I cast him a dark look: I don’t need him to defend me. “Look,” I say, “fair trade: I can teach you how to throw a punch if you let me wear your pants.”
“Why? I can already hit a target at twenty yards.” He thrusts out his chest with a swell of pride.
“Because you might not always have your crossbow and it’d be useful to know how to fight with your hands.”
Tobek shrugs, glancing toward Bryn to see if she’s watching. “Maybe,” he says at last.
North snorts and I look over again, annoyed at his uninvited assessment. He crouches, whispering words that sound like nonsense but feel like magic, pressing his fingers to the stones as he completes a circle around our camp. Despite myself, I draw closer, hugging my arms around my chest. When he finishes, he sits back on his heels and looks up, expression unreadable.
“Please don’t kill my apprentice,” he says.
I shift my weight, eying the rocks. “Were you casting a spell?”
A half smile twists his lips and he stands, brushing his hands off on the seat of his trousers. He still holds several stones and they rattle in his hands. “A barrier ward,” he says. “To keep you safe, as promised.”
So he’s a charmer, just like Thaelan.
“Why don’t we just keep moving?” I ask. Basic rule of the ring: A moving target is always harder to hit.
“Because the earth is made of stone,” he says, “and stone holds magic better than wood. It’s more defensible to stand still than to trust the horses and wagon’s walls against the hellborne.” He offers me a smile. “Seven days to New Prevast, Miss Locke, but six nights as well.”
I hug myself tighter, quelling the nervous energy that comes from standing still after running my whole life. Will Perrote camp for the night too, or are we sacrificing what little lead we may have?
“Is it safe to touch them?” I ask, toeing the edge of a stone.
“Are you a transferent?”
“Are you afraid I’m going to steal your spell?”
His mouth twitches. “Should I be?”
I stare at him, and he shakes his head wryly. “There’s only so much clean magic left in Avinea, Miss Locke,” he says, tossing a stone through the grass ahead of us. It bounces several times before rolling out of sight. “You saw for yourself the lengths people will go to grab it. I have to protect my investments.”
“Are you talking about us or the rocks?”
His smile is a flash of teeth before he pockets the rest of the stones, nudging my foot with his own. “They’re safe to touch,” he says. “I cast my spells with lots of knots. Makes them harder to steal. Like yours, for example.”
My hand circles my wrist on reflex. The hard threads of magic bump beneath my fingertips. “What do you mean?”
“It almost looks like a curse,” he says. “Curses are not cast with the intention of being removed. Here. Look.” He shrugs half out of his coat and rolls up his shirt sleeve, exposing a slender forearm corded with muscles and veins. A narrow line of magic sits in the crook of his elbow, forked on both ends and weighted by an open circle on the left. “This is a protection spell,” he explains, dipping his shoulder toward me so I can see his arm more clearly. “See how the spell has sharp edges? It makes it easier to grab a hold of when it’s time to be removed. Miss Dossel has something similar on her arm. But you . . .” He straightens, reaching for me.
I recoil, out of the way, and he lifts his hands. “Sorry,” he says. “I forgot. But you can see the difference. Yours is all curves and blurred edges, like spilled ink. There’s nothing to hold on to.”
I stare at him, cold all over. “But you could still remove it, right?”
“Very carefully,” he agrees. “It would take time and a great deal of skill, but yes. I could remove it.”
A wolf howls in the distance and I flinch at the sound.
“They’re in the hills,” he says, pulling his coat back on, shaking out the collar. “They won’t come near the camp.”
I rub my arms and look away, embarrassed by the way he watches me so closely. “So how do you know if it’s a curse?”
“An intuit could tell you. They can trace a spell’s lineage all the way back to the king who summoned the magic.”
I glance toward Tobek, sulking by the fire. He doesn’t look like he’ll tell me anything tonight. At least, not without charging me money for it.
“Well, I’m not a transferent,” I say, crouching, “although my mother was.”
“Really.” North rocks back on his heels, eyebrows raised. When I tense beneath his interest, he drops his eyes and quickly adds, “It’s probably for the best you didn’t inherit the ability. Magicians are worth almost as much as magic these days. The hellborne trade them like animals. Transferents are preferred, but spellcasters aren’t bad. And if you’re an amplifier with a pack of addicts holding your leash?” He snorts, shaking his head. “You’d be better off dead.”
Chilled, I press my fingers to the ward. I don’t know what I’m hoping for: a spark, a memory, a miracle; something hidden in the magic that speaks to something hidden inside me. But it’s just rock under the press of my fingertips; I’m still just a girl.
Disappointment floods my mouth and I stand, hating myself for falling into that trap of hope, of thinking a girl from the Brim with nothing but a scar above her heart could somehow be special just because her mother was. Or to be special in spite of what her mother tried to do.
But I’m a murderer, I tell myself. I’m the villain now.
“Oh,” North says suddenly, with staged surprise that would be endearing in any other circumstance. “I almost forgot.” He rummages through his coat pocket and holds out my mother’s book.
I struggle to find my voice again. When I do, it wavers, waiting for the trap to spring and his motives to become clear. “What do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” he says, “it was already yours.” Lowering his voice to a mock whisper, he pulls a guilty face. “I didn’t actually pay for it.”
How could he, with Fanagin dead on the ground?
Stepping back, I curl the book under my arm, avoiding his eyes. “You mentioned clean water?”
North points to a copse of birch trees beyond the wagon, all skinny, silver things with mottled bark. They cast long shadows in the growing twilight, like iron bars creeping toward camp. “Twenty minutes to dark,” he says, as I mumble thanks.
The river is shallow and the water is warm as it twists through the trees. It soothes my fraying nerves, but as I rinse the mud from my hair and the blood from my skin, I awaken the tender bruises on my arms and throat and with them, memories of how I got here. My movements turn frantic and blood begins to drip into the water like loose threads of magic. With a sudden gasp of panic, I crouch and pull my arms over my head.
I killed a man to save my sister, trading virtue for vice, compassion for selfishness. There’s no going back from that kind of imbalance, and unless I harden myself into iron, the sacrifice will be for nothing.
My palms are not the floor, I tell myself, and I am not defeated. I am stronger than this.