Maray swallowed whatever half-coherent comment was sitting on her tongue while, beside her, Heck shifted, and his sword extended toward Rhia’s chest, all ready to cut through that half-mending, half-decaying flesh under her dusty and grimy dress.
“When I fell ill and Laura returned to help, he found out. He found out and followed her when she met with your father, and he found out about you, Maray. And he came to me with an offer. He promised to leave me and Laura alone if I made good on my promise and gave him your hand instead of Laura’s. He knew you had magic, like me, and I saw a chance to save my daughter, once more.”
Maray didn’t know what to feel. Her emotions were coiling like a snake, withdrawing into the darkest parts of her mind. Rhia had traded her life for her mother’s. Were there any lines Rhia wasn’t willing to cross?
“But let me guess,” Heck asked, taking Maray’s words right out of her mouth. “He tricked you again.”
Rhia nodded remorsefully. Was it possible that the Queen was actually regretting all the bad choices she had made?
“He not only found out, but he was after her from the moment he sniffed her in Allinan.”
Heck’s sword didn’t leave its position at Rhia’s chest. And to Maray’s surprise, Goran and Pete stepped right up and added their weapons, points forward, ready to hurt their Queen. When Maray glanced sideways at them, Goran gave her a nod that said as much as they would never let anyone hurt her. Not even the Queen of Allinan.
“He had been crossing back and forth between the borders, searching for you, Maray. He was what Jemin Boyd and you, Hendrick Brendal, had been after. He had been waiting for Maray’s return, and his plan was to snatch her right out from under my nose before I could use her blood to become strong enough to defeat him.” She turned a bit more so she was facing Maray completely. “I wouldn’t think of hurting my family if I had another choice. Your blood is the only thing strong enough to defeat him and make sure he’ll never bring back the Shalleyn into Allinan.” Her voice changed, and it was almost like a plea. “I didn’t poison Gerwin, believe me. I didn’t.”
“Then who did?” Laura asked. Her body was stiff and her head held high. She was struggling, fighting the effects her mother’s words had on her, and she was looking less like the mother she grew up with and more like an emotionless princess by the second. “Mother, who poisoned the man I thought married me for love, and in reality betrayed me even more than you did?” The coldness in her words physically hurt Maray. It smashed, right into her face, the fact that her family had been even more of a lie than she had dared to believe until now.
“He must have found a way to do it.” Rhia pushed all swords away with a slow movement of her fingers, unbothered by the contact between the steel blades and her skin. Heck cursed beside Maray. “He has tried to come after you before, you know. He attacked in the courtyard on your first morning in Allinan.”
Maray remembered vividly the assault of a red-eyed Yutu. Was Gan Krai that warlock, that shifter with crimson eyes who had stood in the crowd at her public introduction? And if he was… It hadn’t dawned on her until now that they had been fighting the wrong fights. That the position Gan Krai had put Rhia in—even if it had been by her own bad choices and her reckless hunger for power—had left her no choice but to find ways to protect everyone in Allinan. Sacrifice one for the many—Laura for immortality, and Maray so she could eventually beat Gan Krai.
“Jemin is out there hunting Gan Krai.” Her statement wasn’t directed toward Rhia or her mother. Her eyes locked on Heck’s as they both came to the same realization. Horror mirrored in Heck’s gaze, eyes turning into dark chocolate under the shadows of acknowledgment of what danger his friend was in.
“If he is, you can’t help him,” Rhia said coldly, and for once, Maray believed her without a doubt.
Maray’s heart turned into a lazy beating lump of flesh inside her chest, and all of her defiance, all of her attempts to comprehend, suddenly didn’t matter. Everything was true—and not true at the same time. Rhia was evil, but she had also seen her hands forced to do the beastly things she’d done. And now, Jemin was in danger because of her—probably dead by now. And then, if they were trusting Rhia’s story, she realized Gan Krai might have already negotiated with Jemin and put him up for an impossible bargain.
