Magic of Wind and Mist

  I gathered up the wind and flung it at the monster. It shattered across its snout. The monster hardly seemed fazed.

  “Hanna!” Isolfr was at my side, glowing with starlight. “Combine our winds. It might be enough—”

  The monster roared again, cutting him off. But I didn’t think. I just called down the south wind, let it swirl and weave around me. Isolfr did the same with the north wind. Then he reached over and grabbed my hand. The moment our palms touched, our magic combined, infused with the power of opposites. It erupted into a riotous spray of light, magic showering all around us like rain.

  The monster flew backward.

  At the same time, there came another wash of magic, pale pearly green and charged with a sense of malice and wrongdoing. It was like needles on my skin, and it dragged me forward across the boat, following the trajectory of the monster. Isolfr didn’t let go of my hand. I screamed, feeling that terrible magic soak into my body, mingling with my own magic, creating something new, something terrible.

  Isolfr and I slammed up against the railing. We tipped over the side. Isolfr was screaming. The water below was pale green and calm, which I didn’t expect.

  We tipped farther. I knew we were going to fall. I didn’t know how to stop it.

  “Frida!” Isolfr shouted. “Stop the spell!”

  That was the last thing I heard before Isolfr and I, still holding hands, fell overboard and splashed in that eerie emerald water.

  Everything went green.

  And then everything went dark.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My head ached with a sharp pain that came rippling through the darkness. I groaned and rolled over onto my side. A pale light seeped in at the edges of my vision, growing wider and vaster until I realized it was just sunlight bouncing off the ocean.

  I rolled over again and hit up against something hard and flat—a wall. No, not a wall. The side of a boat. I blinked, trying to force things into focus. It didn’t look like the side of the Penelope II. It was too short, for one, and for another it was covered in slick red paint.

  Fear jolted through me. I sat straight up. The haze of waking up was gone, and every one of my actions was propelled by fear.

  I was in a boat. A small, narrow one, big enough for only two or three people. Isolfr was with me, thank the ancestors, sprawled out on his stomach. The bow and stern curled up into fancy, decorative spirals, and we didn’t have sails or oars or any way to direct the boat away from this one spot, which was in the middle of the ocean.

  Sea and sky. For the first time I really became aware of the enormity of the water. It was a dark glassy green and so calm it was like sitting on the surface of a mirror.

  Another jolt of fear, this one sharper and more pure than the last.

  “Isolfr!” I scrambled over to him. The boat tilted back and forth. “Wake up! Isolfr!”

  I shook him by the shoulder, praying to every god I knew that he wasn’t dead. He didn’t move. I shook him harder, then rolled him onto his back. This elicited a groan of protest from him, and I slumped back, relieved that he was at least alive.

  His eyes fluttered open, but then he squinted against the brightness and flopped back over onto his stomach. He moaned into the painted wood of the boat.

  “You’ve got to get up,” I said to him. “Something’s happened.”

  He lifted his head and blinked at me. For a moment Pjetur flickered through his features before disappearing permanently. He was only Isolfr now.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “I was hoping you would know!” I felt a pang of dread. Maybe it was expecting too much from him, but Isolfr had always seemed to know more than he let on. Surely he could tell me where we were.

  Isolfr gripped the side of the boat and heaved himself up to sitting. The boat rocked. Isolfr cried out, then tightened his grip on the boat, his knuckles whitening.

  “Yeah, it’s not the Penelope II,” I said.

  “I see that.” Isolfr looked around, his eyes wide. He tilted his head back at the sky and gave a little yelp.

  “What? What is it?”

  He pointed up at the sky, and I followed the path of his finger. Nothing but pure, empty blue.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Exactly.”

  I glared at him. “Stop talking in riddles! What the hell’s going on?”

  “There’s nothing there! No sun.”

  Fear shot through me. Immediately I craned my head back. He was right. The sky was empty and full of light but there was no sun, no burning disc of fire.

