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The wyrdness hummed above Rostfar’s conscious mind, vibrant and welcoming as if to say, Where have you been? What took you so long? without judgement or reproach. From one heartbeat to the next, all Rostfar’s panic melted away. She felt warm – and not the dangerous, near-to-death sort of warm, either.
Up, said the wyrdness. Rostfar didn’t even have to kick. She broke the surface with a gasp of relief, exactly where she needed to be. The smooth wood of the boat was within arm’s reach.
“Can you hear me?” Rostfar shouted, treading water. Her mind was like an exposed nerve, hyperaware of every shift and pulse of the wyrdness all around her. She could almost feel the presence of Faren’s mind; the texture of his panic was so sharp and undeniably human, although she couldn’t say how she knew that.
The oar floated past. As Rostfar grabbed it, pulling herself nearer to the boat, she got her first proper look at Faren’s face. A spike of terror pierced her to the marrow, although she couldn’t explain why. He didn’t look dangerous – far from it, with his hazy eyes and blue-tinged lips – but the skin-crawling fear washed through Rostfar stronger than before. Images of fire and blood flickered through her head like a half-remembered childhood nightmare. She gasped and seaweed rushed into her mouth, banishing the images from her mind.
Grasping the edge of the boat with one hand, Rostfar threw the oar. It landed with a thud. Faren turned his head to look at it, but Rostfar knew he wasn’t really seeing. The freezing-sickness had well and truly set into his bones.
Rostfar considered listening to her screaming instincts and swimming back to shore. Faren would be dead, and the acrid sense of foreboding that clung to him would die, too. Nobody would blame her if she said she couldn’t save him. There was something wrong, something she was supposed to protect her people from —
No. Rostfar felt sick as soon as the thought formed in her mind. The only danger here was the cold and the sea; a danger that Faren needed rescuing from. She didn’t understand what the wyrdness was trying to tell her, and she wouldn’t try to. Magic had never brought her anything but strife.
Rostfar bared her teeth and swam to the end opposite of Faren so that his weight would counter hers. Her arms trembled, numb fingers scrabbling on the slick wood, but she managed to haul herself into the boat. Faren didn’t even seem to notice.
Pulling herself up into a crouch, Rostfar caught sight of torches bobbing along the clifftop. Relief flooded her, but she couldn’t savour it for long.
“What’s your name?” Rostfar asked when she could breathe again, not because she doubted Arketh but because she needed to know if Faren could still speak.
“Faren,” he whispered between shallow, trembling gasps.
“Okay. Faren.” Rostfar searched around the boat until her eyes snagged on a swathe of woven fabric. It was stiff with beeswax, probably designed to keep the boat dry and free from rot. Better than nothing, Rostfar decided. She helped Faren out of his damp outer layers, ignoring his stuttering protests, and wrapped the makeshift blanket around his shoulders.
“You?”
Rostfar hesitated before realising she hadn’t given her name. “Rostfar,” she told him as she pressed a drinking-bowl into his hands. “You’ve got to get moving. Bail out the water.”
Faren just stared at the bowl. Rostfar bit down her irritation, frightened by how sharp her temper had become. She closed his stiff fingers around the bowl’s crude handle. He hissed in pain as the joints moved, but it relieved Rostfar to see him open and close his grip when she moved away.
He bailed and Rostfar began to row.
By the time Rostfar brought them to shore, the beach was awash with torchlight and chatter. Hands reached for her, forgetting to respect her boundaries amidst the chaos and adrenaline. She could barely bring herself to stumble through the surf onto dry land.
“Is it true?” The words leapt at her from the haze of faces and torchlight. Rostfar forced her eyes to focus on Isha’s face. “Is it Faren?”
No sooner had Rostfar nodded than Isha ran past her. She didn’t watch him go, didn’t have the chance. Strong, warm arms wrapped around her shoulders and held her tight, just the way she liked it.
“Let’s get you warm,” Mati said. Rostfar realised she was shivering.
“Arketh?”
“With Nat.” Mati tried to nudge Rostfar towards the cliff path. Despite his height and build, his touch was gentle. Too gentle. He had always been afraid of his own strength.
