Otherbound

by Corinne Duyvis

  Amara leaned away. No blood.

  “See? It’s fine. Look outside. Jorn …” Cilla smiled feebly despite the strain in her jaw.

  Amara’s own jaw clenched for different reasons. She knew what she’d see. Jorn, fighting the mages, risking his life for Cilla’s, using magic the spirits had never let Amara access. She understood Cilla’s gratitude and what Jorn’s dedication to the Alinean crown must mean to her. Cilla had nothing else left of her family.

  Amara also understood what Jorn’s dedication would mean to her. He couldn’t afford to have her blacking out while protecting the princess. She was a liability.

  She moved automatically as she thought, taking Cilla’s boot and widening the opening, then taking her toes to guide them back in. Cilla pulled her foot away and tried that same smile again. Tentative. It lit up her face regardless. Amara wished she didn’t notice those things.

  “You don’t have to,” Cilla said.

  “I do.” Amara kept her gestures direct. “Can you run?”

  Experimentally, Cilla leaned on her still-bare foot. Her eyebrows pulled together. “I doubt it. What I mean is, I’d appreciate it if you weren’t so—if you could act normally around me.”

  “This isn’t the time.” Amara shouldn’t talk to the princess like that. Ever. But surviving took priority. She stood and looked out the window. In the distance, a gust of wind spiraled around Jorn, then swept out and knocked down both mages. The Elig rolled over and clasped a pale, blood-smeared hand with the other mage. The air around them glimmered.

  Amara had meant to simply assess the situation but found herself drinking in the sight. The only time she could see magic was like this, when it was raw and fleeting. Once a mage used a spell to bond that magic to something physical, an object or a person, it became invisible to non-mages.

  And to Amara.

  It was said that spirits favored some people, and that made them mages; that the spirits favored some mages in particular, watching over their health without even making them pay the price of backlash. The thought of Amara being favored made her smile wryly. Not favored enough, apparently, if she couldn’t even detect other mages’ spells, let alone cast her own. All she could do was wait out her healing.

  Maybe she was simply doing magic wrong. It was hard to tell, when no one would explain how to do it right.

  Jorn turned to run toward the carecenter. Amara watched the glossy magic of the Elig mage’s shield, and his upheld arm, which even from this distance she could see was shaking with exertion. Spirits provided the raw energy. Mages were responsible for the rest.

  Amara’s knowledge of the process started and ended there. She wondered what it felt like.

  Cilla’s arm brushed past hers and snapped her from her thoughts. “Amara?”

  Amara made a questioning sound.

  “Do you hate me?” Cilla spoke with an oddly clear voice for such a loaded question.

  Amara shook her head automatically. “Of course not.” Jorn was coming up the stairs. Dull bricks muted his footsteps. They shouldn’t be talking about this now. Or ever.

  “You’ve saved my life so often. I owe you.”

  “May I speak honestly?” Amara’s signs came awkwardly. Cilla leaned on her shoulder as they moved away from the window and the display of magic. Cilla had put her boot back on but still walked slowly.

  “Yes! That’s what I’m trying to say.”

  Amara darted another glance outside but couldn’t see anything. “It’s not that simple. You’re the princess. You can’t owe me.”

  “I …”

  Cilla’s voice and Amara’s hands dropped the second Jorn came into sight. He didn’t even look tired. “You should’ve been gone by now.”

  Amara gestured at the way Cilla favored her foot; she couldn’t run like this. Did they still need to? Amara had no place asking those questions.

  Cilla, on the other hand— “Are we safe?”

  “No,” Jorn snapped, then checked himself. He smiled thinly. “Apologies, Princess. No. Dissolving the mage’s shield would have cost too much time. Others might be coming.” Only now did Amara notice the red stains spreading across his topscarf. Small. She’d expected worse. At least Jorn focused on Cilla, not Amara. He didn’t know about the blackouts. When he did find out—

  She couldn’t let that happen. If the blackouts were another ability the spirits had given her, she’d need to learn more, put a stop to them before she got Cilla—and herself—killed.

