She caught herself. That unseen something tugged at her lips again. Like fingers playing with her face, pulling her muscles left and up without her consent. She was trapped.
And this time, she was aware of every second of it.
“Eh worrgee,” her mouth said, pushing air from her lungs past her lips. What did that mean? The sounds came from her own mouth, but they sounded alien, foreign—Jélis, maybe, or some language from the northern continents.
Her hands still hovered by her chest, then spread apart. They signed, unfinished and too quickly and nothing like her normal gestures, “It’s working. I’m here. This is me I’m doing this I’m using her hands, this is working, it’s working—”
“Amara, what are you—what do you mean?” Cilla’s voice caught.
Behind Amara came footsteps. Maart. Her body turned to face him a second later than she would have. “Anything wrong?” Maart asked.
Yes, she wanted to say. This isn’t me. I’m trapped. This isn’t me!
Instead of signing, Amara stomped her feet. Her hands clapped. Her lips pulled in a grimace. She filled her lungs, held that breath, let it shudder out. “It’s real,” her hands said. Her eyes looked at those hands, moving without her commands. She never watched her own signs. There was no point. But now her eyes stayed glued to her hands as they tumbled over themselves. “It’s real it worked I’m here.”
“What are you talking about?” Maart asked.
Cilla shuffled closer, but not too close, leaning in with only her head and her still-bare shoulders. She laughed nervously. “How many mushrooms are you on, Amara?”
Amara’s head shook, slowly at first, then stronger, enough to send hair slapping against her cheeks. She laughed. The sound was not her own. “No. Not Amara.”
What kind of spirit would take control like this? What kind of mage would have her stand here laughing and make her smack her lips?
“I think you’re doing something magical,” Cilla said slowly. “Something mage-like.”
Amara’s hands said something else, but with her eyes sliding up to watch Cilla’s face, she couldn’t see what. Cilla’s nostrils flared, and she kept her distance.
Amara concentrated on sensing her hands to identify their movements. The signals didn’t come from her, but she could recognize the tug of her muscles, the brush of skin. “—but doesn’t know. She never knows,” her fingers said.
Amara wanted to scream.
Someone was doing this to her. Someone was pushing and shoving around her muscles. Someone was shutting her out.
“Stop this,” Maart said. “Jorn will be back soon. Please stop.”
“If you’re not Amara,” Cilla asked, “are you a spirit? A mage?”
Amara felt her lips stretch. Was she smiling? She never smiled like this. Not with her lips parting, her teeth visible.
“Then who?” Maart shook. Frustration—and fear, too, Amara thought, but she couldn’t comfort him, couldn’t tell him his fear and anger helped as little as her own.
“I am not a mage. I am—” Amara’s hands paused there. The next movements came slowly. “N-OO-L-U-N. S-A-N-D-I-AA-K-OO. The letters aren’t the same. We have a separate letter for the d. It’s a hard sound, like in Maart, and the k is softer. But this is close. This is how you’d say it.”
“Nolan,” Cilla repeated, almost a question.
Nolan, Amara repeated to herself. She didn’t know the name. How could she not know the name? This person was in her body. This person was in the tips of her fingers and the heat of her belly and the squish-and-pull of her lungs.
She should know the name.
“You’re not a mage,” Cilla stated. “Why are you possessing her?”
Maart’s hands kept rising and moving together as if he wanted to say something, but Cilla had said all there was to say. She looked calm. She was good at that. Even when she was afraid, nervous, she hid it under tight smiles and nods.
This calm was new. Regal.
“Possessing her? No, no, Amara’s the mage, not me. I’m just a boy. Amara she pulls me in, she makes me see through her eyes,” her hands said. “Her mage powers they do this but she doesn’t know it. You have to tell her. You have to explain.”
The hands moved too fast. The inflections were wrong, as was the grammar—but not when Nolan wanted his words to work. When he cared enough to slow down.
Amara wanted to shake her head. She wanted to dash away, move backward, as though that would leave Nolan behind in the space where she now stood and leave her free. Her body didn’t listen. Her connection to it was severed. Amara was thoughts, nothing more. She couldn’t even move that lock of hair out of her eyes.
