Chapter Twenty-Nine

I grabbed Erik’s arms and pulled him into the shallows where the cold water could wash away the blood. Sand and sediment swirled in the eddies, sloshing up my ankles and the back of my skirts.

He groaned, his blond hair matting, skin flushed. His eyes fluttered beneath their lids.

Shock. He was going into shock. I needed to stabilize him before I handled the arrows.

I pulled off my sweater and stuffed it under his head. In nothing but my undergarment, cold air needled my skin, causing gooseflesh to pebble my arms. Around me, the water ran red. Red like poppies, red like plums.

Red. The color of the sea the day Hans died.

The day Hans died.

Blood.

Red.

Ocean.

Sea.

And I was back, was pressing on Hans’s chest and being hauled away as the sky furled out like a flag, and here is a body, and here is the foam, and here are the flies, their lacy wings quivering. Here are all the big things threatening to spill, and I couldn’t—

I couldn’t—

I couldn’t—

Erik’s breathing had gone ragged, wet sucks in and out. Pale hair, pale lashes, lips that were tinged blue. If I didn’t act fast, this wound would bleed him out, would kill him.

And there, Erik’s friends. Kaspar silent on the strip of pebbled beach, Bo and Signey hurrying down the rocks. Helpless. They were helpless. They didn’t know how to save him.

I did.

You could let him die. The thought prickled dangerously soft, desperately gentle, a blush, a kiss, the brush of a feather.

My hands twitched. The water pulled the hem of my skirts, dragged the sleeves of my sweater, a swirl of cream in the eddies. Blood billowed like smoke.

I could let him die the same way Hans died, could let him bleed out here on the beach until he was nothing but a body and bones. He needed the bleeding staunched, his wounds bandaged. Maybe a compress of honey and yarrow. I could see it in my mind’s eye, the little rocky outcropping where the white plant grew. It called to me like a tree extending its roots…

This is where it is , it said. This is how to save him.

Save him!

I blinked and pushed the thought aside. His friends weren’t doctors. They wouldn’t know if I did any of that. They wouldn’t know if I was helping him or killing him or just letting him die.

My ear throbbed from where it had been nicked. Something wet trickled down the back of my neck. Blood? No. A soft pattering that dappled the water.

Rain.

I should let him die. It was smarter to let him die. Lothgar’s second, the general’s son, the best person at reykr in Volgaard’s army. His loss would be a huge blow, could maybe be leveraged to delay the pending attack, and he was a job—just a job—but…

Why did you give me the map? My question that night at the Rose & Thistle Inn.

The turn of his head. The glint of his eyes, gray, the color of dried heather, of fire ash.

I know what it’s like to be unhappy.

Beneath those words, a deeper current, red like life, like heart: I see you.

Something in me ached.

Icy water rushed over my hands. Rain pattered his face. Erik groaned, his cheek lulling into the river. It caught his hair, spun it gold in the drifts.

I gritted my teeth and hauled his head higher on my sweater.

Stefan would let him die. Hell, anyone would let him die. Anyone who wasn’t a Vold.

“Can you save him?” Kaspar called. His voice seemed small, distant, like he was standing at the end of a tunnel and it was just Erik and me.

So many personal questions.

Do you want me to stop?

I clenched my fists, unclenched them. “I need the white willow and two writing quills. Signey, start a fire. Kaspar, find a pot.”

His friends hurried along the beach. The clank of pans, the scrape of rocks, the strike of steel on flint-stone.

Erik’s eyes fluttered open, a sliver of gray. They met mine and my heart stuttered. Then he let out another groan, and those gray, gray eyes rolled shut.

I uncorked the brandy bottle and doused it over Erik’s wounds.

He tensed and mumbled something, tried to roll over, smoke pouring off him, his body steaming.

“Shh,” I said, smoothing my thumb over his bare skin, the ridge of his spine, the slope of his shoulder, across a rough indent where scar tissue knotted. “Breathe. Just breathe.”

Smoke continued to coil, continued to pour, forming shapes. Whalebones and white waves. A cracked door, dark wood ribbed with iron, golden light spilling out onto the pebble riverbank.

I blinked.

Through the door, a woman, her face all angles carved honey in the candlelight. A tiara sat atop her head. “Then send him back,” she hissed with a flick of her hand. “I can’t have him here.”

The door fell apart, a rush of water, and we were on a beach. Hunks of ice. Black sand. Water lapped my legs like puppy dog tongues.

We needed to get him stable. We needed to get the arrows out. “Hold him down,” I said to Signey and Bo.

A fold, a fall, and there was that doorway again, a yawn of breath, golden light slatting the beach.

Inside, the same woman, the same honey carved features, a green dress instead of a blue, her belly round and swollen.

“Hire a tutor and keep him in your rooms,” someone just beyond the frame said. “Herleif doesn’t visit them, anyway.” A pause. “Ginja, he’s just a boy.”

The woman’s voice dropped to a snarl. Red lips, white teeth. “ This is a boy,” she said, pointing to her belly. “ He is a mistake.”

Erik murmured something, his cheek scraping the pebbles.

I ripped my eyes away from the illusion and stretched out my hand. “Quills.”

Someone dropped two feather pens into my open palm.

The illusion twisted again, and there was the woman sitting at a table.

