It took some time for my nerves to smooth over, but I dragged myself up to standing and worked my way back to the inn. The innkeep from the night before was at the counter, and his eyes widened when he saw me, and he ducked into the room behind the counter. I was too shaken up to take any joy from it.
Naji was sitting on the bed when I walked in, scrawling out something on a piece of thin-pressed paper. He had his thumb and forefinger pinched against his nose, but once I closed the door he dropped his hand to the table and let out this weird, contented sigh, like he was finally sitting down after a long day’s journey. I didn’t much know what to make of it.
His tattoos glowed, almost enough to cast light of their own. He went back to writing.
“Did you find everything? You were gone longer than I expected.”
“Everything but the swamp yirrus.” My throat felt strange when I said it, dry and scratchy.
He didn’t stop writing. “Why not? The waterfront night market here is supposed to be indefatigable in its supply of nefarious properties.”
It took me a second to realize he was making a joke, but I wasn’t in much of a joking mood.
“Well?” He lifted his head and squinted at me. “Why didn’t you get the swamp yirrus?”
“I brought you your money.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the last of the pressed gold pieces and tossed them on the bed. Naji stared at them. They glimmered in the light of the lamp flickering on the bedside table. Then he looked back up at me, and I could feel him studying my face, trying to get an answer out of me that way.
I realized there wasn’t no reason to lie to him. Not about this.
“The one vendor selling it had gray eyes,” I said. Naji didn’t react at all, just listened to me. “The same as the woman from before. The one who—”
“So you didn’t want to buy from him.”
I shook my head. “Gave me the creeping shivers. I’m real sorry. But if a girl don’t have her intuition, she don’t got nothing. That’s what my papa taught me.”
“Sounds like a wise man, even if he was a pirate.” Naji sighed. “Did the vendor . . . react to you in anyway? Mutter anything? Hum?”
“Act like he was casting a spell, you mean? No.” I shrugged. “He did say I seemed a long way from home, which worried me a bit. That was before I saw his eyes. In every other way he seemed normal, like I was just some customer.”
Naji nodded. “You did the right thing. They certainly sent him to try to find us.” He paused. “I’m glad to see you didn’t take off my charm just to spite me. He would have recognized you otherwise.”
My hand went up to my neck, to the strip of worn leather. I’d forgotten I was even wearing it.
“I’ll take that back now, by the way,” Naji said. “I’m going to make you one of your own, so you can stop borrowing mine.”
I slipped the charm off my neck and the air in the room felt different, darker, like the lamp magic had started to run out. Naji slipped the charm back into his robe and went back to writing. I hated to see it disappear.
“What did you need the swamp yirrus for?” I asked. “Was it important?”
“Everything on that list was important,” Naji said. His pitch quill scratched across the paper. “But I can make do.”
I wanted to sit down, but it seemed weird to sit on the bed next to Naji. So I made a place for myself on the floor and watched him write. When he finished, he tucked the quill back into his robes and read over the sheet one last time. Then he started rifling through the bags, pulling out the wisteria vines and the rose petals.
“You don’t have to watch me do this,” he said, laying everything out on the bed.
Ain’t no way I was ditching the inn after the run-in with Gray Eyes at the market, and downstairs there wasn’t nothing but drunks and whores, and I wasn’t of a mind to deal with either.
“I’d rather stay, if it’s no trouble to you,” I said.
He glanced at me. The scars made his face unreal, like a mask, but I didn’t mind looking at him.
“You might find this unsettling.”
I shrugged. Naji picked up the wisteria vine and started braiding the pieces together, threading in the rose petals and strips of acacia leaves. He chanted in that language of his while he worked. The room got darker and darker and his tattoos glowed brighter and brighter. I recognized some of what he was doing as dirt-magic—the chanting over dead leaves and the like—but those tattoos and the darkness weren’t like nothing Mama ever taught me.
Naji set the charm down on the bed. He reached into his cloak and pulled out that mean-looking knife from earlier, and then, so quick I hardly had time to realize what he was doing, he drew the knife over the palm of his hand. Blood pooled up in a line across his skin. He tilted his hand over the charm and dropped the blood a bit at a time into the twist of wisteria vines.
