“I thought you were against the ministers.”
“I loathe them. Your people did a far better job. That doesn’t mean I’m after trouble.”
“You have to instruct her.” Cilla stepped forward to underscore her words.
An eyebrow rose, more curious than anything. “And why’s that?”
“You said my people did a—ah!” Her head whipped around. Amara instantly met her eyes out of habit. A second later, she realized Cilla wasn’t looking at her. She was looking past her.
Amara’s head turned. So did the heads of people around her, gasping, backing away at the sight of the abruptly murky sky and lightning slashing down onto—no, that wasn’t right. The lightning slashed up. A stone’s throw down the boardwalk, a hair-thin thread of flame snaked from the ground, crackling high and sharp into the sky. The crowd dashed away. A scream tore through the air.
The rope of fire flung itself into a half circle, coiled, then snapped out.
So did the bargaining and haggling. For a moment, the market was silent. Then the air welled up with whispers, questions, the word magic in a half dozen languages.
Amara didn’t linger on the sight. Her eyes sought out Jorn. He gave a curt jerk of his head—this has nothing to do with us—then turned back to the meat stall he’d been negotiating at.
Not everyone was so blasé. “It’s that damn jeweler!” the mage said. “I told her to warn people about her honesty spell.”
It took a moment for the mage’s meaning to dawn on Amara. Mixed magic. She should’ve known straightaway—something this unnatural couldn’t be backlash. Honesty spells enchanted anyone who passed through them, like Jorn’s boundary detection. If someone with an existing spell came into contact with one …
Determinedly, the mage strode toward where the lightning had been.
“Wait,” Cilla said. She reached out but stopped herself at the last moment, letting her hand hover in midair by the mage’s topscarf. “Wait! You have to understand.”
“Someone is hurt. My oath says to help.”
“It wasn’t my people who did a good job ruling.”
Why would Cilla say … Oh.
Around them, people flocked toward the person whose scream had shriveled into high sobs. Others huddled together, shuffled away, or murmured nervously, as if the lightning might strike a second time. And all Amara could do was stare at Cilla dumbly, thinking No, no, don’t and, at the same time, She’s doing this for me.
The mage barely listened. “Out of my way.”
“Not my people. My parents.” A whisper of a smile flitted over Cilla’s face. “My name is Cilla Annin-Kalhi. Do you know what that means?”
Now, the mage listened. Amara saw recognition dawn in her eyes, saw a hundred expressions appear and fade without settling. She stepped closer. Before Amara realized what she was doing—before Amara could process the threat—the woman slapped Cilla across the cheek.
The slap rang out. Amara’s world stopped. Blurred. Shrank to the corner of Cilla’s lips where the woman’s hand had struck.
“You don’t,” the mage shouted, “get to use—that—name!”
Amara snapped awake. She threw herself forward with a grunt, shoving the mage into the nearest stall, right into a wrap hanging on display. The stall owner protested, but Amara didn’t hear, whirling to face Cilla, who touched her lip and winced. The surrounding skin was already swelling. Cilla’s fingers came back dotted with blood. A sharp red line formed. A drop blossomed and rolled down, dangling from the curve of her lower lip.
“Out of all the names of all the dead in this universe,” the mage said, “you chose to call a toddler? You had to use her entire name?”
“Jorn!” Amara shouted out loud. Forget bystanders realizing what her distorted voice meant. Forget the mage. Forget the magic.
Jorn recognized his name and turned, but he stood too far away to help, trapped by the crowd near the meat stall. The carcasses’ dead eyes stared at Amara from across the market. From the alarm on Jorn’s face, Amara knew he saw the blood. She pointed at the mage and took Cilla’s wrist, pulling her through the market, away from the mage, away from the anxious crowd.
Smooth, hateful cobblestones trembled underneath their feet.
The curse was awake.
olan’s pen tapped the pages of his workbook. He was going over yesterday’s physics problems a final time before class. Only a few of the seats were filled, and he could hear streams of students rushing past the door to get to their own classes. Down the hall, some kids were fighting, others cheering.
