Page 2 of To Touch A Silent Fury (The Bride of Eavenfold #1)

In Ergreen, this courtyard was pleasant enough. Purple and white flowers would sprout from the beds, and by the end of Tanmer, the trellises would be thick with orange lamia. Today, there was nothing but cold dirt and dead vines curled around stone.

With a quick nod to Seth, I darted out .

We crossed the courtyard without incident, but as I flicked up the latch of the door to the West Wing, the wind caught in my hood and pushed it back. The dreary evening light hit my profile as Seth pushed the door, hurrying me inside.

A voice yelled from far away, back towards the main courtyard. “Is that her?”

I stumbled through the door, then leant against the wood to close it, cursing myself. There was no warm candlelight to meet us here, no tapestries on the walls, nor carpets underfoot.

Seth knelt, peeking through a narrow window beside the door. “Five of them, coming this way.”

“Is Harum one of them?”

“I can’t tell.”

“You should leave,” I said, rubbing my cold hands together. “Go out the back way. It’s me they’re after.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Seth said stubbornly. “If they find you, I can defend you.”

I raised an eyebrow. “With your librarian skills?”

Seth folded his arms. His height was the only thing remotely intimidating about him.

“Fine. We’re wasting time.” I took off once more, running to the central stairway.

When I had arrived on Eavenfold island eight and a half years ago, shortly after my eleventh birthday, this wing had been a hum of constant activity. The Women’s Wing, they called it, then. Washer women, cooks, maids, and more came from all over the mainland to work here and serve the Brothers.

Now it lay in disuse, my room the only one with a hint of life left. But I wouldn’t take us there now.

As much as the boys hated coming into this wing, they hated me more, and my bedroom in the deserted dormitory was the first place they’d look. We needed to find some place worse, some place the boys would not want to go .

At the top of the stairs, I turned right, into the part of the fortress destroyed by dragonfire eight years ago.

Here, the wing changed from an intentional structure to a mess of mangled metal, melted stone, and broken roofs.

My route took us down the remnants of a dusty corridor covered in broken glass, the shattered panes rebreaking under our feet.

I tried to keep off the glass where possible, knowing the boys would be listening out for us, but the sheer destruction was hard to avoid.

Just before the large crater in the floor was the fifth door. It was closed, even though I always left it ajar. I pushed the door open, and it didn’t creak. Seth followed me in.

The chamber was remarkable, mostly because it was the only room that hadn’t been touched in the fire. Before Skirmtold’s surprise visit, its sole inhabitant had been a young girl from the Soundlands named Sollie.

There were only a few things known about Sollie.

She was the daughter of a washer woman and had come with her mother to Eavenfold when she was an infant.

She was prone to night-walking and strange fits that disquieted the other children.

In her seventh year, they moved her out of the dormitory below and into this room.

After the fire, her body was never found.

The rumours were something else entirely: whispered, repeated, and warped over time by the unbound boys of Eavenfold.

But I had known Sollie. Not well, and only for a few weeks in pockets of time while we both occupied the same wing. She was just a girl. A few years younger than me, with a quiet way and a sweet tooth. Her troubles were nothing more than that; hers alone, and a cause of her distress.

I stared around the room, taking in the beige single bed carved from heavy wood, still made perfectly under a thick layer of dust. Those brave enough to enter didn’t dare touch Sollie’s bed. The manacles above it, however, shone from the brushes of many oily fingers.

On the small vanity, Sollie’s music box lay open, its song long stopped. I stepped over to it and closed it once more. I recalled winding its mechanism for her in those last days, when she had been suffering one of her tempests. It had stopped playing back to me a few years ago.

“What now?” Seth asked, closing the door softly behind him with a shiver. “We just stand here until the ferry comes at dawn?”

I shook my head. “They’ll check here. We shouldn’t be in the open. Let’s hide in the dresser.”

The wooden dresser in the back left corner was huge, big enough for both of us to squat in.

Seth swallowed. “You want to get into her dresser?”

“Sollie is dead. It’s not her dresser anymore. It's just a piece of furniture, filled with moth-bitten clothes.”

Seth stared at it, and rolled his shoulders. “Fine.”

