I was proud of the way my hands didn’t shake or tremble as they slipped under the wizard’s arms. A warm flush seemed to wash through my body, and I was dragging North’s prone form out into the open field, toward the small, trickling creek. I kept my eyes on the trees and my back to the water, but all I could see were the shadows the trees cast, skimming the ground, weaving in and out of one another as if in a game.
I left our bags behind. The rock in my hand would be useless against sword or magic, but it was the only weapon I had. The wind kicked my curls up around my face, but not even its slight push at my back could hide that second pulse against my shoulder.
I dropped the rock onto the soft ground and threw my hands behind me, then turned to see an enormous beetle. It hovered near North’s prone form for a moment, its wings letting off a loud buzz. Its color was the strangest thing about it, a purple so deep I nearly mistook it for black.
“Get off! Go!” I said, waving the beetle off the wizard. It launched itself back up, caught a strong breeze, and disappeared into the night. I laughed then, shaking my head at the thought of being so worked up over such a small thing.
“I’ve completely lost it,” I said, pressing my hands to my face.
I sat beside the wizard until morning, the gray rock still nearby. My dress was uncomfortably damp with the dew, and the morning was cooler than I expected and far quieter. When the sun was finally above us, when the shadows faded into something far less sinister, I was finally brave enough to stand again. North slept on, untouched by the relief I felt when I made out the familiar form of our bags. Everything, even the contents of North’s bag, which had scattered the night before, was in the exact place I had left it. If the intruder had been an animal or a man, he hadn’t been interested in a loom or glass bottles.
I looked around for what else might have fallen from North’s bag, finding a small, nearly empty bottle and a worn-out, leather-bound notebook stuffed with loose sheets of paper and rumpled maps. I took one of the maps in hand as I walked back over to the wizard. The cold wind that whistled through the trees and tall grass tore the frail paper into two neat pieces, and I had to grab them before the wind blew them away completely.
I collapsed in a heap by North’s side, pressing both fists against my eyelids. The exhaustion was back now, worse than before. Every bone in my body screamed for sleep, but my mind was still restless, turning itself in endless circles.
I turned my face toward North, hoping for some sign that he would eventually wake.
“North?” I asked, my voice thick. The muscles in his arms had relaxed, and his face was slack with sleep. He looked as though he was actually resting and would be for some time.
My body seemed to stand again of its own accord. I washed my face in the frigid water of the creek and filled our flasks. It was strange to see water running freely, winding through the countryside with perfect ease.
It was enough to remind me of my morning prayers. I was halfway through the ancient words when I felt something soft brush against my hands. The wind had carried North’s loose blue cloak over to me.
I gathered the rest of the cloaks, separating them to get a better look. There were five in all, including the red one still wrapped tightly around his shoulders, and most were ripped and tattered. I had repaired only the yellow one in Cliffton.
Maybe, I thought, it wouldn’t be so bad to have a few more minutes of quiet.
Some hours later, when the sun was almost directly above us and I was on my third cloak, North sat up suddenly.
“Syd!” he said, on his feet in a moment.
I glanced up from the green cloak. I had liked him much better asleep, tucked away in his silent dreams.
“My name is Sydelle,” I said, snipping off an excess bit of thread. His lips parted slightly, as if surprised to find me sitting nearby. “Syd reminds me of some fat, lazy old man—I knew a Sid, and all he ever did was sit on his mother’s porch and complain about the heat!”
“Was that the one who tried to give me his chicken?” North asked. “Had a perpetually dazed look about him? Too much time in the sun, maybe?”
I gave him a pointed look, which he returned with an annoying grin. Finished with the green cloak, I folded it neatly beside me.
“You—” he began, looking down. His hand came up and touched the red cloak, still hanging around his shoulders. “What are you doing?”
“I think it’s fairly obvious,” I said. “If you’re done sleeping away the day, I was hoping we could move on before nightfall. If we take Wickerby Road, we should be able to find Prima, the road that will take us directly to Provincia.”
The road that was one day supposed to take me into a new life far from home. Henry had said it would take me less than a day to find the road from Dellark, and if I stayed on its straight path, it would take only a month to arrive in Provincia, Palmarta’s capital city.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” North asked, dropping down next to me. “And wait—why are we over here?”
I thrust the yellow, black, and green cloaks at him. “I heard something last night, and I thought we’d be safer where I could see someone approach.”
“And you didn’t think to wake me?” he asked, suddenly angry. “What if it had been a wizard? What would you have done then?”
“A wizard like the one that attacked us last night?” I asked. The blue cloak in my hand was icy to the touch. “You knew him—not Genet, the other one.”
North rubbed the back of his neck. “His name is Reuel Dorwan. He’s been tracking me for a while now—if I had noticed him earlier, I would have tried to find a way to end it once and for all.”
For the first time in years, I pricked my finger on the needle.
“You want to kill him?” I asked slowly.
North turned his face away and took the blue cloak from me.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said.