“Go, Hendrick,” Scott said curtly, reading Heck’s face from his position beside Laura. “Find Jemin and the others.”
Heck hesitated, eyes searching Maray’s, and she saw it then that there was something more there than the need to protect the Princess of Allinan, his friend. The same fear to leave her alone as Jemin showed whenever he left the room was written all over his features, and Maray’s heart felt a small stab at the meaning of it.
“Find him,” she said, swallowing whatever guilt was building inside her stomach. “Bring him home safe.” She waited for Heck to turn on his heels before she shed the first tear in a long time. One single tear, for her family, the boy she loved and might have lost, and the boy she might have just sent to his certain death in the hope of returning Jemin.
Jemin
Jemin woke up with a headache. It wasn’t the sharp stinging that occurred every now and then when the weather was changing, but a dull type of hammering against his skull from the inside.
In his mind, he could still see Gan Krai’s crimson eyes as they eagerly waited for the frozen lake to swallow him. His bones felt still cold from his dip in the icy water. But Gan Krai? It couldn’t be, could it? The intensity of the pounding in his head increased with the attempt at a clear thought, and with a groan, Jemin rolled over, and his nose painfully hit the ground.
An explosion of smells erupted inside his nostrils, earth, water, trees, snow, meat, sweat, soup, and a horse-like scent that reminded him of the stables behind the palace. But what was dominating all of the other odors was the woody tinge in the air. Jemin pushed his hands against the floor and fell face-first as he realized his hands were in a different place than normal. His entire body was different. His shoulders more narrow, his legs shorter, his hips curved in a way that made it impossible to stand up straight. And then, there was the thing with the fur—as he glanced down his side, he saw it there, caramel-colored fur. With a shriek, he remembered what Neelis had told him before he had passed out from exhaustion. He was a Yutu. A shifter. Just as Neelis and Seri. Like Langley had been. He was no longer human.
His cry came out as a howl, followed by the sound of his claws scrambling over the wooden floorboards.
“Jem?” Seri’s voice hit his ears, almost tearing apart his eardrums.
Jemin shrank away, slithering along the floor on all fours, unable to get to his feet—paws.
“Jem?” Seri repeated in a whisper. “Are you okay?”
Jemin lifted his head. It was oddly heavy. Different from his light, human head, but also strangely strong and surprisingly flexible.
“Give yourself some time to adjust, Jem,” Seri suggested, and Jemin found her sitting there in the corner at the table. This was Pen’s cabin. The smells were the wooden walls and the forest enclosing the small clearing outside.
Seri was a human outline overlaid with aromas… Human, salt, sweat, something floral. As she fanned out her hair in a movement that Jemin identified as a gesture of insecurity, a wave of warmth, of pulsing blood, and a smell of Yutu—a smell Jemin had never before noticed—hit his virgin Yutu-nose.
Jemin wanted to speak. It was there on his long, wet tongue, but it wouldn’t obey. All that came out was a yelp that sounded a lot like a helpless puppy in his sensitive ears. He felt them twitch on the top of his head, a sensation that made him want to turn and twist them as much as he could, to find out what information every angle was going to provide.
“Jem,” Seri called for his attention, and he rolled over to his feet. This time, it worked. He was prepared to land on paws rather than boots, and as he stood, the cabin felt suddenly undersized. His tail hit something behind him—a chair maybe—and he flippe
d around to check, smashing into the small table by the fireplace.
“Calm down,” Seri said and held up her hand, palm down, the way someone would do to get a dog to sit. When Jemin shook his head, again he almost lost balance, stumbling to one side, and got a shriek in response.
Before him, Pen, the Gurnyak, was stomping his little hooves, nostrils flaring as if he was ready to attack either by bite or by toxic smoke, but his horse-lips curled as if he was laughing out loud.
“Pen, leave him alone,” Seri ordered, sounding irritated. “He needs to learn to stand up straight before you can play with him.”
When Jemin turned back to Seri, slowly this time so he wouldn’t destroy the cabin, he found the girl standing right in front of him. His instincts kicked in, and his jaw snapped for the leg closest to him, ready to tear it from her.
