Chapter Eighteen

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T he river was in my eyes. It filled my mouth and flooded my nose. It was everywhere, sending me spinning and tumbling until I wasn't sure which way was up.

When I was a child, I'd spent most of my summers at Agnes's family home on the coast. I was no stranger to swimming in strong currents, but the repulsion spell had left me weak as a kitten. The river cared not which way I moved my limbs, and every time I broke the surface it plunged me back underwater just as quickly.

My lungs began to ache.

Just when I was certain that, this time, I would not reach air before my breath gave out, I collided with something solid. Something that reached out to grasp my arm.

I flailed, certain I was about to be eaten by a river monster, before realizing it was only Grimm. The current had thrown us back together. He pulled us to the surface, and together we inched toward the river's edge, finding one rock to cling to, then another. Finally, a bend in the river slowed the water enough that we could haul ourselves dripping onto the bank.

The earth there was muddy, but I collapsed onto it, uncaring. I wanted to fall asleep in the muck and never move again.

"We need to keep going," Grimm said.

I let out a muffled groan of protest, but he was right. We had come out on the other side of the river but were still in full view of the opposite bank. I was certain a crossbow bolt could make the leap, and I had no desire to be shot again. The wound on my arm already hurt enough. I wrapped my tattered coat sleeve around it, so I would not leave behind a trail of blood.

Grimm led the way through the trees while I did my best to walk without stumbling. It wasn't just my arm that hurt; my whole body felt bruised and my throat ached from the spellsong. When Grimm finally steered us toward the weeping branches of a tree, I crawled beneath the leaves and curled up on the roots there as though they were a feather bed. My eyes were already closed when I heard Grimm say, "Loveage, the protective bubble…"

I opened my eyes. Grimm sat across from me, hunched so that his head didn't brush the low branches of our shelter. In the dim light, I saw the mangled remains of a bubble spell in his hand, ink seeping from the sodden mass of paper.

Sorcerers' coats were made to resist water, but being plunged into a raging river was apparently beyond their capabilities. When I checked my own pockets, I found the paper there in a similar state—just sopping clumps of mush. I stared at the mess blankly for a moment before brushing it off my fingers and beginning to pick at the knot in my sash holding my violin case strapped to my back. It had stayed in place in the river, which was more than could be said of my bag, but the water had made the knot grow tighter and my fingers were shaking. Eventually, Grimm made an impatient sound and brushed my hands away to untie the knot himself.

Once it was undone and the case lay before me, I opened the lid slowly, afraid of what I would find. The case had been a gift from my brother several years ago, and he must have spent a pretty penny because the enchantments on it had held stronger than those on my coat. The inside was bone-dry, and my violin unharmed. I dug into the compartment where I kept rosin and spare strings and found a piece of paper. Only one, but that was a worry for later. The inkwell in my pocket was slightly diluted but still plenty dark enough to scratch out the words in the old language. It hurt to write, but everything hurt, so I didn't think much of it until Grimm said, "You're bleeding," and gestured to my arm.

The bolt had torn through the flesh of my forearm in an ugly line. In my muddled state, the first concern that floated to the top of my mind was That will make playing uncomfortable .

"It will keep," I said, and set about finding a better position to hold my arm in so I could finish scriving. Once the bubble spell was written, I shoved it in Grimm's direction and fell promptly asleep.

It was not a restful sleep, more like a drifting of consciousness. I had bitten off more than I could chew with the repulsion charm, and this was the result: tiredness that winnowed into my bones to such a degree that even the remedy was not an escape.

I came back to myself with a start when Grimm shook my shoulder and informed me sternly that he would not be carrying me back to Miendor if I fell ill from ignoring my wound.

The first aid spells we had prepared were nothing but pulp, but I used water from Grimm's canteen to wash the gash out as best I could. My bag had had bandages in it, but those were lost to the river. Grimm had one blanket that he'd taken out of his bag and hung over a tree branch to dry, but I didn't fancy ripping up our only source of heat, so I reached for my sash instead. It was already ruined and had dried while I slept.

