Otherbound

by Corinne Duyvis

  The air smelled of dust and blood. Cilla wouldn’t last much longer. He’d lose her like he’d lost Maart.

  That thought did the trick.

  Nolan abandoned Amara’s panic for Cilla’s pain, for blackness, for crunching in his ears, for pressure on every part of his skin. Pushing and breaking and digging in deep. The pain ebbed, flooded back in. At this point, Cilla should have been past the pain. Her nerve endings were destroyed. She was supposed to fade and die.

  Instead, her bones snapped into place, broke again from continued pressure, mended themselves a second time. Cuts healed over. Blood drained from places it shouldn’t be, slipping back into burst vessels that shuddered deeply under her skin. Muscles braided themselves back together.

  Healing would keep Cilla alive, but it wouldn’t make the curse stop coming. Too much blood had already spilled, wet and slick.

  The stones fell away, anyway. Clattered to the floor and mattress. Nolan followed, falling amid rubble as the stones’ grip on him—on Cilla—loosened. He sucked filthy air into punctured, half-healed lungs, dirt clogging up his nose, and knew something was wrong.

  The curse wasn’t supposed to end, not with so much blood spilled, and Cilla healed, yes, but she did it jaggedly, first on one side and then the other. She felt different from Amara in a way beyond the physical. Something pushed at him, nagged at the edges, tried to get between her and him like a fingernail prying at a seam.

  But she was alive. Healing.

  Nolan pushed himself up onto all fours. Cilla’s body was taller than Amara’s, shorter than his, heavier than either of them. His hands on the uneven floor were the deepest brown, his fingers short and broken.

  He hurt. But he’d saved her.

  Using blurred, newly healed eyes, Nolan sought out Amara. He found her across the cell, lying on her back along with Jorn and the marshals. Debris and dust swept a half circle on the floor, blasted outward—Nolan possessing Cilla must’ve knocked them all back. Magic on top of magic on top of magic.

  Jorn was already climbing to his feet. Nolan glanced over, then—wait—he glanced over. He was directing Cilla’s body. He had control. Mixing spells either snuffed out magic or amplified it. But for how long?

  Jorn shouted at the marshals. He supported himself against the wall, his coughing a distant sound through the ringing in Nolan’s ears. Nadi reached the cell and took in the situation without a word. Amara stayed on the floor in a half-sitting position, motionless from her toes to her eyelashes as she stared at Nolan.

  He’d seen her in dirtied mirrors, in glass reflections, in still water. Not like this, solid and footlengths away. Face-to-face.

  Did she see him, too? Did she recognize him?

  Before either of them could talk, the ceiling shook. Nolan’s head snapped up. Stone crumbled and dropped. Something rippled through the walls and floors like rings expanding in the water—like the curse. Jorn backed away. So did the marshals. Another lump of rock fell from the ceiling.

  Cilla healed fast. Crushed ribs snapped back to their normal positions, pulling lungs with them, sucking in air and dust. Nolan pushed himself up, though his movements wobbled. Pain lanced through his legs. He fell again, to his knees and then sideways off the mattress. Cilla’s hands scrambled on the floor, but not because he made them. Was she back in control? He tried to move. Cilla didn’t respond.

  Nolan still felt those fingernails prying at him, though, wedging him loose. He couldn’t let them succeed. Cilla wasn’t done healing.

  More stone fell from the ceiling. Amara stumbled back, her eyes fixed on Cilla. The marshals were shouting. The metal beams of the cell were twisting loose from the walls. The air itself seemed to quiver.

  The anchor, the curse, and Nolan. Too much magic stacked in one body.

  A beam lashed around, knocking over a marshal, slamming into Jorn’s skull. He crumpled. A perfect triangle of dark shone on his temple, the skin scrunched up on one side. As Nolan watched, it uncoiled, spread out, and started to knit itself back together.

  That wasn’t right, Jorn couldn’t heal—

  Nolan’s connection with Cilla snapped loose. Suddenly there were thick bars in his vision, and past them, the back of Amara’s head, her dust-matted hair.

