Chapter 1: Things the Shadows Took
The first thing the shadows took was a marble.
A small one, blue glass with a twist of silver at the center, a reject from a batch you'd made for a toymaker on the Sidra. It had been sitting on the windowsill of your studio, catching the morning light, and when you turned back from the furnace it was gone, and a wisp of darkness was sliding off the sill and out through the crack under the shutter like smoke going up a flue.
You stood there with your blowpipe in one hand, and thought: Huh.
The second thing was a sliver of amber glass the length of your finger. The third was a scrap of paper you'd been sketching on. The fourth was the last bite of your lunch, a honey bun from the bakery two streets over, which you'd been saving and which you resented losing more than the rest put together.
By the end of that first week you'd stopped pretending you were imagining it.
The Rainbow at the heart of Velaris was full of strange things. Artists' magic leaked out of every doorway: a painter down the street whose murals moved when nobody was watching, a sculptor whose stone birds occasionally flew off. You'd lived in the quarter for six years, since you came north from the Day Court with your furnace-hands and your apprenticeship papers and a single trunk, and you'd stopped being surprised by much. But this was something else. This darkness came in through the cracks of your studio every afternoon, curled around the legs of your workbench, drifted along the shelves where your finished pieces stood, and watched you.
You could feel it watching. It didn't feel hostile. It felt curious.
So on the ninth day, you talked to it.
"You know," you said, without turning around from the furnace, "if you want something, you could ask."
The shadows went still. You could see them out of the corner of your eye, pooled under the window like spilled ink.
"I'd have given you the marble," you went on. You lifted the blowpipe from the glory hole, the gather of molten glass on its end glowing orange as a setting sun, and began to turn it slowly, letting the heat run from your palms down into the iron the way your gift let you, keeping it soft. "It had a bubble in it. Nobody would buy it. And the honey bun, honestly, you could have just asked. I'd have split it."
There was a pause. Then something cool and soft brushed against the back of your neck, light as a breath, and was gone.
You laughed out loud. It echoed off the brick walls.
After that the shadows didn't steal. They visited. They came in the afternoons and sat on your shelves and coiled through the handles of your finished pitchers, and sometimes, when you were working the glass, they drifted close enough to the furnace that you worried for them, and you'd say "Careful, that's hot," and they would retreat, and you swore some of them looked sheepish.
You started leaving things out for them. A bead of green glass. A curl of copper wire. Half a honey bun, every day.
They took it all. They didn't take anything else.
He came for them at the end of the third week.
You'd known he would, eventually. Everybody in Velaris knew whose shadows those were. There weren't many people in the Night Court who could command darkness the way it moved through your studio. The High Lord himself, they said, and one other. The spymaster. The shadowsinger. The quiet one of the High Lord's Inner Circle, who stood at the back of every portrait and every party and every story, and whom the city's gossips could tell you almost nothing about except that he was beautiful and frightening and never, ever smiled.
It was late. The furnace was banked for the night, glowing low. You were sitting on your workbench with your feet on a stool, eating the other half of the honey bun, and the shadows were coiled in your lap like a cat, which was a sentence you had never expected to think.
The door opened without a knock.
You hadn't locked it. You never did. You looked up.
He filled the doorway, then he ducked through it, because he was very tall and his wings were tucked tight against his back and still nearly brushed the frame. Illyrian wings, huge and dark and veined, folded like a cloak. His hair was black and cut short, falling a little over his forehead. His eyes were hazel, gold-green and grey, and they swept the studio once in a single practiced arc, the shelves, the window, the furnace, the exits, before settling on you.
Then on the shadows in your lap.
And something crossed his face that you were fairly sure no one in the city had ever seen before. It was pure, astonished embarrassment.
"They've been bothering you," he said. His voice was low, and quieter than you'd expected, with a roughness at the edges like it didn't get much use.
"They've been visiting," you said. "There's a difference."
The shadows in your lap shifted. Two of them slid down off your knees and across the floor toward him and wound around his boots, then up his legs, curling around his wrists, sinking into the leather of his fighting gear. You watched them go and felt, absurdly, a pang.
"I'm Azriel," he said.
"I know who you are." You held up the honey bun. "Want the rest? They've had theirs."
He looked at the bun. Then at you. A long, unreadable look. You could see the hands at his sides now, and you understood why he wore gloves to every portrait sitting in the city, because he wasn't wearing them tonight. His hands were scarred. Old burns, thick and ridged and shiny, running from his fingertips past his wrists and disappearing up into his sleeves. Around each wrist, set into a band of dark leather, a blue stone glowed faintly. Siphons. One on the back of each hand too.
He saw you looking. His hands didn't move, but his whole body went very slightly still, the way an animal does when it's waiting to be struck.
You looked back up at his face. "They're very well behaved," you said. "Your shadows. I want you to know that. They stopped stealing as soon as I asked."
The stillness broke a little. "They stopped," he repeated, "because you asked."
"Is that unusual?"
"They don't listen to anyone," Azriel said slowly. "Not even me, half the time." He looked down at the shadow wrapped around his right wrist, which was, very clearly, straining back toward you. "They talk about you."
"They talk?"
"They whisper." He seemed to regret saying it immediately. He glanced at the door. "I'll keep them away from now on. I'm sorry for the trouble."
"Don't," you said, before you could think about it.
He stopped.
You put the honey bun down on the bench and slid off it, and you went to the shelf by the window, and took down the thing you'd made two nights ago and had been too shy to give to anyone. It was a little glass vessel the size of a teacup, blown thin as a soap bubble, dark smoked glass shading to midnight blue at the base. Inside it, suspended in the glass itself, a spiral of silver threads curled up from the bottom like smoke rising. You'd been up half the night getting the threads right.
"I made this for them," you said, and held it out. "So they'd have somewhere to sit when they come. It's silly. But."
He didn't take it. He stared at it, and then at you, and the shadows around his wrists had gone utterly still, and in the low furnace light you could see a muscle jumping in his jaw.
"Why," Azriel said, very quietly, "would you make something for them?"
You thought about how to answer that honestly. "Because they're lonely," you said. "I can feel it. Every afternoon when they come in. Like someone standing just outside a lit window." You hesitated. "I know what that's like."
He took a step toward you. Then another. He was close enough now that you had to tilt your head back to meet his eyes, and you could smell cedar and night air and something like rain on stone. He reached out, slowly, as if you might bolt, and his scarred fingers closed around the little glass vessel, around your hand holding it.
Your hands ran hot. They always did; it was your gift, the heat that let you work glass without tools. You felt him flinch at the warmth, a tiny sharp movement, and you started to pull away, horrified, and he didn't let you.
"Wait," he said hoarsely.
And then something in your chest snapped like a pane of glass dropped on stone.
It wasn't pain. It was more like a door swinging open in a wind. A rope pulled taut between your ribs and his, glowing, humming, and down the length of it came a rush of feeling that wasn't yours: shock, and fear, and want so vast and old it took your breath away. The shadows around his wrists flared up wild, filling the studio, the furnace light guttering. You heard them for the first time, a hundred soft voices all at once, all saying the same word.
Mate.
Azriel stared at you. All the color had left his face.
"No," he whispered. "No, no, I can't—"
He let go of your hand. The glass vessel stayed in his palm. He backed away, one step, two, his wings flaring half open and knocking a jug off a shelf to shatter on the floor, and then he was in the doorway, and then the night swallowed him whole, and he was gone.
You stood alone in the wrecked quiet of your studio, your hand still burning, your heart pounding like it had been struck, and felt down that new bright cord in your chest, all the way across the city, his heart pounding back.