by Bree Barton
Quin groaned. “Must you talk about all the delicious foods we do not have? My raw skalt is looking more pitiful by the minute.”
She couldn’t help but smile. When her mother had talked about the river markets, Mia closed her eyes and tried to make the scenes spring to life. She had trouble imagining them. The picture Wynna painted was so different from the sparsely populated markets Mia had gone to as a child, somber affairs with flavorless food and free knife sharpening, where all women were required to have a father, husband, or brother present to ensure all was as it should be. Which was to say: boring.
“Look,” she said. “There’s what’s left of one.”
The boat was skirting the bank of the Natha where one of the old river markets had stood. Wood frames and beams, once draped with canvas tents, were now in shambles. There wasn’t much left: looters had long since combed the flotsam for valuables. Mia did spot a few swatches of soiled linen crushed into the earth and stamped with muddy boot prints. It seemed impossible this empty space had ever held anything vibrant or alive.
“My father has made a royal mess of things,” Quin said quietly. “In his efforts to restore the rich heritage of the river kingdom, he has stanched the flow of everything that might have made it rich. He promised a return to greatness and then stripped Glas Ddir of all the tastes and colors and cultures that made us great.”
The sunlight shifted, shining on a copper scrap tucked amidst the ruins. Mia thought of Domeniq’s mother, who had sold iron and copper cookware at the river markets before all female merchants were banned. Lauriel du Zol was a big woman, in both stature and heart, with ample flesh and a lush waterfall of tight black curls. Laughter came easily to her.
Lauriel was also Wynna’s best friend. She had moved her young family to the river kingdom from Fojo, following Mia’s parents back to their homeland. Soon after, King Ronan sealed the borders, trapping them there. The du Zols found a cottage in Ilwysion, and Mia and Dom grew up together, thick as thieves. She could still picture their mothers on the balcony of the Roses’ cottage, reminiscing about life in Fojo in hushed tones, the quiet murmur of their voices punctuated every few minutes by Lauriel’s hearty belly laugh.
Mia missed that life. She had lost it all so quickly: Dom’s father murdered by Gwyrach, then Mia’s mother killed within a matter of days. Lauriel and the twins—Domeniq’s nine-year-old sisters, Sach’a and Junay—left the river kingdom overnight, slipping through some secret channel back into the fire kingdom. Dom chose to stay behind to train with the Circle.
“May I ask what you’re thinking about?” Quin asked.
“The river markets. Everything we’ve lost.”
In fact she was thinking of Domeniq standing over the dead men in the glade. What would his mother say if she had seen him kill two men? Lauriel was skilled with her hands, too, but she used them to meld cookware out of iron and copper, not lance a man’s heart with a dagger.
“Where did you live?” Quin said. “Before you came to the Kaer.”
Mia’s thoughts had spiraled into a dark place; she was grateful for the interruption. She pointed toward a snow-frosted peak in the distance. “Our cottage was halfway up that mountain.”
“Did it get cold in the winter?”
“Miserably. We had to wear three layers of socks just to get out of bed. But I always liked the snow. My sister didn’t.” She paused, savoring a childhood memory. “Once I lured her outside by promising to make her fifty angels in the snow. A host of Angels for Angelyne.”
“Did you keep your promise?”
“Absolutely not. I’d lost all sensation in my toes after Angel number nine.”
Quin looked amused. He took a deep breath and sighed it out. “The air is so clean here. All these tall oaks and elms. It must have been nice to be lulled to sleep by the whisper of wind in the trees.”
He wasn’t wrong: she’d been happy as a child. But once her mother died, the things Mia loved seemed smaller. The cottage felt shrunken and suffocating. Her father had assured her she was not in danger, but it was impossible to feel safe.
She darkened. She’d spent three years hunting Gwyrach. Did that mean she’d been hunting herself all along?
“All my life I’ve wanted to leave the Kaer and the village beyond it.” Quin shook out his curls. “It took nearly getting killed for me to do it.”
She was surprised. “Why would you want to leave?”
