Chapter 1 BLAME
Five minutes into the conversation, Kellen was grinning so widely his face ached. He could see Nettle trying to catch his eye and very slightly shaking her head. She knew what his grin meant, even if this idiot merchant didn’t.
I’m going to lose my temper, Kellen thought. Any minute now.The inevitability of it was almost calming.
“I didn’t hire you to lecture me!” the merchant was saying. “I hired you to fix the problem!”
Kellen stood there in the stupid, overdecorated reception hall, letting the flood of words pour over him. The merchant had glossy, angry, frightened eyes. His hair was dyed, but that just made his pale, haggard face look older. Petty, weak, childish. The sort of man who needed chandeliers the size of dinner tables to feel powerful and who made you stand while he sat and ranted at you so that everyone knew who was in charge.
“Are you listening to me?” demanded the merchant.
Kellen’s head snapped up, his mind airy and bright with anger.
“The blood’s showing again,” Kellen pointed out, a little spitefully.
The merchant immediately curled his hands into defensive fists. His gloves were so padded that they looked like clownish silken paws, but even this had not been enough. The blood always found its way through, mysteriously oozing from his palms and fingers until it could not be hidden.
Kellen wore gloves too, for a different reason. He was used to the weight of the iron bands hidden within the cloth. Right now, he was wondering whether that weight would break someone’s nose if he punched them in the face.
“They said you knew how to deal with curses!” snapped the merchant. “But you’ve done nothing, and it’s been two weeks!”
Kellen had taken the job against his better judgment. Or rather, he had allowed his rational judgment to outweigh his better instincts. For once there had been a reasonable prospect of a decent payment. Now, however, reasonableness was losing its appeal.
“That’s because I was trying to find out who cursed you, and there were too many suspects!” Kellen exploded. He could almost feel his leash snap, his temper bounding forward like a big black dog. The aghast silence all around him made him want to laugh.
Oh well. Boring job anyway.
“All the marsh-silk pickers, the carders and dyers, the folks in your felting mills . . . they work themselves to the bone for you, and you pay them spit!” Kellen’s voice echoed off the frescoes and ornamental arches. “And the lodgings you rent to them are stinking hellholes, crammed to the eaves with too many families! What did you think would happen? I’m surprised they haven’t allcursed you!”
“How dare you?” Powerful people never said anything original once you stopped showing them the deference they expected. In a state of outrage, they all used the same script.
“Anyway, I did work out who cursed you,” said Kellen, “and they’re already dead. So you don’t need to know who they were.”
No, the merchant didn’t need to know about the sad little note or the body in the river. The dead woman’s family didn’t need a ladleful of stigma added to their grief. Kellen would have felt differently about the curser if she’d been alive and still dangerous, but she wasn’t, so all he felt was pity.
“Dead?” The merchant looked alarmed. “Is that a problem? Can you still lift the curse?”
“Talking to the curser often helps, but all I need to know is the reason for the curse,” Kellen said grimly. “And there’s no mystery here, is there? You’re the reason! It doesn’t even matter which of your victims cursed you. Because in this case, the problem is you.
“You made somebody desperate enough to become a curser. You’ve got blood on your hands. And thanks to the curse, now everyone can see it.”
“You’re one of those rabble-rousers!” The merchant was recovering from his shock. “Who do you work for! Who paid you to come here and say all of this to me?”
“You did, you idiot!” exploded Kellen. “You hired me to get rid of your curse, and I’m telling you how to do it! What did you expect me to do, give you an ointment? You can’t cure a curse; you have to unravel it. You have to find the reasons that wove it and work out how to pull the threads loose. And the only way I can see for you to do that . . . is to be sorry.
“You need to understand what you’ve been doing all this time, and regret it, and change. So you need to spend a month gathering raw marsh silk in the Wilds, or washing the thorns and grit out of sticky fluff until your fingers bleed, so you understand other people’s lives. Then you need to find ways of mending the harm you’ve done and doing penance for anything that can’t be fixed. If you do this for long enough, then maybe—”
“Maybe?” The merchant gave an appalled huff of laughter. “You want me to do all this for a ‘maybe’? This is ridiculous!”
Kellen had let himself become earnest again. Yes, this whole conversation was ridiculous.
“Fine,” he said. “Do what you like. If you pay someone else enough, I’m sure they’ll tell you you’re blameless and sell you a curse-proof hat. It won’t work, but at least they won’t be rude.”
