I touch his hand and he flinches. “What did you find?”
He stares at my fingers. “Iron,” he says, and sighs. “There was iron buried under your skin.”
The room spins; metal and light and the taste of blood. “What does that mean?”
“Iron mutes magic,” Solch says from the foot of the bed where he sits, glasses pushed high up his forehead. He wipes something clean with a rag before bouncing a tiny chip of metal across his palm for me to inspect. “Magic goes in, none comes out. It means someone was hiding something in you that they didn’t want found.”
My hand goes to my scar, now buried beneath a thick wad of bandage. “Hiding what?”
Standing, North drags a hand through his hair. My blood freckles his face, stains his fingers, is black against black on his shirt. “The clean magic you promised, for one thing,” he says. “The infection sank so fast, it didn’t touch it, and there’s enough there to convince my council to go to Brindaigel for the rest. With Miss Dossel—” He stops, catching himself, and I pretend not to notice how easily he’s adopted his new alliance. “It’s hope,” he says at length. “The most we’ve had in years.”
But any future that keeps Bryn in our lives promises nothing but misery.
Avoiding his eyes, I examine my arm, cracked and peeling with dead skin but already starting to heal. Poison lurks in my veins, turning them more black than blue, but when I angle my arm to the light, I catch the first hint of something paler.
Clean magic.
“Here. Drink this.” Solch thrusts a glass at me, full of a brown liquid flecked with beads of something black. I accept it with a reluctant thanks.
A bell rings by the doorway, hanging from a coiled rope. Solch glances toward it and stands. “Duty calls,” he says wryly, and North nods in tense acknowledgment. He waits for Solch to close the door behind him before he releases a breath and drops into the armchair, fists pressed to his mouth as he stares at me. Wordlessly, he extends a hand and I give him the glass of liquid. He sets it on the ground beside him, out of reach.
“When did your mother give you that scar?” asks North.
“The night she was arrested for stealing magic from the king. Why would she put iron inside me?”
He studies his hands, shoulders hunched. “There’s a spell,” he says, sitting back. “I can feel the edges of it, but it’s buried too deep to read, too long hidden beneath that iron. I can’t risk searching for it, not . . . not like this.” Not while his hands tremble, swollen from excising too much poison from both of our bodies. “When we reach New Prevast, we can assess the situation in a more controlled environment. But you were right.” He stands and begins pacing the room, pausing at the balcony doors. “The magic you carry bears Merlock’s mark, Faris. It came from Prevast. From Avinea.”
My skin prickles.
“Miss Dossel is not a princess,” he says.
I hug myself, relief warring with regret. “I’m sorry,” I say softly. “I know you needed that magic.”
“Rammesteel,” says North, folding his arms over his chest. “It’s a fortress, built two hundred years ago by King Tanoseen during the Fire Wars, in case Prevast ever fell from a seaward attack. Only Prevast never fell and Rammesteel was never occupied. It fell into disrepair and then into memory and then into legend.” He sighs. “Until you came along.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Corthen wasn’t a king,” North says. “He couldn’t hold on to all that magic he stole; it wouldn’t be safe. He had to hide it somewhere. We always assumed he’d expended most of it during the war, but maybe . . .”
“Brindaigel,” I whisper.
North smiles thinly. “The Northern Continents cut off our trade routes years before anyone else was scared off by the plague because a shipment of guns and powder went missing off the coast. The entire crew disappeared, but when Corthen showed up on the battlefield with pistols, the Continents blamed Avinea for an act of piracy.” He shakes his head. “I’m willing to bet it was an act of mutiny, and the one leading the charge was named Dossel.”
Gunpowder, I think with a jolt. That’s how you move a mountain without magic.
North returns to the bed and sits on the edge, next to my legs. “There are no rules of succession for the brother of a king,” he says. “After Corthen was killed, anyone could have claimed that stolen magic as their own, and only an intuit would know the difference. Especially if that someone had pistols and a trained crew of men to defend their right.”
All the lies we’ve been told—all the death. And for what? So a coward could play king? No. So a coward could become king.
“The perfect strategy,” I say suddenly. North looks at me, eyebrows raised, and I repeat what Bryn had said the night we met: “Perrote declared war on Avinea the instant Merlock abandoned it and he’s been winning ever since. He wants all of it, North.” I look at him, incredulous. “Brindaigel was only ever meant to be temporary.”
North snorts, shaking his head in disbelief. “And he might have won, if not for you.” His eyes meet mine, and I flush beneath their intensity.
“What do we do about Bryn?” I ask, dropping my eyes, picking at a loose thread in the coverlet.
“She doesn’t have to know any different until this is gone”—he touches my arm—“and we drain every last ounce of my father’s magic out of those mountains.”
My breath catches. “We?”
“I’ll need you,” he says.
North’s fingers soften against my arm, protected by my sleeve. He half laughs, dry and humorless. “You’re glowing,” he says. “Like starlight on water.” Swallowing hard, he adds, in barely more than a whisper, “Magic suits you.”
My stomach somersaults and I feel the curious press of the infection in my blood, warmed by the sudden heat of desire. Will this be my life now? Tempering my vices, balanced precariously on a narrow edge in which one instant of weakness could send me falling?
How does North resist the temptation?
Pulling a thin cord from around his neck, North snaps it in half and slides an iron ring free, the band simple but heavily worn. “Wear this,” he says, standing. “It’ll help keep you muted until we reach New Prevast.”
I force a smile of thanks. The ring’s too big for any finger but my thumb and I roll it into place.
“It was my father’s,” says North. “Not that he ever meant it for me. He gave it to my mother before she fled the palace in Prevast. It . . . hasn’t fit these fingers for many years.” He offers me as self-depreciating smile that quickly disappears.
His father. King Merlock.