“So Amara’s responsible for doing this?” Cilla asked.
“Yes! She pulled me in for years, since before Jorn took her from the palace I’ve been in her head, since before the coup. Always in her head. Locked up. She sucks me in every time I close my eyes. She can do more than heal but she never knew.”
No. Amara couldn’t think beyond that single dim word: no. This was madness. This was beyond believing.
Maart was staring at Amara’s hands. Cilla scanned the rest of her. Her eyes dipped to the way Amara’s feet stood on the floor, wide and steady, then rose to the eagerness of her hands, and settled on her lips, her eyes. “I’ve never heard of this happening,” Cilla said. “Mages do odd things, but they don’t move into each other’s bodies.”
“They do!” Amara’s movements contained too much energy. “Amara does! Normally I can only watch, but now my medicine is changing something. Amara still pulls me in, but now I can … I can …” Her hands thrust out, then in, pressing to her breastbone. “I can move.”
Tears pricked Amara’s eyes. Nolan’s tears. Not hers. She knew, because if her body was her own, those tears would’ve shown up minutes ago.
“Where are you from?” Cilla asked, still calm. “Are you responsible for her blackouts?”
“Is she having a blackout now?” Maart asked.
“She must be,” the hands said. “That’s why you have to tell her.”
Yes. The hands. These were someone else’s hands, not hers, not right now. She was not in her own body but in someone else’s, deciphering what went on.
That was better. Easier.
“I’m not from here. Before, when Amara blacked out, I took over. I was the one who ran to the carecenter. I didn’t know what happened. This time, I wanted to test it. She must be having a blackout. I can’t feel her. Normally I can feel her thoughts, pain—everything—but she’s blank now.”
Not blank! she wanted to shout. I’m here I can see this I can see this! I’m here!
No point. Nolan couldn’t hear her.
But he said he could the rest of the time. For years. No, these words on her fingers couldn’t be true—she couldn’t trap anyone inside her head. Her thoughts were hers. The only things that were hers and no one else’s.
“Where are you from?” Cilla repeated. “‘Not from here’ can mean anywhere. Not from these islands? Not the Dunelands at all? Where, then? The Continent? The Alinean Islands? Eligon? The—”
Amara’s head shook. That lock of hair brushed back and forth over her forehead.
“Where?” Something insistent and hard crept into Cilla’s voice.
Another laugh that wasn’t hers. “I’m not from this world. Not from this … planet.”
The door opened. Jorn came inside with heavy boots, every step a creak and a cloud of old grain dust.
Abruptly, Amara crumpled. Her muscles sagged, her shoulders drooped, and it was as if those movements finally opened her lungs to her. She drew in air, lifted her head, pumped her lungs full, gasping for more and more and more, in and out, and—was she back? She screwed her hands into fists, curled her toes inside too-hot boots, and felt her exhales turn to near-sobs.
Her body. Hers.
“Shouldn’t you be preparing dinner?” Jorn asked Maart.
Maart bounced away as if stung. “Yes
. Sorry.” He backed up to the food cart. Early winterbugs buzzed around the fish. He waved them off, no longer looking at Amara, not wanting to direct Jorn’s attention her way.
Cilla didn’t move, though. The skin over her jaw tightened. She must think Amara was still … not her. She’d be worried that this Nolan might cause trouble with Jorn.
Nolan. Amara repeated the name, committing it to memory, although she didn’t think she could forget it, ever.
She finally brushed that lock of hair away from her forehead. “One of Cilla’s brush hairs fell from the stem,” she told Jorn. Amara let her hands move slowly, deliberately, the way they hadn’t when Nolan directed them. Every sign its place and time. “It could prick her if it slipped inside her winterwear.”
“So get behind a grain cart and take off your wear,” Jorn told Cilla irritably. “Princess.”
“I planned to.” All Cilla’s reserve seeped away. “I thought, if it was easier for them to check like this …”
“It looks clear,” Amara said. “But you should make certain.”
Cilla turned toward the nearest cart, but her eyes lingered on Amara, long enough for Amara to dip her head. I’m here, she wanted to say. It’s me.
