by Mary Taranta
“She’s dead, North,” Solch calls after us as North barrels me through the next room, past the ghost girl. “Put a knife through her heart before it goes sour, and then find some new skin to wear to bed.”
North’s anger darkens the already stilted air in the house. He shoulders my weight down the flight of stairs, wordlessly lifting me into his arms when I stumble and can no longer stand. He slams through the front doors ahead of the mute servant, into the humid air, sticky as a second skin. I curl into his chest, listening to the thunder of his heart as North kicks the gate open and moves into the street, turning both ways in a helpless waltz. His fingers tighten around my hip before his expression breaks and he sags back against the wall, sliding down until he’s seated on the ground and I’m cradled in his lap.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, staring ahead. “You’re going to die and I can’t stop it. I’ve only made it worse.”
The truth always hurts.
His legs give slightly across the slick cobblestones as pressure begins to mount in my chest. I feel my heartbeat slow to a crawl as it sucks in the last of my clean blood. Fear floods through me, a desperate need for another day, another hour, another moment to be alive. A tiny, cowardly voice offers my choices: If I die, so does Cadence, and Bryn wins everything. But if I let the poison into my heart and accept my fate, if I turned hellborne, maybe—
No, I think, fierce and absolute.
But, I counter, and it is tantalizing in its possibilities.
Grabbing the front of North’s shirt, I force my eyes open. “I’ll make you an offer,” I say.
He stares down at me. “What?”
“Anything you want in exchange for a spell.”
“A spell,” he repeats with a frown. “What kind of spell would you—?” Understanding dawns over him and he blanches as he shakes his head. “No. No! Absolutely not.”
“I saw you do it to the hellborne.”
“No.”
Taking his hand, I press it against my heart so he can feel the way it shudders in my chest. “The gods love sacrifice,” I say.
He stares at his hand beneath my own before his fingers slide more firmly through mine. “There’s another option,” he says, hoarse and uneven. He wets his lips. “It . . . it would stop your heart instantly. No pain.”
“Thank you.”
“Faris.” There’s a story framed in his mouth, a beginning, a middle, but no end, not for me. My fingertips skim the slope of his jaw and I force a smile.
“Ask for something in return,” I say.
North touches his forehead to mine and briefly closes his eyes. “An ounce of your strength,” he says.
“It’s yours,” I say, and he returns my smile with a tremulous one of his own.
“Cadence will live in the palace,” he says. “She’ll grow up, Faris. I promise.”
I nod, fighting a spate of tears, an overwhelming sense of envy for the life Cadence will have that I’ll never see. The life North will have. “She’ll fall in love with you,” I say. “But don’t give her a sword until she earns it.”
He chokes on a laugh before nodding tightly, sliding his hand free of mine. He fumbles through his pockets and retrieves a stone laced with magic before, with shivery softness, he peels back the collar of my dress.
“What is this?” he asks, tracing my scar with his thumb.
“Darjin the Second,” I joke, closing my eyes. “My mother’s greatest legacy.”
North’s weight shifts around me; his hand turns steady and his breathing evens out. When he presses harder against the serrated teeth of my scar, the scar bites back, sharp and familiar.
“There’s something in there,” he says.
I open my eyes just as the door slams open behind us. Solch swings through the gate with a screech, the bowl of soup and vomit clutched in one hand. North twists to see him, expression fraught with unasked questions.
“Iron,” says Solch, and he grins.
Twenty-Two
THROUGH THE GARDEN AND BACK inside, into pale light and sour air. Thirteen steps and through two doors before North lays me on the bed and I finally melt like water. Eyes closed, I press back against the tatty pillow that smells of sweat and darker things. I’m hot, I’m cold, I’m sick, I’m dying.
I’m not dead yet.
“Miss Locke.” North presses a hand to my forehead, his thumb rubbing the line of my brow. “Look at me.”
