by Maya Motayne
Alfie approached her slowly, his voice hushed. “Finn. Can you hear me?”
She started at that, her eyes finding his before darting away. Her throat was working. “I said I’d help you, but I can’t. Not if he’s here.” Her face twisted with an emotion that didn’t seem right for it. “I can’t.” She turned and dashed through the roaming crowds of the Brim.
“Finn!” Alfie shouted after her, following as she darted through an opening between stalls and burst out the other side into another stretch of the Brim. They had moved from the dress section into a lane of stalls that specialized in hand-carved wood.
“Finn, please,” he said as she ducked into a stone alley between two shops. “Wait!”
She stopped then but did not turn to look at him. Her back quivered and Alfie could think only of the last time they’d been in an alley, of her smirk as she’d fought him after the cambió game. She might as well have been a different person now.
“I can’t.” Each word sounded as if it’d been pulled up from a deep well, hand over hand.
Alfie bit the inside of his cheek, unsure of what to say. She was afraid and so was he, but he needed her help to save his kingdom. Ignacio housed the core of magic he’d released, and Finn knew him. She might know his weaknesses. Maybe she could draw him to her so that Alfie could try to trap the magic again? The man promised to find her, so keeping Finn at his side all but guaranteed another chance at trapping the magic within him. He couldn’t do this without her.
He stepped closer to her stiff back. “Finn, please listen—”
She spun on him, shoving him hard against the alley wall. With a twist of her hands, coils of rock wrapped about Alfie’s wrists, waist, and ankles, securing him tight against the wall.
It all happened so fast that he could not process it. He fell still with shock. Why was she trapping him like this when a moment ago he’d gotten on his knees beside her, prepared to die?
“Finn,” he said, betrayal burning his words, curling them at the edges. “Why?”
She looked at him, her dark eyes blown wide with fear. She opened her mouth to speak and he knew what she meant to say—I’m sorry. But she pressed her mouth closed in a quivering line instead. Somehow that made the words louder still, as if she’d shouted them. She reached behind her head and pulled the hood of the vanishing cloak up, disappearing from sight.
“Finn! Wait!” Alfie shouted, but she did not reappear. Alfie looked at the stone coils holding him down. “Romper!” With each repetition, pieces of rock broke away from him. He pushed off the wall, his body crying out in pain from Ignacio and using the dark magic. He hurried through the Brim. Using his propio, he searched the milling crowds for her red magic, but she was nowhere to be found. He didn’t know what to do. He needed her. Not only because she knew Ignacio and could help Alfie stop him, but also because she was the only other person who’d seen what he’d seen, who could tell him that the fear surging through him was valid and real. And now she was gone. How would he find her?
Alfie ducked back into the empty alley where she’d trapped him. He healed his broken fingers and the wound on the back of his head. He needed a moment of quiet away from the crowds of the Brim, a moment to calm himself. His stomach knotted in guilt at the thought of using Finn as bait to draw Ignacio, but he had no time for guilt now. He needed to focus. He didn’t even know the magic’s goal. Did it simply want to reduce Castallan to black dust?
The slap of a skipping rope against the cobbled ground forced him out of his thoughts. A quartet of girls and boys were jumping rope, two of them turning the ropes while the others jumped.
The Black King, turned to bone,
In your heart he’ll make his home
Your eyes will bleed, your soul burned black,
At his feet, you’ll bend your back
So hurry little ones, off to bed!
Lest Sombra wake and take your head!
They sang it over and over again, spinning the rope faster until it snapped against a boy’s ankle, ending the game in a fit of giggles. Alfie’s pulse roared in his ears.
The magic’s goal was there, in the song that the black-eyed man had sung in the pub. It wanted to bring Sombra back, to find the bones he’d been reduced to and unite them once more. Alfie could hardly breathe. His desperation to save Luka might bring to life the villain that gave him nightmares as a child—Sombra himself. His stomach roiled. He put his hand over his eyes, willing himself not to be sick in this alley.
