Free Shadow Sister by Carole Wilkinson Page A

legs ached. His feet were blistered. He was hungry, even though it was not long since they’d eaten. Tears filled his eyes. He wanted to weep like a child.
    In the old days, people knew how their lives would unfold. Farmer, merchant, priest – they all had roles in their communities. Survival might have been difficult at times, loved ones died, crops failed, houses burned down, but at least folk knew what they were supposed to be doing in this life. Since the nomads had invaded, the world was not as it should be. Tao had tried to map out his life, but like so many people in Huaxia, it had slipped out of his control. He had no idea what he should be doing.
    A sound broke the silence, interrupting Tao’s thoughts. “What was that?”
    Kai craned his neck, snuffed the breeze. “Nothing that can do us harm.”
    The dragon shape-changed into a boy the same age as Tao and they continued along the path. As they drew closer to the sound, Tao recognised what it was – a baby crying. He expected to discover an abandoned infant on a bed of moss, but around the next bend there was an old man with a baby in his arms and despair on his face. The man’s eyes lit up with hope when he saw them. He held out the child to Kai who shrank away from the baby.
    “I can’t feed him. I don’t know how.” The old man looked hungry himself.
    “I’ll take him,” Tao said, though he had no experience in caring for babies.
    The child was a few months old and so skinny Tao could see its ribs. The baby kept crying. Tao still had some of the water from the underground cave and he poured it into his gourd.
    “It isn’t water he wants,” the old man said. “He’s had nothing but water for several days.”
    “This is special water,” Tao said. “It should at least enable him to sleep while we work out what to do.”
    The water didn’t seem special. In the daylight it no longer glowed. It just had a greenish tinge, like stagnant pond water. Tao managed to drip some of the water into the baby’s mouth. He had seen starving babies before, in the villages near Yinmi, and they were usually listless, with death already in their eyes. This one still had some fight in him.
    The baby did go to sleep. There was no urgent need to keep moving, so Tao suggested that they stay and help the old man. Kai didn’t object. Tao remembered a woman who had lived in his family community who made a sort of porridge to feed to her infant.
    “I need to light a fire. Kai, see if you can find some food – roots, mushrooms, anything.”
    The illusory clothes Kai wore while in his boy shape were old-fashioned, as they had been when Tao first met him, but the old man was too distressed to notice that there was anything unusual about Tao’s companion.
    Tao laid the sleeping baby on the grass while he collected wood and lit a fire so that he could cook the remainder of his grain.
    Kai returned with wild roots and some sort of edible tree fungus. He also had a dead rabbit. If he’d been cooking it for himself, he would have flung it on the fire, fur and all, and eaten it half-raw. But he skinned the rabbit, skewered it on a stick and held it over the flames, turning it slowly.
    As they waited for the food to cook, the old man told them his story.
    “Our village was destroyed by a wild beast. Many people died.”
    “Is it on the other side of this mountain?” Tao asked. “Does it have a mud-brick temple and a little pagoda with one bell?”
    “Yes, that’s Shenchi, my village. I made that bell myself. I intended to make bells for all the corners of the pagoda roof, if ever I had spare metal.”
    “We passed through your village. We thought it had been attacked by nomads.”
    “No. It was a horrible beast that attacked us.”
    Tao glanced at Kai, remembering the roaring they had heard. “What sort of beast?”
    “It attacked at night. No one saw it clearly, but it sounded huge and made a terrible noise. It destroyed our homes for no reason.” The old man’s