“Listen to me, you grubby little charlatan!” The merchant leaned forward. “I want my money back, right now!”
“Not a chance!” yelled Kellen. “I did what I was paid for! I’ve told you how to lift your curse! It’s not my fault if you’re too stupid to do it!”
The merchant tightened one hand into a fist. There was a tick-tick-tick noise as he did so, and the seam across the knuckles of the glove burst open, white eiderdown bulging out through the gap. As more blood seeped scarlet through the exposed feathers, the merchant gave a whimper of panic and clutched his hand to his chest.
“Fetch me more gloves! A cloth! Something!”
Kellen gave an involuntary snort of mirth, and apparently that was the final straw.
“Guards!” shouted the merchant. “Take this fraud into custody!”
Nettle managed to get arrested by the guards as well, by asking politely. She could probably have walked away in the confusion, but instead here she was in Kellen’s cell in the local jail, her unspoken opinions filling half the room. Apparently she didn’t even trust him to languish in captivity by himself.
Part of him wished that she would just grab him by the collar and yell, What’s wrong with you? Why couldn’t you just tell that rich idiot what he wanted to hear? Or maybe just shut up and let him yell at us?
“You think we should give him back his money, don’t you?” he said accusingly. “Well, I’m not doing that! We earned that money!”
“Actually,” said Nettle levelly, “we can’t. We don’t have enough money. They want you to pay for the glove. The one that split.”
“What?” Kellen stopped pacing to stare at her. “But . . . that was his fault! You saw him! He clenched his hand and stretched the seams . . .”
“And they’re saying one of the tapestries in that room is frayed around the edges,” continued Nettle carefully. “They want you to pay for that too.”
“I can’t believe they’re trying to blame that on me!” Kellen was aghast and furious. “That’s . . . criminal! That’s fraud!”
He looked to Nettle for agreement but didn’t get it. Instead, she looked impassive and raised her eyebrows slightly.
Nettle seemed meek and inoffensive if you didn’t know her. Her expression was usually rather blank, in an attentive, slightly worried sort of way. She appeared diluted, colorless, as if she were waiting for somebody else to give her an opinion to hold. After more than a year of traveling with her, however, Kellen had learned to read stillness and listen to silence. He had become very good at hearing the things Nettle didn’t say.
You lost control again, she wasn’t saying. I told you needed to rein yourself in. When you unravel, so does everything else.
Kellen’s ability to pull apart the threads of a curse came with a mild but annoying side effect. Woven cloth in his vicinity loosened over time and began to unravel. This phenomenon was particularly noticeable when Kellen lost control of his emotions.
“That wasn’t me!” he protested. “I didn’t unravel anything!”
“You were very angry,” Nettle said in a mild, careful tone that Kellen found infuriating. There was something about her “one-of-us-has-to-be-reasonable” air that made him want to be wildly unreasonable. “You’ve been in a bad mood all day.”
This was true enough. He’d had a night of broken sleep and uneasy, half-remembered dreams, and it had left him feeling sour and strung out.
“So what?” Kellen held up his hands in their iron-studded gloves. “I was wearing these!”
Iron damped his unravelling side effect, so there were strands of it in Kellen’s boots, hat, and coat lining. The iron-studded gloves muffling his clever, calloused weaver’s hands made the biggest difference.
The merchant had demanded to know the reason for these gloves, so Kellen had told him about the side effect. Now it sounded like the man was using this as an excuse to blame every loose thread and pulled seam on Kellen.
“And even if I hadn’t been wearing them, it wouldn’t happen that quickly, would it?” Kellen pointed out. “I can’t just make somebody’s clothes fall apart by being angry with them. More’s the pity.” The truth is, he had been thinking that it would serve the merchant right if his stupid gloves fell off his stupid bloody hands. Thoughts didn’t unpick cloth, however.
“Well, we’re going to have trouble proving that, aren’t we?” Nettle stared calmly at the opposite wall, refusing to meet Kellen’s angry gaze.
Nettle was like a belt that rubbed. Familiar, irritating, every little chafe adding to a thousand others. Comforting, necessary. Unavoidable, every twinge of irritation mixed with guilt and a sense of obligation. She might as well have been family.
Her strangeness was something you noticed only when you paid attention to her, and most people didn’t. She always held her face and body too still. All her motions were careful and deliberate, as if she were getting used to steering her body, which was in fact the case. Kellen knew that she was fifteen, but strangers found it difficult to guess her age. There was something young-old about her face, a weathered smoothness that spoke of storms survived. He wondered if she would always have that ageless oddness. A young woman with an old woman’s careful gravity, and then an old woman with a quiet, fey blaze like a winter sky.
