Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet (13 page)

I do not like it here.

CHAPTER 13

Find it. Why does it matter? What is it?

I finger the crystal through my shirt, whipping my hand away when Alger’s face appears atop the stairs. I absently wonder if Fyel’s obsession with the crystal is due to a fondness for pretty things and smile to myself.

“Up. Up the stairs.” Alger points to the stairs as though I don’t understand his words, then taps the top one with my cane. “Up up up, now, in the light. I must see. Come up. No more in there. Up.”

I lean on the creaky railing along the stairwell and drag my splinted leg up each step, wincing by the time I get to the top. I’m eager to get my hands on the last of the regladia, and curse myself for the burst of anxiety with Daneen that worsened the injury.

I wish I could understand myself.

Alger steps behind me and grasps both my shoulders before marching me into the front room and sitting me on that same wicker bench he led me to on my first day here. He takes a seat on the chair. Pauses. Stands and moves the chair over so it’s directly in front of me. Sits. Stares at me.

I’m used to Alger staring at me, but it’s usually while I’m working, which makes him easy to ignore. But this—sitting in the direct line of his scrutiny, with nothing to do but stare back—this is awkward.

I meet his chartreuse eyes. They are level and unblinking, constant. I wait for him to laugh, to cry, to say something odd and shove me off into the kitchen, but he doesn’t. He stares. And stares. And
stares
.

I drop my eyes to my hands and startle myself. They’re so . . . red. Redder even than yesterday. Cherry-pie-filling red. Not quite dark enough to match blood, but there’s barely a hint of tan color left at all. I turn my hands over, investigating. Pull out the collar of my shirt. Red everywhere.

Cleric Tuck didn’t recognize me. Alger wept at the sight of me. Fyel called my transformation wonderful. But what does it
mean
?

I want a mirror. But maybe I don’t. No one is colored the way I am. There are peaches and whites and browns and creams and yellows, but not such a bold red.

I pinch my hair and bring it forward. It looks redder, too, and darker. Not as red as my skin, though.

“Do you know what this is?” I dare ask, lifting my gaze to Alger. His stare hasn’t yielded. “Why I look—”

“Ssshhh,” he says, and continues to stare.

“But—”

“
Sshh!
”

My hands collapse into my lap. I stare at the wall behind Alger, then move my gaze around the rest of the room, briefly checking for any sign of a jagged, iridescent crystal. Not surprisingly, I don’t find one.

I study my feet. Reach a pinky under the bandaging and try to scratch an itch. I should really pry this boot off and wash up, if I can convince Alger to let me.

Alger clears his throat and says, “I’m changing my name.”

His voice in the silence startles me. I knit my eyebrows together. “Again?”

He nods, grinning. “Shah.”

“Shah?”

“Shah.”

“Is your name now.”

“Yes.” He nods. “Shah. It has a nice ring to it. Mysterious. I can be mysterious.”

I won’t argue that. “It sounds like the wind.” Allemas, Alger, Shah. It’s getting hard to keep track of them all.

He claps his hands. “Yes! The wind. Now, I’ve decided what to do, and I’m going to tell you, Maire. I’m going to tell you what to do.”

I wait. He grins. A few heartbeats pass.

“You want me to bake you something,” I guess.

“Yes! But not a cake. I hate cake.”

I gawk at him, but only for a moment before rubbing my temples in tight circles. “You hate cake.”

“Yes.”

“But you asked me to bake it—”

“Make something different.”

Pulling my hands away from my head, I study their bizarre color. “How about pie?”

“What is pie?”

“Gods above,” I mutter, and pull myself to my feet. My stomach growls; I’ll have to snack while I work, which is how I eat most days. I snatch my cane from beside Alger’s—Shah’s—chair.

“Something to make me smart,” Al—Shah—says, following after me. “So I’ll know what to do.”

“What to do about what?”

He laughs as I pick a bowl out of the cupboard. “About Maire.”

“The donkey?”

“You’re silly. She’s dead.”

I nearly drop the bowl as I spin toward him. “Dead? What? When? How did she die?”

He shrugs. “Make me smart.”

