Shard, page 1
part #2 of Cruelly Made Series
Shard
K. M. Hade
Shard
Copyright © 2021 by K.M. Hade
All rights reserved.
Shard is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover by Eerilyfair Design
Contents
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About the Author
Also by K. M. Hade
1
Crystal
The team is sacred. The team is everything.
And I have failed mine.
It’s been two days since ScatheFire was dragged below. I want to believe he’s dead. Hopefully, he died.
If I was his Heart, I’d know he was dead.
I’d felt the death of my Aether team. I’d been just enough of a success as a Heart to be aware of how they’d decayed into Blightlings.
But I am not his Heart, so I don’t know.
There’s no point in apologizing, much less speaking. It’s all so empty. Pointless pebbles spit into a huge pit. There is nothing I can do to even begin to make this right.
I failed him. I failed all of them.
Blood stalks over and deposits my bowl next to my leg. It contains slop from the most recent feeding at the slop wall. “Eat.”
I don’t move. Rot will be along soon to eat up my portion.
Blood looms over me. “You’ve been on the front. You know all about dead Mages, soldiers, horses, and rats. Stop moping and eat.”
Speaking is so much work. It’s so cold without ScatheFire. “He was your teammate.”
“And there are four of us still here,” he says. “You haven’t eaten in two days. I am done indulging your pity-party.”
Pity-party? Is that what a Fell team calls it when they’re grieving one of their own? “Next you’ll tell me I have no right to feel sad.”
“You can be as sad as you want. Just stop feeling sorry for yourself. You said it yourself. You’re a weapon to be used until you’re broken. You aren’t broken.”
I feel broken.
Rot glances up from his meditation. “She isn’t moping. Don’t thump on her, Blood.”
Smoke uncurls his legs and stretches.
Blood deposits himself on his own cot. His fingers toy with the rose brooch over his breast. They’re all wearing prisoner uniforms now, their army uniforms folded and tucked under the mattresses with the pieces of my incomplete familiar. He still looks every bit the Captain, though, and is careful to keep his white hair neatly braided and more white than grimy. “We need to regroup. I don’t plan on letting that Storm come back for seconds, the Warden get any clever ideas, or for us to be training fodder for every ass-backward set of privileged Aether-brats that comes through here when school starts again this fall.”
I hadn’t thought about that last part. If any of the students get hurt, it’d be on us. If—by some miracle—we ever do manage to get out of here, we’d have a lot of enemies. I also didn’t want to hurt anyone else.
Who had unleashed the Blightlings into the arena? The Warden had to have been in on it, but the Storm team had been angry at Storm. They hadn’t been expecting it. Storm had indicated the Warden. But why would the Warden have risked killing a Storm team with the Ball Blightling?
I shudder. Whatever that thing had been…
“Do you think it was Storm’s idea or the Warden’s to unleash the Blightlings?” Smoke, seeming to read my thoughts, asks Blood.
“I don’t know,” Blood admits, annoyed. “Storm was in on it, but her team wasn’t. Maybe the Warden agreed to Blightlings, but someone down below got greedy and unleashed that… thing. Maybe it got loose. We don’t know, and frankly, I’m not inclined to spend a lot of time sorting it out. We know the Warden isn’t our friend. For all we know, he’s playing some court games and killing off that Storm team and blaming it on us is exactly what he had planned. Oh look, she’s killed again, better leave her here forever. For now, we assume he was in on it. Our mission isn’t over.”
Smoke nods.
Stubborn Fell. I lean my head back against the wall. “The mission is a failure. Don’t be delusional. It’s not going to work. I can’t be your Shard. What happened to ScatheFire could happen to any of you.”
Blood sighs. “Will someone please tell her that ScatheFire getting snatched by a Blightling had nothing to do with her magic? He got snatched because we got betrayed by our fellow Mages. Her magic is the reason we aren’t Blightlings right now.”
I curl forward so I can rest my head on my knees. “No, I lost focus. My shield cracked. ScatheFire saved me from my mistake.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, you say that like you’ve trained against floating balls of demi-god-knows-what on a regular basis,” Blood says sarcastically.
“Admit it: my magic isn’t stable. Floating cosmic ballsacks or not.”
“Neither are your emotions. You think everything is your fault, but you don’t even have a familiar. More like you aren’t stable.”
Smoke nods once more. Rot looks pensive.
I’ll be the happiest person in the world if I am insane, and this is all a very bad delusion.
Blood waits for my reply, gives up waiting, looks at the ceiling. “ScatheFire said you were like a badly handled horse, and he was right. You overreact to everything. Someone raises a hand with a brush, you assume you’re going to get hit. Someone puts the leg on, you expect the spur. Someone touches the reins, you spin. The horse is a mess, but it’s not the horse’s fault.”
