V
The Thorn in Your Side
MATILDA He was drowning, sinking to the cold, dark heart of the river, until I took his hand.
I saw myself through his eyes. My auburn hair flowed around me like threads of silk. My white dress billowed around my legs as I kicked against the currents. The golden bracelets on my arms clinked; the moonstones that pierced my ears winked in the dim light. My hand was strong, confident, as I held on to his, refusing to let him go.
His terror diminished as if I had just tamped down hot coals, turning
fear into smoke.
“Don’t leave me,” he whispered.
I pulled him upward.
We broke the surface together with a gasp.
The dream ended.
I closed the scroll, trembling. But I felt heavy, as if my clothes and hair were still drenched from the river. My eyes stung, as if I had opened them underwater. My heart was pounding in my throat.
I had never seen this mortal boy before. I had only read his dreams, and yet he knew of me. Somehow, he had seen me, and I had slipped into a dream of his, unknowingly.
I waited until my mother took her resting hours, and then I buckled Bade’s shield to my back and left our burrow. I ran through the shadows and firelight of the corridors to Alva’s door, and there I hesitated, anxious to knock.
She must have sensed my presence.
The door swung open, and she gazed down at me, blue eyes alight with amusement. Her face was sharply beautiful, hewn from high cheekbones and framed by spools of golden hair. Her lips were full and painted black, her cheeks dimpled, her skin white as alabaster. She wore a red gown, clasped at her shoulders with silver brooches, and she smelled like mulled wine and charred wood. I noticed there was a quill in her ink-stained fingers, as if I had interrupted her writing.
“Does your mother know you are here, Matilda?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Then come in. She will not like you lingering in the corridors.”
This was my first time visiting Alva’s burrow. I stepped over the threshold, taking in the wide chamber. There were endless shelves laden with scrolls, mismatched furniture, a marble hearth, a mantel lined with colorful wine bottles, and eldritch tapestries on the walls. But my attention fixated on her desk, where she had been writing in a new scroll.
“Why did he dream of me?” I said, unable to hold the question any
longer. “I have never seen him before.”
“Who?” Alva asked.
“Vincent.”
“Ah. The gray-eyed mortal boy who often dreams of drowning. Come, sit down, child.”
I did not feel like sitting. I felt like pacing, like burning, but I let her guide me to a chair. I shifted Bade’s shield to rest against my legs, in case I needed it.
“To answer your question,” Alva began, pouring herself a glass of wine, “I do not know.”
Her reply frustrated me. It must have shown on my face, because she chuckled.
“Do not despair, Matilda. I have a theory.”
“What is this theory, then?”
She took a long sip, enjoying my impatience. “Do you know what dreams are?”
“They are something the mind creates,” I said. “Silly fancies, is what my mother calls them.”
“To some, yes. But they are also a glimpse into the soul.”
I frowned. “That does not answer why this strange boy is dreaming of me when he and I have never met.”
“Maybe when you read his first dream, a connection was forged between you two. Perhaps you left an impression upon him.”
“But how? By the time I read that first dream of his in your scroll, it was just ink. The night he dreamt it had long passed.”
“The soul does not follow time as we do. It does not move the same way.”
I mulled over that notion, trying to understand what she was implying to me.
“Does the soul move through the past? Through the future?” I eventually asked, stifling a shiver.
Alva smiled. “So I have heard it said by Orphia.”
“Orphia?”
“Yes. Death is well acquainted with souls. She gathers them when they are at their most desperate, their most bare. If you have further questions about it, perhaps you should go to her.”
The last divine I wanted to approach about this was the matriarch.
“And if it bothers you—this boy dreaming of you—then you can return the scroll. I can cease lending them to you.”
“No,” I said quickly. “I like to read them. They are teaching me things about the mortal world.”
“Very well.” Alva grinned as if she knew something I did not, exposing a row of wine-stained teeth. “But take care, Matilda.”
It was a dismissal, and I gathered my shield, wincing beneath its weight.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Do not let the dreams make you too soft,” she said. “Guard your own soul, child.”
The sennights steadily passed, one blending into the next. And Vincent continued to dream of me.
I read them after Alva wrote them down, intrigued to see myself in his mortal world. Slowly, his nightmares of drowning ceased, and we climbed trees instead. We sat beside each other in his fortress hall and challenged each other to throw pebbles into his older brothers’ cups. We rode ponies across the moorland and pretended we were flying. We climbed towers and scaled parapets. We laughed and we argued; we dreamt within the dreams.
We were bound by friendship and a familiarity that made my chest ache.
Sometimes, I yearned for it to be real, and perhaps that was the softness Alva had warned me about.
“What is your name?” Vincent would eventually ask me, every time.
I never answered.
That question broke the dream like a flash of lightning, and it left me feeling bereft when I rolled up the scroll.