  “I think the mages are too weak to follow,” Jorn said. “Let’s find Maart and go.”

  olan had moved Amara’s body.

  He’d run.

  He buzzed with energy and felt it building into a headache at the back of his skull, but his pen practically flew across his notebook’s pages, and he couldn’t stop now. Amara’s magic was shifting. She’d gone from letting him witness her world from the backseat to offering him the wheel and gas pedal, and that meant—

  Nolan couldn’t begin to understand what that meant.

  Amara’s blackouts gave Nolan control.

  He didn’t realize he wasn’t alone until Dad stood right in front of him.

  “You look better.” English. That didn’t bode well. Nolan and Pat always spoke English together, but their parents stuck to Spanish around the house, or simple Nahuatl between Dad and Pat as practice. Dad saved English for his rare Talks, capital T. “That explains the noise.”

  Oh: the washer was banging on the bathroom tiles and whining high. Nolan slapped his notebook shut, though he wasn’t worried about Dad peeking. As much as Pat took after Dad, she hadn’t inherited his respect for privacy. “Sorry—”

  —and Cilla was still leaning on Amara’s shoulder as they trailed after Jorn—

  —Dad shoved open the curtains to let the evening sun roll in. Slow, wide beams caught dust swirling around the room. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “Your mother told me you saw her at the Walgreens. You’re trying to help out?”

  Nolan wanted to listen, but his mind was stuck on the word he’d just written down. Control. The ink burned through the pages of the book, right into his hands and head.

  “I. Yeah. I wanted to …” He gestured at abandoned, knocked-over piles of laundry. Some of his euphoria ebbed away. He’d meant to refold the messier stacks now that Amara’s world was calmer, but how long had it taken him to get even this far? Some help he was.

  “I figured. It’s a good thing.” Dad pulled up an old chair that mainly served as a mannequin for his business jacket. “An odd thing for a teenage boy, but a good thing.”

  Nolan found it hard to care about what a teenage boy was supposed to do. He spent half his life as a girl. As Amara, he’d done laundry a hundred times.

  “I’m glad you’re showing initiative. But if I had to choose, I wish you’d take the initiative to do homework or sneak out for a date. Wouldn’t you like that better than laundry?” Dad eyed a pair of Pat’s skinny jeans.

  Nolan took care not to shut his eyes for too long, but he couldn’t tune out Amara entirely. By now, Jorn had locked on to Maart’s anchor. Nolan tried to ignore that, replaying Dad’s words instead. Did he want those things? They sounded nice in the abstract, but it seemed safer to care about what he could actually accomplish. Writing in his notebooks. Swimming.

  Laundry.

  “Listen, when your mother gets home and sees this … she’ll feel touched. Then guilty.”

  “She’s working two jobs,” Nolan protested. “I’m the one who feels guilty.”

  “You shouldn’t, which is why she didn’t tell you. You need that medication, Nolan.”

  “I don’t! All it does is make me nauseous. I know Dr. Campbell said to give it a couple of months, but …” But no pills would ever work, was the truth. Every time, Nolan tried to refuse them.

  “We won’t give up,” Dad said sharply. “As long as you keep trying, we’ll keep trying.”

  And every time, his parents insisted. Nolan would take the pills for
a few months, deal with the side effects, and stop once people realized his seizures weren’t going away.

  “Can I keep trying while doing laundry?” Nolan wanted to smile, but it rarely worked when Dad paid him such close attention. He had this way of scrutinizing people, level and unflinching, that made Nolan’s smiles feel transparent.

  “Just know your mother will struggle with it.”

  Nolan averted his eyes. He’d meant to help. Not add to guilt Mom shouldn’t feel, anyway.

  “I should finish up some work. There was a system crash at the hospital that set us back a few days …” Dad waved it off. “But I have five minutes.” He looked over the bed—the collection of Nolan’s stump socks dotting the sheets, the crookedly folded tops. He reverted to Spanish. “You, uh, want a lesson in folding?”

  By the time Nolan finished folding and hanging the newly washed clothes, the buzz he’d felt over affecting Amara’s world had transformed into a full-on headache and the early stir of nausea. As he headed to his room, Pat called something to him.

