“You have jars full of rocks in the wagon.”
“These are different.” He turns cagey, protective, as if this is a defense he’s fought before. I bite back a grin to think of a younger North hoarding stones at the monastery. “The river wears them smooth, see?” He demonstrates one, squinting it into focus. His enthusiasm is endearing, as is the flip of his hair over his forehead. “They hold the magic more uniformly that way. Spells are less likely to fray.”
“What about that one?” I point to a dark gray stone, rougher than the others, pockmarked and ugly.
Making a face, he dances the stones across his palm and separates it out. “Pumice,” he says, “from when the earth bled fire. It’s not really rock, it’s just hardened lava. There are whole fields between here and New Prevast made of this stuff. They’ve all turned green now, but if you dig deep enough, you’ll still find it buried underneath.”
Intrigued, I hold out my hand and he drops the pumice into it. It’s lighter than I expected, and feels brittle, though it doesn’t break when I squeeze. “Can’t you use these for magic too?” I ask.
“Too porous,” he says, clicking his other stones together, discarding several, pocketing the rest. “Magic would slide through it like water.”
I curl it in my fist, watching him scavenge. A touch of the giddiness returns, a hint of flirtation. “In Brindaigel, they say anyone who can catch Rook’s starlight will be granted a wish from the king,” I say.
North’s expression is impossible to read. “What would you wish for?”
“Nothing,” I say, my giddiness fading as a list of insatiable desires rolls through my mind. “It’s a meaningless gesture because it’s an impossible task. No one has ever caught starlight before.”
“Have you learned nothing from us?” He leans into the riverbank, bracing his weight by my knees. Despite myself, I bend closer, tempted by the secrecy in his demeanor and the mischievous glint in his eye. There’s a touch of Thaelan to him, but he’s still entirely new. Entirely North. “Hold out your hand,” he says.
I do so slowly, and he makes a fist above my cupped palm. Water drips from his hand, forming a small puddle in mine. It shimmers like a mirror before turning deep blue, freckled with twinkling light.
I laugh, incredulous, as North leans even closer.
“The skill is in cheating, Miss Locke,” he says softly. And then, “Make your wish.”
The temptation is overwhelming; the moment feels like magic, like anything is possible. But all at once I remember myself, pulling back, spilling the water into the ground. I drag my hands across the tops of my thighs, unnerved by how easily I let myself be caught up in his company. “I don’t believe in wishes,” I say.
He doesn’t bother hiding the flicker of irritation as he pulls back. “Not everything has to be hard won, Miss Locke.”
It’s the same sentiment Alistair offered, made more tempting by a man who has never expected anything in return. But North is not a stupid man. Even if he wanted to help me, he wouldn’t risk losing Bryn’s potential value as the daughter of a king with magic to spare, not for the small amount of stolen magic that I carry. He needs a seedling to save the world and I’m the annual flower that won’t return in the spring.
Clearing my throat, I push to my feet. “I’m going to keep searching.”
“Me too,” he says, not looking at me.
The thickening fog threads between my feet as I edge away from North and the strange feelings he’s awakening, a warring dichotomy of attraction and a deeper, bitter sense of guilt. Thaelan is barely dead, I tell myself, and Cadence needs me to be stronger than this.
But when North approaches me some time later, his pockets weighted with stones that click as he walks, I can’t help the smile that flickers across my face.
He sits beside me on a fallen log, stealing an inch closer than I would have ever offered on my own. “Is this in your book?” he asks, holding a small blue flower toward me.
“Phoralis,” I say. “It’s poisonous.”
“So don’t eat it,” he says.
“They teach you well in that monastery,” I say, and smile before catching myself, making my expression serious. Impenetrable.
“Keep it,” says North, dipping the flower so it brushes the back of my hand. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it wasn’t. “When you go home, you can show your mother all the plants you found in Avinea.”
“She’s dead,” I say.
He blinks.
Maybe I should sit in the river until my rough edges are smoothed out too. Shaking my head in apology, I murmur thanks and accept the flower, twisting it between my fingers.
We listen to the approaching storm, lost in our own thoughts. But when lighting breaks across the sky, I jump at the thunder that follows, close enough it sounds like gunshot.
“We should go back,” North says with a sigh, standing.
A gust of wind gutters his hair and snaps his coat behind him, and the first drops of rain slip through the branches. Reluctantly, I follow, hugging myself as the wind rises, howling and growling and—no.
That’s not the wind.
Fear slides down my back and pools low in my stomach. “What is that?”
North doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. A beast appears, a shadow figure with its back bent forward, the serrated edges of its spine as pronounced as fresh tilled earth. Withered arms hang limp at its sides, its fingers tapered like tallow candles beaded with wax. Embers flash in the dark; raindrops hit its body as steam releases with a hiss. It turns toward us, blurring its edges out of focus before it redefines itself.
A shadow golem. Another one of Perrote’s spies. While it’s bigger than his usual shadow rats and crows, I’d recognize the acrid smell of magic anywhere.
North edges ahead of me, in a position of defense. The golem lifts its head with a grunt, beady red eyes scanning left to right, searching for its prey before it locks on us and roars in challenge.
“Run,” North orders. He plunges a hand in his pocket and retrieves a stone overlaid with a lacework of magic. “Straight back to camp. Get Tobek and then lock yourself in the wagon.”
I hesitate. I ran from Perrote’s magic once before and have regretted it every day since.
Not this time.
The golem charges. North stumbles back, slipping on the slick moss, and without thinking, I grab his arm before he falls. He spares me a momentary glance, gratitude framed on his lips, before we break apart as the golem bowls between us, roaring loud enough to silence the thunder overhead.
Sparks scatter across the ground as the golem immediately rounds on North. Mumbling quickly, North unspools the magic around his fingers but there’s no time to cast anything complicated. When the golem charges again, North throws out a meager spell, no more than a flicker of light that buys him a scant few meters of time to back away and try again.
Frantic, I pat down my coat, unearthing the tinderbox from that afternoon. Alistair killed a shadow rat in the dungeon with a match, but it was much smaller. What if this doesn’t work?