I knew him. I knew his fears, his worries, his passions. I saw glimpses of the river fortress he called home, the love he had for his three brothers, the respect he harbored for his father, the sadness that sprung from his mother’s mysterious absence. And in his dreams, I was not a goddess but a mortal girl he loved as his friend.
I knew him, but he did not truly know me.
I could tell the seasons were changing in the mortal realm by the water that flowed in our underground rill. In spring, the currents were babbling, lukewarm. In summer, they swelled deep and hot, steaming. Autumn inspired lukewarm rapids again, peppered with stray leaves shed from trees above, and in winter the creek was chilled and slow-moving, clotted with shards of ice.
My mother bloomed in the cold, while I mourned for autumn. But my twelfth winter would soon reach its end; my childhood was waning like the moon. I discovered that time passed swiftly when I was training with Bade in his forge with Hem keeping a watchful eye on us as he worked, my lessons progressing from shield to sword. I likewise discovered that time
seemed to stall when the god of war was away in the mortal realm with the Poet Queen, which seemed to be more and more frequently.
In the last stretch of winter, when it seems the ice will never melt and the earth will never warm again, he was gone for a fortnight, and I languished in the burrow, waiting for him to return.
I was rereading one of my favorite dreams—Vincent and I were exploring the caves by the sea and we had uncovered a locked coffer, barnacled and slick with seaweed, in one of the tide pools. He sometimes dreamt of the ocean, but the fear of drowning never accompanied those waves; I had yet to understand why, but together we puzzled over how to open the coffer’s rusted lock.
My focus broke when Zenia called to me, reality dragging me from the salt-laced caves and Vincent’s side back to the under realm.
I startled, the scroll tearing as I hid it beneath my blanket. I rose from my bed and walked to the innermost room of the burrow, where my mother and Phelyra were standing, waiting for me.
“Close your eyes and reach out your hands,” Zenia said. She was holding something behind her back, and her eyes were bright, mirthful.
Phelyra stood at her side, a coy smile on her painted lips.
I remembered she had promised me a gift, a reward for keeping their secret about the eithral scale. I closed my eyes, extending my empty palms forward.
I hoped for a mountain of Skyward coins, so I could burn them all and listen to their music, but my mother set something cold and flexible in my hands. I was not prepared for its weight; the gift nearly slipped through my
fingers, and I grasped it tightly.
My eyes fluttered open.
Balanced on my palms was a golden belt, studded with oval moonstones.
“Try it on,” my mother urged when I hesitated.
This was not what I was expecting. But it was exquisite craftsmanship, spun from the purest of Underling gold, thick as my wrist. The moonstones were uniform, like eggs that had been cut in half, their white adularescence beguiling as I turned the belt over in the light.
“It’s beautiful,” I said softly. “Thank you both.”
Zenia brought it around my waist and showed me how to latch the clasp right above my navel.
“Your mother wanted moonstones to remind you of home,” Phelyra said. “So you never forget where you come from. But I gave them a little of
my own enchantment.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Each stone is a pocket. I thought that would come in handy when you begin to travel the realms. You might need to carry a few things with you.
And yes, you won’t feel the weight. You could tuck a horse or a hound or a divine’s shorn head into those pockets, although I hear you are swift these days, even with that battered shield Bade has you dragging around.”
“Phel,” my mother scolded, most likely at the shorn head comment.
But such talk did not bother me.
I gazed down at the stones that gleamed at my waist. I touched one, my fingers disappearing within its heart, as if I had dipped them into a pool of deep, cold water, and I sensed the vastness of the pockets Phelyra had woven.
I could tuck Alva’s dream scrolls away here. Maybe I could even force the shield I carried into a pocket, although I imagined Bade would consider that cheating. That was when I noticed the stone closest to the latch had a dark blue streak within it. A shadow that had not been there a moment ago, before I had brought the belt around me. I bent my head to study it closer, just as my mother gasped.
“What is that?” Zenia tapped her fingernail against the gemstone. I realized that the pockets were inaccessible to her, and I snuck a wry glance at Phelyra, whose brow was arched as she, too, noticed the strange pattern.
“I spent three winters harvesting only the best moonstones. Remove the belt, Matilda. I will replace that one.”
“Let it be,” Phelyra said, exasperated. “If you replace it for a mere smudge, I will have to reenchant every stone again for the pocket spell, and I do not have the time for such nonsense. Also, that moonstone is not spoiled. It has merely reacted to touching Matilda.”
Phelyra was right.
The stone had responded to me in some strange way, and as I studied it closer, the shadow reminded me of a shut eye, with long, dark lashes.
“You did not enchant it so that my mother can keep an eternal watch over me, did you?” I teased Phelyra.
She scrunched her nose and tilted her head, her flaxen locks shifting to cover one of her eyes. She winked with the other. But my mother’s frown only deepened.
