She should have been able to take comfort in Tomik. She should have felt safe next to his solid, slumbering warmth. But it made her uneasy. Tomik was the brother she never had. There should have been nothing wrong, then, with sleeping next to him. Yet as much as she tightened her mind-magic when she was around him and screwed it down into a tiny knot she refused to untie, her heart didn’t need magic to sense that this—being together, being so close, so warm, so secreted from the world—meant something more to him than it did to her.
Terror waited when she closed her eyes. When she opened them and saw Tomik, she worried.
Sometimes, Neel tried to speak with her. She could sense him, could feel a tendril of his thought unfolding like a tiny pea shoot in the earth of her mind. She stopped it every time. We’re fine, she told him once, then closed herself against his eager response. She didn’t want to tell him what had happened after they’d rowed away from the Vatran shore. That would make everything more real.
Neel didn’t know what he was doing. He might try to touch the edges of Petra’s mind, but he was far away in India, and as Petra had learned long ago from John Dee, distance made it harder to send thoughts through a mental link. Neel didn’t have the mind-magic to force the issue, and it was easy to keep him at bay. Usually.
It was harder at night. When she was tired, it was difficult to find the energy to strengthen her defenses against him, and sleep meant surrendering all control. If Neel wanted to reach her while she slept, she wouldn’t be able to ignore him. Petra and Tomik had finally crossed—or at least they thought so—into Bohemia, and the sun set a few hours later in the Vatra than it did here. Each night, Petra waited to close her eyes. She waited until the trembling sensation of Neel wandering at the outskirts of her mind faded. There was a physical kind of silence. It stretched, and Petra knew that Neel was asleep. Only then would she let herself relax and fall into a fitful sleep of her own.
Yet the days were long and exhausting, and one night an aching weariness consumed her. She fell asleep next to Tomik even before he closed his eyes.
She dreamed a beach. The pinkish sand was hot under her skin, and as she lay there, green waves foamed at her toes. The sun had set, but a violet light lingered in the air. Petra smelled the brine of the sea, and something else, too: sandalwood soap. She recognized it, and didn’t realize until she caught its scent how much she had missed it.
She sat up and turned, and there was Neel.
“Hello,” she whispered.
She expected him to be angry. They had yelled at each other before, voices full of fury. This wouldn’t be the first time, and she knew that she deserved whatever he might say.
But he was silent, and his eyes were narrow with hurt.
Petra stood. Her feet sank and burned into the sand as she crossed the few steps between them. “Can you see me?”
The question startled him into speaking. “See you? Why in the name of the four tribes would I see you?”
“Oh.” She understood. She remembered how, when John Dee had used their mental link to tap into her sleep, her dreams had painted themselves around the words he’d said. Neel must still be awake. He would be in his palace, in his black marble-tiled bedroom, perhaps, with the mahogany bed hung with blue silks and a cloud of tulle to keep the mosquitoes out. He could hear Petra’s words, but that was it.
Neel’s gaze shifted to stare at the sea, and the Jewel of the Kalderash glinted on his ear. “Oh,” he mimicked her tone. “That’s all you got to say to me, after more than a week of stark nothing. Oh.”
His voice pierced her. Petra did something then that she never would have dared do if awake. She rested her palm on his cheek and turned his face to look into hers. His eyes were golden in the dim light. “I’m sorry,” she said.
She knew he wouldn’t be able to feel her fingers against his skin. This was her dream, not Neel’s.
“Don’t do that,” he said, and she snatched her hand away. But he went on: “Don’t hide away from me like that.”
“I didn’t mean to. All right”—she spoke over his angry sputter—“I did. But … there’s … there’s a blackness inside me, Neel. Like I swallowed the blood of a Gristleki. Sometimes, it bubbles. It fountains up. It’s so hard to ignore it. I had to seal myself shut. If I let you inside, I didn’t know what might slip out.”
His face softened. He said, “Tell me.”
So she did.
