The Jewel of the Kalderash

  Petra immediately understood. The Gristleki were used to people backing away from them. Humans always did.

  She rushed at the two monsters and slipped between them as they flinched in surprise. She delivered a backhanded coup with her sword, digging her blade halfway through a neck. The body toppled against the last Gristleki. She tugged the sword free.

  The Gristleki shoved aside the gray corpse. Its face was fixed on Petra’s, and filled with insane delight. Here, at last, was a challenge.

  Petra remembered her lessons with John Dee, and with the Metis, who had told her to crave her mind-magic like a drug. Call it forth and let it rule you, they had said. Let it use you.

  It was almost the hardest lesson they had taught her.

  She let the magic fill her stomach and lungs until it seemed to suffocate her. The idea of who she was—that she was Petra Kronos, and had a history and hopes—receded.

  She looked at the monster and thought of only one thing: which way it would move.

  It clawed left, she swerved right. It kicked at her feet, she jumped. She let it make its moves, and with every move she dodged, letting it advance, letting it herd her back into the trees, yet never allowing it to touch her, always dancing away until she saw it cock its head with surprise.

  She stabbed her sword into the side of its exposed neck and pushed.

  Blood spat forth. The body crumpled.

  Petra stood, her rapier visible now, slick with inky blood. Her stunned senses registered one thought: she was the only thing left standing.

  The only one, she thought again, and realized what this meant just as Astrophil shouted, “Tomik!”

  Petra rushed to his fallen body and dropped to her knees. He must have been touched. He must have been poisoned. She illuminated a Glowstone, turned him over, and searched for a scrape or suction mark, wondering how she could possibly ever cure him. Astrophil dragged a lock of blond hair aside and Petra saw the red blood oozing from his temple. She saw the bloody rock on the ground. He had hit his head when he’d fallen.

  “Tomik.” She shook him. “Tomik!”

  He opened his eyes and stared blearily at her. Then he turned his head and vomited.

  Petra wiped his mouth with the sleeve of her coat. Fur fell in tufts, drifting onto Tomik’s cheek, and she saw that patches of her coat had disintegrated, burned away by the touch of the Gristleki’s poisonous skin. Tomik’s coat was also ragged and splashed with black blood. Gristleki blood was flecked on his skin.

  And on hers. In fact, she was covered with it. If their skin and tongues were poisonous, what could the blood of a Gristleki do?

  She clamped down hard on that question and shoved it into the back of her mind. It was useless to try to answer it. Time would tell. In the meantime, she had to take care of Tomik.

  The monsters seemed not to have touched his skin, but she was worried about his head. He mumbled incoherently as Astrophil peered into his eyes.

  “My extensive medical research leads me to conclude that Tomik is concussed,” said the spider.

  “What does that mean?” said Petra.

  “He hit his head.”

  “I can see that. What does it mean?”

  “He should lie still. If he did not fracture his skull, he should be fine in a few hours. If he did…”

  Petra did not want to consider the end to Astrophil’s sentence. “How many hours?”

  The spider wrung four legs. “It is difficult to say. Sometimes these illnesses pass quickly. Sometimes they do not. But if we do not move him and he is to remain here on the ground, we will need a fire.”

  Petra burst to her feet, eager for something to do, and gathered the scattered wood from the rowboat. Yet even as she heaped the scraps into a pile near Tomik, she knew she had nothing to light them with. There were no matches. There was nothing. Nothing except …

  She wiped her sword on the snow and considered it. She knew, from having watched her father forge horseshoes and other metallic things in his smithy, that metal could produce sparks. But that required a lot of force, and usually heat.

  Her magic would have to do. She grabbed a small rock and struck it against the sword’s hilt.

  It took several attempts before she managed to draw a spark from the sword, and then it fell on a board and immediately died. The second spark burned a little longer. Petra was blowing at it frantically, certain it would fade like the first, when Astrophil stepped onto the wooden board, hawked, and spat a drop of brassica oil onto the smoldering spark.

