The day she first came to see me at Death’s convent, her face was less lined and her fiery hair had no trace of gray.
She wanted to be a mentor, not a mother, but I was ten years old and I didn’t know the difference. We both learned a lot that first year, as she tried to pass on her knowledge of the Dead while I tried on her clothes and lip rouge and begged to sleep in her bed.
Wind chills the tips of my ears as Lysander carries us through a grove of trees that have dropped their silver leaves.
I asked Master Cymbre about the seasons in the Deadlands once. I think I was twelve. She couldn’t explain why there weren’t any, she said, any better than her mentor could when she’d asked the very same thing. But she still knew a lot more than I did, and I never stopped relying on her to answer my impossible questions.
Why the moon turns blood-red sometimes.
Why we can’t look upon the Dead without them turning into Shades.
Why Simeon doesn’t like kissing girls, only boys, but I like both.
Why love hurts when it’s the thing we live for. The thing some people search their entire lives for. The thing some people die for.
Why I don’t know where I belong.
“With me, chickadee,” Master Cymbre would singsong when I asked her that, in the years before I started going by Sparrow.
She’s never been my mother. She’s always held a little something of herself back from me, just enough to remain as mysterious as Vaia, the Five-Faced God who created our world and then vanished long ago.
But she’s all I have. All that’s left of our trio, which once felt invincible.
“You’re quiet back there,” Meredy murmurs, gazing at me over her shoulder. “Everything all right?”
I nod, still lost in memories. Like the day Master Cymbre first took Evander and me into the Deadlands and explained the price of our magic. That while we could come here and have the freedom to bring spirits back to their bodies, our spirits would never rest here when we died. We’d just . . . disappear.
It seemed so unfair to ten-year-old me, I’d flopped down under a silvery tree and cried so hard I gave myself hiccups. Nothing we got in return for raising the dead—invitations to all the palace parties, the fame, the heaps of gold for each person we brought back to life—seemed to be a good exchange for our spirits.
“All magic has a price,” Master Cymbre told me more than once. “If it didn’t, every blue-eyed person would raise all their loved ones and Karthia would be overrun with Dead. If gray-eyed people could change the path of a huge storm without giving themselves a stroke, we’d never have to fear another dark cloud.”
“Sounds like a perfect world,” I’d grumbled.
But Master Cymbre had merely smiled. “You wouldn’t think it was perfect. There would be other problems. Karthia would be crowded, restless, and miserable.”
“What are you trying to say?” I demanded.
“I’m saying we make our own problems. As long as people exist,” she’d said, her steely blue eyes focused intently on mine, “there will be trouble and discontent and rumblings of how things could be better. There is no ‘perfect.’”
Meredy gives me another worried look, and my face warms as I realize I’ve been staring absently into the distance. Still, the heat in my cheeks feels good compared to the cold breeze that’s numbing every bit of my exposed skin as Lysander bounds up the side of a small mountain, his pace never lagging.
“What’s the price of a beast master’s magic?” I ask her, careful to keep my voice low.
If Meredy’s surprised by the question, she doesn’t show it. “When we exercise any amount of control over our beasts,” she murmurs, “we become like them for a little while. Feral. In possession of only our most basic instincts.”
I think of how different she sounded as she searched her bear’s mind earlier. “You didn’t seem very beastly after you and Lysander did your silent-talking thing.”
“That’s because it was brief. Just a little magic. I wasn’t trying to see through his eyes, or to fully possess him and force his limbs to move.” Meredy’s lips twist in a grim smile. “As you’ve seen, I’m quite capable of controlling my . . . less human urges.”
“Like what?” I ask, trying to distract myself from thoughts of Master Cymbre fighting for her life, from horrible scenarios playing out in my mind like a shadow-puppet play on a wall. “Eating raw fish? Running naked through the Deadlands?”
Meredy doesn’t answer.
It’s hard to tell in the Deadlands’ perpetual dimness, but her cheeks look redder than usual. I wish I could read her mind right now.
Instead, I’m left alone with my thoughts. I should’ve paid more attention to Master Cymbre after Master Nicanor’s death. I was so caught up in trying to get revenge on the giant Shade and in grieving for Evander that I didn’t notice how she must have been grieving, too. Maybe we could have mourned together.
Maybe if she’d thought I was willing to listen, trusted that I wasn’t some potion addict trying to escape the past anymore, she would’ve told me what she was planning tonight. But I’d sided with the healer and insisted she rest. I should have known better.
She’s too much like me to just sit on her hands and wait when something is wrong. She’s doing this to protect me.
Lysander suddenly comes to a halt on a narrow stretch of beach beside a large dark lake, breathing hard. Meredy leans forward, wordlessly talking with him again. He stomps a huge paw and lowers his head.
There in the sand, right beneath Lysander’s nose, are a few fiery red hairs streaked with gray.
I scramble off the bear’s back and drop to my knees, sifting through the chilled sand for any other sign that Cymbre was here. For any reason to hope she’s still alive. Meredy joins me, walking up and down the lake shore so many times I get dizzy watching her.
“Don’t touch the water! Not even with your boot!” I warn her over the lump in my throat as Meredy’s path veers closer to the water’s edge. As she moves farther out of my reach.
There are a few spirits floating farther out in the lake, toward the middle. From shore, they look like mist or fallen clouds as they hover on the water’s surface. They don’t notice us, too busy forgetting who and what they were as the lake strips away their dearest memories. I don’t want that to happen to Meredy, and all it would take is one accidental step into the water to make her forget something about herself.
“We should move on,” I tell Meredy as she strides toward me again. “Can Lysander try to pick up Cymbre’s scent again?”
Meredy shakes her head, her face pale. “The trail ends here.”
I swallow hard as a wave of cold crashes over my head. “Does that mean . . . ?” I can’t finish. I can’t go through this again. Meredy steadies me with a hand on my shoulder, and after a moment, I find my voice again.
“There’s no body. How can we be sure she’s dead if there’s no body?”
“Breathe,” Meredy urges, squeezing my shoulder.