Otherbound (43 page)

He couldn't. He was trapped, the way he'd been before he'd ever taken the pills.

At least Pat would be safe with Cilla dead, he thought distantly. At least Nolan would have his life again.

But for now … for now, he was here, watching through Amara's eyes fixed on Cilla's broken face, and Nolan could only repeat to himself,
This isn't my body, this isn't my pain, this isn't my world, this isn't my love.

Stones on each side. Cilla's eyes forced shut. Lips that had kissed Amara's, torn beyond recognition.

Not my pain not my pain not my pain I don't want to feel this not my pain.

The hands Cilla had revealed her royal mark with, swallowed by stone. Amara's hands had looked just like that, mangled on the floor in that other cell. Nolan had put them back together. This time he couldn't do a thing. Only watch and wish he wasn't. He'd tried to climb into Cilla's body at Olym's farm, and it hadn't
worked, for all his extra pills, for all that he'd focused and wished and concentrated so hard—

It hit him so clearly that the cell went quiet for a full second.

He'd done it all wrong.

Instinct. That was how he'd first controlled Amara. He'd wanted her to run from the mages—urged her on—slid into her mind without realizing it. It was how he'd first left, too. Her pain had cut too deep.

Emotion and instinct. Only with those could he take control.

And now, with Cilla dying and Amara screaming and the palace shivering and crying with magic and the rock still churning … This wasn't like sitting in his safe, sunlit room and squeezing his eyes shut to concentrate. This was not a school assignment. This was not a world to chronicle in his notebooks, to distance himself from.

This was real.

My pain
, Nolan whispered.
Mine
. He couldn't control Amara anymore, but he'd never needed that to make her heal. He only needed to be present. If he could slip into Cilla's body … if the pills still offered him control over
that …

He opened himself to Amara's panic until it seared through him so hot and sharp he could no longer separate it from his own.

The air smelled of dust and blood. Cilla wouldn't last much longer. He'd lose her like he'd lost Maart.

That thought did the trick.

Nolan abandoned Amara's panic for Cilla's pain, for blackness,
for crunching in his ears, for pressure on every part of his skin. Pushing and breaking and digging in deep. The pain ebbed, flooded back in. At this point, Cilla should have been past the pain. Her nerve endings were destroyed. She was supposed to fade and die.

Instead, her bones snapped into place, broke again from continued pressure, mended themselves a second time. Cuts healed over. Blood drained from places it shouldn't be, slipping back into burst vessels that shuddered deeply under her skin. Muscles braided themselves back together.

Healing would keep Cilla alive, but it wouldn't make the curse stop coming. Too much blood had already spilled, wet and slick.

The stones fell away, anyway. Clattered to the floor and mattress. Nolan followed, falling amid rubble as the stones' grip on him—on Cilla—loosened. He sucked filthy air into punctured, half-healed lungs, dirt clogging up his nose, and knew something was wrong.

The curse wasn't supposed to end, not with so much blood spilled, and Cilla healed, yes, but she did it jaggedly, first on one side and then the other. She felt different from Amara in a way beyond the physical. Something pushed at him, nagged at the edges, tried to get between her and him like a fingernail prying at a seam.

But she was alive. Healing.

Nolan pushed himself up onto all fours. Cilla's body was taller than Amara's, shorter than his, heavier than either of them. His
hands on the uneven floor were the deepest brown, his fingers short and broken.

He hurt. But he'd saved her.

Using blurred, newly healed eyes, Nolan sought out Amara. He found her across the cell, lying on her back along with Jorn and the marshals. Debris and dust swept a half circle on the floor, blasted outward—Nolan possessing Cilla must've knocked them all back. Magic on top of magic on top of magic.

Jorn was already climbing to his feet. Nolan glanced over, then—wait—
he glanced over
. He was directing Cilla's body. He had control. Mixing spells either snuffed out magic or amplified it. But for how long?