“I’ve had the best of everything.”
“Stop being stupid, Pebbles. You know what I’m getting at.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone again,” I say. Then, I add, “Without meaning to, I mean. I’m flawed. I shouldn’t have felt the things I felt in that arena. I can’t control my magic. I can’t. It’s too wild. ScatheFire is…”
I draw a shuddering breath.
“There’s no way out,” I rasp. “This is hopeless.”
“That’s not true,” Rot mutters.
“You saw what was happening on the lower levels. The Atrament Fell we ran into.”
Blood leans back against the wall and crosses one knee over the other, placing the heel of one foot on the toes of the other. “I don’t see you killing yourself.”
I touch my chest. “I’ve still got all my Aether.”
“And if you think you’re so dangerous, do the right thing.”
“It’ll trap you three down here,” I rasp.
Rot groans and Blood sighs. “You need to think clearly. They aren’t taking the Aether out of you. Make peace with it.”
Smoke, lurking in his corner, says, “They’re willing to let us and all that Aether go to waste and risk word of the Aether getting back to court for the sake of this experiment. They are not taking your Aether out.”
Blood twirls a finger. “They’ll never get another chance to run this test, so they’re probably thinking the price of that much ruined Aether and court rage is worth it. She’s the only Heart-capable Mage that they’ll ever be able to throw at a Fell team without the court going into complete uproar.”
Sometimes it sucks when they’re right. I hug my knees a bit tighter. “So what do we do? I can’t be your Shard.”
Rot shrugs. “You seem able to hamfist it.”
“That doesn’t make me a Shard, it makes me a blunt object.” I can barely reach them, which is more than I should be able to do, but I’m so fucking powerful that I’m like a bull in an ice sculpture display. I put my hands over my face. “I sacrificed him.”
The real, agonized truth surfaces in my mind. I closed the arena gate with crystal. I could have refused. I could have run after him. I could have—
“And what were you going to do? Leave that gate open so that fucking thing could come back for a second helping from the Imperial Mage Buffet?” Blood demands, his tone like acid.
I flinch. “Of course not.”
Rot gestures for Blood to shut up. Then he tells me, “It’s easier to blame yourself. But you did the best you could, and it’s not your fault. We got screwed. You know that, right? ScatheFire sacrificed himself to save the team.”
“Again,” Smoke murmurs.
It hurts when he says that. It’s like a scythe cuts through all of us.
It’s hard to wrap your head around someone dying (or worse) for you when you’re the one who’s supposed to do the dying. And it seems especially unjust that it was ScatheFire that had to pay that price. Again.
It’s so hard to believe he’s actually gone. I
Blood, grimly, breaks our silence. “We’re lucky only one of us ate it. I promise you, if one of those Aethers had been killed, it would have been pinned on all of us. ScatheFire is lost. The army will send down some other poor bastard Fell who has lost his team or needs a team. That’s how it works, and we know it. We aren’t like Aether teams. We grow new parts.”
I don’t want new parts. I want ScatheFire back.
Smoke turns his head. “So if we get assigned a new part, you won’t fight it this time?”
“Do I look like I’m in a position to fight it?” Blood asks dryly. “Pebbles, I don’t need to wipe your brain’s ass for you. You know it’s the lucky people who die for this war.”
Rot says quietly, “That’s not going to make her feel better.”
Blood throws up his hands. “We aren’t here to feel better. We’re here to survive. You think they’re going to let us out of here alive if we don’t do exactly what they want and find a way to shove it up their assholes first? We,” he points at himself, then Rot, then Smoke, “and ScatheFire too. We all agreed we wanted pensions and peerages and it didn’t matter what we had to do to get it. Which is why we’re still alive and not rotted through. Because we want what’s on the other side of this and aren’t going to settle for anything less. ScatheFire didn’t make it. We still can. We go back to the basics. That means we focus on her familiar and training.”
I struggle against the helplessness in my chest, and the distraction of that black cat pacing in the corner. “Consecrating my familiar in the Pit isn’t a good idea.”
“It’s our only option. You need a familiar.”
“Do I, though?”
“A familiar changes everything,” Rot says softly. “You’re not alone anymore.”
“Them taking ScatheFire’s familiar from him was barbaric.” Blood snorts, touching his little rose. His brooch looks silly pulling on the thin fabric of his prisoner uniform, but he refuses to take it off, silliness be damned.
But consecrating a familiar in the Pit? You need all kinds of wards and anchors and hallow ground to consecrate and animate your familiar. And my familiar is a snake, so…
But there are three Fells who didn’t do a thing to deserve to be down here, so I’ve got to wring the towel for them. My life doesn’t matter. I don’t have any right to erase the value from their lives.