  A small flame licked the wood.

  “It worked!” Astrophil jumped up and down, and the burning board trembled beneath his small weight.

  “Astrophil! Don’t—you—dare—” Petra scolded him as she puffed at the flame. “Do—that—again!”

  “But am I not a clever spider? I thought, ‘Now if only we had some oil. Oil is so flammable.’ And then it occurred to me that I had oil. I admit that was a rather disgusting and ill-mannered way to use it. Normally, I would never approve of spitting, but—”

  “You need that oil. It’s all you have.”

  “Oh, but I am a machine. I can run for days on very little.”

  Petra narrowed her eyes. “How many days?”

  “Many, many!”

  “Astrophil. Promise me. Never again.”

  The flame ran along the board, and Astrophil jumped from it to the snow. “Oh, very well. I promise.”

  Once the fire was burning steadily, Petra gathered fallen branches and stripped bark from the trees to add to the flames. She used one large, curled piece of bark to scoop some clean snow, then held the makeshift bowl close to the fire until the snow melted. She trickled the water into Tomik’s mouth.

  He seemed to be doing better, and when he said her name, Petra relaxed, thinking that the worst was over. As her tension eased, a sense of pride grew inside of her, dancing like one of the small orange flames. She had fought the monsters. She had fought them, and had won. They were all dead.

  Then she remembered the eyes of the first Gray Man she had killed, and her pride vanished.

  They were all dead. And they had once been human. She had killed four people. Four people like her father.

  Petra choked. She turned away from Tomik and hid her face in her hands, yet couldn’t block out the knowledge of what she had done. Maybe she couldn’t see the bleeding gray carcasses, but she could smell them. She knew they were there.

  Dark eyes. The first one had had dark eyes. And the others? What color were theirs? Everything had happened so quickly. She had not noticed. She didn’t know.

  Petra pressed her fingers against the tears sliding down her cheeks.

  Had one of the monsters had silver eyes?

  What if…?

  She couldn’t finish the thought.

  Astrophil climbed up her wrist and pulled away one finger. “Petra, what is wrong? Tell me.”

  “What if…” she whispered. “What if one of the Gray Men was my father?”

  Astrophil fell to her lap. Horror filled his tiny face. “No.”

  Petra let her hands drop away, and her wet cheeks shone in the firelight.

  When Astrophil spoke again, his voice was heavy. “Stay here,” he said. “I will look.”

  Petra stared at the fire as the spider noiselessly crept away. She tried not to imagine him peering into each monstrous face, searching for silver eyes that would be strangely hard, because they had been enspelled at Prince Rodolfo’s command.

  A lifetime seemed to pass before the spider crawled onto her knee. “Master Kronos was not one of them,” he said.

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “Petra. I have never lied to you.”

  “You might. You might, to protect me.”

  “I have looked. I inspected very carefully. I swear to you that I did not see your father’s eyes, and I would know them if I saw them.”

  Petra nodded shakily and pushed a handful of snow down her mouth. She wanted it cold. She wanted t
he freezing lump traveling down her throat to scour clean everything she felt inside her.

  “Petra?” Tomik muttered.

  She wiped the tears from her face and turned to him.

  “I thought of something,” he said.

  “What?” The look on his face gave birth to a new dread within her.

  “What were the Gray Men doing here, in the Novohrad Mountains?”

  Petra hesitated. Then she said, “It was a random attack. They were here and caught our scent. That’s all.” But she was not so sure.

  “Maybe they knew we were here,” Tomik said. “What if they were searching for us?”

  16

  The Beach

  IT WAS DAWN when they decided to leave the clearing, and then only because Tomik stalked away from the campsite.

  “You need to rest!” Petra dragged at his elbow.

  “And if I’m right?”

  “You’re not. You can’t be right.”

  He shook off her hand and kept walking. “If the Gray Men were here to find us, we need to move.”

  “No. You need to listen to me.”

