Page 42 of A Deal with the Shadow King

The fresh air clears the dark spots that were dancing in front of my eyes.

He lets go of my hand and rolls up his left sleeve to his elbow, showcasing the inked drawings on his lower arm. “I’ve seen you dawdle about with Introduction to Runes. Can you tell me the meaning of one of these?”

I press my lips together, slighted by the jab. I’m the most studious of the three seeds, and while Mara thinks that makes me a dork, I bet she’s never even tried to paint the most basic rune. Forcing down a flare of anger, I concentrate on the familiar symbols.

The runes are laid out in three squares, the nine closest to his wrist bigger than the five by five ones in the middle of his lower arm, a set of a hundred written in such small calligraphy near his elbow that I shudder.

I hold out one finger and recite the first nine near his wrist from memory. “That’s Fae, Faerie, male, light, flame, wind, stone, water, heart, and the one in the corner here is the mark for ‘the lack of.’”

The last one is most clever. If I were to combine it with the rune “light,” the combination of the two spells “darkness.”

His mouth opens slightly.

I search the five by five square, my bottom lip tucked between my teeth. With more certainty than I possess, I trace the first three, the skin of his underarm soft and smooth under my fingertips. “And those are tree, flower, and apple.”

“You switched the last two.” He smacks his lips. “But impressive.”

The corners of my mouth curl up, and I let a hint of arrogance show on my face.

That’ll teach him to underestimate me.

“To travel through the sceawere, you need an iron-clad will.” One raises his left hand to the network of strings closest to him and glides his fingers along the flexible threads the way a musician caresses his lyre. “The in-between is a sort of unending harmony. The strings are all part of a gigantic instrument, in a way, and traveling to the right place only demands the right melody. Runes act as a sheet of music and mark the desired notes.”

He tangles his left hand in a hanging piece of woven threads. The ink on his knuckles darkens as he moves the strings between his expert fingers, and his right hand comes as a sort of violin bow, his fingertips pricking a few of the runes on his lower arm.

As he moves, peeks of the familiar rooms in the castle are replaced by foreign places. One handles the glass strings like they’re part of the most fragile musical instrument in existence, and his loving, careful movements bring a shiver to my core. His black nails are cut short, his long fingers more nimble than I expected. Men who fight often trade their agility for strength, but not One, obviously. A big part of me wishes he would touch me instead.

“Traveling within a world can be as easy as cutting through butter, but a novice can tap the strings a little too hard—a false note, if you will—and end up in the wrong realm.” He slows down, moving languorously, as though he’s serenading a long-lost lover.

“The runes on your hand, they’re…different.”

He motions to his left arm. “Those are tattoos, inked permanently into the skin but these—” he flips his right hand to show me his knuckles. “They’re the equivalent of musician calluses, branded on my skin by all my travels, some of the destinations so ingrained in my memory that they have become part of my flesh.”

Woah.

“Play the wrong sort of song” —he flicks the threads roughly, touching the runes near the kink of his elbow, and a shadow condenses across several pieces of glass. A demonic pair of reptilian eyes stares back at us from the other side— “and you will attract the entirely wrong kind of attention.”

The monster juts an arm forward, and I tug One away from its long claws, but the creature only manages to streak the glass between us.

A small, gentle laugh trickles off One’s lips before he bends the strings again, now threading the runes closer to his wrist. “Familiar places come easily.”

The foot of my Faerie bed appears through the fray, and I squint, but it’s there one moment and gone the next.

“But if your mind isn’t clear and focussed, if you let your fears get the better of you or muddle your runes, you will get stuck and wander the in-between until nightmares find you.”

He twists the strings more rapidly, and I’m disoriented to the point of helplessness until he grabs my hand again and pulls me forward. Colors and shapes blur together, and the cold goodbye kiss of the sceawere peppers flecks of ice on my skin.

“Welcome to New York, a staple of the new world,” he says, releasing me.

Tall, sharp-angled towers run up and up around us, ten times the length of the tallest castle in Demeter, stretching almost as far as the eye can see. Lights flicker in the large windows of the humongous buildings, all the way up to the empty night sky, and the road in front of us is black and crusty. A few cracks run deep into the unknown material and reveal a few lonely weeds.

The narrow alleys the coachman rushes through in Lundan come to mind, full of dirt, grime, and the occasional criminal.

Behind us, a rectangular container full of garbage reeks of rotten cabbage, the acrid smell clogging up my nostrils. The mirror we just walked through has a smashed corner and a white trim, the thin, flimsy-looking piece of glass leaning on the garbage bin, tilted to the side as though it’s part of the trash.

I wonder at a world where a mirror so big could be left lying around, unattended. Do these people know anything about magic?

“Why are we here?” I ask, not understanding the point of the lesson, our surroundings dirty and drab.

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