Otherbound

by Corinne Duyvis

  The second mage was a Dit woman, just as familiar. The last time Amara had seen her, the mage had been side by side with the knifewielder. Amara’s cheek ached with a long-ago memory: encountering the hired mages for the first time, that blade hooking into her cheek—

  Focus. Amara double-checked the entrance to make sure the knifewielder wasn’t with them.

  She wasn’t. Just the two mages. It should’ve calmed Amara, should’ve made her grab Cilla and flee.

  But what Amara wanted—needed—was to burst through the crowd and kill these mages, knifewielder or not. Killing a mage ended their spells. A curse like Cilla’s would’ve required tens of mages working in unison, but in the end, a single person channeled the magic. A single mage responsible. It could’ve been a minister. Could’ve been someone they hired. Could’ve been one of these two.

  Without the curse, Cilla would still need to stay on the run, but life would be infinitely easier. The mages wouldn’t be able to track her. She wouldn’t need endless drugs to stop her monthly bleeds. She wouldn’t have to worry about stray paper cuts.

  She wouldn’t need Amara to get hurt in her stead.

  Amara wanted the mages dead. These two. The knife-wielder. All of them.

  But that was Jorn’s task. She reined herself in, focused on her own. Were the mages tracking Cilla? She checked the lamps suspended to the walls and the beers in people’s hands for any immediate reactions to nearby magic. Nothing.

  Magic backlash wasn’t always visible, though.

  They needed another exit. Amara nodded at the door to the dumphouse and didn’t wait for approval to pull Cilla along toward it. She’d grown up protecting Cilla, and Jorn let her do that however she saw fit.

  The dumphouse’s shit-stink grew thick as they neared it, streaking past rented rooms. Amara chanced a look over her shoulder. Someone waltzed into the dark behind them. Too big to be the woman, too dark to be the man. Too drunk to be either of them. Good, so—

  —Amara barely corrected her stumble. Cilla’s grip kept her upright. Her hand squeezed Amara’s in reassurance, or a wordless Careful!

  What had she stumbled on? No time to check. The dumphouse door stood ajar. They barged inside. Shuddering gas lamps lit the hut, illuminating men leaning into walls to piss into ditches, two other shapes sitting in crouches. Amara ran straight through, Cilla’s hand safe in hers.

  “You girls in a hurry?” a woman shouted, her voice thick with alcohol. Too loud. If the mages heard, it’d point them right at Cilla.

  Amara reached the doors on the other side of the dumphouse, the ones that led to the street, and stood aside so the light hit the lock. Often, inns locked their dumphouses, unlocking them only for back-street cleaning. No one wanted to drag shit through the inn, and no one wanted a dumphouse on a respectable street front.

  Amara really missed the mainland’s sewage system. For all you could say about the ministers, they’d still come up with a decent invention or two.

  If the doors were locked, she could manage the mechanism with her knife, but if she was lucky she could—

  —Amara’s hand rested loosely around the handles. She blinked a couple of times fast. Cilla stood awfully close all of a sudden, close enough for Amara to smell the wine on her breath despite the dumphouse stink.

  There’d been a full footlength between them a second ago. What’d happened?

  “What is it?” Cilla asked, tension visible in the hunch of her shoulders, the press of her lips, the balls of her hands. Both hands. Just a moment ago, Amara had been gripping Cilla’s fingers tightly. Why hadn’t Amara noticed them slip away? She should’ve noticed.

  Shaking her head to clear the fuzz, she pressed the handles together. The doors opened wide, fresh air and light bursting in. Amara shielded her eyes. The inn was all low ceilings, black wood, shimmering gaslight, and flickering fire pits. She’d almost forgotten it was daytime.

  Amara checked behind her. A woman stumbled in and hunkered by the door. Another two shapes approached. Their steady, sober gait told Amara enough.

  This time, Amara probably did grab Cilla’s arm too tightly. They turned north and ran.

  olan had separated the whites and darks just like he’d always seen Mom do, keeping the patterns he wasn’t sure about to one side, and tossed the whites into the washing machine. While that ran, he’d pulled up yesterday’s laundry from the clothesline in the stairwell. Still moist. That couldn’t hurt, could it?

