Silverbow [The Shadowhunter Chronicles]

To the Waters and the Wild

"Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
–The Stolen Child, by W.B. Yeats

Idris, 2009

Summer ended in that slippery way it usually did. One moment Niya was in New Orleans, having what was surely the most interesting summer of her life. But in the blink of an eye she was back in her smelly, cramped, Shadowhunter Academy dorm room writing an impossible essay. 500-words in Chthonian on how she spent her summer.

For the average student, it might be the Chthonian that caused the issue. But Niya was fluent in more demon languages than the average Shadowhunters. No, her issue lay in the fact she was lying through her teeth.

Her summer had been full of ups and downs, excitements and disappointments. None of which she could talk about in her essay. Some of them were the typical teenage dilemmas that no one would tell their professors. For Niya that was George Lovelace, the goldenboy of Shadowhunter Academy and her boyfriend of nearly eight months.

They kept in touch all summer. She'd gone to Scotland to visit him; he'd come to New Orleans to visit her. But, somewhere in the middle of that Niya had come to the realization they weren't in love. Niya had plenty of brushes with the feeling to know it when she saw it. She planned on breaking up with him the moment they returned to Idris.

Only it turned out, breaking up with your best friend was more complicated than it seemed.

Then there were the more...secret secrets. The ones she couldn't even tell George or Simon. The ones that involved a certain half-faerie, half-Shadowhunter relative. The ones that caused her to pull down her sleeves to cover the telltale silvery marks of a Nephilim.

She was thankful for the knock on the door, and even happy to see George when he poked his head in. He sauntered over to her desk with his usual boyish confidence and perched on the edge. "You're stuck on this too?" He asked incredulously, peering down at her half written letter. "You and Simon both...Well, at least you wrote about the sheep. They're very important."

"Very important," she agreed. There had been a lot of them in Scotland. She had made it her mission to pet one, despite the fact that none of them were very interested in being pet.

"I came to visit too," George reminded her, tapping my half-empty paper. "Write that."

Niya looked up at him out of the corner of her eye and shook her head. "Get out of my room, Lovelace. I can't get anything done with you here." He put his hand over his heart and pretended to be hurt.

She knew the kiss was coming before George moved in her direction and turned back to her paper. He had no choice but to kiss her temple. "Save me a seat at dinner!" Niya called as George headed for the door.

He lingered in the doorframe for a moment watching her. Niya tried to pretend she couldn't feel all the questions he wanted to ask hanging in the air between them.

➵

Niya walked out of the classroom and in the exact opposite direction of her room. Her hands felt a little strange, like they didn't really belong to her and she was just borrowing them from someone else. In fact, so did her legs. The realization made her a little light headed, but still she kept moving. The quicker she got away from that classroom the better.

She could still hear the slam of the door when Julie Beauvale had marched out, unable to even be in the same room as a faerie, or a half-faerie as the case was. But that was almost drowned out by the cacophony of voices whispering faerie slurs under their breaths.