Jorn wouldn’t respond well to this development. Even the way he regarded Amara now put her on edge, made her want to escape. He knew she was hiding something.
She couldn’t let him take her back to Drudo palace as Ruudde had told him to. She didn’t want to think about what would happen there. She didn’t want to think about anything.
What did Nolan mean, he was in her head?
t worked.
Until Jorn entered and the shock launched Nolan back to himself, he’d pulled it off. He wasn’t worthless. He could move—walk—laugh. He wasn’t trapped behind Amara’s eyes anymore.
At dinner he was nauseated and jittery, more concerned with picking out Amara’s thoughts than anything else. He’d scared her. He’d assumed she’d been gone, but her thoughts now made it clear he’d been wrong. How did that work? How could he sense her normally but not when he steered her body?
Amara was a mess as she worked and ate. Nolan’s name cropped up in her thoughts every few seconds, sometimes as signs and sometimes as sounds. The word sounded odd in her mind—the syllables too choppy—but it was his name. She’d never thought his name before.
Nolan hardly touched dinner, giving half-there answers and disappearing for too-long blinks that had his parents exchanging knowing looks. The pills aren’t working, they had to be thinking, and, for once, they were wrong.
After dinner, he found himself scrubbing even the bottom of the dinner plates twice. He kept the dishes low in the sink in case they slid from his hands. The Dunelands startled him too often for him to take risks holding anything fragile.
Scrub, rinse, stack. The water soaked into his fingers. Soap bubbles covered everything, popping open with the scent of lemon.
Nolan hadn’t meant to freak out Amara. When she’d first drawn him in, she’d been away from her family and working at the Bedam palace—Drudo palace, now—for only a few months. Nolan had been five; Amara must’ve been around the same age. The years worked differently there, and so did the days. Amara’s were longer by over an hour. It made time hard to calculate.
At first Amara’s magic had pulled him in only while he slept, then also when he consciously closed his eyes. Within months they’d reached the here-and-now point of every last blink. He’d never stopped being scared it would progress further. He’d ended up in a coma twice before, when he was nine and thirteen and had given up on fighting to stay in his own body. At some point, he knew it might not matter how much he fought.
He remembered the first time Amara had pulled him in during the day, when he’d hidden in the school bathroom, pressing his eyes shut and suddenly unable to move, suddenly trapped in that other body. In that world people shepherded him—Amara—left and right, teaching her to cut vegetables and sew and carry the horse-fuzz after stable servants sheared Elig horses. Nolan hadn’t even been able to wrinkle his nose when she scooped up the manure.
So he understood Amara’s fear at being controlled. He shouldn’t take over like that. He’d only meant to let her know about him. Still, the thought—oh, the thought of finally balling those hands into fists, or pointing her eyes where he wanted to look … Was he supposed to go back to spending half his life trapped? Pretending he wasn’t there?
From the living room, Pat shouted, “Nolan! You done? Want to watch a movie?” Some murmurs followed. “Or do you need help washing up?” She sounded less excited now, although Nolan didn’t need to hear that to figure out Dad was behind the addendum. He must’ve made her ask in the first place, too. Pat knew too well what answer to expect.
“Thanks. I’ve got homework.” Actually, Amara had asked Jorn for permission to nap after dinner, and Nolan could use the quiet of her sleep to think.
“You sure? The main actress has huge boobs!” Pat tried nobly not to giggle. Nolan imagined joining them—Dad ribbing Pat while he worked, Pat faking annoyance because she was watching the movie—then a stab of unease from Amara caught his attention. He lowered another glass to the counter and—
—Amara’s grip on her topscarf tightened. She stood by her bedroll, exhausted, unable to convince herself to pull her scarf out of its intricate folds. She wasn’t a prude; servants couldn’t afford to be. Even if she were, Maart was washing in the creek, and had already seen far more than her shoulders, and Jorn and Cilla sat around the corner, reading. Paper rustled. Amara tried to kill the rage that shot up unbidden. It took them seconds to read those pages—seconds.
She still didn’t pull off her scarf. It wasn’t about modesty. It was about this being … hers. Her hands dropped from the scarf’s edges. She stepped away from the bedroll, her footfalls quiet without her boots. She felt a sting in her heel, but it passed a second later.