Neel laughed when she described the rowboat slinging down the mountainside, and she realized it was funny, a little, now that they had survived. He fell silent when she told him about the Gristleki attack, and grew grim at the thought of Astrophil picking his way from corpse to corpse, searching for evidence that Petra had killed her own father.
“But you didn’t,” he said. “You’re safe.”
“For now.”
“And right now you’re sleeping.”
“Yes.”
“With Tomik, tucked in the snow. Snug as cats.”
She felt awkward. “I guess.”
“Well, good.”
“Yes,” she said. “Good.”
“I, uh, ought to say something.” He shuffled a bare foot in the sand. “All this truth-telling you’re doing makes a fellow feel sort of small. ’Cause I’ve been hiding from you, too, Pet, in a way.”
She waited, and wouldn’t let herself guess what he would say. Her heart rattled within her.
He said, “That last night on the island, before I snuck in your room and you forged the link, someone tried to snuff me.”
She stared.
“I mean, someone tried to kill me. Pushed me off the palace wall.”
Petra demanded an explanation, and when she got one, shook her head. “You never should have pulled that stunt with the globes. Giving them to Tomik, announcing they’d be destroyed. You made people mad.”
“Only for a bit!”
“You toyed with them.”
He made a dismissive noise.
“Anybody could have tried to assassinate you, Neel.”
“Assassinate.” He tugged thoughtfully at the hem of his white tunic. The cloth was far too simple for a king, but Petra didn’t want to see him as one.
“That’s the word you use when you murder royalty,” she said. “This is political.”
He rubbed a hand through his longish black hair and sighed. “Personal, too, maybe.”
“You have to figure out who pushed you. If you don’t, you won’t be safe.”
“It’s a Maraki, I bet.” Neel’s voice was glum. “They were itching to get the crown.”
“I don’t know. They’ll get it in less than two years, anyway. That’s not so long to wait.”
“Yeah, but it’s a dicey time for the Roma. Some of us want to stop being so secret in our ways. To step forward, declare our kingdom, and play that lousy chess game of international politics. But plenty of Roma want things the way they’ve always been. The Maraki do, most of ’em. And the Kalderash, too. Queen Iona made that clear to me. Maybe for some Roma, less than two years is too long.”
“If that’s the reason someone tried to kill you, it can’t be a Maraki, then. Not if they and the Kalderash want the same things. After all, you’re Kalderash now, and…” She trailed off when she saw something bitter twitch across Neel’s face.
“Nope,” he said. “Not me. I’m Lovari, through and through. The trickster tribe.”
Petra bit her lip. She should have known better than to say something that would rub right into Neel’s fresh wound. Hesitantly she asked, “Do you have any ideas about who might have done this? Some clue?”
He described the clear, sparkling bead he’d found on the palace wall. “Could have been from a necklace, hung ’round a girl mad with love of me.”
“It could have fallen off a man’s clothes,” Petra said. “Roma men wear fancy outfits. Flashy colors. Beaded shirts and shoes, too.”
“I like my theory better.”
“The theory where you nearly got murdered
by someone in love with you.”
“Sure. Makes me seem dashing, don’t you think?”
She rolled her eyes.
“You know,” he said, “I think I can hear you rolling your eyes.”
She laughed, and it felt foreign—but good—in her throat. “No, you can’t.”
Neel didn’t move, but seemed suddenly closer. An emerald wave brushed over their bare feet. The sky was darker now. “It’s hard,” he said, “to just hear your voice. Wish I could see you.”
Petra hadn’t meant to say it, yet she did: “I can see you.” She hastened to add, “But it’s not real.”
“You can? How? What d’you mean, ‘not real’?”
“It’s because I’m asleep,” Petra said. “My mind is … painting a picture to match your words. I’m dreaming while we speak.” Neel’s expression was fascinated, like it might have really been. But now a gold hoop, not a sapphire, gleamed in his ear. “That’s why it’s not real. You can’t trust dreams.”
Neel grinned. “How do I look, then? Handsome as sin, I’m sure.”
