Chapter 16
When Elver untied Artair the next morning, he sat up a little stiffly, rubbing at his jaw.
It felt tender to the touch and mildly swollen on one side.
He gritted his teeth; he had the impression they’d been given a good rattle.
A cold sensation passed over him as he watched Elver kick dirt over their fire.
‘What happened last night?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did he… Did the Other give you trouble?’ He stood up hurriedly. ‘Did he hurt you?’
The monster girl looked at him blankly for a moment, then seemed to note how he had his fingers pressed to his jaw.
‘Oh. Yeah. No, he didn’t hurt me. But I had to… hit him. Sorry about that.’
This was his nightmare come true. The evil that was inside him was hurting others. In this moment, I am safe, and the evil is contained , he told himself. But the words felt hollow.
‘What did he do? Did he get free? Did he try to run?’
Elver frowned, no longer looking at him. Oddly, she seemed vaguely embarrassed.
‘It was nothing. He kept asking daft questions, so I had to hit him to get him to shut up.’ She looked up at him then in a slightly challenging way.
‘I am sorry,’ said Artair. ‘Really sorry.’ His face suddenly felt warm.
What kind of questions was the Other asking?
Whatever they were, they had clearly made Elver uncomfortable.
‘Perhaps tonight you should gag me as well as tie me up.’ Elver shot him a look, and his cheeks grew even warmer. ‘I just thought…’
‘Maybe I should gag you today as well.’ But there was a quirk to the corner of her mouth as she said it, as though she were trying not to smile, and that made him feel a little better.
In the morning light, she seemed to have put the business of the other trapped jih spirits behind her, and that made him feel a little lighter too. She really was going to help him.
‘Wait…’ She stalked over to their bag of food and lifted it up by the end. The cub rolled out of it, making happy snuffling noises. He was followed by a cloud of crumbs. ‘Twelve save us, the little turd has eaten all our food!’
‘And we spent all our money yesterday.’ Artair winced. The cub looked a little bigger than he had, certainly around the tummy area, and he had fewer feathers and more blue scales. Artair supposed he was growing up.
‘ You spent all our money,’ pointed out Elver. She sighed. ‘Come on. Let’s pack up and go. Maybe we can find some food on the road.’
After the wild weather of the night before, the sky had been scrubbed clean, revealing a bright cold day filled with birdsong.
As they got ready to leave, Artair thought he heard something in the wood, back the way they had come; a cough maybe, a shuffle.
He had the peculiar sense, as he stood there staring into the trees, that something was staring back at him—and he had the distinct impression that it hated him.
You’re being ridiculous , he told himself. There’s no one out there. No one even knows you in the wider world.
The idea was meant to reassure him, but instead it made him think of the time before the Golden Tower of the Perpetual Morning. Once, there had been people who knew him. Had cared about him even. And what had happened to them?
He closed his eyes briefly, summoning the words of his mantra. There was a task he had to finish, and he couldn’t afford to be distracted from it. Dredging up his old, fragmented memories would not help him.
When Elver called him a second time, he slung his bow on his back and followed her back onto the path.
They walked until midday, and between the pair of them they found a handful of edible things: Elver discovered a colony of blackberry bushes that had mostly been picked clean by birds and some underripe nuts on a tree Artair didn’t recognize, while Artair picked some wild tubers that were good to chew on.
‘How long until we reach this mage?’ asked Artair, after his stomach had performed a particularly loud and musical rumble.
‘A few days at least,’ said Elver gloomily. ‘By which time I’ll be ready to eat this grass. Or the cub will be ready to eat us.’
Eventually they emerged from the wood onto another man-made road; this one, in Artair’s opinion, much prettier than the last. It was paved with smooth white stone, and on its borders pink and yellow flowers were growing in abundance, filling the air with a sweet, heady scent.
The road trickled off into the distance like a fine ribbon.
Despite himself, Artair smiled. The view from the monastery walls had nothing like this.
‘What are you smiling at?’
The cub, perhaps sensing that he was already in trouble, had consented to be put back in the sack and Artair could hear him snoring lightly from Elver’s arms.
‘It’s a fine day,’ he said simply. ‘And I’m in a part of Tlevrae I never expected to see.
’ He glanced down at her. She had pulled her hood back, and the light bounced off of her white hair like a beacon.
