The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,128
me. Her heart is in her eyes, clear and vulnerable and familiar again. Suddenly she’s the same girl who offered me dumplings when I was hungry at the feast. She’s the girl who wondered with me at the statue’s head in the water in the ghostlands, who stared at me with longing and loss when I said I wished I could kiss her.
“Oh, gods,” she murmurs, her eyes widening with shock as the mist vanishes, dissipating into the morning air as if it had never been. Her unshed tears spill down the cheek I hovered over. “Gods, North, I’m sorry. I was just so—please, my world needs you.” And then her voice drops even further, until her final words are a whispered confession: “I need you.”
I have to remind my legs how to move, because they’ve locked up, holding me in place. “I wish you did.”
Her breath hitches as though I’ve dealt her a physical blow. “Everyone will be reborn. We will be reborn. Not as a prince and a goddess, not with the weight of destiny on our shoulders.”
Skies help me. I could almost say yes, and condemn both our worlds.
It takes everything I have to turn my back.
“If you go home,” Nimh says, “I’ll never be able to fulfill the prophecy.” Her voice is aching. My heart is aching. “If I let you go, I damn the world.”
I resist the urge to turn.
“If I stay, I let you damn mine.”
I shift my weight, telling myself to take one step. That if I can take just one step away from her, the one after that will be easier, and the one after that easier still. I wish I were better at lying to myself.
“Wait.” Nimh draws a shuddering breath. “If you will not stay here, then I would see you reach your home safely. Let me give you some small protection before you go. So that you may find your way safe from harm.”
My jaw aches from clenching it, and I realize I can’t open it to speak. I turn back toward her and nod.
Nimh is looking around, tear-filled eyes scanning the clearing for something. She stoops to pick up a small, round stone, out of place among the more irregular, jagged rocks around it. She curls both her hands around it and draws it close to her, cradling it against her breastbone, and closes her eyes.
I can watch her like this, with her eyes closed—memorize her features and burn them into my memory so that I won’t forget. I could take her picture with my chrono, but it would just be a photo of a beautiful girl and a sunrise. It wouldn’t be Nimh; it wouldn’t be magic.
When she opens her eyes, her spell complete, I’m already stretching out my hand toward her.
“It cannot protect you from a blade or a beast,” she whispers. “But it will keep you safe from the magic of any who wish to harm you.” Gazing down at my hand, she places the stone in the center of my palm, careful not to let her fingers brush mine. The stone is warm from her skin, and for a moment, it almost looks different now—a faint sheen about it, perhaps, a hint of a glow.
Then I blink, and it’s only the colors from the sunrise.
When I lift my head, Nimh’s eyes are waiting for me. “Keep it with you,” she breathes, but her words are not so much a demand as a plea, her gaze beseeching. The tears filling those eyes spill out, painting glinting tracks of reflected dawn down her cheeks.
I want to lift my hand, touch her face, catch those tears, and hold her until she stops crying. I want her to just be Nimh again, and I want never to have heard the name Lightbringer. Instead, I close my fist around the stone and nod.
This time when I walk away, she doesn’t stop me—and I don’t look back.
TWENTY-NINE
NIMH
The sun rises, the slow crawl of its light revealing the valley below like the drawing back of a curtain. On the cliff the morning is already here, but for a few minutes I can stand with the light warm on my hair and gaze down over a land still sleeping, steeped in shadow.
The mist gathers around me, invisible now to the eye—but there, waiting for me. It stirs to my slightest whim, something that ought to have been impossible, for even the strongest magician alive cannot control the mist, only tap it for