She had Kellen to thank and blame for that. Nettle was his responsibility, and she never let him forget it.
Chapter 2 GALL
Nettle hunched on the sill of the little window and watched the sky. She tried to make her mind just as cool, blue, and untouchable, but it wasn’t easy with Kellen pacing up and down right behind her.
“That merchant’ll have to get the magistrate to release us, once he’s calmed down,” he was telling the walls and world for the ninth time. “He still needs me!”
Nettle took a breath and let it cool in her lungs for a second before answering.
“He won’t,” she said with determined calm. “You humiliated him. He’ll convince himself you’re a fraud.”
“Well . . . he shouldn’t!” Kellen glared at Nettle, as if making her back down would somehow change the situation. “All I did was tell him the truth!” He was always like this, raging at the world for not being as it should. His furious innocence was exhausting. Kellen started pacing again, and she knew he was hating her for being right.
The sky was wide and flawless. When Nettle was little, it had just been the roof of her world, a place to store the sun and stars. Since then, she had come to understand the texture of that wild, blue air. She knew its chill strength, its living tremors, the sweet and treacherous way it bore one’s weight. Nettle watched the birds and felt her soul reach out, like an amputee wanting to stretch a lost but remembered limb.
I hate being heavy. I hate being here. I hate being right.
As usual, she was right. The merchant didn’t arrange their release. It was somebody else who came to rescue Kellen and Nettle just a few hours later.
The visitor was six foot tall but, as he ducked through the doorway and straightened, he seemed taller. His dark gray riding coat looked well-made. He could not have been more than thirty, but his complexion was grayish too. There was something quietly forbidding about him, as if a stone lion had found a way to look human.
Nettle felt a tingle in her teeth. This man had a touch of the Wilds, she could sense it—a familiar pang, like the worst kind of homecoming. Then he glanced her way, and she saw that his left eye was covered by an eye-patch of dark red leather. It looked expensive and showy, which only ever meant one thing.
Marsh horseman.
He stood and watched them in silence for a little while. He seemed to be waiting, as if they had asked to see him, not the other way around.
“What?” demanded Kellen at last, getting impatient. Fortunately, the visitor showed no sign of being offended.
“Do you want to get out of here?” he asked. His accent was a lot less refined than his clothes. Mizzleport dockyards, Nettle reckoned.
Kellen opened his mouth, and Nettle cut in quickly before he could say anything sarcastic.
“Yes,” she said. “We do.”
“Good,” said the stranger. There was another pause. Either he was trying to make them nervous, or he didn’t consider talking a particularly valuable skill.
“The merchant’s had a change of heart then, has he?” asked Kellen, casting a triumphant glance at Nettle.
“Not yet,” said the stranger. “But he’ll listen if money talks. My name is Gall, and I’ve been sent to make you an offer.”
“Sent by who?” demanded Kellen. Nettle was pretty curious herself. Anybody who could hire a marsh horseman was probably very rich.
Marsh horses were creatures of the Deep Wilds. They could not be bred, trapped, or tamed by humans. It was said that they could be acquired only by trading with the people from the White Boats, at one of the Moonlit Markets held where the Wilds met the sea. The price for such a horse was usually a single, living human eye, of clear vision and beautiful color, willingly given by its owner. Since rich people didn’t like giving up their own eye, they would generally pay a fortune to someone poor or desperate enough to surrender one of theirs.
Such an arrangement had consequences, however. The rich buyer might fancy that they owned the marsh horse, but the horse itself always knew whose eye had bought its loyalty. Most marsh-horse owners were philosophical about this unbreakable bond and hired the one-eyed unfortunate to control the horse. Such coachmen or coach-women were generally treated with respect by anyone who knew what was good for them.
“There are questions I won’t answer,” said the stranger simply. “That’s one of them. If that’s a problem, I can save us all some time and leave now.”
“You can’t expect us to—”
“Kellen!” hissed Nettle.
Kellen sighed angrily, then shrugged. After a pause, Gall continued.
“You have a rare talent, boy. Unique, probably. There are plenty of people claiming they can undo curses for money, but they’re all liars. You really can. So you should be rich by now. But you’re not. You’re running from one town to the next on hope and an empty belly.”