  He sat on his parents’ bed—better AC in this room—and tried to fold carefully, like Mom, but his movements came anxious and fast, resulting in uneven folds and sleeves that stuck out the wrong way. The faster Nolan moved, maybe the faster Amara would run through the inn, too. The faster she’d be safe.

  Downstairs, Dad talked on the phone—

  —Amara disappeared. From one moment to the next, she was gone, and—

  —Nolan grasped an undershirt tightly. This was the second time Amara had blacked out in the space of a few minutes. First in the hallway, now here, by the outhouse doors—

  —Nolan always got more of Amara’s thoughts the longer he stayed, until he forgot there was a Nolan at all. But even when he was there for just a blink, kept his eyes shut for under half a second, he sensed her.

  Not now.

  Nolan still saw the outhouse doors through her eyes, still felt the chilly, rusted metal of the door handles. Still smelled the stench. Still saw Cilla moving closer. Her hand fell from Amara’s, leaving behind cool air on clammy skin.

  But Amara wasn’t there. Her mind was empty.

  Move! he wanted to shout.

  For three full seconds, she stayed at the doors, thoughts beyond reach. Then, as quickly as she’d left, she blossomed back into the vacuum at the edge of Nolan’s mind.

  Amara blinked rapidly, looked at Cilla, then at her now-empty hand. Her confusion didn’t last long. She threw open the doors, and they fled, cold blasting inside—

  —Nolan stared at the crumpled undershirt in his hands. Shakily, he spread it on the sheets. He could do nothing for Amara, anyway. He watched. He dealt. End of story.

  Fold the sides in. Fold it double. He pressed the fabric flat, hoping to get out the wrinkles as he watched flashes of Amara running through the streets, dragging Cilla along, their boots slamming into painted cobblestones—

  —we can go inland, Amara was thinking, lose them in the streets like Jorn always says, hope he finds us soon. But if she led the mages west, toward the dunes, Cilla could flee into the local carecenter. A carecenter meant healing spells. The mages might lose track of Cilla’s curse in all the magic swarming around the area.

  Amara tugged at Cilla’s arm. A moment later, they dove into an alley on their left, narrow enough that no one had bothered painting the pavement. Laundry hung from beams suspended between high-up windows. Sheets flapped in the wind and blocked the afternoon sun, choking the alley in darkness, as if night had fallen in the space of a second.

  They hadn’t ducked into the alley in time. Pain flared in Amara’s shoulder—

  —Nolan jerked back. He reached for his shoulder, intact under his shirt. The pain faded into a memory. It wouldn’t stay that way. Already, his eyes were dry enough to sting.

  He dropped flat on the bed until he could reach his backpack, fishing out the notebook and pen he carried with him no matter where he went. He blinked. Kept in a scream. But he had to see what happened—

  —Amara ran, clutching her shoulder. Blood seeped through her topscarf and into the gaps between her fingers. The arrow had only scraped her. Could’ve been worse. If it’d hit her spine, she’d be down for the count. But the cut was deep. It’d take at least twenty seconds to heal—twenty more than she could afford, especially with no other alleys in sight, nowhere to escape.

  “Get—in front—” Amara tried to sign, hoping Cilla could see her hands. Cilla didn’t run fast enough. She lagged behind. Amara needed to shield her in case the mages let loose another arrow.

  N
ormally, they’d simply fire raw magic they drew from the spirits, as the ministers had when they took over Cilla’s palace all those years ago. These mages couldn’t afford to. You didn’t enchant something—or someone—twice. Ever. That was why Jorn deactivated his boundary detection spell whenever they needed to cross it—it might interact with Cilla’s curse or Amara’s healing.

  Sometimes, mixed magic flared tenfold. A single bolt could destroy the whole street. Other times, spells canceled each other out. Hitting Cilla with a bolt could mean the mages sabotaged their own curse and the bolt fizzled into nothing before even breaking her skin.

  The wind slapped the laundry overhead into brick walls. Not far ahead, a girl Amara’s age reached out the window to adjust her clothes. She shouted something in a language Amara didn’t recognize. Before that, Amara hadn’t even noticed the silence. The alley was locked away from the world. Just the wind and too-shallow breaths and endless footslams that reverberated throughout her body.