  “I don’t understand.” I stared at him. “What does that mean?” A horrible thought struck me. “Sea and sky, are we dead? Is this the ocean of ghosts?”

  Isolfr stared at me. “I can’t die,” he said. “Not the way you can.”

  I looked over the edge of the boat, down at the glassy, unnatural water. Of course. He was a spirit of the north wind. He couldn’t come to the ocean of ghosts.

  “Then where are we?” I looked over at him again. “You know, don’t you? Just say it.” I had my own suspicions, but I wanted desperately to be proven wrong. “Please. Isolfr. Where are we?”

  Isolfr’s eyes clouded. He looked away.

  “Tell me!”

  “The Mists,” he whispered.

  I couldn’t breathe. The air seemed tainted, thick, poisonous—of course it did, it was Mists air, laced with unnatural magic.

  “How?” I finally said.

  Isolfr shook his head. “I don’t know. If Lord Foxfollow meant to do it on purpose, we wouldn’t be here.” He swept his arm across the vista of the sea. “We’d be imprisoned. Or—or dead.”

  I looked out at the expanse of ocean. We were alone, a tiny boat floating amid saltwater, no provisions, no protection from the cold.

  “We’re basically imprisoned right now,” I said. “And we’ll be dead soon enough.”

  Isolfr shook his head. “This isn’t Lord Foxfollow’s doing. It’s not his style.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “You know so much about his style?”

  “I do, actually.” Isolfr hesitated. “This—this was probably the spell that Frida and Kolur cast.” He shivered at the word “spell.” “It must have combined with Lord Foxfollow’s magic somehow.” Isolfr turned his attention toward the horizon. It was a dark line in the distance, a seam between the green ocean and the pale sky.

  “That’s it?” I said. “It combined with Foxfollow’s magic somehow?” Anger rose up inside me, trying to smother my fear. It wasn’t working. “This isn’t the time to start keeping secrets again,” I said.

  “I’m not keeping secrets.” Isolfr turned toward me. He looked paler than usual in the odd, fractured light, and even more impossibly beautiful. That made me angry too. This was not the time for Isolfr to be beautiful. “I told you everything that I know.” He paused. “That I think I know. I’m only guessing about the magic mixing. But it seems the most likely answer.”

  I slumped down against the side of the boat. We rocked gently over the water. “We’re trapped here.” I looked up at him. “And we’re going to die. Just admit it.”

  “No.” Isolfr shook his head. “Frida and Kolur’s spell”—another shiver—“for all its darkness, it was a protection spell. It’s likely still protecting us.”

  “It put us in a pleasure boat.”

  “A gondola,” Isolfr said. “A favorite of the Mists nobility. I’m sure there’s a reason for it.”

  I rubbed my head. “Well, what are we supposed to do while we wait for the magic to start helping us?” I glowered. “So what do you think we’ll die of first? Thirst? Or the cold?”

  Isolfr looked over at me, his eyes glittering, silver and pale blue. “I don’t need to worry about either of those things.”

  “Congratulations. I do.” I sighed and ran my hands over my hair. “I’m not just going to sit here and hope the protection spell protects us. Can we try calling the winds?”

  Isolfr hesi
tated. “I don’t know if it will work.”

  “Well, can we at least try?”

  Another pause. I could tell from his expression that he thought this was a stupid idea, and I knew, when he nodded, that he was just humoring me. But I didn’t care. I wanted to prove him wrong.

  I steadied myself and lifted my hands. The air was so still that even that small movement seemed a massive disruption. I’d never felt this kind of stillness before.

  “Together,” Isolfr said. “One, two, three—”

  I reached deep into myself, deep into the memories of my father’s ancestors, and then my mother’s too, because I always thought my magic worked the best when I pulled from both sides of my family. The air stayed still. I tried to feel for the magic, for the whisper of spice and warmth, for anything, but there was only that stone-dead stillness.

  I looked at Isolfr. His eyes were closed and his face was scrunched up in concentration. But I didn’t even feel the brush of a north breeze.