Nettle exchanged glances with Kellen. The stranger was evidently well-informed. Raddith had no end of con men preying on the desperate by claiming they could cure curses. It had always been hard for a scruffy fifteen-year-old like Kellen to convince people that he wasn’t just another charlatan. His attitude also made him a lot of enemies. Word of Kellen’s successes were starting to spread at last, but there were also plenty who would swear violently at the mention of his name.
“You need protection,” the stranger continued, “and somebody to vouch for you. Someone who can get you rich clients and make people think twice about locking you up.”
“A patron, then?” Kellen was clearly annoyed, but he was too honest to deny the truth of the stranger’s words. “A mysterious, anonymous patron?”
“If you want to put it that way,” said Gall. “We’d tell you which curses to unravel, and we’d see that you were well paid for it. You’d be fed and given somewhere to sleep each night. And trust me, nobody will ignore or underestimate you if you turn up in a carriage with a marsh horse between the shafts.”
“You’d be coming with us, then,” Nettle said sharply. A tame marsh horse never went anywhere without its horseman, and vice versa.
“You’d accept my protection and guidance,” Gall said blandly.
“Guidance?” Kellen made it sound like a dirty word, and Nettle didn’t blame him. “You mean orders.”
“Advice,” said Gall. “And supervision.”
“We don’t need to be put on a leash!” snapped Kellen.
“Not everyone would agree,” said Gall, and let the silence stretch.
Nettle knew how silences were used, and she had no trouble filling this one. You make people jumpy, with your strange talent, and the way you pick apart the knots of everyone’s secrets. You can’t and won’t rein in your temper. You cause trouble.
“Why bother with us at all, then?” asked Nettle. Gall looked at her, and the experience was a little like facing into a damp wind. His one eye was dark gray, like his coat, and almost as lightless.
“My employer needs someone who can unravel curses,” he said. “And there’s a matter that needs investigating. I think you’ll want to hear about it, actually.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Kellen.
“You two have put a dozen cursers behind bars, haven’t you?” said Gall.
“Sixteen,” Kellen corrected him. Unravelling curses nearly always meant identifying the cursers, who were then handed over to the authorities for arrest.
“Do you know what happens to them after that?” asked Gall.
“They get sent to the Red Hospital.” Kellen fidgeted uneasily.
“And after that?” pressed Gall. “Do you ever keep track of them? Do you ever visit them in the Hospital?”
“No!” Kellen said sharply, looking unhappy. “I’m the last person they want to see!”
Nettle couldn’t blame Kellen for wanting to avoid angry cursers who hated him, but it was also typical of him. He always wanted to put upsetting things behind him so that he could forget about them.
Gall nodded quietly to himself, seeming unsurprised, then reached into his pocket. He drew out a creased and grimy slip of paper and passed it to Kellen. Nettle leaned across to read it over Kellen’s shoulder.
A good choice. She has every reason to want revenge against the young unraveller of curses. After all, he’s the one who put her behind bars.
There was no signature.
“Where did this come from?” demanded Kellen. “Who wrote it? Who’s this ‘she’ they’re talking about?”
“We don’t know,” said Gall. “The note was found among the belongings of a dead criminal, and we haven’t identified the handwriting. But we believe the ‘unraveller’ they mention is you.”
Of course it is, thought Nettle, her blood running cold. “Unravelling” was the way Kellen always talked about his curse-lifting. It was the way he saw things, as a tangle of threads to be pulled apart.
“So what does this mean?” she asked. “Are you saying some criminals are trying to get a curser to take revenge on Kellen? How can she do that if she’s a prisoner in the Red Hospital?”
“A good question.” The thing that happened to Gall’s face was probably a smile. “As far as we can tell, the prisoners there are all secure. They shouldn’t have any means of affecting the outside world or harming anyone. But my employer thinks we’re missing something. You two have an instinct for cursers, and a knack for prying out secrets. She wants you to take a look round the Red Hospital, to see if everything’s as secure as it should be.”
“What if we don’t take up your offer?” asked Kellen. “What if we say no?”
“I leave,” Gall said immediately.
No threats. No dwelling on the desperation of their position. Kellen glanced at Nettle again.
“Let me talk about it with my friend,” he said.
After Gall had left the room, Kellen dropped to a crouch with his back to the wall, frowning.
“For all we know, he might have written that note himself,” he muttered, clearly rattled. “What do you make of him?”
