She should know the name.
“You’re not a mage,” Cilla stated. “Why are you possessing her?”
Maart’s hands kept rising and moving together as if he wanted to say something, but Cilla had said all there was to say. She looked calm. She was good at that. Even when she was afraid, nervous, she hid it under tight smiles and nods.
This calm was new. Regal.
“Possessing her? No, no, Amara’s the mage, not me. I’m just a boy. Amara she pulls me in, she makes me see through her eyes,” her hands said. “Her mage powers they do this but she doesn’t know it. You have to tell her. You have to explain.”
The hands moved too fast. The inflections were wrong, as was the grammar—but not when Nolan wanted his words to work. When he cared enough to slow down.
Amara wanted to shake her head. She wanted to dash away, move backward, as though that would leave Nolan behind in the space where she now stood and leave her free. Her body didn’t listen. Her connection to it was severed. Amara was thoughts, nothing more. She couldn’t even move that lock of hair out of her eyes.
“So Amara’s responsible for doing this?” Cilla asked.
“Yes! She pulled me in for years, since before Jorn took her from the palace I’ve been in her head, since before the coup. Always in her head. Locked up. She sucks me in every time I close my eyes. She can do more than heal but she never knew.”
No. Amara couldn’t think beyond that single dim word: no. This was madness. This was beyond believing.
Maart was staring at Amara’s hands. Cilla scanned the rest of her. Her eyes dipped to the way Amara’s feet stood on the floor, wide and steady, then rose to the eagerness of her hands, and settled on her lips, her eyes. “I’ve never heard of this happening,” Cilla said. “Mages do odd things, but they don’t move into each other’s bodies.”
“They do!” Amara’s movements contained too much energy. “Amara does! Normally I can only watch, but now my medicine is changing something. Amara still pulls me in, but now I can … I can …” Her hands thrust out, then in, pressing to her breastbone. “I can move.”
Tears pricked Amara’s eyes. Nolan’s tears. Not hers. She knew, because if her body was her own, those tears would’ve shown up minutes ago.
“Where are you from?” Cilla asked, still calm. “Are you responsible for her blackouts?”
“Is she having a blackout now?” Maart asked.
“She must be,” the hands said. “That’s why you have to tell her.”
Yes. The hands. These were someone else’s hands, not hers, not right now. She was not in her own body but in someone else’s, deciphering what went on.
That was better. Easier.
“I’m not from here. Before, when Amara blacked out, I took over. I was the one who ran to the carecenter. I didn’t know what happened. This time, I wanted to test it. She must be having a blackout. I can’t feel her. Normally I can feel her thoughts, pain—everything—but she’s blank now.”
Not blank! she wanted to shout. I’m here I can see this I can see this! I’m here!
No point. Nolan couldn’t hear her.
But he said he could the rest of the time. For years. No, these words on her fingers couldn’t be true—she couldn’t trap anyone inside her head. Her thoughts were hers. The only things that were hers and no one else’s.
“Where are you from?” Cilla repeated. “‘Not from here’ can mean anywhere. Not from these islands? Not the Dunelands at all? Where, then? The Continent? The Alinean Islands? Eligon? The—”
Amara’s head shook. That lock of hair brushed back and forth over her forehead.
“Where?” Something insistent and hard crept into Cilla’s voice.
Another laugh that wasn’t hers. “I’m not from this world. Not from this … planet.”
The door opened. Jorn came inside with heavy boots, every step a creak and a cloud of old grain dust.
Abruptly, Amara crumpled. Her muscles sagged, her shoulders drooped, and it was as if those movements finally opened her lungs to her. She drew in air, lifted her head, pumped her lungs full, gasping for more and more and more, in and out, and—was she back? She screwed her hands into fists, curled her toes inside too-hot boots, and felt her exhales turn to near-sobs.
Her body. Hers.
“Shouldn’t you be preparing dinner?” Jorn asked Maart.
Maart bounced away as if stung. “Yes. Sorry.” He backed up to the food cart. Early winterbugs buzzed around the fish. He waved them off, no longer looking at Amara, not wanting to direct Jorn’s attention her way.
Cilla didn’t move, though. The skin over her jaw tightened. She must think Amara was still … not her. She’d be worried that this Nolan might cause trouble with Jorn.
Nolan. Amara repeated the name, committing it to memory, although she didn’t think she could forget it, ever.
She finally brushed that lock of hair away from her forehead. “One of Cilla’s brush hairs fell from the stem,” she told Jorn. Amara let her hands move slowly, deliberately, the way they hadn’t when Nolan directed them. Every sign its place and time. “It could prick her if it slipped inside her winterwear.”
“So get behind a grain cart and take off your wear,” Jorn told Cilla irritably. “Princess.”
“I planned to.” All Cilla’s reserve seeped away. “I thought, if it was easier for them to check like this …”
“It looks clear,” Amara said. “But you should make certain.”
Cilla turned toward the nearest cart, but her eyes lingered on Amara, long enough for Amara to dip her head. I’m here, she wanted to say. It’s me.
Jorn wouldn’t respond well to this development. Even the way he regarded Amara now put her on edge, made her want to escape. He knew she was hiding something.
She couldn’t let him take her back to Drudo palace as Ruudde had told him to. She didn’t want to think about what would happen there. She didn’t want to think about anything.
What did Nolan mean, he was in her head?
13
It worked.
Until Jorn entered and the shock launched Nolan back to himself, he’d pulled it off. He wasn’t worthless. He could move—walk—laugh. He wasn’t trapped behind Amara’s eyes anymore.
At dinner he was nauseated and jittery, more concerned with picking out Amara’s thoughts than anything else. He’d scared her. He’d assumed she’d been gone, but her thoughts now made it clear he’d been wrong. How did that work? How could he sense her normally but not when he steered her body?
Amara was a mess as she worked and ate. Nolan’s name cropped up in her thoughts every few seconds, sometimes as signs and sometimes as sounds. The word sounded odd in her mind—the syllables too choppy—but it was his name. She’d never thought his name before.
Nolan hardly touched dinner, giving half-there answers and disappearing for too-long blinks that had his parents exchanging knowing looks. The pills aren’t working, they had to be thinking, and, for once, they were wrong.
After dinner, he found himself scrubbing even the bottom of the dinner plates twice. He kept the dishes low in the sink in case they slid from his hands. The Dunelands startled him too often for him to take risks holding anything fragile.
Scrub, rinse, stack. The water soaked into his fingers. Soap bubbles covered everything, popping open with the scent of lemon.
Nolan hadn’t meant to freak out Amara. When she’d first drawn him in, she’d been away from her family and working at the Bedam palace—Drudo palace, now—for only a few months. Nolan had been five; Amara must’ve been around the same age. The years worked differently there, and so did the days. Amara’s were longer by over an hour. It made time hard to calculate.