  Nolan hopped back. Her door was ajar. He could just catch a glimpse of Pat’s reflection in the crescent-shaped mirror Grandma Pérez had given her on her eighth birthday, when she’d spent every waking moment reading about astronomy. She gave the mirror a wounded look, which included her eyebrows going comically high and her lower lip jutting out. “I can’t stop you,” she declared. “But, oh, it’s dangerous!”

  Apparently she hadn’t been calling to him, after all. Nolan shifted, allowing him to see more of her face. She wasn’t holding a phone to either ear. Her eyebrows shot up again. “It’s dangerous!” she repeated. Her eyes caught his in the mirror. She squeaked. In a single step, she yanked her door open. “Nole? Are you spying on me?”

  “Your door was open.”

  She plucked at her T-shirt’s neckline. “The AC’s acting up.”

  “Were you practicing for that school play?” He vaguely recalled it coming up at dinner.

  “What? No.” She shifted her weight and scoffed. Pat’s scoffs had as wide a range as Nolan’s smiles. At the bottom rung was Seriously? followed by I’m really too cool for this but, whatever, I’ll play along. Somewhere at the top sat This is the most important thing in the world, but OMG I’ll die if anyone knows. This scoff had seemed closest to that last one. He should talk to her about it, but his head hurt. He craved sleep. It’d make his parents happy—proper sleep meant less chance of seizures—and it’d let him keep track of Amara. She was following Jorn around the harbor now, keeping her head low and waiting for another blackout.

  He’d controlled her. The memory made a smile twitch at his lips, headache or no, but he curbed it. Watching Amara was the last thing he should do. The last thing he should want to do.

  He couldn’t get sucked back in. He’d ended up in a coma twice before.

  “What’s your role?” he made himself say.

  She sighed. “I’m this nurse solving a mystery. There’s singing. And I have to be vulnerable.”

  The disgust in her voice almost made him laugh. “Do you need help rehearsing? Or feedback?”

  He couldn’t help Mom without her feeling guilty, but maybe he could help Pat. Using Pat this way might not be fair, but the more he had going on in this world, the less he’d think about Amara’s.

  Pat looked confused. “Um. Are you sure you can?”

  “I’m feeling pretty good on these pills,” he lied.

  “If you say so, but … I need someone objective. You lie. You lie to make people feel better.”

  Nolan considered lying about that, too, but it wouldn’t be much use. “I’ll be honest. I swear.”

  Pat laughed. “All right. Nolan with opinions. This, I gotta see.”

  hey’d arrived on Teschel the night before. Another island. They hadn’t been to the mainland in weeks. This time Jorn hadn’t bothered with an inn. Instead, he’d set up camp in an unused granary across from a run-down farm. The storehouse was blocky and stained from age and weather and had long windows so filthy, they bordered on opaque. Pale trees—the very edge of a forest—pressed up against one side of the building, and abandoned fields stretched out on the others. Weeds sprouted upward, some tall enough to reach past Amara’s hips.

  Amara didn’t know what had happened for people to abandon the farm, but Jorn was right about one thing: no one would expect to find a princess here.

  Maart was inside, tending to Cilla and preparing their lunch. Amara ought to help. Instead, she sat crouched by the entrance. The low sun cast everything in the pink shade of morning, from the dew on the grass to Jorn’s shape as he crossed the fields. After every determined step, he paused, leaned in to brush his hands over the ground, then took his next step. He kept his head down. A distant whine accompanied his spell.

  Shimmery air—as if from heat—trailed behind him, coiling around too-tall weeds and dipping with every dried-out ditch he crossed. Slowly, the tail end of the trail sank and faded as it settled into blades of grass and thick-leaved autumn flowers.

  It shouldn’t fade, Amara thought. I’m a mage. I should still be able to see a simple boundary spell.

  Amara concentrated, squinted, willed with all her might: nothing.

  Frustrated, she glanced back at Maart, who was muttering from inside the granary. He’d been rinsing their kommer leaves in a bowl of cold water, but right now, the water frothed and bubbled.