It takes me an hour to turn my head, another minute to meet his eyes. My heart beats slow and onerous, overworked; my words come out like graying flower petals on a windowsill. “Miss Locke again?” I ask.
North rolls his shirtsleeves higher, past his elbows and the spells inked there, and kneels beside the bed. At some unspoken order, Solch hands him a scalpel and North hesitates, the tendons in his arms corded like rope. His fingers curl through my hair and he’s a whisper at my ear, coarse and uneven. “Faris always,” he says.
My mouth dries out, starchy with the taste of fear, of desire. I want him. A greed unlike any I’ve ever felt before, fringed with dark, sulfurous thoughts: I need him. The poison responds with a roar of agreement.
North presses his thumb to the scar above my breast and I feel the pressure of his magic threading through me, tentative and searching.
“If you’re wrong,” he says over his shoulder.
“She’s dead anyway,” Solch says, his eyes on me.
Taking a deep breath, North flattens his palm against my shoulder, pinning me to the bed, and I know this moment. The way the light flashes on the blade of the scalpel, the way my heart lurches with fear. The way I lie so powerless beneath the hand of someone I know, someone I trust.
This is how good-bye begins.
• • •
I don’t know this place.
I stand, a shadow in a sea of light. Masked faces swing and smile past, ball gowns from a different time. Oddly colored hair totters high and higher, frosted pinks and pastel blues. The people who pass are bright and pretty things, dressed in colored fabrics that shine in the flickering light of the chandeliers.
A brooding man sits on a throne, a fist pressed against his mouth as he watches the party with disinterest. Women bow in invitation, but his eyes lock on me, on the poisonous weed in his garden of flowers. Shifting his weight, he lifts his head and his hand unfurls, summoning me closer.
Music eddies around me. When I reach the dais of the throne, I hesitate before I kneel, bowing my head, exposing my neck: a gesture of subservience to my king.
“Your majesty,” I say slowly, fighting the words, like wading through the thick bog outside Brindaigel. My words turn to salt and scrape my lips ragged.
“Look at all the liars and thieves,” Merlock says.
Frowning, I turn to the hall that stretches like a mausoleum at my back. The colors have bled from the dancers, turning them into vapor, skeletons in ribbons of rotting flesh. Their dancing turns frantic. Tiles crack beneath their feet and the walls rattle loose with the music. Marble falls from the ceiling and the glass roof shatters, while outside a fire blazes brighter than the stars.
I look back to Merlock and realize it’s actually North who sits withered and broken, crumbling beneath the weight of his crown. A hole gapes in his chest where his heart should have been, the wound ringed with poison.
“Faris,” he says, “I can’t save you.”
I bolt awake, into North’s waiting arms. He cradles my head against his shoulder, fingers digging into my back as he repeats my name like a promise. In the weepy, muddy light, my nightmare clings, sticky and terrifying. Memories begin to return, replacing the fear: Revnik, Solch, ever North at my door.
North. Closing my eyes, I strain toward the gentle pressure of his touch, the soft heat of his body, the way he’s barely there and yet everywhere, a charge of energy that snaps across my skin like lightning.
“Slowly,” North murmurs, holding me tight.
I pull back, in time to see the remorse flicker across hi
s face before his expression turns impassive. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
He lowers his head, arms unfurling around me. “The infection got into your blood,” he says at last. “I excised as much as I could, but you’re still poisoned. I—I can’t remove it completely. There’s a possibility that your body will fight off what’s left, but . . .”
But there’s a possibility that I’ll always have dead magic hiding in my veins, ready to swell like a rising tide to flood my heart and turn me hellborne.
Guilt colors his voice. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “I took a vow to serve my kingdom and in a moment of weakness, I—”
I touch his hand and he flinches. “What did you find?”
He stares at my fingers. “Iron,” he says, and sighs. “There was iron buried under your skin.”
The room spins; metal and light and the taste of blood. “What does that mean?”
