They wasted little time. Monday morning, they were at the train station. Thomas was a wreck. He couldn’t figure out the ticket machine or navigate the station. He became so overwhelmed that Sigrid eventually told him to shut up and follow her lead. The moment she deposited him in the train cabin, he folded a new leaf of khat in his mouth, sank low with his head against the windowpane, and began to snore. Sigrid sat on the bench across from him and bit her nails, watching London recede in their wake.
Her pack sagged at her feet, stuffed with survival equipment and magical tools. She’d brought an iron stake—according to legend, a must for any traveler hoping to come upon the hidden island—and a carnelian stone to help point the way. Several small cloth bags were filled with various gemstones and crystals: healing and amplifying, heart-opening and evil-warding. These items, and matches, and their wits.
Hours later, Thomas woke.
“Hello,” he said, groggily righting himself.
Sigrid stared at him. “What are we doing?” she asked. “Alice and the others were prepared. They planned extensively. They’d been circling together for weeks before they left—knew each other’s magic, inside and out.”
“You know my magic,” Thomas said. “You know everything.” He reached for Sigrid’s feet, propped on the bench beside him.
Sigrid drew them back.
He sighed. “You’ve been preparing for this your whole life.”
As they chugged farther into the Highlands, the world became over-saturated in the eerie blue-green of a dense forest, or of leagues under the sea. A curve in the tracks revealed a wide, churning river outside the window. The train soared over it on a bridge so thin Sigrid felt like they were flying.
He was right, of course. Every kilometer they traveled felt like it was bringing Sigrid closer to where she was meant to be—or, perhaps, where she could not have avoided ending up.
Ferrying a boat to Eynhallow was difficult. It was the off season, and local fishermen were superstitious about the tides. Finally, they found an ancient mariner swathed in a cloak, eating canned fish beside a rusted trawler. They had to repeat their request three times while the man gummed sardines with golden teeth, but eventually he’d nodded. Neither Thomas nor Sigrid dared ask any questions when he immediately ushered them onto his boat and untied it from the dock, its sputtering engine jettisoning them away from shore.
The wind was icy and merciless. Sigrid inched nearer to Thomas, aglow as ever with warmth. His eyes, clear and sharp as glass, darted across the water as the boat sliced through the sound. The fisherman killed the engine and the trawler glided toward a dilapidated dock. Sigrid leaped from the boat’s deck to the dock, grasping Thomas’s hand in terror. Luckily, the dock held, though its wooden slats were soft under her tread.
“Best be careful, miss. Fog’s rolling in,” the mariner said, his Orkney accent nearly unintelligible. “Don’t seem right, a young woman traveling the islands alone.”
Sigrid narrowed her eyes in confusion. Within moments the trawler receded into the mist.
“Crazy old dodger,” Thomas muttered, shouldering his pack.
Eynhallow was tiny and flat, tipped like a dish in a sink. The tall end, buttressed by craggy cliffs, rolled down to a shallow shoreline on the other side. The edges of the island were hidden by a creeping mist. Like many places empty of people, Eynhallow brimmed with all manner of the inhuman. Sigrid felt a lingering dread, and the buzz of unfamiliar magic just under the skin.
The island’s undulating green was littered with moss-covered boulders and anonymous cairns. The whipping wind sent a chill right to the bone. It was not hard to believe, navigating the pockmarked landscape, that this was about as close as one could get to the edge of the world.
Thomas set off north and slightly west, across the heart of the island, directly through the monastery remains where Alice Gray and her two fellows had been found. He moved among the ruins with an odd ease, as though returning to a place he once knew. The rubble was crawling with latent hexes. The wind seemed to whistle around the crumbling ruins—or was it a whisper?
Sigrid crouched in the grass near Alice’s final resting place. What force could possibly have made someone so smart and accomplished willingly lie down to die? Sigrid shut her eyes and tried to call forth any residual magic, anything Alice might have left behind. There was something . . . a wisp of feeling. Sigrid opened herself to it, allowing her heart to be touched by what remained of Alice’s soul.
Fear.
Fathomless, unhinged fear. And, tangled in the dread and anger, a warning:
DON’T TRUST THE CHOICE.
Sigrid recoiled, pulling her wool coat tight around herself.
Thomas led them to the shore. Their footsteps in the short, wiry grass made no sound and left no mark. The fog bank had farther advanced, and there was nothing now to differentiate the steel-grey ocean from its ruff of murk. They stood at the water’s edge, squinting.
Sigrid tried not to think of the other explorers, found on the sand, grasping. The image of their half-rotted bodies crept over her sight in that now-familiar way. In the cold, surrounded by such powerful and foreign energy, she lacked the will to fight off Thomas’s visions. Sigrid saw what he saw: the gruesome spectacle of death. Just beyond the bodies, one of the rowboats was beached, nodding in the lapping waves.
“Thomas,” Sigrid warned. As quickly as the vision crept in, it washed away. But Sigrid blinked, once, twice, and still the boat remained.
Thomas grasped it by the bow. He’d conjured the boat whole cloth from his own mind.
“Are you ready?” he asked, planting one foot inside the vessel. He reached a hand out to her.
Alice’s warning echoed in Sigrid’s mind. But she and Thomas had come this far. There was no turning back.
Sigrid took Thomas’s hand and crawled into the boat, gasping as it teetered in the shallows. They shoved off from shore, and within minutes Eynhallow disappeared.
Sigrid held fast to the iron stake. With her other hand, she worried the carnelian stone hanging around her neck, which seemed to pulse and warm as Thomas rowed.
“What’s it saying?” Thomas asked. “Are we on the right track?”
Sigrid shut her eyes and held the stone tight in her palm. She called forth the memory of Alice’s ghost and its desperate cry. As the stone throbbed, Alice’s warning grew louder, stronger, and more urgent.
“We’re getting closer,” Sigrid said. “Keep rowing.”
The mist around them, dark as pitch when they left the shore, began to warm and brighten. It was a contrast to the growing burden of Alice’s screams, pressing in on Sigrid’s mind.
“Closer,” she said, breathing shallow. “Very close.”
Not a minute later, the boat scraped rocky land. Thomas leaped over the bow and dragged it farther ashore. Steep cliffs loomed over the shore. They walked cautiously, looking for any path, any sign of life.
“Don’t lose grip of the stake,” Thomas called over his shoulder.
Sigrid held it to her chest with a white-knuckle grip. If she let go, Hether Blether could disappear entirely. The stone in Sigrid’s hand began to throb with heat. “The sorcerer. He’s near,” she whispered.