Magic of Blood and Sea

This next spell is a bit more involved, I’m afraid.” He was laying out the rest of the stuff I’d bought for him, the powders and the uman flower. “I’ll be stepping out of myself for some time. I have questions that need answering.” A long pause, like he expected me to say something. “You really don’t have to stay. It’s . . . Well, I’m doing something very rare, full ack’mora—I wouldn’t expect . . .” He straightened up, ran one hand through his tangled-up hair. “Though I ask that you stay in the hotel. My . . . oath. I’m not sure what would happen to me if you got caught up in danger while I’m away.”

All that talking, and the only thing I could say in response was, “Away?”

He nodded.

“The Mists?”

“Curses, no.” He shook his head. “We call it Kajjil—there’s no translation.”

“But it’s a place?”

He stopped messing with the powder vials on the bed and looked me hard in the eye. “I’m not allowed to discuss it with outsiders,” he said, and I understood that well enough, being a daughter of the Pirates’ Confederation and all.

I used the language of pirates to tell him I understood, which was a joke, because I knew there wasn’t no way for him to know what it meant. But he kind of half smiled at me, not with his mouth but with the skin around his eyes, and got to work.

This one was a lot weirder to watch, ’cause it wasn’t nothing like the bits of magic I’d dabbled in before. Most of it centered on the uman flower. He spent a while mixing up pinches and shakes of the powders I’d brought him in some big clay bowl that looked like it’d come from the inn’s kitchen. Then he set the uman flower on the floor and cast a big circle around it with the powders. The knife came out again, only this time he cut along one of the tattoos on his arm, and he splashed the blood onto the circle, right on the flower like we weren’t in an inn.

He said some words and then he sung some words and then he stepped inside the circle, and everything got real screwy.

The room fell dark, first off, even though the lamp was still flickering over in the corner. It just didn’t cast no light. Neither did Naji’s tattoos, which had taken to glowing as well. It was like the darkness was so thick it swall

For the first time, I understood the difference between leaving and not staying. It was the difference between a snarl and a smile.

But I looked at his eyes, where the brightness was. And everything changed.

He kissed every part of me. Every time he kissed me he told me that he loved me, and after a while I knew I had to believe him.

His eyes brightened. For a minute a tightness pinched in my chest. I thought about the man from the Mists smiling for me like he was Naji. But he wasn’t Naji. Because this was Naji’s smile.

I told myself he didn’t have to be bound to me at all in order to love me.

He was thinking of me as he lay dying in a world between worlds.

I found him.

I found his thoughts, warmed by blood, thin blood, weak blood. He was thinking about food and water. He was thinking about me.

“Love is a wound,” the assassin said. “Neither life nor death.”

That was what kissing Naji was like: the best day at sea, warm sunlight and cool breeze. Happiness.

Kissing Naji was happiness.