His tattoos glowed so bright the whole room was blue.
He stopped speaking and squeezed his palm shut. His tattoos went back to normal. Then the whole room went back to normal, though I could still smell blood, steely and sharp, hanging on the air.
He dabbed at his palm with a handkerchief, not looking at me.
The sight of blood ain’t nothing to get me worked up, but the idea of using blood in magic—Mama had told me it was a dark thing to do, and dangerous, though she’d made it sound like blood-magic always used someone else’s blood, not the magician’s. She always said it was the magic of violence.
“I want to apologize,” Naji said. He slid off the bed, the charm resting in the palm of his hand. “I didn’t want to bring ack’mora into this—”
“What’s ack’mora?”
He looked down at the charm. “What you would call blood-magic. I didn’t want to use it, but without the swamp yirrus . . .” His voice trailed off. He shoved the charm at me. “This is for you. Please wear it at all times.”
He sounded more formal than usual, like he was nervous. Weird that he should be more nervous than me. But I took the charm from him anyway and ripped a strip of fabric off one of my scarves so I could tie it around my neck. The sense of protection that wrapped around me was warm and thick, like blood.
“I’ve never seen anyone mix ’em up like that,” I said. Naji had walked back over to the bed and was cleaning off the space. He looked over at me when I spoke. His face was pale, drawn, in a way it hadn’t been a few minutes ago.
“Mix them up?” he said.
“Yeah, dirt-magic and blood-magic. Uh, ack’mora.”
“Yes,” he said. “I do combine them sometimes. I learned some—what did you call it? Dirt-magic?—from my mother.”
“You have a mother!” I didn’t mean to blurt it out like that, but the idea of him coming from somewhere was too bizarre.
“Of course I had a mother.” He scowled and yanked the uman flower out of the bag.
It took me a minute to realize he’d switched into the past tense. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I really did feel bad about it. “It’s just—you’re an assassin, and I didn’t think—”
“I had a mother before I went to the Order,” he said stiffly. He obviously didn’t want to talk about it. “I thought you’d prefer a charm born of the earth and not me, but, well, I had to make do.”
I thought that a weird way for him to say it, a charm born of me, like he’d hacked off part of himself and handed it over.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” he said, and he actually bowed at me a little. Not a full bow, just a tilt of the head, but I got real warm and looked down at my hands. I was very much aware of that charm pressing against my skin, soft as a lover’s touch.
“This next spell is a bit more involved, I’m afraid.” He was laying out the rest of the stuff I’d bought for him, the powders and the uman flower. “I’ll be stepping out of myself for some time. I have questions that need answering.” A long pause, like he expected me to say something. “You really don’t have to stay. It’s . . . Well, I’m doing something very rare, full ack’mora—I wouldn’t expect . . .” He straightened up, ran one hand through his tangled-up hair. “Though I ask that you stay in the hotel. My . . . oath. I’m not sure what would happen to me if you got caught up in danger while I’m away.”
All that talking, and the only thing I could say in response was, “Away?”
He nodded.
“Curses, no.” He shook his head. “We call it Kajjil—there’s no translation.”
“But it’s a place?”
He stopped messing with the powder vials on the bed and looked me hard in the eye. “I’m not allowed to discuss it with outsiders,” he said, and I understood that well enough, being a daughter of the Pirates’ Confederation and all.
I used the language of pirates to tell him I understood, which was a joke, because I knew there wasn’t no way for him to know what it meant. But he kind of half smiled at me, not with his mouth but with the skin around his eyes, and got to work.
This one was a lot weirder to watch, ’cause it wasn’t nothing like the bits of magic I’d dabbled in before. Most of it centered on the uman flower. He spent a while mixing up pinches and shakes of the powders I’d brought him in some big clay bowl that looked like it’d come from the inn’s kitchen. Then he set the uman flower on the floor and cast a big circle around it with the powders. The knife came out again, only this time he cut along one of the tattoos on his arm, and he splashed the blood onto the circle, right on the flower like we weren’t in an inn.