  Tomik stopped. “Is my opinion that unimportant to you? Am I your slave, for you to tell what to do?”

  She was struck silent.

  Astrophil raised a timid leg. “May I say something?”

  “Of course not,” Petra told Tomik. “Of all the stupid things to say!”

  He looked at her. “Do you know why you’re angry?”

  “I am not!”

  “I wish to say something,” said Astrophil.

  “You’re angry,” Tomik told Petra, “because you know I’m right. We might not survive another attack. If the Gristleki are hunting in the mountains, we must get out of them, fast. That frightens you, and makes you feel powerless, and guilty because even though you’re telling me to rest, part of you wants to push me to run as fast as I can.”

  “Aren’t you clever. Don’t you know everything. Well, let me tell you—”

  Astrophil put the tips of two legs in his mouth and blew a shrill, tinny whistle. When Tomik and Petra fell silent, the spider said, “I, as a scholar of many subjects, including medicine, believe that Tomik is perfectly fine.”

  “He is?” Petra whispered.

  “He is rushing about, arguing with you, is he not? His pupils are a reasonable size, and he is not wavering on his feet. I would say—if anyone cared for my opinion—that you are arguing over nothing.”

  Nothing, Petra thought, except that everything Tomik had said—everything he had accused her of—was true. “So we should leave.”

  “Quickly,” said Tomik. “While there’s sunlight, we should look for food and shelter.”

  “Let us find some rabbits for you to fence,” Astrophil told Petra.

  * * *

  IN THE END, Petra used her sword to bring down a fox—a winter-starved, stringy fox who had snaked past her as she had crouched, perfectly still, in the shadow of a tree. She had been waiting for more than an hour when she sensed its approach and sliced the invisible rapier through the air. The fox didn’t even pause in the moment before the blade cut its body in half.

  Tomik lifted his brows when Petra brought back the bloody halves of the fox, but he knew better than to say anything. He skinned the split carcass while Petra started a fire, her eyes narrowed at Astrophil the entire time. “Don’t you spit on it,” she told him.

  “I do not spit,” he said. “I expectorate.”

  * * *

  ON THEIR SECOND DAY traveling through the forest, after Petra had returned from hunting with a weasel neatly pierced through the heart, Tomik said, “You’re getting better at this.”

  Petra struck a rock against the pommel of her sword, and blew at the spark that jumped onto a curl of bark.

  “You’re getting better at that, too,” Tomik said.

  Petra shrugged. “Practice.”

  “Two days’ worth? You’re not just drawing on your magics, Petra. You’re adapting so quickly to them. If I learn a new technique, it takes me a long time to perfect it. Weeks, even. What exactly did the Metis teach you?”

  She glanced at Astrophil, who slept near a tree in a nest of snow. He had been with her for every lesson with the Metis, even the most troubling one. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Tomik, you were thrilled at the thought that you could study magic in the Vatra, but you didn’t go back to the Metis, like I did. You didn’t ask them to teach you. Why not?”

  Tomik pushed a twig near the growing flame. “They seemed heartless.”

  “Exactly.”

  He looked at her differently. “In fact, I thought I’d pay a high price for any lesson I might learn.”

  She blew at the flame.

  “Petra, you didn’t. You didn’t agree to become one of them.”

  “No.” She sat back on her heels. “They … explained that magic comes at a price. It needs energy, just like a fire needs kindling or brassica oil to burn. Magic usually borrows it from your body—from your breath, your energy, the food you eat. The hours you sleep. It’s not always noticeable that it takes something from you. But if you do notice, you can feed your magic what it needs, and that makes it stronger. You pay for it later. I’ll be tired in a few hours.”

  Tomik peered at her face. He knew it well, and knew she was hiding something. “There’s more. What else did they teach you?”

  Reluctantly, Petra said, “I have a Choice.”

  “What do you mean, Choice? About what?”

