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Whatever the reason, Eirnin’s house appeared quicker than I expected. The garden was blooming, big red and orange flowers bobbing a little in the breeze. The air crackled, like a storm was about to roll in from the ocean.
Something disruptive.
I touched my charm again. After so long on the island I knew danger didn’t have to look like what I expected. Naji would probably tell me to turn and run back to the shack, but then, Naji wasn’t right about everything all the time. Much as he liked to think otherwise.
So I walked up the stone pathway, my hand curled tight around the sword, and kept watch for anything out of the ordinary: shadows moving through the trees, or a curl of gray mist. I prayed I wouldn’t see the gray mist.
I didn’t see anything.
I knocked on Eirnin’s door. No answer. A chill rippled through me, but then, Eirnin had been known not to answer if the mood didn’t suit him. I knocked again, and then shouted, “Eirnin! It’s me! I’m here about some clothes!”
Nothing.
At this point, the dread was pooling in the bottom of my stomach, and the forest seemed full of sneaking terrors, though I couldn’t see any of them outright. Part of me wanted to turn back and the other part of me didn’t want to go anywhere near the woods.
I pounded hard on the door, and this time, it creaked open.
I stopped, lifted the sword a little. A scent like flowers drifted out from inside the house. Dead flowers. Rotting flowers.
“Eirnin?” I called out, nudging the door open further. I stepped inside, sword lifted. It was dark. The air was colder than it was outside, as cold as the ice storms in the north, and it felt wrong somehow – empty, hollow.
When I stepped into the main room, the darkness erupted.
Shapes poured out of the dead hearth, dark shadows that slid and undulated along the walls. Moaning filled up the room, the moaning and wailing of a thousand echoing voices. I couldn’t move. The darkness slid around me, thick and oily, smelling of decay and magic.
And then a pale figure moved into the room, transparent and glowing. A ghost.
It looked at me, and although its face was stripped of humanity, like all ghosts, I recognized its features immediately.
“Eirnin,” I said.
The ghost opened its mouth and a stream of ululating syllables poured out. It was the language of the dead. I’d heard it once before, when a sea-ghost boarded Papa’s boat and tried to pull us all under.
I screamed and found the strength to break through the hold of the angry magic that Eirnin had left behind when he died. I raced out of the house, swinging my sword through the thick shadows. They shrieked when I cut them, and their cuts splattered spots of darkness across my hands and arms.
I burst out into the garden. The forest had stilled. Behind me, I could hear the rattle and screams of creatures in the house, and I didn’t stop to contemplate on what had killed Eirnin. I just ran. I ran out of the garden and into the woods, and I wasn’t even out of sight of the house when I slammed into Naji’s chest.
“I told you to stay at the shack!” he roared, dragging me to my feet.
“I’m trying!” I shouted back.
He dragged me into the shadow of a tree, wrapped his arm across my chest, and melted us both into shadow.
A heartbeat later we stood at the edge of the forest, the beach flowing away from us to the edge of the island. Naji slumped up against a nearby pine tree, and for the first time I noticed how pale and waxy he was, and my heart twisted up and I had to stop myself from ru
“I didn’t take off the charm,” I said.
“I see that.” Naji closed his eyes and let out a long breath. “You realize what that was, correct? What you felt the need to stumble into?”
“Eirnin’s dead.” I sat down at the doorway to our shack. “I saw his ghost.” I didn’t have a lot of love for Eirnin, truth be told, but the fact that he was no more for this world gave me the shivers.
“What were you doing at his house?”
“Getting new clothes.”
Naji glared at me.
“I was go
His face softened a little at that. “I did warn you.”
“No, you didn’t. You said something on the island had changed. And what in hell does that mean?” I kicked at the sand. “What was all that stuff, anyway? You know what I’m talking about, right? The shadows pouring out of the hearth–”
“It was his magic, released when he died.” Naji straightened up and stepped away from the tree. He looked better, which was something of a relief: it meant I wasn’t in danger no more. “It has to burn away before it’s safe to go back to his house. Which could take months. I don’t know. Years, maybe.”
“What killed him?”
“I’ve no idea.” Naji frowned. “Perhaps you should stay in the shack for the next few days. Until we figure out the cause–”
“What about you?” I said. “Why do I got to be locked away like some princess in a story?”
Naji glared at me. “You know why.”
I turned away from him, fuming. His damn curse.
“Ain’t fair,” I muttered.
“None of this is fair,” Naji said, and he stopped pacing long enough to collect his sword. “There’s a fish in the shack waiting for you to clean it.”
That was something, at least.
Naji gave me a dark look. “You might as well get used to it.”
“What, fish? Trust me, I’m plenty used to fish.”
“No,” he said. “Letting me protect you.”
“We’ve had this conversation before.” I turned away from him and stepped into the shack. A huge flat halibut was laid out next to the hearth, a single glassy eye staring unseeing up at the ceiling.
“And yet you act as if it’s the first time you’ve heard it every time I remind you that you need to stay safe.”
I pulled out my knife – another gift from Eirnin, although this was, admittedly, one he hadn’t known he’d given me – and shoved it up under the fish scales. Naji didn’t think his curse could be broken, cause he had to complete three impossible tasks in order to do so: hold the princess’s starstones skin against stone, create life out of violence, and experience true love’s kiss. Thing was, I knew at least one of the three, the last one, wasn’t impossible at all. Cause I loved him. I loved him more fiercely than I’d loved anyone. But he didn’t love me back, and I ain’t one to embarrass myself needlessly.
Naji stepped into the shack behind me and shut the door.
“Maybe we should concern ourselves with figuring out who killed Eirnin,” I said, fish scales sticking to my hands.
“Maybe we should,” Naji said.
But neither of us got to talking.
I spent the next day or two in the shack, like Naji asked. He strung up strands of tree vines and red berry leaves and muttered his charms while I sulked in the corner and watched him. Just cause I was in love with him didn’t mean I wasn’t go
Course, I understood that if he hadn’t locked me away he would hurt, a pain in his head or his joints, but I still didn’t think I was in as much danger as he believed. Just as long as I stayed away from Eirnin’s house, right? And there was no way in the deep blue sea I’d go back there.
Those two days were boring as hell, which was exactly what I expected. Naji left to go fetch water or to catch fish and gather berries for us to eat. I sat in the doorway, my knife balanced on my knee, and tried not to look at the bonfire.
By the third day of imprisonment, I was going batty.
“You ain’t seen nothing!” I said to Naji, after a week had passed. He’d let me sit just outside the shack that day, and though the air was colder than usual the sun had managed to burn away most of the clouds. “I ain’t seen nothing, either. Probably Eirnin’s heart just gave out. He was old.”