Page 124 of Stealing Tink

Wanderer.

I stand up. “I don’t understand,” I say. “None of this makes any sense. Why would the Fates agree to that?”

“Trust us, we have no idea,” says Nox.

But then I remember the tales of the Eldest Sister. The Sister obsessed with love.

I stop. “So you’re saying the man I know as the Nomad—he’s been following me into my various reincarnations?”

“That’s pretty much it,” says Blaise.

I sit back down, fold my hands together in my lap. “How many lives?”

“We’ve counted thirty-five. So far.”

My brain stalls. Freezes. “You said that in the first tapestry, he died saving me. How?”

Blaise and Nox look at each other before Nox explains, “Because of the way you’d been woven into the tapestries, if you were killed in another realm, you would die for good. In the past, you’d always found ways to move in between worlds. Sometimes you could remember who you were, sometimes you couldn’t. It just depended on how bored the Fates were and how much they wanted to change the rules. But there’s a rule about those tapestries, about inhabiting two worlds at once. If you were killed before your time, you wouldn’t come back anywhere.”

“You mean I would have died here too.”

“Exactly,” says Nox. “And Fa—the Nomad figured out how to make rips in the Fabric. How to send you off to the next realm, like you’d been doing. Your soul was so interwoven with the Fabric, a tear in your soul would rip it and take you with it.”

My mind goes back to the conversation the Nomad and I had in his office. How he had known I’d never killed anyone before. He’d said he could just tell, but all that time, he knew who I was and that, had I killed, I would no longer belong to that world. Which must be why he stopped me from killing that faerie dust harvester in the tavern.

My mind races back to my last moment with him. How he’d looked at the wound in my side. He’d been assessing whether it was fatal before he turned on me.

Before he taunted me into killing him first.

And then I had been whisked away.

All of the nightmares come swarming back into my vision.

They’d always ended before I actually died. I’d always woken up before the Nomad’s murder was complete.

Except for the time I’d killed him in the dream instead.

“He’s been forcing me to kill him in self-defense all these years, all these lifetimes,” I whisper.

Blaise nods. “We’re not particularly fond of him, but even we have to admit, it’s pretty romantic.”

I can’t help that my heart soars at the idea that I’ll see him again, that…

“Wait,” I say, a terrible thought occurring to me. “If he always does this, if this is the way our story always ends, why did I wake up here? Why did I wake up in the first realm?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out,” says Nox, “and I think I have a theory. You said that before you killed the Nomad, he had changed a tapestry so that it showed a woman waking up?”

I nod, my heart pounding.

“He did it. He finally did it,” gasps Blaise.

“Did what?”

“Found the original tapestry. Your original tapestry. It must have been the only way to wake you up.”

“But—” I trail off, feeling the vibrations of my voice against my throat. “That means he wasn’t lying when he said he’d help me get my voice back.”

Blaise and Nox look confused, but I ignore them. I scoot forward in my seat. “If it worked, why isn’t he here now?”