The Wizard’s Promise

  It was the longest second I’d ever known.

  And then we plunged back down. Seawater poured over the deck, burning with cold.

  In the shock of that freezing water, magic stirred. Wild magic, tumultuous and deep and unfathomable. I held on and stared at the dark gray side of the warship, and I knew I was going to die.

  Water rose up around us, glittering in the sun.

  The magic tasted like salt on my tongue.

  And then the ocean crashed down on the Penelope, and for a moment, all I saw was light splitting through the murk, and all I felt was a cold so deep, it sank straight to the marrow of my bones.

  Then darkness.

  CHAPTER 7

  In my dreams, I heard the sharp cry of a seabird.

  My dreams were unclear, nothing but murky shapes in the dark, momentary dots of brightness, a sense of floating in thick air. That bird cry was the only moment of lucidity.

  It happened again, louder.

  Again.

  The murk brightened and cleared away. I felt the ground beneath me, rough and cold, and I smelled pine. In the distance, someone sighed, over and over.

  I pushed myself up to sitting and blinked, trying to clear out the shadows. Slowly, shapes formed: a march of trees in the distance, smooth gray pebbles underneath me, the ocean. That was the sighing, I realized. The ocean, rolling in along a shore.

  I was on a shore. I was dry, by some gift of my ancestors, and I was alive.

  I stood up, my legs shaking. The tide was out and dark seaweed dotted the beach in clumps.

  There was no warship anywhere.

  Relief flooded through me and turned to hysterical laughter that echoed up and down the beach, blending with the rush of the waves. I turned in place, taking in my surroundings. I didn’t see the warship, didn’t see any hint of the Mists at all – but I didn’t see Kolur either. Or Frida. Or the Penelope.

  “Shit,” I whispered. A wind blew in from the north, tousling my hair. I turned left and right, trying to decide which direction to go first. We must have washed ashore Juldan, protected and unharmed – there had been that surge of magic before the world went dark. It wasn’t borne by the wind, so it wasn’t Frida’s. It had been borne by the sea. Kolur? I couldn’t imagine it. Of all the explanations of his behavior, the idea that he was a powerful wizard was the most absurd. I just couldn’t accept it.

  Following some instinct burning inside of me, I went left. The wind pushed me along. I still wasn’t entirely in my right mind; everything was trapped in a pale haze, and I stumbled over the unfamiliar beach, afraid of what I would find. Or of what I wouldn’t.

  I didn’t know how long I walked. Everything on the beach looked the same – the trees, the seaweed, the stones. Despair crept up on me, worse than the cold.

  Maybe I wasn’t alive at all. Maybe that’s why I was dry. This wasn’t a blessing from my ancestors at all. I stopped walking and stared down at the ground, and tears welled up in my eyes. I’d never felt so empty, so alone.

  And then I saw it. A piece of broken board. Smooth, polished birchwood.

  The same as the Penelope.

  I bent down and picked it up. It was damp with seawater, but other than that, it was just a broken splinter of wood. Seeing it gave me a shuddery feeling like I was too cold.

  I tucked it under my arm and kept walking.

  As I walked, I found more hunks of wood, all that same polished birchwood as the Penelope. That shuddering turned heavy and settled in my stomach, and I walked as quickly as I could. It didn’t take long before I saw a dark lump farther down the beach. It didn’t look like a ship, even a wrecked one. I stopped and stared at it, still holding that first piece of wood close to my heart. The lump looked like a much larger version of the clumps of seaweed that had washed ashore.

  The north wind blew. I moved forward.

  The lump was a towering mass of seaweed, dark and stringy and swaying back and forth from the wind. It was taller than me. As tall as a fishing boat.

  The sick feeling intensified.

  “Hello?” My voice sounded small. “Kolur? Frida?”

  I edged closer to the mound of seaweed. The air crackled with leftover sparks of magic. This was the Penelope, I was certain of it, but she’d been transformed. Magic can do that, when you use too much at once. It changes the ordinary into the extraordinary.

