“Petra. I have never lied to you.”

“You might. You might, to protect me.”

“I have looked. I inspected very carefully. I swear to you that I did not see your father’s eyes, and I would know them if I saw them.”

Petra nodded shakily and pushed a handful of snow down her mouth. She wanted it cold. She wanted the freezing lump traveling down her throat to scour clean everything she felt inside her.

“Petra?” Tomik muttered.

She wiped the tears from her face and turned to him.

“I thought of something,” he said.

“What?” The look on his face gave birth to a new dread within her.

“What were the Gray Men doing here, in the Novohrad Mountains?”

Petra hesitated. Then she said, “It was a random attack. They were here and caught our scent. That’s all.” But she was not so sure.

“Maybe they knew we were here,” Tomik said. “What if they were searching for us?”

16

The Beach

IT WAS DAWN when they decided to leave the clearing, and then only because Tomik stalked away from the campsite.

“You need to rest!” Petra dragged at his elbow.

“And if I’m right?”

“You’re not. You can’t be right.”

He shook off her hand and kept walking. “If the Gray Men were here to find us, we need to move.”

“No. You need to listen to me.”

Tomik stopped. “Is my opinion that unimportant to you? Am I your slave, for you to tell what to do?”

She was struck silent.

Astrophil raised a timid leg. “May I say something?”

“Of course not,” Petra told Tomik. “Of all the stupid things to say!”

He looked at her. “Do you know why you’re angry?”

“I am not!”

“I wish to say something,” said Astrophil.

“You’re angry,” Tomik told Petra, “because you know I’m right. We might not survive another attack. If the Gristleki are hunting in the mountains, we must get out of them, fast. That frightens you, and makes you feel powerless, and guilty because even though you’re telling me to rest, part of you wants to push me to run as fast as I can.”

“Aren’t you clever. Don’t you know everything. Well, let me tell you—”

Astrophil put the tips of two legs in his mouth and blew a shrill, tinny whistle. When Tomik and Petra fell silent, the spider said, “I, as a scholar of many subjects, including medicine, believe that Tomik is perfectly fine.”

“He is?” Petra whispered.

“He is rushing about, arguing with you, is he not? His pupils are a reasonable size, and he is not wavering on his feet. I would say—if anyone cared for my opinion—that you are arguing over nothing.”

Nothing, Petra thought, except that everything Tomik had said—everything he had accused her of—was true. “So we should leave.”

“Quickly,” said Tomik. “While there’s sunlight, we should look for food and shelter.”

“Let us find some rabbits for you to fence,” Astrophil told Petra.

* * *

IN THE END, Petra used her sword to bring down a fox—a winter-starved, stringy fox who had snaked past her as she had crouched, perfectly still, in the shadow of a tree. She had been waiting for more than an hour when she sensed its approach and sliced the invisible rapier through the air. The fox didn’t even pause in the moment before the blade cut its body in half.

Tomik lifted his brows when Petra brought back the bloody halves of the fox, but he knew better than to say anything. He skinned the split carcass while Petra started a fire, her eyes narrowed at Astrophil the entire time. “Don’t you spit on it,” she told him.

“I do not spit,” he said. “I expectorate.”

* * *

ON THEIR SECOND DAY traveling through the forest, after Petra had returned from hunting with a weasel neatly pierced through the heart, Tomik said, “You’re getting better at this.”

Petra struck a rock against the pommel of her sword, and blew at the spark that jumped onto a curl of bark.

“You’re getting better at that, too,” Tomik said.

Petra shrugged. “Practice.”

“Two days’ worth? You’re not just drawing on your magics, Petra. You’re adapting so quickly to them. If I learn a new technique, it takes me a long time to perfect it. Weeks, even. What exactly did the Metis teach you?”

She glanced at Astrophil, who slept near a tree in a nest of snow. He had been with her for every lesson with the Metis, even the most troubling one. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Tomik, you were thrilled at the thought that you could study magic in the Vatra, but you didn’t go back to the Metis, like I did. You didn’t ask them to teach you. Why not?”

Tomik pushed a twig near the growing flame. “They seemed heartless.”

“Exactly.”

He looked at her differently. “In fact, I thought I’d pay a high price for any lesson I might learn.”

She blew at the flame.

“Petra, you didn’t. You didn’t agree to become one of them.”

“No.” She sat back on her heels. “They … explained that magic comes at a price. It needs energy, just like a fire needs kindling or brassica oil to burn. Magic usually borrows it from your body—from your breath, your energy, the food you eat. The hours you sleep. It’s not always noticeable that it takes something from you. But if you do notice, you can feed your magic what it needs, and that makes it stronger. You pay for it later. I’ll be tired in a few hours.”

Tomik peered at her face. He knew it well, and knew she was hiding something. “There’s more. What else did they teach you?”

Reluctantly, Petra said, “I have a Choice.”

“What do you mean, Choice? About what?”

“I’m a special case. Because I’m a chimera. Because I have two magical abilities, I can choose between them. I can feed one to the other.”

“I don’t understand.”

Petra wished Astrophil were awake to explain, though he didn’t like discussing the subject any more than she did. “I could only do it once. I could choose to pour my mind-magic into my skill over metal—or the reverse. If I did, my one remaining talent would become very powerful. But only for a short time, as long as it takes for one magic to consume the other. Entirely. Once that short burst of power fades away, the magic that is left will start to eat itself until it disappears, too. My magic will be gone.”

Tomik’s hands fell to his sides. “You’d be helpless. Ordinary, for the rest of your life. It wouldn’t be worth it, Petra. How long would this ‘short burst of power’ last? Ten minutes? Twenty?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if you had made this … Choice when the Gristleki attacked, and your power ran out in the middle of the fight? We’d be dead.”