The legend spoke of bruxos parting the god and his dark magic, thus turning his body to bones, bones spread throughout the world over so that they could never be reunited with the magic, so that Sombra could never be awakened.
This dark magic was working to find Sombra’s bones, to restore his body. To bring about Nocturna—an unraveling of all things good.
Svana had asked Paloma if she’d checked on “the pieces” in Castallan. She must have been talking about pieces of Sombra’s body—the body of the dark god of legend.
Alfie’s mind spun with possibilities, new fears to consider, new paths to explore. Should he try to find the pieces of Sombra’s body and destroy them? Was that even possible? Where would he begin? The bones could be anywhere in the world. There were too many options. No, his best chance was to stop the magic before it found Sombra’s bones and awakened him.
A shiver skittered up his spine at the thought.
“Focus,” he told himself. He could not let himself spiral into fear now. He was uncertain of many things, but he knew he needed to find Finn. She would be the key to drawing Ignacio to her once he had a plan to trap the magic once more—if he could find her. Then a thought flickered to life in Alfie’s mind.
Alfie pulled Finn’s journal out of his pocket. Ever since he’d discovered it in his bag after their battle over the books, he’d found himself carrying it around in his pocket, thumbing through the sketched faces, wondering about the girl who’d drawn them and knocked him clean off his feet. Luckily for him, this book was exactly what he needed to find her.
He let his own magic darken into that wine red of hers. With her journal he should be able to get to her, even if it was somewhere he’d never been, but he needed to concentrate. Moving through the channels of magic was tricky, trickier still when using object transport. If he didn’t keep a clear head, things could go wrong. As a child, he’d tried to haphazardly transport and found himself stuck in a laundry chute instead of the library. If he wasn’t careful, he might find himself stuck between places or worse. He wasn’t even sure of all the consequences. He was the only person who could do this, thanks to his propio, so he didn’t know to what extent he could mess up. He supposed he’d be finding out.
He took his doorknob out of his pocket and dropped it on the ground between his feet. It spun before sinking in. Alfie knelt down and gripped it. “Voy.”
The floor broke into its portal of colors, the hues of magic connecting everything and everyone. He stepped into it, hoping the magic would lead him true.
Alfie came to feeling a ring of pressure circling his middle.
He wondered if this was what corsets felt like. His neck hurt as if he’d been sleeping with his head flopping off the bed’s edge. He raised his head and saw a small spare room. A bed was tucked in one corner. There was a cracked mirror on the wall and a broken desk lay in pieces on the far side of the room. The room was a mess, clothes strewn on the floor and food left to spoil. There, beside the destroyed desk, stood Finn. She leaned against the room’s one small window, glaring at him, her nostrils flared. Her heel was wrapped in a makeshift bandage of dirty cloth.
“Where am I?” Alfie murmured.
“Interesting question,” she said, her voice terse. “Half of you is in my room, the other half is in the hall.”
“Qué?” Alfie said. His voice was syrup-slow, his mind fuzzy at the edges.
He was so tired that he must’ve lost control of the magic on the way, and now he was stuck in the middle of her door. His head, a
rms, and torso hung into the room, his waist was caught in the door, and his legs and backside were hanging outside in the hall. He was lucky he’d maintained enough concentration to get caught in the door instead of split by it.
“Coño,” he cursed, exhausted.
“How did you find me?” She hobbled to him, her wounded leg stiff and bleeding. She bent before him, leaning so close that her breath ghosted over his nose. There was real fear in her eyes then and Alfie knew without question who she was afraid would find her. “Tell me how you tracked me or else you can stay where you are and be my royal doorknocker.”
The small journal still in his hand, Alfie pressed his palms to the wood and said, “Ondular.” The wood rippled as if it were made of water. Finn’s jaw dropped as Alfie stood and stepped through it. After he passed through, the wood stilled again. The hole his waist had been stuck in remained, like a peephole in a giant’s door. A wave of exhaustion swept through him.