“Of course not,” I said in a low voice. “I’m just a stupid little girl who’s incapable of understanding anything.”
North bristled. “There isn’t much to say about him except that he’s the vilest rot ever to have walked this world. That trick he did was pure dark magic, magic that’s forbidden by wizarding society. Not that he cares, of course. He never did.”
“His trick—was that what caused you to act like that last night?” I asked. “I tried everything to wake you up, and you still slept like the dead.”
North shook his head and turned away from me. I drew in a sharp, angry breath at the silence that followed. He would have walked away if my voice had not caught him and held him there.
“I hope you realize that nothing will ever be right between us until you tell me—until you just tell me why you took me,” I said, frustrated. “You keep everything to yourself, and I’m just supposed to accept the fact that you can create a gust of wind and stop the world from shaking and that you’re surprised I can fix your rotting cloaks—”
“It’s because most humans can’t,” he cut in, turning back to me. “What would you like me to say, Syd? It takes some degree of magic inside a person to repair a talisman and not have it lose its ability. That is why I was surprised.”
He reattached the rest of his cloaks in a whirl of color.
“Are…you saying I have magical ability?” I asked carefully.
“Magic is inherited through families,” he said. “You may have had a wizard in your family, but it was a long time ago. What power you have in you is weak and useless.”
“Not useless,” I said, giving him a hard look. “Not entirely.”
“No,” North agreed with a small smile, and for the first time I thought I finally had an answer to one of the hundreds of questions that poured through my mind. I bent to pick up my loom.
“Are you positive you didn’t see anything last night?” North asked after a moment. “It’s not like him to just…give up….”
“I thought there might have been something out there, but it was only a bee
tle,” I said, watching a strange look come over his face.
“A beetle?” he repeated.
“Well, it was rather large,” I said defensively. “It was practically the size of a small animal!”
“And purple?”
I whirled around. “How did you know?”
“Please, please tell me you killed it. Tell me you took your boot and smashed it,” North said, passing a hand over his face. He didn’t wait for my response; he already knew the answer. The wizard moved quickly, throwing his bag over his shoulder and scanning the wide expanse around us.
“Stop moving!” I said. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“It was a rover beetle,” he said, his mouth set in a firm line. “Time to leave, Syd.”
He reached for my arm, but I pulled it away.
North blew out a frustrated sigh, but he knew what I wanted. “It’s a beetle that can sense magic. They’re trained to track wizards, usually by the Wizard Guard, but in this case, by our dear friend. And it means he probably knows by now where we are, unfortunately.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Next time I won’t make the same mistake.”
North let out a humorless laugh.
“There won’t be a next time. There are a number of ways to find a wizard, and he won’t use the same trick twice.” He motioned for me to follow him. “We need to leave now. He’ll be right behind us.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the path his boots made in the mud.
“We have to stay off the main roads,” he said, still a number of steps ahead of me. “He’ll have a greater opportunity to find us if we stay out in the open for too long.”
“But Wickerby is the fastest way to Provincia—”
“And if he finds us on it, he’ll know exactly where we’re going,” North said. “I need your help, Syd. We have to find a different way.”
“All right,” I said. I reached for his black cloak, forcing him to stop. “If that’s true, then I need to look at the map. If we’re where I think we are, I can find us a route that stays close to Prima Road, but not on it. Are you sure we can lose the time, though?”
“We won’t be losing it if it keeps us alive,” he said. I pulled out the map I had accidentally torn, and we both looked it over.
“I still don’t understand why Dorwan would be tracking us,” I muttered. “I don’t like feeling like a pawn in someone else’s game.”
“He wants to stop us from telling the Sorceress Imperial that he was the one behind the poisoning, not Auster,” North said, tying something around my neck. I glanced down at the black cloak around my shoulders.
“It’ll mask any remnant of the locating spell still on you,” he said, answering my unspoken question. “I think. At least I hope.”
“You hope?”
“It’s the best I can do for now,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
And he was.
By the end of the week, North and I had developed a routine. It wasn’t the best, and it certainly wasn’t fun, but it was our routine, and we clung to it like a religion. I seized the maps and plotted our path through the maze of roads; I cooked, washed, and mended. North found us food and shelter. My anger toward him for taking me from my home was still there, but I could no longer ignore him or sit around waiting for my life to weave itself back together.
It was a strange experience to wake up one morning and find the leaves of the trees a muted yellow instead of their usual vibrant green. And with the change of colors came a change in the weather. The warm, sticky air was suddenly, at least to me, dry and chilled. It was days before I became used to it, and weeks before I realized that time was slowly marching forward. It was fall—a real fall—and it was beautiful.
I found a bundle of paper in one of the markets we had passed through and used the only gold I had to purchase it. I wrote letter after letter to my parents and Henry, telling them what cities we were cutting through so they would know where to reach me. There was no telling who would read them, or if the letters would even get through the line of Saldorran soldiers.
