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  Echo in Onyx

  Sharon Shinn

  Echo in Onyx

  Copyright © 2019 Sharon Shinn

  All rights reserved.

  This edition published 2019

  Cover image by Dave Seeley

  ISBN: 978-1-68068-140-6

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  This book is published on behalf of the author by the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.

  This book was initially an Audible Original production.

  Performed by Emily Bauer

  Executive Producers: David Blum and Mike Charzuk

  Editorial Producer: Steve Feldberg

  Sound recording copyright 2019 by Audible Originals, LLC

  Where to find Sharon Shinn:

  Website: www.sharonshinn.net

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sharonshinnbooks/

  Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Sharon+Shinn&ref=dp_byline_sr_all_1

  Books by Sharon Shinn

  Uncommon Echoes:

  Echo in Onyx

  Echo in Emerald

  Echo in Amethyst

  Samaria series:

  Archangel

  Jovah’s Angel

  The Alleluia Files

  Angelica

  Angel-Seeker

  Twelve Houses series:

  Mystic and Rider

  The Thirteenth House

  Dark Moon Defender

  Reader and Raelynx

  Fortune and Fate

  Elemental Blessings series:

  Troubled Waters

  Royal Airs

  Jeweled Fire

  Unquiet Land

  The Shifting Circle series

  The Shape of Desire

  Still-Life with Shape-Shifter

  The Turning Season

  Young adult novels:

  The Safe-Keeper’s Secret

  The Truth-Teller’s Tale

  The Dream-Maker’s Magic

  General Winston’s Daughter

  Gateway

  Standalones, Collections, and Graphic Novels:

  The Shape-Changer’s Wife

  Wrapt in Crystal

  Heart of Gold

  Summers at Castle Auburn

  Jenna Starborn

  Quatrain

  Shattered Warrior

  THE KINGDOM OF THE SEVEN JEWELS

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  ROYALS

  Harold: the king

  Tabitha Devenetta: the queen, Harold’s second wife, the mother of his daughter

  Cormac: the king’s oldest legitimate son and heir

  Jordan: the king’s second legitimate son

  Annery: Harold and Tabitha’s daughter

  Jamison: Harold’s bastard son

  Edwin of Thelleron: the first king of the Seven Jewels (long dead)

  Amanda: the first queen

  NOBLES

  Garvin Andolin: governor of the province of Orenza

  Lady Dorothea: his wife

  Marguerite: his daughter

  Patience, Purpose, and Prudence: Marguerite’s echoes

  Elyssa: from the province of Alberta

  Cali: from Alberta

  Leonora, Letitia, and Lavinia: triplets from Banchura

  Deryk: from the province of Banchura

  Dezmen: from the province of Pandrea; a close friend to the princes

  Darrily: Dezmen’s sister

  Vivienne: from Thelleron; Cormac’s former fiancée

  PROFESSIONALS & WORKING CLASS FOLKS

  Brianna: An innkeeper’s daughter, maid to Lady Marguerite

  Jean: Brianna’s aunt

  Nico Burken: an apprentice inquisitor

  Taeline: a priestess in the temple of the triple goddess

  Constance: housekeeper to governor Andolin

  Rory: a footman in the Andolin house

  Del Morson: the head inquisitor in Orenza

  Lourdes: the head housekeeper at the palace in the royal city

  Malachi Burken: the king’s inquisitor and Nico’s uncle

  Chessie: an acquaintance of Nico’s

  CONTENTS

  THE KINGDOM OF THE SEVEN JEWELS

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  CHAPTER ONE

  Because I was born the same year as the daughter of the governor of Orenza, I was always fascinated by the life of Lady Marguerite Andolin. Whenever travelers arrived at my mother’s posting house, fresh from Orenza’s capital city of Oberton, I quizzed them for information about Marguerite. By the time I was ten, I knew every detail there was to know: Her eyes were blue, her hair was blond, her favorite color was purple. She had a brood of brothers almost too numerous to count. And she was one of the few people in the whole province of Orenza with three echoes. They showed up overnight three days after she was born.

  I knew the story so well I might as well have been the nursemaid who entered the room that sunny morning to find the four small bodies wailing in the crib. One was still in her frilly nightshirt, while the other three were naked, pale, and shivering. The maid shrieked and ran from the room to call for the governor’s wife, the nanny, the housekeeper, anyone who could help her bathe and dress the new arrivals. She was so excited that she couldn’t even form the words to describe what she had found. When the nanny finally grabbed her and shook her and demanded, “Are there echoes?” the girl was only able to reply by nodding and holding up three fingers. Whereupon the nanny fainted.