“If Harum has any sense, he’ll want off this island more than he wants to kill me. We only need to hide long enough for them to get bored and pick an easier target.”

I pulled my cloak off, and knelt down. In big swipes, I dusted the floor beneath our feet with the fabric.

“What are you doing now?”

I looked up at him and blew a long curl of white hair out of my face. “Dusting the floor. Unless you want the only boot prints in the room to lead straight to the dresser.”

Seth pulled his cloak off as a piece of glass cracked in the hallway. We both froze, looking at each other. Without a word, we finished up the dusting and climbed into the dresser. I winced at the creak of the wood as we settled ourselves amongst off-white shifts and folded trousers.

A voice shouted in the corridor as Seth pulled the door closed with a small click.

“There ain’t nobody here, Harum.”

It was pitch black in the wardrobe, and I nearly yelped when something touched my wrist before realising it was only Seth. I gripped his hand again as we listened, his legs folded on either side of mine in the small space.

His fear seeped over mine, overlapping like two waves. Seth was usually anxious, but his current level of stress was far more palpable than normal. There was something protective there, too, and angry.

Seth never cared about shielding his emotions from me, always offering me his touch and the window into his mind freely.

I hadn’t worn my gloves today despite the cold, and he had taken his off the moment he’d noticed, to offer me a means to touch his skin and use my small power. He knew I needed his reassurance.

“All the rooms empty?” Harum replied, from back towards the stairs.

“Think so,” the voice said. “She’s probably gone out into the back fields.”

“I didn’t ask for your wisdom, Patrik, I asked if the rooms were empty.”

A grumble accompanied the sound of more glass breaking underfoot. “They’re all full of dust and nothing else.”

“Are they hiding with Scary Sollie?” Harum asked.

More glass, closer now.

“Door’s closed.”

I held my breath, hoping the fear would be enough.

The Wings of Eavenfold outdated the arrival of the Moontouched Brotherhood.

The fortress on this island was built a few centuries ago in the lifetime of Courvin as a military stronghold.

Then, when the Nox wiped out half the population of the mainland a century and a half ago, Eavenfold became the place they sent the sick to die.

The manacles by Sollie’s bed used to be in every room, chaining up the infected so the doctors could tend to them without the risk of a flailing touch. In the dormitories, only the nail holes remained, but here the Brothers had found a new purpose for the restraints. Holding a tormented child.

“Then open it, idiot,” came the reply.

Seth squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back. The door opened, and this time, it creaked.

“There’s no one here,” Patrik said.

“I can see you standing in the corridor,” Harum said. “Your Fate Ceremony is in what, two years? And you can’t even stand in a kid’s room?”

“Fine,” Patrik replied.

Boots shuffled into the room. I breathed as quietly as I could, hoping the clothes around me muffled it further as creaking floorboards signalled his every move.

Patrik stepped towards the wardrobe, and I tensed.

If he opened the door, I would jump straight on him, get my hands to his neck before he could make a noise. What I’d do next, I could hardly think. How high up was the window? Was there grass beneath it, or icy stone?

The steps continued past the wardrobe door. A chain moved. A mumbled prayer to Dional, the Tastelands’ Founder. Then the steps hastened out of the room, and Patrik slammed the door behind him. “She isn’t in there.”

Harum swore. “Right, spread out. If one of you brings her to me before dawn, I’ll send you a fine bottle of ciante when I get home.”

We both kept utterly silent as the footsteps on the glass retreated back down the corridor, and then for several minutes beyond that, until nothing could be heard but the wind through the holes of the building.

Seth finally let out a large sigh and pushed open the door of the wardrobe, but he made no move to stand. I released his hand and felt a little guilty when he flexed it.

“What did you mean?” I asked, still sitting amongst the clothes. “When you said there were two reasons Harum would have been given Death?”

Seth sighed. “Death is the quickest to accomplish. My Fate was considered favourable, and it’ll still take me eight years to unlock my full power.”

We locked eyes, both knowing Harum’s Fate would be the work of mere hours. “The Fates must need him for something quickly, then, for his blood to turn to Death.”

