I wanted to call out to her again, but the masters had drawn close, and they would hear me. I grabbed Calder and twisted my ring, thinking Hearthenge, but nothing happened.
Helki rolled his eyes at my efforts. “That won’t work here, twig.”
“Then we’re walking to Hearthenge,” I snapped, turning on my heel and storming past them.
“We can’t, Ven.” Calder’s voice halted me in my tracks, and I turned over my shoulder, realising he hadn’t moved. “It will take us five days to walk there,” he explained. “Can we survive in here that long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can the rest of the world survive the Darkness without any of us—” He gestured to the masters, almost regretfully including them. “—for that long? Can we really trust the small council to protect everyone against something they don’t understand?”
“We could return …” Vidrol mused, though there was a cruel, cunning edge to his voice. “For a price.”
I didn’t even want to know. “One of us needs to go back.” I hated the words as they left my mouth.
Calder returned to me, tipping my chin up, his eyes reading every insecurity that blazed out of me.
What if I couldn’t survive without him?
“Five days,” he cautioned, narrowing his eyes on me. “If you’re not back in five days, I’ll tear through all three of the worlds to find you.”
If we’re not all dead.
I nodded, and his eyes drifted, flicking over my face. Another muted vibration of pain travelled through me, my eyesight blurring for a moment, and I thought I saw a flicker of something in his gaze, but then it was gone.
Vidrol appeared behind Calder, setting a hand against his shoulder, and then suddenly, Calder was gone.
“Good riddance,” Vidrol muttered. Something twisted in his expression that I couldn’t quite read.
“That looked a lot like interfering,” I said, brushing past him.
“Do you know where you’re going?” he returned, falling into step behind me.
I stopped walking, my eyes tracing down the path of the mountain where the road should have wound. The entire landscape was different, besides there being no road. There were no orchards or groves of peach trees. Even the streams were wider.
So that’s why he got rid of Calder so quickly.
“This is definitely interfering,” I accused, though I wasn’t entirely surprised, only quietly furious.
“Will you give us your sight, in order to see the way?” Andel asked, his smile slow and sharp. He knew.
“I will, won’t I?” I asked, meeting his gaze evenly. “Because you’ll show me that I have no other option.”
“Clever koli.” He stepped toward me, but I held up a hand.
“For how long will I be blind?”
“Until you reach your destination.”
“Which is?” I gritted out, leaving no ambiguity for their manipulations.
“Hearthenge,” he indulged.
“Then you almost have a deal,” I said.
“Almost?” Annoyance raced across his features, pulling at the corners of his eyes.
“You can take my sight if you show me the way to Hearthenge and ensure I live through the journey.”
“Anything else you want to demand?” Fjor asked sarcastically, moving to stand on Vidrol’s other side. They were surrounding me again.
“No.”
“Good.” It was Helki who spoke from directly behind me. I heard the sound of steel unsheathing from leather, and an image of Calder flashed through my mind, the thick scars cutting through his eyes from when Helki had removed his sight.
I stepped away from Helki, but Vidrol was there in front of me, preventing me from going any further. I turned to the side, to Vale, and grabbed his arm. He allowed it, watching as I unravelled the wrappings that wound up his arm. I waited for him to jerk away, but he didn’t. He gave me a shadow of a smile, uncaring that I was revealing his marks. I pulled the length of fabric free and spun to find Helki still standing there, waiting with his knife expectantly. I knocked his knife hand away—though it didn’t move very far—and stuffed the cloth into his other hand.
“I never agreed to be cut.” I glanced to the knife, and then back to him. “I agreed to be blinded. This will do.”
“That’s for me to decide.” His retort was gravelled, angry.
“No, Helki.” I pressed closer, wishing I was taller. “I’m not your slave anymore. It’s for us to agree on.”
He bared his teeth at me, leaning over so that our faces were almost level and I was forced to tip back slightly. “I. Don’t. Agree.”
“Then the deal is off,” I said simply, drawing a chuckle from someone behind me.
“Calm yourself, Helki. You can cut her up another day.”
I wasn’t sure if Vidrol was serious, but I felt him behind me, and then he was reaching around me, snatching the material from Helki’s hand. He fit it carefully over my eyes and tied it off behind my head, pulling away a section of my hair to sit above the blindfold and hold it in place.
“There,” he muttered. “Do you agree with the blindfold, Tempest?”
“Yes,” I forced out, though I didn’t like the loss of my sight around them.
I could make out some shapes, and colours, as the dulled light of Forsjaether peered through to me. I felt a sudden change come over me as it happened. The grass stopped swaying against my legs, urging me back to the edge of the cliff, as though the wind had disappeared altogether … except it hadn’t. I could hear it. It was a song of whispers, turning my head back the other way. The way the grass had been blowing. I felt a burn in my throat, muted—like the pain that still hummed beneath the blanket of my skin. I was desperately thirsty, and desperately hot.
The water of the ocean was so close …
“Onye,” Fjor’s voice whispered, heavy against the wind, his touch against the blindfold that shielded my eyes.
Onye, the blindfold whispered back, and suddenly, everything was gone. The shapes. The colours. The light.
I was truly blind.
Fjor had turned the blindfold into a magical artefact with a single incantation—something that would have taken several sectorians years of work. Years of layering their voices and intentions over the object.
“Ylode.” Another word in Fjor’s deep, silky voice. Another battering against the wind.
It struck a cord of familiarity in me, and a memory flashed through my head, sharp and painful.
The Dealer pulled something from his pocket. It was a collar of sorts: long, thin, and metal. It was inscribed in Forsan, the words too small for me to read. I shook my head, pleas tumbling from my lips, but my mother stood behind me, holding me still as the collar was placed around my neck.
“Ylode,” he said to the collar, touching it once.
“No,” I whispered, my hands whipping up to the material, even as it repeated the horrible word back to Fjor.
I tugged at the material, scratched at it, pulled at it desperately, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Calm yourself.” Fjor snatched my hands, pulling them away from my face, from the raw skin that now bore the brunt of my panicked ministrations. “The word can mean many things, as most words can. It won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do—it was merely to stop you from pulling the blindfold off.”