“Didn’t you?”
“That’s different. Kaer Killian is your home. You belong there.”
“The place you were born is not always the place you belong.”
A squall of homesickness blew over her. Her mother had always been home for her, a calm, soothing presence. Mia winced, remembering the atrocious things she’d said to her the day she died, the grief writ large in Wynna’s hazel eyes. A cruel trick of memory, the way certain words snaked constantly through Mia’s mind, a serpent coiled and ready. Her mother’s eyes were two giant canvases of feeling, ever-changing portraits of spark and shadow, but by that night, they were two black holes gone dark forever.
Mia had been fighting off the memory for three years, and once again she forced it away. How could you feel homesick when you no longer had a home?
“I owe you an apology,” Quin said.
She raised one brow. “An apology for what?”
“I had to repurpose your wedding gown as a fishing line.”
He nodded toward the line trawling on the boat’s port side. She recognized the tangle of white silk on the floor of the coracle, no longer quite so white. By some small miracle, Quin had managed to slip the dress out from under Mia’s head while she was sleeping, slice off strips with his sheath knife, and knot them together into one long rope.
He poked at his bridegroom jacket, now missing a few more gold buttons. “Did you know fish love shiny things? When you don’t have a lure, a bright button works brilliantly as bait.”
Mia hardly heard him. All her thoughts had boiled down to one: the journal.
Her mother’s book was gone.
Chapter 19
Too Lovely
“ARE YOU LOOKING FOR this?”
Quin held up the soft brown book, the fojuen wren still fitted into the clasp. Her relief was palpable as she snatched it from his hand.
“You shouldn’t have taken—”
“It’s blank, Mia.”
She could feel his eyes on her, watching. She shouldn’t be keeping the key with the journal; that was careless. From now on she’d keep the ruby wren tucked into the neckline of her blouse, close to her heart at all times. Not that Quin couldn’t rip open the book if he wanted to. It was leather and paper, nothing more.
Mia twisted the stone and the pages fluttered open. The book was most certainly not blank. Her mother’s inscription and the map were still intact, and in fact the ink extended a touch farther; she saw the beginnings of the Twisted Forest, the Natha River winding up into the braided trees. She felt a strong tug to the east, as if her mother were pulling the boat gently toward Fojo Karação, dangling the bait of safe haven. Mia knew in her bones they were headed in the right direction.
In her Gwyrach bones. A firestorm of anger tore through her. She was hunting the Gwyrach who killed her mother, yet she was a Gwyrach. She couldn’t hold the two things in her head. Every time she remembered she had magic, it decimated her; she oscillated from numb gray disbelief to scorching white fury. She hated that this was happening to her. It wasn’t fair.
“It’s your mother’s, isn’t it?” He hooked one arm around the oar and folded the other over his chest, studying her. “You called out for her in your sleep. You kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry.’”
She wasn’t surprised she’d apologized in her sleep; she had spent every day of the last three years apologizing silently for the awful things she’d said. But there was an edge to Quin’s words she didn’t understand.
“I don’t trust your father,” he said, apropos of nothing. �
��Neither does my father, for what it’s worth. There has been a remarkable shortage of Gwyrach caught in recent years, though they seem to be reproducing beyond the walls of the Kaer just fine.”
The conversation she’d overheard in the drawing room came rushing back. She weighed the benefits of telling the prince she had been eavesdropping, but that was a delicate confession. She decided to bite her tongue.
“My father has been an invaluable resource to the crown. If not for him, the kingdom would be crawling with Gwyrach.”
“The kingdom is crawling with Gwyrach. Yet another reason I don’t trust the Hunters. The Circle has turned against us—and against each other, as we’ve seen.”
She felt suddenly protective. “Domeniq du Zol is the only reason we’re here right now. He saved our lives.”
“By taking two others.”
“Sometimes that’s how it works. Heart for a heart, life for a life.”
“For someone so obsessed with justice,” he said, “you sure do have a funny way of doing math.”
