“The Heart doesn’t belong to anyone.” Eli stepped away from the girl warily, hands hovering instinctively over thorn and bone.
“It belongs to my world.” The witch bared her teeth. “And we are taking that world back. You might be dressed like a made-daughter, but you are our Heart. And I forbid you from going anywhere near the Witch Lord.” The air around her head crackled with thunder and lightning, and hot pink sparks burst like fireworks around her forehead — a garish halo. The scent of chemical smoke filled the room.
Eli’s eyes flashed, and behind the yellow slits of a reptilian monster were the storm clouds of a distant planet. She looked around her prison. “No chains today? Don’t tell me you’re getting soft.”
“I made a promise.” Clytemnestra quickly crossed her heart.
“Then you can’t stop me.”
Clytemnestra rolled her eyes. “It’s too late now, sleeping beauty. If all goes well, my sisters and brothers will soon be flooding the Coven. If it goes badly, I’m sure we can get you a memento of your dead lovers.” Gone was the attempt at appeasement, the offering of scraps of war. The witch was bored of this game. Her patience had run out.
So had Eli’s.
The pearl blade clutched in one fist, the divider, that would tear the witch’s essence from her body. Eli drew another dagger — the ensnarer, a tangle of rose thorns. An offensive pairing, and a brutal one.
Long yellow teeth spilled from a thin mouth.
She pointed the pearl blade at Clytemnestra.
“I haven’t had a challenger in decades,” said Clytemnestra, delighted. “We never thought you had it in you.”
“I don’t work for you. We work together, or not at all. And I’m getting out of this cell one way or another. I’m no one’s prisoner.”
Clytemnestra narrowed her eyes. “You have always been free to go, but the Heart stays here with me.”
Eli felt a twinge of pain from a recently healed wound. But Tav’s magic was strong, and it would hold.
“If you want to pull apart my body, you’ll need to come closer,” she said softly, keeping her stance light, her grip firm on the blades.
“After all these years, my pretty little assassin, I thought you would know.” Clytemnestra vanished and then reappeared behind her. “I’m faster than you.” Claws raked Eli’s back.
Again, she disappeared, and then reappeared in front of Eli’s face, knocking the thorn dagger from her hand. “I’m stronger than you. And I’m —”
Eli pressed her forehead against Clytemnestra’s, the Heart of the world flaring up under her skin. Clytemnestra shrieked and pulled away, a burn mark spreading across her face. A whisper of a smile flitted across Eli’s face and then faded.
Slowly, deliberately, Eli unbuckled her belt of daggers and let it fall to the ground. Her eyes swirled with smoke and light. She took a single step toward Clytemnestra, letting her body flicker in and out of existence.
“I’m still here,” she said, her body fading except for her head, disembodied and grotesque. “But you can’t hurt me.”
A hand rematerialized, gripping Clytemnestra’s curly blond hair. The little witch was thrown against the wall, cracking her head against its unforgiving surface. A thin trickle of white liquid flowed down her neck like milk.
Clytemnestra vanished, sliding into invisibility. Eli only laughed. “Cute trick, but you can’t hide from me.”
A scream of rage, and then both bodies fully rematerialized, Eli’s teeth embedded in Clytemnestra’s leg. Eli tossed the tiny body aside like a rag doll and fell to all fours.
“Let me go, and I won’t have to kill you.”
A pause, a silence heavy with the weight of a thousand eyes watching and waiting. Then a single, high-pitched giggle. Clytemnestra started laughing, kicking her arms and legs in the air like a toddler having a tantrum. Then she sat up, brushing her golden hair out of her unnaturally blue eyes.
“Oh, you are fun.” She floated up, up into the sky, staring down at the pile of blood and bone and pearl and death crouched on the earth. She burst into flames, the white fire encasing her entire body. “Let’s play.”
Fifty-Three
THE HEIR
Take me to the library.
The thought pulsed outward from Kite’s body like a tsunami, and the wall before her ripped open, scattering stones and clumps of dirt and shattered eggshells. A blue robin’s egg fragment caught in her hair. She stepped back in surprise at the violence with which the passageway had opened up before her.
Always, before, the stones had slid coyly to make room for her body, or had simply melted away, had reformed around an elegant passageway leading to the archives. The walls had even offered phosphorescent moss and flowers to light her path. It had welcomed the witch with the touch like soapstone and the eyes like lotus blossoms. The Coven loved the girl who had made a nest out of scraps of poetry and old letters.
She had meant to ask nicely, to make a wish and offer hope to the sentient structure that stretched across so much of the world. (How much? No one knew. The Labyrinth had never been mapped. It was alive, and kept growing, moving, and changing.)
But the command had been regurgitated from her body automatically. The sweetness of overripe bananas filled her mouth — the alchemical creation of a ruthless Witch Lord. Stolen magic. The essences of dead witches. The walls did not know their touch the way they knew hers, and crumbled before the threats of the Witch Lord.
Sorrow flooded Kite’s limbs, making her hair lie flat against her back. She did not want to be the Witch Lord’s arm. She did not want to use fear and force to move through the world.
She needed to end this, and soon. The hallway was dark, but Kite didn’t need sight to find her way home.
Kite entered the Coven for the last time.
An army of children and daughters and discarded things followed