ScatheFire would tell me that, and he’d also yell at me and probably spank me for saying my life didn’t matter.
Fuck, I miss him so much my brain wants to spiral and my heart feels like it bleeds. It hurts. Every part of me hurts.
Time to turn my attention to the survivors. In the Academy, I’d been trained (as were the Aegis) that a member of your team would probably be lost at some point. We got warned and taught all about the guilt, the pain, the despair, the way it would feel like everything was thrown off balance. You’d have your own anguish, and you’d be carrying the anguish of your surviving team. You, the core, had to turn your attention to the matter of holding the rest of the team together.
The protocol is to get the rest of the team out of the bad situation that had taken the lost member, hold everyone together until it is safe, then fall apart. Usually the team protected the Heart or Aegis, but this was one of the times the Heart or Aegis were solely responsible for the team’s survival.
Many teams don’t survive the loss of even one member. The trauma and loss—usually happening on a battlefield against Blightlings, or in heavily Blighted areas—creates wounds so large that Blight infection is instant, and the entire team is lost. Even if the team survives the initial loss, the wounds can still become Blight-infected as the Blight preys on despair. Team survival depends on the Heart or Aegis pulling the team through.
And somehow, even though I am neither Heart nor Aegis, and nobody can really agree on what my actual name is, I’ve got to fall back on all that training. I don’t have any Heart magic or the Heart bonds for this, but I did study hard back at Academy. On tests that hadn’t involved magic, I’d always had the top score. I’d hoped that if I really studied, I’d figure out what I was doing wrong.
I look at Blood. “So tell me what a Shard does. How does a Shard shard?”
I knew how a Heart hearted. In theory. I’d also been told I was everything from too impatient to too bossy to too critical to too lazy to too selfish to too self-centered, and that was why I was a bad Heart. Except those traits should have disqualified me from being a Heart at all, so I still don’t understand why everyone insisted I was cut out to be a Heart.
Blood smirks. “Shard? Obnoxious nags. Fucking splinter in your brain killing all the good times.”
Rot grimaces. “They stick in your mind. So when the Blight is trying to fuck with you, an Aegis will shield you and a Heart is supposed to make the pain bearable and give you strength, right?”
“Yeah.” An Aegis is a shield. A Heart is supposed to be like the Great True Love in a fairy tale that conquers all.
“A Shard kinda…” Rot struggles to explain it, looks to Smoke, who shrugs, and Blood, who offers no help either. “Reminds you to keep your shit together. I guess it’s like a spur or a whip for a horse. You can give them a little tap that doesn’t hurt, or you can beat the shit out of them.”
“So, if we’re going to keep up the horse analogy—” I say.
“You were cavalry and Rot there’s familiar’s a horse, so it works,” Blood agrees.
“A Shard is like a whip or spur, or maybe a harsh bit.” I conclude.
The Fells kind of roll this around in their heads, exchange looks, and more or less nod as one that this is a pretty good analogy.
“There aren’t a lot of Shards.” Blood tries to sound cocky, but he just sounds tired. “Fells all come from the shit. We’ve gotten whipped, so we want to hold the whip. But the Shard gets to hold the whip. See how that’s a problem? Lucky thing that most Fells can’t even be Shards at all, so most Fell teams don’t have to deal with it.”
“Until you do,” Smoke murmurs.
“She’s not a Fell,” Rot says to Blood, like it’s part of an ongoing conversation I haven’t been part of.
I tuck my knees up closer to my chest and pick at the fabric on my shins. “So how are Shards chosen? Like what qualities does the Academy look for when they’re trying to spot a potential Shard? Because it sounds like how they find Aegis.”
Not every Crystal Mage can become a Heart, but the vast majority can and do. A potential Aegis, though, has to be spotted and cultivated. They need the right disposition and mental fortitude, but they also need the desire to be an Aegis, which is what lets their magic become internal rather than external. An Aegis actually is sort of like a butterfly.
Blood wriggles his toes. “Been thinking on that. Hell if I know. I do know there’s a Fell Team a few years behind us, came up through the Academy without a Shard, but their Venom became a Shard after about a year on the front.”
I sit up straighter. “You’re joking. I’ve never heard of that happening with Aethers. I mean, I teased ScatheFire about becoming the Shard but—”
“It happens from time to time with Fells.” Blood nods, a sly grin on his face. “My point is there’s no test to see if you’re a Shard or not. Only an Aegis has an actual transformation.”
“Yeah,” Rot says reluctantly, with a guilty glance in my direction.
“Are you saying we fake it?” I ask, blinking several times.
“Yes,” Blood says.
We all look at him like he is absolutely fucking nuts.
“And how will that work?” Smoke inquires.