  The carecenter was another minute away. Exhaustion in her legs and lungs joined the pain in her shoulder, which bored deep and sharp and hot, even as she felt her skin stitching up—

  —Nolan favored his shoulder without thinking as he wrote. About the news sheet. Amara’s resolve to keep reading. Jorn’s drinking. Cilla in the niche, the mages in the doorway. His handwriting turned crooked. He checked his shoulder again, knowing he wouldn’t find anything.

  Breathe. In, out. He was fine. Amara’s pain was not his. Still, her exhaustion seeped into him, weighing heavier with each blink. He focused on keeping his writing legible, and took his pen off the paper whenever he closed his eyes, wanting to avoid ink blotches. That was a good thing—

  —because when the next arrow hit, it wasn’t Amara’s shoulder, and it wasn’t a scrape. It hit her low, between pelvis and spine. The arrow didn’t feel sharp. It felt blunt, like a punch. Amara’s legs gave out. She went flying to the pavement, shredding her palms on the stones. She gave it a second, two seconds, three, unable to do anything but lie there and wheeze. The world shrank to that spot in her back.

  Get up! Nolan wanted to scream. Get up! Get up!

  The mages were coming closer. Nolan heard their footsteps and saw Cilla’s boots scrape to a halt and turn to Amara, limp on the stones. Blood trickled down her back, and for one bewildering moment, Amara mistook the laundry flapping overhead for birds, great big herons bearing down on her, a fish splashing on dry land. She even heard squawking, not far off now.

  No, not herons. Seagulls. They were close to the dunes.

  With a shaky hand, Amara reached back for the arrow. She pulled, swallowed a scream, and let the arrow clatter to the stones. The sound was light. Harmless. Something that made a sound so harmless shouldn’t be able to hurt so much. She pushed herself up, and in the corner of Amara’s eye, Nolan saw the shapes of the mages approaching and people pulling in their laundry and shutting their windows.

  Then—Amara disappeared. For the third time, blackness swept over her, pulling her out of reach. Her body thumped back to the ground, lifeless—

  —Nolan’s eyes shot open. He looked around in a daze, at the glow coming in through thick curtains, at stacks of laundry surrounding him in blacks and browns, at the old-school TV set bolted to the wall. Through the wall came the muffled rattle of the washing machine.

  Amara had a theory about how she could die: hit fast, hit hard. The mages following her through that alley would be eager to oblige. Taking out Amara would mean taking out the princess’s last defense.

  And then? Maybe whatever magic of Amara’s that pulled Nolan into her world would disappear. He’d live out his life in his own world and his own body, a concept he could barely grasp.

  Or he’d die, too. Nolan’s life was secondary to Amara’s. That much he’d always known. He was the hanger-on, the badly made copy, the hazy mirror image in this alter-ego life they led together. Maybe whatever connection Amara had forged with him was strong enough that he’d experience her death along with her pain.

  He couldn’t stop it, either way. And either way, Amara would die. On cold, unpainted cobblestones with fingernails that hadn’t grown back all the way.

  He hated her. Amara had taken his life and locked it into hers, and he hated her more than anything in the world for that. But he didn’t want her to die. Nolan closed his eyes—

  —and felt the wound healing, despite Amara’s absence. If she’d just come back as she had before, if her mind was just here, she’d be running again in seconds. It’d hurt, but she’d have no choice. They’d been in worse situations, and—all she needed to do was come back like before, crawl upright and run, and—

  Her arms convulsed as if a pulse went through them.

  “Come on!” Fear made Cilla’s voice crack. She grabbed Amara’s hands to pull her up, but Amara’s mind was still absent. Nolan had never felt her mind this far gone, not even when she slept. Run, he pleaded. Run.

  Amara’s hands tightened around Cilla’s. She let herself be pulled onto unsteady feet, then away, in a stumble that turned into a run. An arrow slashed past her ear.

  Amara moved, yes, but where were her thoughts?

  The hospital still lay—what?—half a minute off? Nolan needed to know how far behind the mages were and if Amara and Cilla had any chance of making it. Amara’s head turned. Enough to catch a glimpse of the Elig mage rearming himself, the Dit mage still running. Nolan looked back in front of him, at Cilla dashing around a corner—

  He looked back in front of him. He. He.

