Shadows of Uprising (Guardian of the Vale Book 2) Read online

  Shadows of Uprising

  Tamara Shoemaker

  Contents

  Advance Praise

  Dedication

  AIR * EARTH * WATER * FIRE

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  A Message from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Tamara Shoemaker

  Coming Soon

  Copyright

  Advance Praise

  “Tamara Shoemaker confidently spins the second episode in The Guardian of the Vale series, broadening and deepening her elemental fantasy world. Stirring action and surprising plot twists will keep you reading all night long.”

  —Emily June Street, author, Tales of Blood and Light

  “In Shadows of Uprising, Tamara Shoemaker perfectly illustrates her mastery of young adult fantasy. Alayne’s heartfelt journey through grief is one more obstacle to achieving unity with her powers, and her complex friendships are something every young adult can relate to. Shadows grabs you and won’t let you out of its powerful clutches.”

  —C.D. Gill, author, Behind Lead Doors

  “Shoemaker weaves together suspense, epic adventure, and shocking twists as masterfully as her protagonist Alayne weaves the four elements.”

  —Taryn Noelle Kloeden, author, The Fenearen Chronicles

  For Tim, who believes in me.

  AIR * EARTH * WATER * FIRE

  FOUR ELEMENTS * FOUR POWERS * FOUR PATHS

  SHADOWS OF UPRISING

  “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.”

  - Mahatma Gandhi

  Prologue

  Jeb Barnard Smyth killed Dyllon Rand in a shoe store on a Tuesday in early summer. When Continental Media reported that Smyth was a Natural Human and Rand a soft-spoken, card-carrying member of the extremist Elemental Alliance, the EA, it obliterated the public opinion that Natural Humans were harmless. In reaction to the murder, the EA launched a relentless media campaign to garner support for their platform. Their strategy smattered the news outlets every night: expand the Elementals' rights, limit those of Natural Humans, and place the members of the Alliance in the highest seats of power.

  Smyth's weapon of choice had been a rifle, and Rand's back had been turned as he'd stooped over his five-year-old granddaughter to help her strap on a new pair of sandals.

  Stanwick Jones and Kathy Frontenleid, Continental Media news reporters, shared the incident on every Media Imaging Unit, or MIU, across the Continent. Simeon Malachi, the notorious convicted Shadow-Caster who’d been dominating the info feeds prior to this incident, slid into the gray area of local news before vanishing from the MIUs—just as he’d vanished after his violence at Clayborne Training Facility at the end of the school year. When he was mentioned, it was in relation to how his neo-conservative political rhetoric had been refined and purified into something tenable by the Elemental Alliance. And Dyllon Rand’s tragic death only bred more sympathy for the EA and its aims.

  Who wouldn't be outraged by the murder of an elderly gentleman as he collapsed on top of his five-year-old granddaughter?

  That was just the beginning. In the following weeks, the High Court opened up floor hearings to prominent members of the Elemental Alliance who took every opportunity to work the sympathies of the Justices and the audience in the chambers.

  “Perhaps,” they said, “CommonEarth was a better place because of people like Dyllon Rand, who only wanted to show his granddaughter the natural order of things. Perhaps,” they continued throughout the summer, “it is people like Jeb Barnard Smyth, a Natural, who have twisted what is good and tried to convince us that it is instead evil. Will we be convinced?”

  The question rang from MIUs nationwide every night.

  Will we be convinced?

  WILL WE BE CONVINCED?

  Week by week, fewer and fewer people searched Continental Media's news site for listings about Simeon Malachi, and more and more people searched for news of the Elemental Alliance. Stories of their humane efforts across society as a whole grew thicker and more numerous, and it churned one girl's stomach into a froth of unease as the flood of public opinion washed across her already broken world.

  Alayne Worth would never be convinced

  Chapter 1

  He died the same way in every one of her dreams. Alayne always killed him.

  This night, she tried again, stepping carefully through the woods, flinching each time her shoe crunched the dead leaves. Her glance flickered over her shoulder.

  He was near, somewhere; she could feel it, but she couldn't find him. She slid down a muddy slope, climbed across a hedge of thorns and boulders, and then scrambled back up the other side. The world was utterly silent except for the thud, thud, thud of her own heartbeat behind her eardrums.

  She crested the hill and peered through the trees.

  He squatted near the turgid river, his back to her, washing his hands carefully in the cold water. The moon glittered in the thousand drops of liquid that traced his wrists, shattering the darkness.

  Alayne froze into a crouch, a statue that housed a cache of hatred. In the breath of a moment, her fingers curled around the handle of a knife she hadn't realized she carried. As she drew it from her belt, the malicious blade slit the braided leather as easily as butter. Alayne refused to take her eyes off the man in the flannel shirt. Her sweaty hand tightened around the hilt as she measured the distance to her target, and in a single movement, she whipped the blade behind her ear before releasing it to slice through the air.

