“Oh,” Tobek says, relieved. Flattered. “I can do that.”
I wipe my mouth, annoyed by her intrusion and by his eager willingness to abandon my lesson to offer her one instead—a lesson I doubt she even needs. “Didn’t Pem teach you that too?” I ask darkly, watching North as he heads into the wagon, pausing on the steps to scratch Darjin between the ears. With a storm coming, he and Tobek plan to sleep inside tonight, and the thought of his proximity unsettles me.
“Who’s Pem?” Tobek retrieves his crossbow and quiver from the other side of the fire. He makes a show of testing the string, counting his bolts. Preening for attention.
Bryn shrugs, dropping the blanket to her feet. “Nobody,” she says, eyes sliding to me in warning a moment before blood fills my mouth as she bites her own tongue.
Tobek groans. “Don’t tell me. Previous life, another tragedy?”
“My life is a fairy tale,” Bryn says sardonically. “And Faris never actually told you her story.”
“Nothing to tell,” I say, spitting out a mouthful of blood. “There was a girl who knew a boy and had a sister. One of them was killed, one of them was cursed, and one of them . . .” I swallow hard, picturing the ash and ember feather in the wagon this afternoon. Three more days, I tell myself. “One of them is still waiting to be saved.”
“Then I win,” Tobek says, waving his hand. “You both have been coddled.”
“And you haven’t?” Bryn gives him a withering look. “North practically tucks you into bed and kisses you goodnight.”
Tobek flushes, throwing his shoulders back. Good, I think; fight back. Don’t give her power over you. “Know what this is?” he asks, pulling his collar away from his neck, revealing three black dots ringed with red.
“Meaningless?” Bryn pulls a bolt from his quiver and drags her fingers through the feathers of the shaft.
“It’s the mark of my first master,” Tobek says, proud. Defiant.
I lean closer, stomach clenching. “You were a slave.”
Bryn looks up sharply. “Are you infected?”
“No! I mean, I was, but”—he wets his lips and glances toward the wagon, tugging his collar back into place—“not anymore.” Setting the crossbow down, he pulls out the worn deck of cards he carries in his vest, nervously tilting them in his hands. “A few years ago, I got caught cheating the wrong man,” he says. “He got me hooked on poison and wouldn’t give me any more unless I kept working. We ran a scam of Crowns.” A wan smile flits across his face. “Was pretty good at it too.”
I know the game. Requiring no skill to play, it’s a game of chance and cheating, and an easy way to trick noblemen out of a handful of tretkas down in the Brim.
“So what happened?” asks Bryn. She picks up his crossbow and sights down the tiller.
“One day he was just gone. Not long after, North found me begging opium in Cortheana.” He says it with a shrug, feigning indifference, like the boys who live in the streets who pretend they don’t care that there’s nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep, no one to hold them and say everything’s all right.
But I recognize the worship in his face because I saw it so much in Cadence, in the way she idolized Thaelan. I kept food in her stomach and clothes on her back, but Thaelan carried a sword and taught her how to hold it. I was the sister. He was the hero.
“North removed the infection?” I ask.
Another shrug. “Any transferent could do it if they really wanted, but most won’t. It’s complicated, and takes time. Anytime you touch dead magic like that, with all its loose edges, you risk spilling some of it into your own blood. But North took a chance.” Lowering his head, he toes circles in the dirt. “He saved my life. And my soul. He turned a half-bred monster into something not so bad.” He looks to Bryn for approval, even as the fear of condemnation shadows his dark eyes.
Bryn doesn’t even look at him. “So how do you shoot this?” she asks.
“Aim and release,” he says, sighing, running a hand through his hair.
“Show me,” says Bryn.
He smiles.
Excusing myself, I retreat to the safety of the wagon, to where North reads with one knee braced against the table and his chair rocked back on two legs. He chews his lower lip and pretends not to notice me.
I sink into the chair across from him, unnerved. The Brim was rarely ever silent and I feel especially vulnerable tonight, to be so cut off from the world. If Perrote were to attack, we’d have nowhere to run.
North cracks the spine of his book, tilting his head to see me over the cover. “Everything all right?”
“Is it true?”
“It’s true,” he says. “Tobek is no longer infected. I was there.”
“No, I mean Farodeen the First,” I say. “Did he actually wrestle giants out of the sky?”
“Of course. That’s how Avinea began.” North closes the book and tosses it on the table, resting his hands on top of his knee. “Fire and giants and a farmer.”
I stare at his fingers, long and narrow but also swollen and trembling, the joints discolored, callused from wear. When he notices my gaze, North slides his hands into his lap, out of sight, a gesture meant to be casual but too deliberate to be anything but habit.
Don’t hide them, I want to say. I think they’re beautiful. The hands of a boy who knows how to fight. How to survive.
“So how did he get up there?” I ask, leaning forward, my own hands entwined across the table. I pick at the edge of a book. “And how did he get back down?”
“He took a leap of faith and landed in the clouds,” says North, deadpan. “After that, he just closed his eyes and fell.”
“And he didn’t die?”
“Sometimes, falling makes you stronger.” North stands, his chair screeching across the floor.
“Did it hurt?” I ask softly. “Saving Tobek’s life?”
North tenses. A debate plays across his face before he grabs an atlas from his apothecary chest. “Yes,” he says.
He opens the book to the index in the back before angling the book toward me with tented fingers. “I can’t find Brindaigel,” he says. “Does it have another name, maybe? Or is it a newer territory?”
My stomach tightens. “Why does it matter?”
“Your king was Corthen’s ally in the war,” he says, scanning the list of countries. “He had to have some stake in Avinea, a possible trade route or resource Corthen promised in return. What did he want badly enough he would send his daughter into enemy territory twenty years later to find, and without an escort?”
“Wrong question,” I say with a ripple of nerves. Can Bryn hear us? I cover my wrist, almost unconsciously. “You should be asking what kind of daughter seeks out her father’s enemy behind his back.”
North stares at me. “So then it is mercenary.” He chews his lower lip, expression darkening. “Maybe I should ask what kind of girl agrees to go with her? A binding spell requires mutual agreement, Miss Locke.”
“I was compensated,” I say, standing to avoid his prying eyes.