  Pain tore Nolan apart. He looked down, seeing a broken arm and blood on black skin. Ilanne. He’d left Cilla’s body, moving into Ilanne’s, lying outside the cell—

  He snapped free a second time. Pain pulsed through Nolan’s head. Whose body was he in now? A marshal’s? Jorn’s? No, Jorn lay beside him on the floor, no longer healing. The skin on his temple, where the beam had hit, had reattached itself but not yet smoothed over, and the area around the V-shaped cut turned rapidly darker. Jorn blinked slowly. He slurred words Nolan couldn’t make out.

  How was Cilla? Nolan couldn’t see her. A scream distracted him—not the muted shouts from outside the cell block, where the mages were still fighting, and not the marshals as they dove to evade falling stones, but something else, shapeless, unformed. It came from inside the cell. Amara was shouting words she had no tongue to form. She half turned, enough for Nolan to see her claw at her mouth. Her eyes spread, panicked.

  It wasn’t her. Nolan knew in a heartbeat.

  “What’s happening—why am I—” a marshal shouted. She was studying her hands, the fingers curling. No, not her hands. Few people had their own hands left. Every last spell of Cilla’s was tipping sideways. The curse, shredding the walls and agitating the metal; the anchor and Nolan, tearing travelers from their bodies and flinging them into others.

  A cell beam caught Nadi in the hip. She screamed and staggered into the cell. She tried to support herself on the walls, but her injured leg gave way, and she slid to the floor. Maybe she wasn’t Nadi anymore; maybe this was just Ruudde. He stayed down, hand pressed to his hip.

  He wasn’t healing, Nolan realized. It had to be Ruudde.

  Nolan dragged himself to the cell. He had to check on Cilla and Amara. He stepped past Jorn, who was pushing himself to a sitting position against the hallway walls. He stared at his hands. Tears slipped over his cheeks and dangled from the scruff on his chin. He whispered something, nearly lost in the chaos. It had sounded like mine.

  Nolan slowed. Why would Jorn cry? Or look at his hands like that? He was turning them to see his palms, his stare not shocked or confused but awed, and he touched his fingers to his lips, eyes shut, as if savoring the moment.

  Nolan stepped toward him—

  Saw the world from Cilla’s eyes for a flash of a second—

  Then another body pulled him in, this one lying on the cold floor. Nolan pried the body’s eyes open. A turned-over bench lay by his side. His chest ached, but the pain crept away. He raised his arm. The yellow-brown skin of the Jélis. The green-cuffed sleeves of the marshals. He was possessing Gacco.

  Nolan stood. He reached Jorn in two uneven steps, then fell to his knees. “Jorn?” Gacco’s lips moved clumsily. Too thick, too wide, too dry. His teeth felt odd, too.

  Nolan checked the cut on Jorn’s temple. It wasn’t healing. This had to be Jorn. A Jorn who was crying and awestruck instead of angry, instead of protecting Cilla from all this chaos …

  The real Jorn. Maybe for the first time.

  Why had they needed Amara, then? Whatever traveler had controlled Jorn for so long could’ve distracted the curse for Cilla himself.

  A lump formed in Nolan’s throat. He knew the answer. He’d shouted it at Nadi: No traveler wanted to deal with the pain that came with guarding Cilla. The traveler must’ve suppressed the healing all those years, or healed out of sight, wrapping up nonexistent wounds, to keep Cilla and Amara in the dark.

  “Yes,” Jorn said. “Jorn.”

  “Why would—” Nolan cut himself short when Jorn’s head snapped back. His eyes unfocused. The purple started to seep away from the bruise on his temple, the skin knitting up. Within seconds, the healing stopped, and Jorn was himself again.

  “We don’t have long.�
� Nolan marveled at the taste of Dit in his mouth. It wasn’t like reciting sentences at home. Gacco’s body knew the words as well as it knew air. “Who cast the anchor spell?”

  In his peripheral vision, a marshal stumbled toward them. She extended her arms, fingers straining wide as if to summon magic. The marshal wasn’t a mage, though. The air around her hands didn’t shift; the magic didn’t crackle. It told Nolan who controlled that body, though—Nadi, or the traveler who had possessed Jorn for so long.

  And they were trying to attack Nolan. In all this chaos, that, not protecting Cilla, was their goal.

  Nolan knew enough. He whirled back to face Jorn. “You?” he whispered.

  Jorn had cast the anchor spell. They must’ve wanted him close to Cilla in case she fled. He could track her better than anyone.