He could see the blue mark of one of her scars, stark against her collarbone.
‘I suppose I’m seeing a lot of things I never expected to see. ’
‘I’m glad you’re having such a lovely time,’ said Elver. ‘But I feel like I shouldn’t have to remind you that you’re only here because Mother Maura—may her face shrivel up and fall off—has kidnapped your friends.’
‘Ha.’ He knew that she hated the mage because she had orchestrated the theft of one of the jih spirits, but the idea that she was on his side in some way made him feel better than he had in days.
When he’d left the Golden Tower he’d been afraid of being alone.
And now Elver was with him. ‘But we’ve got a plan, right? We’re going to get them back.’
Elver snorted. ‘A plan feels like a very grand word for what it is. But if we can get that illusion spell, we’ve a chance.’
Artair nodded. ‘I’m glad we’re taking it. The chance, I mean.’
The pair of them lapsed into silence for the next hour or so, until a shape emerged from the trees ahead of them.
It looked like a tall, covered cart with a pair of oversized wheels, and it was being pulled by a figure in a wide green hat.
The cart itself was painted a deep green, with curling, looping patterns picked out in white and pale blue.
It turned on the road and started heading towards them.
‘A walking shop,’ said Elver. ‘This might be our chance to get some coin. If you keep him talking, I will sneak up on him and give him a little taste of poison.’ She saw the expression that passed over Artair’s face. ‘Only a touch! Enough to knock him out.’
‘So your first instinct is to steal.’
‘Monk, the sooner you realize that humans don’t care about us, that they hate us, actually, the easier things will be for you.’ She snorted. ‘They barely even like themselves, let alone monsters. We’re nothing to them. If the situation were reversed, this human wouldn’t hesitate, believe me.’
‘We could sell him something instead,’ said Artair quickly.
‘And what have we got to sell?’
‘My bow,’ he said, although his heart sank as he said it. The bow belonged to the monastery, and it was a beautiful thing, carved with sigils of the Perpetual Morning’s holy order. And they used one exactly like it to kill Chessun , whispered a traitorous voice in his head.
‘Oh sure, go and face Mother Maura with no weapons, that sounds like a great plan,’ said Elver.
‘I’m tricking her, not fighting her,’ he replied. ‘I imagine we could get a good price for the bow, and then in the next town we can get some food. Maybe a room for the night. And, if I’m honest, every time I look at the thing, I think about the cub’s mother. I’d be glad to be rid of it.’
As they had been speaking, the thing Elver had called a walking shop had been approaching them, and as far as Artair could tell, speeding up.
The man pulling the cart was a cheerful-looking chap with long red hair, a sharp nose and a lean physique—no doubt from pulling his cart about everywhere.
He smiled warmly as he approached. Artair suspected that if he hadn’t been holding the poles of his cart he would have been waving madly.
‘What ho, young lovers!’ he called. Elver sighed.
As they drew up to the cart, he lowered the poles and stepped forward to shake their hands.
Artair watched, bemused, as his hand was pumped enthusiastically, while Elver drew away with her arms folded.
‘Not a shaker? Fair enough. You don’t know where I’ve been, do you?
’ The trader grinned at them. ‘Lorian Owllight is my name, a humble magicar performing spells in the name of our Lady Dusk.’ He sketched a quick bow.
‘Another bloody magpie,’ said Elver.
‘Not a fan of the magical arts either? Child, you wound me.’ But Lorian remained positively cheerful, Artair noted. ‘Would you care to buy or sell this fine afternoon?’
‘You can do magic?’ Artair glanced at Elver, who was shaking her head slightly. ‘Could you… make something look like something else? Or hide things?’
‘Oh now, those sound like the sort of spells you’d want to be getting from Tisk the Trickster,’ said Lorian.
He used one finger to push back the brim of his green hat, and in the bright sunshine Artair saw that he was younger than he’d initially thought—barely older than he or Elver.
‘My Lady Dusk doesn’t go in for that sort of thing, I’m afraid.
She will take your poems and your songs, and in return she will give you a glimpse of your future.
An extraordinary deal, don’t you think?’ He leaned towards them, as though imparting a secret.
‘They have to be ones she hasn’t heard before, mind.
Easily bored, easily changeable, that’s our lady. ’
‘We have a bow to sell,’ Elver said shortly. ‘How much will you give us for it?’