I encouraged some of my Vold energy to leak into my limbs, and while it resisted at first, curling back towards my chest, I persevered, cajoling it, until it was quickening my step, helping me to better dodge the blurry obstacles visible through the material still stuck to my head. I carried on until my magic refused to help me any further, and my limbs were threatening to collapse beneath me. I had no idea how far I had gone, or how long I had been running for.
I collapsed against a large rock, the sound of a stream beside me. I had been following it since descending the grassy mountain I woke up on—knowing that if we were only a day from Hearthenge and had been travelling from Edelsten—at least three of the main streams in the area would lead me right through the Capitol.
I felt around the rock, seeing a few grey blurs beside it—smaller rocks that I was able to shift out of my way. I stumbled around until I had gathered enough sticks that I could lay them over the gap between the rocks. I tried to do it haphazardly, to create something that the masters wouldn’t look twice at. When I was done, I crawled beneath the sticks, making myself as small as possible as I curled between the rocks.
At any other time, it would have been impossible to sleep in such a position, but I was drained. Body and spirit. I closed my eyes and drifted, lulled by the sound of the water and a small, precious feeling of victory.
What is done can be undone.
It was the opposite of something the masters would have said. They would have stared me down and declared that nothing they did could be undone … but if they could be an exception, then so could I.
After all, I was far more like them than any of us would likely admit.
They had taught me to fight, to manipulate, to bite with my words. They stitched the need for violence into my fingertips and whispered the way of vengeance into my mind. They hadn’t just dragged me into their game—they had taught me to play it.
Eight
Barricade
When I woke, there was pain in every corner of my body, and I desperately needed to crawl out from my hiding place and stretch my limbs, but I didn’t dare. Instead, I stayed exactly where I was and listened. I listened to every turning leaf, every gurgle of the nearby stream. When I was sure the masters weren’t nearby, I pulled myself out, knocking sticks everywhere. I stumbled down toward the stream, finding a seat in the long grass. I turned my attention inward, seeking out that flipping little organ inside my chest. My power pushed back—not exactly eager, in my state of continued pain and exhaustion, but it was enough.
I touched the blindfold, whispering the word that kept it in place.
“Ylode.”
I went through the same agonising process of cutting it up and stitching it back together. It was painful to dissect it into shapes—shapes which became letters, and letters which formed meaning. I had to understand each little syllable and nuance of the word before I could even spell it, and then I needed to repeat it over and over, trying out a thousand different possible meanings before one would fit.
Lock.
The meaning clicked into place like an old lock giving way under too much pressure, rust peeling away to glitter around my mind like confetti. I carefully reversed the letters but paused before speaking the new word. Kcol. It stumbled through my mind, incomplete. A word that wouldn’t form on lips.
It was a word that didn’t exist.
I frowned, feeling like my time was running out as I rushed through every possible explanation, until I arrived at the most obvious. You couldn’t unlock anything without a key.
I stopped trying to think in terms of unlocking and focussed my mind instead on forming a word that could act as a key. I knew what it sounded like—like a lock clicking over. But how did I spell that? I tried to speak the sound, willing it to mean what I thought it meant, but I couldn’t seem to imitate it. If I curled my tongue and flicked it out, I came close to the word—but that wasn’t a word. That was a sound.
I eventually groaned, my lips tired from constantly trying to shape and reshape words. I turned my head toward the stream, listening to the water beat up against one of the rocks, bubbles popping as though fish were breaking the surface, though I knew they weren’t. Not here in Forsjaether.
I crawled toward the sound, and then mimicked it. I added in a sharp-sounding letter—something like a fist against a door.
Open up. Let me in.
“Nokk,” I sounded out, touching the blindfold.
It loosened, drooping against my fingertips. I tore it off—almost in disbelief—but then immediately fell against the slope leading down to the water.
Pain knocked against me, kicking me over, wrapping the organ in my chest in a tight fist. It stole my breath and replaced it with words that didn’t belong to me.
You’ll never be enough.
You’ll never be one of us.
I gasped, arching up, my face turned to the grass, tears of pain at the corners of my eyes.
The words evaporated like smoke—dark and billowy, perfect and terrifying. It clouded my eyes, dousing me in darkness again. It was Fjor’s magic, like a thing of its own, demanding retaliation. I crawled away from it, but it was inside me, eating away at me, taking up residence inside the caged house where my heart bled. I flopped into the water of the stream, pushing my head below the surface to scream, bubbles exploding all around me.
Suddenly, it stopped.
The feeling simply washed away, carried downstream, a thought best left alone. I would never be enough. I blinked water from my eyes as I surfaced, staring around at the suspended world. The moon hung like a pendulum on one side of the sky, the sun on the other. The water was clear, but not vibrant. Everywhere was sucked of saturation, shadowed by grey. It was the ghost of a world.
I pulled myself out of the stream, walking to the other side, my hand rubbing constantly at the soreness in my chest. I kicked into a run, too wary of the pain in my heart to use my Vold magic. To compensate, I ran hard and fast, my breath panting and muscles twinging with the effort. When I began to recognise the landscape, I increased my efforts, ignoring the way my sore knee wanted to buckle beneath me. By the time I reached Hearthenge, I was devastated to see five figures surrounding the tilrive tree.
I slowed to a jog, and then to a walk.
I was out of time.
I had to choose one of them.
I glanced up to the suspended moon as I took each slow, measure step, thinking of the prophecy I had woven around my mark.
It was a strange prophecy—one I had taken literally. It meant that my mark granted wishes. But now, as those wishes loomed over me and the moon stared down at me, I wondered if there was more to Skayld. It was the name of the moon—but the moon had no name.
Fjor had called me Skayld, because my mark was my essence. I was a fragile light persevering in an overwhelming dark. I was a dichotomy of things—ungodly and predestined, imperfect and determined. Good … and evil. I had murdered, and I had saved. I met the end of each new day in dogged defeat and precious victory, feet dragging and head held high. I had shed the sentence from my back with blood on my hands, always chasing the darkness to reach the light. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that Skayld wasn’t the name of the moon at all. It was my name. It was my every inconsistency, weakness and strength combined: a summation of who I was. It was my past and my future.