Magic of Wind and Mist

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  I gasped and dropped my hold on the bars. Isolfr looked at me mournfully. I knew then he’d seen the horror on my face. The recognition.

  “I know,” he said. “Everything’s lost.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Time passed. I didn’t know how much. There was no sense of time in the dungeon, only the slow, wet drip of stone. Time spread out over thousands of years. It was no good to me.

  Only Isolfr and I were locked up. There was no sign of Trystan, even though the guard had said he’d been arrested too. But the guard could have been lying.

  Trystan could have been lying.

  Isolfr and I did not speak. There was nothing to say. He curled up in the corner of his cell, head tucked over his knees, and I paced, trying to decide what to do next. Every now and then I would feel for the magic, to see if the trace of Lord Foxfollow and his vicious magic had vanished. It hadn’t. He had finally found us.

  Eventually, other guards appeared. They brought water and food with them, bowls of beef broth and stale bread, which they slid through the bars in the cell door. They didn’t say anything to us. They wore the same Garrowglass colors as the guards who’d brought us down here and who had watched us walk past on our way to the manor grounds on the day of our arrival. Which had been today? This morning? It seemed a thousand years ago.

  One of the guards sat down in a stone chair in the corner and the other one clanged his way back up the stairs. Isolfr was curled up in a ball in the corner of his cell, tucked into himself like a cat. I imagined he wanted to appear as if he were sleeping. The guard didn’t seem to notice, however, or care. I dragged my broth and bread and water jar close to where I sat on the floor. Sniffed it. I didn’t smell anything.

  “Excuse me,” I called out. “Excuse me, Master—”

  “Ain’t no master,” the guard said, running a cloth over the blade of a narrow knife like the one that had been held to my side. “And my name’s of no interest to you anyway.”

  He sounded bored. I took that as a sign, along with the colors he wore, that he worked for the Garrowglass family directly, and not for Lord Foxfollow. He was not a monster. At least not literally.

  “Is this food poisoned?” I said.

  The guard stopped polishing his knife and looked up at me. For a moment we just stared at each other.

  Then he roared with laughter and picked up his rag and took to polishing his knife again.

  “And if it was,” he said, “would I tell you?”

  My cheeks burned. I looked down at the soup. My stomach felt tight and empty, and my throat was dry. I wanted to eat it. I didn’t know what it would do to me.

  Footsteps echoed down the stairwell. I jerked my head up. The guard didn’t look up from his knife polishing. Shadows flowed over the walls.

  Trystan.

  His hands were bound behind his back, and his hair hung loose from its ponytail. He peered over at Isolfr, still sleeping in his cell, and then over at me. His expression was worn out, exhausted, frightened.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, his eyes burning through mine.

  “Shut up!” the guard shoved him with the butt of his sword. “Don’t talk to the other prisoners.” Trystan and the guard shuffled out of sight. A few seconds later, the clang of a cell door opening and closing and locking ricocheted around the room. Isolfr jerked up at the sound, wide-eyed. The first place he looked was me. My skin sparked. I pointed off to the side, to where they had taken Trystan.

  “Trystan!” Isolfr shouted. The knife-polishing guard looked up from his work and kicked the cell door.

  “Keep your mouth shut, boy.”

  The other guard marched into view. He nodded once at the knife-polishing guard, then disappeared into the stairwell. I slumped down, my hands still on the cell bars. The guard was staying. There was no way to speak with Trystan now.

  I settled on the cold floor. The scent of broth was nearby, wrapping around my senses. Isolfr hadn’t touched his food; but then, he didn’t need to.

  I reached over and grabbed the jar of water. Gave it a good sniff. It smelled metallic, like stone and dirt, but not poisonous. I took a hesitant sip.

  It was as sweet as fruit nectar.

  That was enough for me to forget my fears about poison. I slurped the water down. Then I turned to my food. It sat there, plain and unappetizing. I broke off a hunk of bread and dropped it in the broth.

  I needed to eat. I couldn’t wallow in the darkness of the dungeon. Trystan was here. He had not betrayed us.

