“Aster? Are you all right?”
I give a jerky nod. “I, uh, felt it. Felt her magic draining your skin.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you to look at it.” Her face is pinched and filled with anxiety.
And this is exactly what I didn’t want. More worry. More pity.
I swallow down all the spiders in my throat and shake off the lingering sense of cold that seems to have settled deep inside me.
“It’s all right.” I shake my head at her incredulous expression. “It just reminded me of being there. Being stuck there,” I tell her.
“Well, thanks for trying.” She gives me an exhausted smile. “But we’re never doing that again.”
Shifting back until I’m sitting with her skin still pooled in my lap, I carefully wrap it around her shoulders.
“I felt something, Reva,” I say. “Something that wasn’t just the sorceress’s magic.” Licking my lips, I say the next words softly enough that she leans in to hear them. “I think Noush is still in there.”
Her face flits through half a dozen emotions before she settles on a hesitant smile. “Yeah?”
I nod, squeezing the fingers that are still resting on my thigh. “We can try again.”
For her, I’d revisit the basement a thousand times.
She gives me a soft smile and squeezes my thigh again before getting to her feet. “Well, thank you. I should—” She jerks her head to the door. “—get some sleep. You should too.”
That small smile is enough to send me off with a warmth fighting off the chill in the air. She might not forgive me yet, but there’s a spark of something more powerful than magic in my chest.
Hope.
Chapter 3
Finch
It’s another damp day on the island, the air thick with rain as I wander through the woods. I’m soaked through by the time I head back to the house, mentally bracing myself for what I’m about to walk in on.
I bloody love my ship and my crew. But they’re a bunch of nutters, honestly.
“Cap.” Jack approaches from out of nowhere, making my tentacles whip up as if they’re ready to throw a punch. “I found something. More names on the list.”
Someone else has been busy, it seems. Jack’s been travelling in his raven form, going all over the kingdom to check if the arrest warrants have spread.
“Where?” I ask.
“To the north. It’d be at least a few hundred miles by road, I’d say,” he tells me.
I nod, that’s not too bad. Over two weeks later, and it seems like the king’s memories aren’t coming back to him as quickly as we’d feared.
“How many more names?” I ask. Just how fast is the net tightening around us?
“Only a couple,” Jack replies. “Slim Tony and Silvertooth.”
He’s standing in front of the front door even though it’s pissing with rain and my hood is plastered to my head. I’malready drenched, and I’d prefer not to develop webbed feet to add to my oddities. My eyebrow shoots up as I sidestep him before Jack reluctantly allows me through the door into the entrance hall. He then stands awkwardly in front of the door beside the kitchen. Something about the way he’s clearly trying to block my movements has my suspicions triggering.
“What don’t you want me to see?”
“I, er, brought some things back with me,” Jack says. “A bag of books and newspapers that Kit asked for.”
“All right, he asked for them, did he?”
