Quin groaned. “Must you talk about all the delicious foods we do not have? My raw skalt is looking more pitiful by the minute.”
She couldn’t help but smile. When her mother had talked about the river markets, Mia closed her eyes and tried to make the scenes spring to life. She had trouble imagining them. The picture Wynna painted was so different from the sparsely populated markets Mia had gone to as a child, somber affairs with flavorless food and free knife sharpening, where all women were required to have a father, husband, or brother present to ensure all was as it should be. Which was to say: boring.
“Look,” she said. “There’s what’s left of one.”
The boat was skirting the bank of the Natha where one of the old river markets had stood. Wood frames and beams, once draped with canvas tents, were now in shambles. There wasn’t much left: looters had long since combed the flotsam for valuables. Mia did spot a few swatches of soiled linen crushed into the earth and stamped with muddy boot prints. It seemed impossible this empty space had ever held anything vibrant or alive.
“My father has made a royal mess of things,” Quin said quietly. “In his efforts to restore the rich heritage of the river kingdom, he has stanched the flow of everything that might have made it rich. He promised a return to greatness and then stripped Glas Ddir of all the tastes and colors and cultures that made us great.”
The sunlight shifted, shining on a copper scrap tucked amidst the ruins. Mia thought of Domeniq’s mother, who had sold iron and copper cookware at the river markets before all female merchants were banned. Lauriel du Zol was a big woman, in both stature and heart, with ample flesh and a lush waterfall of tight black curls. Laughter came easily to her.
Lauriel was also Wynna’s best friend. She had moved her young family to the river kingdom from Fojo, following Mia’s parents back to their homeland. Soon after, King Ronan sealed the borders, trapping them there. The du Zols found a cottage in Ilwysion, and Mia and Dom grew up together, thick as thieves. She could still picture their mothers on the balcony of the Roses’ cottage, reminiscing about life in Fojo in hushed tones, the quiet murmur of their voices punctuated every few minutes by Lauriel’s hearty belly laugh.
Mia missed that life. She had lost it all so quickly: Dom’s father murdered by Gwyrach, then Mia’s mother killed within a matter of days. Lauriel and the twins—Domeniq’s nine-year-old sisters, Sach’a and Junay—left the river kingdom overnight, slipping through some secret channel back into the fire kingdom. Dom chose to stay behind to train with the Circle.
“May I ask what you’re thinking about?” Quin asked.
“The river markets. Everything we’ve lost.”
In fact she was thinking of Domeniq standing over the dead men in the glade. What would his mother say if she had seen him kill two men? Lauriel was skilled with her hands, too, but she used them to meld cookware out of iron and copper, not lance a man’s heart with a dagger.
“Where did you live?” Quin said. “Before you came to the Kaer.”
Mia’s thoughts had spiraled into a dark place; she was grateful for the interruption. She pointed toward a snow-frosted peak in the distance. “Our cottage was halfway up that mountain.”
“Did it get cold in the winter?”
“Miserably. We had to wear three layers of socks just to get out of bed. But I always liked the snow. My sister didn’t.” She paused, savoring a childhood memory. “Once I lured her outside by promising to make her fifty angels in the snow. A host of Angels for Angelyne.”
“Did you keep your promise?”
“Absolutely not. I’d lost all sensation in my toes after Angel number nine.”
Quin looked amused. He took a deep breath and sighed it out. “The air is so clean here. All these tall oaks and elms. It must have been nice to be lulled to sleep by the whisper of wind in the trees.”
He wasn’t wrong: she’d been happy as a child. But once her mother died, the things Mia loved seemed smaller. The cottage felt shrunken and suffocating. Her father had assured her she was not in danger, but it was impossible to feel safe.
She darkened. She’d spent three years hunting Gwyrach. Did that mean she’d been hunting herself all along?
“All my life I’ve wanted to leave the Kaer and the village beyond it.” Quin shook out his curls. “It took nearly getting killed for me to do it.”
She was surprised. “Why would you want to leave?”
“Didn’t you?”
“That’s different. Kaer Killian is your home. You belong there.”
“The place you were born is not always the place you belong.”
A squall of homesickness blew over her. Her mother had always been home for her, a calm, soothing presence. Mia winced, remembering the atrocious things she’d said to her the day she died, the grief writ large in Wynna’s hazel eyes. A cruel trick of memory, the way certain words snaked constantly through Mia’s mind, a serpent coiled and ready. Her mother’s eyes were two giant canvases of feeling, ever-changing portraits of spark and shadow, but by that night, they were two black holes gone dark forever.
Mia had been fighting off the memory for three years, and once again she forced it away. How could you feel homesick when you no longer had a home?
“I owe you an apology,” Quin said.
She raised one brow. “An apology for what?”
“I had to repurpose your wedding gown as a fishing line.”
He nodded toward the line trawling on the boat’s port side. She recognized the tangle of white silk on the floor of the coracle, no longer quite so white. By some small miracle, Quin had managed to slip the dress out from under Mia’s head while she was sleeping, slice off strips with his sheath knife, and knot them together into one long rope.
He poked at his bridegroom jacket, now missing a few more gold buttons. “Did you know fish love shiny things? When you don’t have a lure, a bright button works brilliantly as bait.”
Mia hardly heard him. All her thoughts had boiled down to one: the journal.
Her mother’s book was gone.
Chapter 19
Too Lovely
“ARE YOU LOOKING FOR this?”
Quin held up the soft brown book, the fojuen wren still fitted into the clasp. Her relief was palpable as she snatched it from his hand.
“You shouldn’t have taken—”
“It’s blank, Mia.”
She could feel his eyes on her, watching. She shouldn’t be keeping the key with the journal; that was careless. From now on she’d keep the ruby wren tucked into the neckline of her blouse, close to her heart at all times. Not that Quin couldn’t rip open the book if he wanted to. It was leather and paper, nothing more.
Mia twisted the stone and the pages fluttered open. The book was most certainly not blank. Her mother’s inscription and the map were still intact, and in fact the ink extended a touch farther; she saw the beginnings of the Twisted Forest, the Natha River winding up into the braided trees. She felt a strong tug to the east, as if her mother were pulling the boat gently toward Fojo Kara??o, dangling the bait of safe haven. Mia knew in her bones they were headed in the right direction.
In her Gwyrach bones. A firestorm of anger tore through her. She was hunting the Gwyrach who killed her mother, yet she was a Gwyrach. She couldn’t hold the two things in her head. Every time she remembered she had magic, it decimated her; she oscillated from numb gray disbelief to scorching white fury. She hated that this was happening to her. It wasn’t fair.
“It’s your mother’s, isn’t it?” He hooked one arm around the oar and folded the other over his chest, studying her. “You called out for her in your sleep. You kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry.’”