“Lothgar’s a fool,” she said, high and heady, a little drunk. Her waist was slim, her hair braided into a crown that accentuated the real one fixed atop her head. “If he were smart, he’d train him. Send him with the First Born.” She swilled her glass and nodded, resolute. “We’d be rid of him before Ylír.”

I slid both quills into the wound on Erik’s shoulder.

He hissed. Ice shot from his hands, sharp spears, and suddenly, we were on a frozen lake, the stars and moon reflected in whorls. A fox. A man. A herd of reindeer crossing.

I poked around until both quills’ hollow shafts hooked over the arrow barbs. There. My eyes locked with Signey’s. “You holding him?”

She nodded.

“Good. Whatever he shows you, don’t let go.”

Then, slowly, carefully, I eased the arrow out.

I balanced the bowl of water on the pebble-black beach and pulled my hair back. The blood around my ear had crusted a rough black-brown, trickles of it running down my neck, disappearing into the edge of my undershirt.

Impossible to tell how bad it was.

I doused the corner of a rag with brandy and shoved it against my head. The sting of alcohol made me purse my lips. My ear burned.

The river rushed. Bloody brandy dribbled down my arm as illusions spilled from Erik’s tent. A pen of lambs. A churning sea. Bones and bells. That woman, over and over and over. And there she was doing needlework, a tapestry in her lap. There she was sleeping, her cheek crushed against a velvet pillow. There she was laughing and singing and talking, playing with a kitten and a leaf on a string.

Beside the tent, Bo drew circles in the pebbles and Kaspar fiddled with the bandage around his thigh.

I tore the rag away from my ear and studied my reflection in the bowl of water. Rain dappled the edges.

It was hard to tell, but it seemed like an arrow had torn the outer shell of my ear, leaving it jagged and ugly. I prodded the flap of skin and blinked away tears from the pain. Luckily, my hearing seemed okay. And I could stitch that. Maybe. Worth a try.

I tied my hair into a bun that kept everything away from my ruined ear, reached for the needle and suture thread, and—

The jewelry box dropped into my lap.

Love me, it said. Use me.

“There’s a mirror in that,” Signey said.

What? There was no way she’d just given this to me. But there was her bag, the bast cording loose, and there was the metal chest sitting open beside it. And here was the jewelry box, rosettes and spotted orchids, the hum of it so strong it vibrated my teeth.

“Don’t tell me that bowl of water is working for you,” she added, pulling the bodies of the dead bandits along the riverbank. She took off their shirts, their trousers, and laid them prone in the dirt. We’d killed four in total—the two Erik dispatched and two others.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“Sorry.”

I flipped the lid open and pulled down the tabbed board. There was my face in the mirror, the planes of it starker, bruising purple playing beneath my eyes, in the hollows of my cheekbones, my ear torn and ugly. That would take work. But first…

I returned my attention to the painted linen, the rosettes. Could I ask her what it was? Why it hummed? Could it be that easy?

Signey crossed one of the bandit’s swollen arms, ran her fingers through his hair. “You know, I used to imagine myself killing him.” The words came out of nowhere, and it took me a moment to realize she wasn’t talking about the bandit. “It would have been so easy. But tonight, when he almost died, I—”

She glanced over her shoulder and swallowed. Smoke and grizzled shapes poured from Erik’s tent, the images sloppy from s?ven, bears that looked more like demons, a ropy coil of trees, all falling back into that woman with the dark hair, pretty face, crown.

Signey licked her lips. “Thank you.”

Stiff wind whistled against the basalt rocks, dark shapes of stone towering around us.

“Tell me what this is,” I said, holding up the jewelry box. “It feels—”

Ancient.

Powerful.

Like I never want to let it go.

“Old.”

Signey uncorked the bottle of oil and swiped it over the bandit’s nose, forehead, lips.

Her own lips pressed into a line. “It’s a jewelry box.”

Except it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. I traced one of the pale pink rosettes with my thumb. “It’s not Vold.”

Signey kept even strokes over the bandit’s body. “Sometimes when foreign merchants came, they’d bring gifts, things they hoped would convince us to open our borders to trade.” She moved to the next bandit and repeated the same pattern—nose, forehead, lips. Her gaze kept steady on her hands. “This one’s from the Sanokes.”

I nearly dropped the jewelry box. “What?”

“It came from a merchant who came from the Sanokes.”

“I heard that, but…” I stared at it, the creamy white linen, the heath orchids painted delicately along the side, spotted pinks and purples—the same pinks and purples that grew on winding trails and from crags in the cliff. Maybe I should have made the connection, but…there was no way I would have.

“He called it a Lover’s Box. You write a message, and the box will send it to a reciprocal box for a toll, something you care about.” She plucked the jewelry box—Lover’s Box—out of my hand, flipped the latch with her thumb. “It might take your ability to see the color green or smell rain. It took one man’s memories of his favorite dog, and Erik can’t hear whistling. But they say the lovers who created it would rather live in an empty world than a world without each other.”

“You think it’s magic?” I asked. It couldn’t be magic. The Sanokes didn’t have magic.

She shrugged and went back to the dead bandit. “I think it’s a mirror.”

“You’ve used it?”

“We try not to.”

“Who has the other? Lothgar?”

With an expert crack, she broke the bandit’s chest and eased her knife’s tip into the cavity. A few quick strokes and she held his heart, raw and fatty, in her hand. “Use the mirror as long as you like. Just don’t think too hard about it… It can sense that. And keep your blood off it.”