Otherbound

by Corinne Duyvis

  She’d scratched it open.

  Cilla looked up with eyes that were red, too. “Don’t,” she pleaded—

  —Nolan needed to hurry. He unfastened the flipper from his stump. The lifeguard was already there with his crutches, the anti-slip tips still attached. Bringing his prosthesis to the pool was useless; he’d only damage it, and hopping was dangerous as hell on these tiles.

  He grabbed the crutches and swung his way to the changing rooms as fast as he could without risking a fall. People pretended not to stare, and he ignored them, because he only needed another second, just a little more—finally he thumped onto a private changing-room bench. His crutches slammed into the door. He buried himself in Amara’s world and prayed he wasn’t too late—

  “—here! Pressure!” Amara kept her signs short and pressed her hands back to the wound to gather more blood, though it was already on her face and arms and even her throat. She had a good view of the wound now, and it wasn’t just one scratch—she counted at least half a dozen in every direction, like the starry spikes that surrounded the volcano in Cilla’s tattoo. Most of the scratches didn’t go deeply enough to draw blood—Cilla’s nails were too short for that. She must’ve gone over the scratch again and again and again.

  Amara took Cilla’s blood-stained hands, but Cilla shook her head, tried to pull them back. The marshal forced her still, and Amara smeared Cilla’s bloody hands clean on the bed’s blanket. She couldn’t remove all the blood with the stones already eagerly scraping away from the walls or with Cilla fighting like this—and in the names of the dead, she shouldn’t be fighting!—but she removed the worst of it. It’d have to be enough. Oh, please, let it be enough.

  Amara wadded up the blanket. She shoved it at the marshal, who pressed it against Cilla’s chest and held it there.

  Footsteps rang down the hall.

  Amara stumbled away from the bed. The smell of copper was in her nose and everywhere else. Normally, she didn’t smear the blood on her face. Normally, Cilla’s injuries were minor.

  A ripple went through the wall. The stones shifted their attention—

  —Nolan didn’t want to see this. He wanted to feel it even less. His eyes opened with a start. He rolled from the bench before he realized it and grunted as his head hit the wall. The dressing room was well-lit, bright and yellow and safe.

  He didn’t want to go back—

  —he went back and the floor was dragging Amara in. The stones crushed her body bloody and broke her bones and it took too long to end.

  Nolan stayed for all of it; she’d heal faster if he did.

  By the time the curse faded, Jorn and Gacco had arrived. Amara lay there, her chest rising and falling. Broken ribs stabbed her lungs. She felt them twist, gathering shattered pieces to mend. There were no pauses, no stutters. She healed the way she’d always thought a real mage ought to.

  “What do we do with them?” the Elig marshal asked. From where Amara lay, curled up and facing the wall, she could just see everyone huddled near the mattress. The marshal still pressed the blanket to Cilla’s chest. She was bloody, too. At first, Nolan thought the blood was Cilla’s, but when Amara’s gaze lingered, he realized the red lines standing out on the marshal’s skin weren’t smears but scratches. Cilla had fought her.

  She’d given up now, though. Her head lay flat on the pillow, staring at Amara.

  “I’m sorry.” Cilla barely moved as she spoke. The marshal was still holding her down. “I didn’t mean for … you weren’t supposed to …”

  “Keep the pressure on.” Jorn stepped sideways, blocking Amara’s view of Cilla. “How deep were the scratches?”

  Amara’s head lolled sideways. Watching took too much effort. She couldn’t think through the pain. Her jaw repaired itself, bone grinding against bone. The noise echoed in her ears and skull.

  Amara drifted out, leaving Nolan alone with the sound of gnashing bones. Injuries like these took a long time to heal, even now that he wasn’t blinking back and forth. Vaguely, beyond Jorn’s voice, he heard a familiar choked sound. Gacco. Throwing up in the hall.

  This isn’t my body, Nolan told himself. This isn’t my pain.

  It didn’t make it hurt any less, but he repeated the words, anyway.