  I reached out my hand, the hand wearing my bracelet, and ran my fingers over the seaweed. It made a chiming noise, and the blood in my hand jolted. Beneath the sweep of seaweed, I could make out the dark wood skeleton of the Penelope.

  A boat was one thing. But if Frida and Kolur had still been aboard when this happened–

  “Kolur!” I shouted, louder this time. My voice carried on the wind. “Where the hell are you?” I whirled in place, feeling wild and out of control and alone. The whole world was empty. “Kolur!” I screamed. “Kolur!”

  “Quiet, girl. You make enough noise to wake the dead.”

  I thought I imagined his voice at first. It seemed to come from everywhere. But I realized that was just the wind, and when I whirled around, kicking up sand, I saw him shambling toward me. He was pale and his face was ragged, but he didn’t seem hurt.

  “Oh, sea and sky, you’re alive.” I slumped with relief. “I thought I was alone here. I thought I was dead–”

  “Not so lucky, I’m afraid.”

  I scowled at him for making such an awful joke. But he only squinted up at the Penelope. “Shit,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Will Frida be able to fix her?” Was Frida even alive? “Or are there wizards in Juldan–”

  Kolur glanced at me, frowning. “I don’t know. Probably have to get a new one.”

  “A new–” The air escaped me. A new boat? “We can’t afford that, can we?” Did Kolur have money? Why hadn’t he sent me home in Skalir?

  Kolur shrugged. “Depends on where we are. Not every transaction requires money.”

  “Depends on where we are?” I blinked and looked around, at the sea and the trees. “Aren’t we in Juldan?”

  Kolur looked over at me. “There was magic involved in setting us free,” he said after a moment. “Surely you felt that. We could be anywhere.”

  Frida. Or maybe Isolfr. He could swim in the frozen ocean; perhaps he could channel enchantment through it as well.

  “We need to find Frida,” Kolur said. “I take it you haven’t seen her.”

  “You mean you haven’t?” My sick feeling returned, stronger than before. Isolfr might have sent us here, but Frida would be the one to get us home. That was the whole reason Kolur had brought her aboard.

  “She’ll be around her somewhere.” He walked out past the remains of the Penelope and gazed down the shoreline. “This way.” He pointed to the left.

  “How do you know?”

  “Just a feeling. Come on.”

  I joined him, and we walked down the beach in silence. The old magic radiating off the boat muffled the air around us, muting everything. I hadn’t noticed how drained the colors were until I saw the Penelope. Now I couldn’t not notice.

  We hadn’t been walking long when I spotted a streak of brown against the gray expanse of the rocks. “Look, there.” I pointed. The streak wasn’t moving. “You think that’s her?”

  “Might be. Too far off to tell.” But Kolur broke into a jog and I followed along behind him, cold air burning in my lungs. When I was close enough to see it was Frida, I began to run.

  She didn’t move.

  I knelt down beside her and pressed my fingers under her nose. Still breathing. Kolur’s footsteps crunched over the stones. He wasn’t in much of a hurry.

  “Frida!” I shook her arm. She had all the magic; she would be able to get us to safety. “Frida, wake up.”

  Her eyelashes fluttered. I shook her harder. By now Kolur had joined us, and he said, “Frida, open your damn eyes.”

  She did.

  “Well, that was exciting,” she said. “You know I h
ate the water, Kolur.”

  Kolur laughed. “We do what we have to do.”

  “What?” I said.

  They both ignored me. Frida sat up and shook out her hair. Then she patted it with one hand. “Dry,” she said. “Thank you.”

  I swiveled to look at Kolur. There was no way he’d done this. Kolur bought his charms from shops in the capital. He made me do all the magic on board the Penelope. He was a fisherman, not a wizard.

  But Kolur didn’t respond to Frida’s thanks, just stuck out one hand to help her to her feet. She accepted it and, once standing, put her hands on her hips and glanced around.

  “Where are we?”

  “Don’t know,” Kolur said.

  “The Penelope?”

  “Damaged,” I said. “Magic-sickness.”

