Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet (21 page)

“Maire—”

“I can’t, Tuck,” I say, barely more than a whisper, avoiding his dark gaze. “I’m sorry.”

I stand and stagger away from it; Cleric Tuck hobbles to his feet, his dark brows drawn.

“What do you mean?” he asks, his voice hard.

I shake my head. “What I am can’t be
fixed
,” I say, recalling his words from the inn. “I’m not who you think I am. I’m so sorry, Tuck. It just . . .” An especially cold breeze runs through my hair. “It never was you.”

I avoid his gaze, looking instead at the shrine to Strellis over his shoulder. To my eyes it seems to grow silver teeth, smooth on one side, serrated on the other. I stumble away from it, away from Cleric Tuck, and run home, ignoring the sharp protest of my leg and the hard obsidian of Cleric Tuck’s gaze.

He tried to cut off my hand. I took a fruit and he tried to cut off my hand but it’s mine now. The knife is mine too. His hands are mine. His hair and his pumping thing and his skin but I don’t want the mess. It’s so messy and red. He looks like her, on the inside. They all do.

CHAPTER 24

I am beside myself when I arrive home, but when Arrice inquires after me, I can’t bring myself to tell her about Cleric Tuck. She’s always had such high hopes for him, and what little I can tell her about Fyel—about my life before—will sound too far-fetched, even though my looks alone whisper that I am not what I once seemed. Arrice knows it, and Franc does, too, but it’s so much easier for them to pretend they don’t.

But I tremble, and my foot throbs anew. Arrice coaxes me by the fire, props my foot up, and hands me a bowl of stew. I hold the hot dish in my hands and stare out the window, watching the storm recede as night descends, the changes slow, subtle. Franc comes home, his trousers splotched with mortar and dirt, his shirtsleeves stained with paint. He’s been working on the wall and the barn sunup to sundown since we arrived, and it’s aging him. I say nothing, only watch him rub his lower back. Arrice fusses over him as well and sticks him in another chair with another bowl of stew. He sighs, takes off his hat, and looks at me.

“You should take it off,” he says, gesturing with a rise of his brow to my wooden boot. “Let the doctor look at it.”

Arrice stiffens in the kitchen and mumbles, “The doctor is dead, Franc.”

Franc licks his lips and grunts, dropping his attention to his dinner.

I eat slowly, staring at the fire, each bite settling my stomach. My foot feels better by the time I’m done, and I mull over Franc’s words as I take the dish to the kitchen. Arrice near-wrestles it from my hands and sends me upstairs to rest, and to “get your head on straight so you can tell me what all this hustle and bustle is about.”

I trek upstairs, leaning on the rail—I haven’t used my cane for some time—and peek into my old bedroom, where Allemas lies on the bed, his position unchanged since morning, his large feet hanging off its edge. His breathing is even and heavy.

“Allemas,” I say. He doesn’t stir. I shut the door and slip into Arrice and Franc’s room, which Arrice and I are still sharing. Twilight seeps through the window. The bed is made, the covers turned down.

Sitting on the edge of the mattress, I wiggle the toes of my right foot. They’re all mobile, but my ankle remains stubborn, bending no more than a hair’s width in either direction.

Footsteps trudge up the stairs, and Arrice pokes her head into the room. “Franc’s going to carve a new cane for you, one better suited for your height, so you can take off the boot. Might be ready by tomorrow.”

My shoulders slump. “He doesn’t need to do that, I—”

“It gives him something to do that isn’t manual labor,” she chides. “And that thing on your foot is awful.”

I look down at the wooden boot Allemas fashioned for me. That feels so long ago now. Dirt has embedded itself into the grain, making the wood look weathered and gray. “It’s pretty atrocious, isn’t it?”

Arrice just smiles and shuts the door. I listen to her descend.

Leaning down, I unhook the straps of the wooden splint and free my leg from it. I palm the crystal hidden there and tuck it into my breast-binds. The bones and muscles of my damaged leg are stiff. I remove the bandages—I don’t need them anymore, save to hide my scars—and gently, tenderly, rub spots on my ankle, avoiding the ones I know will hurt. I wonder if I’ll need to keep it splinted always, in order to step right. That, or I’ll rely on a cane for the rest of my life.

Careful, holding on to the night table, I stand, keeping my weight on my good leg. I space my feet shoulder width apart and bit by bit lean onto the bad foot. It starts to ache before I’ve straightened. I try to add a little more, a little more. Dull pains, blunt pains, but nothing sharp. A cane might work. Maybe.

