I got up, lit a single candle from the embers of the fire, and quietly padded to the kitchen to gather the few things I needed—my silver knife, a tincture made from the hearts of midnight thistles, an inkwell, a quill, and a blank piece of vellum. I spread them out on my worktable. My candle sent flickering shadows dancing over the worn wood.
My heart pounded in my ears, but I pushed away my fear and pricked my finger with the silver knife. There was a difference in the way I bled knowing that it would be used to write, like magic slipped out from beneath my skin in a way that could not be replenished. I squeezed my finger and let the blood drip into the inkwell, then stirred in the thistle tincture to keep it from coagulating.
I hesitated, anxiety twisting in my belly. Surely nothing too bad would happen this time—I was only helping the girl I loved. I was doing something for the people of Amalska, those I’d sworn to protect. A deep breath steadied me, and then I dipped my pen into the ink. I chose my words sparingly, because every letter would pull at my mortality, drawing me back into the dust we would all one day become.
I didn’t ask for much—only one small thing that would give Ina her freedom, even as I wished with all my heart for her to choose me instead of Garen.
Ina will find her manifest tomorrow.
Sweat broke out on my brow before the last word was finished. When I set down my quill and released the magic, it felt like a bent tree branch snapping back in my face. Several minutes later, I finally found the strength to put everything away in spite of my shaking hands.
I eventually crawled back into bed, keeping my distance from Ina so as not to disturb her rest. My bones ached no matter what position I tried. Still, it didn’t hurt as much as it had the last time, perhaps because I was older now and had no growing left to do. It was just the slow ache of time passing more quickly than it should, the fever of my life burning out more quickly.
The sweating and aches subsided after a while, and I finally fell into a deep sleep.
But I woke not to a morning breeze, or the soft touch of Ina’s hands and her kiss good-bye, but to smoke that smelled of death.
CHAPTER 5
INA AND I STUMBLED OUT INTO THE FOREST AS QUICKLY as we could, coughing all the while. Though a plume of smoke blotted out the exact location of the sun, the temperature told me that we’d overslept.
“Something feels wrong,” I said. In my Sight the life in the valley ebbed away, a soft counterpoint to the violence of the flames. The absence of life was a wound in the landscape, a dim spot where once there had been brightness.
“No!” Ina took off down the trail toward the vista, sliding though the mud and slush.
I raced after her, coughing, not certain whether smoke or fear stole more of my breath. Ina skidded to a halt at the edge of the cliff. Seconds later, she fell to her knees on the rocky ground, screaming.
Shifting clouds of smoke blew away to reveal the valley in flames. The largest building in Amalska had already been reduced to scorched bones—the hall where the entire town must have gathered this morning for the community meeting. A train of eight large wagons dotted the main road of the village, the first one already trundling out of town.
Bandits.
They must have raided at daybreak. It was already almost over.
I caught the edge of Ina’s cloak as she leaped to her feet and tried to bolt for the trail.
“Stop,” I cried. “There’s nothing we can do!” If we went to the village now, we’d only be targets, whether for the chaos of the flames or the cruelty of the bandits. I didn’t want to make the long climb down before we were certain all of them had left and another wave would not be coming.
She fought me for only a moment, until the last of the meeting hall collapsed, sending a dark cloud of smoke bursting into the sky. No one who had been in that building could have survived. We sank back to the ground and huddled together, our eyes blurring with tears.
If only we had wakened sooner. If only there had been some way to stop the bandits.
The shadow god had surely taken the village.
“I hate him.” She choked out the words. “He could have sent fighters. He could have done something. Anything! Why didn’t he help us?”
I didn’t have to ask to know she spoke of the boar king. She was right. He should have been able to help. What was the point of having a monarch with powerful magic at his disposal if he didn’t use it to protect his people?
I murmured words of comfort to her, knowing they were empty but sure that silence would be worse. She clung to me until the last of the bandits’ carts departed with their spoils, just as the sun hit its height in the sky, glowing an angry red through the haze.
“I have to go back,” she said after the wagons had disappeared into the pass. “Someone must have survived. My parents . . . they knew this could happen. They planned for this. There are places they could have hidden.”
My stomach twisted. I couldn’t tell her the truth: Amalska was a dead place. Normally the valley was bright with life, softly glowing in my Sight, the villagers’ mortal magic and manifests resonating with mine like a distant echo. Now I sensed nothing—only a void.
“I’ll come with you,” I said. Miriel’s rules about me staying away from the villagers were meaningless now.
I followed Ina down the trail, my heart leaping into my throat every time her step faltered near the edge or the wind whipped at our backs. I racked my mind for words of comfort she might need when faced with the destruction below, but what comfort are words to someone who has lost everything? I had lost everything, too. Without the village, I no longer had a purpose. My dreams of ever being part of the community had burned as surely as everything else. All I had left was Ina. I had to protect her, to keep her close.
