15

WE RETURN FROM LAMBS’ ISLAND, sacks heavy, sand in our hair, vai on our breath. Esta is dancing along the causeway rocks with no care for the slippery seaweed or the crunch of periwinkles under her bare feet.

I’ve never seen her so happy. For the first time, she looks her age and not like a dour little midget. Dash holds my hand the whole way back, and Lils and Nala help each other over the rocks, laughing as the wind whips their wet shifts around their legs and snags at the finest tendrils of hair worked loose from their buns. The tickle of dream-miasma from Lils’s few loose coils is barely a feather brush against my thoughts, lending the day a hallucinatory feeling, like I’ve been drinking ’ink-laced vai by the gallon.

“You’d best watch that hair, Lils, darling,” Dash yells at the two girls. “It’s drying.”

Lils pauses to twist the stray wisps into thin braids, and Nala helps her pin them tightly into her bun. They look like ghost girls on the rocks, with the sun low on the horizon and the Red Death staining the far waters behind them.

I turn my body closer to Dash and let his warmth soak against me. He makes a very comfortable windbreak, and I smile as he hugs me tighter against him. He’s keeping his wounded hand tucked close against his side, and I keep pushing down the questions I want to ask him. Something’s not sitting right, but the thought in my head is too crazy, too huge and ugly for me to face.

She looked like Ilven. Just for a moment. For one stupid terrible moment, I thought Ilven was alive.

But she’s not, and the only way I would see her now is if she were some shade from nightmare memory. Ghosts are lonely creatures, sometimes merely echoes, but other times they are more willfully destructive—stupid things clinging to life, filled with refusal to accept death. Ilven would never be so gauche.

By the time we reach home, the vai and the dreams and the exertion have taken their toll, and it’s all I can do to get undressed and curl up in my bed before I fall over.

As I battle to keep my heavy eyelids open, Dash kisses my shoulders and tells me to trust him.

*   *   *

IT’S EARLY MORNING, and the others are still sleeping off their hangovers. We’re standing on the little balcony among the buckets of cold rainwater, just the two of us.

“Morning,” he whispers to me, as if we had just met on the street. Then he grins. It’s very awkward and shy—so very un-Dash-like. “There’s something I want to see,” Dash says.

In answer I pull my blanket around my shoulders and hop from one painfully icy bare foot to the other. “I’m freezing to death,” I point out through chattering teeth.

“Unlikely weather this time of year. Cold winds coming off Lambs’ Island.” He frowns.

A shudder runs down my spine. “You dragged me out here at dawn to chat about the weather?”

“Not at all.” Dash squats down by a bucket of water and stirs it thoughtfully with one finger. Then he reaches into his jacket pocket and draws out a folded paper packet. “Take it,” he says. “But be careful.”

The paper is tightly twisted at both ends and smaller than a package of headache powder. With shaking fingers I unscrew one end. A fine smear of grayish powder is gathered in the crease. Longing courses through me in a wave of heat, unexpected and strangely welcome. “Where did you get this?”

“I have contacts. Take it.”

“Now?” I can’t believe that it’s actually there. It must have cost Dash a fortune. Just the bribes alone he would have had to pay the dealers to convince them to sell to him … I take a deep shuddering breath.

“That’s what we’re here for.” He sits down cross-legged, his back against the house, and watches me.

I take the pinch of scriv and breathe it deep. Instantly, I feel whole, Lammer, myself. Magic snaps around me, the call of power. This is more scriv than I’ve taken since I left home. A glass—even a bottle—of vai pales in comparison.

For this, I would go back. I swallow and close my eyes, letting my body remember the balance, finding the scriv-tripped center within me. No more thoughts of going home. I concentrate instead on feeling the scriv activate my magic.

There. I open my eyes and the whole world is clearer, sharper. Dash is somehow more real, and around us the air is a living thing, a veil for me to manipulate.

“Working?”

“Yes.” I breathe the word out.

“Good.” He folds his hands and says nothing for a while, just watches me, crake-curious. “You control the air, you can harden or soften it at will. Heat it? Cool it?”

It’s a rather Hob way of looking at the process. War-Singers control the molecules. We can manipulate the energy: increase density here, and the air becomes hard; push the molecules someplace else, and you can suffocate a person in a little private vacuum. “Essentially,” I say.

“And you can move things about using that control over air?”

“You know I can.”

“Good.” He stands, shoves his hands in his jacket pockets, and leans back against the balcony rail, as casual as can be. The sky is pinking. The look-fars on the cliffs are calling the alarm for the Red Death. It’s still there, tainting the ocean. “I want you to pull water up out of this bucket”—his chin jerks—“and make a wall of water between us.”

One deep breath to focus, and then I am doing as he asks, pulling the water, using the air to bring it toward me. Then I press it flat between two hardened layers of air, almost like holding the water between plates of glass.

“Pretty,” says Dash.

It is. The water ripples and shimmers between us like an antique glass windowpane, distorting his features.

“You can let it go now,” he says softly, and the water falls to the ground, soaking the hem of my shift, splashing across Dash’s boots. The scriv fades from my system, and a pang of loss rocks me so hard I almost drop to my knees.

“Very good,” he says. “You’ll do.” He steps closer to me and kisses me once, then pulls away. “Looks like all my bargains are going to pay off.”

My heart goes tight, warmth flares all down my back, then leaves me cold again. I’m feverish.

“As it is,” he says as he steps away, heading back into the house, “I’m just Gris-damned lucky.”