  “I’m a special case. Because I’m a chimera. Because I have two magical abilities, I can choose between them. I can feed one to the other.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Petra wished Astrophil were awake to explain, though he didn’t like discussing the subject any more than she did. “I could only do it once. I could choose to pour my mind-magic into my skill over metal—or the reverse. If I did, my one remaining talent would become very powerful. But only for a short time, as long as it takes for one magic to consume the other. Entirely. Once that short burst of power fades away, the magic that is left will start to eat itself until it disappears, too. My magic will be gone.”

  Tomik’s hands fell to his sides. “You’d be helpless. Ordinary, for the rest of your life. It wouldn’t be worth it, Petra. How long would this ‘short burst of power’ last? Ten minutes? Twenty?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if you had made this … Choice when the Gristleki attacked, and your power ran out in the middle of the fight? We’d be dead.”

  “That’s why I didn’t choose,” she said softly.

  “And you didn’t need to. You defeated them anyway.”

  “But if I was desperate—”

  He shook his head. “Say that you were, and made your Choice, and succeeded. Say that you felt your magic burn out, and didn’t care because you thought it was a fair price to pay. What if, the next day, something worse came along? You’d have nothing left to fight it.”

  “I know the risks, Tomik. I know the cost.”

  “Then promise me you won’t do it.”

  This was exactly what Astrophil had said, once they had left the Metis’ cave.

  “I wouldn’t be able to control the surge of power anyway.” Petra glanced away from Tomik. “The Metis told me so.” She stoked the fire. “Please, let’s not talk about this. The Gray Men might track us, and…” She looked at the rash on her fingers, from where black blood had splashed. She tugged on a mitten. “Things are hard enough.”

  * * *

  AS DAYS PASSED and Petra and Tomik didn’t sicken, they gave up worrying that the Gristleki blood might have poisoned them.

  She grew deft at hunting, but the forest didn’t have much to offer. It was better here than in the bone-freezing mountains. It was warmer. The pine trees were like giant fur coats that blocked the wind, and heat always flushed through Petra’s body during the endless hours of walking. But her br
eath fogged the air, and it was too cold for there to be many animals for food. They were hibernating or had migrated months ago.

  Petra killed what she could. Once, she let her mind-magic unfurl and slipped over a stretch of snow. She was looking for a hidden thing, and when her hand plunged through the snow and into a hole in the earth, she found it. She hauled up a sleeping rabbit by its ears and cut its throat with the base of her blade just as it began to twitch itself awake.

  Holding the warm, bloody rabbit in her arms made her feel like crying again. It had the weight of a baby. With its dark, liquid eyes, the rabbit looked like a human enchanted into an animal shape.

  Petra told herself that she was being foolish. They needed to eat. And she had grown up in a village. She knew that cows in the field would die, and had helped her cousin Dita kill chickens. It wasn’t pretty, but it was food. It had never bothered her—before.

  Petra went alone to hunt, insisting that Astrophil stay with Tomik. The spider didn’t like it, but Petra said he distracted her. The truth was that she couldn’t bear the thought of Tomik stranded in the trees by himself. If the Gristleki attacked, at least he and Astrophil would have each other.

  They wouldn’t stand a chance. Petra knew this. Still, every day she plucked the spider from her shoulder and set him on Tomik’s.

  The three would meet again later, eat whatever Petra had caught, and trudge on through the snow-filled forest, forcing their way through pine branches when there was no clear path. Tomik checked the maps he had tucked inside his coat before passing through the Loophole, and seemed to know where they were going. If he sometimes looked a little anxious around the eyes when he suggested they head south, or west, Petra didn’t question him.

  Astrophil chattered at first, saying he was going to cheer them up by teaching them a new subject every day. But eventually Petra and Tomik’s silence, and the silence of the forest, began to affect the spider, too, and he crouched quietly on Petra’s ear or slept in the crook of her neck, one leg wrapped around a lock of her dirty hair. He insisted on keeping watch at night.

  Petra had trouble sleeping, curled together with Tomik in a new snow cave he built each night. When she closed her eyes she saw gray, scaled claws.