“Jem!” Seri yelled, and her voice was profound with authority in a way that he had never acknowledged in Scott’s commands. His head dropped, weighed down by a sensation he couldn’t place. Was this a Yutu thing? Pack hierarchy? Just because she was the pack-leader’s daughter…
Jemin wanted to ask Seri what was going on but, again, no words, no voice—at least not the voice he remembered, the voice that could hiss curses and yell at his opponents. A howl was all he could work up, followed by a growl which sounded familiar and yet strangely disturbing in his new ears.
Before him, Seri had bent down to bring her head level with his. “This must be scary for you, Jem,” she noticed correctly, “but it will pass. You’ll be able to transform back soon.” A smile decorated her lips, and Jemin saw her face as if it were for the first time. Her eyes, dark orbs under slit lids, her lashes, black frames, throwing shadows onto her cheeks, the black silk of her hair as it fell to her chin on both sides. And he could see more than that. Every pore, every droplet of sweat, every single hair of her arched brows. It was as if he was eying a painting from too close, and the details made him lose the overall impression.
Ready to gain some distance so he could think clearly, he curled his entire body and sat on his hind legs, uncomfortably aware that Seri was staring.
“Very good,” Seri praised.
Behind him, a soft screech informed him of Pen’s immediate proximity, and he felt his muscles tighten.
“It’s alright, Jem. Pen is here to make sure no one disturbs us while you are going through your first transformation.” She gave a reassuring smile. “And Dad will be back with clothes for you—and weapons.”
It sounded so easy. Transformation. Jemin glanced at his caramel fur again and realized that he wasn’t only a shifter—he was also naked—besides the coat that resembled his human locks but much shorter and less curly.
“Don’t worry about that,” Seri said as if she was reading Jemin’s mind. “You’ll learn to keep your clothes while transforming. They simply will disappear with your human appearance, and you won’t have any uncomfortable surprises when you shift back.”
Jemin remembered how they had left the small restaurant or coffee place in the south of the capital. He had put on his clothes after he had finished the soup, and after a walk that had seemed like it was never going to end, Neelis and Seri had helped him through the portal, and then they had strode back to the forest. Jemin didn’t remember them informing him where they were taking him, but he had wanted to go straight back to the palace to tell Maray and Laura about Gan Krai. The rest was a blur of evergreens, snow-mud, and sounds.
“Are you with me, Jem?” Seri asked in the background, and Jemin found himself able to nod. His head went down and up again in a way that made the rest of the room blur, and he needed another second to stabilize himself so he wouldn’t crash back down to the floor.
“Good. You need to focus. I’m here to help you get through this.”
Jemin wanted to throw at her that that was easy to say, but to do so, he would have had to know how to get back his human shape so he could confront her with all of the questions, all the thoughts that were rioting through his mind.
“I can tell you are scared. Transforming is scary. Especially that first time.” Seri smiled and sat on the floor before him so he had to lower his head to be level with her. He let himself drop to the ground and marveled at the sounds of his paws on the floorboards and the pounding of his Yutu-heart. “Let me help you get back into your human shape so you can actually tell me how you are.”
The way Seri was speaking was different from all of the times Jemin had heard her before. There was no sarcasm, no darkness, no mocking edge to her voice. Just Seri concerned about him and offering help.
Seri seemed to take his silent attention as a sign he was ready to listen and rested her back against the wall beside her. Pen trotted to her side and curled up, nose sitting on her knee, peering at Jemin through beetle black eyes.
“The first thing you need to understand is that you are no longer dependent on your bracelet.”
Jemin glanced at his paws and found that there was no sign of his clothes or his life-saving, magic bracelet, which had become as much a part of him as the weapon he carried every day—and which was now lost to the depths of the lake that had nearly drowned him.
Pen blew a gust of breath through his nose as he watched Jemin’s twitching head, and Jemin returned his attention to Seri.