  I had to decide what to do.

  • • •

  I woke up with a jolt. At first I had no idea where I was. My body ached all over, and I was still clinging to the fragments of dreams about life on the sea, leaning over the side of a ship as Isolfr bobbed in the water beside me.

  But I wasn’t onboard the Penelope. I wasn’t even in the proper world. I was in the Mists, in a dungeon, and I had slept on the cold stone floor.

  I rolled up to sitting. The guard’s chair was empty, and all but a handful of the torches had burned out. One of the still-burning torches was close to my cell, and so I was bathed in reddish light while Isolfr lurked in shadows, his pale face floating against the darkness.

  “Isolfr,” I whispered, “can you hear me?”

  He answered almost before I had finished my question. “Yes.”

  “How long have the guards been gone?”

  “I can’t say. They left a while ago. No one has replaced them.”

  “And Trystan?”

  “He’s in his cell. Sleeping.”

  We stared at each other through our bars. Water dripped. I could hear myself breathing.

  “We have to do something,” I said.

  Isolfr rubbed his forehead, a shadow passing over his face. “We can’t use magic to escape. You heard the guard—”

  “Maybe it was a bluff.” I pressed myself against the bars, as if I could squeeze myself out and undo all our locks. “We can’t just sit here, though. We have magic! Both of us! There’s got to be something we can do.”

  “I wouldn’t risk trying to escape.” Isolfr wrapped his arms around his chest. “You don’t know what sort of enchantment they have woven through the bars.”

  “I can feel it,” I shot back.

  “It’s Mists magic. You can’t read it.”

  I knew he was right. The magic had a cold, metallic hum to it, and a haziness that made it hard to grasp on to. Yes, I knew it was there, I could feel it interacting with the magic in my veins, I even knew it had at its source Lord Foxfollow, but I didn’t know how to control it. And that’s what skill with magic is. Control.

  “So we won’t try to escape.” I drummed my fingers against the bars, listening to the hollow, empty sound they made, and thought. “But we can do something else. Something smaller.” I felt for the magic again, wishing I could find the south wind’s familiar gusts, but there was only that strange, horrible Mists magic. “Something the prison wouldn’t recognize.”

  An idea struck me then, hard and sharp as an arrow. I jerked my head up and found Isolfr again. He had slunk away from the bars and was leaning up against the wall of his cell, staring down at his feet.

  “The Flames of Natuze,” I said.

  Isolfr tilted his head toward me.

  “It’s magic from our world, so the prison won’t likely recognize it. But it’s not an escape spell, either. It’s just talking, really.”

  Isolfr glanced over at me. His eyes flashed silver in the torchlight.

  “We can tell Kolur and Frida what happened, if nothing else,” I said. “And maybe they can even send help. It’s worth trying, Isolfr. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the morning.” Foxfollow. His name was a threat, a weapon poised in the darkness.

  Isolfr shuffled back over to the bars. “The Flames of Natuze,” he said slowly. “Do you know how to cast the spell?”

  I immediately deflated.

  “No,” I said. “But you do.”

 
; Isolfr fidgeted with the hem of his shirt. “We don’t have fire, anyway,” he said. “We have to have a flame to cast the—”

  “But we do have fire!” I pointed at the torch. “I can grab it—get it over to you—” My words faltered. I could probably grab the torch and snake it into my cell, but the gap of space between me and Isolfr was too vast. The fire would go out before it reached him.

  “I’ll have to cast it,” I said.

  Isolfr stopped his fidgeting and looked up at me with huge shining eyes.

  “You don’t know how,” he said.

  “I realize that! But you can tell me what to do.”

  Isolfr moved closer to the bars. The thin strips of torch flame fluttered across his features.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt,” he said.

  His words struck me the way his kiss had. I blinked, and my cheeks warmed, and for a moment I wasn’t stuck in some filthy dungeon, wearing servant’s clothes and waiting to die.

  But only for a moment.