  “Figures.” She took a deep breath, clearly less upset by this situation than I was. Both of them were, but Frida’s nonchalance was more frustrating. Kolur never told me anything. But Frida was a witch, a real witch. She had been to Jandanvar; she had seen the magic at the top of the world. And all the little charms she’d taught me aboard the Penelope didn’t make up for the fact that she kept Kolur’s secrets for him.

  I was worked up enough to demand an explanation when Kolur said, “I figure we should keep walking west. Bound to run into someone sooner or later.”

  “How do you know that?” I said. “How did any of this happen? How are we all still alive?” Questions tumbled out of me, one after another. “And that warship! What happened to it? Is it going to come after us?”

  “Oh, it’s still out there,” Kolur said. “But we got some time before it comes after us again.”

  “How do you know that?” I shrieked, but I knew I wasn’t getting answers from either of them. They were already walking down along the waterline, heading to the west.

  I hated them both. I was glad they were alive, but I hated them more than I ever hated anyone. Even Isolfr. He had at least warned me about the Mists. Not that I’d been able to do anything about it.

  I ran after Kolur and Frida, stumbling over the stones. They both trudged along in silence. We followed the gentle curve of the beach, not passing any houses or boats or people or animals. No signs of civilization. Uneasiness peeked through my anger, and I thought about the chains of uninhabited islands, places where no creatures could survive.

  “How do you know we’re going in the right direction?” I asked when I couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “There’s nothing here but trees.”

  Kolur glared at me. “I know, girl.” He jerked his head off to the west. “We landed a bit farther off than I expected.” He turned away and took to walking again. Frida did her best to ignore both of us.

  “Than you expected?” I caught up with him. “So you can do that kind of magic, then?”

  Kolur grunted. “Plenty of people can do that kind of magic.”

  “Sea and sky, I am so sick of you not answering my questions.”

  “Stop, both of you.” Frida stood a few paces ahead of us, pointing at the sky. “There’s smoke.”

  She was right; a thin gray twist curled against the sky.

  “Ah, finally.” Kolur took off again. I glowered after him. I’d every intention of returning to that conversation, even if I had to make him listen to me.

  Seeing the smoke did give me hope, though. There were others here. We weren’t stranded on one of the empty islands.

  It didn’t take long before we had circled around the bend and come across a round fabric tent. Smoke drifted out of a hole at the top of the roof. There was no garden, only hard frozen soil, but the rocks had been arranged like a path leading to the tent’s opening, and that gave it a feeling of permanence.

  “Huh,” Kolur said. “Don’t look Juldani, does it?” He glanced at Frida, but she only shrugged.

  I had no idea what a Juldani tent looked like. My anger with Kolur flared again, that he’d lived the sort of life where he would know that, and he chose to keep it a secret.

  Kolur walked up to the door and tugged a rope attached to a metal bell. A few moments later, an old woman answered. Her hair was knotted up in a brightly embroidered scarf that made her face look perfectly round.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” Kolur said, speaking with a sharp, prickly dialect I didn’t recognize, “but would you mind telling us what island we’re currently on?”

  The woman scowled at him. “Lost your way, did you?” Her dialect wasn’t the same as the one Kolur spoke, but it wasn’t much closer to the Kjoran way of speaking I was used to.

  “I imagine this must happen to you frequently,” Kolur said. “Weary, confused sailors finding their way to your door.”

  This didn’t sound like him in the slightest. He was being polite, for one. I didn’t like it. I snuck a glance at Frida, but she had her arms crossed over her chest, looking bored.

  “No,” the old woman said, “it doesn’t. Because most sailors aren’t so stupid as to get blown off course.” She poked her head farther out the door and looked at each of us in turn. “Not much of a crew.”

  “They’re better than they seem,” Kolur said.

  That really didn’t sound like him.

  The woman made a scoffing noise. “You’re in Tulja,” she said.

  Tulja. The name was foreign and unfamiliar, and I was struck with a flurry of panic that it wasn’t Juldan, or even Jolal, which was only a day or so farther north. Tulja? I couldn’t even remember it on Papa’s carved map.

  “Rilil is up the road there, if you’re looking for sailing work.” The woman scowled at us again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to.”

