Shimmer and Burn Read online

  Tobek growls with frustration, rocking his head back in the grass, and I sit against his squirming legs, humiliated by my mistake.

  “What’s going on?” Bryn demands, still safe in the wagon. Her dinner knife flashes silver in the fading sunlight. “I’m paying you to get us to New Prevast.”

  “We’re making camp for the night,” North says, arching an eyebrow before he scrutinizes the stones in his hand. “There’s clean water through the trees if it’s needed.”

  Tobek lifts his head off the ground and offers Bryn a wide, cheeky smile. “Warm enough for a swim.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve been pinned by my servant,” she says.

  He deflates a little and I pity him, for believing she might be human beneath that pretty skin. Rocking back to my heels, I stand, offering Tobek a hand up. He refuses it, embarrassed, scrambling to his feet and edging away from me. “Stop doing that,” he says, petulant, spitting out a mouthful of dust and casting a sideways glance toward North. Then he notices what I’m wearing and straightens. “Those are my pants.”

  And his shirt, judging by the size. I found them buried in a drawer last night while looking for the dagger.

  “My dress smelled like the marketplace,” I say tightly. Like blood and guilt and gunpowder.

  “So then wash it.”

  “Tobek,” North warns in a low voice.

  I cast him a dark look: I don’t need him to defend me. “Look,” I say, “fair trade: I can teach you how to throw a punch if you let me wear your pants.”

  “Why? I can already hit a target at twenty yards.” He thrusts out his chest with a swell of pride.

  “Because you might not always have your crossbow and it’d be useful to know how to fight with your hands.”

  Tobek shrugs, glancing toward Bryn to see if she’s watching. “Maybe,” he says at last.

  North snorts and I look over again, annoyed at his uninvited assessment. He crouches, whispering words that sound like nonsense but feel like magic, pressing his fingers to the stones as he completes a circle around our camp. Despite myself, I draw closer, hugging my arms around my chest. When he finishes, he sits back on his heels and looks up, expression unreadable.

  “Please don’t kill my apprentice,” he says.

  I shift my weight, eying the rocks. “Were you casting a spell?”

  A half smile twists his lips and he stands, brushing his hands off on the seat of his trousers. He still holds several stones and they rattle in his hands. “A barrier ward,” he says. “To keep you safe, as promised.”

  So he’s a charmer, just like Thaelan.

  “Why don’t we just keep moving?” I ask. Basic rule of the ring: A moving target is always harder to hit.

  “Because the earth is made of stone,” he says, “and stone holds magic better than wood. It’s more defensible to stand still than to trust the horses and wagon’s walls against the hellborne.” He offers me a smile. “Seven days to New Prevast, Miss Locke, but six nights as well.”

  I hug myself tighter, quelling the nervous energy that comes from standing still after running my whole life. Will Perrote camp for the night too, or are we sacrificing what little lead we may have?

  “Is it safe to touch them?” I ask, toeing the edge of a stone.

  “Are you a transferent?”

  “Are you afraid I’m going to steal your spell?”

  His mouth twitches. “Should I be?”

  I stare at him, and he shakes his head wryly. “There’s only so much clean magic left in Avinea, Miss Locke,” he says, tossing a stone through the grass ahead of us. It bounces several times before rolling out of sight. “You saw for yourself the lengths people will go to grab it. I have to protect my investments.”

  “Are you talking about us or the rocks?”

  His smile is a flash of teeth before he pockets the rest of the stones, nudging my foot with his own. “They’re safe to touch,” he says. “I cast my spells with lots of knots. Makes them harder to steal. Like yours, for example.”

  My hand circles my wrist on reflex. The hard threads of magic bump beneath my fingertips. “What do you mean?”

  “It almost looks like a curse,” he says. “Curses are not cast with the intention of being removed. Here. Look.” He shrugs half out of his coat and rolls up his shirt sleeve, exposing a slender forearm corded with muscles and veins. A narrow line of magic sits in the crook of his elbow, forked on both ends and weighted by an open circle on the left. “This is a protection spell,” he explains, dipping his shoulder toward me so I can see his arm more clearly. “See how the spell has sharp edges? It makes it easier to grab a hold of when it’s time to be removed. Miss Dossel has something similar on her arm. But you . . .” He straightens, reaching for me.