“Iron mutes magic,” Solch says from the foot of the bed where he sits, glasses pushed high up his forehead. He wipes something clean with a rag before bouncing a tiny chip of metal across his palm for me to inspect. “Magic goes in, none comes out. It means someone was hiding something in you that they didn’t want found.”
My hand goes to my scar, now buried beneath a thick wad of bandage. “Hiding what?”
Standing, North drags a hand through his hair. My blood freckles his face, stains his fingers, is black against black on his shirt. “The clean magic you promised, for one thing,” he says. “The infection sank so fast, it didn’t touch it, and there’s enough there to convince my council to go to Brindaigel for the rest. With Miss Dossel—” He stops, catching himself, and I pretend not to notice how easily he’s adopted his new alliance. “It’s hope,” he says at length. “The most we’ve had in years.”
But any future that keeps Bryn in our lives promises nothing but misery.
Avoiding his eyes, I examine my arm, cracked and peeling with dead skin but already starting to heal. Poison lurks in my veins, turning them more black than blue, but when I angle my arm to the light, I catch the first hint of something paler.
Clean magic.
“Here. Drink this.” Solch thrusts a glass at me, full of a brown liquid flecked with beads of something black. I accept it with a reluctant thanks.
A bell rings by the doorway, hanging from a coiled rope. Solch glances toward it and stands. “Duty calls,” he says wryly, and North nods in tense acknowledgment. He waits for Solch to close the door behind him before he releases a breath and drops into the armchair, fists pressed to his mouth as he stares at me. Wordlessly, he extends a hand and I give him the glass of liquid. He sets it on the ground beside him, out of reach.
“When did your mother give you that scar?” asks North.
“The night she was arrested for stealing magic from the king. Why would she put iron inside me?”
He studies his hands, shoulders hunched. “There’s a spell,” he says, sitting back. “I can feel the edges of it, but it’s buried too deep to read, too long hidden beneath that iron. I can’t risk searching for it, not . . . not like this.” Not while his hands tremble, swollen from excising too much poison from both of our bodies. “When we reach New Prevast, we can assess the situation in a more controlled environment. But you were right.” He stands and begins pacing the room, pausing at the balcony doors. “The magic you carry bears Merlock’s mark, Faris. It came from Prevast. From Avinea.”
My skin prickles.
“Miss Dossel is not a princess,” he says.
I hug myself, relief warring with regret. “I’m sorry,” I say softly. “I know you needed that magic.”
“Rammesteel,” says North, folding his arms over his chest. “It’s a fortress, built two hundred years ago by King Tanoseen during the Fire Wars, in case Prevast ever fell from a seaward attack. Only Prevast never fell and Rammesteel was never occupied. It fell into disrepair and then into memory and then into legend.” He sighs. “Until you came along.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Corthen wasn’t a king,” North says. “He couldn’t hold on to all that magic he stole; it wouldn’t be safe. He had to hide it somewhere. We always assumed he’d expended most of it during the war, but maybe . . .”
“Brindaigel,” I whisper.
North smiles thinly. “The Northern Continents cut off our trade routes years before anyone else was scared off by the plague because a shipment of guns and powder went missing off the coast. The entire crew disappeared, but when Corthen showed up on the battlefield with pistols, the Continents blamed Avinea for an act of piracy.” He shakes his head. “I’m willing to bet it was an act of mutiny, and the one leading the charge was named Dossel.”
Gunpowder, I think with a jolt. That’s how you move a mountain without magic.
North returns to the bed and sits on the edge, next to my legs. “There are no rules of succession for the brother of a king,” he says. “After Corthen was killed, anyone could have claimed that stolen magic as their own, and only an intuit would know the difference. Especially if that someone had pistols and a trained crew of men to defend their right.”
All the lies we’ve been told—all the death. And for what? So a coward could play king? No. So a coward could become king.
“The perfect strategy,” I say suddenly. North looks at me, eyebrows raised, and I repeat what Bryn had said the night we met: “Perrote declared war on Avinea the instant Merlock abandoned it and he’s been winning ever since. He wants all of it, North.” I look at him, incredulous. “Brindaigel was only ever meant to be temporary.”