"At least it will match if I bleed through," I quipped, wrapping the scarlet fabric around my arm. It was awkward to do one-handed, unraveling even as I worked.

Grimm watched me struggle for a moment, then held out a hand. "Let me, please," he said crisply, the please at the end tacked on just in time to avoid becoming an order. I held out my arm and let him work.

Grimm wrapped the makeshift bandage round and round with gentle fingers, before tucking the ragged ends of the sash away. It was neatly done—Grimm was always careful, so careful, with everything he touched. The only surprise was that such care would extend to me.

It was not our usual way of interacting. I sat very still once it was done, oddly warm despite the gooseflesh covering my arms, wondering if I should thank him. Before I could, Grimm ruined the gesture by saying, "You shouldn't have cast that spell. It was foolish of you."

Any trace of goodwill I felt immediately vanished.

"I think a little gratitude is in order," I said, pulling my arm back. "Since you were the one they were about to bespell. Or would you rather I had just stood there and let it happen?"

Grimm tilted his head to one side in a doubtful manner, as though questioning whether being vaulted into a river really counted as being rescued.

"It got us away at least," I added sulkily.

"At what cost?" Grimm reached out again, as though now that he had touched me without violence once, it was easier to keep doing so. I watched, bemused, as he lifted my hand and held it out to catch the fading light, too distracted by the contact to question the reason for it. His fingers were warm.

"Your nail, Loveage," Grimm prompted, when he saw me blinking at him, and I quickly redirected my focus toward my hand instead of the person holding it.

One of my thumbnails was partially black.

I shook free of Grimm to inspect it more closely. The white half-moon that normally lived at the base of my nail had been replaced by a rising darkness. It looked for all the world like I'd hit myself there with a hammer. It was possible I had bashed my hand against something in the river, but I didn't really think that was the case.

Grimm clearly didn't think so either.

"You're lucky the magic didn't demand more of you," he said. "It's a mistake to underestimate the price of casting. The consequences of doing so are dire."

"I wouldn't call this dire," I said. The nail would likely grow out. Even if it didn't, one blackened nail seemed a fair exchange for getting away with our lives. I was still very much clinging to the idea that what I had done had been right and necessary, and not simply the result of a moment of sheer panic. And over Grimm, of all people.

Grimm's frown deepened. "Loveage—"

"Enough. I'm not in the mood for a lecture on how magic should or should not be used, and by whom. This was a one-off, and I feel poorly enough to have learned my lesson." My muscles felt like someone had stretched and wrung them out, and my voice was rough from where the spell had singed my throat. "You casters are lucky," I grumbled, "not having to worry about what you can afford."

"We do," Grimm said unexpectedly. "Though only when casting exceptionally powerful spells, or when we're young enough not to have learned how to channel it yet."

I looked at him curiously. I'd heard of plenty of scrivers who hadn't learned how to use their gift from birth (our skills usually developed later in childhood, after learning to speak and write in the old language), but casters were much easier to spot. All you had to do was hand your child a simple spell and see if they could cast it. Unlike scrivers, they didn't need to understand the meaning and cadence of the words, so long as they could sound them out.

But that might not have been possible for Grimm, I realized. Oh, he could read perfectly well now , as he'd reminded me on several occasions, but not without effort. It was very possible that it had been even more difficult for him as a child, and you couldn't cast a spell when the words were lost to you.

"Did something like this happen to you?" I asked, waggling my thumb.

Grimm looked at me, expression unreadable. "Yes."

"How?"

"I made a mistake."

It was shocking to hear it stated like that, so simply. I made a mistake , as though that was something that could just be admitted to. The concept was so startling that I had to press down hard on my ruined nail. The pain grounded me enough to focus on what he said next.

