I drift while he unravels the brown wool, then cry out as he peels it from my wound. I try to pull away, but his grip on my wrist is relentless. “Pity,” he says as he looks at my grotesquely swollen hand and the empty space where my pinkie and ring finger used to be. “What made you desperate enough to reach into a bear trap?”
I don’t answer, and I don’t think he expects me to. He disappears for a few moments and returns with a wet cloth. I roil with bubbling pain as he cleans the raw, bloody meat of my hand. His pale eyes meet mine. “I’m going to heal this, and then I’ll do your back.” He says it with confidence, as if I weren’t hovering on the precipice of death.
He takes my hand between both of his and stares intently at it. I feel faint flashes of heat, then cool.
Magic. This medicine man is a wielder. Here, in the outlands. In the thieves’ caverns.
And he is a healer. No one with that much magic could have escaped the elders’ notice—they would have found him as a child and brought him to the temple to serve like all the rest. They’d never have left him in the outlands to molder in a cave! For a moment, all my questions about who Raimo is and how he came to be here sharpen my mind and drag me back from the shore of oblivion. But then the old man moves my hand and another bolt of pain scatters all of them.
A deep wrinkle appears between Raimo’s bushy white eyebrows. He peers with even more intensity at my wound. More flashes of cold, then hot, then cold again, but I feel them only vaguely, like the idea of temperature instead of the reality.
And now Raimo is scowling.
He mutters to himself, then matter-of-factly unbuttons the back of my dress and pulls it down my arms. The action tugs at the bandages over my flayed back, and I writhe helplessly. Once again, I feel wisps of hot and cold, this time across my backbone. I have no idea how long it goes on, but when I’m jerked into solid awareness again, Raimo is leaning over me.
“You’re keeping secrets, my dear.” He uses the pads of his thumbs to lift my eyelids wide. “Ice-blue,” he says. He coils a lock of my hair around his finger. “And burnished copper.”
My heart skips unsteadily.
He moves closer, until his hooked nose is only a few inches from mine. He smells of fish and wet fur. “I am going to ask you a question, and it is very important that you answer me truthfully. Your life depends on this truth. Understand?”
I nod, though my heart is thumping madly.
“Do you have a mark?”
“Wh-what?” I whisper. “Why are you asking me that?” Panic swirls inside me. How could he know?
He smirks as he reads the fear in my eyes. “You’re not strong enough to stop me if I want to search for it, but it will be easier if you’d just tell me where it is. I’m not going to hurt you.”
I search for malice in his eyes, but I see nothing except ice. Cold, but not evil. I hope. “On my leg.”
He wrenches the hem of my skirt up. I know the moment he sees it, because he curses. “It’s certainly hard to miss. Oskar—has he seen this?”
“No.”
“Does anyone outside the temple know who you are?”
I think of Mim, but I refuse to expose her to more danger. “No.”
“Good. No one can know. Stars, I’ve been waiting so long for this.” He moves back up to my head and takes my face in his gnarled hands. “You were born the day Karhu and Susi aligned, yes? Do you know?”
“No . . .” But Kauko said the stars predicted my birth—was this what he was talking about?
Raimo’s chin trembles as he smiles. “You might have secrets, but you’re terrible at keeping them. You’ve been a princess all these years, haven’t you?”
My skin burns with shame, and I close my eyes.
“You’re the one who was found,” he says. “They thought you were her. But you’re not.”
A low sob escapes from my throat as he flays me with the truth. “How can you possibly know this?”
He lets out a bark of laugher. “Because I am very good at keeping secrets. So—what happened when you didn’t inherit the magic? Did you run away, or did they cast you out?”
“I ran. They . . . were going to kill me.”
He grins as if I’ve given him wonderful news. “Ah, they never figured it out!” He claps his hands over his thighs, which are covered in a black robe very much like the ones the priests wear. “Well, you’ve complicated my evening. Try to keep breathing while I prepare a few poultices.”
I frown. “But you were healing me with magic.”
The shadows nest in the hollows under his eyes and make his face look like a skull. “I was trying. But as it turns out, that won’t work.”
“Why not?”
Something akin to delight deepens the rows of wrinkles on his gaunt cheeks. “Because you, my dear, are completely immune to magic. It won’t help you.” He raises his eyebrows. “But it can’t hurt you either.”
I blink at him in confusion. “What are you saying?”
“There are more magic wielders in this land than you could possibly know.” His gaze strays down to my leg, where my blood-flame mark lies stark and red on my exposed calf. “And to every one of them, you could be either their most powerful asset—or their worst enemy.”
CHAPTER 9