  She yanked the curtain shut. Kolur turned to face us, and before I could start in on him, Frida did it for me.

  “Tulja!” she said. “You brought us to Tulja?”

  There it was again, the idea that Kolur had done magic.

  “Didn’t mean to. It’s farther north than we were, though.” Kolur grinned. “Let’s see what we can find in Rilil, shall we? I hope someone’s selling a boat.” He breezed past us and made his way to the frozen dirt road the woman had pointed to. I hung back with Frida.

  “How did he bring us here?” I asked her.

  She sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. “I’m not the one to answer that, I’m afraid.”

  “Gods! No one will tell me anything.”

  “Because you’re young and ignorance will better serve you. Come, before Kolur leaves us behind.”

  I couldn’t believe she’d said that to me. I stood in front of the old woman’s tent, watching Frida hurry to catch up with Kolur. Ignorance would better serve me?

  I thought of Isolfr then, and Gillean. Isolfr had tried to tell me about Lord Foxfollow, and Gillean had died for it. And look at all the good it had done. The warship still attacked us. We were still trapped here on Tulja – wherever Tulja was.

  I realized Kolur and Frida seemed in a mind to leave me. “Wait up!” I shouted, and ran up the road to catch up with them. Panting, I said, “So where is Tulja, exactly?”

  “North,” Kolur said. “A bit longer of a sail than I expected.”

  “How long?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “How long, Kolur?”

  “Nothing you need to worry about. We’ll be in the town soon.”

  I fumed. My anger was like magic, propelling me along the slippery, miserable road. I gave up trying to ask questions, because I knew it would just leave me angrier than I had started. My mood did not make for a pleasant walk.

  After a while, we began to pass more signs of life. There were round white tents, and a handful of little stone huts, and fences that held in great shaggy horned creatures that stared at us with the doleful eyes of deer and caribou. Every now and then, we’d pass someone standing outside one of those houses, and they studied us like we were a danger. That sense of hope I’d got from the smoke seemed ridiculous now. So there were people. What if they refused to help us? Or mistrusted u
s enough to attack us?

  Civilization suddenly seemed more dangerous than the wild.

  The ground was patched with snow, and ice daggers still hung from some of the fences. We were much farther north than we should be.

  Eventually, the tents and grassland gave way to something like a proper town, although the buildings were really just mounds dug out of the earth, some of them augmented with stone or grass roofs or scraps of that same thick fabric that had made up the old woman’s tent. Everything was crammed in close together. The roads remained unpaved, and the signs hanging next to the doors were painted with unfamiliar letters. Pictures, really. I squinted at them as we went past, but I couldn’t read them.

  Kolur could, however, because he stopped in front of a sign jammed into the ground next to one of the larger mound-buildings and said, “We need to eat. Get up our strength.”

  I wasn’t hungry. But Kolur and Frida both ducked inside, and I wasn’t about to let them leave me alone.

  It was a mead hall – the sort of thing, in Kjora, you’d find standing alone in the wilderness. It was odd to see one in a town, even as small and semi-permanent a town as this one. Faces turned toward us as we walked in. Mostly men, their hair long and plaited. They turned away from us just as quickly. It was a relief to know we weren’t of interest.

  Kolur led us to a table in the back, one that was shoved up against a stone-lined wall, underneath a sprawling set of antlers. “Sit here,” he said. “I’ll tell the mead master we’ll be wanting some food.”

  I hadn’t realized how exhausted I was until I sank onto the hard, roughhewn wood of the bench. My legs seemed to dissolve away from me, and every joint in my body was filled with a dull, distant ache.

  “He’s right, you know.” Frida peered at me in the smoky candlelight. “We need to rest. Gather our strength. That magic took a lot out of us.”

  “The magic,” I said. “It wasn’t yours.”

  “I won’t give you your answers.” She tilted her head. “Ask Kolur.”

  “Kolur won’t tell me anything.” I glared down at the table. Voices rose up in waves, laughing, shouting lewd remarks at one another. It was the sort of place Mama would love but wouldn’t let me go; the sort of place Papa would hate, and not on my behalf, either.