Rostfar stood and stared at the shadowy figures flitting around Faren. She watched as Aethren, one of her brightest hunters, helped lift Faren onto a stretcher. Aethren was clearly trying to give orders, but nobody was listening to them. Beside the stretcher, Isha stood out like a spark, flitting around and getting in the way.
“Rost,” Mati said and nudged her again. She swayed into him, drained, but still couldn’t bring herself to move. He rested his hand against the small of her back. “I’m going to carry you. Is that okay?”
Rostfar nodded. Mati carefully wrapped his cloak around her and lifted her up, enveloping her in the familiar comfort of his arms. Unable to cope with the ruthless battering of the world any longer, Rostfar pressed her face into his shoulder and allowed him to carry her away from the beach.
The warm, waveless water of the bathtub gave Rostfar relief beyond words. Pale light trickled through the top of the shutters from the second moon, Sylvrast. The light had a cold, silver hue, but Rostfar took comfort from it nonetheless. It meant that morning had come at last.
“That was quite the wake-up surprise, Rost.” Mati sat on a stool by the tub, gently teasing the knots of salt and seaweed from Rostfar’s hair. She hummed a sleepy agreement, not wanting a conversation. A conversation meant thinking and explaining, and she’d done enough of that in one night to last a lifetime.
Even when her lips had been blue with cold, everyone wanted a piece of her. Marken wanted to make sure she wasn’t in danger of dying. Nat wanted to know what she was thinking. Ethy wanted to know what she had been doing out on the cliffs at night. Rostfar wasn’t entirely sure what she had told them, only that it had been a hasty lie full of contradictions.
I was sleepwalking—
No, Arketh was—
We couldn’t sleep.
I’m sorry.
I’m too tired.
And underneath it all, the panic ran circles in her head.
(they’ll know they’ll know they’ll find out it’s over they’ll know they’ll)
“Rostfar?”
Rostfar shook herself out of her thoughts. Mati’s hands had stopped moving in her hair, and she whined softly in protest. “Don’t stop.”
“You went stiff as a bowstring,” Mati said. The concern in his voice was clear, even to Rostfar, but he returned to combing her hair. Rostfar slumped against the back of the tub.
“It’s been a long night, is all.”
“But that’s not all, is it?”
“It’s . . .” Rostfar trailed off, picking a piece of seaweed from between her toes to avoid answering.
Mati must have understood her silence, because he sighed and said, “That’s the worst of it.” He helped her out of the bath and into some dry clothes, and the two of them sat down by the fire with bowls of tea.
“I have a bad feeling,” Rostfar finally said. “About Faren. And I know Isha will be happy – I would be too if I hadn’t seen Nat for years – but it’s something . . .” She shook her head, teeth clenched. A careful glance up at Mati’s lower face revealed a tight jaw and lips clamped in a thin line.
“You had one of your—” despite them being alone, Mati lowered his voice, “moments?”
Rostfar’s heart sank through her stomach. “No,” she forced herself to say. She couldn’t hide the truth now. “Arketh did. She’d – I don’t know, dreamed Faren was out there? And I can’t shake the feeling something’s wrong. Why else would the wyrdness call her?”
“But do you know it was . . . that?”
“Yes!” Rostfar snapped. She slammed down her tea, then groaned and cupped her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. But I know what it was. I’ve been through it too often myself.”
For a while, there was a blessed silence punctuated only by the crackling fire and Mati sipping his drink. Rostfar tried to coax her tired muscles to relax, to recapture the pleasantness of the bath and Mati’s fingers in her hair.
“Have you spoken to Nat yet?” Mati asked at length. Rostfar gripped her drinking-bowl a little too tight, grimacing at the thought of talking with her twin sister. They already had much to discuss, and that was without the addition of the night’s chaos. The impending conversation sat like a lump of chewed wood in the pit of her stomach.
“I don’t know what she could do.” Rostfar shrugged miserably and stood. She mustered up a smile. “No point fretting, as Isha would say. Don’t lose too much sleep on my account, you.”
Mati smiled back, easy and soft and open. “Don’t worry about me, love.”
Rostfar clucked and pressed a kiss to Mati’s temple, breathing in his body heat and the scent of his skin.
He leant against her touch and whispered, so quietly she almost didn’t hear. “It’ll be alright. You know that, don’t you?”
“I wish I did,” Rostfar murmured back.