I felt it, then, although I kept it to myself. There was something dark and slumbering within me. One day, it would stir, and I did not know how to prepare for it.
I sensed something was wrong with Bade the next time I saw him for training at the forge.
His fortnight with the queen had ended, but when he returned to train me, he was distracted. Snow was caught in his hair, white as the spots dappling a fawn’s coat, and I could smell the cold, brisk wind on him. There were fresh scars on his forearms, newly healed, and his red cloak was torn and splattered with mud.
“Have you been fighting?” I asked, which was wasted air. Of course he had been fighting, and he must have lost to be so morose. Swallowing, I shifted my grip on the hilt of the broadsword he had given me. My shield was perched on my other arm like a dutiful falcon.
A tense beat passed as I waited for him to begin the spar.
Bade was silent, his eyes distant. His own sword—the obsidian one that I admired—remained sheathed at his side. His arms were crossed over his chest. He was gazing at the coals in the fire pit, as if enchanted by their crackling glow.
“Did you hear me?” I said again, louder. But my heart faltered,
dismayed.
This was not like him.
His attention never strayed from his task, and his eyes were bloodshot when he finally looked at me.
“What did you say?” he asked in a hoarse voice.
“Did something happen in the mortal realm? A battle you have been
waiting for?”
“Yes.”
Why did he sound so mournful? Had the war ended? Was he falling into a slump of peace?
He had failed to notice the moonstone belt at my waist, which had first alerted me to his inattentiveness. I had expected him to remark upon it directly. To deem it a hindrance, and to demand that I remove it during sparring.
I would have preferred the old Bade, even as he liked to irritate me, and I decided that I needed to cheer him. I needed to bring him around.
“How is the thorn in your side?” I asked with a grin.
Bade’s eyes narrowed. “My what?”
“The thorn,” I repeated, mirth fading. “You once called her such. Don’t you remember?”
“You speak of Adria,” he said, glancing away. “She is…”
I waited, but he never finished his statement. It was like there were no words he could find to describe her, and my heart went cold.
“I cannot stay here,” he muttered, raking fingers through his hair. His snowy crown melted, and he began to stride away before he remembered me, standing in his wake, shocked. “We will have to resume this another
time, Matilda.”
“When?”
“I do not know. Return to your mother.”
With that, he vanished into an adjacent corridor. A dark eastward route that I had never taken.
I sheathed my sword and eased my shield into one of the moonstone pockets—it fit perfectly, just as Phelyra had claimed—before following him.
I knew the map of gemstones, and I could navigate by them.
He was moving quickly, as if something in the distance had hooked him, reeling him in. Every few steps, I could hear his breaths, ragged in the shadows.
Had he been wounded? If so, I would have noticed, and gods heal themselves quickly as long as it is not a blow on the fault line. His armor had been unmarred. There was no mark upon his neck, and I could not understand his distress.
He was my salt-sworn ally, but in many ways, I was also his.
I followed Bade from ruby to emerald to malachite, all the way to the door that opened to the mortal realm above us.
I forced myself to wait ten inhalations before I dared to cross the threshold behind him. When I did, I was met by a wash of bitter wind, and a quiet world cloaked in fresh snowfall.
This door rested in a craggy oak’s trunk, sheltered by a close-knit forest.
I studied the tree to remember where the door hid, and then traced Bade’s footsteps, the snow crisp and ankle-deep. I trailed him to the forest’s edge, and there I stopped, gazing down at the muddy vale that stretched before me, embraced by stark mountains.
It held a war camp. There were rows of tents and heraldic banners.
Smoke rose from campfires; the air tasted like burning leaves and oak, mixed with the mire of mud.
I watched Bade step into the encampment, well known amongst the armored warriors. Some even bowed as he passed, although he paid them no heed. His red cloak was an easy mark, and my eyes tracked him all the way to a great tent erected in the center of the camp. There, he vanished, and I struggled to swallow the fire at the back of my throat.
He was returning to the Poet Queen.
And had he not just left her? I wanted to toss up my hands, grind my
teeth in frustration.
You fool.
This was how gods lost their immortality. By succumbing to distractions. By letting down their guard. Had he not taught me this? Had he not been persistent in reinforcing this lesson to me, again and again, like his sword glancing off my shield, forcing me to grow stronger, harder, wiser
beneath the blows?
A branch creaked above me.
My mind went blank; my chin snapped up. There was a sentry archer poised directly above me, on watch. I did not think she had noticed me yet, but my heart lurched all the same.
Silently, I retreated, filling my footsteps as I went.
It would do us no good to expose the location of an Underling door.
Those thresholds were our secret, and footprints emerging from a crooked oak would raise suspicion. Again, Bade had lost all sense, leaving a trail for any curious mortal or Skyward to find, and I could not shake the shiver that followed me back to the burrow.