A touch of warmth against my cheek. My eyes blinked open, to be met by the heart-shaped face of a little old woman.
“Time to eat, love,” she said. She padded quietly across the room to retrieve a plate. I shook my head when she brought it back. I felt sick to my stomach.
I touched the fabric against my skin. Someone had dressed me in a sleeping gown of red silk. And there was more silk strung up around the room, from wall to wall, the different colors and shapes running together. My eyelids stayed open only long enough to see the little woman’s kind face.
“Where…?” I breathed out, unable to finish.
“You are finally home,” she whispered into my ear. “We’ve been waiting so long for you to come.”
The old woman woke me from my nightmares. She held my head in her lap, brushing and combing my hair away from my face. Mostly, she told me nonsensical things, hushed me when I tried to speak.
In the early light of one morning, I heard her voice across the room, whispering urgently.
“—must make that demon lift his magic. She hasn’t eaten in days, and I fear—”
“He said that she would wake long enough to eat. Are you telling me you can’t get her to, Beatrice?” The man’s voice was deep and strong. I saw him through a thin veil of lashes; he was dressed in deep red robes, with a head of graying black hair. The silver crown was worn low on his head. He looked like a god of war.
“She won’t stay awake long enough!” the woman said. “I’m afraid she’ll die if you don’t right this.”
I tried pushing myself away from them, toward the wall. My arms felt as though they were full of sand. They flopped about helplessly, twisting in ways that would have hurt had I not been so numbed by sleep. Poison, I thought. I’ve been poisoned….
I made a distressed noise, squeezing my eyes shut. Beatrice was at my side, pressing her warm hands against my face.
“Please, Your Majesty!” she cried. “Please.”
I saw his face as he knelt beside me, studying me closely. I blinked, fighting desperately to keep my eyes open.
“Salvala,” he said, the name of the goddess falling from his lips like a prayer. “This humble and obedient king welcomes you to your kingdom.”
I found North in the small garden. The flowers and green sinews of life that he had brought back with his magic lay scattered around him, burning.
“I did it,” he said. His back was to me, but he always could find me. “I ruined it all.”
“North,” I cried, wrapping my arms around him from behind. “I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”
“Syd,” he whispered. “You need to wake up.”
“No,” I said. “I won’t leave you.”
“Sydelle.” His voice was louder, suddenly not his own. “I said wake up!”
I glanced up, feeling his form shift and change in my arms. He glanced back over his shoulder at me, a low laugh rising in his chest.
I was looking not at North, but at the mutilated face of Reuel Dorwan.
I sat up with a scream, kicking and thrashing at the sheets. My sleeping gown was wet with sweat. A nightmare. Please, Astraea, I thought, pressing my face into my hands. Just let it be a nightmare.
“It’s lovely to see you again, too, Sydelle.”
Dorwan sat across from the bed, in the chair usually occupied by Beatrice. If he hadn’t been wearing that rotting pale coat, I might have taken him for a stranger. As the burns from his duel with North healed, the skin of his face had been pulled back, giving him a perpetual sneer.
Beatrice was nowhere in sight. I tried to pull myself off the bed to escape him, but I got no farther than the edge. I didn’t have the strength.
“I don’t advise that,” he said. “You’ve been asleep for nearly a week. Your body needs to wake itself up.
“I had to keep you asleep,” he continued. “We couldn’t have you getting upset enough to cause another quake, could we?”
“What…are…?” The words scratched my throat. The wizard handed me a glass of water from the nightstand, but I turned away from it.
“Come now, Sydelle,” he said. “No poison this time. Wizard’s honor.”
I accepted the glass and downed its contents in one large gulp, though a part of me wished it were poison.
“That’s better,” he said.
I turned my head away again, looking around the small room. The fire crackled and hissed, but I could still feel the coldness radiating from Dorwan.
“Do you know where you are?” he asked.
“In hell?”
Dorwan let out a burst of laughter. “Close. You’re in Auster. The king’s summer palace on the coast.”
“If I’m in Auster, what are you doing here?”
“I’m just a messenger,” he said, “who brought wonderful news to the king.” Dorwan inched closer to me, and I drew my knees up to my chest for protection. “Tell me, Sydelle, do you know anything about Auster’s faith?”
I took a deep breath, humoring him. “They believe that Salvala’s gift of the sword to man was better than Astraea’s gift of magic.”
“And they expect their goddess to return and reclaim the throne of the heavens,” Dorwan finished.
“What does this have to do with me?” I asked.
“It has everything to do with you, and that’s why finding you was so delightful,” he said. “When poison and duels didn’t work, I had to figure out a different way to take you from Wayland. He wasn’t ever going to let you go unless I put a sea—or a lake—between the two of you. Luckily for me, I caught the king’s ear, and he was willing to listen to the word of a wizard.”
“What did you tell these people?”
Dorwan’s face pulled back into another uneven smirk. “That I had found his goddess, of course. Their legends said that one of their most hated enemies would bring her to them. There are a lot of strange similarities between the two of you: a beautiful girl with the ability to control the magic of the world, to harness the power of storms and other terrible calamities. Crimson hair and a vengeful temper, too, of course.”