  He exploded into a sprint, but his legs moved on autopilot. He clenched his hands—Amara’s hands—and guided her eyes, and opened her mouth, and pursed her lips. His breath—Amara’s breath?—came in too-short spurts.

  He was doing this. These movements couldn’t be a coincidence. Couldn’t be. “Nolan,” he tried to say with unfamiliar lips. The n’s were lost, and so was the l, his name unrecognizable except to him. Owwa, it sounded like. But it was close enough.

  “What?” Cilla shouted. The wind turned her voice frail.

  Nolan was steering Amara’s body. He could—he was really doing this—

  mara lay in the alleyway, the clatter of the arrow still echoing—

  —then she was running. Stumbling. The alley no longer choked her, the world having opened back up. Storefronts and pubs lined one side. On the other, dunes blocked any view of the ocean but not its salt on the air. She crashed to the ground before she could take in the image properly. Her palms scraped open, just like—just like a moment ago, she wanted to think, but more than a moment had passed. She’d blacked out again.

  The mages couldn’t be far behind. She had to keep moving. She couldn’t let whatever was happening cost Cilla’s life, but—how had she been able to get here while blacked out?

  Amara scrambled to her feet. She’d almost finished healing, but that didn’t stop her lungs from burning or her mouth from tasting of metal. Cilla was still running in that way she did, at once precise and raw, unpracticed. Cilla looked over her shoulder. The wind tugged at her chin-length hair.

  All right. Focus on Cilla. Focus on the stinging of her own healing palms. On the now. Everything else came later.

  “Into the carecenter.” Amara signed as broadly as she could. Servant signs weren’t suited to speaking across distances. “I’ll delay them.”

  Cilla looked as if she’d object but whipped her head back anyway.

  Another arrow flew. Amara ducked instinctively into its path. The arrow clipped her arm, and she hissed, slapping her palm against the cut. Sweat pasted her hair to her face, smoky strands obscuring her vision.

  She couldn’t afford another blackout, but right now, she couldn’t prevent one, either. What she could do was slow down the mages. She had her knife and one advantage: not worrying about getting hurt. She’d go for the Elig mage first. Wrestle away the bow.

  Then, on her right, blocky shoulders came into view, thick black curls, things she recognized in a he
artbeat. “Keep going!” Jorn snapped, and faced the mages. “Find her!”

  Amara ran before fully processing his order. Jorn told her to run. So she ran.

  Up ahead, Cilla was sprinting up the carecenter steps. Once under the archway she went left, and Amara followed. The sting in her arm had already faded. Up two steps. Two more. She didn’t like having Cilla out of her sight like this. At least no one would stop them: island carecenters were poorly staffed, simply places for the sick and injured to gather as they waited for volunteer doctors or the mages on duty to stop by—and for those already enchanted to avoid any magic that’d interact with their healing spells. Mages weren’t supposed to cast spells out in the open that might affect passersby. Not all mages cared.

  Amara found Cilla rubbing her ankle in the second-floor hall, by a tall window overlooking the boardwalk. “Jorn is holding them off,” Cilla said, breathing a sigh of relief.

  “We still need to go.” Amara’s hands were urgent. That window made them too visible. Something else worried her more, though. “Your ankle?” She jogged past patient rooms to close the distance between them. A girl’s sticky coughs leaked out through hardwood doors.

  “I twisted it going up the stairs,” Cilla said. “It’s fine. It’s all internal.”

  Amara crouched and loosened the tie that bound Cilla’s boot and removed it gently, prompting a stifled grunt of pain. She needed to be sure, though.

  Cilla’s skin was the near-black of soaked bark, which made contusions hard to see. Blood stood out better. She scanned the back of Cilla’s ankle and the warm curve of her calf, and ignored the jump of her own heart. She rarely came this close to the princess.

  She ignored the coarse hairs and the imprints from Cilla’s winterwear, too, and the stink of sweat-drenched horse-fuzz that drifted from the boot lying next to her. Cilla had to wear her boots all hours of the day, taking them off only to sleep. Otherwise, her toes might stub or her toenails might tear. Splinters, rocks, or grass might cut her open. Bugs could sting her too easily. Cilla’s winterwear was extra thick, too, and they’d sewn pads to the knees, and when the weather chilled further, she wore long Jélis-made gloves.