by Bree Barton
Mia detected more than a trace of bitterness.
“It should be Karri,” he said. “My sister was always better than I was at everything—at least everything that mattered. Hunting, archery, swordplay, diplomacy, war games. I was off deboning fish in the kitchens while Karri was crushing our weapons master out on the castle grounds.”
“Perhaps you can change the laws of succession when you’re king.”
“I don’t want to be king.”
“Then you’re the only man in history who hasn’t dreamed of sitting on the river throne.”
“And yet I’m the one who must. Meanwhile, my sister, the most talented swordsman I’ve ever seen, the most gifted politician, the sharpest mind, and the noblest soul, will wither in the queen’s gallery, getting drunk on stonemalt.”
Mia studied him. “You have talents, too. You caught a dozen skalt with a button.”
He laughed. “Ah, yes. Master of the button arts. That’s me.” He added ruefully, “Would that a dozen skalt would save my skin.”
They fell back into companionable silence. After a while, Quin said, “I am good at other things besides catching fish, you know. I loved history. I excelled in theatrical studies—I have a gift for the pretending arts. And I took a particular shine to music.”
“Yes,” Mia said. “I’ve heard you play.”
Was it her imagination, or had Quin’s eyes gone hazy? “I had a music teacher. He was from Luumia, only a year older than I was—his parents were musicians in my father’s court, so he lived in the castle with his sister. She was lovely. We used to take long walks through the grove of plum trees. Sometimes she and I would—”
“I don’t need to hear what you and she would do,” Mia interrupted.
Quin smiled. “Her brother was a musical prodigy. He was also my first true friend. We spent long hours together in the library, playing piano. He told me a pianist should touch the keys the same way he touched a woman: gently. But my father . . .”
He set his jaw in a hard line. Whatever he’d been about to say, he thought better of it. “My father decided the piano was not in my future after all.”
“Quin.” She stopped walking. “What if your father is grooming Tristan to be king? If he really does consider you unfit to rule, he could have hired an assassin to kill you.”
Quin didn’t seem half as delighted by her theory as she was.
“While I appreciate your keen eye for filicide, that does seem a touch extreme.” He paused. “Though I suppose, if my father were looking to hire a skilled assassin, he wouldn’t have to look far.”
He looked at her pointedly.
“Oh. You mean my father.”
She remembered her father’s strange manner when he gave her the journal, and again when he escorted her to the Royal Chapel. Had King Ronan commissioned Griffin to kill his own son?
Or did Quin mean her?
Once again, his conversation with his parents came flooding back to her: he’d thought her dangerous, even then.
“The Hunters only kill magicians,” she said. “That’s the Creed. It’s sacrosanct.”
“You must admit you’re being a touch fanatical about this, Mia. We just saw a Hunter break the Creed and kill two other Hunters. Everyone can be bought.”
“Not my father.”
“Fine, then. One of his men. They were the only people in the Chapel with bows and arrows.”
“Except all the guards! I’m telling you, the Hunters only kill Gwyrach.”
He stared at her, his green eyes reflecting the blue needles, the color of a shallow pool at the base of a waterfall.
“Why did you want to join the Circle? Seems like awful bloody work. For a girl, anyway.” He jerked his head back toward the river. “Your Hunter friend is clearly good with a blade, but I can’t imagine you—”
Mia bent, whipped the knife out of Quin’s boot, clasped it lightly by the tang, and flung it at a swyn tree twenty feet ahead. It sailed through the air like a silver ribbon, slicing into the white trunk with flawless precision.
“Point taken,” he said.
Mia retrieved the blade, using her smock to wipe off the soft white curls of birch bark before sliding it back into the sheath. The prince’s mouth was smiling, but his eyes weren’t.
“You know,” he said. “I’m beginning to regret bringing that knife.”
