Alexa Egan - Shadow’s Curse

Krythos. Also known as a far-seeing disk. A notched glass disk about two and a half inches in diameter. It is used to augment and amplify the Imnada’s natural telepathic abilities over long distances.

Lucan. Leader of the clans during King Arthur’s reign. He conspired with Morgana, the king’s half sister, to place her son Mordred upon the throne. His betrayal led to Arthur’s murder. He was captured by the Fey for his treachery and imprisoned within the Bear’s Stone for all eternity.

Morderoth. The night of the new moon, when the shift is impossible for the Imnada.

Mother Goddess. The moon from which the Imnada derive their magical powers.

Ossine. Shamans and spiritual advisers to the clans, they tend to be the strongest and most powerful of the Imnada. They maintain the bloodline scrolls used for selecting each Imnada mating pair and protect the Imnada from out-clan interference with their armed militia of enforcers.

Other. See Fey-blood.

Out-clan. Someone who is not a member of the five clans.

Palings. Magical mists conjured and maintained by the Ossine of each clan. They are used as a natural force field, disguising and shunting people away from the hidden holdings. In recent years, these warded fields have weakened as the clans’ powers have weakened.

Pathing. Speaking mind to mind. Imnada can use this telepathy to speak to one another over short distances or when they are in their animal aspect. For longer distances, they use the amplifying power of the krythos to connect with each other mentally.

Realing. A magical servant bound to a specific person or place.

Rogue. An unmarked shapechanger without clan or hold affiliation.

Signum. The mental imprint set on every shapechanger’s mind at birth by the Ossine. It identifies clan affiliation and rank. Those cast out of the clans have their signa stripped, denoting their outlaw status.

Silmith. The night of the full moon, when the shift comes easiest and the powers of the Imnada are at their height.

Sisters of High Danu. An order of Other priestesses, also known as bandraoi, devoted to a contemplative life in service to the gods.

Warriors of Scathach (Amhas-draoi). An Other brotherhood of warrior mages who serve as guardians between the Fey and human worlds.

Ynys Avalenn. Also known as the Summer Kingdom, this is the realm of the Fey.

Youngling. A child of the Imnada who has not yet reached maturity or been marked.

DEEPINGS, CORNWALL—THE PRIMARY SEAT OF THE DUKE OF MORIEUX

No matter what, they would not see him weep.

Instead Gray bit his lower lip until blood dripped hot down his chin to mix with the streaks already smearing his bruised and battered chest. He twisted against the silver fetters clamped around his wrists and ankles, his torn flesh mottled a sickly shade of green from the metal’s poisonous touch, but the struggle only served to sap him of the little strength he had left.

“Just get it over with,” he shouted, despising the weakness cracking his voice and the tremors shaking his knees.

The old man merely stared with milky pale eyes at his only surviving grandson. An air of disappointment carved long lines in the Duke’s solemn aged face. His heir had let him down—again.

Gray’s gaze widened to take in the Gather elders ringing the Duke like hounds round a carcass. The ruddy-faced corpulence of Lord Carteret down from his lonesome Highland holding. Owen Glynjohns from Wales, with his bold good looks and bard’s clever tongue. The Skaarsgard, who’d traveled from the ocean-sprayed Orkney cliffs where the seals basking upon those rocky shores and the rugged fishermen plying their coracles on the cold northern seas considered each other kin. Each of the men looked on impassively, their duty done if not enjoyed.

The fourth elder watched the proceedings with a face pale as bone and eyes hollow with mute rage, his hands clamped against the arms of his chair like claws. No doubt Sir Desmond Flannery was imagining his own son’s sentence, due to be carried out on the morrow. Mac would never snivel or flinch in fear. He was the consummate soldier, unlike Gray, his supposed senior officer.

Sir Desmond leaned forward, his mouth twisted in disgust. “Enough dallying. Let’s have it done then. The sun’ll be down in another wee bit and he’ll”—he seemed to choke on his words—“he’ll shift. The chains aren’t intended to hold a bird on the wing.”

The elder was right. Already Gray felt the queasy slide of Fey blood magic stealing over him, flames burning blue and silver at the edges of his vision. The sun would set soon, and the dying sorcerer’s curse would take him over, twisting his unwilling body from man to beast for the hours of night. His eyes flashed wildly toward his grandfather before darting away again, his bowels churning ominously.

