Page 36 of Heart’s Rescue

“Sorry,” I mutter.

I turn away, grasping desperately for whatever realization I’d had before the memory I’d been trying to swallow all morning had burst forward to drown me. I’m tired, and exhaustion rubs at the weak places in my mind, grinding sand into the cracks. The parchment in my hands rustles in the wind.

That’s it. The wind. I meet Rowan's gaze and try to smile.

“Wind,” I say. “This is the only place I’ve felt the wind.”

Rowan's eyes widen, and then a grin spreads across his face.

“Heh,” he says, and it’s just the word, not actually a laugh. “How ‘bout that. You noticed.” His eyes drop to the parchment, then back to me. “You figure it out yet?”

I turn to the page in my hands, running my gaze along the interlocking circles. There’s nothing to suggest wind in either the circles or the numbers. There’s the sketch that looks like a face, and then the three bumps on a point, like a key. There’s the cloud.

The cloud. There are no clouds down here. Rowan has never seen the stars, so he’s probably never seen a cloud either. I trace the little sketch with the tips of my fingers.

How would you draw the wind?

“This one,” I say.

Rowan rocks back on his heels. He looks almost obscenely pleased, especially considering I had a knife to his throat this morning.

“Well, lady,” he says, “I take it back. I guess you can read a map.”

“Hardly!” The word forces its way through my lips, followed by a sharp laugh. I identified one feature on his bizarre void chart. I still couldn’t read the cursed thing to save my life.

“This is a terrible map,” I declare.

This is a brilliant map. I don’t dare say so; Rowan’s already smiling, and that’s unsettling enough.

“Glad you like it,” he replies.

Rowan leans forward and gently tugs the chart from my fingers. Our eyes meet long enough for my breath to catch in my throat, and then he steps back, folds the parchment, and tucks it into the pocket of his jacket.

“I need to get a better view,” Rowan says, tilting his head at the forest behind us. “I’m gonna climb that tree and take some measurements. Don’t wander off, ‘k?”

I swallow hard. My mouth seems to have gone dry, and my heart is thumping like I’m actually considering running off, but my legs feel strange and trembly. Rowan walks toward the trees, and I spin around to stare off into the distance beyond the bluff.

Rowan… unsettles me.

I know how to handle everyone in my life. Protocol dictates how to behave around the terrifying King of the Summer, around Father and Mother, and around my beloved. Even the words I exchange with my brother Petya, who likes to pretend he’s above all this etiquette nonsense, are always poured perfectly into the rigid molds of our roles. I know the right kinds of curtseys and greetings and the steps to all the dances. It’s a world of straight lines and sharp corners, and I know just where to walk to avoid getting cut.

But none of that applies down here. Or, more honestly, none of that applies to Rowan. His brother and I fell instantly into the same kind of patterns, of batting my eyelashes and listening politely to tame jokes. Interacting with Phaedron, despite his injuries and the utter strangeness of this world, felt almost familiar.

But not Rowan. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t listen to me like he’s waiting to fill his own role in the conversation, or like he already knows what I’m about to say. It’s unsettling. I remember his eyes watching me from beneath the shadow of his hood, the eyes that seemed to cut through me, as though he could read my thoughts just like he reads his charts of the void.

My beloved is not a murderer.

I shiver. There’s a creaking groan from behind me, and I turn to see Rowan swing himself up the limbs of an enormous dead tree. My chest tightens; stars, that can’t be safe. But Rowan moves with a sort of fluid confidence, pulling himself up higher and higher. He’s left his cloak behind, draped over his pack, and I can see the flash of his bare neck as he looks for the next handhold.

There’s another sound, a dry crack like a little explosion. This comes from somewhere else, somewhere past the tree Rowan is scaling. I drop my eyes to scan the dead forest, but there’s nothing. It’s nothing.

I turn back and Rowan has squeezed himself against the tree’s trunk. He’s balancing with one arm slung over a limb, and in the other, he’s got some sort of metallic sphere. I think of ships again, of my tutor with her wild white hair. We’d taken a rowboat into the harbor at night so she could show me how to take a reading with a sextant, leveling my eyes at the horizon and then twisting the knobs while she held the boat steady.

Whatever Rowan has in his hands isn’t a sextant, I can see that much from where I’m standing half-frozen in the snow, but it’s probably not that far off. A Lands Below sort of compass, or—

Another snap. This one is less like dead wood and more like something living. I turn back to the trees, to the shadows under the trees.

The shadows. One of the shadows is moving. It’s flickering, sliding around the thick sentinel rows of dead trees like a living thing. There’s a glint of light, like the sun flashing off an eye or a blade, the hint of something sharp and dangerous.

Then there’s a creature. It’s so dark it looks like a hole punched through reality, leaving jagged edges. It’s standing between me and the tree Rowan climbed, and it doesn’t have eyes, exactly, but I know it’s looking at me. Right at me.

“Rowan!” I scream.

The creature leaps for me.