I turn back to the counter, if only to hide my face from him. Was that why he stopped bringing her to the forest? But he has a faster way to travel, anyway . . . Gods, he didn’t
kill
her, did he?

I fumble for flour and butter. He wouldn’t kill the animal without motivation, surely. Perhaps he simply left her in a cellar for too long and she starved to death.

My stomach clenches, but not for hunger. Food has lost its appeal.

Alger—Shah—really likes pie. I’m surprised he liked
this
pie, considering the foulness of my mood as I made it, but he enjoyed it enough to give me the supplies I need to change the bandages on my leg. He shoves me into the backyard to do it.

“And move the rocks, there.” He points to where the rocks already lay.

“That isn’t moving them at all.”

“No,
there
,” he insists, shaking his finger. A foot to the left, then.

He vanishes into the house, this time not bothering to lock his many locks.

I stare at the miles of blazeweed before me and, sighing, lower myself to the slim porch. My ankle feels too loose when I pull off the wooden boot, and it throbs anew, despite the regladia in my belly.

It looks terrible.

There is no infection, thankfully, but the entire limb looks like it was mauled by a bear or large dog. The scars are violet and shaped into identical lines, zigzagging in line with the trap’s teeth. My ankle is malformed, bowing where it shouldn’t be bowing and bumping where it should be smooth. Even if I somehow manage to rid myself of Alg—Shah—I’m not sure it will ever return to normal, even with a surgeon’s help.

My vision blurs. I wipe the back of my wrist over my eyes and take in deep breaths. It’s okay. I’m okay. I’m alive. I’m doing far better than others.

I think of the marauders, of the screams, of the corpses, and shudder.
At least Cleric Tuck is okay
, I remind myself. I wish I knew the location of Daneen’s home so I could pinpoint where to find him should I ever escape.
Near Ochre!
I should have shouted. So he could find me. Fyel’s visits are comforting, but I need help from people who are corporeal—people who can do more than merely speak to me.

I rub my eyes a second time and pull a rag out of the mixing bowl, which I’d filled with water. At the very least, I can get rid of the smell of unwashed, sweat-logged skin.

When I’m done, I stretch my legs forward to give the injury a moment to air out. Reaching over the edge of the porch, I pinch earth and rub the soft grit between my fingers. I’m being too hard in my thoughts. I wonder where I would be had Fyel not warned me of the marauders. Had the road not risen up to give me a few extra seconds. I might be dead with the others.

I sense him before I see him, as if the pressure of the air has changed. As if a storm lingers beyond the mountains, the scent of it carried on the breeze. I can see him better this time, but his form is thinner and his coloring is even paler than usual. It’s as if staying in this realm is wearing him out, which worries me. Has he lingered since his last visit, waiting for Shah to give us some privacy?

My stomach flutters despite the piecrust and apples I reluctantly fed it. For a moment I want to drape the rag over my foot to hide its ugliness, but Fyel has already seen it, surely. And why should I hide it from him?

“Do you like cake?” I ask.

He hovers by the side of the house, just over the blazeweed. He raises a faint, translucent eyebrow at the question, an expression that once again nags at my missing memory.

“I have never had it,” he replies.

Unwrapping a length of bandage, I say, “Even on your birthday?”

“No.”

“Everyone has cake on their birthday.” Arrice made me honey cake for my last one—at least, for the anniversary of the day she found me.
No one should make their own birthday cake
, she had said the night before.
Don’t you dare.

“You are classifying me with human terms,” Fyel says, though a soft smirk plays on his lips. He looks at me differently somehow. More tenderly, perhaps. More hopeful. “Raean terms. Birthdays . . .”

“I’ll make you a cake someday.” What kind of cake would Fyel like if he could eat it? What could I enchant it with? Maybe a healthy dose of honesty and compliancy. Yes. That would do nicely.

“Try to coax Alger into traveling,” he says.

“Shah. He changed his name again.”

Fyel sighs. “If you can travel, cover more space, you might be able to find the crystal. You need to
feel
for it, Maire.”

I press the pad of my thumb into my necklace.
Feel
for it. I suppose I understand his meaning. Maybe I’ll sense it the way I just sensed him. “Okay.”

