The first speaker smiled. “The opposite. He’s better. Woke up this morning like he’d never been ill at all.” He leaned closer to his friend. “But to hear Freia tell it, his healing wasn’t just a turn of luck. She says she… did something.”
“Did something?”
A nod. “Magic.” He drained his beer. “I went by to visit, and she looked like she’d seen a ghost. Just sitting there, staring at her hands as if she’d never seen them before. Said last night she put her palm on the boy’s forehead, wishing for a miracle, and saw all this gold around her fingers. Felt something happen.” He shrugged. “Could be she was dreaming, but the boy woke up good as new today. She’s convinced it was magic, like long ago. Slinking around in the air and waiting to be used.”
“That was centuries ago.”
The first man shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”
Didn’t Neve know it. She quirked a tiny grin into her own tankard. The world had magic again, and sooner or later, someone would make up a story as to why. She wondered how close the myth would get to the truth. She wondered if someday, someone would tie the disappearance of the Wilderwood and the last Second Daughter to the rebirth of magic.
She wondered if she’d be part of the story at all. Neve couldn’t decide whether she wanted to be or not. It seemed exhausting, being a myth.
A shiver worked through her shoulders as the door opened again. Alpera was just as cold as Valleyda, especially up here on the northern end, right before you crossed into the Wastes—wide expanses of nothing but rock and ice. But inside the tavern, the light was warm and the air warmer, heated by the dancers enthusiastically twirling to the sounds of a string band at the back of the main room. Neve didn’t understand the language they sang in, but the lilts of it reminded her of Solmir. She tapped her foot in spite of herself.
“A dance, sweet one?”
The asker was a big man, with shoulders half as wide as Neve was tall and a ruddy, good-natured face. A refusal was poised on her tongue, but his eyes were kind and his smile genuine and he didn’t strike her as the kind who might pressure for more if she gave in to a dance. She’d grown skilled at ferreting those out.
So, with a laugh, Neve relented, tossing back the rest of her ale and offering her hand. “Lead the way.”
The steps to the folk dance were as foreign to her as the language the song was sung in, but her partner—Lieve, he informed her, making the introduction between twirls with a dramatic flutter of his hand—led her gallantly through them, gentle touches on her wrist or hip to guide her in the right direction. Neve caught on eventually, laughing hard enough to give herself a side stitch, and when the dance ended with everyone clapping both hands above their heads and stomping one foot, she was right on the beat.
After, the band meandered into a slower tune, one whose melody seemed vaguely familiar. A slight frown creased Neve’s brow as she turned toward the instrumentalists, trying to think of where she’d heard it before.
Lieve smiled, a more reserved one now, and once again held out a somewhat tentative hand. “Slow dances are much easier to learn.”
She could see in his face that he wanted to keep dancing with her, that though he’d never push for something she didn’t want to give, he still wanted to ask. The kind thing to do would be to cut him loose now, let him down gently.
Neve smiled, patted his hand. “I’m afraid I—”
But then a lone voice rose to accompany the melody, and Neve remembered.
It was the lullaby, the same one Solmir had sung her in the crumbling cabin at the edge of the inverted forest. The one he’d sung as he carved the night sky she still kept in her pocket, a worry stone to run her fingers over.
She stood there stricken, until Lieve’s face went from sheepish embarrassment to concern. “Sweet one, are you—”
“May I cut in?”
The voice reverberated from behind her, the one she’d heard in her head all these months. Neve whirled around.
He looked the same and wholly different. Solmir’s hair was still long, worn pulled back in the front, bleached lighter by time in the sun, making his dark brows that much more severe. The scars on his forehead weren’t quite as pronounced, their color blending into his pale skin. His blue eyes were only on her.
“You,” she murmured.
“Me,” he answered.
Behind her, Lieve excused himself with as much dignity as possible. Neve barely noticed. She and Solmir stood in the center of a sea of twisting dancers and neither was quite able to move.