Finn reached behind her and picked up an ax from her bed. “To think I went through all the trouble.”
“I found you by using my propio and this.” Alfie held out the journal. She snatched it from him, her face flushing with anger. When she opened her mouth to insult him, no doubt, he raised his hands in surrender. “I accidentally took it when I got my books back from you.” Beneath her fury he could see a fear so palpable that it struck him square in the chest. He couldn’t stop himself from adding, “I promise, no one else is coming. Not that I know of.”
“Good. Then get the hell out of my room.”
“No,” Alfie said, and she crossed her arms, an angry surprise crossing her face, as if she couldn’t believe he had the audacity to disobey her. “I’m here because I need your help.”
“You know, everyone always seems to need my maldito help.” She hobbled away from him to the shabby set of drawers on the far side of the squat room. She rummaged through, throwing shirts and trousers over her shoulder and onto her bed, where a bag sat waiting to be packed. “Kol needed my help getting the cloak, that monster in the gray cloak needs my help in putting myself into an early grave, and a few hours ago you needed my help saving Bathtub Boy, a favor that’s brought me nothing but trouble. Now you need more help?” She gave a sharp laugh. “You won’t be getting it. I’m leaving town. So why don’t you do me a maldito favor for once and fix the hole you put in the door before the landlady sees it and throws her chancla at me.”
“Leaving town?” Alfie stepped forward, only to get hit in the face by a shirt in desperate need of laundering. He placed it on the bed. Was she so simple to think that man and the black magic inside him would stay in this city? “You truly think you can outrun what we saw?”
“I don’t think,” Finn said, rifling through her drawers. “I know. And we’re only a few maldito blocks from the Blue Thimble, Prince. I’m not staying here to wait for Ignacio to come knocking down my door, which you already put a giant maldito hole in. I’m leaving now.”
She lived in the Brim, then. He’d traveled only a short distance to get to her, and he’d still passed out midway. This dark magic had done a number on him. Alfie forced those thoughts to quiet. His mind spun trying to find a way to keep her here. He knew he shouldn’t mention it, that this would strike a nerve, but what did he have to lose? “Was it him you were trapped by?”
The girl froze. Her injured leg aside, she was upon him in a breath. She seized him by the shirt and slammed him against the wall.
“You think you know trapped, Prince? You don’t know a maldito thing. You were weeping over being trapped behind walls of money,” she snarled. “Trapped is feeling your body move without you saying so. Trapped is living with a man whose propio is controlling you with a fistful of words. If you really knew what trapped meant.” She let go of his shirt and rubbed her palms on her trousers as if he were filthy. “You would understand why I’m leaving.”
Compulsion. Now Ignacio’s words made sense, his taunting Finn about her having to obey him. Alfie had thought he’d meant it in a parental sense, not a literal one. He remembered how the man had relished in watching Alfie’s body obey his command, as if it were an extension of Ignacio and not Alfie’s at all. Guilt combed through him. She was right. He knew nothing about what had happened to her. It wasn’t fair of him to ask her to help him, but there was no choice.
Finn winced and leaned sideways, gripping at the wall. The cloth wrapped around her ankle was soaked with blood, the more she moved, the more she bled.
“At least let me heal you.”
“I don’t want anyone’s maldito help!” she spat, her words snapping like a whip.
Alfie’s anger flared to match hers, and then they were chest to chest. “You may not want it, but you certainly need it!”
Finn glared up at him for a long moment. He returned her glower with one of his own, unrelenting. Finally, she staggered away and perched on the edge of her bed.
Alfie knelt before her and carefully untied the blood-soaked cloth. She cursed as he pulled it free of her skin. He held his hand over the wound, the word for healing on his tongue.
“Sanar,” he said. Nothing. His hand was shaking. The reality of what they’d seen in the Brim had shaken him to his core and the magic was slipping through his fingers, responding to his feelings of uncertainty. It didn’t feel safe in his hands. Too much arrogance and the magic would flee, too little confidence and the results were the same. Balance. He needed balance.