  This was not good. He was a spirit of the north wind, and he shouldn’t have to concentrate the way I did.

  “Fine. You’re right. It’s not working.”

  Isolfr’s eyes flew open. “I’m sorry, Hanna,” he said, and he seemed genuine.

  “I’m going to freeze to death,” I said. “And I can’t even call the winds, which, you know, is the one thing I can do to protect myself—”

  “It’s a different world,” Isolfr said quietly, “with different winds.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Jandanvari magic will likely work here,” he said.

  “I don’t know a single useful Jandanvari spell.” I drew my coat tight across my chest. The Jandanvari magic Frida had taught me was fisherman’s magic, simple stuff to let you know where to cast a net or how to hold a spell. Nothing that would help us. I shivered. The still air felt like shards of broken glass. Soon, the cold would be too much.

  But then Isolfr knelt down on the bottom of the boat with his palms up and his eyes closed. He began to hum, a low, throaty melody that rose and fell like the wind. As he hummed, a glow brightened inside of him, and he was illuminated like a magic-cast lantern, pale blue light competing with the Mists brightness. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was beautiful, casting that eerie blue light, but I was also afraid. The magic crackling across my skin was unfamiliar. Not at all like the spells Frida had taught me.

  I expected the winds to blow in from the north, for the gondola to rise up on the waves and rush toward shore. Instead, a heat-sphere materialized in the middle of the boat.

  “All that for a heat-sphere?” I muttered.

  Isolfr opened one eye. It was nothing but light. “Test the ocean water,” he said, his voice echoing and thrumming. “It should be fresh.”

  I hesitated for a moment, thinking of the cold.

  “Please,” Isolfr said. “I’m trying to keep you alive.” He shut his eye, a light going out.

  My cheeks warmed, and I felt the way I did whenever Mama chastised me for dawdling on my way home and making her worry. He was right. This magic, he didn’t have to do it.

  I pulled off my gloves and leaned over the side of the boat and dipped my hands into the water. I cried out at the shock of the cold, but I managed to scoop up a handful of water and splash it on my tongue.

  Fresh.

  “It worked!” I cried, and I held my stinging hands up to the heat-sphere. The warmth spread over them like a blanket.

  Isolfr let out a sigh that sounded like a gust of wind. The light faded out of him and he dropped forward, his face pressed down into the boat’s bottom.

  “Isolfr!” I pushed over beside him, still keeping my hands held up to the heat-sphere. “Are you all right?”

  He groaned in response, and I felt a rush of relief.

  “You better not have hurt yourself,” I told him.

  “I’m fine.” He lifted his face and blinked at me. His eyes seemed too big, wide and guileless. “That should hold you over until the protection spell directs us to help.”

  “We still don’t know for sure that it will.” I dropped my gaze down to my hands, still warming by the heat-sphere. “I mean, thank you. For the fresh water.”

  In response, Isolfr sat up and leaned against the gondola’s edge. The light bounced off the water, sending sparkles into the air. There was no warmth anywhere except for Isolfr’s heat-sphere and in the panicked drumming of my heart.

  • • •

  I’m not sure how much time passed. The boat floated in the glassy sea, not moving forward, only side to side, rocking us like a cradle. I sat close to the heat-sphere, my knees drawn up to my chest. When I felt thirsty, I’d scoop up water from the side of the boat. I’ll give Isolfr credit: it was as sweet and sparkling as water from a spring, even if it did my freeze my hands to drink it.

  We didn’t talk much. There just wasn’t anything to say. Casting the spells to get me warmth and fresh water seemed to have exhausted Isolfr anyway, and he curled up at the bow of the gondola, his head resting on the railing, his eyes closed. I did ask him if he was all right, early on; he fluttered his eyes and said, “I’m fine,” and that was that.

  We sat.

  We waited.

  My stomach grumbled. I sighed and dropped my head back to look at the broad expanse of blue sky. My stomach grumbled again.

  “I don’t suppose there are fish in these waters.” I looked over at Isolfr. He stirred, opened his eyes. His expression was sleepy.

