I kicked and struggled, and he shushed me, reaching for something. The tip of a blade slid behind my ear.
Another voice spoke—younger, gentler. The blade stilled. The two voices seemed to argue, and then a rag was stuffed in my mouth, a sack slipped over my head. My wrists were bound behind my back, and I was thrown over someone’s shoulder. I thrashed, drawing grunts of annoyance from whoever carried me.
The slap of waves told me I’d been brought down to the shore. I was tossed into what must have been the hull of a boat, wood scraping my arms. I flailed, trying to stand, but hands pushed me down. The younger voice murmured softly. The hood was pulled from my head.
My captor was tall and leanly muscled, but he was only a boy, not much older than me. Golden hair brushed his shoulders. His face was far too grave for his age, as if the world was a millstone worn about his neck.
We were in the stern of a small boat, bobbing just offshore. There were three other prisoners lying on their stomachs in the bow, tied up as I was, with sacks over their heads. In the dim moonlight, I could see the men bore no warrior-marks on their hands; they were not from Stony Harbor.
I scrambled to my feet and spit out the rag. “Don’t touch me.”
The boy stared at me curiously. His eyes were ocean blue. There were strange black markings around one of his eyelids.
From his belt, he drew a knife.
My foot caught on something as I tried to back away, and I tripped, toppling onto my side. The boy hovered above me, too big for me to fight. Maybe if I’d had my own knife, I’d have stood a chance, but it was strapped beneath my skirts, out of reach.
“Go on then,” I said. “Kill me.”
He grabbed my wrists, kneeling behind me. There was a long pause, and then the blade bit into me, slicing into the underside of my wrist as I cried out. It went on for a full minute before his palm brushed across the stinging cuts and an almost-pleasant heat simmered under my skin. He picked up the rag I’d spit out, and I felt him wrap it around my bleeding wrist. A moment later, the rope that bound me fell away. The boy hauled me to my feet.
“What did you do to me?” I motioned to the bloody rag on my wrist.
His eyes drifted over me again, but he remained silent.
“Whatever you want from me, you won’t get it.”
The boy looked up toward the forest, like he heard someone coming. He mumbled something. When I didn’t reply, he jostled me and spoke again, more insistent. “Svim? ” he asked, gesturing at the water.
Did he mean swim, as in, Can you swim? Confused, I nodded.
He shoved me off the boat.
I hit the water, cold seeping into me instantly. I swam hard, staying under as long as I could, aiming for one of the sea caves carved along the cliffs. Once I was inside the cave, I dug my fingers into the sloping rock wall and climbed onto a ledge. I waited there, shivering, until daylight seeped in.
By the time I made my way through the forest and back home, I was feverish. Father ordered sentries to scour the woods, but no trace was found of any intruders. It was assumed that I’d taken ill, fallen asleep on the bluffs, and dreamed it all. With no proof otherwise, I’d begun to believe it myself. No proof, except the mark on my wrist that could not be explained. Father suspected I’d cut myself out of grief, but I didn’t think so.
And each year since, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, when I crawled into bed after returning from my prayers at the bluffs, I dreamed of eyes the color of oceans.
Now, after all this time, here he was. Not a dream at all.
The ocean-eyed warrior coughed, water trickling from his mouth. No longer a boy, but a young man, exhausted and half-drowned, freezing in the harbor’s cold waters. He was blue enough that I’d thought him dead already. If I did nothing, he would die where he lay.
If I summoned a healer, Father would know. The man would be sent to the cells. He might be tortured for information or hanged as a spy.
What if he was a spy? I knew nothing about him. Just because he’d let me go that night didn’t mean he wasn’t a brute. He’d been creeping about in the forest in the company of other dangerous men; he’d cut me with a knife for no apparent reason.
The warrior clasped my wrist with what little strength he had left. “Hjalp mir,” he whispered through cracked, bleeding lips. I didn’t need to speak his language to understand. He’d suffered. He was no older than Garreth, and I thought of my brothers washing up on a foreign shore—how I hoped someone would take pity on them.
His thumb stroked the inside of my wrist, over the scar he’d left, and it pulsed with warmth in response, as if springing to life at his touch.
My choice would seal his fate, and I already had one man’s death on my conscience. There was only one way to decide.
Men could lie. Souls could not.
Carefully, I began to roll him over. When he gagged, I held him on his side as he retched up seawater. There were tears in his jerkin, traces of blood seeping through from injuries hidden beneath his clothes. Like the corpses on the beach, a warrior-mark adorned his right eye, but his was different. Instead of scales, black tendrils of fire curled across his eyelid—the markings I’d been unable to see clearly that night years ago. Its shape was oddly similar to the scar on my wrist.
I unfastened the collar of his tunic. There, resting in the hollow of his broad chest, lay a silver medallion. My medallion, attached to a loop of rope around his neck. The medallion was once my mother’s; I’d lost it that night when I was caught by his people in the forest. How had he gotten it? Why was he wearing it?
None too gently, I pulled the rope from around his neck and slipped it over my own. “This is mine, you bloody thief.”
Brushing salt and sand from his chest, I pressed my palm against his heart, opening my mind, seeking the core of his true self.
I did not touch his soul. I fell into it—like I’d been shoved off a cliff. It was all around me, submerging me in its wilderness. Images flickered, rippling like reflections on water; as I tried to grasp them, they trickled through my fingers. His soul was darkness and light, jagged and smooth, smoldering fire and crackling ice. It screamed and whispered. It was every shape, every color. Laden with guilt, buoyant with innocence. It was all things, all at once, and I was lost in it.
The strangest part was that I sensed him—his consciousness—floating there beside me. Watching me drown in him. Feeling everything I felt.
As I sank deeper, he pushed back, expelling me. Pain shot through my arms and I followed it, returning to my own mind. Gasping, I opened my eyes and met the man’s furious glare. His hands gripped my forearms, hard enough to bruise.
No soul felt like his—it defied their very nature. No one had ever been able to shove me out of their soul from within. “Who are you?” I demanded. “Where did you come from?”