The Prince's Shadow

Chapter 2: The eyes in the dark

Chapter Two: The Eyes in the Dark

Sheila Ren first encountered the eyes when she was seventeen and was hemorrhaging beneath the altar of the Asylum of Saint Vex.

It began in silence.

Not the cozy quiet of loneliness, but the suffocating silence that roared. Rotten with putrid breath and hidden teeth, it wrapped itself around her lungs like wrapping smoke. She gasped for air. Her legs were numb. Her head reeled, and even the solid rock under her felt far away.

Her hands trembled over the gash in her belly, wet with blood. The agony hadn't quite caught up with her yet her body was still numb, still dazed. Above, a single torch flickered, casting ugly shadows on the walls of the crumbling chapel.

And he stood above her.

The man. The shadow. The beast.

She couldn't get a look at his face, not really. Most of it was covered by a hood, and what light touched him obstinately left. But his eyes oh, gods above, his eyes cut through the dark like twin swords of onyx.

Cold. Curious. Not enraged. Not feral.

Just watching.

Like she was a moth with a broken wing.

"You shouldn't have seen," he whispered.

His voice was calm. Too calm. A surgeon's voice before the first cut.

“I—I didn’t mean to…” she rasped. The words slipped between cracked lips, weak as smoke.

“I believe you,” he said, crouching. “But intentions mean so little in the end.”

Sheila tried to crawl backward, but her body wouldn’t move. The stone beneath her palms was slick with her own blood. Her vision blurred again. She tasted metal.

His gloved hand reached out and brushed a lock of hair from her cheek.

“So young,” he whispered. “They always send the young ones to clean up the messes, don’t they?”

“I’m just a maid,” she whimpered.

“Exactly.”

The blade in his other hand gleamed. Not crude. Ornate. Ritualistic. Etched with ancient runes she didn’t recognize. He raised it, and the firelight caught the blood already drying on its edge. Someone else had already died tonight.

"You don't have to die," he told her. "But you do have to be forgotten."

And then the knife fell.

Sheila woke up screaming.

Her boarding house room was dark, lit only by the streetlight outside the tiny window. Her sheets were damp with sweat. Her heart beat against the confines of her ribcage like a drum in warning. She still felt the phantom of the knife in her belly.

She sat up, gasping desperately, holding her knees.

"Just a dream," she panted. "Just a dream."

But it wasn't. It never was.

Ten years hadn't diminished the memory. Time hadn't dimmed the eyes. The shadow she remembered from that chapel was seared into her mind like it had been branded. And when she'd watched the man on the television the returned prince every cell in her body screamed.

She knew it was him.

Not because of the manner in which he walked. Not because of the voice, although even that had made cold water trickle shivering down her spine.

It was the eyes.

Those same, obsidian eyes.

He had left her to perish. She had crawled out of that church with her guts blown out and her lungs burned. A gardener had found her hours later, in the weeds, unconscious. Her memories had been fuzzy at first, shrouded in pain. But the eyes had not vanished.

And the kingdom had welcomed him like a hero now.

They called him prince.

She kicked her legs over the side of the bed and stood, winces as the old scar pulled tight across her stomach. It never healed quite right. She went into the tiny bathroom and turned on the sink, splashing water against her face. Her image stared back at her older, harder. Her dark hair was cut shorter now, jagged to her jaw. Her eyes once wide and trusting now seemed to be hollowed by years of fear and quiet anger.

She was still that girl beneath the altar.

But now, she was also the woman who had survived it.

A knock startled her.

“Ren?” a voice called softly from the other side of the door. “You alright?”

It was Lysa, the innkeeper’s daughter. Barely twenty, sharp-eyed and kind, always bringing her scraps of food or news from the city.

“I’m fine,” Sheila said, forcing calm into her voice. “Just a nightmare.”

Lysa stopped. "You were screaming."

Sheila opened the door a crack. "I said I'm fine."

The opening revealed Lysa's face. Anxiety printed on her soft features. "It's the prince, isn't it? The one who returned."

Sheila remained silent.

Lysa stepped closer. "You don't think it's him."

There it was. The first thread pulled.

Sheila stepped back, voice low. "Don't say that so loud. People wish for miracles. They don't care if it's a falsehood."

"But you do."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Sheila stared at her. “Because I’ve seen what lies wear when they want to kill.”

Sheila strolled through the remainder of the city later that morning, the quieter parts. Hood up, head down, she strolled under the skeletal profiles of crumbling arches and broken statues. The sun never really had a chance to warm this part of Caelwyn. It was where the palace light did not. And where she could be alone.

She faced a shuttered building a former library reused as an archive. Sigils bleached the stone. She knocked twice, then waited, then knocked once more.

The door creaked open.

Iron-gray-haired man with a leather apron looked out. "Ren. Figured you were dead."

"You say that every time."

"Still true." He stepped aside. "Come in."

The air within stank of paper and dust and secrets. There were old books along the shelves, their covers unmoved for years. The man Old Merton was one of the handful of record keepers who had worked in the royal archive as it was reduced in size. Sheila had come to him years previously when she started asking her questions. He had gone along with it to begin with. Now, he feared her persistence.

"I want to see the records of Prince Kairo's childhood," she said to him.

Merton frowned. "Still chasing ghosts?"

"I'm not chasing them anymore. They're back."

Merton hesitated. "You've seen him."

She nodded.

"Then you realize he's changed."

"It's not change," she said. "It's replacement."

He looked at her for a long time before releasing a sigh. "You'll kill yourself, girl."

"I already did. Once."

He swung open a locked cabinet in the rear. "You didn't get that from me."

"I never do."

Sheila went through hours of digging through files. Photographs. Letters. Medical records. She trembled with her fingers as she superimposed pictures of the real Kairo soft-eyed, wiry, gentle on to the man she'd seen speak yesterday. There was a resemblance, sure. But something in the mouth. The way the ears were shaped. The slight asymmetry. None of it matched.

She stared at one photograph longer than the others. Kairo at thirteen, smiling beside his mother in a sunlit garden. His eyes were soft.

Not the eyes that had stared down at her on the chapel floor.

She closed the folder slowly. “You’re not him.”

That night, she returned to her room and locked the door.

She lay in bed but didn’t sleep.

She recalled the chapel. The moment the knife had pierced her. The rhythm of her own hard breathing. The moment when he'd looked away. And she remembered the promise she'd made in blood and black:

"If I live, I will not forget."

And she hadn't.

And now, she would not run.

She would seek out someone who would believe her. She would tear the mask from his face.

Even if it killed her.