Page 81 of Cursed Shadows 5

Of all the languages he’s learned to speak, the one on this island is a language he hasn’t quite mastered enough to read. Speak, yes, but read—not more than few words and numbers.

“She took… a, uh… an air kar.” Eamon frowns on what he’s trying to say, as though unsure himself of what it really means. “It is a kar that flies.”

Dare runs the pad of his slender, pale thumb over the worddestination. He slides his gaze to the following letters. At first look, it’s shaped nonsense.

He sounds out the letters, “Vv…ah-nn...”

“Van-koo-ver,” Eamon mutters, reading over his shoulder. “I don’t know where that is. But it’s certainly not on this island—I know every village, town and city in this land.”

Dare keeps his frown focused on the letters he cannot read. “Is there a map?”

Eamon shoves from the dining table, fast, as though burned by the idea. He marches straight for the bookshelf and isn’t kind about the way he riffles through the books. Some topple off the shelves, hit the carpeted floor, hard, until he yanks out a hefty book, glossy blue, and Eamon declares it, “Atlas.”

He tosses it onto the dining table.

It lands with a hard thud.

Dare waits as he fingers through the pages, map after map after map. As he waits, he keeps the parchment pinched between his fingers, and his free hand moves over the rest of the papers scattered over the table. Parchment after parchment, inked with letters he cannot read—until his fingertips touch something glossy.

He pushes aside the envelope that buries the gloss, and revealed are two faces looking up at him. Paintings, of sorts. Pocket-sized painted faces.

Dare’s frown deepens as he plucks the first face up from the table, instantly recognisable. But what Bee’s face is doing looking at him from a pocket-sized painting is unknown to him.

There is a slight difference in this portrait to when he last saw her. To him that was maybe three months ago now, but in her realm it has been a year.

Not a while, but long enough for her to chop much of her hair off until it is blunt over her shoulders, and the icy blond is gone, now left with only her natural mousy shade.

He tucks the small painting into his pocket. Might come in useful. Then he reaches for the second, the face that is not Bee’s…

So this must be Tesni.

A hum thrums his throat, curt.

She is not nearly as grubby as he expected given the state of her bedchamber.

Light hair with a blushed hue; a warm, softly freckled complexion. She would look soft if it wasn’t for the glass-blue of her eyes, the sort of echoing shade that gives her a piercing, hollow stare.

Eamon smacks his hand down on the parted book. “Canada,” he breathes the word with the relief of a bated breath. “That’s where she is. Canada.”

Dare pockets the second portrait and strides around the table to study the map.

Eamon’s shoulders sag. “It makes sense. That’s where Tesni is from. That is her homeland. Bee mentioned it when she spoke of her travels.”

Dare frowns at the map, studies its familiar details.

Eamon drops onto a wooden chair and runs his hands down his cheeks, leaving whitish streaks that are fast to disperse back into his natural complexion.

“She’s stuck.” Eamon lets his lashes shut on the realisation. “The fones don’t work. The air kars won’t work in the Cursed Shadows. And there are no bridges outside of Britain and Ireland. Wherever she is… it’s too far to find safety.”

“The iilra are ripping space apart,” Dare tells him. “New bridges will become outside of these islands.”

“That doesn’t help Bee.” The look Eamon shoots him is desperate. “Even if there’s a new bridge in Canada, how will she know that?”

Dare’s mouth tilts as he sinks into thought.

That word…

Canada.

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