North snorts, shaking his head in disbelief. “And he might have won, if not for you.” His eyes meet mine, and I flush beneath their intensity.
“What do we do about Bryn?” I ask, dropping my eyes, picking at a loose thread in the coverlet.
“She doesn’t have to know any different until this is gone”—he touches my arm—“and we drain every last ounce of my father’s magic out of those mountains.”
My breath catches. “We?”
“I’ll need you,” he says.
North’s fingers soften against my arm, protected by my sleeve. He half laughs, dry and humorless. “You’re glowing,” he says. “Like starlight on water.” Swallowing hard, he adds, in barely more than a whisper, “Magic suits you.”
My stomach somersaults and I feel the curious press of the infection in my blood, warmed by the sudden heat of desire. Will this be my life now? Tempering my vices, balanced precariously on a narrow edge in which one instant of weakness could send me falling?
How does North resist the temptation?
Pulling a thin cord from around his neck, North snaps it in half and slides an iron ring free, the band simple but heavily worn. “Wear this,” he says, standing. “It’ll help keep you muted until we reach New Prevast.”
I force a smile of thanks. The ring’s too big for any finger but my thumb and I roll it into place.
“It was my father’s,” says North. “Not that he ever meant it for me. He gave it to my mother before she fled the palace in Prevast. It . . . hasn’t fit these fingers for many years.” He offers me as self-depreciating smile that quickly disappears.
His father. King Merlock.
North’s expression mirrors my own. This is a conversation we haven’t yet had, that needs to be said. North is the Prince of Avinea and I am a girl from the Brim. When he returns to New Prevast, there will be councils and crowns and guards and Bryn. There’s no more freedom after tonight. No more North.
Eager to escape his hungry eyes, I stand and stagger to the worktable, finding the piece of iron North dug out of my skin and cradling it in my hand. Something happened to my mother that night between stealing magic and saying good-bye. Instead of running to Avinea, she ran home and buried this inside me. What kind of spell needed nine stitches to stay hidden? And how could my father not notice this?
Unless he’s the one who put it there. But was he helping her, or hoping to bury
her treason where no one would find it? When have I ever saved anyone? I think, with a chill.
“You said the magic in me could be traced to Merlock,” I say, bouncing the iron across my palm, turning to lean my weight against the table.
“Yes.”
“But Bryn’s spell was scraped clean?”
“According to Tobek. Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I say, mind racing. If my mother stole this magic ten years ago while it still bore Merlock’s mark, but a spell cast afterward was scraped clean . . .
Did my mother know Perrote wasn’t a king? Was that why she planned to leave Avinea? To bring back an army and expose the truth? Perrote must have panicked and scrubbed his magic clean—and ordered every magician in the kingdom executed—to ensure no one else could do the same.
North frowns, concerned. “Faris?”
I shake away my thoughts, dropping the iron. “It’s nothing,” I say, yet it could be everything if it means my mother never intended to kill me, only to warn me.
The door swings open and Solch returns, humming beneath his breath. Clapping his hands, he rubs the palms together with an eager smile as he looks from me to North.
“So,” he says, “I’ll be the drunken uncle who makes a scene at dinner by discussing the family fortune.”
North straightens. “I thought we agreed—”
“I know.” Wincing, Solch offers his hands out in peace. “We did settle up at the start of the tour, but unfortunately, my boy, terms and conditions subject to change without notice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A girl like that glows bright as the sun out here in the dark,” says Solch. “Intuits will be at my door for days wanting a taste. Lord Inichi will send his usual dog to sniff around back. That’s a lot of hassle. A lot of headache. We have to factor in surgery, she made use of a bed—I’ll round down for the hour out of respect—and there’s the matter of medical supplies.” Solch wets his lips. “I want more than a spell, North. I want half of what’s inside.”