I lift it to try and take a step, but a sensation like cool mist, like powdered sugar hanging in the air, prickles my senses, and I
know
without turning.

“Fyel.” I whisper his name and turn around, watching his shape materialize in the space across the bed. He truly does just . . .
appear.

My heart grows its own crystalline wings at the sight of him. He’s
here
, he
came
, but peachy hues still cling to his skin. Other than that, he looks as he should look, every part of him.

“I’m sorry,” I say, rushing out the words. “Cleric Tuck, I didn’t mean to—”

“Who is Cleric Tuck?” he asks, his brows drawn together.

I swallow. “The man, out where the fields meet the forest. Where you were.”

He rubs his forehead, wincing as he does so. “You were harder to find,” he says. There’s a formality in his voice that clips my heart-wings. “I found you . . . but . . . I do not understand myself.”

“The storm—”

“There are laws,” he says, “that prevent me from—”

“I know,” I say, thinking of how intently he listened to the heavens when he set off the traps in Allemas’s cave. He’s not supposed to interact with Raea. Holding in a sigh, I murmur, “You still don’t remember.”

He shakes his head. “Not . . . Maire. I know you, but I do not . . .
know
.”

The words should be nonsensical, but I understand them. Even now, looking at him, I
know
Fyel in a way I cannot explain. I know him somewhere in the murky fog of my own memory, like smelling something new in the kitchen and recognizing it by taste, but not by sight.

“Where do you go, when you leave?” I ask. He studies me as the words leave my lips, staring at the cut of my hair and my Carmine-style dress. His gamre eyes linger on mine for a moment, but then they shift to my wingless arms. I look like a crafter, but I don’t.

He doesn’t trust me yet, so he doesn’t answer. The silence pricks me like sun-dried pine needles.

“When we met . . . the second time,” I begin, trying to move around the bed toward him, but when I put my full weight on my foot a sharp pain stabs my ankle. Gasping, I sit on the bed and pull it toward me, gingerly rubbing the ache away.

I let out a stunted breath.

“You are hurt.”

“I tried to run,” I say, resting my foot on the bed. “When I was at the house where Allemas kept me, a house surrounded by blazeweed. You visited me there several times. Do you remember?”

“Blazeweed,” he repeats, lines creasing his forehead. It’s a familiar expression to me, both from the past several months and the fog.

I nod. “I climbed over the house to avoid it and ran into the woods, but I got caught in an animal trap—”

I shiver at the memory. Though it’s grown less vivid with the passing days, I will never forget the moment those teeth sank into my skin, back when it was still brown with a carmine hue. I remember breaking, searing, burning. I remember the earth beneath my hands.

“You were there,” I murmur. “In a way. Do you remember?”

“I am sorry,” he says.

I backtrack, trying my first approach. “I had a dream about the time
before
. . . you had put rings in the sky.” I assume now that this
was
another world, though I can’t imagine how either of us came to be there, or how something so curious and massive could be built by a single individual. “Rings of stone . . .”

I still don’t remember this story myself, so relating it is challenging. “I found you because I liked them, I think. Does that sound familiar?”

“I know what you describe. Sky-rings,” he says, flapping those liquid wings. They look chalky in the light filtered by the dregs of the storm. “But there have been many, and I would have remembered you.”

“Because I’m red?”

His lip quirks at that. “There are many crafters of many colors.”

Turning around to face him, I say, “Because I’m pretty?”

I’m not sure if crafters can blush, for he doesn’t. Instead he counters, “Because you are bold.”

I smile at that and try to summon more details from my dream.

“It was a world with a sandy beach and a violet sky with two suns,” I try, focusing on his eyes, “a larger red sun and a smaller blue sun, about half the size of the one here. And there were trees built in rough layers”—I illustrate with my hands—“and giant, scooping leaves. Dark green leaves, like wilted basil. And there were birds with long, pink bodies.”

Fyel’s brow draws together, studying me.

“I think this place was unfinished, for there was a white gap in the sky, and I don’t think we can touch worlds once they’re finished. We forget if we touch finished worlds. Like you’ve forgotten. Like I did.

“And we lay there.” I resist the urge to fall back on the bed, to look up at the ceiling as though that foreign sky might shine through its logs. Instead I sit on the mattress near him and reach for his translucent hand, only to shy away at the last instant. His image blurs for a moment, and I fear he’s slipping away. But my vision is merely clouded with tears. As I pull back to wipe them away, Fyel’s hand follows mine, as though they’re tethered together by some sort of string. “We lay on golden sand. It was warm, but it was wet, too. The air was heavy.” I blink, and a tear falls off the roundest part of my cheek, passing through Fyel’s fingertips. “And . . . it was a long time ago, I think. And you wore different clothes. You were sleeping, or trying to sleep, and I was lying next to you—”

“Maire.”

