The fire in me rose with the words, like flames to wind. The mead hissed and steamed. I thrust my hand into it. Flames leaped from the bowl, burning my skin. The scent of hot metal filled the air. I closed my eyes and saw more flames, the flames of my nightmares.
The flames I’d leaped through. Huge figures strode toward me, made entirely of fire, their arms and legs and necks bent at unnatural angles. One of them reached in my direction. I drew away, hot shudders racing through me. He wasn’t reaching for me, though. He was reaching for the bowl in which the mead yet steamed. He dipped a fiery hand into the liquid, then jerked back with a roar.
“How dare you offer us the drink of our enemies? We refuse your gift!”
The flames in my blood burst through my skin. Pain—I’d never felt pain like this. My skin was melting, my bones were melting—I started screaming and couldn’t stop. The ground buckled beneath me like a horse trying to throw me from its back.
Someone grabbed me. There was a roaring in my ears, and then—silence, save for the steady beating of wings.
I opened my eyes. Ari looked at me, his green eyes wide, his hands shaking as he clasped my arms. The fire still burned in me, but it was contained—barely—beneath my skin once more. Liquid dripped from the hand I’d thrust into the mead, and the drips fell back into the bowl.
I drew my arms free, shook the last of the mead from my hand, and looked into the liquid. Somehow, impossibly, the earthquake—if there’d been an earthquake—hadn’t spilled any. Maybe you couldn’t spill mead like this by accident, or maybe the fire giants hadn’t wanted to call on Freki and Muninn’s master, either. “The mead was no good.” My throat felt scratchy from screaming. “It just made them angry. The spell—”
“The spell isn’t worth your life,” Ari said.
What is this small life against the fate of the world? But if I’d died, the fire would have burst through my skin, out into that world.
Muninn’s wings beat on. “Stupid girl! The power will never be contained now.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” There was movement in my backpack. Freki backed out of it, holding the hilt of Svan’s knife between his teeth.
We all turned to look at the fox. He dropped the knife in front of me. “Even had you offered more suitable brew, the fire’s hold on you is too tight. A working as great as this one requires blood. I can give you that.”
Muninn’s wingbeats fell silent. I stared at Freki, not understanding—not wanting to understand.
“Haley,” Freki said, “not long ago, you gave me a gift. Two gifts: a drink of sacred mead and the life of one of my kin. I would repay those gifts now.”
A single sharp beat of Muninn’s wings. “No.”
“No!” For once I agreed with Muninn completely.
Freki tilted his head and said nothing.
“There’s nothing to repay!” Wildness rose in me. Fire roared in my ears as I yelled, “It was a gift! You don’t pay back a gift! That’s not how it works!”
“The spell will consume you if you do not complete it.” Freki nudged the sheathed blade with his nose.
“So let it consume me,” I said.
“Hell no,” Ari said.
“After the spell consumes you,” Freki went on matter-of-factly, “its power will be set free into the world.”
I shook my head. “I won’t kill you. No way will I—” I looked wildly around. “If the spell needs blood, it can have mine!” I grabbed the knife out of its sheath and drew it toward my wrist. I had a lot more blood than Freki did. I might not even have to die.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” Ari tried to grab the knife. I wrenched it away from him and pressed the blade to my skin. It was sharp, and I was used to breaking skin. A thin line of blood welled up.
I smelled a burning sulfur smell. Paper-thin flames rose up out of the cut—out of my blood. I froze, clutching the knife, mesmerized by the sight. The ground trembled. I barely noticed. Such a pretty light—
Ari’s hand clamped down over my wrist. The fire went out. The ground went still. I jerked my arm away from him. “How dare you—”
A sickening burned-skin smell stopped me mid-sentence. I looked down and saw puckered red skin around the cut. Pain seeped into my awareness slowly, like blood through a bandage. I felt the cut bleeding again, and I knew any moment fire would follow once more—my own blood burning, melting my skin. I doubled over and threw up in the grass, even as the pain in my wrist flared hotter. Burning hurt way, way more than breaking skin or drawing blood.
Ari grabbed my wrist and wrapped something around it. His handkerchief. I swallowed and sat up as the pain receded a little.
“So you see,” Freki said calmly, “your blood will not do. It will only set the power free.”
I smelled the handkerchief beginning to burn. Ari grabbed the water bottle out of my pack and poured it over the cloth. The burning smell subsided, replaced by the wet ash scent of an old campfire. Ari handed me the bottle, and I drank deeply, cool water soothing my throat. “I won’t kill you,” I told Freki again.
“Don’t be silly, Haley.” Freki laid a paw on my leg. “I cannot die. I will only leave this world for a time, nothing more. Even so, I do not offer this lightly.”
My chest ached. “Will it hurt?”
Freki didn’t answer, which was answer enough. Muninn’s wings flapped sharply downward. “I will not allow it,” the raven said.
The little fox laughed. “You have no power over me, Muninn. We’ve always been equals, in our master’s eyes and all others’. This gift is mine to give.”
To my amazement, Muninn didn’t argue with that. He glowered at us all in complete silence.
I looked at Ari. Ari swallowed hard. He tore a blank page from his mother’s spellbook and made it into a funnel, then sat down, balanced the mead skin between his knees, and used the funnel to pour the mead back into the skin. Nothing soaked through the waterproof paper. Not one drop hit the ground. In a few seconds the bowl was empty.
“You didn’t want me to do this before,” I said.
“Not so much depended on it then,” Ari said grimly. He took the fire stone out of the funnel and set it on the ground. The black stone had my blood upon it still; the mead hadn’t even smudged it. Ari set the coin on the ground, too, bouncing the silver in his palm as if it were hot. His skin was burned where he’d grabbed my wrist, a new welt across his palm and fingers already blistering.
“I hurt you.”
“I’ll survive,” Ari said brusquely. “I’d like to see to it that you survive, too.”
I looked down at Freki. He looked up at me. His tiny eyes were filled with compassion. “It is different for humans, I know,” the fox said. “If you leave this world, you leave it forever, and there are those who would miss you if you did.” He flicked an ear toward Ari, even as Ari muttered, “Damn right.”
“Accept this gift, Haley. Erase the debt between us.”
“There’s no debt between us.” My throat tightened around the words. I glanced at Ari. His lips were pressed together, his expression grim. If the fire beneath my skin destroyed me, he really would be alone here.