“W-what language is it?” she asked.
He paused, longer than before. “It’s death.”
“Death!” she shrieked. “Is that what I am? A death mage?”
“I think so,” he said.
“Then I’m in Death? And those things that dragged me here were ghosts?”
“Noa, we can talk about this later. Just get yourself back.”
Noa was shaking down to her slipper. She was a magician. She had been attacked by ghosts. She was in Death. Her logical mind clanked and whirred itself into exhaustion, and could make no sense of it.
The otter was still staring at her. Then it moved between her and the shadow, its nostrils twitching.
Noa’s heart thudded. The otter looked young and healthy, which meant it was only as big as a small dog. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t hurt her. Was it some sort of Death guardian? Did it want to stop her from leaving?
Julian had said that it would listen to her if she spoke to it. “Please move,” she said, her voice faint. “I need to get back to the castle.”
The otter didn’t move an inch.
“You’re speaking Florean,” Julian said in the carefully patient voice he used with Mite when she was in danger of exploding.
“Of course I am!” Noa wished that Julian were there so that she could strangle him. “How am I supposed to say anything in a language I just learned I could speak tonight?”
“You’ve known how to speak it your whole life. You just didn’t know you knew, because the spell the mages put on the Words made you forget the knowledge that you were—”
“Oh, black seas!” Noa was cold, and frightened, and something inside her snapped. She scooped up a rock the size of her fist and hurled it at the otter.
Well, not quite at it. It was still an otter, or at least it looked like one, and a person would have to have a heart full of stale bread crumbs to hurt an otter. But the otter didn’t know she’d missed on purpose, and it darted aside with an angry growl. The fish fell onto the ground and flopped about, getting itself covered in the ashy grime that seemed to cover everything.
Noa lunged forward, toward the shadow that now seemed like only a shadow, but when she imagined it as she had seen it before, like a curtain, that was what it became. Sharp claws slashed at her leg, and she yelped in pain. She kicked out and managed to shake the otter off. Maybe it thought her leg would substitute for the lost fish, or maybe it was just out for revenge. Noa didn’t intend to find out.
She grabbed a handful of shadow. It was light and thin as gossamer, but oddly sticky, like putting your hand into a spiderweb. Beneath the shadow was a hole. It was oval and pointed like a staring eye. On the other side of the hole, through a filmy sort of darkness, was a familiar wall and a familiar bookshelf.
She was looking into Julian’s tower!
Before she could think too hard about the impossibility of picking up a shadow like a curtain, or the wisdom of jumping into mysterious holes in Death, Noa flung herself through.
13
Noa Recovers from Death
Noa stretched and yawned. She had been awake for a while, but it felt nice to just lie there under the blankets with a cat warming her feet.
She didn’t remember much of what had happened after she returned from Death—she must have fainted on the way back. When she awoke, she was on the floor of the tower, and Julian was muttering a blood spell over her. She didn’t feel any pain, but part of her knew she must have been hurt worse than she thought, for Julian’s face was pale. She closed her eyes, and when she had opened them again it was morning, and she was curled up in Julian’s bed with sunlight streaming through the tower windows.
She turned her head to watch the whitecapped sea glide past the island. She knew she should be terrified by what had happened, but she was too full of excitement to have room for anything else. The events of last night had resolved into one heart-stopping revelation:
She was a magician.
Noa wanted to dance around the tower. So she could speak the language of death, which was more than a little creepy and would not have been her first choice of magical powers, but she was still a magician. She wasn’t the only Marchena in generations to be born without any magic. She could speak a long-lost magical language, which made her a lot like Julian, powerful in a unique way that set her apart from everybody else. She was definitely more unique than Mite.
And surely there was a way that she could use her magic to defeat Xavier. She imagined herself standing before Julian and his council and demonstrating her powers to exclamations of awe. She saw herself waving her hands and capturing the islands of Florean one by one. (Her imagination was fuzzy on how this would work, but it did a fair job of supplying the intimidating, windswept black cloak that she would be wearing.) She saw Julian seated on the throne of Florean, turning to smile his old smile at her, his eyes bright with happiness and gratitude.
She was a magician!
She lay there in a giddy state until she happened to glance down at the foot of her bed and found a small freckled face staring back at her.
Noa bolted upright with a scream in her throat, dislodging the cat. “Mite! How long have you been there?”
“Not long,” Mite said. She jumped up from where she’d been crouching with her chin propped on the bed. “Since you woke up and started grinning and rubbing your hands together. What’s so funny?”
Noa’s heart was still thudding. “Oh . . . I was thinking about all the ghosts I just met,” she said. “I told them that I had a little sister,