I draw my sore limb toward my body, my red toes and red foot and red ankle and red calf, and begin rebinding it. “What does it mean? This.” I gesture to myself before looping the bandages around my ankle, which has swollen a little more after my jaunt to the shrine. “Why am I red?”

That look intensifies in his countenance. So peaceful, so happy. “It means you are remembering.”

“He knows, doesn’t he? Alger—Shah. He knows something about it. He doesn’t want me to remember.”

I tuck the end of the bandage into itself and reach under my shirt to pull the crystal free. I turn it over in my hand and watch the sunlight dance off its edges. It really does look like spun sugar.

Fyel hovers closer to me and reaches down, taking the crystal from my grasp.

Taking
it.

My gaze switches between the pendant and his face. My stomach flutters as though full of newly hatched moths. “You can touch it,” I whisper.

He nods once and turns the crystal over in his own long fingers. That peaceful expression is gone, replaced instead with a look of concentration. A line creases the center of his forehead, and I long to smooth it out.

Tentatively, I reach up a finger. Maybe, if he’s touching this, I can touch him . . .

My hand passes through him. He looks at me with those gamre eyes that I cannot describe. So close, yet . . . he’s almost not real.

The crystal falls back against my stomach.

“I do . . . ,” I begin, hushed, “I do trust you.”

A glimmer of that peace returns to his face.

Then it vanishes.

“
No!
” Shah screams from behind the back door. He flings it open and stumbles over me. My heart leaps into my throat. I snatch the crystal and stow it under my shirt.

Fyel’s wings beat once, sending him backward, before Shah scoops up dirt and throws it at him. To my wonderment, the grains leave tiny white spots where they land on his person.

He disappears.

“No no no!” Shah shouts. He scoops up another handful of dirt and throws it toward the space Fyel just occupied, watching it rain over the ground.

Then he pounces on me.

“No!” he cries, and his fist slams into the side of my face. The impact convulses up my jawline and swirls my vision. His other fist hits my shoulder. He strikes again and again. My cheek. My breast, my stomach. I can’t breathe as the orbs of fire shoot up my ribs and down my torso. He hits and hits and hits and—

“
Stop!
” I cry.

And he does.

I look up at him, one of my eyes already beginning to swell. Tears dance in his wide eyes. His hands are frozen in the air, unnaturally halted in their barrage.

He struggles, grunting through half-closed lips.

I stare at him, huffing short, fire-laced breaths. I scramble backward until my back hits the doorway, but Shah remains in the same position, a marionette held up by invisible strings, but his puppeteer has left the stage.

Shah stopped, but not of his own will.

Of
mine
.

And he stays like that for a long minute before his assuaged temper finally sets him free.

I found the key. Found it on the shelf after the air stopped from their bodies. I am away.

CHAPTER 14

My breathing is labored as I crawl backward into the house. It hurts. Everything hurts. Without the support of the splint, the mending bones in my leg erupt as I drag them behind me.

I grip the edge of the tiling beneath the water pump and heave myself forward until I can rest my forehead on the cool stone. My eyes close. Air breathes in and out, in and out. A dozen bruises in the shape of Shah’s hands sing through skin and muscle. The ones on my face hum into bone.

How?
The simple question draws sluggishly across my brain. The red skin, and now this. The soil Shah threw—did it hurt Fyel? Is that why he left? Was he frightened of Shah, as I am? Could he have
done
anything to stop him?

No
, I think, shaking, and I feel its truth. If Fyel could have stopped Shah or helped me, he would have. He would have done it long ago.

I trust you.
I had meant it.

I reach up a hand and grip the pump handle in numb fingers. Crank it just enough to get that first, cool splash. It rains over my head and traces rivulets over the sides of my neck, bringing the faint taste of blood into my mouth. I wipe my face, wincing as I brush over the first bruise.

I hear Shah come into the room and feel his shadow hovering over me. I cower and hate myself for it.

He doesn’t speak but walks past me, a shuffle in his step. He disappears up the stairs.

I would escape, sneaking on the edges of my feet out the door, then bolting down the road, running until I passed out, until my body couldn’t run anymore. Until I found a savior, or at least a hiding spot.

Running until neither Shah nor Fyel can find me.