Chapter 21
Unknowable Parts
THEY WOVE THEIR WAY through the Twisted Forest as the air thinned. Mia was tired, but the crisp alpine wind was invigorating. Though she carried no compass and no map save her mother’s, she couldn’t help but feel like an explorer, the very thing she had wanted more than anything to be.
The prince flumped down on a swyn trunk, effectively spoiling the silence.
“I’m hungry.”
“But the fish—”
“Was hours ago. I am reliably always hungry.” He stretched out his arms, catching the back of his head and staring up at the swyn needles. “Exquisite. It’s like looking at two blue skies.”
She sat down on her own tree trunk. She was hungry, too. Ravenous.
Discreetly she opened her mother’s book. They were loosely following the Natha on its ascent: the river was the clearest strip of ink. She tried once again to rub the page gently with her finger, on the off chance she could court more ink. It was useless.
“I truly hope you are not charting our escape route with that book of nothing.”
She snapped it shut. “Perhaps it’s time for you to catch more fish.”
He flourished a hand at the river. “It would appear the good fish of Glas Ddir are constitutionally unable to swim upstream.”
He was right. No shimmery silver skalt had braved the uphill climb.
She chewed her lip. In light of her mother’s capricious journal, it was hard to pin down an exact itinerary. When she closed her eyes, she conjured the non-magical maps she’d spent her childhood poring over. By her estimation, they would be hiking through the Twisted Forest for several days, maybe a full week. They had to climb the mountain and descend the other side to reach the Salted Sea, which connected Glas Ddir with Fojo Karação. Until then, the river would provide freshwater aplenty, but they needed food.
“You’re the Huntress,” he said. “Why don’t you hunt us some game?”
“I don’t hunt animals.”
“Humans are animals.”
“Gwyrach aren’t human,” she said.
“You look human to me.” His smile faded. “How did you heal me, Mia?”
“I don’t feel like giving you a primer in magic.”
“You don’t know how, do you?”
She could feel the flush creeping across her cheeks and neck; yet another example, she thought, of how your own flesh could betray you. Her words slammed through her. Gwyrach aren’t human.
Did she really believe that? If so, then the blood shunting through her—the breath hissing through her trachea—the aortic valves contracting to keep her alive—were inhuman valves, inhuman breath, inhuman blood.
What made a creature human? Her brain? Her heart? Or was it some unknowable sum of unknowable parts?
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“How do you know? If you accidentally brush against me, I might drop dead.”
“Is that why you told your parents I was dangerous?”
She’d revealed herself. He stared at her, unblinking. “What else did you hear when you were eavesdropping in my chambers?”
“That your parents mistrusted my father. And I was leverage. Your blackmail bride.”
He reddened. “That wasn’t my fault. I knew my father intended our marriage to be an intimidation tactic—and I was right. But I’d assumed it was the people of Glas Ddir he wished to intimidate, when in fact it was your father.”
He picked up a stick and jabbed it into the ground. “They promised him they would keep you safe and unharmed . . . as long as he fulfilled his quota.”
“His quota
of Gwyrach.”
“Yes.” Quin stared hard at his stick. “For my father’s Hall of Hands.”
“And if my father did not comply?”
Quin’s silence spoke volumes. Shelves. Libraries.
So her father hadn’t lied to her: he really was trying to protect her. They had forced his hand. If Griffin refused the marriage, the king would have killed her.
Or worse.
She swallowed hard.
“But you didn’t know I had magic. Even I didn’t know. Why did you think I was dangerous, Quin?”
Mia’s blood skulked through her veins. The prince turned away.
“Because,” he said, his voice low and cold, “you are.”
Chapter 22
Thawing
AS THE NIGHT WORE on, the air grew colder, and for once Mia didn’t think the ice prince was to blame. A northern wind nipped at her nose and fingertips.
She heard a crack of twigs and whirled around.
“Quin?”
They hadn’t spoken for hours, but his voice was soft. “I’m here.”
“I thought I heard something.” She sniffed the air but smelled only damp, loamy earth.
