“A wizard like the one that attacked us last night?” I asked. The blue cloak in my hand was icy to the touch. “You knew him—not Genet, the other one.”
North rubbed the back of his neck. “His name is Reuel Dorwan. He’s been tracking me for a while now—if I had noticed him earlier, I would have tried to find a way to end it once and for all.”
For the first time in years, I pricked my finger on the needle.
“You want to kill him?” I asked slowly.
North turned his face away and took the blue cloak from me.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said.
“Of course not,” I said in a low voice. “I’m just a stupid little girl who’s incapable of understanding anything.”
North bristled. “There isn’t much to say about him except that he’s the vilest rot ever to have walked this world. That trick he did was pure dark magic, magic that’s forbidden by wizarding society. Not that he cares, of course. He never did.”
“His trick—was that what caused you to act like that last night?” I asked. “I tried everything to wake you up, and you still slept like the dead.”
North shook his head and turned away from me. I drew in a sharp, angry breath at the silence that followed. He would have walked away if my voice had not caught him and held him there.
“I hope you realize that nothing will ever be right between us until you tell me—until you just tell me why you took me,” I said, frustrated. “You keep everything to yourself, and I’m just supposed to accept the fact that you can create a gust of wind and stop the world from shaking and that you’re surprised I can fix your rotting cloaks—”
“It’s because most humans can’t,” he cut in, turning back to me. “What would you like me to say, Syd? It takes some degree of magic inside a person to repair a talisman and not have it lose its ability. That is why I was surprised.”
He reattached the rest of his cloaks in a whirl of color.
“Are…you saying I have magical ability?” I asked carefully.
“Magic is inherited through families,” he said. “You may have had a wizard in your family, but it was a long time ago. What power you have in you is weak and useless.”
“Not useless,” I said, giving him a hard look. “Not entirely.”
“No,” North agreed with a small smile, and for the first time I thought I finally had an answer to one of the hundreds of questions that poured through my mind. I bent to pick up my loom.
“Are you positive you didn’t see anything last night?” North asked after a moment. “It’s not like him to just…give up….”
“I thought there might have been something out there, but it was only a beetle,” I said, watching a strange look come over his face.
“A beetle?” he repeated.
“Well, it was rather large,” I said defensively. “It was practically the size of a small animal!”
“And purple?”
I whirled around. “How did you know?”
“Please, please tell me you killed it. Tell me you took your boot and smashed it,” North said, passing a hand over his face. He didn’t wait for my response; he already knew the answer. The wizard moved quickly, throwing his bag over his shoulder and scanning the wide expanse around us.
“Stop moving!” I said. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“It was a rover beetle,” he said, his mouth set in a firm line. “Time to leave, Syd.”
He reached for my arm, but I pulled it away.
North blew out a frustrated sigh, but he knew what I wanted. “It’s a beetle that can sense magic. They’re trained to track wizards, usually by the Wizard Guard, but in this case, by our dear friend. And it means he probably knows by now where we are, unfortunately.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Next time I won’t make the same mistake.”
North let out a humorless laugh.
“There won’t be a next time. There are a number of ways to find a wizard, and he won’t use the same trick twice.” He motioned for me to follow him. “We need to leave now. He’ll be right behind us.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the path his boots made in the mud.
“We have to stay off the main roads,” he said, still a number of steps ahead of me. “He’ll have a greater opportunity to find us if we stay out in the open for too long.”
“But Wickerby is the fastest way to Provincia—”
“And if he finds us on it, he’ll know exactly where we’re going,” North said. “I need your help, Syd. We have to find a different way.”
“All right,” I said. I reached for his black cloak, forcing him to stop. “If that’s true, then I need to look at the map. If we’re where I think we are, I can find us a route that stays close to Prima Road, but not on it. Are you sure we can lose the time, though?”
“We won’t be losing it if it keeps us alive,” he said. I pulled out the map I had accidentally torn, and we both looked it over.
“I still don’t understand why Dorwan would be tracking us,” I muttered. “I don’t like feeling like a pawn in someone else’s game.”
“He wants to stop us from telling the Sorceress Imperial that he was the one behind the poisoning, not Auster,” North said, tying something around my neck. I glanced down at the black cloak around my shoulders.
“It’ll mask any remnant of the locating spell still on you,” he said, answering my unspoken question. “I think. At least I hope.”
“You hope?”
“It’s the best I can do for now,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
And he was.
By the end of the week, North and I had developed a routine. It wasn’t the best, and it certainly wasn’t fun, but it was our routine, and we clung to it like a religion. I seized the maps and plotted our path through the maze of roads; I cooked, washed, and mended. North found us food and shelter. My anger toward him for taking me from my home was still there, but I could no longer ignore him or sit around waiting for my life to weave itself back together.
It was a strange experience to wake up one morning and find the leaves of the trees a muted yellow instead of their usual vibrant green. And with the change of colors came a change in the weather. The warm, sticky air was suddenly, at least to me, dry and chilled. It was days before I became used to it, and weeks before I realized that time was slowly marching forward. It was fall—a real fall—and it was beautiful.