I wonder if that belief is even true.
Maybe she can scent the vampirism on me.
She yells something at us, and I shake my head to indicate I don’t understand. I take a careful step forward. She flicks her knife like she intends to launch it at me, but at the last second her fingers close back over the hilt, like she’s only just remembered this is her sole weapon, and she’s clinging to it for dear life.
Instead, she points the blade toward the sand. Farin and I take this as a command to kneel, and we do, thinking to placate her. Hopefully, we can show her we mean no harm.
“Well, this is going well,” Farin says, sounding more nonchalant than I prefer when I’m meeting my sister for the first time since childhood and have no way of communicating with her.
Something about Farin’s tone must give her pause, though, because her blade falters.
“You speak Linnish?” she asks, her voice hoarse with thirst.
I’ve never heard the term before, and my mind is threatening to go off on a scholarly hunt for how our language could possibly have made it to another realm, but I remind myself this isn’t the time for that.
“Yes,” I say, and Zora swallows, blinking rapidly.
“It’s dead,” is all she says in return.
It’s my turn to blink.
“The language,” she says, emphasizing the word by conducting her blade through the air. “It’s dead one.”
Farin cocks his head to the side. “And yet you speak it.”
Zora doesn’t seem to know which one of us to point the knife toward, or whether she should be pointing it at either of us at all, because the blade is shaking and zigzagging erratically. “Not well. Not for long time. I must…” She pauses, biting her lip. “I must search for words.” She points to her temple with the hand that’s not holding the knife. “Some words go missing.”
I frown, but my curiosity is getting the better of me. “How do you know Linnish?” I think I’m pronouncing her word for our language correctly, but I’m unsure.
“It was taught in school to me. But for reading and writing. No person speaks this language,” she says again, more emphatically this time, as if remembering how suspicious she is of us. As if the curiosity of our language had wiped it from her consciousness for a moment. “Who are you?”
I look at Farin, but he only shrugs, his palms still held out in front of him. “This is all you.”
Right. This Farin not being able to lie thing is going to be inconvenient. Though I suppose I should be grateful that my vampirism allows me to skirt the curse. I rifle around in my brain for a lie that might be convincing. I can’t very well spout out the name of a country without her knowing I’m making it up. If Zora was taught a dead language in her schooling, I can’t imagine geography wasn’t part of that education.
However…
“We’re voyagers from across the Great Sea,” I say. “Our people search for new lands, as ours have dried up,” I say, pulling from legends of the Nether. “Thanks to a storm, we were shipwrecked here. My friend and I are the only survivors, at least that we’ve been able to find. There could be others, but we’re beginning to doubt that. We’re just trying to survive. To find a way off this island.”
“To explore this new world?” Zora asks.
I shake my head and fight the burning in my eyes. “At this point, we’d just like to get back home.”
“You said home is dry,” she says.
“That doesn’t make it any less home,” I murmur.
I try not to think about the last memory I have from home. Of Blaise kissing Farin with enough fervor that even I believed it.
“Hm.” She surveys both of us with those wide eyes of hers. Fates, they hurt to look at. Everything else about her has changed so much, but her eyes are the same.
Except that they don’t recognize me.
Still, she lowers her knife.
When I shoot her a questioning look, she says, “Alone? Difficult to stay alive. Not alone? Staying alive has better chances.”
I hate how she sounds like she knows from experience.
“Unless you try to eat me,” she says with a shrug. “Then, staying alive much harder. So don’t do that.”
Farin flashes her the kind of grin that makes my stomach flip. “We wouldn’t dream of it, would we, Nox?”
Zora’s eyes flash again with something that I can’t help but hope is recognition at the sound of my name, but if there’s a part of her that remembers anything connected to her original life, she doesn’t mention it.
My sister brings her knife back to her side and stuffs it in a belt that clearly did not belong to her originally. She’s punched an extra hole in the belt so it’ll fit her waist, and now the blade rests exposed at her hip.
“That’s dangerous, to keep your knife there. What happens if you slip and it twists?” Farin asks her.
Zora shoots him a look of acid, one I find immensely satisfying.
“When I stab myself on accident, here is my permission to laugh at me then,” she says, and it’s so much like the Zora I remember, I almost laugh. Almost.
Farin’s eyes linger on my sister a tad too long for my liking. “I’ll remember that. There’s a cave back that way,” he says, pointing into the brush. “It makes for a better shelter than the beach.”
Zora immediately looks wary, and she opens her mouth to say something, but then she clamps it shut and allows a wry grin to overtake her face. She gestures in front of her. “Lead my way.”
She follows us from behind, careful to stay at both of our backs.