"When I was young," Grimm continued, "no one thought I had enough talent to be worth training. Then, the year I turned eleven, Dwull experienced a drought. The Coterie was occupied on the northern border that year. Rock giants, you remember?" I nodded, even though I didn't, really. Rock giants would not have been remarkable enough to penetrate the miserable blur of my own eleventh year. "The Citadel sent along weather spells for us to cast until someone from the Coterie could be spared, but no one in Dwull was powerful enough to call anything more than a few clouds."

My mouth twitched. "Let me guess, no one was powerful enough until you tried."

Grimm nodded. "I'd heard my mother reciting the spell often enough that I was certain of the words. I took one of the spells out into the field and cast it. And it began to rain."

I was hard-pressed not to roll my eyes. "That makes for a good story, but I don't see how you causing Dwull to bloom again can be called a mistake." If anything, the tale seemed designed to celebrate Grimm's origins. Didn't you hear? The first spell he ever cast saved an entire province.

Grimm shook his head, frustrated. "You don't understand. It didn't stop. I had the power, but not the skill to protect myself, or anyone else. I poured too much of myself into the spell and then I woke up a week later with my hair turned gray and it was still raining . The fields flooded and crops were lost just as they would have been from drought. Streams overflowed into people's homes. Even when the rain stopped everywhere else, a patch of it kept going over the place I was standing when I cast the spell. It's a pond now. I didn't pay attention to what cost the magic demanded, and the result was devastating."

It came back to me now, how Grimm had been set apart from the people who had gathered in his family home for the harvest. I'd thought it was awe that kept them at a distance, but perhaps it had been fear. Or resentment.

"What happened afterward?" I asked.

"The Coterie sent someone to reassess my abilities, since I could clearly cast. Phade was the one who came. They arranged for a scholarship that allowed me to study with a tutor in the city until I was old enough to begin at the Fount."

I could not imagine willingly leaving my home at that age in order to give myself over to such cold custody, but it wasn't difficult to picture a tinier, equally serious version of Grimm, dutifully studying. He'd likely had exactly the kind of tutor I'd always done my best to drive away. Maybe even one of the very same. It did help explain why Grimm always acted like there was someone constantly hovering over his shoulder, ready to rap his knuckles if he so much as thought of breaking a rule.

"I know you think I'm… unyielding," Grimm said, "but magic has guidelines for a reason. It is not always worth testing the limits of what you can do."

"Don't you think I know that?" I snapped. "Why else do you suppose I avoid Grandmagic? Anyway, the only one hurt was me, so I don't see why you're worried. A blackened nail is nothing to fuss over."

Grimm looked rather pointedly at my bandaged arm but let the subject drop before it could turn into a true argument.

It was fully dark by then, so we prepared for sleep as best we could. There was only the one (still slightly damp) blanket, and even huddling back-to-back, it wasn't quite enough to cover both of us fully. Added to the discomfort of the too-small blanket and the hard ground was the knobby line of Grimm's spine, pressing into my own back, warm and too close.

To distract from the awkwardness, I pointed up at the ceiling of the bubble, to where a large moth was throwing itself at the faintly iridescent barrier.

"Are moths carnivorous?" The thing was nearly the size of my own head, and it was batting its dusty wings with a worrying degree of determination.

"I don't think they have teeth," Grimm said, but he didn't sound certain.

The muffled thump, thump of the moth and the steady ache of my arm kept sleep at bay. I wished Grimm's canteen was filled with something other than water so I could dull the sharp edges of my thoughts.

"Have you ever slept under the stars before, Grimm?" I asked.

"Can't see any stars."

"You know what I meant."

He was quiet for a long while. Then, just when I was sure he'd decided to ignore me and feign sleep, he said, "In summer, when it was very hot, we sometimes slept out in the courtyard."

"Oh."

"Not all houses are built with magic in their bones," he added stiffly.

It hadn't been confusion that dried up my words, but memory.

"We did the same when I was small," I said.

On heavy summer nights, my mother had laid pallets in the stone courtyard so we could taste the faint breeze as it moved through the trees. It was such a long time ago that I'd nearly forgotten. My father's manor was built with just the sorts of spells that Grimm referred to, keeping it blissfully cool in summer and holding heat from the fires in winter. And yet I was never as comfortable there as I had been in my childhood home.