Nolan double-checked the questions he’d flagged as beyond his reach. Two out of every three.
The totally pathetic thing was that completing even a third of his assignments meant an improvement. Everything was an improvement. He could hold on to his train of thought. He found himself spreading his eyes open in class before realizing he no longer needed to; he could deactivate his phone’s alarm, which normally woke him every few hours so he wouldn’t stay in Amara’s world too long; that morning, he’d woken up disoriented from nothing but the weirdness of his own dreams instead of the jolt of remembering who he was, where he was, that Amara was nothing but a far-off girl in a far-off world.
If she was even that. Maybe the medication worked. Maybe he really had been hallucinating all these years.
“Oh, good!” Sarah Schneider thumped her backpack onto the desk next to Nolan’s. “You did those problems. Can I copy them?”
“You probably don’t want to.” Nolan tried to come up with something else to say, something witty, but nothing came to mind. He didn’t have much practice, and, despite his uninterrupted sleep, he was tired. He’d dreamed about the Dunelands, then spent too long staring at the cabinet where he kept his journals. It’d been a real dream, complete with random nudity and Maart showing up in his kitchen and Pat shouting at him—nothing like Amara’s dreams or the Dunelands not-really-dreams he’d had as a kid that had evolved into something more. These dreams didn’t need to go into the journals.
Nothing needed to go into the journals anymore. What should he even do with them now?
“Oh!” Sarah only now turned to look at him. She must’ve thought he was someone else. No one ever asked to copy his homework. Mainly because he never did any.
“You can copy my Spanish homework,” Nolan offered. “I guarantee that’s in good shape.”
Sarah laughed, showing off braces that glinted in the stark lighting. “Thanks, I got that from Luisa already. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m bad.” She punctuated that with an angelic batting of her eyelashes.
“I don’t …” Nolan sucked his cheeks, thinking. He could do this. Talk to a cute girl. Sometimes he forgot just how clueless he was, though. The way Amara slept with Maart came so easily that Nolan occasionally, sourly, had to remind himself that he was still a virgin.
He’d kissed a girl before, a year ago. Maybe he could do it again sometime. Nothing stopped him. He was like everyone else now. He could date and kiss and a whole lot more—see what sex was like with his own body. He’d probably be decent, having lived the girl’s perspective a hundred times already. That had to give him a leg up.
Plus, Sarah was … nice, even if she weirded him out. She seemed so young. Not physically, since she was taller and had a lot more going on cleavage-wise than Amara or even Cilla, but just the way she laughed and talked, the way she simultaneously complained and bragged about her part-time job at the fro-yo shop. Last week she and her friends had been late for English class, and she’d been the only one to actually run through the halls despite those tiny heels of hers or her bag bouncing off her hips. Even her brother had lingered with her friends, way too cool to run. Nolan couldn’t remember Amara or Cilla ever being that young.
Maybe Sarah wasn’t young. Just normal.
“Well, I can’t judge you for copying homework,” Nolan said, realizing how long he’d been silent.
“No way. Mysterious loner boy cheats on his homework?”
Mysterious loner boy? His eyebrows rose. It didn’t sound as if Sarah meant it in a bad way, though. Maybe she was into mysterious loners. “And not just any homework,” he said. “I’ve even copied Luisa’s Spanish a couple times. There’s no excusing that.”
Sarah laughed. “Oh, shit, Luisa never told me that. Seriously? Tell me you were sick.”
“Meet-my-lunch sick that time,” Nolan lied, half laughing. After yesterday, and given how often he supposedly dozed off in class to check on Amara, it seemed safe to joke about. How was Amara doing? He should close his eyes and—no. She’d kicked him out.
“Well, you can get away with just about anything if you’re sick.”
Nolan swept his pen at the empty exercises in his physics workbook. “Think Mr. O’Brian will agree?”
“I could cover for you? I can go, ‘He was totally hurling, Mr. O! I could hear it all the way from the girls’ bathroom!’”
“Take it from an expert. Hurling lets you skip all the tricky assignments.”