“And you looked at me.” The way he looked at me when he grasped my hand; the moment he became warm and solid and
real
. “But I don’t remember more than that. I woke up. I . . .” My eyes sting and I blink once more. “I broke.”

“Maire.”

He hovers close, glimpsing the hand that had reached for my tears only seconds ago. There was warmth in the way he said my name, familiarity. The peachy tone of his skin fades, replaced by pure white. And he smiles, soft and caramel-like, and says, “You are my lahst.”

I sit up, never breaking eye contact with him. “You remember?” I whisper, my chest squeezing down into a single, hard ball. So quickly. I touch a lingering tear on my lashes and wonder.

He nods. “I was very foolish to do what I did.”

The tightness springs loose. I want to hug him. I want to fly off this bed and sink into his arms and cry into his chest and thank the gods. I swallow the desire, shivering with the effort, and answer, “Yes, it was.”
But I don’t regret it
. If only we’d had more than a moment.

I start as the door opens and Franc peers into the room. “Are you all right?” he asks me. I gape and shift my gaze to Fyel, then back to Franc.

“I-I—”

“He cannot see me,” Fyel says.

I almost snap my neck looking back to him.
What?
Then Cleric Tuck couldn’t—

“Maire?” Franc takes a step into the room, scanning the space I keep focusing on. “I heard you talking?”

“I . . . Yes, thinking aloud,” I croak. “Trying to piece together . . . my thoughts.”

He nods once, slow and unsure. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

I clear my throat and ask, “Allemas?”

“Still out. I’ll stay up here while you get some rest.”

I nod, and he departs, closing the door behind him.

My breath rushes out all at once. I grab fistfuls of the bed’s top blanket. “They can’t see you?”

He nods.

“Fyel . . .” I want to walk to him, but I don’t trust my step without that boot, and I especially don’t trust myself not to try and touch him. Keeping my voice low, I say, “Allemas is sick.”

“I know.”

“He was in so much pain yesterday. Hunched over and moaning . . . and he started
leaking
, Fyel. This substance—not like water or honey or anything I can describe—just oozed out of him, and he cried for it and said it was his. He looked like he was dying. It burned my skin, but I got it to seep back into him—”

All levity fades from his features. The joy of his remembering is so short lived. “It is his soul,” he says.

My tongue grows heavy, as do my bones. My words are almost too weighted to climb up my throat. “H-His soul?”

He nods.

“That . . . isn’t what I imagined a soul would look like.”

“No, it is not,” he answers. His words are spaced in such a way that I know he’s carefully selecting each one. “Allemas does not have a true soul. It is killing him.”

“Not a true soul?” I whisper. “Then how? How does he live? He . . . he isn’t human.”

“No.”

Propping my elbows on my knees, I rest my head in my hands. “Is this what I was supposed to learn?”

“Part of it, yes.”

“What’s the rest?”

He doesn’t answer. We linger together in silence a long moment. I imagine a slick, gray soul slurping beneath my skin, or seeping from my heart, but the image doesn’t feel right. What do most souls look like if Allemas’s is unusual? Is mine different from Arrice’s, from Franc’s?

Was Fyel referring to the condition of my soul when he said I was fragile? Broken?

“Fyel,” my voice is cool and cloud-like, “what did I make? What did I craft?”

He hovers closer. “I think you know.”

“Do I?”

“Do you want to be told every answer?” he counters.

Yes
, I want to say, but I force myself to think back, think hard. Steel . . . I know steel from other worlds. Yet I know intuitively that my own creations were not made of metal. Perhaps Fyel used steel. Regladia, though. I remember regladia. And cakes. I think hard on cakes, on flour and sugar and lavender and cacao—

“I made plants,” I try, and when he nods, I smile. “Did I make trees?”

“You made all sorts of things.” He sounds nostalgic.

Plants. Regladia. Trees.

Wheat. Rye. Cinnamon. Sugarcane. Mint. Olive. Cacao.

I slip from the edge of the bed, placing my weight on my good foot. “That’s why . . . the cakes.”

He nods.

“They remember me.”

He nods again.

“I did the eggs, too, didn’t I?” I try. “Milk . . . bees?”

When he answers, his voice is soft and sounds of a smile. “Many agricultural things.”