Tav’s body was shaking, both from fear and from the effort of holding open the wound without destroying Eli.
She had better be alive.
She trusted me.
“I’ve fulfilled my end of the bargain,” they told their mentor, ally, and enemy. “I have delivered the Heart to your hand.” They could already feel the promise they had made fading, the oath fulfilled. The magic was satisfied.
Tav smiled, and knew it was feral. They had outwitted the Hedge-Witch, and they both knew it.
“Clever baby,” crooned the Hedge-Witch. “Such a fast learner. But I’ve been dealing in deception for much, much longer.”
The succulent had finished shredding itself and was now a collection of stubby greygreen leaves on the floor oozing lifeblood. The pieces began to twitch violently. And then they began to grow, reaching arms up to the sky and legs down to the ground, shaking out hair matted with earth and cobwebs and coffee grounds.
“I thought that was a new plant,” said Tav. “I didn’t recognize it. How’s it going, you guys?”
They tried not to let their fear bleed over their body and turned, smiling, to face their former comrades growing from the mutilated plant.
Their hand tightened on the hilt. The obsidian blade was now half its size, worn thin by the power of the Heart. It felt small and fragile in Tav’s hand.
Their eyes flicked to Eli, who had collapsed on the ground, gasping for breath. As they watched, she coughed up an acrylic fingernail.
They were unarmed and outnumbered.
Thirty-Four
THE HEIR
There was music playing.
The low murmur of a cello, the melancholy chorus of violin. Every movement under the ice, every ebb and flow of the mass of light that trembled and turned and reached and desired was an orchestra playing an eternal dirge, a melody of mourning and vengeance.
Finally, the dead witches had found someone to gift their revenge.
Kite.
Not just any witch, but the Heir Rising.
They would devour her body and steal her essence. They would take their revenge on anything and everything in their path.
Sometimes trauma blotted out all hope, all futures, all belief in change. Sometimes suffering only wanted to make more suffering, spreading like a virus. Sometimes destruction was just destruction, and there would be no rebuilding.
The trapped and broken essences of witches long dead were not interested in a new world. They couldn’t imagine it. They no longer loved.
Kite could feel their desire to destroy her in their touch.
“Poor things,” she said, as she watched the fingers crawl up her leg like a caterpillar, “I can’t take you back with me.”
But they couldn’t be reasoned with now that they had been submerged into rock; they needed and hated the obsidian desert, just as they needed and hated themselves.
“The Witch-Killing Fields were a nursery rhyme we used to sing whenever one of the children went missing. Dead or junked and good as dead. Street myths. Legends. We understood they were true, and we didn’t forget you, I promise we never forgot you.”
The hand wrapped about Kite’s leg and began to pull her into the stone. Kite’s essence flared up, hot as molten glass, but the hand was too strong, the fury too great.
Kite wasn’t a fighter.
The memory of Circinae’s touch prickled up and down her body. A red storm coming to obliterate her light. Fire scorching her soul. Falling, falling forever out of the sky. No. Not again. Never again.
She looked desperately toward Cam, but he was still unconscious on the ground. They would vivisect him, too, when they were done with her.
The stone blade was lying beside him on the black ice. If she could only reach it —
Pain seared through her body; the witches were pulling her out of her skin, forcing her into her most powerful and vulnerable state. Without her body holding her together, it would be impossible to resist the resting place of the stone field, impossible to resist the cry from her dead sisters. If they succeeded in drawing her out of her skin, she would be lost. She would forget her mother, Clytemnestra, the library, and Eli.
There was no coming back from an obsidian grave.
Eli. The reckless, confusing, passionate girl that Kite had known and loved all her life. Eli was brave, and Kite could be, too. She could fight back.
She had to try.
Kite pulled back, hair lashing the air, sparks burning from the tips. They scattered across the blackness and continued to burn, casting an eerie bluegreen light over the smooth surface.
Wrenching a handful of strands from her head, Kite whispered a spell over her own dying cells and threw the hair onto the disembodied hand. The appendage released her, as if burned, and a discordant wail broke through the haunting song. Stepping back, Kite could see that each individual strand had wound itself around the hand, lashing the fingers together. The hand collapsed in on itself and fell back into the chasm. She was safe — for now.
The reprieve was short. Looking across the circle, Kite could see other body parts emerging from the lacerations in the stone. Like sickness leached from a wound, the remnants of flesh and magic were oozing out of the cuts in the ice.
And in the middle of the circle, free at last, its bond broken by ritual — the sword.
Kite ran.
The music grew louder and more urgent with every step, the tempo racing to catch the lost princess, who had nothing but teeth and nails and volumes of history to keep her alive.
Fear bleeding into her heart like water damage spreading across a page, Kite hurriedly cast an ancient spell of courtesy. It was one that princes used to cast when they courted the silver trees that grew in a distant galaxy. According to the records, it was like asking someone to dance — they could choose to take your hand or not; they had the power of acceptance or refusal.