“Probably just the sound of my empty stomach. I’m going to forage for purslane.”
“Purslane is an excellent plan.”
She had no idea what purslane was, but she wasn’t about to admit it.
Quin began rummaging around the forest floor, plucking handfuls of green, until finally he dropped a clump of fleshy leaves into her lap. “Surprisingly nutritious, for a weed.”
“It’s edible?”
“Yes, Mia. I’m not trying to poison you.”
The purslane tasted like paper, but she wasn’t complaining. While she discreetly picked the fibrous strings from her teeth, she stared up at the trees.
From her mother’s sketches, Mia had failed to grasp how sensual swyn were: their supple, graceful curves; the long limbs intertwining, interlocking. The moon shone against the creamy white bark like candlelight on naked skin.
“What are you thinking about?” Quin asked.
Embarrassed, she looked away. “That we should make camp.” She had been thinking nothing of the sort. “If we stretch the gown between trees . . .”
And thus began her embarrassing attempt at shelter making. First she tried tucking the wedding dress between plaits of swyn, but there wasn’t enough fabric left, thanks to Quin’s fishing efforts. So she resolved to build a lean-to. She made a simple frame by driving two forked sticks into the ground and lashing them together with what was left of the gown and train. But she needed a stronger pole or at very least more robust branches: every time she tried to brace it, a chilly gust of wind collapsed the whole mishmash.
Quin watched her in silence, munching his purslane.
“Don’t feel like you have to help,” she said.
“Oh, I won’t.” He spat out a piece of bark. “I did see a cave a ways back.”
Mia could have pummeled him.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “We don’t need covering. We’ll sleep out in the open. The sky is perfectly clear.”
No sooner had she said it than a crack of thunder pealed overhead. The first drops of rain misted the tops of the swyn.
Quin folded his arms and leaned back into the tree, infuriatingly smug.
“You were saying?”
Mia shivered at the mouth of the cave. Rain fell in rivulets from the ledge above, reminding her of pale ribbons streaming off silk, or her sister’s silver tears.
She hugged her legs to her chest, chin resting on her kneecaps, and let herself be soothed by the susurrating rain. She had wrapped herself in the tattered remains of the wedding dress: not very insulating.
Mia was busy knitting together her own rules of magic—real magic, not the faulty information populating her books. Her wildly fluctuating body temperatures were clearly a symptom, as were the sudden pains that split her head apart like fractured glass. She had been taught that a Gwyrach manipulated her victim’s body, controlling his bones and blood, breath and flesh. But she had come to suspect the true physiological transaction was far more complicated. What her books had failed to mention was that the Gwyrach’s own body was also affected.
Mia’s body was a sensitive instrument fine-tuned to the people around her. The headaches had lessened significantly after leaving the castle, supporting her theory that they only occurred when she was suffering from a kind of sensory overload: dozens of bodies with their own delicate chemistries jostling against hers. Healing felt like being wrenched and drained. Watching someone die was emptiness.
And then there were the sensations she’d felt when enthralling Quin: honeyed heat, supple limbs, flesh like melted chocolate.
If her body were calibrated to the bodies of those around her, it made sense that her internal temperature would mirror theirs. Magician and non-magician were yoked together by this strange alchemy. Specific emotions registered at specific climates.
Enthrallment felt warm. That made sense: desire was hot.
She stole another glance at Quin.
Hatred, apparently, was cold.
He was curled into the back wall of the cave. Mia had the impression he would fold himself up like a pair of trousers if it meant keeping her at a distance. Earlier, when she’d leaned a little too close, he’d spun away, the air around them crackling into black frost.
It hurt more than she cared to admit. She’d caught herself enjoying Quin’s dry wit, and she could feel her own dislike thawing. She had mistakenly believed his was thawing, too.
She couldn’t get warm or comfortable on the rocky cave floor. The rain rasped through the Twisted Forest, drumming lightly on the swyn, as Mia’s teeth began to chatter.