  It was what everybody had hoped for, of course. The governor and his wife had two echoes each, but their sons hadn’t been particularly blessed in that regard, since none of them had more than two and one didn’t have any. Three echoes had always been a rare phenomenon, rarer still in recent decades. Some said there were fewer than fifty people in the whole kingdom who could boast of such a thing.

  By the time I was twenty-three, I had seen only a handful of echoes, and I still found them both magical and a little unnerving. They looked just like their originals—absolutely exact copies, down to the placement of freckles and quirks of expression—yet just a shade or two paler, a few pounds less substantial. They ate and drank like ordinary men and women—and they slept and performed other human functions, or so I understood—but they never spoke. They had no independent thoughts. And they all replicated their masters’ movements without variation, turning their heads to the same precise angle, blinking in concert, smiling and frowning and laughing like reflections in a mirror. />
  What would it be like to have such a constant shadow? What would it be like to have three? Glorious and gratifying, I thought—and perhaps irksome and awkward at the same time. My mother had gotten married when I was ten, and I now had almost as many siblings as Marguerite. I could hardly find an hour when there wasn’t some sister or brother underfoot. Privacy probably wasn’t as hard to come by in the governor’s mansion as it was at an inn, but for a woman with three echoes, solitude was never a real option. I would probably hate such an existence, I admitted to myself, but that didn’t mean I didn’t envy it.

  Perhaps I envied it all the more because, the summer I was twenty-three, I had become disenchanted with my own life. My mother was expecting her sixth child, which meant my two younger sisters were now sharing my room, and I never had a moment alone. It was time to move on, I knew. I had acquired a good number of skills during the years I had acted as my mother’s assistant—I could cook, sew, garden, groom a horse, rock a baby, and calm the angriest customer—but I was itching to move on to something a little grander. A job that I had chosen, a life that was mine.

  For the past couple of years, I’d thought my future would include a boy named Robbie, and we would run his family’s farm together once his father passed on. But then Robbie decided he was in love with the miller’s daughter, and they ran off together one cold night last winter. . She was already pregnant when they came back three months later. Never in my life had I seen a girl so smug.

  It was hardly a wonder that, this summer, I was about as unhappy as a girl could be.

  It was the hottest day we’d had so far when my mother drew me aside after we’d fed the last of the travelers who’d taken rooms for the night. My stepfather and my brothers were making a last visit to the stables to check on the horses, and my sisters were cleaning the kitchen. My mother picked up a folded envelope to fan her face with and motioned for me to follow her outside. The day’s heat had finally started to fade once the sun went down, though the air was hardly any cooler in the back garden. But it had that dense, hopeful smell of rich earth and green, growing things, and I felt my mood lift a little.

  My mother made her way to a stone bench situated next to the tomato plants and carefully lowered herself down. She was eight months along and had grown big and ungainly. More than once I’d seen her refuse the opportunity to sit because she didn’t think she’d have the strength to push herself back to her feet.

  “You’ll have to help me up in a few minutes,” she said. The light from the kitchen window cast just enough illumination that I could see her faint smile. “A woman my age has no business being pregnant.”

  “You’re not that old,” I said, taking a seat beside her. She wasn’t even forty. She’d been only sixteen when she had me after a summer romance with a boy from the next town. He’d had the misfortune to die before he could marry her, though I’d often thought my mother was relieved, not disappointed. “Anyway, you like being pregnant. Or at least you like having babies in the house.”

  “I do,” she admitted. “I might not stop with this one.”

  I groaned and then I laughed. “Pretty soon we won’t have room for any paying guests.”

  “Well,” she said, “I know you think there’s not much room for you.”

  I shrugged. “It’s time for me to start my own life, I think,” I said. “As soon as I can figure out what it should be.”

  “No one figures out what her life should be,” she said. “It just happens. You can plan and plan, you can save all your money, you can open a shop in the heart of the city—and then a fire burns down the building and all your hard work comes to nothing.” She turned her head to look at me. “Or you can think your life is over and one day a handsome stranger shows up at your door, and suddenly the world is made new again.”

  I spread my hands. “Well, I’m ready. Where’s the shop? Where’s the handsome stranger?”

  She fanned her face again with the envelope, then she held it out to me. “Maybe you’ll find one of them in Oberton.”

  I took the envelope from her hand, but didn’t open it. It was too dark to read—and anyway, I was too busy staring at her. “What’s this?”

  “A letter from your aunt Jean. I wrote her a while back asking if she could help you get established in the city. If she’d let you stay with her while you look for work.”

  Jean was my father’s sister, an intelligent and formidable woman who always made me feel as if I had forgotten to comb my hair or honor the triple goddess. She lived in a small house on a busy street and worked as a bookkeeper for an attorney. She’d never been married and didn’t seem to have much of a maternal streak, but she’d always been kind to me in an offhand, matter-of-fact way.

  But maybe she was about to become the best aunt ever. “And she said I could?” I breathed. “Gorsey!”