Jorn shouted at the marshals. He supported himself against the wall, his coughing a distant sound through the ringing in Nolan's ears. Nadi reached the cell and took in the situation without a word. Amara stayed on the floor in a half-sitting position, motionless from her toes to her eyelashes as she stared at Nolan.

He'd seen her in dirtied mirrors, in glass reflections, in still water. Not like this, solid and footlengths away. Face-to-face.

Did she see him, too? Did she recognize him?

Before either of them could talk, the ceiling shook. Nolan's head snapped up. Stone crumbled and dropped. Something rippled through the walls and floors like rings expanding in the water—like the curse. Jorn backed away. So did the marshals. Another lump of rock fell from the ceiling.

Cilla healed fast. Crushed ribs snapped back to their normal
positions, pulling lungs with them, sucking in air and dust. Nolan pushed himself up, though his movements wobbled. Pain lanced through his legs. He fell again, to his knees and then sideways off the mattress. Cilla's hands scrambled on the floor, but not because he made them. Was she back in control? He tried to move. Cilla didn't respond.

Nolan still felt those fingernails prying at him, though, wedging him loose. He couldn't let them succeed. Cilla wasn't done healing.

More stone fell from the ceiling. Amara stumbled back, her eyes fixed on Cilla. The marshals were shouting. The metal beams of the cell were twisting loose from the walls. The air itself seemed to quiver.

The anchor, the curse, and Nolan. Too much magic stacked in one body.

A beam lashed around, knocking over a marshal, slamming into Jorn's skull. He crumpled. A perfect triangle of dark shone on his temple, the skin scrunched up on one side. As Nolan watched, it uncoiled, spread out, and started to knit itself back together.

That wasn't right, Jorn couldn't heal—

Nolan's connection with Cilla snapped loose. Suddenly there were thick bars in his vision, and past them, the back of Amara's head, her dust-matted hair.

Pain tore Nolan apart. He looked down, seeing a broken arm and blood on black skin. Ilanne. He'd left Cilla's body, moving into Ilanne's, lying outside the cell—

He snapped free a second time. Pain pulsed through Nolan's head. Whose body was he in now? A marshal's? Jorn's? No, Jorn lay beside him on the floor, no longer healing. The skin on his temple, where the beam had hit, had reattached itself but not yet smoothed over, and the area around the V-shaped cut turned rapidly darker. Jorn blinked slowly. He slurred words Nolan couldn't make out.

How was Cilla? Nolan couldn't see her. A scream distracted him—not the muted shouts from outside the cell block, where the mages were still fighting, and not the marshals as they dove to evade falling stones, but something else, shapeless, unformed. It came from inside the cell. Amara was shouting words she had no tongue to form. She half turned, enough for Nolan to see her claw at her mouth. Her eyes spread, panicked.

It wasn't her. Nolan knew in a heartbeat.

“What's happening—why am I—” a marshal shouted. She was studying her hands, the fingers curling. No, not
her
hands. Few people had their own hands left. Every last spell of Cilla's was tipping sideways. The curse, shredding the walls and agitating the metal; the anchor and Nolan, tearing travelers from their bodies and flinging them into others.

A cell beam caught Nadi in the hip. She screamed and staggered into the cell. She tried to support herself on the walls, but her injured leg gave way, and she slid to the floor. Maybe she wasn't Nadi anymore; maybe this was just Ruudde. He stayed down, hand pressed to his hip.

He wasn't healing, Nolan realized. It
had
to be Ruudde.

Nolan dragged himself to the cell. He had to check on Cilla and Amara. He stepped past Jorn, who was pushing himself to a sitting position against the hallway walls. He stared at his hands. Tears slipped over his cheeks and dangled from the scruff on his chin. He whispered something, nearly lost in the chaos. It had sounded like
mine
.

Nolan slowed. Why would Jorn cry? Or look at his hands like that? He was turning them to see his palms, his stare not shocked or confused but
awed
, and he touched his fingers to his lips, eyes shut, as if savoring the moment.