"Grimm," I said a while later, mind whirling with the prickling unease that so often accompanied my memories.

"What?" He was obviously closer to sleep than I was. His voice was rough with it. Maybe that's what made it easier for me to ask.

"Were you afraid to cast again, after?"

I felt the movement as Grimm turned his head slightly to look over his shoulder at me. "Phade said mistakes could be educational. If I chose to run from mine rather than choosing to improve, it would have felt like I was ignoring the lesson. I didn't want to do that. What would have been the point of it all?"

It didn't take long after that for Grimm to fall asleep. I lay awake as his breath grew even and deep, hating him a little for how easy he made it seem.

Everything always looks better in daylight was something Rainer used to whisper after waking me from my nightmares. These words had soothed me as a child, but now I knew them for what they were: a lie.

In the weak light of morning, we were still lost in the middle of the Unquiet Wood with no guide and no paper with which to replace our spells. My arm felt worse than it had the previous night, and the same persistent, furry dragonflies that had followed us since stepping into the forest hovered outside the barrier, waiting.

At least the moth was gone.

"Do you think you could compose a spellsong that would help us?" Grimm asked as we were preparing to leave the bubble.

I'd already spent time thinking about this. "Maybe, but I'm just as incapable of using Grandmagic in a song as I am putting it to paper. That means no more protective barriers, no more repulsion spells, and certainly nothing that will protect us from monsters."

Grimm let out a heavy breath but seemed to have expected this answer. "Limited resources are better than none."

"Actually," I said casually, "there is one spellsong I thought we could try."

"What's that?"

"I want to send a message. To the sorcerer."

Grimm paused in folding the blanket. "Messages don't work. The only people who say differently are charlatans on street corners trying to sell you something. Besides, if they did work, Agnes is the one we should be messaging, not some made-up sorcerer."

It was true that message spells were incredibly unreliable. Magic had a way of rearranging the letters of whatever you tried to send, as though it resented any words and paper not given to it to be eaten. But—

"This wouldn't be an ordinary message!" I'd given the matter a great deal of thought the night before when I should have been sleeping. "It's a song, not a letter. We can hide the meaning of our message in the words of the spell and then the recipient would only have to listen and translate that, rather than unscrambling a jumble of letters. And Jayne said the sorcerer is real, she just didn't know how to find her."

"Oh, well, if Jayne says it, it must be true," Grimm said, with what I thought was an unnecessary amount of sarcasm.

"Consider this a test," I said. "We've only cast one spellsong together before, and I'm not entirely convinced that wasn't just luck. Wouldn't it be better to know if we can get another to work before we set off?"

Appealing to Grimm's sensible nature was apparently the right approach.

"Fine," he said brusquely. "But we'll have to be quick. We have a lot of ground to cover today."

I'd already composed most of the song in my head the night before, careful to keep it within the bounds of a charm. Just as I'd feared, the hardest part of bringing it to life was playing with my injured arm. I tried to ignore the pain in favor of crafting a melody to catch the sorcerer's attention. I didn't just want to find her, I wanted to impress her. Entice her with something so unusual that she would seek us out, so that I didn't have to leave the forest with my figurative tail between my legs and the curse still round my neck like a yoke.

We only had to run through the song twice before it sounded close to what I'd imagined in my head, each word in the old language ringing with power un-cast.

"Do you want me to accompany you?" It wasn't strictly necessary. I could have rested my arm and let Grimm sing alone and the spell would have worked or failed just the same; it wasn't as though he needed my help. But the truth was I wanted to feel a part of the casting, not just privy to it. I wanted another taste of what had happened with the sunflowers, when my playing and Grimm's voice had combined in unexpected harmony.

"All right," Grimm said, so I pushed the sharp aching of my arm aside and raised my bow again.

