“You don’t have to keep me talking just to keep me from contemplating killing you, you know,” he says, and I have to fight the chill that snakes up my spine. “In fact, you’d think I’d be more concerned with you trying to kill me than the other way around, yet I allow you to follow at my back every night. Don’t you think that’s a sign of trust?”
“I suppose.” I have contemplated killing Farin. Several times. Mostly utilizing graphic methods. But he’s right. I won’t kill him. Not when I don’t know how the magic in the tapestry works. For all I know, killing Farin here would just send him straight back to my body, right back into Blaise’s world. And then he’d be alone with her, and the last time that happened…
Blaise kissing him like her very soul needed it to survive…
I push the thought out of my head, but the writhing in my gut takes a moment to die down, much like the hare I strangled not an hour ago.
Farin wrenches a handful of overgrowth from the trees to make a path for us. “We have the same goal, you know.”
“Is that so? And what is that?”
“Blaise’s happiness.”
I quirk a brow. “Her happiness? And that’s really what you think you want?”
Farin smiles, and again, it’s innocent enough to fool a serpent.
“Of course. Why? Is that not what you want?”
I want a great many things for Blaise, her happiness being only one of them. Farin must know that, because he has the audacity to look satisfied.
“So you think we’ll make our way off this island, beat Blaise to weaving the end of the tapestry, and then we’ll fight for her fair and square?”
Farin laughs. “You think I’m delusional.”
I don’t voice an objection to this.
“It’s not as if I don’t know what will happen when we return. She’ll still want you over me, of course. You’ve had more time with her than I have, more occasions to win her affections. But I’m a patient male, and she and I are more alike than I think you want to admit to yourself.”
“This isn’t real.”
“Does it have to be?”
Blaise kissing Farin. Blaise kissing Farin like she’d never kissed me.
My gut roils, but my years with Abra have taught me to mask my expression and my voice. “Am I supposed to expect you to play fair? Who’s to say when we finish this tapestry, you won’t go back to overtaking my body, trapping me in my own head? That seems like the most likely conclusion to this story, doesn’t it?”
Farin pauses. I knew it was a risk to admit aloud, though perhaps not as risky as it seems. Farin isn’t dull, and he’s been in my head long enough to know I’m not dull either. Like it or not, Farin knows how my mind works, and he’s well aware that I’ve already thought through how his plan is going to work out, and not at all in my favor.
“You don’t know that,” he says, though cautiously. He’s swiveled toward me, unwilling to have his back to me any longer. “I’m in my own body now, aren’t I?” He gestures to himself. A sturdy build, straw-blond hair. Fates, he looks like a born prince. “Don’t you think it’s possible that when Blaise wove us into the tapestry separately, she cleaved our two souls?”
Cleave. An utterly useless word, given that it can mean the opposite of itself.
I hesitate to say my next words, but I can already see the cogs in Farin’s head spinning in that direction, anyway. Better we talk it through than allow his mind to carry him away. “You might have a body here, but that doesn’t mean you have one back home.”
Farin cranes his neck to the side. “Are you trying to convince me to kill you, Nox?”
My tongue falters in my mouth. I don’t know what my aim is any longer. Except that there’s a problem Farin and I both have, one that needs solving, and I don’t want him working out a solution on his own.
“No,” I say, rubbing the back of my neck. “I’m only saying that if we don’t figure something out, we’re both faced with the same problem we had before. Even if we both make it back to our world, we’re still stuck together, regardless of who commands my body.”
He cocks a brow. “More of a problem for you than me, considering I’m the one in control.”
I shake my head. “You know that’s not true. You said as much to Blaise when you admitted you were furious with the queen for putting you in my body rather than a different one. Because you know she can never love you as long as you’re imprisoning me. That she’s going to look at you and only ever see me.”
Farin plucks a berry off a nearby vine, squeezing it between his forefinger and thumb until it bursts, staining his fingertips red. “You heard our conversation?”
“Of course I heard it. You could hear my conversations when the situation was reversed, couldn’t you?”
He nods, almost imperceptibly. “Yes, but I couldn’t feel you. Once I had the reins.”
I don’t know how to respond to that, so I don’t.
“Well,” he says, straightening a bit and wiping his stained fingertips on his pants. “I suppose if you were there, you know there’s a flaw to your logic.”
“And what’s that?”
“Because if you were there, then you felt how Blaise kissed me. And you know she never kissed you like that.”
Blood pounds at my brain, and where I expect a taunting grin to splay across Farin’s mouth, all I get is an assessing look.
Farin putting his hands all over Blaise, lowering her onto the bed. My bed.
A vision of ripping Farin’s head from his body flashes through my mind. For a moment, we exchange a glance of mutual understanding that I’m about to try.
But then I wonder if that’s exactly what he wants. If he thinks his death on this island will send him back, just like I’ve speculated, but he can’t muster up the courage to end it himself.
The thought makes the blood running through my head go cold.