He said some words and then he sung some words and then he stepped inside the circle, and everything got real screwy.
The room fell dark, first off, even though the lamp was still flickering over in the corner. It just didn’t cast no light. Neither did Naji’s tattoos, which had taken to glowing as well. It was like the darkness was so thick it swallowed up any kind of brightness.
So all I could see of Naji were the swirls of blue on his arms, and the two blue dots of his eyes. And his singing got louder, and I smelled blood again, so strong it was like I had it running down my face, and I actually wiped at my cheeks, trying to get it off. But there wasn’t nothing there, and after that I only got the medicine scent of Naji’s magic, the one like a physician about to do you wrong.
Then the uman flower lit up too, and it started writhing around, and another voice added itself to Naji’s, one that was not human. Raspy and animalistic, more like. And the uman flower kept swaying and twisting, dancing like Princess Luni in that old story, the one where she dances herself to death.
Things stayed like that for a while. The singing and the uman flower and Naji’s bright eyes. But despite all of it, I wasn’t too fearful, even though I knew that made me a damn-right fool. I figured the charm was working, and that’s where my complacency came from.
I couldn’t say how long Naji was away. It couldn’t have been too long because I hardly moved one bit and neither of my legs cramped up. When Naji did come back, it happened all at once. The singing stopped and the uman flower stopped dancing and the light came back into the room. Naji slumped forward onto the floor, knocking the uman flower aside, out of the circle. It skittered up to me and I jumped away from it, not so much out of fear but revulsion. Naji still hadn’t moved.
I crawled over to him, stopping just outside the circle, and poked him in the shoulder. He groaned. I poked harder, and then I shook him. The part of my arm in the circle tingled. The smell of his magic was so overpowering, I could taste it in the back of my throat. But at least nothing in the room seemed to be shifting and changing from the magic-sickness.
Naji jerked up, so fast it startled me. He blinked a few times. His eyes were dark again. When he spotted me crouching by the circle he rubbed his head and said, “Don’t cross the line.”
“I know, I ain’t an idiot.” I frowned at him. “You all right?”
He nodded, his head hanging low. I scooted across the floor and leaned against the bed. “What’d you find out?”
“Find out?”
“You said you had some questions that need answering.”
“Oh.” His face darkened for a moment. “It seems we’ll need to go across the desert.” He stood up, using one hand to steady himself against the bed.
“What! The desert?” I was hoping that he’d seen the Hariri clan wherever he went—not them exactly, but the shadows of them, the way fortune-tellers do. I was hoping that he’d tell me that other assassin wasn’t coming after me no more. “I don’t want to go to the desert.”
“You’re in the desert now.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m in Lisirra, and it ain’t the same thing.” I crossed my arms and glared at him. “Why do we have to cross the desert?”
“I need to see someone.”
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”
Naji glared at me. He looked about a million years old. “Yes,” he said. “It’s all that concerns you.”
“Bullshit!” I stalked across the room, taking care to avoid the circle. I balled up my clothes and wrapped the scarves around them for a strap. I took the protection charm off and threw it on the bed.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Leaving.”
“You can’t leave.”
I went right up to him, close enough that I could smell the residue of his magic. “Sure can. I got money and my wits and there ain’t nothing you can do to stop me.”
“There’s plenty I can do and you know it.”
I didn’t have an answer to that, so I stomped away from him, right out the door and into the hallway. I didn’t think about what I was doing; it was a lot like when I left Tarrin, honestly. Get the hell out and come up with a plan later.
Naji screamed.
It stopped me dead in my tracks, ’cause it didn’t sound like anger or magic, but like he was in pain, like someone had stuck him in the belly. The hallway was silent—nobody stuck his head out to see what was going on.
Then there was a thump and the door banged open. Naji spilled out into the hallway. He cradled his head in one hand, and his skin was covered in sweat. His tattoos looked sickly and faded.
“Ananna,” he said, choking it out. “You can’t—”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Part of me wanted to bolt and part of me wanted to get him a cold washrag and a cup of mint tea.
He staggered forward, pressing his shoulder up against the wall. I kept expecting some angry sailor to come out and lay into us for interrupting his good time.