I really had worried our experience in the field was a fluke, not to be repeated, but if anything, the spell flowed even more easily this time. Magic thrummed through the air as soon as Grimm began to sing, voice turning richer with the casting. After a moment he tilted his head back and shut his eyes in concentration, face stripped of self-consciousness as all his focus bent on performing the intricacies of the spell. The crinkle of Grimm's brow said that this was a challenge, but the way his voice soared said that it was a worthy one. And wasn't that a heady feeling—knowing something I had created, however simple, was deserving of that kind of power.

Grimm opened his eyes to look at me, and I grinned fiercely back. Amazingly, the corners of his own lips lifted in a small half smile. This was unheard of. I had earned more scowls than I could count, but never a smile. The expression transformed Grimm's face into something I hardly recognized. With my words on his tongue, and the hum of the spellsong hanging thick in the air between us, I nearly found him beautiful.

I recoiled from the thought as soon as I had it. This was Grimm, after all—cold as winter and bitter as a lemon. It was only the spell we were casting that caused his eyes to be briefly clear of enmity, and for me to feel some sort of way about it.

I threw all my attention back to the spell: how it made my fingers tingle where they touched the strings; how sweet each note sounded; how it felt like I was part of the casting, even though I had given nothing to it. Nothing arcane, at least, just ordinary music. When we finally brought the spell to a close, the air inside our bubble hummed for a moment even after Grimm stopped singing. The sensation was like a pre-shiver or an almost-yawn, something about to take hold. Then Grimm spoke and the feeling vanished before I could give it a name.

"Did it work?" he asked.

I lowered my violin and busied myself with putting it away, grateful to have something to do with my hands, which were slightly unsteady. "How should I know?"

"You said this was a test!"

"Yes, but I'm not the intended audience of the message. I guess we'll know it worked if the sorcerer shows up to save us."

Grimm's eyebrows drew together. "You're—"

"Ingenious? Yes, I'm aware. But there's really no time to dwell on it; we have a lot of ground to cover today. Do hurry up, Grimm!"

I expected this to elicit a full-on scowl, but instead, when I glanced at him, the expression on Grimm's face was one I'd never seen before. A sort of wondrous horror lit up his eyes. He raised a hand and pointed at something over my shoulder. "Loveage," he said, voice hushed.

Turning my head, I discovered our song had attracted an audience, just not the one I'd intended.

Outside the barrier sat two small catlike creatures with round, owlish faces and another creature that resembled a black rabbit with two tiny mouths where its eyes should have been.

Monsters. Little monsters, gathered in close and with their heads all cocked to one side as they listened to us.

I froze, any lingering thoughts of Grimm now firmly banished in the face of this more pressing danger, but these creatures did not launch themselves at the barrier as the moths had; instead they seemed to be waiting for something. Their anticipation was one I recognized. That sense of breathlessness as you waited for a curtain to rise. It was this sense of familiarity that prompted me to crouch down in front of the creatures.

Grimm's hand shot out, clasping my shoulder tight. But I had no intention of moving beyond our bubble of safety. All I did was inhale somewhat shakily before I began to hum the same melody Grimm and I had just finished casting, running through the whole thing once more.

For a moment, nothing happened. I stayed where I was, with Grimm's fingers digging into my shoulder. Then the black rabbit threw back its head, opened its mouths, and sang out the last three notes of the spellsong in answer. Its pitch was eerily perfect.

After that, all three monsters turned and disappeared into the undergrowth.

"Well," I said, once I could say anything at all.

"Mm," Grimm hummed, in what sounded like agreement.

"Mathias said that I woke the wood kraken. I thought he meant I was too loud, but Grimm, do you think… Is it possible the monsters liked my spellsongs?"

I looked up at him and, for an instant, caught Grimm watching me in much the same manner he had the monsters, with equal parts wonder and wariness. His hand dropped from my shoulder, leaving it cold, and he looked away, into the trees.

"I don't know," he said. "But I think it's best we don't use one again until we're out of the woods, just in case."