Right?
I look at the little girl again—the living specter, as she calls herself. There is a strange smile on her small face.
“I’m non-magus,” I tell her in a hard voice. “Both of my parents are non-magi.”
“If that is true, then how can I see her?” she mocks back. Gul winces, covering her ears to muffle the sound of her high-pitched voice.
“I have not come here to go delve into your messy family history, Seer,” the living specter tells me. “I have only come to deliver a simple message to you both: Stick together, no matter what happens. Do you hear me, Savak-putri Gulnaz?” Her last sentence reverberates, pulses in my ears.
I turn to Gul, who has paled on hearing her full name. “Yes,” she whispers. “I hear you.”
Around us, the wind howls like a dustwolf. The little girl begins disappearing again, rapidly, her legs fading to her knees. Gul tugs on my arm, her mouth moving, forming my name. But I can’t hear her. The young girl’s voice is the only one audible in this wind:
Rooh the lost, Rooh the loon
You cannot touch his soul
But see him in a bright-blue moon
And a star will turn him whole.
By the time the last word is sung, the girl is already gone, her mouth the last bit of her to disappear.
“She’s gone, isn’t she?” Gul breaks the silence, her voice soft, quivering.
“Yes. I can’t see her anymore.” I shake my head. “Though I don’t know why exactly I could see her in the first place. And no,” I snap the last word as Gul opens her mouth again. “I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not a seer! I’ve lived in the tenements my whole life. My parents are non-magi.”
“Are you sure about that?” Gul asks quietly.
My hands turn cold, sweat beading the palms. Whore. Slut. You know nothing about your mother or the sacrifices she made.
“Don’t you dare question me about my family, magus!”
Anger flashes in Gul’s eyes for a brief instant and then, almost immediately, dissipates. Someone’s coming, she mouths before placing a finger to her lips.
A second later, I hear the footsteps.
The light metal tap of a Sky Warrior’s boots.
23GUL
The dagger, sensing the shift in my mood, begins to glow in my hand. Glancing at Cavas, I tilt my head sideways, gesturing to an arched doorway jutting from the wall. I am hoping for an exit, but it merely leads to another room, a gallery full of miniature paintings I might have appreciated had it not been for the blue-and-silver bodies reflected in the arch’s tiny mirrors.
Two Sky Warriors. I press into the wall, willing myself to disappear into it. My hand brushes Cavas’s arm. He doesn’t pull away.
“No one appears to be here,” someone says after a pause. A voice, low and musical, embedded in nearly every innocuous dream I’ve had over the past two years as well as my nightmares. “You better not be mistaken about this.”
“I—I swear I saw them, Major,” a man responds. A new recruit, I sense, from his stammer.
It’s only when Cavas makes a small sound—a grunt of pain—that I realize my nails are digging into his arm. I loosen my grip and glance sideways in apology when I see the expression on his face. Terror. The kind that blanches color from skin and lips, that loosens bladders without warning.
I hear the Scorpion prefers boys serving her.
The words made me angry before, and they make me angry now. The fury helps, slows the racing beat of my own heart. My hand slides down, curls around his.
I will not let her hurt you, I think, and instinctively I know this is true. Somewhere between the moment I first kissed this boy at the moon festival and now, he has become important to me. Even though I don’t like thinking about why.
The shield spell I mastered with Amira will be useless in a battle with two fully armed Sky Warriors. As for the attacking spell—even though I performed it during my test, I’m not even sure I could do it right now, or control it effectively if I did. The best thing at this stage would be to disappear—to become a living specter without dying in the process.
Use your mind, Amira always told me while doing magic. So I draw on every kernel of my will, calling on whatever bits of power I have running through my veins.
I want us to disappear, I think. To vanish from their sight.
Warmth rushes from the birthmark on my arm to my hands. Cavas must feel the heat as well, because his fingers tighten around mine in a sudden, painful moment. A strange, tingling sensation crawls up my wrist. When I look down, I see that Cavas’s hand is glowing white where mine glows gold. The white light pulses, traveling from his hand to mine, then up my arm, up my neck. It pauses at my throat, bright and hot, sealing my breath in my lungs.
“M-major. D-did you hear that?”
“What?” Major Shayla’s voice sharpens.
“It’s … it’s coming from this room, M-major.”
They step into the room.
And stare right at us.
It’s the first time I put a face to the voice of my parents’ murderer. Where the major’s voice is like disjointed music, her beauty is like flawed marble, cruelty lining the smile of her perfect red mouth, gleaming in her eyes. Her movements, likely due to her training as a Sky Warrior, are precise and economical, as carefully crafted as her closely cropped gray hair and the three firestones glinting in her left ear.
No. This is not a woman to be trifled with.
The other Sky Warrior—a boy who appears no older than Cavas—stays in the major’s shadow, his shoulders shrinking even as I widen my stance and raise my dagger exactly the way I would at Yudhnatam practice, the way I did only three weeks ago with Amira. Major Shayla spins on the