  The sharp point thudded into the man's back with a satisfactory thump. He jerked upright and then twisted with a cry of pain, falling backward into the river.

  As his face turned into Alayne's line of sight, she gasped. Jayme, the young man who'd captured her heart at Clayborne, stared at her, confusion, pain, and hurt flickering in the brown depths of his eyes.

  The current caught hold of him, and Alayne watched in numb terror as his body arced over the falls headfirst, hurtling out of sight, the moonlit beauty of the waterfall spray masking the horror of a life loved and stolen.

  Alayne opened her eyes, her bedroom at home still gray in the shadows of morning. She pulled her sweat-soaked quilt high against her chin and stared at the swirls on her ceiling. She missed the dated crown-molding that lined her dorm room at Clayborne and the way the sky tilted into her window high up on the spire at school. She missed everything about it, but even when she went back it wouldn't be the same. Her friends would be there, with one notable exception, and the survivors of the battle with Malachi last year were painted now with the grayness of death. Whispers would follow her in the halls and the classrooms: She's the Quadriweave; she can wield all four elements. Bitterness tasted like worms, she decided as the minutes ticked in the stillness.
One by one, she methodically shut the doors of her past.

  Ever since returning home from her first school year at Clayborne Training Facility for Elementals, she'd refused to think of Jayme. She didn't think of him when she traced his name in the steam on the bathroom mirror. She didn't think of him when she jogged every morning to her waterfall, shivering at the spray of water that held more pain than comfort now. She didn't think of him when she cried herself to sleep at night.

  She had never loved him, she told herself, not like that. She'd liked him a great deal; she was comfortable around him, and he made her laugh. He was everything she'd wanted in a relationship, and she'd been excited to see where the future would take them. Love might have come, someday.

  But then, he had died.

  Simeon Malachi, the infamous Shadow-Caster, had killed him. The resulting trauma elevated her relationship with her former boyfriend to a deeper level than any they had shared while he lived. The dreams kept coming—the tramp through a moonlit forest, the figure crouched over the water, the knife, and the slow tumble over the edge of the falls.

  Alayne shoved back her covers and entered the kitchen where her father, Bryan, quickly switched off the MIU on the countertop. The hologram of Dyllon Rand's kindly face wavering in front of the bread box disappeared, and Stanwick Jones's background commentary stilled into silence.

  Alayne shoved her chair out and sank into it with a discouraged sigh. “You don't have to turn it off on my account, Dad.”

  Bryan leaned against the kitchen counter and sipped his coffee, the steam coating his glasses for a few seconds. “I know. I just...” He trailed off, touching the paper on the sideboard.

  “Don't understand why Malachi has so thoroughly disappeared from the headlines?” Alayne finished for him.

  “Well, that's not completely true. Malachi's still there, but he's no longer seen as a renegade in society, a threat to people's way of life, which made him stick out like a sore thumb. Now he’s practically seen as a political visionary, the only-slightly-twisted precursor of the Elemental Alliance.” Bryan sighed. “Did you hear that the High Court is considering allowing use of Shadow-Casting in special circumstances? They think it could benefit our Continent and keep us all safe from the blood-thirsty Naturals. Power to the worthy and all that.” He grimaced, the sarcasm lying heavy on his words. “Stanwick Jones will say anything that puts him in the way of the current of favor, and right now, the Elemental Alliance seems to have that clinched. He's not going to go bad-mouthing Simeon Malachi if it costs him his job. I just—wish he had a little more backbone, that's all.”

  Wynn, Alayne's mother, turned from the stove where she'd flipped the last of the bacon onto a plate and carried it to the table. “I wish that the two slackers from the Continental Guard they sent at the beginning of the summer to watch our house hadn't disappeared without a trace after the shooting. It was all worry and concern about you when Malachi was considered the enemy, and now what do we get?” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Skies above protect the Elemental Alliance from any enemies.” She set the plate on the table with a thump. “Good morning, Layne,” she said pointedly.

  Alayne nibbled on a slice of bacon. “Morning.”

  “Sleep well?” Wynn's concerned gaze belied her overly cheerful words.

  Alayne forced a smile. She knew her parents worried about her. They had reasons to. Shadows darkened the areas beneath her green eyes when she stared in the mirror every morning. Over the course of the summer, she'd progressed from saying little to saying nothing at all. It was easier not to discuss her feelings with her parents; they didn't know Jayme nor understand him. They weren't there during Simeon Malachi's attack on Clayborne.

  She talked to Marysa, but her friend was still recovering from her semester hidden in the dark reaches of Cliffsides, where she'd been kidnapped by Shadow-Casted staff from Clayborne. Alayne hated to add Jayme's death to the issues Marysa had to sort through. Every time she did, Marysa's icy blue eyes glassed over, a sheen of regret that sent pangs of guilt shuddering through Alayne.

  “I slept,” she replied to her mother as she pulled back her chair and sat at the table. It wasn't a lie.

