Page 103 of The Thief and the Traitor Bride

He was already leaving when she woke, opening her eyes just as the door shut. Nore lay there, still and silent, for a full minute. Then she pulled on a warm dress and thick socks and her boots, stealing Caspian’s heavy coat from the wardrobe.

She could not shake the discussion she’d overheard last night and the implications of it. There was something thick and uncomfortable growing in her, an anxiety stirring in her stomach that she could no longer avoid.

But what did she have to go on? An assumption? A similarity between a woman and a myth, and a desperate desire to understand something that had nothing to do with her? It was silly, every part of it, and yet Nore felt her anxiety growing as she wrote a note to Gail to let him know she wouldn’t make breakfast, then headed away from the inn, toward the northern stretches of the Isle.

The road was quieter today; she wouldn’t be surprised to hear that most of the Isle was still in bed instead of heading up to the commander’s training session on the fortress grounds. But Nore did not veer that way: again, she took the path through the skinny trees as the fog rolled in. She wished she’d brought some sort of light, since the fog was thick and dark, but she preferred to move obscured through it.

She was unsurprised to find the same woman from before sitting atop one of the sepulchers with her knees hugged to her chest. She was alone again, a solitary figure in the mist, as still as the stone statues around her.

A hunch. A suspicion.

Nore had spent so much time looking at the map of the Isle, studying this little section: there was a way to get to the Ghostwood from the fortress, she was certain; she thought it would be protected from both curious eyes and the Isle’s winds, if one went about it quietly enough in the early hours of morning.

She’s never alone.

Nore could not bear to squander this lead.

“Are you going to tell me about your ghosts today?” Nore asked.

The woman looked up, her mouth curling into a half smile. “Lindan.”

“I’m a woman, not a country,” Nore said. She nodded all the same, and said, “Well met.”

“Is that how you greet one another in Lindle?” the woman asked. She moved over, leaving Nore room to join her on the large rectangular slab. Nore thought for half a second about what Edith would say about Nore sitting on the lap of the dead, and then she decided she cared more about the mysterious woman than she ever had about her false aunt’s opinions, especially with Nore’s suspicions nearly confirmed. Nore levered herself up, letting her legs hang down.

“Yes,” she said. She spoke the phrase again, in Lindle. The woman tried it, but the words were blunted in her mouth. She laughed, shaking her head, and Nore had the distinct feeling that she had received something precious in hearing that laugh.

“The ghosts,” Nore said, redirecting. “Which one scares you the most?

“It’s called the Ghostwood,” the woman said dryly. She gestured to the mist. “There are too many to choose from, I daresay.”

“Do you believe in them?”

“Of course.” She folded her bare hands in front of her mouth, blowing warmth into them. “I don’t think one could live here, on the Isle, and not embrace the ghosts.”

Nore didn’t know that much about the Isle’s death other than what Terlo had told her and some reading she’d done on the ship over from Lindan. “Do you feel them here, still?”

“I fear sometimes I spend more time with the ghosts than the living.” The woman closed her eyes, and Nore remembered how she’d looked the other day with the wind whipping at her hair.

A woman with the walls closing in. With ghosts haunting her every word and move.

“Not many friends?” Nore asked, mirroring the woman’s previous dry tone.

She snorted. “You’ve come out swinging today, Lindan.”

“I’ve had a trying evening.” And I’m trying to discover as much as I can before your guard goes up.

“Mm.” She straightened, rolling her shoulders. “That makes two of us. And I have plenty of friends. Too many, I daresay.”

“A tragedy,” Nore said, thinking through each word, “to have more friends than one knows what to do with.”

Nore herself had never been in such a situation. She found herself, oddly, thinking of Celestine.

“That it is.” Nore’s companion sighed, unfurling, dangling her legs over the edge in a mirror of Nore’s posture. “I don’t suppose you have any hot tea in those big sleeves of yours.”

Nore felt herself smiling. “No,” she said. “Sorry. Perhaps you should choose more carefully, when it comes to places to think in solitude.”

The other woman laughed—another victory, Nore thought—and said, “There are no other places on this Isle where one can be alone.” She fussed with the edge of her cloak. Nore looked closer, taking in the rings on her fingers: one on her left thumb, one on the ring finger of her left hand, one on the pointer finger of her right. The only one of with any distinct characteristics was the one on her right, and Nore could not make out the design from where she sat. “Too many people. Too little space.”