Page 4

“It’s different this time,” I clipped. “The map comes from the outside.”

Kanuk tramped around me to give his tiger a stroke between the ears. “With all due respect, Jagaros, everything that comes from the outside seems to give me another dozen gray hairs. Including those humans you brought in. I swear, I’ve never seen a group of living beings look so much like the dead.”

Well, that’s what happens when you’re tortured and turned into literal monsters, I thought, but kept my lips pressed in a firm line. Nobody needed to know the specifics about a past the exiled ones had been subjected to against their will. “I trust they’ve been given food and shelter?” I asked Kanuk sharply.

He gave a sardonic dip of his head. “Mani’s ecstatic to have new throats to stuff food and medicine into, and you know as well as I do that there are plenty of abandoned houses for them to occupy.”

I did, and God of the Cosmos knew it twisted a spear of agony into my gut when he said it. But even the familiar sense of failure couldn’t overpower the excitement humming in my fingertips at a new map. A new possibility.

A new maybe.

Yenatin raised his eyebrows at me. With a shake of my hands, the tome that Rayna Drey had left for me thunked onto the surface, just as thick as it was heavy. The gold lettering on the front shimmered in the rays of the sun pouring down: Creepers and Crawlers of the Past, Present, and Future.

Kanuk made a show of gazing around with a pinch of his brows. “Is the map in the room with us? Or is the map an experience? Maybe,” he said, turning to Yenatin, “the more we learn about caterpillars and butterflies, the more we feel a map in here.” He pressed a hand to his heart.

“Yenatin,” I said politely, and held out my hand. The elderly faerie gripped the edges of the table and, with a raspy sigh, passed over his cane.

Which I used to whack my asshole of a brother over the head.

“Fuck!” Kanuk massaged his head. “I let you mimic my appearance and this is the thanks I get? Here.” He lunged for the cane. “Let’s give you a matching bruise, then.”

I twisted the cane out of his reach, thwacked it against his stomach, and then handed it back to Yenatin as Kanuk doubled over with a wheeze.

“Trust me, brother, I much prefer the tiger’s form. I just needed some proper hands for this.”

Flipping through the pages of the tome, I kept my eye out for extra ink and finally stopped at page nine-hundred and ninety-nine. There, scrawled over the printed matter in intricate detail, was a map of the island and three surrounding continents that made my heart pound against my ribcage.

Yenatin peered down at it, squinting through his spectacles.

“It’s hard to read. Whoever drew it doesn’t have the best of handwriting.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but it looks like there are new cities our people have never known about or recorded.” I pointed at a label in southeast Sorronia. “There. Avivarre. I’ve never heard of it, have you? It must be new.”

Excitement began to thrum through each of my nerves, lighting up the hope that had long started rotting away. Over the last five hundred years of our imprisonment in the Uninhabitable Zone, the world around us had morphed and grown and changed… which meant the world maps had changed, too. And Yenatin’s magic needed current maps in order to work properly.

The elderly faerie, though, still looked skeptical. A mask to hide his pain.

“I can certainly try again. But Jagaros.” He lifted his head to meet my eyes, and that mask splintered. “If this does not work, you must promise me that you will be done. That we will be done.”

Kanuk’s tiger huffed, no doubt sensing the exasperation brewing in my chest. I would never be done. I would never stop trying to right the wrongs of the past. But if these were the terms Yenatin had set, I’d have to respect his boundaries and find a different way to find her.

Magic at his age, after all, was extremely tiresome.

I nodded. “Okay.”

Kanuk himself snorted now at my obvious lie, and I shot him a glare, but Yenatin didn’t notice. He had finally closed his eyes and settled one of his liver-spotted hands gently on the open page.

Unlike the five powers that the witch on the mountain milked, enhanced, and injected into her citizens, every innate faerie power was as unique as a fingerprint, and just as hard to define. Not even Yenatin himself knew how his magic worked, exactly, only that it magnified his intuitive senses ten-fold.

If you gave him a good, working map, his fingers could pinpoint the location of anyone he’d ever met. Back when Ranuq had been a bustling empire and there were enough younglings to sneak away or get lost among the island ravines and swamps, he had been the one to find them without fail—to bring them home.

Now, my jaw clenched as his fingers began to trail lazily over the paper, shaking slightly. I’d dug up every map I could find in the palace, slapped every one on a table before him, and given him one name.

And he’d always ended his search with a defeated shake of his head.

“I can’t sense her. It’s like she fell off the face of the world.”

Those words had been uttered to me so many times that I almost felt like I could hear them now, but Yenatin kept his mouth firmly pressed in a thin line, his eyes still closed, his touch roaming over the ink in shuddering stops and starts. At one point, his finger stopped for nearly thirty seconds in the middle of the human territories, Pliyith, and my gaze widened at the spot.