A Song of Wraiths and Ruin (A Song of Wraiths and Ruin #1)(9)
But the more Malik tried to force it down, the higher the pressure within him rose. They couldn’t stay in Ziran, not when they had no money and no one would give work to Eshrans. But they couldn’t go home either—they didn’t have any home to go back to. Home now meant Nana and Mama, and they were both at a camp in Talafri depending on the money Malik and his sisters were supposed to be sending back for them. Returning empty-handed was not an option, but what other choice did they have?
Nadia said something to him, but Malik couldn’t hear her over the sound of his thoughts clogging his mind. The shadows crowded around him, whispering words in languages he didn’t know. Malik’s back hit the wall as he crouched down, his hands to his ears and knees to his chest, unable to look away as the shadows coalesced into beings.
Bloated, fishlike apparitions weaving through the legs of the crowd. Knee-high insects with multicolored scales squawking in the trees beside pulsing clouds of green fog littered with human teeth. Hellish creatures with the heads of donkeys and the bodies of scorpions scuttling in and out of the needle-thin cracks in the stone around them.
The grim folk, plain and real before him as the sun in the sky.
But the worst of all the kinds of grim folk were the wraiths—wayward spirits trapped between the realm of the living and the dead, with bodies formed of roiling black shadows that coalesced around a bloodred cloud that had once been their hearts. It was the wraiths who scared Malik most of all, and it was the wraiths who surrounded him now as the panic threatened to pull him under.
When he was younger, Malik had just assumed the grim folk were so commonplace that no one spoke of them, the same way no one needed to say the sky was blue. He had even foolishly considered the creatures his friends, listening to their stories and making up his own to entertain them.
But they weren’t his friends, because they weren’t real. Papa and the elders and everyone else in the village had made sure Malik knew that the supernatural was to be respected but not believed, and he still had the scars from the lessons to prove it. The hallucinations were a sign of something fundamentally wrong inside him, and the fact that he was seeing so many at once meant that the illness was getting worse. Malik shuddered, his nails digging tightly into the skin of his forearms.
As the panic grew, the world around Malik faded away, as if he were looking up from the bottom of the ocean and sinking fast. The grim folk had never attacked him before, but he couldn’t stop imagining them ripping through his flesh with their talons, devouring him and his sisters, with nobody for thousands of miles caring what had happened to them.
“Get away from me,” Malik choked out with a sob. “Get away from me, get away from me, get away from me!”
People were staring now at this mad Eshran boy rocking back and forth and shouting at creatures no one else could see. The still rational part of Malik’s mind screamed at him to get up before he made an even bigger fool of himself, but his body was far beyond his control.
And because the Great Mother had decided the day had not been humiliating enough, his tears finally spilled over. At the sight of them, Leila recoiled.
“Wait, don’t—I’ll fix this. Stop crying,” she said. It took Malik a second to realize his older sister had switched to Darajat, which they hadn’t spoken since they’d left Eshra. Zirani was the primary language of the Odjubai, the language of scholars and queens; to speak otherwise here was to label yourself an outsider and an easy target.
Nana had once told Malik that when his mind moved too fast, he should think about his favorite place in the world until he felt better. He took a deep breath and recalled the largest lemon tree on his family’s farm, the citrus scent in the air right before the fruits were ready to harvest. The bark was rough beneath his palms as he passed branch after branch, climbing to a place where the monsters couldn’t reach him.
Leila awkwardly reached a hand toward him, then pulled it back. Malik took several deep breaths, pressing his face into his hands until the world finally returned to a speed he could handle.
The grim folk were creatures of stories and nightmares, his own exhaustion manifesting into hallucinations. They weren’t real. This was real.
And sure enough, when Malik looked up again, they were gone.
Several minutes of silence passed between the siblings before Leila finally spoke.
“Caravan drivers will often offer a spot in their wagons to potential workers. We’ll negotiate for one that will take all three of us. It’s not a perfect solution, but I think it’s our only option.”
Throat too tight to speak, Malik nodded. This was the way it had always been: Malik the little brother who ruined things and Leila the older sister who fixed them. If they managed to find a way out of this situation, he would never go against her advice again. Everything was better for everyone when Malik kept his head down and his mouth shut.
Leila set her mouth in a determined line. “All right, let’s leave before it gets any darker. Come on, Nadia . . . Nadia?”
Both Leila and Malik looked down.
Nadia was gone.
“Abraa! Abraa!” The rhythm of the griot’s djembe was steady as a heartbeat. “Come and gather—a story is about to begin!”
Ice flooded Malik’s veins. His eyes flew from person to person for any sign of the windswept curls and round face he knew so well, his earlier panic magnified a thousandfold in his chest. He’d hate himself forever for losing their papers, but if anything happened to Nadia . . .