There are so many questions battling within me where before there had only been one. Part of me wishes I’d never gotten these wisps of answers. Thoughts of my own brokenness tear through the fancy, and I worm back outside to retrieve the pieces of the wooden boot Allemas fashioned for me. He was still Allemas then.

By the time I’m strapped back into it, Shah has returned with a flour sack stuffed with what I assume are his personal belongings. He grabs my forearms and heaves me to my feet.

“I’m not going
anywhere
with you!” I scream, wrenching my arm away from his clammy fingers. “I am not yours! I am
not
a slave!”

“I am not what
I
want to be!” he shouts back, matching my tone perfectly. “And it’s
your
fault! You! You!”

He chokes and hugs himself as I’ve seen him do twice before, dropping his bag. Squeezing his eyes shut. Hissing through his teeth.

The fit passes quickly, but not completely—he’s still hurting when he snatches my bandaged hand and yanks me to his chest. I can feel it in the hardness of his grip, see it in the crossing of his eyes and sallow color of his cheeks. He twists around and we lurch together, our surroundings warping into blurs of color. My stomach heaves. My head spins, and I shut my eyes to keep them from rolling out of their sockets.

We settle somewhere very cold. Ice-laced wind rips through my clothes and whips my hair. Everything is white and blue and smells of stone.

My breath fogs beneath my nose just as I’m whisked away again. Bile burns my throat.

When I feel something solid beneath my feet, I crumple onto it, biting my tongue to keep my last meager meal inside me. I double over and press my forehead to the floor hard enough to get a sliver between my eyebrows. I feel the floor now, smell it. Wood. Old, weathered wood.

A cool breeze. Birds protesting, their song sharp. Leaf bugs. Forest.

Lifting my head, I see the earth between two planks of wood. It’s far beneath me. My muscles tighten, whining beneath their fresh beating. Pushing up to my knees, I see that we’re on a platform in a tree, with a second, higher platform to our left, connected by a knotted rope ladder. This tree is old, for it’s four stories tall and thick as a millstone. The forest surrounding us is dense, filled with trees equally ancient, hiding the horizon in all directions, casting a broken, leafy film over the sunlit sky.

“Safe here,” Shah says, though his voice is a teaspoon too soft to sound normal. “He won’t find us here.”

I feel as though a rope, coiled within me, is being pulled out of my navel, leaving me empty. If he’s right, my one lifeline is gone. I can’t keep my shoulders from quivering.

“He?” I ask, forcing my voice smooth. Willing calmness into my chest as I would will it into a cake. “The ghost-man? I’ve never seen him before. I was so scared of him.”

Shah eyes me, his left eye askew. I force myself to hold his gaze. My words sound empty to my ears, as empty as the lies they are. Please,
please
let him interpret them as truth.

“He is bad,” he says.

“Bad?”

“Very bad. No talking to him. He is gone from our heads now.”

His gaze is penetrating.

I don’t think he believes my ignorance.

There is no ladder or stair that leads to the ground. Beneath the platforms, the tree is all trunk and no branches. Even if my leg weren’t broken, I’d have no hope of climbing down.

Shah knows this, so he is confident in leaving me here. He does so frequently and stays away for so long that I often wonder if I’ve been forgotten. There are no cellar walls to keep me away from the sunlight or the music of nature, but neither is there a water pump or a cupboard. Shah did not bring any of my baking supplies.

The day after my beating I am especially sore. The bruises mar my new skin with round and crescent shapes, purple and sage. It hurts to move. The lack of food and water drags on my body and eyelids, and I sleep more often than not, sometimes only barely registering Shah’s movements through our bizarre tree house.

My mind is not gone, however. I fear more than ever that Shah will see my crystal, that he will know what it is better than I do, and that he will take even that from me. Despite the discomfort, I break it off the necklace and wedge it into the side of my wooden boot, between plank and calf. I will not let him have it.

My head grows heavy. It aches when I rise, so I lie down for most of the day. My belly rumbles. My throat is dry. In Shah’s absence, I find myself wondering if this was the donkey’s undoing, if she was just forgotten and left to wither away just outside my bedroom wall.