He cleared his head and thought of his mother bending a hand over his scraped knee when he was a boy. He thought of what she’d said whenever he hurt himself.
“Sana, sana, colita de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanarás mañana.” The magic flowed through him. Finn’s heel slowly mended under his touch.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Something my mother would sing to me when I was little and hurt.”
It was a nonsense song about a baby frog that had lost its tail. Magic had a language, and bruxos were taught that certain words led to certain results, but if you were truly fluent in magic, the use of the language didn’t have to be strict. Those words his mother would sing made him think of healing, so they became the words he could use to heal. It was what Alfie found the most fascinating about magic, how it was painted by one’s experiences, memories, emotions.
She looked at his left hand, where the two fingers that the man had broken were newly healed before he’d traveled to find her. “What does she say when you get hurt now?”
Alfie pulled that hand back. “I make sure she never knows I am.”
Silence spread between them. She touched her heel gingerly.
“Finn.” He rose from his kneel to stand before her. “Will you at least let me explain why I need your help? Please.” Healing her seemed to have granted him some currency because she gave a barely perceptible nod.
“I need to fix this, stop the magic I released before it hurts more people. To do that, I need help with your propio. If I’m away from the palace for much longer, my family and the guardsmen will notice my absence. So first, I need you to come back with me so you can change Luka’s appearance to match mine. That way I can leave the palace to fix this without anyone knowing.” If he was going to stop this, he needed someone to cover for him in the meantime. The thought of telling Luka what he’d done made his stomach roil, but if he wanted a chance to fix this, he would need Luka’s help. “After that—”
Finn looked away from him, her eyes flinty. “There’s no point in telling me what’s after that when I can’t do the first thing. I can’t change anyone.”
Alfie stared at her. “You lied when I asked if you could?”
“I didn’t lie,” she said, sounding annoyed. “I just can’t do it right now.”
Alfie shot her a look. If it was her propio she should be able to do it whenever she pleased. Was she just trying to get more out of him? He’d already promised her the maldito cloak. “You can’t or you won’t?”
She pinched the bridge of he
r nose. “My propio is blocked.”
“How is that possible?” Alfie asked, his brow furrowed.
“I tried to steal the cloak because I was forced to by Kol. She’s a mobster in the Pinch. Her propio is that she can block other people’s magic. She blocked mine and refused to free me until I got her this stupid cloak.”
“Oh,” Alfie said, the word falling heavily from his lips. “That’s awful.”
“The understatement of the maldito century.” She leaned back against the wall.
“Where is she now? Can you find her, make her return your magic?”
She crossed her arms. “Gone. Left town with my magic still locked up inside me. That pub we were at, the Blue Thimble, is Kol’s pub. She’s certainly not dead because my magic’s still gone. But there’s no way she stuck around after that massacre. So my propio’s gone.”
“I’m so sorry,” Alfie said. Propio magic was something so intrinsic, so essential to him that he couldn’t imagine losing it. If she didn’t find Kol, she might never have her propio again.
“Wait,” she said, her eyes widening. “Your propio is that you do weird stuff with other people’s magic, right? Like you did with my trump card after the cambió game.”
Alfie resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “In a manner of speaking, yes. I can manipulate other people’s magic.”
“Then give it a go.” When he looked down at her, confused, she added, “Fix me.”
He blinked at her. “It’s not that easy; I can’t do it just like that.”
“You seemed to before.” She stood, suddenly full of energy, and closed the distance between them. Her shadow surged around her excitedly. His curled closer about his feet.
“You don’t understand. When I use my propio, it’s like . . . It’s hard to explain, but I can see magic. Think of it this way: everyone’s magic has a color. I can change my magic to any shade. Once I match my magic to someone else’s, I can feel around their magic for a seam and I either sew my own thread into it or I rip it, breaking it entirely. But—”
“So you forge it. You forge other people’s magic the way I—some people forge signatures.”