  I recoil, out of the way, and he lifts his hands. “Sorry,” he says. “I forgot. But you can see the difference. Yours is all curves and blurred edges, like spilled ink. There’s nothing to hold on to.”

  I stare at him, cold all over. “But you could still remove it, right?”

  “Very carefully,” he agrees. “It would take time and a great deal of skill, but yes. I could remove it.”

  A wolf howls in the distance and I flinch at the sound.

  “They’re in the hills,” he says, pulling his coat back on, shaking out the collar. “They won’t come near the camp.”

  I rub my arms and look away, embarrassed by the way he watches me so closely. “So how do you know if it’s a curse?”

  “An intuit could tell you. They can trace a spell’s lineage all the way back to the king who summoned the magic.”

  I glance toward Tobek, sulking by the fire. He doesn’t look like he’ll tell me anything tonight. At least, not without charging me money for it.

  “Well, I’m not a transferent,” I say, crouching, “although my mother was.”

  “Really.” North rocks back on his heels, eyebrows raised. When I tense beneath his interest, he drops his eyes and quickly adds, “It’s probably for the best you didn’t inherit the ability. Magicians are worth almost as much as magic these days. The hellborne trade them like animals. Transferents are preferred, but spellcasters aren’t bad. And if you’re an amplifier with a pack of addicts holding your leash?” He snorts, shaking his head. “You’d be better off dead.”

  Chilled, I press my fingers to the ward. I don’t know what I’m hoping for: a spark, a memory, a miracle; something hidden in the magic that speaks to something hidden inside me. But it’s just rock under the press of my fingertips; I’m still just a girl.

  Disappointment floods my mouth and I stand, hating myself for falling into that trap of hope, of thinking a girl from the Brim with nothing but a scar above her heart could somehow be special just because her mother was. Or to be special in spite of what her mother tried to do.

  But I’m a murderer, I tell myself. I’m the villain now.

  “Oh,” North says suddenly, with staged surprise that would be endearing in any other circumstance. “I almost forgot.” He rummages through his coat pocket and holds out my mother’s book.

  I struggle to find my voice again. When I do, it wavers, waiting for the trap to spring and his motives to become clear. “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing,” he says, “it was already yours.” Lowering his voice to a mock whisper, he pulls a guilty face. “I didn’t actually pay for it.”

  How could he, with Fanagin dead on the ground?

  Stepping back, I curl the book under my arm, avoiding his eyes. “You mentioned clean water?”

  North points to a copse of birch trees beyond the wagon, all skinny, silver things with mottled bark. They cast long shadows in the growing twilight, like iron bars creeping toward camp. “Twenty minutes to dark,” he says, as I mumble thanks.

  The river is shallow and the water is warm as it twists through the trees. It soothes my fraying nerves, but as I rinse the mud from my hair and the blood from my skin, I awaken the tender bruises on my arms and throat an
d with them, memories of how I got here. My movements turn frantic and blood begins to drip into the water like loose threads of magic. With a sudden gasp of panic, I crouch and pull my arms over my head.

  I killed a man to save my sister, trading virtue for vice, compassion for selfishness. There’s no going back from that kind of imbalance, and unless I harden myself into iron, the sacrifice will be for nothing.

  My palms are not the floor, I tell myself, and I am not defeated. I am stronger than this.

  I have to be.

  I whisper the mantra again and again, until my heart slows and the shivers stop. Only then do I open my eyes and confirm that the world still exists, that nothing has changed.

  But I have, irrevocably.

  Numb—feeling exposed—I climb out of the river and quickly dress, eager for the returning weight of my clothing. My mother’s book is knocked aside in the process, and I stare at it with a touch of resignation. Like a rash that never heals, this book keeps finding its way back to me, as inescapable as my scar.