Quin stirred behind her. Something soft and heavy swept past her cheek. She caught a glimpse of green and then felt a weight, her body cocooned in thick, warm fabric.
The prince had dropped his bridegroom jacket over her shoulders.
Every time she thought she had the prince figured out, he surprised her.
She stayed awake until she heard the soft, steady rhythm of his breathing. Then she stood in the mouth of the cave, feeling protective for reasons she didn’t understand. Above her the blue needles wept and whispered. Through the gray fog of rain, she could just make out a slice of river far below. She thought she saw a blotch of green and gold.
She rubbed her eyes. They were not to be trusted. When she blinked, the blotch was gone.
Mia curled up on the rocks and hugged Quin’s jacket close. It smelled of fish and metal. She closed her eyes and conjured up the scent of orange peels sizzling on fresh-caught trout, baking bread, sweet milky cheeses, and hot coffee in a copper pot—the memory of pleasant childhood mornings when the Rose family piled into the du Zols’ cozy kitchen for tasty, steaming breakfasts. Small comforts, from a life that no longer seemed like hers.
Her hands made bony pillows as the clouds of sleep rolled in.
Chapter 23
A Piping Hot Mug of Butterfel
THEY WERE HUNGRY, AND they were cold.
Mia had witnessed three sunrises since they’d left the river, maybe four. It was hard to keep track. The farther into the mountains she and Quin climbed, the more the days and nights bled into one another, a mélange of whites and blues.
The rain had turned to sleet, then snow, clumping onto the azure swyn branches like hand-whipped cream. Mia padded the inside of their boots with dry moss and needles. Every day she and Quin refreshed the padding, though it was getting harder and harder to find any dry brush. They foraged what food they could—weeds and shrubs and berries—and when they grew weak, they dipped scalloped bark into the stream burbling up the mountain and let the icy water slake their thirst. Though the blood in their veins slowed and thickened, the Natha did not freeze.
“Where are we going, Mia?” Quin asked. “Where are you leading us?”
“To safe haven,” she said. She saw the ques
tion in his eyes, the suspicion, but on some level they both understood he had nowhere else to go.
They were getting closer. Mia’s frozen fingers hurt when she pried open the book, but every day more ink shimmered on the page. In the east, the isles of Fojo Karação had begun to reveal themselves, a cluster of landmasses bobbing on the Salted Sea.
Pace by pace, Mia and Quin climbed higher through the Twisted Forest. Once they summited the peak, they could begin their descent on the other side—if they survived long enough to get there.
She was determined to survive.
Even without her trusted sulfyr sticks, she’d had some luck striking the back of the sheath knife against a hunk of coarse jasper until it sparked. She coaxed an orange flame from the kindling, and once it caught, she shoved it under larger, thicker branches. On one fortuitous evening, Quin managed to boil a soupçon of water in a hollow stone to make chokecherry tea. It was the most pungent, sour, delicious thing Mia had ever tasted.
“We need more sustenance,” Quin said.
She nodded. Her lips were so cracked it was painful to speak. Her tendons quivered, her legs straining as the slopes plunged down into canyons and up tall cliffs. Mia had scratches on her arms from the twigs and branches. When the brush grew too thick, she took Quin’s sheath knife and hacked an improvised trail.
Silence stretched between them like a frozen black lake. Mia started inventing sounds to fill it. Her grip on sanity was fraying: one night she was sure she heard a hound baying at the lemon moon.
To keep her brain alert, she worried the fojuen wren between her fingers, mentally reciting everything she knew about ruby wrens. They were the only birds that hibernated in winter. They were indigenous to the snow kingdom. Their anatomy was unique: like mammals, they had a four-chambered heart. But whereas humans had two pulmonary veins, wrens had four, a more efficient circulatory system that allowed them to fly. The wren’s heart beat more quickly, too—its resting heartbeat was seven times that of a human—but when it went into hibernation, it could still its own heart for months on end.