  By the time Amara awoke, her bones had mended. Muscles shifted under her skin, following suit. She dragged her arm out from underneath her until both hands rested in the space between her drawn-up knees and head. Her hands were still bloody, the skin and veins damaged, but the tendons and muscles worked.

  What was Amara doing? The pain scrambled her thoughts, making them hard for Nolan to pick out.

  “Go away,” she signed. “Healed enough go away.”

  Nolan had promised to leave when asked. But—right now, with her body still torn open? Was she thinking clearly?

  “Plan,” she said. “Go before too late. Plan.” She rolled onto her back, letting her arm thump to the side. She wouldn’t be able to sign anymore without the others noticing. Jorn and the Elig marshal faced away from her, but Jorn was looking back every now and then, and Gacco had returned as well, his skin a queasy shade of gray-brown.

  Nolan drew back.

  elp,” Amara signed, hoping to catch Gacco’s eye. From where she lay on the floor, she saw him slanted and upside down. “Left. He left.”

  Gacco frowned but didn’t move.

  Of course. Gacco wouldn’t know about Nolan. Amara needed to think. Her mind felt full. Torn in every direction. “Stopped healing. Help,” she repeated.

  “Hey, Jorn?” Gacco said. “The girl says she stopped healing.”

  Jorn looked over his shoulder irritably, then back at Cilla, who lay motionless. Amara could just about see him think: Nolan. That asshole.

  “I can put her in her cell and bring the doctor,” Gacco said.

  Amara worked up a shudder. She coughed. Blood shot into her mouth and sprayed onto the floor. Must’ve been left in her lungs. Her hand crept to her chest and pressed on her heart.

  She was fine, at least on the inside. Jorn and the marshals only saw the outside, which looked bloody and bruised, with her skin torn and her wear unrecognizable as ever having been clothing. The outside looked as if she could die at any moment. She needed it to. Without the threat of death, Jorn might simply stick her in her cell and wait for Nolan to fix her.

  Jorn cursed under his breath. “Take her to the doctor.”

  “Should I call another marshal to—”

  “That’ll take too long. She’s harmless. Take her!”

  Ruudde’s voice echoed in Amara’s mind: Her, we can control.

  Gacco was by Amara’s side in two steps. He crouched. One hand went under her knees, the other under her shoulders, the same way Jorn had carried her off the dunes and into the pub so long ago. Back then, she hadn’t known Nolan was in control or that he was the one to heal her. She’d thought she was a mage. Maart had been alive. She hadn’t run away. And, unlike now, she really had been dying. She’d been panicked and frightened and hurting like hell.

  This time, she was angry.

  She faked another spasm. She needed Gacco more worried about the possibility of her death than the possibility of her escape.

  One thing the old Amara had in common with this one: she still hurt like hell. The injuries she’d asked Nolan to abandon stung and burned and ached. Pain shot through her with every step Gacco took.

  Stay away, she thought. Stay away, stay away, stay away.

  They arrived at the palace carecenter, which she recognized by scent alone. It lacked the freshness of flowers and polished wood of the rest of the palace. Instead, the room smelled of alcohol, sharp and clean.

  Gacco placed her on a table in the center of the room. He was gentle—she’d give him that—supporting her head and adjusting her scarf to cover more of her arms. She looked past him at tables with gleaming bowls and tools. She tensed. She hadn’t been here since she was a child, but she had no doubt: they were in the operating room. This was w
here Lorres had forced open her mouth, where a mage had looked into her eyes and cast a spell and then reached inside and cut her tongue. She’d tasted the blood but not the pain, and even the blood hadn’t lasted long. The palace mages had performed that trick a hundred times.

  The doctor stopped at her side, blocking her view of the tools. Amara didn’t recognize the face that hovered over her. The woman was pretty, though. Older. Wide, green eyes. Jélis, like Gacco—she had the same frizzed hair and curved nose, and most doctors were Jélis, anyway. As the only people without mages, they’d had to find other ways of fixing their sick and injured.

  “What in the names of the dead happened to her?” the doctor breathed.

  “It …” Gacco must’ve been sworn to secrecy. “Mixed magic. She got banged up in the chaos.”