  Exhaling softly, I sink cross-legged on the grassy bank and pull the book closer. As I thumb through the worn pages, I almost expect to find some hidden note from Alistair tucked inside and his true intentions laid bare.

  Instead, a folded map of Avinea falls into my lap. I slowly smooth it open, biting the inside of my cheek. Thaelan and I spent hours memorizing this map, planning the route we’d take on our way through Avinea, toward the world beyond. We’d lie out on the roofs beneath the stars and imagine how each dot would look, how it would taste and feel and sound.

  Like freedom, every single one.

  But it’s my mother’s book, my mother’s map, and it’s my mother I picture as I trace familiar patterns between the cities, wondering which ones she might have craved. What route would she have taken through Avinea? How far could a vial of clean magic get her?

  Why do I even care?

  A branch snaps behind me and I twist with a flash of alarm. Darjin bounds out of the growing shadows, tail twitching high, and I exhale with relief. “Hello,” I greet as he bumps into my hip and twines around my arm. Throwing himself at my feet, he rocks onto his back and exposes his stomach, paws curling and unfurling, kneading the air with shameless invitation.

  I laugh and dangle a leaf for him to bat. We never had any pets of our own—it was hard enough to feed ourselves—but Cadence once came home with someone else’s chicken, insisting she could domesticate it and teach it to lay eggs on her command. Only it wasn’t eggs it left in our beds and trailed across the floor, and within a week, I sold it for half a kronet. Cadence cried and Thaelan lectured me on the immorality of selling other people’s chickens until I cried too, and Thaelan had to bribe us with sugared pastries to get us to stop.

  My scar aches with warning at the bittersweet memory. Don’t, I tell myself.

  “He used to be a tiger, once upon a time.”

  I startle forward, crumpling the map in the process. North appears, barely more than a shadow himself, save the dusky olive of his face above the collar of his coat.

  “Were you spying on me?” I demand.

  “No,” he says, but blushes. “It’s dark,” he adds with a forced smile. “You weren’t back. I promised to keep you safe and I honor my word.”

  Water drips down my neck and I rub it away. Now that I know there’s no threat of attack, my body slowly unfurls. Darjin waits at my feet, purring like a summer thunderstorm. He paws at a leaf, reminding me of the game I abandoned.

  “Small tiger,” I say, twitching the leaf for him before I stand, grabbing my shoes and cramming the map back into the book.

  “Small confession,” says North, hands sliding in his pockets as I fall in step with him and we head for camp. “He used to be life size. In truth, Darjin’s just a very complicated spell my mother cast almost thirty years ago.”

  I glance at Darjin as he trots between us, amazed that magic could produce something so real, when all Perrote uses magic for is moving mountains and making shadows. “Was she a transferent too?”

  “Only a spellcaster, but a good one.” He smiles at the memory, before his face darkens. “King Merlock used to give pretty courtiers a few threads of magic to weave as they pleased if they ever did as he pleased.” He holds back a branch while I duck underneath. “After the city of Prevast fell, the court disbanded. My mother wasn’t the only one to land on her back. When I was born, she didn’t have the means to care for both a tiger and a son.”

  “So she made him smaller?”

  “No,” says North, “she sent me to Saint Ergoet’s Monastery in the interest of my education.”

  I look over, nonplussed. “Oh.”

  We reach the edge of the perimeter ward but pause. North crouches, scratching Darjin’s chin. “This cat was her greatest accomplishment and I was the second. In fact, she almost named me Darjin the Second.” Dark hair falls forward, framing his forehead. It makes him look younger, more boyish. “Luckily she was persuaded otherwise,” he says, eyes flicking up to meet mine.

  “North suits you,” I say. “Steady as a star.”