The flames had already begun to dwindle by the time we reached the valley floor, though a column of smoke still rose from the meeting hall. The houses surrounding it had also burned, leaving little but charred rubble and the reek of blackened flesh behind. The muddy river tumbled through town in a song of sorrow. I shivered in spite of the mild afternoon air. In the face of this destruction, it felt more like a cruelty than a kindness.
Ina ran toward her parents’ house, which still stood intact on the near side of the river. I knew we’d find it empty. I stepped through the door she’d left hanging open. The house still smelled like a home. A place where at any moment smiling people might come through the door, eager to share a meal and their hopes for the coming spring. My throat tightened until I could barely breathe. The most important things in the world—a family and a home—had been taken from Ina.
Though the bandits had left the kitchen untidy in their haste to take anything useful, a kettle of water still stood ready to be heated. Dough sat rising in a warm spot next to the oven, overflowing from its dish and collapsing upon itself. Ina rushed through the four small rooms, even checking the loft, her breathing fast, her hands trembling. I helped her push aside a shelf that covered a trapdoor in the floor, but a lantern shone down into the secret cavern illuminated only shelves of preserves, spices, and dried meat. I retreated to the front door and watched helplessly as she began to come to terms with what I already knew. They were gone. Everyone had been at the meeting hall for the weekly tithe.
After closing the trapdoor, she fell into my arms.
“How could this happen?” She sobbed into my shoulder.
I held her wordlessly, my heart breaking. What were we going to do now?
“Maybe they got away,” she said, her head jerking up. “Someone else will know. Someone must have survived.” She pulled away and took off out the door.
Wide, muddy wagon-wheel tracks showed that the bandits had continued north, no doubt headed for the next city on the trade route. I trailed behind as Ina hurried among the other houses of the village, which were silent in the way that only dead things are. She combed through people’s homes in a panic. Objects the bandits hadn’t taken littered the rooms—everything from books
to wool-stuffed sleeping mats to barrels of pickling vinegar.
Waves of horror crashed through me as we approached the meeting hall. Burned corpses littered the ground, bodies twisted into unnatural configurations where they had fallen. I choked on the stench of charred meat and scorched hair. Not a single body showed signs of life. Ina stopped over one and covered her face with her hands. Her breath came shallowly.
Resting over the corpse’s exposed organs lay a silver belt buckle tarnished by fire—an intricate design of looping branches and leaves framing a leaping stag.
I numbly led Ina away from Garen’s body.
By the time the sun had begun to edge toward the western hills, it was clear that the bandits had left no one and nothing. Our desperate search for survivors ended in front of the smoldering remains of the meeting hall. In the fading twilight, I could now barely make out the outlines of bodies amidst the rubble. Ina crumpled onto a stone bench chiseled into aspects of all Six Gods—fire, wind, earth, water, shadow, and spirit. Not one of them had watched over Amalska today.
“What did my people do to deserve this?” she asked, her voice hollow.
I tried to say more, to offer her some explanation, but the words caught in my throat. My chest felt like it was caving in. No potion could bring back the dead. I couldn’t rewrite the past without sacrificing my life, and there were no guarantees it would even go right. Miriel’s loss ached more keenly than ever. Perhaps she would have known what to do.
Images of the villagers I’d known and loved raced through my mind—an older couple who had always brought me honey candies when I was still a child; a young woman whose breech baby I’d helped Miriel deliver one stormy autumn night; and most of all the children, who hid behind their parents, cautiously peeking at the “witch” while their parents bartered with me for tinctures at the vista. I dropped to my knees, taking perverse satisfaction in the discomfort of the chilly mud and the cold that seeped into my bones.
After a while, Ina knelt and bowed her head alongside me. I spoke the prayer of the shadow god over and over, but it brought no solace. Even as I stole melodies from the wind and the water to sing vespers of comfort, the hole of loss continued to deepen. I stayed in place even as my knees grew stiff, even as the breeze grew cold and biting when the sun slowly sank over the hills. When it finally touched the tips of the mountains, the hazy sky turned red as blood. Shadows closed in on us.
Ina did not speak until the first stars glimmered in the sky, barely visible through the clearing smoke.
“I can’t let them die in vain,” she said. “I know what to do.” The certainty in her voice was cool and detached, a turnabout from her earlier tears.
A spark of fear kindled in my stomach.
“What?” I said, my voice coming out like a croak.
“My manifest will be my revenge.” Ina got up and walked off with purpose, leaving me to clamber to my feet on unsteady legs.
“Wait!” I called, but she had already disappeared into the night. Though I had spent most of my life alone on the mountain, somehow the solitude of this moment was more total, the shadows darker, the sky more empty. Embers glowed in the rubble, still sending up tendrils of smoke that scratched at my nose and throat.
“Ina!” I called.
Only the distant hoot of an owl answered me as dread climbed up my spine with clawed hands.
I hurried through the town, shouting Ina’s name. Then something pulled at me—a strengthening current of magic, insistent and deep. The flow of power tugged me nearly all the way back to the base of the trail leading up my mountain.
Up ahead, a flame guttered in the wind.