  Alayne's fingers slipped on her glass of water, cold with condensation, and the liquid splashed across the tablecloth. Impatiently, she twisted the element, and the moisture evaporated.

  She glanced at her mother who stood beside her chair, arms akimbo.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Wynn said and then proceeded, “I don't see why you have to keep doing that. Malachi hasn't been found even if everyone does seem to think he’s a political visionary, and you twist the elements like it's not a big deal that he's out there.”

  “Mom, it's easy enough to find us. I don't see what cleaning up one spilled glass of water is going to do to help move the process along.”

  “It's just your whole attitude, Layne. You're not careful; it's like you don't even understand—”

  “Wynn, just drop it, hon.” Bryan's voice overrode his wife's, and she turned back to the stove with a jerk.

  Bryan finger-combed his shoulder-length blond hair into a ponytail before cracking his knuckles on each hand. “Let's not start this again, okay? Last year, you and Layne were at each other's throats before she left for assessments. I don't want to make this a yearly tradition.” Frustration laced his voice.

  Wynn's back was rigid, but after a moment, she turned and placed a pitcher of orange juice and a plate of steaming pancakes on the table. “I'm sorry, Layne; you know I worry about you because I love you.” Her gaze met Alayne's, and Alayne forced another smile.

  “Thanks, Mom. I love you, too.” She did. Even though her mother sometimes grated on her last nerve and lived in the shadow of paranoia, she loved both her parents. She just forgot to tell them very often.

  Wynn didn't respond. She tossed the frying pan in the sink with a clatter. “May I remind you that we will have company soon, Alayne, so unless you're set on greeting him in your pajamas, I suggest you hurry through breakfast and get dressed.”

  “Company?”

  “Daymon Houser. Or did you forget?”

  Alayne had forgotten. She sighed. “He doesn't care what I wear, Mom.” She could wear a kangaroo suit with a backpack on, and Daymon wouldn't notice.

  “Well, this time, be sure you don't set up your target right next to the house siding. You scarred the paint last time.”

  “Yes, Mom.” Alayne shoved the rest of the bacon in her mouth and moved back to the bedroom. Her relationship with Daymon was complicated. They'd hated each other at the beginning of last year. Daymon's bitterness deterred most people from befriending him, but his hatred had seemed to center around Alayne in particular. When Alayne discovered Daymon's responsibilities as a Guardian of the Vale—the tiny thing that held the powers of the four elements and that had been planted within Alayne's side when she was only a year old—she realized it wasn't hatred of her that drove him so much as bitterness at the cost of his Guardianship. If he allowed her death, he would die as well—he and all the Guardians.

  Since this discovery, they had at least reached speaking terms. He wasn't much less prickly than the previous year, but at least they didn't want to kill each other now.

  Over the summer Daymon had been coming to her house every few days for target practice. Alayne had tried archery and liked it, but her favorite was knife-throwing. She was starting to get a good grasp of it. It had taken Daymon a while to convince her that she needed lessons, though.

  “You have to be prepared,” he'd told her seriously days after their return from Clayborne. “I can't be with you one hundred percent of the time even though I'm your primary Guardian, and I'm going to need some help.”

  “Yes, but why do you assume that I'll need to know weapons?” Alayne had asked. “I have four elements at my disposal.”

  “Alayne.” He'd looked at her as if she were dense. “Remember Jayme?”

  That knife had run deep. She'd had
the power of all four elements then, too, but Simeon Malachi's simple sharp blade had whirled past her and embedded itself in Jayme's chest.

  “Fine,” she'd snapped. And it was settled. Daymon came to Alayne's house every day or two and taught her how to hold the weapons, tilt them just right, throw them in a curve or an arc or faster or slower, depending on her target and where she wanted the blade to hit.

  By the summer's end, she sported a good throwing hand and a sharp eye, and she'd taken to practicing on her own in the evenings or up at the waterfall.

  Daymon himself she tolerated as well as she could. He wasn't so bad, she'd finally admitted as the summer advanced. Every now and then, his supercilious smirk when she'd missed her mark made her want to punch him, but for the most part, he'd smoothed his surly attitude from the year before into a more tolerable, even sometimes pleasant, one.

  It was annoying, though, that her parents treated Daymon like a deity or the son they never had. When she returned to the kitchen in her favorite jeans and forest green t-shirt, Daymon sat in her chair, helping himself to an enormous stack of pancakes. She frowned as he drowned his food in syrup.

  “Hungry much?”

  He deliberately cut a massive forkful and shoved it into his mouth, eyeing her. “You didn't sleep well,” he said around the pancakes.

  “You never learned manners.”

  He swallowed. “Same dream?”

  Alayne shrugged. “It's not a big deal.”

  He let it go, and she brushed past him toward the back sliding door, stepping out into the late summer heat. Bryan followed her out, unlocking the tiny shed where they kept the knives they'd acquired for Alayne's practice.

  “Dad?” Alayne asked as he brought the case out and laid it on the deck railing.