Chapter Five Kit #4
Catharine presses my arm and whispers excitedly into my ear. It takes a moment for her words to register.
“He’s dressed like the finfolk.”
One of the magic creatures of the islands.
I want to say that perhaps it’s just an unusual costume.
He could be a vagabond. There must be a thousand other explanations, and the Islands of Skyare—the islands Idris comes from, the islands Catharine has been reading about—are far from here.
What would one of their kind be doing in our highlands?
But in the tight evergreens all light goes dim, and freezing water drips from the branches onto my clothes. My words stick in my mouth.
We emerge into a narrow clearing with a broken tree at the center.
Either lightning or wind has snapped its trunk.
Jagged wood pierces the air like spears, higher on one side than the other.
It looks like a brutal throne. Speir approaches it and takes a shallow grayish bowl from—I’m not sure where from; it seems to appear out of the fold of his clothes.
Speir balances the bowl precariously on the sharp spikes of wood. He takes a canteen from his belt and pours out water. It doesn’t so much as ripple when it hits the bowl. A smell rises from it, foreign to this forest. Cold and salt.
The smell reminds me of Idris.
“I told you,” Catharine whispers. Her face is alight with curiosity and awe. “Magic is real. The stories are real!”
Speir’s mouth quirks up. He clearly hears her, but he does not reply.
All I feel is a shroud of heaviness settling on my shoulders. I shake Mother’s arm. I hardly dare speak louder than a whisper. The weight demands reverence. “Mother?”
“Trust me, love,” Mother whispers back. “I said I would protect you.”
Speir steps away from the bowl, apparently satisfied. He turns to Catharine and me. “Will you look?”
I do not move. I can’t quite make myself believe this. My world is one of linen sheets and toast. Ledgers and pencils. And yet, here I am with someone who seems less and less human every minute.
“Go,” Mother urges, releasing me and giving me a gentle push.
I do not move. My mind struggles to make sense of what I’m seeing. Even Catharine hesitates now.
Mother’s excitement sours into a severe frown. She turns it on my stepsister. “Go and look in the bowl.”
My hand is still clasped round Catharine’s.
I feel her tense, but she dips her head in submission and walks forward.
I step with her, wanting to protest or plant my feet.
But the instant I move, something pulls me on, as if the bowl is the eye of a storm, and we are caught in the wind.
The pressure does not ease even when we stand beside the tree trunk.
My head fogs with it, with the need to know what is inside the water.
I knew how the selkie story would end. But how does this one go?
Catharine raises her gaze to me. Her look seems to say, Whatever comes, I am with you.
I nod and squeeze her hand.
We bend over the water, which shimmers with unexpected opalescent color. Not a bowl: a seashell.
Our reflections stare back at us, unnervingly clear and still—sharper than even the mirrors in the castle.
I can see every blemish on my face. The darkness under my eyes.
The severely critical tilt of my eyebrows.
The softness of my jaw and flab under my chin.
The blotchiness of my skin. I lift my hand to a crumb at the corner of my mouth—but no, it’s a freckle I’d never noticed before.
But my hand … In this ruthless reflection, I can see every bulge round the joints, even the joints I’d never realized were affected before.
I hate every unnatural bend in my fingers, the stretch of bone against skin, the puckered wrinkles over the knuckles.
I want to claw my way out of my body, to escape this thing that is aging and dying when it hasn’t even reached eighteen years. It closes round me. A trap. A noose. My breath catches with the force of my panic. My bones are too fragile. My body too breakable. I am suffocating.
I close my eyes tightly. My heart—or maybe my soul—lurches inside my chest, trying to break free. It happens again, and pain blossoms across my ribs. Again, and the pain spreads to my head and my fingers and my toes. Again—
And I am tumbling through air. The cold cuts at me. I am a raw thing with no case, no protection, falling and falling and—
Something warm envelops me.
The pain stops.
I take a trembling breath. The panic has eased, just as suddenly as it came. I open my eyes.
I am still looking into the shell. But something is wrong about the angle. I am standing on the left, but my reflection is on the right.
My hand is still against my lip—I can feel the touch of my finger—but in the reflection my hand has dropped.
Then I turn my gaze to the Catharine in the water.
And she has her finger against her lip.
“Kit …?” says my voice. I tear my gaze away from the reflection, and I am looking into my own face, my own eyes. I look terrified.
But it isn’t me.
I am staring at my own body. But I am not in it.