And yet, Mia thought, she’s back in the Kaer while I sit around watching a bunch of strangers roast shmardas.
“What happened in the Chapel, Dom? After Pilar shot the arrow. You were there—you must have seen Angie.”
“I didn’t see anyone. I left the Kaer faster than you. I had to make sure I got to you before Lyman and Tuk. I led you to the boat. I even looped back around to Tristan’s camp, but you were already gone. All I found were two dead men.”
Mia sat up. “Two?”
“Two guards, dead in their own sick. The prince did admirable work with that chokecherry brew. I do love a man who knows his poisons.”
Mia’s mouth had gone as dry as bonemeal. “What about Tristan? Where was the duke?”
“No sign of him. But there were tracks in the snow.”
She staggered to her feet, her one swallow of rai rouj rushing to her head. How had it not occurred to her? Quin said the poison was temporary, that it would wear off in a few days. And if that were true . . .
“I have to go back. If there’s even a chance Tristan has made it back to Kaer Killian . . . if he tells the king Quin is dead and that he should be prince, and then demands Angelyne as his princess . . .”
“Relax, Mia. These things take time. Just yesterday Tristan was rolling in his own vomit in the Twisted Forest. It would take him at least five days to get back to the castle, and that’s if he were at peak health. It’s not like they’re going to schedule a royal wedding the following day. They’d have to mourn the prince.”
She sank back into her chair, mollified, at least for the moment.
“The best thing you can do for Angelyne,” Dom said, “is to learn how to harness your magic. If you want to keep her safe from the duke, stop fighting your magic and embrace it. Even the most powerful men can be felled by an enthrall.” He eyed Quin over his tankard. “Have you two been fully yoked?”
“Like with an egg?”
Dom looked amused. “Yoked, Mia. You’ve been in the woods for days, eating together . . . sleeping together . . .”
“Not like that, we haven’t.”
“That’s a pity.” His eyes slid over the prince’s slender form. “I would not miss an opportunity to exchange body heat with a boy that beautiful.”
Mia stared at him. It had never occurred to her Dom might be interested in boys. She had, in her more arrogant moments, thought Dom might be interested in her. But when she saw the way he was watching Quin, with both shyness and longing, she realized he had probably always loved boys, and she’d just been too naive to notice.
“You really didn’t know, did you? I wanted to tell you a hundred times. Now you know why you were never my type.”
Mia felt sad. How much had her friend suffered in the river kingdom, longing for boys he knew he couldn’t have? And why did this kind of love threaten King Ronan so deeply? Queen Bronwynis had envisioned Glas Ddir as a place where all loves could flourish. How far they had fallen.
“Four gods, Dom. All those years . . .”
“It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure. At least here I can be who I am.” He laughed. “Sort of. There are forty-six men in all of Refúj. At least half of them are grandfathers. To say pickings are slim would be like saying volqanoes are hot.”
Mia barely heard him. She was distracted by Pilar, who was now inching closer to Quin, her body canting toward him. She’d given him his own glass of rai rouj, and his cheeks were flushed and ruddy as he grew jollier by the second.
Pilar punched him playfully on the shoulder, and he burst into laughter.
“Quin.” Mia stood. “You know you shouldn’t let her touch you. She could be enthralling you.”
“She can’t,” Dom said. He stood and kicked the loose dirt over the threshold of the tavern. For the first time Mia noticed the border of blue uzoolion. “That keeps the bar brawls from getting ugly. Magic and liquor: not a great mix.”
Pilar stood with arms akimbo. “I didn’t enthrall your precious husband, Rose.”
There was a sudden hush in the tavern chatter. The two women who had been discussing the river rats leaned forward. Mia got the impression the patrons of the Blue Phoenix wouldn’t mind if Pilar punched her in the face.
“All I’m saying,” Mia said, taking a more measured tack, “is that you shouldn’t abuse your power.”
“I shouldn’t abuse my power?” Pilar clenched and unclenched her fists. “Come with me, Rose. You’re getting your first real magic lesson whether you like it or not.”
Chapter 41
Wilder
THEY CLUSTERED TOGETHER IN an empty market stall, Domeniq and Pilar on one side, Quin and Mia on the other. Pil had drawn a line in the sand—a literal line in the literal sand—separating the Dujia and Dujia-adjacent from the river rats.
Pilar held out her hand. “Uzoolion,” she commanded, and Dom unlatched the blue stone around his neck and placed it in her palm.
In one swift movement, Pilar jammed her thumb into the crook of his elbow, where the humerus met the radius and ulna. Mia watched his dark skin blanch, then turn a crude purple. His fingers twitched violently and went sickly white, and right as Mia was about to wrench him safely out of harm’s way, Pilar let go.
“Faqtan!” Dom swore. He picked his arm up by the wrist and let it fall, his hand slapping lifelessly against his side, dead weight. Then he grinned. “You’re getting faster.”
Pilar grinned back. “I know.”
Mia was horrified. She might not know much about magic, but she knew human physiology.
“You’re starving the muscles of oxygen. That’s neqrosis.”
“Very good, Rose. High marks for effort. You’ve got the name wrong, though: it’s called unblooding.”
“Wrong. It’s called neqrosis. Do you know what neqrosis means? Corpse. If you cut off the circulation for long enough, it isn’t just your muscles that go numb—your tissue will die and your bones will collapse. You’d never be able to use your hand again, Dom.”
Pilar shook her head. Her face was painted with an emotion Mia couldn’t read. Anger? Sadness? Or was it, of all things, pity?
“There’s so much you don’t know,” Pilar said. “And you’re trying so hard to know everything. Can you think of any other situations where it might be useful to unblood someone? An assailant, perhaps?”
Mia said nothing.
“Or what about the history of magic?” Pilar prodded. “Can you tell me how or why it evolved the way it did?”
Every answer that landed on the tip of Mia’s tongue was wrong. She would only be reciting what she had learned in books—books her father had given all the Hunters. Books inked with lies.
“Let me tell you a story,” Pilar said. “When she was young, my grandmother was coming home from a hat shop with a new pink hat. Four men appeared from the shadows. They crushed her hat, put their hands around her throat, and ripped off her skirt. A fifth man came out of a nearby shop. She begged for him to help her, to show mercy. ‘I’ll show you mercy,’ he said. He unbuttoned his trousers.”
A thick, heavy silence fell over them. Pilar looked away.
“You think we exist on the margins of society because of our magic. That we have been hunted and killed as punishment for being Dujia. But you’ve got it backward. We were hunted and killed for thousands of years, long before we had magic. We are magicians because of our suffering. A woman’s body can survive only so much abuse before our very blood and bones rise up in revolt.
“Magic is born in the margins. It is nurtured among the vulnerable and broken. It is our bodies crying out for justice, seeking to right centuries of wrongs.”
Pilar had transformed into a gifted orator, eloquent and fierce.