Petra saw the familiar planes of his face, the little scar nicked across his cheek. Nail-bitten fingers. Bright eyes. “You look like you,” she said.
“What else do you see?”
“A beach. Stars. Constellations that don’t exist.”
“Describe it to me. Tell me everything you see.”
“Why?”
“So I can dream, too, next time, and be there with you.”
Petra said nothing.
Defensively, Neel asked, “Something wrong with that?”
“It wouldn’t work. Even if we were both asleep, right now, we wouldn’t see the same things. I would dream my dream, and you would dream yours.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Darkness fell swiftly as Petra described the beach that she could, in fact, no longer see. Neel shifted into a slightly lighter shade than night, then disappeared into the black. Yet Petra could sense that he was still listening, so she told him about the pink sand and the shaggy bark of the palm trees. Her mind began to feel fuzzy, so she sat down.
She felt Neel settle onto the sand next to her. She turned to him.
And opened her eyes. Dawn was shining through the shell of snow that cocooned Petra and Tomik. Their cave was transformed into a halo of light.
Petra’s hand held Tomik’s, her fingers intertwined with his in a way that felt new, and strange.
And he was wide awake.
Petra pulled her hand away.
Tomik looked down at her and smiled.
17
Astrophil’s Decision
PETRA SCRAMBLED out of the cave. When she emerged, the light hurt her eyes, and somehow her heart, too.
She heard Tomik’s boots scraping against the inside of the cave but kept her back turned. She didn’t want to see him push his way out. She couldn’t bear the thought of looking him in the face. I didn’t mean it, she wanted to say.
What had she meant, then?
Petra’s dream had been so vivid. She had felt Neel’s hand in the darkness—his, with its rough palm and the watery sensation of his ghost fingers spilling past the tips of his real ones, reaching to slip down her arm and across her wrist as they sat on the beach. And she had reached back.
Heavy boots crushed the snow behind her. Tomik. “Petra—”
“Good morning.” Astrophil dropped from a tree branch onto Petra’s head. “I trust everyone slept well?”
Tomik chuckled, and Petra wheeled at the sound and faced him. “No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“If you say so,” Tomik replied, but the confident grin didn’t leave his face.
She should tell him the truth.
Petra flushed. How could she tell him the truth?
What was the truth? It had been a dream. Petra had seen what she’d wanted to see. What she hadn’t even known she wanted. It was a revelation, but one that made her heart feel stupid and sore. It had nothing to do with what would happen if Neel were there, right now.
It had nothing to do with the terror that might be stalking them.
She looked at Tomik, and saw him misinterpret her blush—misinterpret everything.
Petra briefly closed her eyes. When she opened them, she meant to say something to Tomik—what, she wasn’t quite sure—but then she squinted against the light. Something was different. It hadn’t been so sunlit before, in the forest. They had always been shadowed under a canopy of fir trees. Now Petra could see patches of blue sky.
The forest was thinning. They hadn’t noticed it in the darkness last night, but the trees here were fewer and not so thickly clustered together.
Then Petra saw it: a tree stump. Where there were tree stumps, there were people.
“Give me the map,” she told Tomik, and he handed it over. She unfolded it. “We’re close to Krumlov.” Her voice was bright with hope.
“Not that close,” said Tomik.
“We can make it by nightfall, if we push the pace.”
“A breakneck pace. A fool’s pace. We’d have to practically run.”
“Let’s get moving, then.”
“We can make it to Krumlov Castle tomorrow, easily. What’s the harm in spending one more night in the forest?”
One more night of not knowing how she would find Fiala Broshek and transform her father back into a human. One more night of sleeping next to Tomik.
“No,” she said. “We reach Krumlov by nightfall.”
Tomik crossed his arms and studied her. “Let’s put it to a vote. There are three of us, after all. Right, Astrophil?”
After the briefest of pauses, the spider said. “Yes.”
“Then Astro’s vote will break the tie.”
“Wait a minute,” said Petra.