Was the village still standing? Were my family and friends all right? I was desperate for information, for any hint of their well-being. North dutifully mailed my letters—at least until we got so low on money that we could no longer pay for postage, since we had to conserve every coin we had. This presented a new problem entirely.
“We’re going to have to stop for a few days,” he said suddenly as we cut through a stand of trees. We were on our way into a small village I had found on the map, having seen no sign of Dorwan at all. “I’m thinking we’ll need at least two hundred gold pieces for food and transportation.”
“We haven’t got the time,” I said. “You wouldn’t even let me stop to wash my face in the river this morning!”
“Without any money we won’t be able to continue at this rate. Perhaps you feel differently, but I do enjoy eating real food and sleeping in actual beds. And since you insist on separate rooms, my poor little money bag has gotten considerably thinner.”
It had already been over two weeks since our run-in with the wizards in Dellark. I didn’t think we had time to waste, given that we had less than a month to cross the rest of the country.
I looked away, gripping the strap of my bag. “I don’t think we should stop. I want to get to Provincia as soon as we possibly can. Maybe you wouldn’t understand because you have nothing at stake—”
“Nothing at stake?” North let out a dry laugh. “If Auster takes over the country, do you honestly believe they’ll leave everything as it was? That the wizards will have any place left? Who knows what they’d do to us?”
“So you’re doing this because you’re scared for your own life,” I said. “How inspiring. Astraea would be ashamed of you. You’re supposed to be protecting her people.”
“Astraea can go rot,” North said harshly. I flinched as if he had slapped me. “She doesn’t give me food or find me a safe place to sleep at night. I do that myself.”
“You’re a wizard,” I snapped. “Can’t you just use magic to make your own food?”
“Ah, yes,” he retorted. “Because mud pies are so very delicious and the wind fills empty stomachs quite nicely.”
I gave him a long, hard glare before storming ahead. North caught up to me and blocked my path.
“Move,” I said. “If you want to stop, then fine, I’ll go ahead by myself. You can go wander off a cliff for all I care!”
“I’m sorry I said that about Astraea,” he said quietly. I tried to step around him, but he moved with me. “I haven’t been able to find any customers in the past few towns we’ve passed through, because opinions toward the wizards have changed. A lot of people blame the wizards for the king’s death and the war. I’ll be lucky to find a few jobs here and there to keep us going, but don’t think, not even for a moment, that I’ve forgotten why we set out in the first place.”
His face was so sincere that my body seemed to unwind on its own accord, loosening all the knots and frustrations.
“Well, have you ever thought of bathing?” I asked, turning away. “No one wants to hire a wizard who smells worse than their outhouse. And who knows what creatures are living in that hair?”
“Why do I need to brush my hair, anyway?” He lifted his arm and gave a few experimental whiffs. “And I smell wonderful. All manly and whatnot.”
Seeing my look of utter disgust, without another word, he wrapped an arm loosely around my shoulders, and the black cloak came up around us, and I was falling, falling, falling…
The moment my feet hit the ground, I pushed him away from me. North tripped over his heavy cloaks, stumbling backward until he fell onto the dirt with a startled curse.
“Don’t do that without giving me some warning!” I cried, my head still swimming dizzily.
He grunted as he picked himself off the ground.
“All right, all right,” he said. “Next time I’ll warn you when I’m about to tw
ist the magical pillars of time and the world.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said crossly. “But you’d better!”
“I thought you’d like twisting…,” he mumbled, picking leaves from his matted black hair.
“Twisting,” I repeated slowly. “Is that what it is? Why can’t we just twist to Provincia if it’ll get us there faster?”
North let out a dry laugh. “Don’t you think that if I was capable of doing it, we would already be in the capital by now? Twisting is extremely difficult for a wizard to do alone, let alone with someone else.”
“How far can you twist us at a time, then?” I asked.
“A mile—at the most,” he said. “And that’s quite a feat.”
I blew a stray curl out of my eyes. “Where are we now?”
“Our best chance for a job. Have a look.”
Dellark had been far nicer than anything I was used to in Cliffton. But even at night, this city was grand, far grander than anything my imagination could have produced, and for an instant I was sure we were in Provincia. Its walls and towers reached toward the sky in columns of the purest white. I followed the line of purple flags on the towers down to the moat surrounding the city. From a distance, the walls glinted in a way that reminded me of the porcelain in Mrs. Whitty’s shop at home. So smooth, like cream. It was Fairwell, home of master artists and their apprentices, the city that was to have been my first stop on the road to my future. I would take this chance to walk its streets, even with a reeking wizard at my side.
“Fairwell seems to have captured your heart as well,” North commented, pausing only a moment to readjust his leather bag.
I nodded. “It’s so…” I couldn’t find the right word. Even I, a world away in my little desert house, had heard stories of Fairwell’s fabulous glass sculptures. I had to find the green crystal dragons, and the blown vases large enough to fit a grown man inside. Henry would be incredibly jealous—in all of his travels, he had never once seen the white walls of Fairwell.