“You can’t . . .” Naji closed his eyes, pressed his head against the wall. He took a deep, shuddery breath. “You can’t go out there alone, without protection. The Hariri clan—”
“To hell with the Hariri clan. Let ’em send their worst.”
Naji looked like he wanted both to roll his eyes and puke. “That’s the problem,” he said. “They will.”
He pushed himself away from the wall and swayed in place. He didn’t stop rubbing his head.
“Please,” he said. “Come back to the room. You can’t leave. I have to protect you.”
That was when I figured it out. It sure took me long enough.
“Are you cursed?” I asked.
His expression got real dark. He jerked his head toward the doorway.
“Get in the room.”
I did what he asked. I tossed my dresses on the floor and sat down on the bed. The color had come back to Naji’s cheeks, and his eyes weren’t glassy and blank no more. He locked the door behind us and started sweeping at the used-up magic circle with his foot.
“Well?” I said. “You are, ain’t you? That’s why you have to protect me.”
He didn’t say nothing. The circle was gone, replaced with smears of powders and streaks of drying blood, but he kept kicking at it. The dust made me sneeze.
Naji finally looked at me.
“Yes,” he said. Then he turned his attention back to the powders.
I folded my hands in my lap all prim and proper like a lady. Naji wasn’t protecting ’cause of some stupid oath. He was protecting me ’cause it hurt him if he didn’t.
“When did it happen?” I asked. “During the fight, I’m assuming?” I thought back to that night in the desert, crawling through the sand, flinging my knife at his chest, killing the snake—
“The snake,” I said.
Naji stared at me for a few moment. Then he nodded.
“Was it a special snake?”
Naji looked weary, but he shook his head, his hair falling across his eyes. “It was just an asp, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I suppose it would have bit me had you not killed it.”
“Oh.”
He stopped kicking at the circle and leaned up against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. “You saved my life. Now I have to protect yours.”
“From the snake?”
“Apparently.”
“So what you told me was true,” I said. “About having to protect me and all? It just wasn’t an oath.” I frowned. “What happens if you don’t protect me?”
“I imagine I would die.” Naji turned away from me and fussed with the robes he had lying across the table. “That’s generally how these sorts of curses go.”
I didn’t have nothing to say to that. I’d accidentally activated some curse when I killed that snake and now we were stuck with each other.
This was why untouched folks hate magic.
“So why are we crossing the desert? Is there a cure?”
That darkness crossed his face again. “I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What about the Hariris? You keen on killing me so bad you’re gonna march through the desert just to get to do it? You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going with you—”
“I told you we are not discussing this matter further.”
There was an edge to his voice, anger and shame all mixed up the way they get sometimes, where you can’t tell one from the other, and that shut me up at first. But the more I got to thinking about it, the angrier I became. This was worse than an oath, ’cause oaths can be broken. And I didn’t want Naji’s curse hanging over my head.
“Well, I think we should discuss the matter further.” I stood up. “This don’t just affect you, you know. I had plans. And they didn’t involve tiptoeing around so some assassin wouldn’t get a headache.”
Naji glared at me. “There’s nothing to discuss. If you try to stay behind with the other sea rats, I’ll bind you to me.”
“No, you won’t.”
He stepped up close to me, his scars glowing a little from the faint coating of magic in the room. “All I need is a drop of your blood. And I know I can fetch that easily enough.”
I lunged at him, but he’d already whirled away from me and all I did was slam up against the wall for my trouble. He had pulled his pitch feather out and was scratching something across the top of his chest armor, trying his best, it felt like, to ignore me. I leaned up against the wall and watched him. I did still have the Hariri clan to worry about, and if I took sail with even a southern ship they’d probably catch up to me eventually.
“I’ll go,” I said, as if he’d put the decision to me in the first place. “At least until you take care of the Hariris.”
Naji glanced at me. Then he tossed his quill aside, sat down on the floor next to the uman flower, picked it up, and started pulling off its petals in long, thin strips. We didn’t say nothing, not either of us. The only sound in the room was a crackle as the petals came off the stem, one at a time, white as ghosts.