That wasn’t right, Jorn couldn’t heal—
Nolan’s connection with Cilla snapped loose. Suddenly there were thick bars in his vision, and past them, the back of Amara’s head, her dust-matted hair.
Pain tore Nolan apart. He looked down, seeing a broken arm and blood on black skin. Ilanne. He’d left Cilla’s body, moving into Ilanne’s, lying outside the cell—
He snapped free a second time. Pain pulsed through Nolan’s head. Whose body was he in now? A marshal’s? Jorn’s? No, Jorn lay beside him on the floor, no longer healing. The skin on his temple, where the beam had hit, had reattached itself but not yet smoothed over, and the area around the V-shaped cut turned rapidly darker. Jorn blinked slowly. He slurred words Nolan couldn’t make out.
How was Cilla? Nolan couldn’t see her. A scream distracted him—not the muted shouts from outside the cell block, where the mages were still fighting, and not the marshals as they dove to evade falling stones, but something else, shapeless, unformed. It came from inside the cell. Amara was shouting words she had no tongue to form. She half turned, enough for Nolan to see her claw at her mouth. Her eyes spread, panicked.
It wasn’t her. Nolan knew in a heartbeat.
“What’s happening—why am I—” a marshal shouted. She was studying her hands, the fingers curling. No, not her hands. Few people had their own hands left. Every last spell of Cilla’s was tipping sideways. The curse, shredding the walls and agitating the metal; the anchor and Nolan, tearing travelers from their bodies and flinging them into others.
A cell beam caught Nadi in the hip. She screamed and staggered into the cell. She tried to support herself on the walls, but her injured leg gave way, and she slid to the floor. Maybe she wasn’t Nadi anymore; maybe this was just Ruudde. He stayed down, hand pressed to his hip.
He wasn’t healing, Nolan realized. It had to be Ruudde.
Nolan dragged himself to the cell. He had to check on Cilla and Amara. He stepped past Jorn, who was pushing himself to a sitting position against the hallway walls. He stared at his hands. Tears slipped over his cheeks and dangled from the scruff on his chin. He whispered something, nearly lost in the chaos. It had sounded like mine.
Nolan slowed. Why would Jorn cry? Or look at his hands like that? He was turning them to see his palms, his stare not shocked or confused but awed, and he touched his fingers to his lips, eyes shut, as if savoring the moment.
Nolan stepped toward him—
Saw the world from Cilla’s eyes for a flash of a second—
Then another body pulled him in, this one lying on the cold floor. Nolan pried the body’s eyes open. A turned-over bench lay by his side. His chest ached, but the pain crept away. He raised his arm. The yellow-brown skin of the Jélis. The green-cuffed sleeves of the marshals. He was possessing Gacco.
Nolan stood. He reached Jorn in two uneven steps, then fell to his knees. “Jorn?” Gacco’s lips moved clumsily. Too thick, too wide, too dry. His teeth felt odd, too.
Nolan checked the cut on Jorn’s temple. It wasn’t healing. This had to be Jorn. A Jorn who was crying and awestruck instead of angry, instead of protecting Cilla from all this chaos …
The real Jorn. Maybe for the first time.
Why had they needed Amara, then? Whatever traveler had controlled Jorn for so long could’ve distracted the curse for Cilla himself.
A lump formed in Nolan’s throat. He knew the answer. He’d shouted it at Nadi: No traveler wanted to deal with the pain that came with guarding Cilla. The traveler must’ve suppressed the healing all those years, or healed out of sight, wrapping up nonexistent wounds, to keep Cilla and Amara in the dark.
“Yes,” Jorn said. “Jorn.”
“Why would—” Nolan cut himself short when Jorn’s head snapped back. His eyes unfocused. The purple started to seep away from the bruise on his temple, the skin knitting up. Within seconds, the healing stopped, and Jorn was himself again.
“We don’t have long.” Nolan marveled at the taste of Dit in his mouth. It wasn’t like reciting sentences at home. Gacco’s body knew the words as well as it knew air. “Who cast the anchor spell?”
In his peripheral vision, a marshal stumbled toward them. She extended her arms, fingers straining wide as if to summon magic. The marshal wasn’t a mage, though. The air around her hands didn’t shift; the magic didn’t crackle. It told Nolan who controlled that body, though—Nadi, or the traveler who had possessed Jorn for so long.
And they were trying to attack Nolan. In all this chaos, that, not protecting Cilla, was their goal.
Nolan knew enough. He whirled back to face Jorn. “You?” he whispered.
Jorn had cast the anchor spell. They must’ve wanted him close to Cilla in case she fled. He could track her better than anyone.
Jorn nodded. His eyes looked different. Softer. He swallowed and hesitated in a way the Jorn that Nolan knew hadn’t done in years. “I—I know you have to—”
To—what?
Behind Nolan, more stones crashed to the floor. He recoiled, then checked over his shoulder. The possessed guard who’d been coming their way now leaned against the wall. Instead, Amara stalked toward Nolan and Jorn. She picked up Ilanne’s hooked blade and moved determinedly around debris and injured bodies, then dove sideways, avoiding another swing of a cell beam.
It wasn’t her.
A crack in the cell’s ceiling loosened more stones. One crashed onto Nolan’s hand and rolled onto the floor. He hissed, but even as his hand healed, he wrapped it around the stone to feel its weight. Heavy. And Nolan’s arm—Gacco’s—was strong. Nothing but lean muscle.
“Oh,” he whispered.
“Do it. Fix it.” Jorn’s voice was steady. His eyes weren’t.
“This isn’t what I meant. This isn’t …” But Nolan’s fingers tightened around the stone, rough and cold against his skin. He felt himself pried loose from Gacco’s body again, but he latched on, begging for a few more seconds. He needed to stay by Jorn’s side just a little longer. Jorn needed to stay himself for just another moment.
He looked at Amara, footlengths away now. She shouted something.
Nadi, Nolan thought with odd impassiveness. Something about the way she walked just screamed Nadi at him. He smiled anyway. It was still Amara’s face, her eyes. She still watched him from somewhere in there. He hoped she saw his smile. He hoped she knew what it meant, because he would never have the chance to explain.
Jorn’s tears welled up again, gathering in his eyelashes.
Nolan imagined him burning Amara’s hands. Hitting Maart’s grave with the back of his shovel. That made it easier.
Not fair, but easier.
Jorn trembled as he spoke. “I don’t want to—I’m—I’m s—”
Nolan brought the stone down, right on that purple, fragile bruise.
44
Jorn seized and spasmed and then, from one moment to the next, the room’s chaos died down and Amara’s body was her own again. The cell bars froze in place. Amara stumbled. So did a marshal down the hall; so did Gacco, who stared at the stone in his hand, then at the body he was hunched over. He dropped the stone and scrambled back.