“Does it?” she said airily. “Well, shit. I oughta try that.”
“You should. And we should go out.” He didn’t even realize he was saying the words until they’d already passed his lips. That … might’ve needed more finesse.
She blinked in surprise. “We should, huh?”
Was that a question or an agreement? “I …”
Right on cue, the bell screeched. Mr. O’Brian walked into the classroom.
“Hey. I’ll think about it.” Sarah flashed Nolan a smile, unzipped her bag, and pulled out her physics book.
His first day without Amara, and he’d already asked out a cute girl. Nolan closed his eyes, reveling in the noise of the classroom instead of that of Amara’s world.
Maybe he really could do this.
n a way, Amara supposed Cilla should be grateful for the curse. It must’ve taken many mages to cast. With that much power, they could’ve killed Cilla straightaway. It would’ve been quicker. More effective, too. They’d had one chance to get rid of the princess, and they’d screwed it up.
It would’ve been easier for everyone if they hadn’t.
They couldn’t wait for Jorn. Amara kept her hand around Cilla’s wrist, ignoring the looks around them as they stormed away, diving between stalls to avoid the crowd. The commotion from the mixed magic served as a good distraction. If they drew too much attention, Jorn would—
Didn’t matter. The curse came first.
The cobblestones shifted. Would that be it this time? The stones? Would they twist and groan and batter into her? Would they spread apart and choke her in the earth?
“The cut’s small,” Cilla said, her voice muffled through her hand. Blocking the blood wouldn’t stop the curse, but it might slow it down. “It’ll heal fast. At least—at least there’s that.”
They ran for the market center. One half stood solidly on the dunes while the other half towered over the beach on high posts; they might find a safe spot underneath. The salt scent of the water was stronger here, mingling with rot and dirt and cold. The market seemed far off and long gone.
The sand shifted as they ran. The dune grass swayed as if carried by a ripple of wind.
The moment they plunged into the chilly shade under the market center, Amara grabbed her knife. She pulled Cilla’s hand away to expose her lip. The longer this went on, the more blood Amara would need to make the decoy work.
How could Amara have been stupid enough to think she could trust the mage?
“Do it,” Cilla said.
Cilla’s cut bled slowly, one drop at a time. Amara would never be able to distract the curse with so little blood. She raised her knife and pressed its point to Cilla’s lip. At least the skin there was soft, with no risk of hitting bone or tendons. Amara pressed. Puncture wounds bled less than slashes. They were small, too, which made it easier to block the blood from the air. Cilla held in a grunt.
At the market, the dunes had shielded them from the worst of the wind; they lacked that protection here. A gust blew sand into Amara’s eyes and nose. The dune grass rustled by their feet and bent as though touched by an unseen storm, pointing in the wrong direction. So it hadn’t been the cobblestones that moved back at the market, Amara realized, but the dune-grass roots underneath, the moss in between. The grass pricked at the legs of Cilla’s winterwear, whipping past but not yet through.
Moving away was pointless. The curse would just shift its weapon to the sea or sand.
Amara ran her hand over Cilla’s lip, smearing the blood onto her own skin. She pressed it to her hands, to her arms, her exposed throat. Already, the grass was shifting. It tickled at her legs. Amara backed away from Cilla. Her heel hit a half-buried log, and she fell. The ground felt like ice. The sun hadn’t touched this sand in years. In her peripheral vision, a sand spider the size of her palm scuttled to safety.
The first blade of grass cut Amara’s arm.
Cilla knotted up a corner of her topscarf and pressed it to her face. Once the blood clotted, they could carefully peel away the scarf, making sure they didn’t tear open the wound again. Curses followed curses.
All around Amara, the dune grass rustled. She bit back a scream as a blade tore through her wear by her knee. Dune grass was tough and tall, and right now, animated by the spell, the blades felt like just that—blades. Like knives so sharp she almost didn’t notice at first when they cut her.