“Magic is now running through your veins. You might not feel it yet, but it is. Your wounds heal by themselves. You can jump between worlds without the inconvenience of getting stuck like normal warlocks whose magic works only in this plane.”
Jemin listened attentively. Those were definite advantages. At least his head told him that, and he seemed to be enough himself to be able to think rationally even when there were instincts and reflexes guiding his reactions at the moment.
“That magic helps you shift back and forth between your human self and your Yutu-self,” Seri explained and waited for a sign Jemin had understood.
With a sigh, which sounded more like a yelp, Jemin retreated into his mind and focused on his body. Where was this magic Seri had just spoken about? Was he supposed to see it flicker under his fur? And even if he should theoretically be able to feel it, everything felt different in his body. He wouldn’t have been able to differentiate what was normal for a Yutu from what was magical.
With what he thought was a helpless look, he gazed up at Seri, whose eyebrows rose expectantly.
“You are feeling it, aren’t you?” she assumed. “I knew it. I knew you were a natural. You are a natural at everything else.”
In his mind, Jemin skipped back to the sword fight training and dexterity training they had done together, but something in her eyes let him guess that wasn’t the only thing she was referring to. He imagined himself blushing, how his furry head became crimson, and then he thought of Maray—and how much he wanted to be ‘a natural’ with her.
“Focus, Jem,” Seri called, demanding his attention. She slid closer on her knees and laid her hand on his neck, pulling his head toward her, her eyes inquisitive. “Am I wrong?”
Jemin desperately wanted to say she was, but the lack of a human voice made it impossible. He gave a quick nod with his snout, cautious not to accidentally hit Seri’s face with it, and continued to search for that magic in his veins she had been speaking about—
It began with a tickle in his back, right behind where Seri’s fingers were curling into his fur, and gradually spread in slow waves like a lazy tide. A sense of excitement came with it, the way he remembered drawing his sword in preparation for a fight, or how he pushed the soles of his feet into the ground when he leaped over obstacles. It was a sense of power and at the same time of being at its mercy. As the line between both feelings swam, Jemin felt something new: there was a void where he was sitting—a void and not a void at the same time. There was a here and there was a there. Not the way he was accustomed to with his bracelet. There was Allinan, and there was the other world, both coexisting in one place where he was. It ran through him like a storm of realization.
He had magic. He was a Yutu, and that meant he could travel the borders without any outside help. And one moment he was here, and the next, he was there—
Vienna wasn’t the same as in his memory, he discovered, when his eyes were blinded by the headlights of a vehicle—not the Krai salt fueled ones that gently roamed Allinan, but the stinking, metal ones that he had always wondered how people could find visually pleasing. As he tried to see, the smell of exhaust and winter hit his sensitive Yutu nose. He couldn’t remember if he had ever been in this exact spot in this dimension—Pen’s cabin but in the world where Maray grew up…
While he stood, musing, absorbed by the details of his perception, a honk hit his ears from behind the headlights, calling his attention to the danger ahead. With surprising precision, he jumped off the concrete, into the shelter of a doorway close by, ignoring the uncomfortable sensation in his paws. While he was used to Viennese streets under the soles of his shoes on his human feet, to the skin of his paws, the street felt like an array of icy, dull blades. He suppressed a wince as he landed in the entrance of one of the ornately facaded houses, and while he pressed himself against the carved wood behind him, he noticed the orange patterns of streetlights and the sound of more beeps behind the car which had almost run him over.
For a moment, he stood there, petrified and sidetracked by the wind that was ruffling his fur as it blew around the corners with a singing howl, but when the sound of footsteps drew closer from behind the door, his flight-instinct set in, and he couldn’t control it. Jemin first leaped to the side, the starless night around him blurring at the speed of his movements, and then he ran. He didn’t look to either side but continued as if Gan Krai himself was after him. He ignored honks and shouts and hoped that whoever noticed him as he passed by, fast as lightning, wouldn’t see more than a dog. He ran, panic beating him forward, and he sprinted by the walls to the palace gardens, the walls he knew existed in both worlds.
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