And Mira’s arrow.
Crouching, she unwrapped it. In the lantern light, the strange markings did the opposite of gleam – they seemed to suck the light inside them. Hurriedly, loathe to touch it, she tucked it in her quiver. If the wizard asked why its fletching looked different than the rest, she would lie and say for luck. But as she watched, the fletching changed to match those of her own arrows.
“Can’t make it fucking easy, can you?” Anya muttered hotly, pulling free her knife and notching a deep X in the butt end.
When she came upstairs, Sylas had spread his bedroll beneath the kitchen window and was already fast asleep. She raised the kerosene lamp to dim it and paused as the light fell over his face. Though his color was improved, he was still pale and wan as a spent cloud. In sleep, his carefully molded mask betrayed him. His face was gentle; almost boyish.
Extinguishing the light, she crawled into her bed, and fell asleep listening to him breathe.
Outside, in the dim light of morning, an east wind blew.
The air was still a bit chilly and smelled of damp earth, which always made her feel colder than she really was.
She pulled Johanna’s wide-brimmed hat over her head.For luck, she thought, sparing a glance for the rowan trees at the gate.
But something nagged her. She wasn’t imagining it, now; the brim clung to her fingers. So did the leather chin cord.
It was then she noticed, on the back of her hand, an oily sheen. The front of her hand, too. She pushed up her sleeve. A dewiness, all over her skin. Not rain and not quite sweat. Almost like…slime. It wouldn’t wipe away, no matter how she rubbed. Like it was part of her.
While Sylas was busy adjusting his rucksack, she bent and snatched a dead leaf from the ground. She tried to drop it, but it stuck. She turned her palm to the ground, and shook it, hard enough to rattle her bones.
It clung to the palm of her hand, like a spider to the glass of a window. Like a moth to the bark of a tree.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After yesterday’s rainstorm, the air smelled fresh and mossy green. Nothing like the city after a rain, a more beige sort of smell. The air was chilly, like early spring, but the activity kept Sy’s body pleasantly warm, and the chorus of birdsong warmed his spirit. It wasn’t a dreadful introduction to the fearsome forest.
But it quickly became one. They followed a game trail, much smoother than the open forest floor, but better suited for hooves than stiff leather. Though he had purchased, with Anya’s reluctant guidance, the best boots he could afford, his heels were better accustomed to paved stone walkways and smooth wooden floors and soon rubbed raw. It did not help that he continuously stumbled over the endless twigs and vines, tripped while dodging beetles and loose pebbles. He felt as graceless as a gosling.
“Step where I step,” Anya advised him the third time he nearly fell, as if she didn’t have to keep doubling back to wait for him, even with all her attention turned on every blade of grass, every fallen log, every upturned stone.
It was the last she spoke for hours, intent on guiding them steadily forward.
When he wasn’t carefully avoiding sharp rocks and fallen branches, rather than contemplate the chilly gloom of the forest and what it might be hiding, Sy studied his silent companion.
He was an artist. With paints and pencils, once; now, with flesh and blood, and the finest in the city at that. But evenhe must submit to one rival’s superior talent. The beauty of the wildflower speckled countryside, of the regal mountains in the far distance, of the vast forest he now stumbled through, had outdone his wildest imaginings, was far outside his scope. And chief among nature’s finest works, remarkable in its accomplishment, was his traveling companion’s face.
There was a random but sublimely coherent beauty to her, one only nature could have made: the asymmetric lay of her eyebrows, one arched higher than the other; the bluntness of her jaw and chin against her long, narrow face; the slim upturn of her nose. Accidents that alone would be unassuming, or even unbecoming, but combined into a picture of serene, rugged elegance. He could memorize it, behold it for hours every day, and never capture the likeness if he tried.
And those eyes. In the clouded light filtering through the branches, they gleamed green like peridot, like a landscape painter’s rendition of the sea, like nothing he had quite seen before. Whenever they paused for Anya to study a fork in the trail or listen to something he couldn’t hear, he memorized the color. He could replicate that hue in any face, but it would suit none the way it suited her, and no other color would suit her better – though if she asked, he’d suggest a warmer undertone to her cool ash-brown hair, something brash to bring out her eyes even more.
He wasn’t sure what to make of her. Gruff, but eloquent. Steely, yet easily bruised. He could never tell if she would respond to him with a biting remark or a thoughtful, intense gaze. She was determined to think of him as a dandy, a fool. A man of means, careless with his money, toying with elements he didn’t understand.
More than once, he had felt an irrepressible (and supremely irritating) need to explain himself to her, but he wouldn’t disabuse her of that particular notion. In fact, he was grateful for it – it kept a careful wedge between them, and this arrangement would work much better with it there. It would be much harder to betray a friend than a stranger, and betray her he must. The question was, how?
Perhaps he could persuade her to accept the victory itself as payment. Hunters liked to boast, didn’t they? Surely the boast of capturing a magical bird, one so rare most believed itdidn’t even exist, was worth something as currency. Should he succeed in creating the spell, he was sure to become a legend himself – he could promise her a role in the story.
Perhaps there was a way to use the phoenix for his own purposes and let her keep it after he was done. He’d run over several possibilities now, all of which left plenty of bird remaining – a spell penned with a mixture of his and the phoenix’s blood, with one of its feathers, with its claws, with all three. He could write the spell, earn his coin and his freedom, and leave her with what remained of the bird to use as she pleased. No doubt another buyer would be forthcoming. Perhaps she could stuff it, a trophy, something else beautiful for her bare walls.
Easier to betray, but much harder traveling with a stranger. Relying on one for his life. One with a hatchet on one side of her belt, a knife on the other. A shotgun slung with a strap over her right shoulder. A bow and full quiver strapped to her back.
What was to stop her from betraying him and claiming the prize for herself, taking it to another spellscribe, one who could pay her far more than what he had promised? And then she’d had that strange attack of pain. An illness, he presumed – one she said he couldn’t cure. Desperation would turn the noblest soul into a scrabbling creature; he was proving it himself, and his soul had never been close to the noblest.
Rich as it was from him, he relied on her honor. But as the hours passed in silence, it gradually occurred to him: in his hurry to find a way to escape his indenture, he had not fully considered all the risks of working with the huntress Anya Degen.
Like, for example, how he seemed to lose all sense of time and place in her presence.
Only a consequence of being in the wood, he reassured himself. When they stopped to eat around midday, she had broken her focused, taciturn silence to explain to him that being under the trees could disorient even the most experienced hunter. One had to be constantly vigilant. It was nothing like navigating a city, unless the city had streets and buildings that changed shape with every storm – or were rearranged by spirits.