“You wouldn’t deny Astro his say in the matter, would you, Petra?”
“No, but—”
“Then I’m sure that we’ll come to a fair, sensible, and safe solution.” There was that confident smile again.
Astrophil trickled down Petra’s hair and crept onto her ear. He held on loosely. There was an odd delicacy in his grip that reminded Petra of something, though she couldn’t decide what. Astrophil, she thought to him silently. I—
“It would be wise to reach the castle as soon as possible,” the spider said in a quiet voice.
Tomik’s smile vanished.
Thank you, Astrophil, Petra told the spider.
“Let us go,” he said, and fell asleep.
The frustration was plain on Tomik’s face. Petra turned from it and strode quickly over the snow.
She thought she knew what Tomik would say if he dared, because underneath his frustration she sensed confusion, but also a barely suppressed joy. Don’t be embarrassed, he wanted to tell her.
I’m not, she wanted to reply.
Yet she was. Petra was ashamed to be thinking what she was thinking when her father was a monster. The only thing she should want was for him to be returned to her, and for her and her friends to be safe. She should focus on what mattered.
It had been only a dream.
She would not think of it.
She would not.
* * *
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON, and the trees were casting long spears of shadow across the snow, when Petra felt a light pressure on that mental stitch that linked her to Neel. You’ve gotta help me, Pet, he said.
What’s wrong? she answered, alarmed.
I am SO BORED.
She couldn’t help it. She laughed. Tomik gave her a quizzical sidelong look, which made her bite back her smile and shrug. Astrophil slumbered on.
Poor you, she told Neel. How many tears should I shed for your pitiful fate?
A whole ocean’s worth. I’m learning how to read.
I thought you didn’t believe in that. You said that anything written was dead. That books box stories up, and leave them no room to breathe.
Yeah, but a fellow could get buried in the papers that get shoved un
der a king’s nose. He sighed. I guess I ought to know what they say. If someone thought it’d be a lark to kill me, people here probably wouldn’t think twice about telling me a little old lie.
You have advisers. Arun, Gita, Karim—
It’d be too easy for someone to read one thing, and tell me another.
Talking with Neel—now, after last night—was going more smoothly than Petra had imagined. As long as she pretended that everything was normal, it was. Who’s teaching you? she asked.
Nadia.
Petra remembered the Maraki girl who was a couple of years older than them, and had black, flashing eyes. Oh.
She’s pretty good at it. And she’s honest as a tiger with a hunk of bloody meat. Nadia will do exactly what she wants. Say what she wants. And heaven help you if you disagree. So I knew that if I asked her to teach me and keep it a secret, and she thought that was a seaweedy shipwreck of an idea, she’d tell me to go chop off my toes and juggle ’em. But—he sounded amazed—she agreed. He groaned. Wish she hadn’t. My head HURTS. And she keeps shooting me these evil looks, like she knows I’m dazing off instead of studying—what is this thing, anyway? A chart of the price of coir over the last ten years? Petra imagined Neel hiding his face in his hands. She hates me.
She’s there with you? Right now? Petra tripped over a fallen branch. She wobbled, then caught her balance.
“I told you,” Tomik said under his breath. “We have to slow our pace. One of us is going to break a leg.”
Petra glared and walked faster.
Yeah, Neel was saying. We’re in the library.
I didn’t even know the palace had a library. I mean, most Roma don’t believe in reading.
Sure, but I’m starting to get the idea that being king means doing and having lots of things you don’t believe in. Neel paused. Wish I was there with you. Astro could teach me how to read. This was his blasted idea, anyway. How’d he learn?
He taught himself.
Huh. Weird to think that something that looks like a mash-up of tiny forks and knives could such be a genius. How’s Astro doing?
Petra became conscious of the faint whirring of Astrophil’s internal gears. They hummed against her ear. She thought about Neel’s question, and realized that Astrophil had been unusually quiet lately. Of course, he spent most of the day sleeping, to make up for nights keeping watch. Still …