“If he survived,” Dominic says, “I hope he knows better than to fuck with us again.”
Bard slowly approaches the fire. He’d been chopping firewood but now settles on one of the logs beside Dominic. His eyes are unfocused, his posture tense, drawing all our attention to him. “I…I should come clean about something.”
Dominic pauses sharpening long enough to say, “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to. I don’t give a shit what Henderson said.”
Bard’s jaw shifts side to side. “Still, it isn’t fair to keep it to myself any longer. Not when it has already endangered the others.” His gazesweeps from Harlow, to me, then to Calvin. He flexes his scarred fingers and clears his throat. “What Henderson said about me is true. I murdered a Sinless.”
My pulse quickens, in both shock and understanding. I recall what Henderson said at the bridge.
Murder. Of an unspeakable nature. Which makes their crimes treason too.
Now that I know Henderson thinks I killed Henry Berkham, it makes sense Bard has been accused of the same. Murdering a Sinless.
“Is that possible?” Harlow asks, voice small.
I note that Calvin doesn’t look at all surprised. He likely knows even more secrets than I do, given how long he’s been with Dominic.
“I didn’t know it at the time,” Bard says, “and it wasn’t my intention. I wanted the Sinless to hurt, that’s all.”
Harlow’s expression twists with a blend of sympathy and curiosity. Those same emotions resonate in me. “What happened?” she asks, tone gentle, encouraging.
The last time we told our stories, Bard clammed up, and I expect him to do the same now.
Instead, he heaves a sigh, one that unclouds his eyes, his face. “Three years ago,” he says, “a Shadowbane came to my home with two of his Summoners. All were masked, even the Shadowbane, so I never saw their faces. They said they were investigating the source of Shade interest, due to an increase in Shade activity. He’d heard I descended from a family of renowned musicians, which is true. Music was once the pride of the Bodin name, long before One Hundred Days of Darkness. Talent was said to run in our blood. After art was outlawed, my ancestors continued to pass down the knowledge of music. Never to play; only to understand, so when the day came that we’d earned our gods’ forgiveness and we no longer had to hide our craft, someone could carry on the Bodin legacy.
“I, like every Bodin before me, studied sheet music, practiced chords. I kept a five-hundred-year-old forbidden instrument in the basement. Once a month, I descended the stairs, lit the lanterns, and practiced the finger placements, never strumming. Never making a sound. It was supposed to be harmless.
“Then the Shadowbane came.”
His voice shakes and my heart rate climbs. I know his story doesn’t end well, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t desperate to know his tale. It’s the wicked artist in me.
No, not wicked.
Just an artist.
In a wicked, false world.
Dominic hasn’t shared the truth with Harlow and Bard yet, but this is the first time we’ve been awake together in the daylight. Now is the safest time to tell stories.
“What happened?” Harlow asks. “What did they do?”
“They searched my home for evidence that someone in my family was guilty of attracting Shades,” he says. “They went into the basement, found my hidden sheet music. Then they pried at my floorboards until one came loose. They uncovered my mandolin.
“I assured them I only held on to it as a keepsake, that I never played it. I begged for them to make an official arrest, to hold a trial and test if I was lying, and the Shadowbane seemed disappointed by that. He hauled me out of the house and ordered me imprisoned. I went along willingly, not fighting his Summoners when they wrenched my arms behind my back. But then my daughter came home.
“Mary…when she saw me like that, she demanded to know what happened. I begged her to go inside. To stay with her mother. I promised I’d sort this all out, that they’d give me a trial and discover I wasn’t guilty of attracting Shades. Her eyes fell on the mandolin in the Shadowbane’s hand, held between two fingers like it was a filthy thing. Mary wrested it from his grip, placed her fingers over the strings, and…”
A sob breaks from his throat and my eyes sting at the pain in his expression.
He lowers his head, shoulders quivering. When he sits upright, breathing a shaky sigh, his cheeks are bright with the trails of tears, a sad smile on his lips.
“Gods, she played so beautifully,” he says. “I had no idea she’d discovered my secret and sought to carry her own, but the way she playedmade it clear. She’d practiced in silence even more than I did, which was astounding for a girl of only sixteen. So when she said, ‘I’m the guilty one. I’m the musician in our family,’ the Summoners released me at once and took her instead. I screamed. I pleaded. I cried for them to offer the same trial I’d begged for, because she couldn’t be guilty of attracting the Shades. She may have known how to play, but she never would have played out loud.”
My heart twists at his words. I can’t tell whether he truly believed she wasn’t guilty of attracting the Shades or if it was just a father’s desperate wish, perhaps a father’s desperate naïveté, but it doesn’t matter to me if she played out loud or not. It doesn’t fucking matter, because if I was in her place, I wouldn’t have been able to resist hearing the beautiful, haunting music of those strings. I would have given in to the devil’s call, just like I always have with storytelling and sewing.
Bard continues. “I rounded up every coin I could find. Sold everything of value. Just to offer something to the masked Shadowbane to keep him from turning my daughter over to the crown. To beg him to give her a local trial instead. Take her to the church and let them test her. But the Shadowbane was long gone by the time I filled my purse, and when I went to the jail, my daughter was gone too. Not dead. No, she was given to Lord Doan, the most respected Sinless in town, save for our duke.”
“Duke,” I echo. “You lived in a protected village.”
