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"Then why don't you do it?"
She snarled, her face twisted and wild. I was not going to flinch. I was not going to run away.
And then something darted out from the underbrush, something swift-moving and black as pitch. A sword flashed. It sliced through the woman and her dark mist, and this time there wasn't any starlight to splatter all over my clothes. She just evaporated. The entrance to the Mists dried up like it'd been left too long in the sun.
I sat down on the transparent tree leaves and the damp ferns.
A branch snapped off to my right. I didn't bother looking over. I knew who it was.
"I told you it was dangerous," Naji said.
"Is she gone?"
"For now." Naji paused. "Thank you."
"For what?"
He stood beside me, his sword hanging at his side. I kept my gaze down on the ground and tried not to think about tossing it off into the underbrush.
"For not telling her where to find me."
I kicked at the fallen leaves, splintering them into shards, digging a ditch in the soil with the heel of my boot. The forest noises had come back, the chittering and shaking and rustling of the rain, the crystalline chiming of the surrounding trees, but the silence between the two of us swallowed all that noise whole.
"I almost did," I said after a while.
"Almost did what?"
"Helped her find you." I couldn't look at him. "She showed me all these things that could happen if I did – amazing things. My own ship, my own crew." I stopped, not wanting to remember some future that wasn't ever go
Naji got real still. I knew he was staring at me even though I refused to look up at his face.
"Why didn't you?"
"Cause."
"That doesn't answer the question." The hardness in his voice sliced through the liquid air of the forest. This time, I did look at him. Lines furrowed his brow. His eyes were sunk low into his face. "I can't keep doing this, Ana
"Cause you're my friend," I said.
All the hardness in his features melted away. "Oh."
"I'm not going to turn you over to your enemies." I stood up, swiping the forest floor off my dress. "So you can stop fretting about that. But I'm thirsty still. That's why I left – you were in a trance and didn't bother to get water."
He didn't say nothing. I started kicking around in the underbrush, trying to find the water jar. I didn't remember dropping it, but that was probably just more Otherworld trickery.
"It's a few feet behind you," Naji said. "Beneath that tree there."
I glared at him and then fumbled around in the wet greenery until I felt the smooth cold stone of the jar. Naji waited for me, his arms crossed in front of his chest, and then we walked the rest of the way to the spring, our silence heavy with our unspoken thoughts.
The spring was waiting for us as though nothing unusual had happened. It bubbled and frothed in its usual place beneath the pine trees. I plunged the jar into the spring, and the water flooded over my hands, cold as ice and reminding me of Echo's almost-touch.
I know that Naji saw me shivering.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Naji paced back and forth through the chiming forest, knocking down tree branches and those sparkling, transparent leaves. I watched him from beside the spring and waited for the thoughts to stop jangling around inside my head.
Finally I got so tired of listening to him trampling through the underbrush that I asked, "So I guess you found out where the Wizard Eirnin is, then."
"Yes." He stopped his pacing, glanced at me, and then looked away. The wind pushed through the trees, and the leaves shimmered and threw off dots of pale light, and the tree trunks bent and swayed. The chiming was everywhere.
"That's it?"
"What else is there to tell?"
I narrowed my eyes at him. He still wasn't looking at me, and I could tell he was leaving something out. He'd done it so much when we first left Lisirra I'd become a master at spotting all his omissions.
"I don't know," I said, "or else I wouldn't be asking."
"The Wizard Eirnin lives in the center of the island," Naji said. "It isn't far from here. That's all I know."
I sighed and refilled the water jar one last time. "Well," I said. "I guess we ought to go look for him." I straightened up and rested the jar against my hip.
"Are you going to take that with you?" Naji asked.
"Course I am. It's impossible to tell east from west on this damned island. Chances are we'll wind up wandering back around to the shack before we ever find the wizard."
"I tracked him," Naji said. "I know exactly where he is." His expression darkened. "Exactly how I knew where you were when the Otherworld attacked."
I shoved past him, jostling water. He didn't say nothing more about the Otherworld attack, and I let him lead me out of the chiming forest and into the darker parts of the woods. The rain had been threatening us the whole time I laid out by the spring, and now it started again in earnest. Naji plowed forward like it didn't even bother him, like he didn't even notice the rain and the gray light and the scent of soil.
We walked for a long time. The rain hazed my vision and filled the water jar to overflowing. The trees crowded in on me, looming and close, and I started wondering if it was the Mists. Echo coming back for one last fight. My hands started to shake.
And then, like that, the trees cleared out and there was this little round house built of stone sitting in the middle of a garden, smoke trickling up out of a hole in the roof.
Time seemed to stop. I forgot about the Mists and about the island: when I saw that house, there was only Naji's curse, which was also my curse. And we'd come so far across the world to get it cured.