  That made her laugh. It was a word much beloved by country folk, a corruption of the common prayer Goddess have mercy on my soul. My mother and I only used it with each other when we were being silly or melodramatic.

  “Better than that,” she replied. “She’s already set up an interview for you for a job you’d love to have.”

  How could Aunt Jean know what job I would love when I didn’t even know that myself? “What is it?”

  “Lady’s maid to Marguerite.”

  I could only stare at her in the darkness.

  “Jean is second cousin to the head housekeeper at the governor’s mansion,” my mother said. “She asked about getting you a position there, and it turns out Marguerite is in need of a maid, as her current one is leaving to be married. You have an interview with the housekeeper next week. You’ll leave for the city the day after tomorrow.”

  I nearly shrieked with excitement and then threw my arms around her, feeling the hard mound of her belly pushing against my waist. “I can’t believe it!” I exclaimed as I drew back. Then suddenly I was flooded with horror. “But what will I wear? Every single dress I own looks like I’ve been scrubbing the floor in it, which I have. I’ll hardly appear suitable to be a lady’s maid if I can’t even dress myself right.”

  My mother smoothed back my hair and dropped a kiss on my forehead. “I’ve got a little money saved to send you on your way, and Jean will take you to the right shop to get a proper dress made. You’ll look just fine. And if you don’t get a position with Marguerite, well, there are plenty of other jobs in Oberton. You’re such a hard worker, and you’re good at so many things. You’ll find something.”

  “You’re the most wonderful mother,” I said.

  She laughed. “That’s right, I am. And to remind you of that fact every day, I want you to take this with you and wear it from now on.”

  She took my hand and dropped a ring in my palm. Even in the dark, I immediately knew what it was—a thin silver band that twisted into a triskele to honor the triple goddess. Each spiral of the triskele was set with a smooth chunk of onyx: one black, one white, and one red. It was the piece of jewelry my mother wore most often, except for her wedding band.

  “That’s to remind you of where you come from, no matter how far you might go from here,” she said. “And to remind you that, wherever you are in the world, someone loves you.”

  I slipped the ring onto the fourth finger of my right hand and found it a perfect fit. I held my hand up to the light seeping out from the kitchen, trying to get a better look. “I’ve always wanted this ring,” I told her. “But I can’t take it from you! It’s yours! Your mother gave it to you!”

  “And your mother is giving it to you,” she said. “Anyway, my hands are so swollen I can’t get it on.”

  “But once the baby is born—”

  “Once the baby is born, I’ll be so busy changing diapers and cleaning up messes that I won’t be thinking about folderols like this!” She took my hand again and folded my fingers into a fist. “You keep it, Brianna. Take a part of me with you when you go out into the world.”

  Of course I started crying. I threw my a
rms around her neck, and said I couldn’t possibly leave behind all the people and the only place I knew. But already my mind was turning. Already I was planning what I would pack to take with me, what I might need to buy once I was in the city. Already I was looking forward to my new life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was a day’s journey by the slow public coach from our posting house to Oberton. The city’s dramatic backdrop was the dark, serrated mountain range that contained dozens of onyx mines, which was the reason Orenza took onyx as its traditional symbol. Empara province, to the southwest, was surrounded by lush forests, so its symbol was emerald; Alberta, even farther south, took its cue from its extensive lavender fields and claimed amethyst for its badge. Altogether, the seven provinces of the kingdom were known as the Seven Jewels—though I myself had never seen any jewel but Orenza, or any city but Oberton.

  And what a sight it was. I couldn’t stop myself from staring out the windows at the tall buildings and the rows of shops and the throngs of people. The whole place thrummed with an energy that seemed to radiate up from the streets themselves, animating the people riding or striding by; everyone moved with purpose, bent on extraordinary tasks. From the coach windows as we drove along, I saw a bookstore, a butcher’s shop, a milliner, a horse trader’s barn, a temple, beggars on foot, fine ladies in carriages, and local soldiers in strict formation. I hugged myself with excitement.

  Aunt Jean was waiting for me at the bustling inn where all the passengers gratefully disembarked. “I see you didn’t bring much. Good,” was her brisk greeting as I grabbed my shabby bag. “We don’t have far to go. We won’t need to hire anyone to haul it for us.”

  “Thank you so much for inviting me here,” I said, hurrying to keep up as she set off down the street. She was twenty-five years older than I was, but age hadn’t slowed her down any, and my bag was heavier than it looked. “If I could get a job with Lady Marguerite—!”

  “No reason you shouldn’t, but we’ll see,” she said. She glanced at me appraisingly. “You’re a smart girl and you’re used to hard work. You’d make a fine lady’s maid—a fine worker no matter where you end up. It won’t be difficult to get you situated.”