  “Mages.” Her eyes rolled skyward. “I’ll need your help. There, in the corner—light the fire to boil the water. Let me know when it’s done.”

  Amara let her head drop sideways. She identified the exits. The door, the windows.

  Before Amara had left to serve at the palace, the kids she’d grown up with had joked about being a servant. They’d sung songs and told horror stories about getting chosen. They held their tongues limp and talked the way they thought servants did. Their parents tsked them and said servants performed a vital duty and needed respect, then went on to ignore real servants on the streets the very same day.

  So Amara had known what was coming when Lorres took her into this room. It’d smelled of alcohol even then. She’d looked past the people holding her down at the same windows she saw now. She’d dreamed of escape.

  “I’ll need to cut away the wear,” the doctor muttered, more to herself than Amara. She took a nearby blade. Amara made her knee jerk. Her wear brushed over her injuries, and the next shiver and yelp weren’t faked.

  The doctor hovered over Amara and brushed aside her hair. “Hang in there. I have something for the pain.” Her voice was gentle, lightly accented. She turned away.

  Amara considered waiting. Numbing the pain sounded tempting. It might slow her down, though, and with both Gacco and the doctor turned away, this might be her only chance. One hand reached for the nearest table. Her fingers wrapped around the cold metal of a surgical blade. She swung her legs off the bed and landed with a thump that sent pain flaring. No time to linger. Don’t look back at Gacco or the doctor. Run. Through the door. Pull it shut.

  Run.

  She faced the hallway along the side of the courtyard. A window stood open. She climbed through it and spun left. Bloody footprints trailed in her wake. No point in kicking off her boots, since her feet would be no better, but she couldn’t afford to leave a trail. As she ran, she sidestepped onto the lawn. The grass might clean off the worst of the blood.

  At least the pain seemed to fade with every step. She held the doctor’s blade tightly enough to numb her fingers. It wasn’t as heavy or familiar as her dagger, but she could still fight with it if necessary.

  She heard shouts behind her—Gacco. The sound fired her up, pumping energy to her legs, her lungs. She bolted around the carecenter. She was near the edge of the palace grounds, but escape couldn’t be that easy—not with the wall surrounding the grounds. She was in no state to climb quickly enough to escape unseen.

  Avoid the wall. She turned left a second time, slipping into a servant passage. Going back indoors was a risk, but so was every choice she made. One evil or another. This hallway at least kept her out of sight. Besides, she’d lived in this palace for a year and dreamed about it for even longer. She thought she’d forgotten, but now, running past, she knew these doors, these halls, these stairs under her feet and these lamp holders on the walls.

  People would expect her to go straight for the exit, or at least stick to the lower floors. She fled into the main building instead. Her topscarf slipped off one shoulder and tangled behind her. Her boots no longer trailed blood, only puddles of mud. That left two problems: a potential anchor and being seen. She’d already passed a handful of servants who’d turned and gawked. Amara had meant to look near death to escape, but now that she had, her appearance worked against her. Nolan was welcome any time now.

  She needed to lose the servants. She sped up more stairs and into another passageway that stretched past a dining hall. Memories rose. The hallway existed for servants to enter the dining hall through one of the doors, put down the food or claim the dishes, and disappear just as quickly. They only used the room for special events, so it’d be deserted right now. The hall itself only led to a kitchen and an office or two, so that’d be empty, too.

  Except for Lorres, coming her way, holding papers to his chest. He did a double take and promptly dropped the stack. “What happened?” he signed, and bridged the distance in a few steps. He reached out, but stopped himself when Amara dashed back. “You need a doctor. I thought you could heal. How can you even walk like this?”

  Could she outrun him? No. But she still had the blade.

  “Did Ruudde do this?” Lorres winced as he looked her over.

  She strengthened her grip on the blade. Lorres had lied to her. Claimed to be on her side and then …

  She couldn’t do it. She jammed the knife into her boot pocket and turned, stumbling, breaking into a run back the way she came. A shout trailed after her—her name. It came from far enough away that she dared glimpse over her shoulder. Lorres wasn’t following.