Amara clenched her teeth until it felt like they’d crack. Sticky blood dripped from a dozen cuts. She only needed to wait this out. Cuts were good. Cuts were clean. They healed quickly—no messy bone shards to mend, no skin to regrow over burned flesh—and bled freely, so it never took long to overpower Cilla’s blood and leave the curse aimless and dying.
The dune grass was everywhere. It cut deeper, harder. Amara wasn’t hiding her face well enough. The points of the grass slashed at the thin skin of her lips, the arch of her throat. She scrunched her eyes shut tightly, so tightly, as blades jabbed her eyelids. Another prick. Amara screamed, but the sound stayed inside her mouth, muffled.
“Amara,” Cilla whimpered distantly. “Amara, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry …”
Amara had to choose which parts of herself to shield. Maybe if she pressed her arms to her eyes …
Her arms. Why was that first gash still bleeding? Shallow cuts usually healed fast.
She rolled onto her side, her hands pressed to her stomach. Another slash. The edges of the cut stood apart the width of a fingernail. Bright blood sputtered up and dripped over the edges, like water spilling from a sluice. Her mangled legs thrashed, sending stained sand up in clouds. Grass blades dug into her, but more slowly now. Enough of her own blood had spilled to confuse the curse.
But her cuts weren’t healing. None of them. The cuts from her lips sent copper spilling into her mouth, sticking to her teeth and the stump of her tongue and the back of her throat.
“What’s—what’s happening, what’s—” Cilla’s words crashed into each other.
Amara’s arms wrapped around her stomach. Apply pressure. Just as Cilla always did. Apply pressure. But she didn’t have enough arms for that. Her stomach bled and her legs bled and her breasts bled and her face bled.
Another voice joined Cilla’s. Jorn’s. He was running toward them across the dunes, swearing. That was never good, never, ever good.
“Curse ended?” Two words only. Amara tried to answer, but the question was probably meant for Cilla. She should turn her head and make sure, but—
“What’s happening? Why—why isn’t she—” Cilla said.
The slashing of the dune grass had turned to tickling. That hurt, too. Or maybe everything hurt. Her clothes felt sticky and too warm. Why wasn’t she healing? She should focus. Use her magic like a proper mage. But she didn’t know what to focus on beyond pressing her hands to her stomach.
Maybe the spirits had stopped favoring her.
Jorn worked his arms underneath her, lifting her up with no effort at all. H
er head rolled back. She tried to keep her eyes open. Apparently her eyes bled, too. Everything was red. She blinked as if that would make it stop. Everything just turned redder. Of course. She’d been cleaning blood for years and years and forever. That was how it worked. It spread and thinned, and then you got rid of it, though now it wasn’t thinning, so maybe she was doing something wrong.
Jorn would punish her. Or he would let her die. Without her healing, she had no purpose.
“You alive?” he asked, looking down at her. Her legs swung back and forth with every step of Jorn’s. He was moving fast, his arms digging into the cuts on her back. They stepped into the sun, higher up now, and the chatter of the market rushed back over her.
She tried to say something, but her hands needed to stay on her stomach. Maybe she could try her lips. They didn’t feel right, though. They hurt.
“Where are we going? Can’t you heal her?” Cilla sounded distant. Amara couldn’t see her. The world was upside down, anyway, and bobbed weirdly, and it was still red.
Did pain really last this long?
“No magic. Her own healing might come back. Do you want to repeat that lightning show?”
“I only meant—”
“Get her topscarf off,” Jorn instructed. “Press it to her stomach.”
Amara let out a moan. No. Cilla couldn’t do that. Cilla needed her hands to compress her own wound, or they’d have to start all over again.
“But—I—” Cilla’s voice got louder as she caught up to Jorn.
Jorn swore again. “You can’t. Then open the door to that pub. Now!”
Amara could just catch a glimpse of Cilla rushing ahead.
Jorn never let Cilla go ahead alone. Not in places this busy. One bump and she might drop her scarf and then the stones would crush her just like that. That’d happened a couple of months ago, and a year before that, and years before that, and it hurt every time, and Amara’s hands and feet always looked weird afterward. Formless. Battered. Like nothing that should be attached to her body.
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