  “I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

  He hesitated. “If you can get the fire, then I’ll tell you how to do it.” He spoke softly, as soft as a heartbeat. “Take care not to burn yourself.”

  “I won’t.” He reminded me of Kolur then, always giving me advice I didn’t need. I felt a moment of levity at the thought.

  I took a deep breath. The torch flickered off on my left, its flame licking against the stone walls. I squeezed myself up against the side of my cell and slipped my arm through the bars. My forearm fit easily, but my upper arm could barely squeeze through. I closed my eyes and concentrated, willing my arm to shrink. My arms aren’t especially slim, but they are certainly narrower than a man’s. No wonder the Garrowglass dungeon left a torch so close to the cell.

  I jammed my shoulder up against the bars. My arm waved free. I twisted it around at the shoulder, trying to grasp onto the torch. My fingers grazed over the handle. The bars pinched at my skin. I pushed myself a little farther out of the bars, trying to jam my shoulder through the gap. Pain radiated around my collarbone. I ignored it. The torch’s light turned my hand orange. I reached—

  I reached—

  My fingers hooked around the torch’s handle—

  And then I had it. I tightened my grip and jerked the torch up. It slid out of its holder easily, and for a moment, a second between breaths, I was afraid I had dropped it. But I could still feel the heat of the fire on my fist, and I disentangled myself from the bars and pulled the torch through. The flames swirled and snapped around the bars, leaving streaks of black in their wake.

  “I got it,” I said to Isolfr.

  “I see that.” He looked paler than usual. “Now prop it somewhere where you can see the flames burning.”

  I turned around in place. The walls were starting to crumble, and cracks appeared in the stones of my cell. I ran my fingers over the walls, holding the torch aloft so I had the light to see by, until I found a fairly sizable one. I dusted it out and nestled the torch inside.

  It held.

  I whirled around, back to Isolfr.

  “Find the magic on the air,” he said. “It won’t matter what sort—just anything to forge the connection. You must be careful, though. Remember what happened with the dragon. This is a small spell, but the danger is still possible.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.” I didn’t tell him that the memory made me nervous. “What’ll I do with the magic once I’ve got it?”

  “Focus it on the fire,” Isolfr said, “and concentrate on the person you wish to speak to. Think of their face, their voice. Assuming it works the same with Mists magic, the fire will find them. If it doesn’t—” Isolfr’s voice trailed away. “I might be able to pull your mind out from here.”

  “You won’t have to.” I faked confidence I didn’t feel. That was always a risk with magic, wasn’t it? That the transformation could overtake you completely, that your mind would be subsumed. But that was magic in our world. Mists magic was stronger, more unreliable—

  No. I couldn’t think like that.

  Isolfr smiled at me, a smile like a gift of courage. I turned back to the torch. The fire was ordinary. I could smell the burning wood and the heated metal flame guard and the smoke. I took a deep breath.

  And then I closed my eyes.

  I had to find the magic first, but I had to be careful, so that the dungeon wouldn’t be able to tell what I was doing. Hesitantly, I reached out, feeling on the air around me. The magic of the prison pulsed. It was old magic, hazy magic. I sifted through it, trying to find something that would interact the right way with the magic inside of me. But everything was slipping away from my grasp. The magic here was as cold and intangible as water. It was magic intended to keep me locked away, not magic put in place to help me.

  So I reached farther, through the walls of the dungeon, into the kitchens, the basements where they stored wine and dried meats—anything.

  And that’s when I felt it. A spark inside my bloodstream.

  “I’ve got something,” I gasped, and my eyes flew open. The torch flame loomed in front of me. I focused on the white of its center. The hottest part of a fire was its strongest part. It was the most basic knowledge of any sort of flame-magic.

  The spark grew inside of me, wavering out through my bloodstream. Whatever sort of magic it was, it wasn’t terribly strong, but it had a touch of the wind about it. A touch of home. I let it shimmer and grow as I stared at the white of the torch flame and thought about Kolur. He was easier to draw up than Frida, for I’d known him longer, even though I hadn’t known the true him. I thought of him standing at the ship’s wheel, shouting instructions to me as the Penelope rocked over the water. I thought of him speaking to Mama outside his little shack on the beach, his hair rustling in the south wind I’d pulled up to torment them both. I thought of our adventures on the open sea, and in Tulja, and Skalir. Kolur. I thought of Kolur.