Once a Fated condition was met, the change would happen. The Fated Mark would settle on the skin, and whatever power its bearer held before that moment would expand or amplify. Improved range, greater influence, or some added element which lay dormant until that very moment.

Seth nodded. “That is the first possible reason. His Fated power is needed now.”

It made little sense to me. Harum’s sensory power—inevitably taste-based given his birthland—seemed benign enough to me; he could make one other person taste what he was tasting.

I struggled to think of any applications of it which could be world-changingly helpful in the short term, although perhaps it would prove its value when three corpses lay at his feet.

“If speed is the goal, that still doesn’t require a Death Fate. Marriage could also be quick,” I said, nudging his foot with mine. “Depending on the willingness of the bride. ”

“There hasn’t been a Marriage Fate in many spans. Ersimmon’s been a Thread in name alone longer than we’ve been alive.”

“I hope the streak continues.” It was an understatement.

Thread Ersimmon, overseer of Marriage Fates, was a doddering fool at the best of times, and these were most certainly not those.

The next Fate to be read was my own, and I hardly wanted to have spent all this time studying just to be carted off as some bride.

It would almost be cruel, I argued, to force the Thread to oversee a failed Marriage Fate, at his age.

“You’re still angling for Acquisition, then?”

“I’ll take anything but Death or Marriage, at this point,” I said with a smile.

Seth smiled back, but there was sadness in it. “I’ll be lonely when you’re gone.”

“I think you’ll be the only one on this whole island to miss me.” I played with a cluster of dust on my hood. “Did you know the Brotherhood picked Harum up only a couple of weeks before me? We travelled here together.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“When they found me, the first ever female Moontouched, it was a good thing. ‘Not only a girl, but a girl from an outside kingdom’,” I imitated loftily.

“I would help the Brotherhood’s growing influence.

Braxthorn’s influence, more likely. Harum was completely ignored as they pushed me in front of crowds from Andiz to Verdusk. He resented me for it.”

Seth frowned. “And then you arrived here, and he tormented you from the off. It seems like a low bar for the hatred he holds for you.”

“You weren’t here for the Heape when I arrived. They’d sent you off home for some Sightlands ceremony.”

Seth went stiff, then nodded. “I recall. ”

“It was like a whole other place, for that one season. Your Groulin assigned the next boy who hit his fourth span to the pursuit of discovering how I existed. A Knowledge Fate bestowed just because of me. I was all anyone would talk about.”

Seth appraised the untouched room like a relic. “Until Skirmtold burnt down the West Wing.”

I nodded. “Guess who was the first unbound to decide it was all my fault?” Seth grimaced; no need for him to fill in the obvious gap. “Within days, I was the doom of the Brotherhood. Harum spread it faster than that dragon’s fire ever could.”

“I’m sorry,” Seth said.

I waved my hand instinctively. In truth, it didn’t hurt much anymore, the Brothers’ quick rejection of me. But I was relieved I'd only have to suffer Harum for one more night. “I’m just glad some boy barely past his third span decided to take pity on me.”

Seth shook his head. “It was never pity. I could see your innocence as plain as day.”

I relaxed back against the wardrobe’s frame. “What’s the other reason, then?”

“What?”

“You said there were two reasons for Harum’s Fate. One was that his power was needed sooner than later. What’s the other?”

Seth dropped his eyes to his boots. “The only other reason I can think of is there’s someone they want dead.”

My stomach flipped. “Who?”

Seth didn’t look at me.

“You think they want me dead?” I asked, my voice toneless. “The Threads?”

Seth still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I don’t know. But everyone is afraid of you. If you make it to your fourth span, they have to give you a Fate. And if you succeed, your abilities will grow. I think the idea of a cursed woman with power is far scarier than setting Harum loose on the island. ”

Oh.

The words were not as devastating as they should have been. I never expected the love of the Threads, nor sought it out. But it carved another curl of wood next to that wide hollow place inside me. “What now, then?”

Seth finally looked at me and reached his hand out. I took it without question, feeling his sincerity. “Now, we stay here until dawn. And then you try to stay alive until the first stroke of Ergreen.”

I breathed out and stared past him into the room, my eyes catching on the music box, open once more. I’d survived nearly nine years on Eavenfold, I could manage another fifty days.