Amara quietly shook her head, then pulled the window curtains aside a few fingerwidths to look out at the farm. Yesterday, all she’d seen of the servant house was a few squares of rain-diluted light. Now, in the clear dawn, she saw that the house was bigger than she’d thought, though one corner had sunk into the ground. Servants ran in and out, humming and gesturing animatedly. She should join them in their songs and their work; at least that, she knew. They were more her people than the girl in the bathtub behind her. She even recognized the tune two servants were humming, though she hadn’t heard it in years.
And, yes, of course, Cilla was trying. Amara ought to be nicer. She ought to apologize. But she didn’t know how much of that was what she wanted to do and how much of it was what she should do. When those two worked in unison, how could she trust herself?
She couldn’t sort out what she’d felt for Cilla before, with Jorn’s words in her ears and Maart’s lips on her forehead, and she couldn’t now, either. Not until Maart’s death felt real, not in the midst of all this.
It had only been a day.
Amara almost turned when Cilla spoke again. “I know how you feel, you know.”
Amara nailed her feet to the ground and studied the silos alongside the barn.
“It scares me just as much when you’re angry at me,” Cilla said. Water splashed. “It might mean that the next time someone hits me, you’ll stand by and watch. And I know standing by is exactly what I’ve always done, but I—I don’t—” An audible swallow. “I don’t want to die.”
Amara knew she was right. With Jorn gone, Cilla relied on Amara more than the other way around. It didn’t feel like it, though, not with Amara’s bones and her mind and her everything still telling her that Cilla was in charge and not Amara. Like a stain she couldn’t scrub clean.
“And no,” Cilla went on, “I didn’t kiss you because I rely on you. I kissed you because I covet you.”
The hunger in her voice heated Amara’s skin.
She was still contemplating an answer when her hands moved of their own accord. Nolan. “I didn’t want to interrupt—I’m sorry. I didn’t know when I’d find you alone again. Listen: N-UU-M-E-DD-I-K-S.” Nolan made her spell. “That’s not a Dit word, is it?”
Amara waited until he left her. “No,” she said, almost relieved at the intrusion. “According to Captain Olym, it’s a term the ministers coined to describe the air-pressure system for the airtrains.”
“Listen: my language has the same word. P-N-EU-M-A-D-I-K-S. It’s pronounced similarly, and it means exactly the same thing. Pressurized air.”
Cilla’s voice came sharply from behind Amara. “Is he back?”
Amara made a quarter turn so Cilla could see her hands and explanation, but she kept her eyes averted. Water spattered against the sides of the tub as Cilla moved. Amara smelled coals and flower-scented soap. “It’s the same word?” she asked. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
It dawned on Amara at the same time Nolan signed. “I’ve been thinking about it all night. Numediks”—he had to spell it again; if a sign for the word existed, none of them knew it—“are a recent invention here, right? We knew the concept long before you did. Someone must’ve brought the technology here. If the ministers coined the term when they built the air-trains, at least one of them is like me. Either they’re from your world and visited mine, or they’re from my world and brought that knowledge to yours.”
Of course Nolan couldn’t be the only one.
“I think it’s the latter, and I think it’s more than just one minister,” Nolan continued. “The Dit mage mentioned she’d heard of ministers inviting spirits in. She was wrong about my being a spirit. She might be wrong about them, too. If people like me traveled here, their healing could just be a side effect, nothing to do with the spirits at all.”
When she could, Amara nodded slowly. With their healing, people like Nolan would be powerful no matter what, and the possibility of combining that healing with a minister’s influence and a mage’s magic might be too tempting for them to resist. That magic would be infinite: their healing meant they’d never need to recover from their spells.
“So it is possible to choose bodies?” Cilla asked.
“I don’t know,” Nolan said before Amara realized he’d taken over again. “It must be. I need pills to control when I travel. If other people don’t have that limitation, who knows what they could do?” He seemed to hesitate. “I thought you ought to know. I’ll go now.”
Amara flexed her hands, making her skin her own again.
“So what does this mean?” Cilla asked, hesitant.
Amara shut her eyes. She stank of old sweat, and the sun shone brightly as though yesterday’s storm had never happened, and the servants hummed on and on as they worked. It made the day taste falsely of summer.
Did this change anything? Whose side were these ministers on?
“I don’t know.”
Overnight, several of the ship’s passengers had chosen to travel by land, but Olym had picked up a handful of new ones in town. The sea didn’t calm down until the afternoon, and they were halfway to Bedam when the storm returned so hard and suddenly that there was no chance of it being anything but backlash. Within minutes clouds crept into the sky; by the time the first passenger commented, Captain Olym was herding everyone but crew belowdecks.
Stay here! Amara told Nolan, and repeated it until she was sure he got the message.
Waves beat against the hull, splashed up the sides, pushed in through cracks despite the storm covers over the side-scuttles—although maybe that wasn’t the sea but the rain. There was no way to distinguish between them. Amara and Cilla crept into a corner away from the crowd. At least a dozen people huddled by tables and chairs in Captain Olym’s sitting room, amid cabinets and gas lamps and that map of the Dunelands’ islands against the wall. Amara noted every creak of wood, every time a passenger moved closer.
The companionway opened. They saw a tilted view of the world outside, dark as the night—then lit up with lightning so bright it left them blinded.
“Lights out!” Captain Olym shouted through the cries of the wind. “Backlash might affect them. Last thing we need now’s a fire!” A wave rocked the ship sideways. Captain Olym grabbed the doorpost as her feet slipped over wood as slick as oil. Water spilled from the deck down the steps. She slammed the companionway shut.
They had just one crew member belowdecks, an Alinean boy maybe a year older than Amara, who was supposed to keep an eye on the passengers. He stumbled from one corner to the other to extinguish the lamps.
“At least we have enough water to put out a fire, right?” a passenger bellowed.
Nervous laughter broke off when something slammed into the aft wall. People jumped back as though waiting for the wall to burst.
“It’s from inside the cargo cabin,” the crew member said, an Alinean accent weaved into his words. “Nothing to be scared of.”
Cilla crept closer to Amara. They kept cautious eyes on the wall and the passengers.
“Can we make it to shore?” an older woman asked. “Or will we wait it out?”
“That’s—um—that’s up to the captain.”
Amara’s eyes were getting used to the dark, allowing her to see the way the boy shot constant, nervous glances at the companionway.
“This is ridiculous!” a different woman said. She had to shout to be heard over the stomping of heavy boots on the deck above, endless sheets of rain, and cracks of thunder so loud Amara jumped every time. “First we have to wait all night and morning, and now this? I should’ve been in Bedam yesterday afternoon.”