  The firelight broadened, stretching out across the wall of my cell. The flames disappeared. Magic radiated off the light, burning my face the way the heat once had. But it was a different kind of burning, a cold sort, like the burning of ice. The magic beckoned me forward. My heart pumped. Fear crawled up my spine. If I did this wrong, Isolfr would have to save me from his cell. His magic would certainly call the attention of the guards—

  The light wavered.

  No. I had to keep thinking of Kolur. I stepped forward. Magic rippled over me. I reached out one hand, trembling, and grazed my fingers across the wall of light. I expected it to burn me but it felt only warm, pleasant, like summer sun. I pulled my fingers away. The tips were stained with light.

  This had to mean it was working.

  I took another step forward. Another. I pressed both hands to the light and pushed. They slid in easily, the light swallowing me up to my wrists. To my elbows. But I couldn’t speak to Kolur with my hands.

  I leaned forward, and pressed my face into the light.

  For a moment, I saw nothing but whiteness, the blinding, brilliant whiteness of the flame’s hot center. And then a shape appeared in the distance. A silhouette of a man, tall and lean.

  “Kolur!” I shouted. My voice was distorted by the magic of the Flames of Natuze. The silhouette turned toward me.

  “Kolur! We were betrayed by Lord Garrowglass. We’ve been thrown in the dungeon and we’ve no way of escape. You’ll have to come through at Jandanvar—”

  The silhouette approached. Shadows rippled and swirled around its feet in a way that did not suggest, remotely, the clothes that Kolur wore. A creeping sick sense of fear rose up in my stomach. Who was I talking to?

  “I’m afraid I’m not Kolur.” The voice was distorted. It faded in and out, manipulated by magic. It didn’t sound like Lord Foxfollow. It was accented in a way that reminded me of Mama.

  “Who are you?” I demanded. “Where’s Kolur?”

  “I don’t know.” The man glided close enough to me that his features materialized out of th
e brightness of the Flames of Natuze. He was handsome, but a scar ran down the side of his face, twisting his expression into a sneer of anger. I jerked back. The Flames rippled around me.

  “I don’t know who Kolur is,” he said.

  I should have pulled away, gone back into the cell. Except the spell had worked. I was enveloped in the Flames of Natuze, and I was speaking to someone through the veils of magic. I just didn’t know who it was.

  “Who are you?” the man asked, but I didn’t answer him, only spun back through the litany of memories I’d revisited while I was casting the spell. My mind had wandered away from Kolur. To home. To Mama.

  “Do you know Maia Euli?” I thought about his accent. “Or Maia of the Na—”

  Even in the blazing light of the flames, I saw the recognition flicker through his eyes.

  “You know her!” I cried. “Maia Euli!”

  “Why? Who’s asking?” His expression grew guarded, careful. He studied me. “What do you want with her?”

  “She’s my mother,” I said.

  The man stared at me. “No,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

  “What’s to believe?” I snapped. “How do you know her?”

  “Maia the pirate?”

  “Yes!” And suddenly, I knew who he was.

  The scar.

  The southerly accent.

  “Are you Naji?” I said.

  The man’s eyes widened. He grabbed the edge of his cloak and twisted it around himself and disappeared in a twist of magic.

  “Wait!” I shouted, that sudden flood of hope stopped short by desperation. “Come back! I need your help! Please!”

  The Flames of Natuze burned around me. I didn’t know if it was possible for me to cry in this in-between place. I didn’t know if my body was really here or not, if my tears could even manifest. But I could feel those tears like hanging weights behind my eyes. I’d come so close to finding help—Naji, the Naji of all Mama’s stories. He had defeated the Mists. He had defeated Lord Foxfollow. And now he had just abandoned me.