Cold and weird, thought Nettle, but there was no point in stating the obvious. Pacting with a marsh horse changed you, and never by making you more pink and cheery.
“He doesn’t care whether we agree,” she said instead. “If we say no, he won’t haggle. He’ll just go.”
“Well, that’s obvious,” said Kellen. “But maybe we should say no anyway.”
Nettle said nothing.
“Oh, and you disagree?” asked Kellen.
“I’m not telling you what I think!” said Nettle. “You’ll just do the opposite!”
“Then what’s the point of even talking to you?” Kellen frowned down at his fists and sighed. “So he’s offering us a way out, and we need one. I know that, all right? Is that what you want me to say?”
“No,” said Nettle, very quietly.
“What?”
“I don’t like him. I don’t like this. Any of it.”
“But you’re the one who wanted to listen to him!” exclaimed Kellen.
Nettle hesitated, trying to find words for her unease. It smacks of the fen-weed, her mother would have said. And it was like a scent, like the lush, creeping fragrance of salt and sweet rot that told you that you’d taken the wrong turn, that the hungry, unseen bog was just one unwary step away . . .
“It’s . . .” She tried again. “The deal looks too tempting. The price looks too low. Which means it must be too high—we just don’t know it yet.”
“So how else do we get out of here? And what about that note?”
Just as Nettle had predicted, Kellen was pivoting to disagree with her. She could see him doing it, even if he couldn’t. He was unbelievable.
“If we’ve got a secret enemy, I want to know,” Kellen declared, as if that had always been his argument. “Don’t you? And if something crooked is going on at the Red Hospital, shouldn’t we find out? If we make a deal with Gall and it goes sour, we can always run away later, can’t we?”
Nettle turned away from him, pulling back her temper like a snail withdrawing its horns. She returned her gaze to the sky and tried to let its calm blue pour into her head.
“Do what you like,” she told him coolly.
So of course he did.
The black carriage stood outside the town jail, blocking half the street, and nobody objected. Pedestrians kept their distance from the sleek black horse harnessed to it.
The animal was a little too large, a little too beautiful, and glossy as polished leather. It didn’t fidget the way other horses did, and its ears didn’t flick nervously as Nettle and Kellen approached. The huffs of its breath stirred little clouds of steam before its muzzle, despite the warmth of the day.
It didn’t smell like a horse either. It smelled of rain.
Gall went up to it and stroked its mane slowly, gently, and with total concentration. It wasn’t like a man calming a beast. Nettle thought of lovers greeting each other, or battle comrades silently clasping hands.
He glanced back at her, and gave a jerk of his head to invite her into the carriage. She climbed up onto one of the seats and set the little bundle of her worldly possessions down beside her.
“Your friend’s just being lectured by the magistrate,” said Gall, in answer to Nettle’s questioning look. “He won’t be long.”
That’s what you think. Nettle suspected the shouting match would probably last for a little while.
“You’ll need new clothes if you’re traveling with us,” she said instead. “Your coat’s felted wool, so it’s all right. But the cotton shirt . . .” She shook her head. “No trim either. And you’ll need buckles and buttons, not laces.”
Everything she and Kellen wore was felt, leather, or clotted marsh silk. Woven fabric fell apart around Kellen, not quickly but relentlessly.
“So you’re Nettle,” Gall said after a pause. “I thought you’d be . . . skinnier. Pointier.”
“With a six-inch nose and knees that bend backward?” suggested Nettle. Everyone expected something like that. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“There were four of you, weren’t there?” asked the horseman.
“Yes,” said Nettle curtly, and added nothing more. If Gall liked the silence game so much, she could play it too.
There had indeed been four of them. Two brothers and two sisters. Cole, Yannick, Iris, and Nettle.
Nettle had been closest to her elder sister, Iris. Sometimes kind, sometimes impatient, Iris had always known Nettle would follow her lead. They formed a united front in quarrels, when Cole was a bossy know-it-all or when Yannick tried to dodge his share of the chores.
Their mother had not been good-natured or fair as the dawn, but after her death she had gained the sweetness of distance, like a blue and hazy hill. Now when Nettle remembered her mother, it was as a warm heart of a peaceful time that she had learned to cherish only after it was over.
It had not been so bad back then, she supposed. Even though she and her family had been living within the marsh-woods of the Wilds.
Their village was in the so-called Shallow Wilds, which were areas of truce. Humankind was allowed to build there . . . and other things could come and go if they chose. Usually they didn’t.