She stopped at a tall window at one end of the building. The world past the glass was so dark that Amara barely saw beyond her own reflection: the ashy shade of her skin, the worn brown of her winterwear, the topscarf in mottled gray and beige.
Nolan studied the sight of her. Amara rarely faced her reflection for long.
She might be his age, but she looked younger. She was slim and hard and hovered on boyish, down to her short lashes and sharp nose. Nolan couldn’t think of her as beautiful. Not because of how she looked; if she were anyone else, she’d be pretty enough.
But when she moved her hands, they felt like his. When her stomach rumbled, or when her feet ached, the sensations mingled with his own. Sometimes Amara felt simply like another version of him, a life he led in a world he couldn’t touch, and not like a girl for him to fantasize about. They’d never see each other face-to-face.
He’d thought about it, anyway. When she undressed. When she touched herself. When Maart did. He had no way of escaping those images—or the guilt that came with them. He’d learned to live with it.
But now Amara knew about him.
“Are you watching this?” Amara’s signs moved so slowly Nolan almost didn’t notice them. He felt her hands, though, and saw their mirrored image in the glass. “Is it true? Are you watching this?”
Her hands went up. They yanked at her scarf. Fabric slid past fabric, untangling, unwrapping, until it glided past her shoulders. She tugged the scarf loose and stared at her reflection, at bunched muscles in her shoulders and at eyes squinted nearly shut. At the slight indentation between her breasts visible above the winterwear that hid the rest.
She flung the scarf at the glass. It dropped in a heap. “Are you always watching?”
Her hands struck the window, palms thunking off, then slammed again, and moved back for a third time, but she stopped there, her arms pulled back and tense. The sound of flicking pages had stopped. Jorn might’ve heard.
She stood there, shuddering, for too long.
Finally she crouched to gather her scarf. She clasped it so tightly her h
ands ached from the effort. Go away, she thought, angry and broken and so far beyond anything Nolan could name he almost choked on it.
Amara turned. She walked back to her bedroll, stiff with hate. The flutter of pages nearby resumed. She tossed her scarf next to her bed and sank down without taking off her wear. Quietly, with small, restrained signs, she said, “I don’t know what I’m doing to keep you here.” Then: “Go away.”
And something clicked and—
—then the world was black. Nolan’s eyes flew open. The first thing he saw: his own water-wrinkled hands. The first thing he smelled: dish soap, sharp lemon.
His eyes shut, turning the world black. They opened again. Shut, open, shut, open, and black every time. Nolan’s black, not Amara’s black.
He darted away from the sink, sending suds dancing through the air. Of course. Of course! The problem had always been that Amara didn’t know she pulled him in. Nolan had thought she’d need a mage’s help to kick him out—but she’d just needed to be aware.
She could control it.
Nolan closed his eyes again for good measure, just for a moment, just to revel in the black. He felt dizzy. He wanted to—oh, he could sleep now, sleep without feeling her blanket on her skin and her irises against her eyelids, he could close his eyes and hear only his own breathing, he could—
Nolan turned, almost walking into Dad. “Whoa. Do you need to lie down? I know dinner went badly.”
And then Nolan couldn’t contain his smile, wide enough to hurt his cheeks. Just like the smile he’d made on Amara’s face. Just like the smile he often saw on Pat’s and could never imitate.
Surprised, Dad smiled back just as broadly.
“I want to watch that movie,” Nolan said.
s Nolan still there?” Maart’s hands formed silhouettes in the dark.
Jorn had long ago crawled into his bedroll, snoring like a grunting boar. Amara eyed him cautiously as she signed, “I assume so.”
Maart shimmied free from his covers and padded over. She edged away to make room, and he lowered himself beside her, staying on the other side of the blanket. He propped himself up on one elbow. It’d slow his signs, but she welcomed the heat of his body through the thin cover, close enough to reach and kiss. Right now, when he eyed her with nothing but curiosity and concern, his lips curved in a smile, she still cherished the hope that things might go back to the way they were before. Silly jokes, sniping about Jorn. Rolling dice together after tasks. Maart always won.
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