Their grip on the hilt was slippery, their palm coated in sweat. Hands still shaking.
“I understand you feel empathy for the made-thing,” said the Hedge-Witch. “I will let you say goodbye before I use her.”
Tav turned to Eli and gently laid a hand on her cheek. They stared into her crocodile eyes. Let their eyes linger on the spot on her neck that they had kissed over and over again, nibbling and biting until Eli had moaned their name.
They leaned forward and pressed a kiss against Eli’s forehead. Heartbeat like thunder.
“Goodbye,” they whispered.
Then they stabbed her with the obsidian knife.
Thirty-Two
THE HEIR
The deadly plains stretched to the horizon like a never-ending nightmare. Kite shivered as she stared down at her feet, bare and pale against the dark obsidian. She could almost hear the cries of the dead witches under the surface, and when the light hit the black ice she could see arms reaching up at her, trying to drag her under.
“Kite?”
She looked up, letting the horror bleed from her eyes. Ink dripped down her face, the same colour as the stone.
“Are you okay?” Cam looked at her nervously, tugging at his moustache.
“We need to find the junkyard,” she said. “Ask the sword.”
“The staff — sword — hates me.”
“Then you must free it,” she told him.
“How?”
She swirled her hair into a nest on top of her head. Maybe a bird would come to rest, and they could dine on feathers.
“I don’t know.” She turned around stared back at the obsidian. So beautiful, and so deadly. Like Eli, she thought wistfully. “You don’t need that, by the way.”
“Need what?”
She could taste the guilt spilling from his body like spoiled fruit, could hear the moment he stopped raising the blade, pulled upward by uncertainty and fear.
“We made an agreement. That can’t be broken. I can’t break that oath. If I do, I will immediately be summoned here for execution. It’s what we agreed.”
“Eli told me not to trust witches.”
“Isn’t it a little late for that?” She turned back and stared at the thousands of stones studding his body. Basanite. Siltstone. Mica. “Shiny,” she said, and licked her lips.
Cam rubbed a piece of blue granite absentmindedly. “So we free the sword, then it can take us to the junkyard, and then you’ll get me home.”
“Oh, I never promised that,” she said, smiling sadly. Her broken reflection didn’t smile at all. “I said I would remake the world. Perhaps at the end of everything, you will find a home. I would never have agreed to an impossible promise.”
Forked lightning danced across the earth. It really was like walking on the sky, knowing at any moment you could plunge to your death. Death wasn’t something Kite thought about a lot. It was hard to kill witches, and harder to kill the Heir to the Coven. The trembling worsened. She didn’t understand why her body was like a violin string being played by a fine bow.
“Have you ever stared at your death?” she asked Cam conversationally. “It’s such an interesting experience.”
“It’s just a rock,” said Cam, as if he wasn’t half rock himself. He knelt down and placed a palm on the surface. He frowned. “It’s hard to hear.”
“Stones aren’t meant to be tombs, but we keep abusing them,” she sighed.
A faint smile played at the corners of his mouth. “The voice of the stone is quiet, but still there. Let me talk to it for a while. Maybe it knows how to break the curse.”
“Being bound to another thing isn’t always a curse.”
“If one of them is unwilling it is. Maybe be quiet and let me work?”
Kite drew back and let him commune with obsidian. The Beast pressed his body against her legs. He was panting heavily.
She missed the library. She missed the Labyrinth. In her own way, she even missed Clytemnestra.
This was the most dangerous thing she had done in her entire life. The absurdity of it overflowed her lungs, and damp air, stringy with seaweed, exhaled from her mouth. A spoiled Heir who knew nothing of war, who knew nothing that wasn’t in a book — how could she overthrow the Witch Lord?
Staring at the graveyard of dead witches was depressing. She almost wished she had held grimly on to the fierce playfulness of her child’s shape, the way Clytemnestra had. But it had been impossible; she had to pass as an adult, and her shape had changed the way she thought, the way she felt. She couldn’t play the way the Warlord played, not anymore. She was a strange thing, a half-grown witch, too old for the Children’s Lair and too young for the halls of the Coven.
“Can you make a circle?” asked Cam.
“That’s such a lovely idea,” she said, watching the stone body bent over the stone universe. “What kind?”
“I don’t know, exactly.” He bit his lip. “The stone seems to think that we can use the essences of the dead witches to free the blade. But we need to … re-enact our bond, and then break it? Does that make sense?”
“Of course. Rituals have power.” She didn’t say that she was afraid of what lay under the rock, and that her own essence had already been defeated once, by Circinae.
She was not the strongest of her kind.
“Then let’s do it now.” He stood. “Lay the sword beside me.”
Kite did, watching as the stones on his body began to shake; listening to the sharp hiss of the blade as it came close to the hand that had claimed it and wrenched it from its resting place. “It really