  Backlash. Harmless backlash, maybe, but it added up. That was exactly why she sat in this crouch whenever Jorn cast his detection wards. With her legs getting stiffer by the second, she’d draw a crude temple in the cold-as-water dirt before her, place her hand in its center, and ask the spirits to forgive Jorn for demanding so much of them.

  This time, instead of a temple, she drew three lines. Three blackouts. They had one thing in common. She’d been in danger each time. She might’ve called on the spirits without realizing it, like a defense mechanism, instinct.

  But why? Danger was exactly when she couldn’t afford to black out.

  Movement. Jorn was pulling away from his spell. Quickly, Amara rubbed out the lines in the dirt and backed into the storehouse, but Jorn wasn’t coming their way. He crossed the field toward the forest’s edge. He’d already completed the part of the spell that extended into the forest, though, and he never left without telling them.

  Right before he disappeared behind an abandoned shed, Amara saw a piece of glass flicker in his hand, and her eyes widened. Mages used enchanted glass or mirrors to communicate. She knew Jorn and Cilla had people working alongside them. That was how they’d recruited Maart when the servant before him died; that was how Jorn kept their funds up. Amara had never found out who, and she’d stopped asking long ago. If those people included mages, though … mages on their side, without Jorn’s temper, who she might be able to ask about the blackouts …

  Following Jorn was stupid under normal circumstances. Jorn’s mood lately made it even stupider.

  Amara did it, anyway.

  “I’ll get firewood,” she signed to Maart, and ran lightly across the field. A heron stood watch on the shed’s roof, overseeing a ditch below. She slowed the closer she came. She heard Jorn’s voice but couldn’t make out the words. She heard another voice, too. Male.

  She pressed herself against the shed and sneaked around one corner, then peeked past the next. Jorn looked as if he was praying, head bowed, one hand to the ground. His fingers rested on the edges of the glass, which flickered in the watery morning light.

  A breeze carried his voice with it. “… I can track Cilla if she runs. No, I’m worried about Amara. I can handle her, but these blackouts …”

  The wind brushed stray nettles past Amara’s hand, and she flinched at the sting but stayed dead silent. Her heart crept upward and beat in her throat. Jorn knew about the blackouts? She needed to hear every word of this.

  “Blackouts? Plural?” The other man swore.

  “According to Cilla, yes. She told me out of concern. But
it’s not just that the blackouts might put Cilla in danger—”

  “Yeah. It’s about what happens if they get worse.” Amara knew the voice but couldn’t place it. She inched back around the corner. Nettles rustled by her ankles. “Whoever’s causing this will catch on and try again. Keep an eye on Amara. If it continues, bring her to Drudo palace. In the meantime, I’ll send one of us to help. I’d go myself, but I don’t know how much Amara remembers. Bracha’s new, though. Those kids won’t recognize her. Maessen is a ghost town, anyway—they don’t need her there.”

  Maessen—a Dit-founded mainland city, Amara knew, on the north side of the Dunelands. The servant before Maart had died near there. Jorn then took Maart from the Maessen palace, told him his duty was to the crown, not the ministers, and proceeded to forget all about the servant who’d come before.

  Up until a minute ago, that was all Amara had known of Maessen.

  Now, she remembered another detail: the name of Maessen’s new minister, Bracha.

  One of us, the man had said, and I don’t know how much Amara remembers, and Drudo palace, and—acutely—Amara realized why she knew his voice.

  Jorn hesitated. “Let’s wait. I’ll handle it for now.”

  “But if—”

  “Better than recognizing Bracha.” Jorn’s sudden rise in volume startled a nearby hare. It bolted to safety, diving into the thicket at the edge of the field. “I need to go. How’s Ammelore?”

  “She’s a big city—she’s doing fine without you,” the man said. “Hey, I’ll contact the harbor and tell them you need more silver. Keep me informed—and in the names of the dead, stay away from the pubs. We don’t need to clean up more of your messes.”

  Amara turned, sidestepping nettles and twigs that might give her away. Behind her, she heard the crack of glass.