  “I’m sorry,” he signed.

  Amara slowed. She shouldn’t. Gacco would’ve alerted the other marshals by now, and probably Ruudde and Jorn, as well. The palace would be crawling with people looking for her.

  “You’re running?” Lorres made no move to approach her. “You said it was bad. I … I didn’t know it was this bad.”

  “Yes. I’m running,” Amara said. This time the words didn’t fill her with fear or uncertainty. Her signs came more decisively as she went on. “I’m running, or they’ll do this to me a hundred more times.”

  “I can’t help you find a way out. You know that. Ruudde considers hiring barenecks a risk as it is. If I don’t do my job well, whoever he hires next might care about the money and nothing else.”

  She hadn’t counted on help, anyway. “Are you going to stop me?” she asked.

  “You must’ve passed servants on the way here. I’ll slow them down.” Lorres stepped sideways, allowing her room to flee past him. “Go. Run.”

  She did.

  She ran through the kitchen and blasted out a door on the other side. At the next intersection, she bent over and wiped a hand down her leg. Her teeth clenched as blood sprayed to the floor. Let them track her here. They’d think she went into one of these hallways.

  Instead, she backtracked to the kitchen. Pans were stacked on one side, metal dishes and pots on the other. She crossed to the wide windows that allowed the cooks to vent the air, and she fingered the locks. They gave with no resistance.

  Steeling herself, she opened the largest window and climbed onto the ledge. She’d done this sort of thing plenty of times when Jorn signaled her to get Cilla out, but never while injured, and never from a building this high. She was two stories up—and two stories for a building with ceilings as high as this meant three stories on any average building. Her eyes squeezed shut at the wind lashing her too-short hair around her head. Her balance suddenly felt frail. She clung to the wall, numb, and forced her eyes to open to slits.

  She breathed deeply. Then she shut the window behind her, careful not to smudge the grease and dirt covering the glass. She hadn’t gotten this far just to let fingerprints give her away.

  Amara inched sideways on the ledge, concentrating on her steps and not the ground below. She passed the main kitchen window and edged past another one. A couple more steps. A little more. The ledge was slimming now, nothing but stones protruding a fingerwidth or three, but there, in front of her: a dirt-layered, web-covered statue of a merman in a niche. Only the front of his face and the tip of his tail stuck past
the wall.

  Amara pushed herself closer—there. She grabbed the merman’s shoulder and reeled herself in, letting her lungs expel air she hadn’t realized they’d been holding. She crept farther into the niche to hide behind the statue. Spiderwebs spread like netting across the merman’s face. Shriveled cocoons clung to every cranny—in the corners of the walls, in the space between the statue’s hair and neck, the dip between his arms.

  Between the height and the recessed niche, she was out of sight while still having a view of the ground below. Carefully, she allowed herself to glance down. Gardens and herb nurseries used to cover this part of the palace grounds, but right now it was deserted, mud and grass and little else. The storms and floods must’ve hit hard.

  Beyond the grounds lay the forest, yellow and red, and beyond that, the dunes and the Gray Sea. On the horizon was a sliver of land. She’d forgotten which island lay so close. Inland, she saw the thin line of the Beedde River and damaged dikes on each side, and more dunes in the distance, and she thought of Cilla—the way she’d shown Amara diggers, the smile on her face so hopeful the memory hurt. The fennel taste of her tongue. Those scratches down her chest, her marred tattoo, and her dark, dead eyes.

  Amara couldn’t abandon her in that cell, not even knowing her own name. She’d already been desperate enough to hurt herself once.

  But Amara didn’t know how to free her, and until Nolan came back, she wasn’t in a position to try. As she waited, pain dripped steadily back in. Her energy faded, the heat in her veins cooling. Below, she saw two marshals pass, scanning the grounds and the perimeter wall. They didn’t notice her. One marshal took a trained wolf into the forest. There had to be enough of Amara’s blood left in Cilla’s cell for it to have her scent; maybe the wind battering her into the wall was the only thing that kept the wolf from smelling her now.