“That’s why I didn’t choose,” she said softly.

“And you didn’t need to. You defeated them anyway.”

“But if I was desperate—”

He shook his head. “Say that you were, and made your Choice, and succeeded. Say that you felt your magic burn out, and didn’t care because you thought it was a fair price to pay. What if, the next day, something worse came along? You’d have nothing left to fight it.”

“I know the risks, Tomik. I know the cost.”

“Then promise me you won’t do it.”

This was exactly what Astrophil had said, once they had left the Metis’ cave.

“I wouldn’t be able to control the surge of power anyway.” Petra glanced away from Tomik. “The Metis told me so.” She stoked the fire. “Please, let’s not talk about this. The Gray Men might track us, and…” She looked at the rash on her fingers, from where black blood had splashed. She tugged on a mitten. “Things are hard enough.”

* * *

AS DAYS PASSED and Petra and Tomik didn’t sicken, they gave up worrying that the Gristleki blood might have poisoned them.

She grew deft at hunting, but the forest didn’t have much to offer. It was better here than in the bone-freezing mountains. It was warmer. The pine trees were like giant fur coats that blocked the wind, and heat always flushed through Petra’s body during the endless hours of walking. But her breath fogged the air, and it was too cold for there to be many animals for food. They were hibernating or had migrated months ago.

Petra killed what she could. Once, she let her mind-magic unfurl and slipped over a stretch of snow. She was looking for a hidden thing, and when her hand plunged through the snow and into a hole in the earth, she found it. She hauled up a sleeping rabbit by its ears and cut its throat with the base of her blade just as it began to twitch itself awake.

Holding the warm, bloody rabbit in her arms made her feel like crying again. It had the weight of a baby. With its dark, liquid eyes, the rabbit looked like a human enchanted into an animal shape.

Petra told herself that she was being foolish. They needed to eat. And she had grown up in a village. She knew that cows in the field would die, and had helped her cousin Dita kill chickens. It wasn’t pretty, but it was food. It had never bothered her—before.

Petra went alone to hunt, insisting that Astrophil stay with Tomik. The spider didn’t like it, but Petra said he distracted her. The truth was that she couldn’t bear the thought of Tomik stranded in the trees by himself. If the Gristleki attacked, at least he and Astrophil would have each other.

They wouldn’t stand a chance. Petra knew this. Still, every day she plucked the spider from her shoulder and set him on Tomik’s.

The three would meet again later, eat whatever Petra had caught, and trudge on through the snow-filled forest, forcing their way through pine branches when there was no clear path. Tomik checked the maps he had tucked inside his coat before passing through the Loophole, and seemed to know where they were going. If he sometimes looked a little anxious around the eyes when he suggested they head south, or west, Petra didn’t question him.

Astrophil chattered at first, saying he was going to cheer them up by teaching them a new subject every day. But eventually Petra and Tomik’s silence, and the silence of the forest, began to affect the spider, too, and he crouched quietly on Petra’s ear or slept in the crook of her neck, one leg wrapped around a lock of her dirty hair. He insisted on keeping watch at night.

Petra had trouble sleeping, curled together with Tomik in a new snow cave he built each night. When she closed her eyes she saw gray, scaled claws.

She should have been able to take comfort in Tomik. She should have felt safe next to his solid, slumbering warmth. But it made her uneasy. Tomik was the brother she never had. There should have been nothing wrong, then, with sleeping next to him. Yet as much as she tightened her mind-magic when she was around him and screwed it down into a tiny knot she refused to untie, her heart didn’t need magic to sense that this—being together, being so close, so warm, so secreted from the world—meant something more to him than it did to her.

Terror waited when she closed her eyes. When she opened them and saw Tomik, she worried.

Sometimes, Neel tried to speak with her. She could sense him, could feel a tendril of his thought unfolding like a tiny pea shoot in the earth of her mind. She stopped it every time. We’re fine, she told him once, then closed herself against his eager response. She didn’t want to tell him what had happened after they’d rowed away from the Vatran shore. That would make everything more real.

Neel didn’t know what he was doing. He might try to touch the edges of Petra’s mind, but he was far away in India, and as Petra had learned long ago from John Dee, distance made it harder to send thoughts through a mental link. Neel didn’t have the mind-magic to force the issue, and it was easy to keep him at bay. Usually.

It was harder at night. When she was tired, it was difficult to find the energy to strengthen her defenses against him, and sleep meant surrendering all control. If Neel wanted to reach her while she slept, she wouldn’t be able to ignore him. Petra and Tomik had finally crossed—or at least they thought so—into Bohemia, and the sun set a few hours later in the Vatra than it did here. Each night, Petra waited to close her eyes. She waited until the trembling sensation of Neel wandering at the outskirts of her mind faded. There was a physical kind of silence. It stretched, and Petra knew that Neel was asleep. Only then would she let herself relax and fall into a fitful sleep of her own.

Yet the days were long and exhausting, and one night an aching weariness consumed her. She fell asleep next to Tomik even before he closed his eyes.

She dreamed a beach. The pinkish sand was hot under her skin, and as she lay there, green waves foamed at her toes. The sun had set, but a violet light lingered in the air. Petra smelled the brine of the sea, and something else, too: sandalwood soap. She recognized it, and didn’t realize until she caught its scent how much she had missed it.

She sat up and turned, and there was Neel.

“Hello,” she whispered.

She expected him to be angry. They had yelled at each other before, voices full of fury. This wouldn’t be the first time, and she knew that she deserved whatever he might say.

But he was silent, and his eyes were narrow with hurt.

Petra stood. Her feet sank and burned into the sand as she crossed the few steps between them. “Can you see me?”

The question startled him into speaking. “See you? Why in the name of the four tribes would I see you?”