  He smiles in acknowledgment. “She died before I began searching for Merlock,” he says, standing, dusting off his hands. Clots of cat fur drift lazily on the soft breeze, clinging to the dark fabric of his pants. “And at the time, I promised to keep him, no matter what. But with Merlock still missing and Avinea dying, I’ve had to . . . borrow some of her spell for other purposes.” Snorting, he drops his chin. “I know it’s selfish to keep a cat when the magic could be used for more important things, but the truth is, a magic tiger is all I’ve ever had of her. Sometimes it doesn’t seem enough. Sometimes it seems too much.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek, eyes dropping to the book clutched in my hands. I don’t want to be beholden to North any more than I am to Bryn, and yet, I feel as if he’s offered me something too valuable to ignore. “This belonged to my mother,” I say, lifting the book. The map falls out, open at our feet, and North bends for it.

  “I suspected it was worth more than it looked,” he says. “It was the first thing you noticed after you woke up in a cage.”

  In truth, the book was worthless even to her; she used it for scrap paper, writing client names and measurements along the inside cover. It had no value to me as a child, but my mother’s betrayal still felt too raw to be real when I smuggled it from our burning house, in case she might return and needed to work again. In the years that followed, it became its own kind of touchstone, a reminder of my mother’s sins and a warning to me on those cold nights with no food and no father and no stories to soothe Cadence’s cries. I would never betray my sister, or break her heart the way our mother broke mine, not for all the gold—or magic—in the world.

  But I’m my mother’s daughter despite it all.

  I shiver, fingers brushing the soft bruises along my throat, where Fanagin choked me.

  “Going sightseeing?” North quips of the map. “Because you’re about thirty years outdated. Here.” Gesturing me forward, he spreads the map across the side of the wagon. Pulling a stubby pencil from his trousers pocket, he asks, “May I?”

  “May you what?”

  “May I continue to prove that you’re safe here,” he says, “by demonstrating the places that are no longer safe out there.” His chin tips over his shoulder, and though we’re far from any sign of the Burn, smoke clogs the lower horizon, thick and yellowed like old mucus against the inky sky.

  I shrug and North hunches forward, rubbing the graphite across entire sections of the kingdom, darkening the paper in shades of gray. “The Burn took Nevik six months ago,” he says, eyes on his work as he scratches out entire cities, angling curves around others. Darjin winds between his feet and North edges him away with the side of his shoe. “Corsant has about a year before they fall. The southeast is entirely impassable except by sea. New Prevast used to be called Gorstelt; they changed the name twenty years ago when they moved the capital.”

  Word
lessly, I watch North reduce Avinea to less than half its size. While the majority of the Burn is focused around the original capital of Prevast in the northwest, there are pockets of it spread in both directions. “How did it get so far away?”

  North steps back, pinning the map in place with one hand. “Magic became a commodity after the war. A black market formed. It’s how most of the nobles paid their way out of Avinea, selling off spells and talismans they’d earned from the king. And with money to be made, people went into the Burn looking for anything that might have gotten left behind. They went home infected, and when they died, their families buried them, not realizing that the poison would spread through the earth. From the ground to the water supply, the farmland, one city, another.” He studies the map and all its dark places with a kind of helplessness. “It spread. And once people figured out that dead magic was still power”—he sighs, lowering his head—“it became an addiction and spread even further.”

  “Why does it kill some people but not others?”

  He considers his reply. “Magic came from the gods,” he says, “and the gods gave man a choice: virtue or vice. We”—he gestures between us—“try to live balanced lives between both, but the hellborne surrender their hearts to poison and their souls to sin. They choose vice. It’s the difference between turning hellborne or accepting death, Miss Locke.”

  Of course. Even the damned get a choice, or at least the illusion of one. I’m proof enough of that.

  “If it’s still magic, can you remove it?” I ask. “Could you survive the plague?”

  North makes a face. “Dead magic is a lot like a curse. It’s frayed at the edges, which makes it harder to hold. In theory, if you catch it quick enough, you can stop the infection from spreading. In reality, it’s a difficult and often painful process. Success is never guaranteed. Anytime you put magic in your blood, it’s only a matter of time before it hits your heart.” He forces a tight smile. “And the only cure for a hellborne soul is a carved out heart. Prince Corbin’s orders. No exceptions.”