Part One of a Seventeen-part serialized story, firmly in the fantasy camp, so fantasy fans rejoice? Find a Table of Contents at the bottom of this post.

This is the start of Volume 1 of my Shapechangers series. If you’ve read this one, you can hop on over to the start of Volume 2, The Wings Take Shape, right now!

The Shape of Family

Part One – Shadow-Dancer

by Rick Cook Jr

From Sind’s Sundry at the edge of town, Sadie bought the star map and a singed pamphlet with the last of her silver and struck out for the skinyard, fingers twitching to be gone. Sind hisself hadn’t said a word. No one had. They all knew she was going, that she couldn’t be stopped.

She tucked the papers within her pack and hucked it over her shoulders, ignoring the tension in her neck and spine. Just a little ways, she thought. I can make it just a little ways.

Her feet pounded the packed dirt, and though it was getting on dusk and all the changers should have been on their way back, the road lay empty.

She sighed as she passed the tall barricades and entered the skinyard, and here discovered why the changers hadn’t left for home. Naked as the day they first changed, they stood in a circle in the corral of sand and gravel. Eyes on her.

“Don’t you have homes?” she said, dismissing them as she dropped the pack to the ground and started stripping layers of cloth.

“Course we do, Sayd.” Her erstwhile partner loped forward from the circle to greet her, still shaking off the day’s Change. Calph wouldn’t follow where she was going, but she could tell he wanted to. “You know how it goes.”

She nodded. “Who is Witness?”

They all answered, “We Witness.” Her blouse and skirt dropped to the gravel, revealing her threadbare shift, and the men and women watched with placid disinterest. Calph, Rory, Helene, Gertie, Miles, and the rest. Her friends. Her comrades no longer.

“What form do you take?” Calph asked, gathering up her clothing as each piece fell away. The Change was upon her now, skin tingling to be unleashed. The body knew the ritual better than the mind.

“I take the swift and stable form, Shadow-Dancer, to flit among the stars unseen.”

“We Witness,” they all said again. She was glad they’d stayed, she realized. She might not have had a place among them anymore, but they were still hers. She still belonged to them.

Calph took up her shift and stockings, her sturdy boots. “When will you return?” The final question. The one she dared not answer. While she hesitated, standing bare before them in the onrushing night, Calph folded her belongings and set them aside. Into her cubbyhole marked “Sarah Sawyer”.

“When my task is complete,” she answered, breaking ritual just enough so that she was not lying.

“We Witness. Shed Sarah for Shadow-Dancer.”

And the Change came over Sadie, equal parts pleasure and pain as her skin ripped and fell away to pile at her feet, replaced with a form at once different and greater than before. Bones snapped and knitted; she dropped to all fours in a cry of ecstasy, tears falling from eyes too big for her human face. She became Shadow-Dancer, nerve ends screaming as the exposed horse-flesh grew skin followed by a coat of midnight black hair mottled with grayish blue. Her sense of fingers and toes diminished, replaced by greater control over her ears, her elongated neck, and a tail of horsehair that begged to swish. The violence of shedding her self paled next to the feel of new skin, new muscles.

It was over. She nickered her pleasure and relief as Calph reached a hand out to rest on the side of her neck, staring into her eyes. He smelled of blood and bone, she realized with her new nostrils. Hints of the wolf he’d been during the day. Shadow-Dancer was larger than Sadie, and she struggled to remain upright at first; the excess flesh it took to become larger drained even the stoutest changer. The others attached her belongings, fitted her with a saddle, and patted her flank for luck as they stepped away to don their clothing. To return to their normal lives.

Only Calph remained, checking her fittings one last time. “You know,” he said, “a riderless saddle isn’t much better than a saddleless horse.”

She nudged at his chest with her nose and he backed away, laughing. “Okay, okay. I get it. Come back to us, Sadie.” She snorted and he nodded. “Go on, then. Git you gone.”

She neighed enthusiastically and reared back in a show of might, surprised all over that her belongings felt like a fly on her back. She dashed off, out of the gravel yard, hooves digging into the hard-packed earth of the main road in a satisfyingly primal way.

Along the coastal road she ran, wind coursing over her.

The familiar tread of hooves other than her own caught her hearing and she darted into the trees a mile distant from her first destination. The patrol trotted by, never slowing even when the horses let fly their nervous whinnies. The patrol’s gilt finery and glowing helms blinded her in the dark, but they laughed and drank as they passed and paid no mind to the signs around them.

The Kingsguard. More Kingsfool this lot.

She waited for even their jocularity to fade before slipping back out onto the road. She should have been caught just now, but she wasn’t about to look a – if she could have grinned she would have – a gifthorse in the mouth. So she sped along until the coastal road gave way to a narrow lane the side of a cliff, two horses wide. This was where he’d been caught, her Jonathan. Her sweet, naïve nephew. Spotted by a farmhand stealing sheep as a wolf.

Captured, and by accounts, taken to the capital as an oddity, to be auctioned off most like. Experimented upon. Sadie didn’t know. All she knew was that she would get her nephew back. Where the capital was from here she had only the faintest notion. Travel was forbidden. Ignorance was bliss. That’s what the star chart was for. If she could suss out how it worked.

The Red Forest loomed ahead, on the other side of the narrowed road.

She could run along the road, listening for patrols, taking shelter in the bloody forest when necessary. Its trees grew wider, its canopies dense. Good for hiding.

Sleep during the day, she thought. Live on the land. Hide and run.

It worked that first night. She dodged three more patrols, her nerves jangling, her senses fraying as the evening wore on. Shadow-Dancer boasted a hale form, but it was not invincible, indefatigable.

She welcomed rest come morning. Deep in the forest, away from prying eyes, she wandered. She considered changing, but she had no clothing and that was the point, wasn’t it?

So she found a place near a stream and slept as horses sleep.

Hands upon her.

Propelled from restless sleep she swung from side to side, reared back and kicked with her hooves, but the man held firm on the saddle’s straps and let himself be pulled along to the side. The sun shone down in spear shafts, glinting off sword and spear all around her.

Some patrol had come upon her in the day, mistook her as she was meant to be mistaken, a common horse for a rider out illegally.

So many blades, so many men. Such the fool she was. The man holding her saddle whispered calming words.

“Where’s the dead man riding this beauty?” a woman of authority called out. She sat atop a pale horse in the rear, eyes disinterested.

“Can’t find him, sir!” another soldier called out. “Must have run off when he heard us coming.”

Sadie shook and kicked out, but these were not the same lot from the first patrol, lazy and obtuse. This group knew to stay back while the crazy man to her left swung up into the saddle.

“You’ll break your neck riding another man’s horse,” a girl’s voice called. Winged Riders, then. Fleetest of foot, the only military outfit Sadie’d ever heard employed children.

She calmed. The Wings rode out from the capital. Everyone knew it. The man in her saddle patted her neck and she wanted to fling him from her back, but it was too late. She was caught. And they’d take her right where she wanted to go.

_____

End of Part One! Come on back next week for the second part!

Part One – Shadow-Dancer
Part Two – Wings
Part Three – Wild
Part Four – Priority
Part Five – Sun-Baked
Part Six – Den
Part Seven – Reveal
Part Eight – Betrayal
Part Nine – Rally
Part Ten – Visceral
Part Eleven – Clash
Part Twelve – Family
Part Thirteen – Worship
Part Fourteen – Pieces
Part Fifteen – Bond
Part Sixteen – Confrontation
Finale – Part Seventeen – Meld