It hadn’t seemed dangerous back then, just rather dull. Nettle’s parents had enough money to own a real house of brick on one of the rocky outcrops, not a wooden stilt-house. There had been a little grove of honey-pears, and a blue boat tethered by the rill. There had been too many siblings, all of them larger and more argumentative than Nettle, and too little to do—no market fairs, no news, no buzzing streets, no surprises.
Then it had all ended. Their mother had perished of a fever and taken their childhood with her.
Another woman had married her father, and Nettle still couldn’t think about her clearly. Her own anger and fear frightened her. It blinded her mind, like looking into the sun.
Even though Nettle had only been nine years old, she had started to realize that she was hated. Her stepmother hated her, hated all four of her stepchildren. Nettle didn’t know why, nor did she ever find out. Perhaps there never was a reason, except that sometimes these things happened, particularly in the Wilds. Sometimes hate was a wild thing. You might as well expect a wolf to be fair or reasonable.
For two years, they had all lived with her stepmother’s warm smiles and hatred. Nobody guessed at the curse growing inside the woman until it was far too late.
One fine morning, the woman had taken all four children out on the boat. And in the middle of a velvet-green marsh lake, jeweled with dragonflies, she had released the curse inside her.
It wasn’t pain Nettle had felt as her bones changed inside her. She didn’t think it was pain, but now that word had so many meanings in her head she couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t quite death that she experienced as her mind clenched like a fist and her personality hissed out of its grip like grains of sand between tight fingers.
She didn’t remember seeing the others’ transformation, though her dreams had painted it since. Iris sprouting dove-white down, Cole’s face hardening into a hawk-beak, Yannick’s cries of pain becoming a gull-shriek. But she knew what had happened to Iris almost as soon as they changed. Even her heron-mind, cold and narrow as a flint, had remembered that. The bloodied white shape in the undergrowth that fluttered and twitched as an eager hawk-beak tore it apart.
The three years that followed were endless and fleeting as a dream, a relentless, perpetual now where time had no meaning.
Food. Flight. Fear. Coiled-spring instincts spurred her mindlessly, puppeted her body, governed her world.
The only thing that pierced her heron-trance was Yannick.
Sometimes she would look up, and her black, watchful eyes would see another bird soaring high above, and she would knowhim. Some grains of herself would return to her grip. She had lost something, hadn’t she? And that gull above her was . . . was . . .
Nettle could still recall the torture of remembering all over again that she wasn’t really a bird. This isn’t right. This isn’t real. Why can’t I think? Why can’t I remember? I used to be able to use my brain, and now I can’t.
Then, for a moment, she would know who she was and what had happened to her. She would cling to that knowledge, but it was like trying to keep thoughts straight during a maddening fever. She was dragged away from herself, whirled around, lost. Again and again.
She never saw her hawk-brother or thought about her dove-sister. But her gull always came back to her, and every time he did, Nettle recovered a little of herself for a little time. Just enough.
And then, one day, she was cured.
It was pain, recovering her human limbs on that gray day by the green marsh lake. She had fallen over there into the mud, naked and shuddering. She could hear someone near her screaming and screaming. An older boy with wide eyes, clawing at his own face. It was Cole, the long-forgotten Cole. Human again, and realizing at last what his hawk-claws had done to his dove-sister.
High up in the sky she could see a familiar gull circling. Yannick. She knew his name now. She reached up a hand toward him wordlessly, begging him not to leave her, entreating him to join her in her new, painfully alert world.
No. She heard his answer as clearly as a voice in her head. The gull tipped on the wind and skimmed away out of sight.
Minutes passed before she noticed another boy standing on the bank, watching Nettle and Cole in flabbergasted horror. He wore thick gloves with metal studs and held four lockets and a ball of twine in his hands.
“What’s wrong with him?” He stared at Cole’s curled, shrieking form. “Where are the others? There’s supposed to be four of you!”
Nettle sat in Gall’s carriage waiting for Kellen. Waiting for her savior, and trying as usual to be grateful for her lot.
This is real. This is me, this lumpy body taller than the one I remember from four years ago. This unfamiliar, half-woman thing that bleeds once a month. This face with expressions I’ve forgotten how to use. Why doesn’t this body feel like home? Why is it so exhausting, hobbling along the ground on these soft feet? Why is it a strain being around people and pretending to be one of them?
I used to be able to fly. And now I can’t.
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