Ina had lit a candle to begin the summoning of her manifest. She sat on a rocky expanse of ground, chanting over the flame. Power gathered around her like a whirlpool. This was the old manifest, the blood rite, and it was too late to stop her now. If I interrupted the ritual, it could backfire on her and irreparably damage her mind and soul.
“No,” I whispered, anguish strangling my voice. When I’d written her manifest in my blood, this wasn’t what I’d imagined.
Her eyes were closed, her cheeks pale. She shouldn’t have attempted to do something like this with her emotions running so high. It required strength and serenity to summon an animal and merge with its spirit, even if she had been doing it with a god to guide her. By the time I reached her, she had disappeared into a trance. The flickering candle flame reflected in the glassy darkness of her dilated eyes.
Power unspooled from her, reaching tendrils far into the sky and up the mountain. My hands shook, though whether with cold or fear I was no longer certain. The only certain thing was the way the wind rushed past my cheeks and whipped at my hair, yet the flame of her summoning candle steadied.
Ina’s eyes slowly began to focus again as something appeared out of the darkness. It gathered before her like living smoke. Huge white wings fluttered into view, followed by serpentine eyes that caught and reflected the candle flame in their icy depths.
She had called the dragon.
She would die.
CHAPTER 6
INA STOOD AND FACED THE DRAGON UNAFRAID, EVEN though it towered over her with feral hunger in its gaze. This wasn’t a quiet serpent still lazy with winter torpor. It was a predator as wild and angry as Ina herself. Unlike a normal manifest, in which a person peacefully invited a creature to share her life, the blood rite had brought the dragon ready for a fight. It snapped at Ina with fangs as long as my forearm, but she ducked nimbly out of the way and drew a knife from her belt. Then she screamed a wordless challenge to the beast.
It roared in defiance, flames pluming from its mouth into the nearby treetops. Cinders rained over us as pine needles sizzled into ash, caught and scattered by the wind. I scurried behind a nearby boulder, choking on smoke and fear.
The dragon circled Ina, then bit at her again. She didn’t even flinch. That kind of confident recklessness would get her killed. Panic crashed through me in drowning waves. I had to do something.
“Ina!” I called to her, but the wind tore the word out of my mouth. Only the beast heard, pausing to fix me with a stare as cold as the heart of winter. I stood frozen for what felt like an eternity but must have been only a heartbeat.
Ina took her advantage.
She hastily swiped her knife over the palm of her hand, then caught the dragon on one cheek with her blade. The creature hissed as she pressed her bleeding hand to the side of its jaw. Magic shimmered in the air around them, called by the blood and the summoning to lock them both in place. The dragon’s hiss dissipated into the wind.
“No!” I shouted, even though it was far too late. If she ended the ritual now, the dragon would turn on her.
Terror consumed me. She was all I had left.
Ina chanted,
“I gift you my blood so that I may serve my kingdom.
I take your blood so that I may be more than myself.
My heart is your heart.
My life is your life.
Until the blood of us both is but memory and dust.
Together, we take a new name.
Together, we rise as one.”
My horror intensified with every word she spoke. This was my fault. I had given her the rite and written it in my blood. Everything I wrote had come true, even the unspoken intention behind the words.
Ina would never marry Garen, because he was dead.
The dragon closed its eyes and bowed before Ina, lowering its head nearly to the ground in submission. She wiped away the blood from its face as tenderly as a mother might smooth away a child’s tears. Then she ran her hand over one of the pearlescent horns jutting from its neck, gently exploring the contours of the spikes down its spine. The dragon quieted and softened under her touch, a low thrum rising from its throat.
Tears glistened on Ina’s cheeks, and though every fiber of me twisted with fear for her and horror for what I’d done, I sensed that her tears were not only those of loss, but also relief. She
had finally found her manifest, the creature that answered something in her. Yet the price had been everything she had ever loved. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Would she still have bonded with the dragon if I hadn’t interfered?
She lay down beside the creature, fitting herself beneath a milky wing. Her body seemed to elongate and pale, magic enveloping them until I could no longer see where the dragon ended and she began. The girl merged with the dragon, and then the beast stood up with a new spark of intelligence in her eyes. The manifestation was complete.
I tried to calm my breathing, convince my heart to ease its pace. There wasn’t anything I could do to change this now.
Ina unfurled her white wings and fluttered them as though testing the air. The taut skin over her wing bones shimmered like it was dusted with silver. Then she took to the sky, awkwardly at first but quickly learning the ways of her new form. I ran after her as she flew back toward the village, even though it was foolish to try to keep up as she circled and swept and dove overhead with the grace of a heron.
It did not take her long to tire, and soon she winged back down to earth, landing clumsily near me. My heart raced. How much of the girl I loved was left in the creature she had become? As if to answer, she slowly folded in on herself, magic blurring the edges of the dragon’s form until it shrank into Ina’s familiar body.
When the transformation was complete, she fell to her knees. A deep scratch adorned her face from cheekbone to jawline. The injury she’d inflicted upon the dragon now belonged to her.
“Ina?” I said tentatively, stepping closer on trembling legs. “Are you all right?”
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