“I told you, I will give whatever—”
“Notmycost,” the Devil said. “Myprice is set, finite, but magyk gifts are bestowed by the Arden. I am merely a vessel. The power will take its own toll, and I cannot say what it might be. Your sanity, your health…your beauty…” He ran his thumb along my braid again, eyes boring into mine as I tried to control the trembling in my limbs.
“I will gladly pay it,” I said, finding that my voice had faded to a whisper. In the blink of an eye, he was perched on a flat rock beneath an oak tree several feet away.
“I’m certain you will. Now, my price is simple. I require three things from you. The first is a promise.” He raised his hand, a large gold coin clasped between his first two fingers. “This coin bears an image on either side, designs that might shift according to your mood. But the day you find both faces empty, your debt is due, and I will come for you. You must keep it close at all times. Do you understand?”
I walked forward and took the coin from him, sweeping my thumb over the embossed image of a Huntress moth. The opposite side was stamped with the image of a coiled snake. They both seemed alive, as if they might leap off the face of the gold surface at any moment.
I pocketed it and looked back at the Devil. “How long do I have?”
“That, I cannot say. The Arden will decide.”
“And what will I owe?” I asked, slightly irritated at having to pull the answers from him.
“Your gift. A single use of your healing gift. When all is well again, you shall be on your way.”
My eyes narrowed with suspicion. He said it so simply that I’d nearly agreed on the spot, but for all my youth and naivete, I at least knew that fay bargains were never entirely what they seemed.
“Whowould I need to heal? And what is the illness?”
“Someone of great importance,” he said with a shrug, “rather like your Sister Superior. I cannot reveal the illness, but it will be within your power to fix. Now, do we have a bargain or not? I am growing weary of these incessant questions.”
“And I am growing weary of your litany of conditions, Devil,” I snapped, then chose my words carefully as I continued. “I agree…to carry your coin, until the day I find it blank, and then to come with you. I agree to use the magyk gift you give me to healoneperson ‘of great importance’. Now, what is your third requirement?”
He took yet another step closer, until we were all but nose-to-nose, and his presence felt so human for a moment that I very nearly forgot what he was—a Devil.
A creature born from sin and shadow.
Nothing less than malice given breath and form and voice.
He might be a devil, I told myself,but he is a devil who is going to give me what I need.
“Your name, girl,” he whispered.
“Names…have power,” I murmured. “People say never to give your name to one of the Fair Folk, because that’s how they control you.”
“If I wanted control, I’d have spirited you away by now,” the boy chirped, his mismatched eyes darting around my face. “A name, if you please.”
Perhaps, I reasoned with myself, giving him a name that was rarely used might lessen his power over me. To the Sisters, and the rest of Nottingham, I was known simply as ‘May’. Hardly anyone used the name that Friar Tuck had chosen when he found me on the steps of the Abbey, only days old and wrapped in green swaddling.
“Marina,” I said quickly. “My name is Marina…of Locksley.”
“Marina,” hummed the strange boy, giving me a little space to breathe again. “Meaning ‘from the sea’.”
I snorted. “A poor choice by the man who named me. The color of my eyes reminded him of a storm-tossed sea, but people say I only inherited the ocean’s changeable temperament, not its beauty or power.”
“Were I capable of untruths, I might agree,” said the Devil, extending his hand. It took me a moment to understand what he meant, but then a hot flush crept up my chest. “I believe we have struck our bargain, Marina of Locksley.”
I took his hand and squeezed, his long, pale fingers enveloping my dark, calloused ones. Before I could get a closer look at the snakeskin pattern on his arm, a blinding flash of light burst from the point where our hands met. I staggered backwards and hit the trunk of a tree, then became tangled in its roots and fell hard. When my vision cleared, the Devil was gone, and the side of my calf was bleeding. I hissed in pain and attempted to staunch the blood with my stocking, but the fireflies returned quickly, performing an intricate, wriggling dance up and down my arm.
I let out a low gasp of understanding and covered the gash with both hands. I had no idea how to call up the power, or if he’d even given it to me at all, but I closed my eyes and imagined healing. I pictured each stage, just as I witnessed them in the infirmary every day: bleeding, clotting, scabbing, the itch and burnof forming scar tissue, then the healing. A strange sensation entered my arms, as if a string was being pulled through them too fast, burning on its way out. It raced through my wrists, then spread through my hands and fingers, which I left in place until I could no longer bear it. When I lifted them up, I froze, unable to even breath for shock.
The wound was already scabbed over. Something that should have taken hours or even days, I had done in only seconds. I looked up, searching for the Devil, but the only sign he had ever existed at all was a small swarm of fireflies, bobbing away between the trees. Sensing that they wanted me to follow, I stood and felt in my pocket for the magyk coin, which would eventually call me to my fate. When I pulled it out, the image of the Huntress moth fluttered its wings ever so slightly, and the snake’s tongue flickered from its mouth, then went still.
“Thank you, Devil,” I whispered into the pressing darkness of the Arden.
Chapter one
