Nothing.
I sighed. His sword was lying across the bed. It wouldn't take long to walk down to the spring, I knew the different paths so well now, and I was in such good spirits I felt invincible. I hadn't even seen any mist in the last week. Hadn't heard no voices, neither.
And I was wearing my charm. It'd protected me from the Mists man in the night market in Lisirra. It'd made him look right through me. Maybe it could do the same with the island.
And Kaol only knew how long Naji would be under.
I scooped the sword off the bed and grabbed the water pot. Naji was wearing the scabbard, so I just carried the sword with me out into the rain. The drops were cold and stinging, the way the rain always was here. Made me miss the warm soft rains that fell across the pirates' islands. But once I got into the thick part of the forest the leaves caught most of the drops, and I trudged over pine needles and crushed ferns, shivering and miserable. My brain started churning up like the sea, thinking on the curse and getting kicked off the Revenge and fighting the Hariri clan. I thought about Tarrin, who I'd managed to shove down deep inside me when we left Port Iskassaya. The memory was back now: his breath tickling my ear, how easy the sword had slid into his belly, the heat of his blood spilling over my hands. And it was this sword that had done it, this sword that I'd used to kill Tarrin.
I suddenly couldn't stand the thought of the sword touching me no more, and I tossed it off into the greenery, my chest heaving, my heart racing. I watched it disappear in a spray of ferns, and for a split second I wondered what I'd done. But then my thoughts went elsewhere.
The woods had gone silent.
There's always noise in the world.
But not now.
I stopped and that's when I heard it, that emptiness of sound, like the forest was holding her breath. I got this creeping chill up my spine, and my palms turned cold and clammy, and here I was alone and with no manner of weapon cause I'd just thrown it away, and what sort of stupid girl does a thing like that?
A shimmer appeared up ahead, a curl of mist, pale silver and hazy. I took a step backward, trying to figure out the best way to run. I was in the chiming forest, all those skinny trees covered with bone-white bark, weird transparent leaves disintegrating in the rain–
"Ananna of the Tanarau."
A woman stepped out of the mist, her body long and thin, her eyes that same eerie silver as the woman in the dress shop. But this was a different woman. The woman in the dress shop had been human enough to fool me; this one had a narrow feral face, her chin too pointed and her cheekbones too sharp. And the silver in her eyes blocked out all the white.
"I don't know who that is," I told her.
The woman laughed. Her teeth were filed into points.
"You don't know who you are?" she asked me.
"I know I'm not Ananna of the Tanarau."
The woman laughed again, and I knew it was pointless to lie. I wished to the deep dark sea that I had waited for Naji to finish his magic.
"Who are you?" I asked.
She tilted her head and little lights danced in the shadows around her. Whenever I looked at them I felt dizzy.
The woman drifted up beside me. It took me a minute to realize that she didn't have feet, that her skirts ended in a cloud of creeping mist that got up under my clothes, all cold and damp. Those little lights swirled outside my line of vision, and I used all my willpower to keep my sight focused on the bridge of her nose. I knew better than to look her in the eye.
"Surely you know," she said. "You've met my kind before. Harbor. Although she did insist on a fully human body." The woman laughed. "Stupid of her. At least she bled all over your world and not mine."
"That ain't what I'm talking about. I know you ain't human." I took a deep breath and steadied myself. "You know my name. Only seems fair I know yours."
The woman gazed at me for a long time. I stood my ground, even though the mist crept and crept around me.
"You can call me Echo," she said.
"You expect me to believe that's your name?"
"I didn't say it was my name. I said it's what you can call me." She gave me this sly, slow smile that reminded me of a fox. It showed just enough of her teeth.
"So what do you want?"
"Now that," she said, "I'm certain you already know."
"You'd be wrong." A lie, of course. I knew damn well what she wanted.
She stared at me for a long time, like she couldn't decide if I was lying or just that stupid. I could tell she figured either one was a possibility.
"Your companion," she said finally. "The assassin."
"Oh, him." I frowned. "I don't know where he is."
She tilted her head. "Don't confuse me with Harbor," she said. "I've been doing this much, much longer than she. That charm she lent you was one of my own devising. It should have worked. But the assassin had taken precautions I didn't realize."
The woman ghosted her hand along the line of my throat, coming close but never quite touching. I could feel Naji's charm pressing against my heart. "You seem to have taken precautions yourself."
"Figure I can't be too careful, out in the wild."
She drifted closer. Her body gave off cold the way a normal person's gives off heat. She still didn't touch me, though, and I figured I could thank Naji's charm for that.
"You can still help me," the woman said. "It will be of your own accord, and that way is always better. And I would never expect you to work for free."
Her silvery eyes drifted over my face and came to rest on the charm.
"Oh yeah?" I asked. "What would you give me?"
She laughed. "Whatever you want."
"Money? Empire money, I mean, not some worthless Mist coins."
"We can acquire wealth, yes. Human wealth."
I looked past her, to the gray space where she'd first appeared. It shimmered in the trees, a thundercloud that lost its way out of the storm. From where I stood, the Mists were grayness. They were nothing.