  Jorn nodded. His eyes looked different. Softer. He swallowed and hesitated in a way the Jorn that Nolan knew hadn’t done in years. “I—I know you have to—”

  To—what?

  Behind Nolan, more stones crashed to the floor. He recoiled, then checked over his shoulder. The possessed guard who’d been coming their way now leaned against the wall. Instead, Amara stalked toward Nolan and Jorn. She picked up Ilanne’s hooked blade and moved determinedly around debris and injured bodies, then dove sideways, avoiding another swing of a cell beam.

  It wasn’t her.

  A crack in the cell’s ceiling loosened more stones. One crashed onto Nolan’s hand and rolled onto the floor. He hissed, but even as his hand healed, he wrapped it around the stone to feel its weight. Heavy. And Nolan’s arm—Gacco’s—was strong. Nothing but lean muscle.

  “Oh,” he whispered.

  “Do it. Fix it.” Jorn’s voice was steady. His eyes weren’t.

  “This isn’t what I meant. This isn’t …” But Nolan’s fingers tightened around the stone, rough and cold against his skin. He felt himself pried loose from Gacco’s body again, but he latched on, begging for a few more seconds. He needed to stay by Jorn’s side just a little longer. Jorn needed to stay himself for just another moment.

  He looked at Amara, footlengths away now. She shouted something.

  Nadi, Nolan thought with odd impassiveness. Something about the way she walked just screamed Nadi at him. He smiled anyway. It was still Amara’s face, her eyes. She still watched him from somewhere in there. He hoped she saw his smile. He hoped she knew what it meant, because he would never have the chance to explain.

  Jorn’s tears welled up again, gathering in his eyelashes.

  Nolan imagined him burning Amara’s hands. Hitting Maart’s grave with the back of his shovel. That made it easier.

  Not fair, but easier.

  Jorn trembled as he spoke. “I don’t want to—I’m—I’m s—”

  Nolan brought the stone down, right on that purple, fragile bruise.

  orn seized and spasmed and then, from one moment to the next, the room’s chaos died down and Amara’s body was her own again. The cell bars froze in place. Amara stumbled. So did a marshal down the hall; so did Gacco, who stared at the stone in his hand, then at the body he was hunched over. He dropped the stone and scrambled back.

  Ruudde—really, truly Ruudde this time—pushed himself to a sitting position. His hands clutched his injured thigh. He looked around the room, blinking, dazed.

  Three spells had been too much to handle. Killing Jorn took out two of them—the anchor spell and, by extension, the travelers’ presence. The room stopped trembling; the stones became stones again. Amara turned. Ilanne’s blade dropped from her hand.

  Cilla stood in the center of the room. She had stopped healing.

  “They’re gone.” Amara was the first to say it, signing carefully.

  She didn’t move again. Neither did anyone else. Ruudde’s eyes shone.

  Cilla’s clothes were drenched in blood, her skin still beaten. Every part of Amara screamed for her to run over and fix it, take the blood before the curse found Cilla, but she didn’t need to.

  The world was silent.

  And as they collided and their arms wrapped around each other and Cilla’s face buried itself in the crook of Amara’s neck, and Amara pressed her cheek against Cilla’s hair, the world stayed that way.

  Ruudde ordered their tattoos removed. Cilla’s ought never to have been there. Amara’s … Amara’s was supposed to stay for years to come. Looking at her reflection to see her neck bare felt like cheating, and every palace servant she passed made her cheeks burn in shame.

  She’d never dared fantasize about this the way Maart had. Now he was gone and she was left, and she almost wanted to say his name so he’d know she remembered him.

  They stayed at the palace for two days to let Cilla recover from her wounds. Ruudde offered to heal her, but Cilla refused. Even with the last traces of her curse removed by the mage who’d cast it in the first place—he’d been on the palace grounds as part of Ilanne’s distraction—she didn’t want any more magic touching her. She requested a Jélisse doctor. Ruudde obliged.

  Amara sat by the side of Cilla’s bed. All the beds in the guest rooms were open, not the alcoves she was used to. Those seemed safer. These seemed freer.

  She remembered waiting in a room just like this, Nolan hovering in the back of her mind. She hoped he was all right. She hoped his family was safe.

  “Are you disappointed?” Amara gestured at Cilla’s sternum, hidden by her topscarf.