Nolan stepped toward him—

Saw the world from Cilla's eyes for a flash of a second—

Then another body pulled him in, this one lying on the cold floor. Nolan pried the body's eyes open. A turned-over bench lay by his side. His chest ached, but the pain crept away. He raised his arm. The yellow-brown skin of the Jélis. The green-cuffed sleeves of the marshals. He was possessing Gacco.

Nolan stood. He reached Jorn in two uneven steps, then fell to his knees. “Jorn?” Gacco's lips moved clumsily. Too thick, too wide, too dry. His teeth felt odd, too.

Nolan checked the cut on Jorn's temple. It wasn't healing. This had to be Jorn. A Jorn who was crying and awestruck instead of angry, instead of protecting Cilla from all this chaos …

The real Jorn. Maybe for the first time.

Why had they needed Amara, then? Whatever traveler had
controlled Jorn for so long could've distracted the curse for Cilla himself.

A lump formed in Nolan's throat. He knew the answer. He'd shouted it at Nadi: No traveler wanted to deal with the pain that came with guarding Cilla. The traveler must've suppressed the healing all those years, or healed out of sight, wrapping up nonexistent wounds, to keep Cilla and Amara in the dark.

“Yes,” Jorn said. “Jorn.”

“Why would—” Nolan cut himself short when Jorn's head snapped back. His eyes unfocused. The purple started to seep away from the bruise on his temple, the skin knitting up. Within seconds, the healing stopped, and Jorn was himself again.

“We don't have long.” Nolan marveled at the taste of Dit in his mouth. It wasn't like reciting sentences at home. Gacco's body knew the words as well as it knew air. “Who cast the anchor spell?”

In his peripheral vision, a marshal stumbled toward them. She extended her arms, fingers straining wide as if to summon magic. The marshal wasn't a mage, though. The air around her hands didn't shift; the magic didn't crackle. It told Nolan who controlled that body, though—Nadi, or the traveler who had possessed Jorn for so long.

And they were trying to attack
Nolan
. In all this chaos, that, not protecting Cilla, was their goal.

Nolan knew enough. He whirled back to face Jorn. “You?” he whispered.

Jorn had cast the anchor spell. They must've wanted him close
to Cilla in case she fled. He could track her better than anyone.

Jorn nodded. His eyes looked different. Softer. He swallowed and hesitated in a way the Jorn that Nolan knew hadn't done in years. “I—I know you have to—”

To—what?

Behind Nolan, more stones crashed to the floor. He recoiled, then checked over his shoulder. The possessed guard who'd been coming their way now leaned against the wall. Instead, Amara stalked toward Nolan and Jorn. She picked up Ilanne's hooked blade and moved determinedly around debris and injured bodies, then dove sideways, avoiding another swing of a cell beam.

It wasn't her.

A crack in the cell's ceiling loosened more stones. One crashed onto Nolan's hand and rolled onto the floor. He hissed, but even as his hand healed, he wrapped it around the stone to feel its weight. Heavy. And Nolan's arm—Gacco's—was strong. Nothing but lean muscle.

“Oh,” he whispered.

“Do it. Fix it.” Jorn's voice was steady. His eyes weren't.

“This isn't what I meant. This isn't …” But Nolan's fingers tightened around the stone, rough and cold against his skin. He felt himself pried loose from Gacco's body again, but he latched on, begging for a few more seconds. He needed to stay by Jorn's side just a little longer. Jorn needed to stay himself for just another moment.

He looked at Amara, footlengths away now. She shouted something.

Nadi
, Nolan thought with odd impassiveness. Something about the way she walked just screamed
Nadi
at him. He smiled anyway. It was still Amara's face, her eyes. She still watched him from somewhere in there. He hoped she saw his smile. He hoped she knew what it meant, because he would never have the chance to explain.