  “Probably not,” he said.

  I sighed. “What sort of ocean doesn’t have fish?”

  “An ocean in the Mists.”

  Those words chilled me more than the frigid air. For the first time, I was struck by exactly how dire our situation was. Because it wasn’t just a matter of being stranded on the open sea—that would be bad enough, as it’s nearly impossible for a man to come back from the emptiness of the ocean—but being stranded in the Mists. The Mists. The land that I’d been taught my whole life to fear. Ever since I was a little girl, my parents had whispered to me the signs of the Mists, in case its people ever came trailing through our village. Mist on the water, unnatural gray eyes. And here I was. Trapped.

  Not that anything in this place looked like what I’d been taught to fear. The sky was bright, the water sparkling. I tilted my head back again. Not a single cloud drifted overhead. I wondered why they called it the Mists when there wasn’t a wisp of mist in sight.

  My stomach grumbled more loudly, and this time the grumble was accompanied by a sharp pang of hunger. Isolfr was staring down at his feet, not looking at me. Lucky him, not having to eat.

  I leaned over the side of the boat and brought water up to my lips to drink. It was so cold that it set my whole body to chattering, but I thought that if my stomach was full of water, maybe I wouldn’t feel the hunger as much. And part of me hoped I’d see a fish flickering through the water.

  I didn’t.

  I kept drinking, even as my fingers turned blue. My hunger hadn’t subsided. I wasn’t sure it was going to, but drinking water gave me something to do. I tried not to think about what would happen when I needed to relieve myself. There wasn’t exactly much privacy on the gondola.

  I scooped my hands in the water one more time, my arms raised with goose bumps and my body shivering with the cold. When I lifted my hands up, the surface of the water rippled and an image formed. It looked like a reflection.

  The water drained through my fingers. The reflection was of a boat, a sailing ship.

  “Isolfr,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Isolfr, get over here.” I didn’t tear my eyes away from the image of the ship in the water, not even to look up to see where the reflection came from. It was a grand-looking ship, with wide golden sails and a carving of a woman at the prow, her hair falling all the way down the length of her body in curls and waves.

  “What is it?” His voice was right next to my ear. I pointed at the water.

  “There!
Look! Please tell me you see it!”

  There was a pause, and for a moment I was afraid I was going mad. But then Isolfr shouted, “We’re saved!”

  I looked over at him. He was leaning over the side, a huge smile plastered on his face. He reached down and touched the reflection, and it shimmered over the water.

  “It’s real,” he said, looking over at me. “It’s real!”

  “What is? The reflection?” I looked from him to the boat in the water. The horizon was still empty. “I don’t see an actual boat anywhere.”

  “Because it’s underwater.” Isolfr hopped to his feet and then dove over the side of the gondola. He hardly made a splash.

  “What in the name of the ancestors are you doing?”

  “Moving us. That ship’ll be surfacing soon, and we don’t want to be in its way.”

  “Surfacing?” I looked over the railing again. The reflection was still there. Isolfr positioned himself beside me and began pushing the gondola through the water. It clearly wasn’t easy for him. He pressed his shoulder against the boat and heaved, his legs kicking up a froth under the water. The boat inched forward.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Isolfr grunted and shook his head. “The water’s too cold for you.”

  We lurched forward. I reached down and paddled with one hand, trying my best to ignore the numbness working through my fingers. The gondola broke the stillness of the water with a faint ripple, and the water licked against the side of the boat, keeping time to Isolfr’s occasional grunts of exertion.

  The reflection of the sailing ship still floated in the water.

  “How do you know it’s going to help us?” I said. I drew my hands up and knotted them in my coat; the water had gone too cold for me to stand. “The ship?”

  Isolfr gave one last push and the gondola launched forward on his momentum and then stopped dead in the water.

  “Well?” He climbed over the side of the boat, and the water evaporated off him immediately. To my eyes, he was completely dry.

  “It’s a fishing boat,” he said. “There’s no guarantee that they’ll help us—”