How could the Heir defeat her own mother? How could she give back her birthright, the power she had been born into?
She couldn’t.
Eli didn’t know what was going to happen, but she knew, deep in the unfurled buds of her being, that Kite was in attendance tonight, and that she didn’t expect to come out of it alive.
What was Clytemnestra playing at? Why had she sent two sacrifices to the Witch Lord? Kite and Tav. A girl with salt on her tongue and a boi with oil stains on their jeans.
Eli could lose everyone she loved tonight.
We could lose more than that. The Heart’s thought pooled like warm honey in her mind. We could lose the whole world.
Eli was a ghostly figure of shadow and light that sometimes flickered with the hint of bone, the coy arch of a rib, or the playful curve of an eyelash. She was the Heart. And her planet was dying.
Eli wondered what would happen if she surrendered to the honeygold warmth that flowed through her veins, letting her skin and stone and glass evaporate into dusk and earth. Maybe the world could be saved. Maybe it wasn’t too late to save the forest and the walls and the deserts from the Witch Lord’s destruction. Maybe if the Heart returned, it could pulse new life into the crumbling core.
But that wouldn’t save Kite or Tav, and the Heart was still a body, still a girl, still a lover. The Heart felt the human fear that sang through her marrow like a melody.
The Heart turned around and went back — back to the room with the pillars of ice, back to the decaying cavern, to the mouth of the beast, to the lair where the Witch Lord puppeteered the death of celestial bodies.
Eli had one last thing to do before she died.
THE HEIR
Kite used to tell time by the paper cuts on her hands, using the marks to remind herself to raise her head from the books, to go for walk in the woods, to lie on the secret island she shared with her secret friend. Now the webbing between her fingers was smooth, and her wrists were forgetting the weight of leather and fibre.
As she brought a drowning to the Coven, as she came to bury and to save, she kept seeing glimpses of paper cranes stamped in a forgotten font; of tulips and roses blooming with ink; of a staircase that was ridged like a spine.
When she had a vision of paper and vellum, Kite closed her eyes and pretended she was a salmon swimming back to its place of birth. She brought a flood that was salty with the bodies that had lived and died in the Coven since the first animal breathed on their planet.
She worried about water damage. Mould was death to a book.
No, there wasn’t time for her fears, and she had to trust in the library, in the knowledge that changed and hid and let itself be forgotten and remembered again. She would trust in transformation.
The water was up to her knees now. She brought the flood. She brought destruction. She brought change.
Behind her came the children with plastic forks and ceramic shards, barbecue lighters and slingshots; buttons and doll’s eyes for ammunition; dirty hands and flexible spines and an innate knowledge of how to shatter.
Behind her came the daughters, their eyes carved from alabaster or plucked from taxidermied lynxes, their bodies sparking like electric eels or glowing with phosphorous; girls like blades, needles, arrows, shields, and shells; girls who smelled of chamomile and acetone, sumac and sesame and gunpowder. Girls with axes woven with stained glass and barbed wire, with spears of smoke and flame, with harpoons crafted from stinging nettle and porcupine quills dipped in ammonia.
Behind her came the discarded things, the monsters of scrap metal and succulents, creatures of corduroy and rust and shadow. The other objects who had followed Kite away from the wastelands had bonded with the soldiers, and many of the children and daughters now wore crowns of asphalt or breastplates of crystal and tire tread.
As they moved through the tunnels slowly filling with water, their footsteps wrote stories with eddies and waves, the white froth in their wake a prophecy for someone else to read.
The Heir walked toward her execution with the grace of a single water lily in a stagnant pool.
Fifty-Nine
THE HEALER
Tav and the Witch Lord twirled through the ballroom as hundreds of sycophants dressed in broken glass and tarmac watched, their eyes gleaming like polished stones.
“What are you?” the Witch Lord whispered, eyes glittering like winter frost under an angry sun. Tav’s eyes watered under the harsh brightness. There was something horribly compelling about her — Tav could smell the dead fish on her skin, and yet felt the urge to lean closer, to catch every word, to let themselves shrivel and blister under her gaze.
“What are you?” they responded, watching the multihued essence writhe within its shell as if trying to tear itself apart.
The mood changed. The room darkened, the crystal chandeliers shaking violently. The sound was a warning. The Witch Lord’s eyes turned storm grey, and a bolt of lightning flashed across them.
“You have not yet earned the right to ask me a question, sacrifice,” she hissed.
The sickly greengold hue of the Witch Lord’s essence made Tav’s stomach twist. They wanted to pull away from her. They wanted to be the sacrifice. They wanted to let her drink them. They wanted to run away. They wanted to join her essence, to lose themselves in her sea.
They were in over their head.
“I am a visitor from another world,” they said finally. It was the truth — but the aftertaste of metal and dish soap told them it was only partially the truth.
“You smell delicious,” the Witch Lord crooned, her claws tightening on Tav’s shoulder, biting skin. Tav clenched their teeth and fought the urge to flinch.
“You smell like the sea,” they said.
The
