I craned my head up, watching as she stopped at my feet. She climbed up onto the table, her bare feet on the emerald stone, and looked down at me.
“Her halo is so dark,” she said, and exhaled roughly through her teeth. “Like there’s a storm just above her head.”
Outside, thunder clapped, as if she had summoned it, and honestly, I couldn’t say for sure that she hadn’t.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Usually, your aura is lemon yellow, clear and bright,” Tove answered carefully. “Right now it’s … it’s flickering between murky gray and dark orange, with a black cloud around your head and dark particles floating around you.”
“And that means I have my work cut out for me,” Sunniva simplified. “Lie back, stay still. You’ll feel better if you close your eyes. This shouldn’t hurt too much, but if it does, tell Tove.”
My mouth had gone dry, but I managed to say, “Okay.”
She pushed the sleeves of her mint-colored blouse up to her elbows, and when she held her hands toward me, her gold bangles clinked together.
“Close your eyes,” she commanded tersely, so I did, and thunder rumbled loud enough to shake the room. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I was in Isarna–”
“You don’t need to say it,” she said, cutting me off. “Just hold it in your mind.”
Riding in the carriage, pulled by Tralla horses on the island of Isarna, the museum in Öhaus with the bedazzled fox skull, kissing Pan in my hotel room, the lined face of Indu as he told me that he was my father—
—and then it was pain cracking through my skull, and I cried out. I flinched, unable to stop myself, and the pain subsided.
“I told you to lie still,” Sunniva said flatly.
Tove scoffed. “Sunniva, she’s in pain.”
“The process can hurt,” she said, sounding only slightly sympathetic. “But it’s the only way I know how to do this.”
I opened my eyes, only for a moment, and Sunniva’s dark brown eyes were glowing silver as she scowled down at me.
“I need you to go back to the memory, the one you were on when it started to hurt,” she commanded.
I took a fortifying breath and pushed through the fog of my mind. Indu’s face smirking at me shifted to a young woman with his blue eyes under thick eyebrows. My sister Noomi.
The pain flared again, a crackling expanding inside my skull, but I gritted my teeth and focused on Noomi. She was glaring at me through the iron bars, and her mouth was moving, but the words came out slightly delayed, sounding far away and warbled.
“You will go, but you will not remember any of this,” Noomi promised me. “The inovotto muitit is absolute agony as the memories are ripped from your mind.”
“Why do you hate me so much?” I asked her emptily.
“I hate you because you exist,” she said coldly.
My head felt like it was going to explode, and I groaned in pain.
“Stay with it,” Sunniva said firmly. “I know it hurts, but I need you to stay in it.”
Noomi’s face appeared before me again, but it was different, from another day. Bold stripes of cobalt blue across her eyes and bloodred on her narrow lips. Her hair was plaited tight to her scalp, woven with strips of leather.
“Is it time to go?” I asked.
“There’s been a change of plans,” she said with a wicked smile.
“You can’t just take her!” Dagny said, and despite her conviction, her words were soft and far away, like they were being carried on the wind.
But then cuffs were on my wrists, made of a strange oxidized metal that left it more jade than copper. They were heavy, far heavier than they’d looked in Noomi’s hands, and the metal burned my skin.
“Where are you taking her?” That was Pan in the prison cell across from mine, his face pressed against the bars, an arm outstretched through the narrow gap between them.
Noomi didn’t answer him and instead led me down the long narrow hall, out of the dungeon and into the darkness.
And then a doorway appeared, glowing a pale orange, and Noomi pulled on my shackles, dragging me along. Through the door was a small, sparse room with a large apothecary table by the far wall. Half-melted marigold candle pillars burned dimly on top of that, the wax pooling on the warped wood.
In the center of the room, four men were standing around an empty bed.
And then another memory overlapped it—Pan lying on the same bed, his blood pooling on the floor around him.
I must’ve been squirming because I heard Sunniva tell Tove to keep me still, and I was only dimly aware of an ambient pressure around my body, pressing me to the floor.
But I was barely cognizant of that, and even the burning pain inside my skull didn’t affect me much. It hurt like hell, but it was more like it was happening to someone else, in another room.
I was in the medica as Noomi led me to the narrow cot surrounded by four men. Indu Mattison stood at the head. To his left was a hunched-over older man, hidden by the hood of his crimson robe. He was the häxdoktor, and his name—Lemak Axelson—appeared in my mind.
The two men to my father’s left were young—the older of the two was maybe my age, but the other had a doughy face and looked fifteen or sixteen. They wore gray kaftans, plain compared to Indu’s with the runic designs.
“What do you want with me?” I asked as Lemak, the häxdoktor, began unwinding a long rubbery tube.
“Everything will be okay, Violetta.” Indu’s voice was like syrup as he used the name my mother had given me, and he patted the cot with his meaty hand. “Lie down and it will be over soon.”
I told him I didn’t want to but then I was on the cot anyway, and the younger men were holding me down. Indu held my left arm away from my body, his fingers digging painfully into the soft flesh of my forearm.
“It will only hurt for a moment, Violetta,” Indu tried to assure me as the häxdoktor screwed a long metal syringe needle onto the end of the tube.
“My name is Ulla,” I said through gritted teeth, and I felt the burning stab as Lemak jabbed the needle into my arm.
From the corner of my eye, I could see the blood, dark and red, as it flowed through the semi-opaque tubing.
“Why are you taking my blood?” I asked.
As I turned my head to get a better look, a dozen images flashed before my eyes. In the same place, the pale skin of my inner arm facing up toward the pale orange light.
My unmarred skin flashed to swollen, bloody track marks to the needle into my arm to an inky black spider crawling down my elbow. And then, for a split second, the cuff was gone, replaced by a friendship bracelet made with bright string and plastic beads.
Somewhere, far away, my body was on fire, the flames eating through my skull, and I faintly heard Sunniva telling me to hang on just a bit longer. But I couldn’t do it. It all hurt too much.
I opened my eyes, and I was staring at the dark stone bricks of my prison cell. The wood bunk was hard and cold against my back, and Dagny wiped a cold rag against my face.
“What’s going on?” I asked her weakly. “Why are you doing that?”
“You’re sick, Ulla,” she said, but her voice cut out. Dagny’s mouth was moving, but it was Sunniva’s voice that came through. “I don’t think you can take much more of this.”