Hills.

  Hazahnahkah watched hills—out there—in the distance.

  Humans were arguing and arguing and arguing, his wielder was one of them.

  No longer was the lonely Island of Osayn in sight, but Hwayoung pursued Nazaki even so, until they were stranded in the middle of the Petal Sea. So then what were those hills? The ferries bobbed on the pink waves, loose rafts of cracked wood tied with hemp. The petals clung together, a false earth, their surfaces undulating in slow, uneven swells. Every splash of a paddle or stumble of a foot sent a scatter of blossoms into the air, fluttering down again like a heavy snow. One was enough to paralyze a man. And one had been paralyzed—Lahahm’s wielder—struggling on his back in a boat.

  “Nazaki! You will come back with me! I gave December 11th’s knife to you!”

  “Go away!” Nazaki shouted, sending several more men to subdue her.

  Hwayoung landed hard as she leapt to another ferry, her feet sliding against the slick wood. She skidded low, driving Hazahnahkah into the boards for balance, splitting a crack down the ferry’s center.

  The men on it fell back, too scared to clash with Hazahnahkah in the open ocean. Their boots and knees bent with each tilt of the unstable floor.

  A man lunged. Hwayoung stepped back cleanly, dragging the tip of Hazahnahkah across the planks. A burst of petals exploded between them as the ferry shifted. The man’s sword missed by inches, and he wobbled, struggling to regain footing.

  Two others jumped from a neighboring raft. Their landings were heavy, too much weight. The ferry tilted hard to the left. Hwayoung dropped to one knee and stabbed Lahahm downward to anchor herself. She watched one of the men lose his footing and tumble backward—

  —straight into the sea of petals.

  No scream came. His body disappeared, swallowed by the surface without a ripple. The fighting stopped. Most stood, awed. One man whimpered while another laughed. Many knelt and prayed. In but a moment Hazahnahkah saw all a man’s makings.

  And Nazaki was left standing stupidly.

  “You will stay,” Hwayoung managed, taking a firm step toward him. Her boat still shook from the man’s fall, but she alone remained firm.

  Hazahnahkah had no part in this. In any of it. He had been watching those hills.

  They were coming closer.

  Nazaki tore off the knife from where she hung around his neck, flipped the blade over, and pointed the handle to Hwayoung. “I give you this, and you let me leave.”

  “I see what you scheme now,” Hazahnahkah whispered.

  The knife seemed amused. “I would never return to someone who abandoned me. That would mean forgiving. And I do not forgive.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  The knife went quiet.

  Nazaki frowned, still holding her out. “You mean you still don’t get it?”

  “Get what?” Hwayoung asked.

  “To give someone a blade is to propose yourself for marriage. How could I ever get married to a cursed girl like you?”

  Hwayoung, for the first time since she saw them unmoor her boat, looked surprised. “I know,” she said. “I know,” she said again, somehow more firm.

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  “So go back.”

  “No.”

  Nazaki breathed the words through his teeth. “Go back!”

  “No!”

  Hwayoung now trembled with her ferry. Hazahnahkah could feel it most intensely. He understood now. Going back to Osayn meant going back to that cage—not with iron bars or curtain rags, hoisted on a wagon, but a cage of hippocratic demands and social expectations, anchored by mistakes. Loneliness was its name, and Hazahnahkah knew it well, but he could not use his First Terror on Nazaki. He would not possess the boy and force him to return. That would make a new cage, both for him, for the girl, and for the boy. Knife was deathly silent, yet Hazahnahkah could still hear what she once said to him before, back when he was bound in the darkness of the weapon’s shed.

  “There is no such thing as freedom.”

  One man shouted, enraged at his friend’s death. He swung at Hwayoung and although she ducked he kicked her to her side. Hwayoung forced herself upright. Another man charged. She sidestepped as the ferry pitched again, this time rightward, and drove the pommel of Hazahnahkah into the man’s ribs. He coughed, fell to his knees, and rolled toward the edge—but a second grabbed his cloak and yanked him back.