“You lied to them?” I said. “What will they do to you when they discover I’m not a goddess?”
“They won’t ever know,” Dorwan hissed. His eyes narrowed, and the splotchy pink of his scarred skin went white with anger. “Because if the king were to find out, he would kill us both—rather horribly, I’m afraid—and then move on to slaughter everyone in Palmarta.”
“They’ll just use me!” I said. “I’ll be the one to kill everyone! Don’t you have any kind of loyalty—to Palmarta, to the other wizards? They’ll be the first to die in the war!”
“Settle yourself,” he said dismissively. “I have far more self-preservation than that. My plan all along has been to use you against them. When the other wizards are dead, I’ll have your blood for myself. I’ll be the only wizard, too powerful for any human army to stop.”
I moved away from him. “I may be a jinx, but at least I’m not a heartless snake!”
Instead of being incensed, Dorwan’s mouth parted in surprise. It was only for a moment, but his one good eye widened with wonder.
“He told you, then? Finally told you?”
“I figured it out myself,” I said.
Dorwan let out a laugh. “It really is a sad story, you know. I think he did mean to save you from all of this. He needed you most of all, but now he’ll never see you again.”
“Leave me alone!” I couldn’t get my voice above a whisper.
“Don’t cry, Sydelle,” he said with a mocking smile. “You’re finally home.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself to wake up from this nightmare, too.
I pretended to sleep through the rest of the day, opening my eyes only to reassure Beatrice that I was still alive. The moment she left the room, I swung my legs out from beneath the covers and stood on weak legs. The dark red silk of the sleeping gown they had dressed me in felt like scales against my skin. Red—I hated red.
br />
My favorite color, North had said. The memory was enough to stop me for a moment.
I rummaged through the small wardrobe and chest at the foot of the bed; my dress was nowhere to be found and neither were my shoes. There was only a single brown cloak—the old woman’s, which meant that she would be back soon. I would have only so much time to find a way out.
I had seen flashes of the guards outside my door when Dorwan finally left. I wouldn’t make it a step past the threshold without being stopped. The only option was the small window that Beatrice had left ajar. I stuck my head outside, taking in the faint salty scent of the afternoon air. From this height, I could see the blue line of the Serpentine Channel, but also the hundreds of feet I could fall into the gardens below.
There was a small ledge below the window, not even a foot wide, but it looked stable enough to support me. It was enough.
I wrapped the woman’s cloak around me, pulling the hood over my hair. The window was tight around my body. I sucked in my stomach to get through, twisting so I could hold on as my bare feet found the ledge.
“Just go.” I took in one last deep breath. “Go, just go.”
I pressed my body against the cold stone, keeping my eyes focused ahead and not on the distance between my feet and the ground. There was nothing for my hands to hold on to until I reached the next window ledge.
It didn’t get any easier, and I couldn’t see any way to climb down to the windows a dozen feet below. There was one last window, and then the wall of the castle came to an end.
The room was empty, as far as I could tell, and the window was closed. I hit it once, twice with my fist, but it wasn’t until the third and fourth time that the latch unhooked itself and the window swung open into the room.
I didn’t waste another second after I made it through. My arms and legs were still shaking with the strain of my climb, but I pushed myself away from the window and pulled up my hood. I waited by the door, listening for the sound of footsteps, then slipped out into the hallway.
I was surprised to find bright, lush carpet beneath my feet instead of the dank stones of Provincia’s castle. The walls of the palace weren’t stone, either—not even plaster. They had been plated with perfect uniform blocks of gold.
I found a staircase, probably one used by the servants, and held my breath as I ran down the steps. When my bare foot touched the bottom step, I forced myself to slow. The hallway was well lit and free of rodents and filth. Two women dressed in blue silk walked past me, jolting my arm.
“Terribly sorry, ma’am,” one of the women whispered, bowing her head. “Pardon me.”
I nodded in return, trying not to panic. I had wanted to avoid any contact with the Austerans, not only for my safety but for theirs as well. I wasn’t sure what I was capable of anymore.
I followed the women down what had to be the servant’s hall toward a wall of sunlight. Outside, the steps down the side of the palace were lined by lush green gardens, each tree and bush molded into a distinct shape. The women talked of little things like their families or the meal they had been asked to make. At the bottom of the steps, they turned and waved good-bye to each other.
“Excuse me,” I called.
The dark-haired woman walked over to me. “Is there something I may help you with?”
“How…how can I get down to the channel?” I whispered. She didn’t look like any devil—if anything, she looked like my mother.
“Oh,” she said, surprised. “It’s a bit of a walk. If you plan on going somewhere, you’ll have to ask about a boat in the center of town. I’m headed that way, if you’d like some company.”
“It’s all right,” I began weakly.
“It’s no trouble at all,” she said, folding my arm under her own. After a moment she lowered her voice and said, “Are you in some kind of peril, dear? What happened to your shoes?”
“I prefer to go without them,” I said, my mouth dry. I reached up to pull the hood farther over my face.