“Of course.” A nondescript little gentleman with a clerk’s fastidiousness stepped forward in response. The Arch Ossine—Sir Dromon Pryor—had eyes that saw everything and a mouth trained for truth-twisting. “Mr. Copper. Whenever you’re ready.”

Gray tried meeting Pryor’s triumphant stare but faltered when the enforcer stepped to the scaffold, a red-hot iron brand held in one brutish fist.

A restless audience whispered, feet shuffling against the benches, but no one called out or came to his defense. They knew the laws that had governed their existence for a hundred hundred generations. Understood the weak and the sick and those no longer able to serve the bloodlines must be excised like a cancer for fear the whole pack would be brought low. Lowest peasant or heir to the Morieux himself made no difference when it came to keeping the five clans of Imnada safe.

Gray found himself scanning the crowd for one particular face—though he knew she wouldn’t be there. The Duke had sent her north months ago. Still, Gray found himself repeating her name in his head like a mantra, a way to hold himself together in these final horrific moments.

What would she have done had she been here to witness his sentence? Would she have turned her back like the rest of them? Or would she have leapt to his defense as she had so many times over the years? He’d never know, and for that he was almost glad.

The brand’s heat could be felt from three feet away. Gray clamped his jaw lest he embarrass himself with last-minute pleas for mercy. Still, two broken rasping words leaked from his bloody mouth as he stood bowed and shaking beneath the weight of his fear.

“Grandfather. Please.”

The Duke’s chin lifted from the sagging folds of his neck while his hands fluttered for a moment as if he might speak. Then Sir Dromon leaned close to the aging leader of the five clans of Imnada, whispering his poison like silver into the old man’s ear. The Duke nodded. His hands relaxed into his lap. His mouth pursed and his eyes hardened once more, pale and uncaring as stones in a pool.

The enforcer laid the brand to Gray’s back, singeing away the skin to the muscles and tendons below. The charred stench of roasting flesh filled his nose. The screams ripped from his body tore up his throat and bounced off the stone circle of the Deepings Hall, echoing back to him in waves of anguish. His knees buckled as he arched away from the pain, every nerve aflame, every drop of blood in his veins on fire, his very soul being cleaved from his body.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he escaped to the darkest corner of his mind as a hunted creature burrows away from even the hope of light, but the desolate keening sounds of his disgrace followed him even there as his clan mark was burned away in a stripping of everything he was or would ever hope to be. He retched until his ribs cracked and piss leaked into his boots.

But not one tear fell.

They never saw him weep.

She never saw him weep.

The bells were ringing nine in the morning when Major Gray de Coursy stepped from the hackney at Tower Hill. Despite the hour, fog cloaked the streets in a thick, choking darkness. It swirled in the alleys and gathered in the parks, bringing with it the stench of dead fish, river mud, and chimney soot. Lanterns threw dim greasy pools of light over the cobbles while footsteps and voices echoed eerily in the green-gray miasma. A link boy offered Gray his services but was waved away. His keen vision cut the gloom like a knife, and he wanted no witnesses to his final destination.

He passed through a narrow, dingy lane, coming out near the disused water stairs south of the Tower and St. Katherine’s, stopping finally in front of a door set deep into a stone wall—part of an ancient chapterhouse, though the wall and yard beyond were all that remained. He knocked once, then twice more.

A key turned. A bolt slid clear and the door swung open on the hunched figure of a man. “She awaits you, my lord.”

“It’s simply Major de Coursy, Breg. Lord Halvossa was my father’s title and would have been my brother’s after. Never mine.”

“Yes, my lord . . . er . . . Major, sir. As you say.” The porter bowed him in, throwing the bolt behind him. “I offered her breakfast but she refused.”

“You did as you should.” Gray approached a low columned outbuilding, Breg following. At the entrance, the old man paused, shuffling foot to foot.

“Out with it,” Gray said sternly.

The porter licked his lips and gave a quick breath as if steeling himself. “It’s an enforcer, my lord. Prowling the streets near Cheapside last night.”

“How could you tell it was an Ossine?”

Breg huffed. “I may be rogue and cast from my holding, but I can still sense a member of the five clans right enough. And I know a shaman when I cast my peepers on one. They’re different, ain’t they?”