  Nazaki barked orders from two ferries away. His face was flat and cold, his missing arm tucked under his coat. “Ignore her. We do not need Vrast for our journey. Those who fight are not worthy of the dream Hazahnahkah gave us.”

  The men closed in cautiously now, like wolves afraid of fire. They circled, shifting across the ferries on quick steps. Each jump from raft to raft kicked up waves of petals that sprayed across Hwayoung’s arms and face. The soft touch of them stung like tiny burns. Hazahnahkah could feel every shift her musculature, where her face shifted to pain, where her joints locked in fear.

  Hwayoung clenched Hazahnahkah tightly. The blade was light and willing in her hands, but before he had a chance to activate his Terrors her whole body changed its tune. She drew short, sharp breaths. She needed a path—

  —and found it.

  She slashed the ropes connecting two ferries. The cords snapped. The gap between rafts widened immediately as the waves dragged them apart.

  A man jumped too late. His foot caught the edge of the ferry and slipped into open air. He grabbed at nothing, spiraling headfirst into the petals.

  The circle broke.

  Hwayoung sprinted across the narrowing planks. She kicked a barrel loose from the ferry’s supplies and sent it crashing into another man’s knees. He stumbled back, swinging wildly, and clipped another with his elbow. Both toppled sideways. Both vanished.

  Nazaki growled. He vaulted from his ferry toward hers. His landing was clean, practiced, like he had always fought on petals. He drew the dagger—Knife—and held it low in a reverse grip.

  “Go back,” he said once more.

  The waves surged beneath them, tilting the ferry steeply. Hwayoung charged anyway. Hazahnahkah flashed in the sunlight beyond The Leviathan Sky, and Knife answered in a blur. Their blades clashed once, twice, three times. Fast, short strikes, feet dancing on slippery wood. No spinning, no flourishes. Every move had to be exact or they would fall.

  Nazaki parried. Hwayoung gritted her teeth as Hazahnahkah jerked in her grip. She let the motion pull her body instead of fighting it, spinning into a low, sweeping kick.

  Nazaki staggered back two steps to keep his balance. His heel struck the edge of the ferry. He froze for half a heartbeat.

  Hwayoung was impaled by the man wielding Lahahm. Hazahnahkah immediately healed her, and at that the man gasped and dropped the spear. Nazaki was eager to fight. He attacked, but not cleanly. The force from his own step pushed him off his footing as everyone else maintained balance in the crowded vessel. He dropped into a crouch, one knee braced, Knife steady in his grip.

  The petals licked over the ferry's edges. The surface of the Petaled Death rose and fell in slow, massive breaths.

  No one moved.

  The ferries drifted apart slowly, the rope ties coming undone one by one. A dozen survivors still shouted from the other rafts, but no one dared to leap across now.

  Around them, the petals shifted, heavy and endless, swallowing every misstep whole. The petals stirred. At first, it was nothing—a soft shifting, like a change in the breeze. The small ferries creaked gently on the surface, bobbing side to side. Hwayoung adjusted her footing, bracing on the uneven boards.

  Then came the first swell.

  It was those hills. Off on the horizon, the pink surface lifted. They rose in wide, gentle humps—low and broad, pushing themselves out of the earth. The humps rolled toward them, slow at first. Beautiful. Peaceful.

  The ferries rose and fell with the motion. Some of Nazaki’s men laughed, uneasy. Others tightened their grips on the rails.

  The hills grew larger as they approached—higher, steeper, closer. In minutes, the hills became cliffs. The cliffs became walls. Hazahnahkah used his Second Terror to create gravity fields around the ferries, but this did not work. He used his Third Terror to warp the space which kept them somewhere else, and this also did not work. He shuddered.

  Knife laughed. “I see you know nothing, Hazahnahkah!”

  Everyone had stopped fighting, and Hazahnahkah tried again. He used every ounce of attention he had. Nothing worked. Then, the next swell came. The sheer speed and size of it nearly catapulted them. Why were none of his powers working? The third swell was on its way. Those hills. It must have been those hills.