  Cilla sat cross-legged on the bed, bruised-black arms propped on her knees, and mused, “Those few days when I got to be the princess in public … part of me enjoyed it. Edo, Olym. People liked me. They finally looked at me like … It was finally real.”

  “I thought as much.”

  “But, no. I’m not disappointed. I was scared to death of having to rule, anyway.”

  “You never showed it.” Absently, Amara ran a finger over the side of her wrist. It’d gotten scratched by accident. Cilla was right: scabs itched.

  “I never wanted you to know. I couldn’t even get Jorn to do what I wanted; I would’ve made a terrible queen. Besides, I would’ve had to find some guy to have children with, and …” Cilla shrugged one shoulder and winced. “It wasn’t not being the princess that made me hurt myself. Yes, it was hard, thinking all my life I’m meant for something so big, so important, then having that snatched away, but it was the rest that screwed me up.”

  She seemed better now. She seemed almost OK. Amara stayed silent, letting Cilla answer the question Amara hadn’t wanted to ask.

  “When I cut myself, I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t know what else to do.” It looked as if Cilla wanted to keep talking, but she shut her mouth and took a few seconds to work up to her next words. They rushed out all at once. “What do you want to do now?”

  Amara remembered what they’d talked about on Captain Olym’s ship. Diggers. Books. Silver. Eligon. Her parents.

  Amara touched her neck, finding only smooth skin. She had gone from having no choices to having too many. What did you do when life wasn’t just choosing the lesser evil? What did you do when you were the only one to decide where to walk, what to say? She didn’t know where to start.

  Cilla hesitated, then added, “Whatever you do—do you want to do it with me?”

  Cilla. That was another choice, wasn’t it? Because right now that girl on the bed was smiling, a hopeful, tiny smile that burst with wanting even as Cilla tried so hard to contain it.

  Amara rested one hand on the bed to push herself up. She brought her lips to Cilla’s.

  This time, the kiss was quieter. Sweeter. When they parted, Amara didn’t want to sit down again. She wanted to stay here, close, where she could feel Cilla’s breath and heat and smiles.

  “You’re not crying this time,” Cilla whispered. “That’s an improvement. Does it mean yes?”

  Amara crawled onto the bed, next to the warmth of Cilla’s legs. “Maybe.” She smiled, feeling oddly calm. “You don’t know me. You knew a servant who had nothing in this wo
rld.”

  She was still a servant and she always would be. That kind of thing settled into your bones and heart and mind. But every day, she’d move a little farther away from it. Become a little less what people had made her and more what she made herself.

  Maybe she needed Cilla to build that person. Or maybe she needed to stay far away.

  “I want to know you.” Cilla touched Amara’s shoulder.

  “Me, too,” Amara said, which was not an answer, but she kept smiling anyway.

  So many choices.

  olan must’ve read the notebooks a hundred times.

  He had a theory: It wasn’t just one traveler who’d possessed Jorn, but all of them. They rotated. Most of the time they reveled in their minister bodies, and one year in every half dozen or so they were on Cilla duty. That was why Jorn went years between drinking and punishments. That was why he’d tell Amara one thing, then another. That was why, two years ago, Nolan’s journals had been filled with Jorn calling Amara kid.

  All these tiny pieces fit together so well and they helped Nolan not one bit, and they helped Jorn, the real Jorn, even less.

  “What did Jorn say?” Nolan said. He stared at the notebook on the kitchen table in front of him. “Before I hit him, he tried to say something. ‘I’m sorry.’ Or ‘I’m scared.’ ‘I’m …’ I don’t know.”

  Pat frowned at him from the living room couch. She slapped the space bar on the laptop to pause whatever movie she was watching. “I don’t either, Nole.”

  “I should know, though.” Nolan paused. “I’m not dreaming about him or anything.” He’d gone from years of notebooks and empty smiles to killing an innocent man. Took a stone and bashed in his skull. He should have nightmares. He should turn away every time he saw a brick, or wallow in guilt, or something.

  He’d spent a lifetime wondering who he was. It couldn’t be this. He wasn’t a killer.

  “Isn’t that good? Not dreaming?” Pat sounded more awkward than anything.

  She’d had nightmares after Nadi possessed her. So why hadn’t Nolan?