Irritated, she held out her hand. “Oar.”
He stood, gave a sardonic bow, and slapped the oar into her waiting palm.
“The lady wins.”
As she passed him, his shoulder brushed against hers, and for a second, the boat tipped, uneasy from the weight of their two bodies. The coldness pouring off him was stippled with little sparks of warmth.
Then it was gone. He jerked away and leaned over the edge of the boat to twang the fishing line. Of course he didn’t want to touch her—she had the power to take his life. But she’d also saved his life. Did he really think she was going to hurt him? What more did she have to do to prove her good intentions?
She’ll kill him soon enough, Lyman had said. That’s what they do.
No. They wouldn’t. She wouldn’t. She wasn’t that kind of girl.
Mia revised. Wasn’t that kind of Gwyrach.
When she put it that way, it sounded so ridiculous she almost laughed.
While a glowering Quin busied himself with the fishing line, Mia got to work. It was time to subject the journal to a series of experiments. She could see the writing and the prince couldn’t: that much was clear. But how was the book doling out ink at its leisure? What made it tick?
She’d spent the last three years subjecting magic to careful scrutiny, treating it like she would a scientific theorem. Yes, magic was magic, but it also existed in the natural world: surely magic subscribed to its own set of laws. If she could crack the code and delineate those rules, maybe she could understand it, and if she could understand it, she could master it. For Mia mastery meant precisely one thing: a road to eradicating magic.
The book was as good a place as any to start.
She had several theories. A Gwyrach had clearly found a way to bewitch the book through some kind of mysterious ink-dispensing device. Was it magnetic? Did an internal lodestone siphon ink from a secret compartment in the book’s spine? Or was it mechanical, a widget or a compass that activated the ink reserves?
Mia angled her body away from Quin. She was subtle, tilting the journal in all four cardinal directions to see if the ink revealed itself. It did not. She tapped the book gently against the boat’s edge, in the hopes that she could dislodge the widget and shunt more ink onto the page. No luck.
She knew nothing. She hated not knowing. Her only grounded theory was that Gwyrach could see the ink and non-Gwyrach couldn’t, though her sample size—herself and the prince—was woefully small.
And her mother, of course. An uneasy truth slithered through her thoughts. How could her mother write in Gwyrach ink unless she were a Gwyrach herself?
Quin let out an exaggerated sigh. “If you’re following something you think you see in that book, then we truly are on a path to nowhere.”
“Oh? And where would you have us go?”
He shifted in the boat but said nothing.
“Good, then. Lucky for you, I’ve always been good with maps.”
“To be good with maps,” he muttered, “one must actually have a map.”
She shot him a withering glance. But he was right and she knew it. She was letting herself be tossed on an unpredictable tempest, biding her time until the magical map deigned to reveal the path to “safe haven.” Mia Morwynna Rose was a rational thinker, a scientist, a Huntress—and apparently a lost little girl, twiddling her thumbs as she waited for invisible ink to appear.
Safe haven. What did that even mean? For a Gwyrach, nowhere was safe.
The rage was inching back into her sternum, a coil of crimson fire. Why was she so angry? And at whom? She didn’t understand why her body now vacillated between extreme temperatures. In the lists of crimes committed by Gwyrach, she’d read about how they could conjure up diseases of the flesh that began with icy-cold sensations, followed by sharp, burning pain, then vesicles on the skin, topped off with putrescent limbs that eventually dropped off the body completely. She shut her eyes, not wanting to believe it. Magic really was an infection. For all she knew, her own magic was eating her alive.
How much farther to the Twisted Forest? The trees were beginning to slope to the east, a pinch of winter in the air. In light of her failure with the journal, she comforted herself that they were headed toward answers. No. Toward justice. Heart for a heart, life for a life.
“I didn’t mean to be cruel,” said the prince. He was more mercurial than the waters flowing beneath them. “I told you as long as we were headed in the opposite direction of the Kaer, I wouldn’t complain. And I meant it.”