“You and my son both,” she said, and led me down the steps of the palace. “Don’t worry, my dear. Whatever the trouble is, you’ll be perfectly safe with me.”
We entered the small village through the shaded marketplace. I kept my eyes on the knotted lengths of silk that covered the stands of flowers, vegetables, and fruit. The tiered, round roofs of the buildings were visible through small patches where no silk had been tied. Instead of the uneven stone surfaces of Palmarta’s cities, stones that were covered with years of moss and dirt, the buildings were smooth, clean, and soft to the touch. Even the stone path beneath our feet was whitewashed. If I hadn’t been in the world of my enemies, if I hadn’t passed a statue of Salvala the sword bearer, I might have thought it beautiful. Now all I felt was the creeping of unease across my skin. I reached for the necklace that wasn’t there.
The woman, Elema, waved to several of the vendors and bent to stop an apple from rolling away from a cart. She threw it back, smiling at the man who caught it.
“I’m going to introduce you to my brother-in-law,” she said. “He has a fishing boat and is one of the few who has obtained permission to sail in the channel during the war preparations.”
I shook my head. “You’ve already done enough for me.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You know the Word as well as I do—life in the service of others. We’re all here to help one another.”
I knew those as Astraea’s words, not the violent, bloodthirsty Salvala’s.
“I don’t have any money to pay for passage,” I said as she brought us down another road, wide enough for us to slip past two horse-drawn carts. Elema greeted both drivers.
“That’s perfectly fine,” she said. “We don’t have much use for money in these parts. If you can trade something or some kind of service, you should be just fine.”
I felt my face relax into a smile. With all the sordid history of wars between our countries, I hadn’t expected the peace of that village to soothe me into something that resembled calm.
“Here we are,” Elema said when we reached a long line of doors in the white walls. She opened the closest door and pulled me inside.
The stew over the hearth smelled sweet, like apples, and I found myself taking a step toward it, even as I noticed the man standing beside it.
“Evening, Elema,” he said. “Sallie’s gone out for a bit. Can’t believe she actually trusted me to watch dinner.”
“I can’t believe it, either, after the stew fiasco of last week,” Elema said, embracing him. “I’ve brought a guest with me. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Course not,” he said, and bowed in my direction. “My name is Ben Crom.”
“I’m Sydelle,” I said. Maybe I shouldn’t have been that honest—Elema gave a little start when I said my name.
“That’s a beautiful name,” she said. “One we don’t often hear around here. Are you from Palmarta?”
I looked back and forth between their faces.
“My father was from Fairwell. He had a sister with that name,” Elema said. “I thought you looked awfully nervous! Is that why you still have your hood up?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, taking a step back toward the door. “I’m sorry, I’ll go—”
“None of that,” Ben said. “No one in this town would harm you. Many have come from Palmarta, and many have left for it. Is that why you’ve come to see me?”
I nodded, keeping my eyes on my bare toes. “I was brought here against my will.”
“And without your shoes, it seems,” Ben said with a small laugh. “Elema, Sallie should have an extra pair for Sydelle to use.”
The other woman smiled and disappeared up the small stairway.
“Come here,” Ben said, motioning me closer to the hearth. “That’s better—a bit warmer, eh? Am I to understand that you’re trying to return to Palmarta?”
“If possible,” I said. “I don’t have much to offer—I can sew and weave, even mix elixirs…but they’re wizard elixirs
.”
“Probably won’t need those, then,” he said, inclining his head toward Salvala’s symbol on the wall. “I have to tell you that it might be a few days before I can take you anywhere. We have very limited opportunities to go out into the channel. The only reason I’m allowed is to bring food to the soldiers stationed on the boats out there.”
“Are you allowed to go near Palmarta’s coast at all?” I asked. Elema returned a moment later with a pair of green silk slippers.
“Unfortunately not, but I think you might be in luck,” Ben said. “Ewald Amert is bringing grain down the channel to the soldiers in the southern part of Saldorra. Is that close enough to Palmarta?”
“That would be perfect,” I said. “The only luck I’ve had in months.”
“Listen, Sydelle,” Ben said. His face lost his easy smile. “I think we both know how dangerous your country will be in a matter of weeks. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay here, where you’d be safe?”
“Nowhere is really safe,” I said. “It would be better if I went. I can find my way home from Saldorra.”
But I couldn’t go home—I couldn’t go anywhere I would put people in danger. I didn’t have the same insane thoughts the queen had about destroying Auster. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, not if I could help it, but I didn’t know where I could go so as not to be a menace to others. There wasn’t any order or sense left for me, just the realization that everything was different. An unnameable feeling welled up from deep inside of me and stole the breath in my lungs.
“Ewald’s going tonight or tomorrow, isn’t he?” Elema asked after a moment. “I’ll watch supper if you take her over to speak with him now.”
“Of course,” Ben said. “Let me get my cloak and we’ll go.”
I gave Elema a grateful smile, and she squeezed my arm reassuringly.
“I never thought—” I searched for the right words. “I don’t know if there’s any way that I can thank you for what you’ve done.”