest poorly, so he had torn strips off both their hides for being more of a hazard to themselves and their fellows than the Shadowborn, sent them home under escort, and assumed that was that.

  “What about Strumheller?” she said.

  Ishmael shrugged slightly. “The order of succession was sent and signed, and the barony has passed to Reynard. My brother has no great love for me, but he’s got too much sense t’meddle with the arrangements and men I put in place—not with the Borders on alert. You’ll have no weakness on your flank.”

  “Reynard can’t hold on to it, not with you still alive.”

  Having disinherited Ishmael, their father had spent years
grooming Reynard to succeed to the barony. His brother had never forgiven Ish for being reinstated, or for the two or three times he had turned up since, alive after long absences. Best to change the subject. “How’s your sister? Is she keeping well?”

  Unlike Strumheller Manor, which had been reduced to smoldering rubble in the border uprising and civil war of two hundred years ago, and rebuilt as a whole, Stranhorne was a seven-hundred-year-old architectural accretion. There were rumored to be ruins three times its age buried underneath its foundations, but Xavier Stranhorne had dryly observed that even he would not knock down his manor to confirm, historian though he was. Inspired by the fate of Strumheller Manor, the Stranhornes had turned their minds to fortification. South- and westfacing walls were doubled and as sheer an ascent as stonemasonry could make them. The top three stories had sniper windows overlooking an open killing ground strewn with noisemakers, and on the roof were three mounted cannon, a detail that appalled Ishmael, who had fought a shipboard action beside cannon. His ears had rung for hours after. The gardens on the east and the courtyard on the north were protected by a fifteen-foot-high wall with enclosed guard posts. There were two gates, the main one into the courtyard, and a smaller, seldom-used one into the gardens on the east of the manor. The massive courtyard gate was now opened and closed by a steam winch, one of the few concessions to modern technology that Stranhorne allowed.

  Even if the features had been added with a mind to repel Darkborn attackers, they should do very well against Shadowborn.