She nodded. “Good. You needn’t worry; I’m taking us somewhere safe.”
He was watching her again. If he were aiming to unnerve her, two could play at that game. Her eyes scraped over his face, looking for flaws. What she found instead were long lashes, piercing green eyes, sharp cheekbones, a slightly upturned nose, bowed lips, a fine collarbone, sloping biceps, and the smooth plane of a chest tapering into lean stomach muscles. His shirt was gaping at the waist; she could see the top of his hip bones cutting a sharp V, like a bird taking flight.
She felt a flutter in her belly. Butterfly or dove, she didn’t wait to see—she reached inside and strangled it.
They were silent a long time, day sinking slowly into night. The sunlight on the water was golden, then salmon pink, then dusky as the moon put on a white veil and walked the sable sky.
When the boat ran aground, Mia wasn’t expecting it. The jolt wrenched the oar from her fingers, and she tumbled forward. Her arms were sore and swollen, her hands so numb she could no longer feel them. Quin caught her before she pitched over the side, his hands firm around the curved mounds of her shoulders.
“You should eat more skalt,” he said, though she sensed he’d been about to say something else. Then he pulled his hands back sharply. For a moment he had forgotten the dangers of being skin to skin.
Mia stepped shakily onto the shore, willing her river legs steady. She stared up at the forest. The Natha dead-ended into a small cove where the Sunbeam’s bow was lodged on a bank of cracked gray rocks.
The prince massaged his neck. “I guess this is where the river ends.”
But the river had not, in fact, ended. Above them was a sight that defied logic: the Natha burbled upward over the cascading boulders in an inverted waterfall. As she stared in awe, Mia realized she had never truly believed this place existed. But here was the proof, incontrovertible. Water running up instead of down.
She felt disquieted, curious, and—against all reason—hungry.
“Four hells,” the prince murmured. “Would you look at that.”
In the woods beyond, the crooked swyn trees clung to one another, swathed in a canopy of sultry blue.
The Twisted Forest beckoned, too lovely to be believed.
Chapter 20
Awful Bloody Work
THE NATHA FLOWED UP the mountain, more stream than river, forcing Mia and Quin to abandon the boat. They cut a path through Foraois Swyn, an apricot moon
slipping long, eerie shadows between the braided trees.
The Twisted Forest was one of the great mysteries of Glas Ddir. The white-barked swyn trees leaned uniformly toward Fojo Karação in the east. The base of their trunks grew horizontally, flush with the ground, forming an easy, low seat. But after a few feet, the trunks shot up sharply at a right angle, like the elbow of an arm reaching toward the sun.
After that, the trees became even more interesting. Twenty feet off the forest floor, the swyn began entwining with other swyn—at least two or three at a time, often more. Creamy white branches twisted themselves around one another like broken fingers, their velvety blue needles forming a thick canopy overhead.
Since girls were not allowed in Foraois Swyn, Mia had never seen the trees before. But her mother, a lifelong lover of all kinds of trees, had drawn pictures for her daughters. “Lonely trees,” Angie would say, tracing the braided limbs. Mia had always thought the opposite. No swyn ever grew alone.
The distinctive shape—the elbow bend and the braiding—had earned the Twisted Forest its nickname, and endless conjecture about why the trees grew in such a way. There were scientific hypotheses: ancient farmers had manipulated the young saplings for timber, or the trees were responding to some kind of magnetic shift in the Earth’s core. But Glasddirans were by nature a suspicious lot, and most suspected magic. The demons of old were an excellent scapegoat. In the river kingdom, demons were blamed for everything.
Mia had always laughed at such ludicrous notions. Now, as she padded quietly along the soft bed of blue needles carpeting the forest floor, she wondered. What if these superstitions bore the seeds of truth, and the trees themselves once held magic? Did that make them wicked?
“As I contemplate who wants me dead,” Quin said, “I keep thinking about the rules of succession.”
“And?”
“If something happens to me, the throne would go to my cousin. Which seems fitting, considering Tristan is the son my father never had.”