But I have not slipped Shah’s mind. For whatever reason, he wants me alive. He brings me a pitcher of water first—I slosh half of it over the platform in my desperation to drink—and food later. I devour the apples and the flour, which I mix with water so I can swallow it. I leave the dried meat.

Shah is not entirely confident in the boundaries of my prison, however. At the end of my first week stranded in the treetop, he returns from one of his outings with a flour sack full of blazeweed and, with heavily gloved hands, spreads it over the edges of both platforms. My pie
did
make him smart, it seems.

Once, only once, I consider jumping. I wouldn’t survive it, of course. The thought passes and does not bother me again.

Halfway through the second week, a half hour after Shah has left on one of his mysterious errands, I climb up the short rope ladder to the second platform, hold on to a tree branch, and shout to the heavens, “
Fyel!
”

Birds chitter to one another. One flees its nest. The buzzing of insects beneath the sun’s heat fills my ears.

I call him again and again, begging him to find me. He never answers.

The sounds of the forest are constant even in the night. Owls calling to their mates, mice scurrying over half-rotted leaves, crickets singing in wide-open spaces. It is never silent, yet the melodies of nature are soothing and seldom wake me.

But tonight I stir, curled up in the center of the lower platform, where I won’t accidentally brush the blazeweed or tumble to my death. Covered in only an empty flour sack. I stir because there are voices nearby that don’t belong to the wood. Voices I recognize.

Sleep presses into me, beckoning me back into my dreams. But I hear them, barely, even if I don’t see the speakers.

“No. No, no. No. No,” Shah says, each word clipped and punctuated.

Fyel’s voice answers. “You cannot leave any more than she can, but
I
can. I am in the earth upon which you stand, which you cannot avoid. Gods help me, I will crush you regardless of what eternal laws I break.”

Shah snickers. “Uh-uh. If you break them, you’ll never have her.”

A moment of silence is broken by Shah’s high-pitched giggle, and then there’s nothing else but silence and slumber.

I wonder if it was a dream, after all.

When I awaken, it is not on planks of old wood, but an uneven floor of rock. The sound of clicking metal snaps me to my senses.

I bolt up to my hands and knees. Shah crouches by my good ankle. He’s fastened a silvery cuff about it, which is connected to a chain that ends in a spike hammered into the rock. Rock is beneath me, above me, and on every side save for one. We’re in a cave of red and charcoal stone, porous and volcanic. Wisps of cloud pass outside the shallow cave’s mouth, and the coolness tells me we’re very high up.

But I dare not check
how
high, for not two feet before me lies an animal snare, identical to the one that seized me the day I tried to run. Beside it, another, and another. They sprinkle the cave like lily pads on a pond, their teeth slick on one edge, serrated on the other. Gaping maws waiting for the lightest touch to snap.

My chest constricts and my body burns. I jerk away from the traps, scrambling back until I squat over the staked end of my chain, but even that does not provide enough distance for comfort. The cool stone of the cave presses against my skin. A pressure not unlike what erupted in me at Daneen’s home builds in my gut and smokes into my breast.

“Please, please not here.” My voice is weak and toadish. I press hard into the cave wall, willing it to open up and let me escape. I don’t want to look at the traps, but I can’t pull my eyes away from their glinting teeth.

Shah walks away from me, taking a narrow path between traps. Two rest on his arm, and he sets them up behind him, cranking open their mouths until they click, click, click, and sets them ready to bite in his wake. No escape.

“I think I have a customer,” he says with a wide, gleeful grin at the front of the cave. The cloudy light makes him a gray silhouette. “This is good if we’re going to buy a new house. Don’t escape.”

He looks at the traps and doesn’t bother tacking a threat on to his words. He doesn’t need to. He steps over the cave lip and is gone.

I curl up as tightly as my body will allow, the top of my wooden boot scraping my thigh. The traps gleam, hungry, watching me. Waiting for another bite, another break.

I push the palms of my hands into my eyes and cry. The tears come too easily, as though there’s a reservoir of them behind my eyes and the water has become level with the dam holding it back. I cry and wish for Arrice, for Franc, for Cleric Tuck, for Fyel. I wish for my memory and for a healed leg and to
gods not to be scared anymore
.