She’s like a cat, they thought dimly. She likes to play with her food.
They felt the moment a fingernail broke skin, but it wasn’t the pain or the blood leaking from their shoulder that Tav needed to worry about. It was the essence that had turned the colour of frostbitten lichen and was inching toward them, calling to something deep inside them. Tav looked down and saw a glow of purple and black flickering in their chest.
“Yes, that’s a good boi,” the Witch Lord purred. “Come and join me. With me, you will be strong.”
A thought broke the surface of the ocean they were drowning in. “Why do we have to be strong?” they murmured. “Why do we need to be stronger? Aren’t we strong enough?”
“We need our strength, child.” Her was mouth at Tav’s ear. The smell of putrid fish was stronger now. Tav’s mouth began to water. “We can use our strength to make this world great again. To rescue it from the reckless children. To save the world. To save ourselves. Until we are strong, we will be at risk. Don’t you want to be safe?”
Safety. The word rippled the pool of Tav’s murky, swampy thoughts. Images, memory, theirs and others’, passed down through stories and blood and DNA.
Bodies tossed over the side of the ship.
Cops asking for ID, one hand on a gun.
Hands shoving them into lockers.
“Are we still on the Middle Passage?” they asked, staring past the witch’s skin and into the sea of gold and hunger that promised pleasure and pain and, above all, obliteration. Was crossing the stars all that different from crossing the Atlantic?
“I will keep you safe.” Damp breath like mist on their neck. In the darkness, the eyes of the other witches burned like embers as Tav spun past them, turning around and around at the whim of the Witch Lord. Dizziness broke over their body likes waves, and they lost all sense of place.
Where were they? Why were they here?
What does it mean, to be safe?
A single thread of greygreen essence touched Tav. Other images flashed across their vision, flooding their senses — a world crumbling into ash, the taste of smoke and sugar on their tongue; the screaming of stone being ground into powder; the lifeless eyes of the daughters and children. Then there was only pain, and they were drowning, lungs collapsing from the pressure of the ocean, their heart ready to burst from adrenalin and fear.
And then everything stopped. Tav’s breath came in short bursts. A heartbeat pounding in their head. A migraine squeezing their skull.
Redpink streaks painting the cavern of stone into prison bars of light.
They were alive. They were whole.
What happened?
“You hurt me,” said the Witch Lord, shock sparking from her entire being. Tav stared in horror at the single burn mark in the shape of a perfect circle etched below her clavicle.
Tav remembered the dreams of destruction. That wasn’t their idea of safety. Someone else’s subjugation was no one’s freedom.
The Witch Lord’s grip tightened on Tav’s wrist, manacles clamping down. “If you won’t come willingly, you will still come.” But Tav heard the underbelly of fear and marvelled at it. When was the last time the Witch Lord felt pain?
Did she enjoy it?
Keep the game interesting. Clytemnestra is coming. They won’t leave you here. Eli needs you.
Tav let themselves be drawn closer to the witch. “Have you figured it out yet?” they breathed in her ear, which was lined with black pearls. They tried to wrestle their panicked heart into some kind of rhythm. “Do you know what I am? What I can offer you? Do you know why Clytemnestra sent me?”
The Witch Lord said nothing, just considered the strange human-magic hybrid in her arms. Her essence was now a deep rose with a blueblack shimmer. It matched the room she had made to trap and play with other creatures.
An engine revved from one side of the ballroom, reminding Tav that they weren’t alone. So they took another risk, hoping it wouldn’t be their last.
“Did you like it, when I touched your essence?”
The Witch Lord drew lines in red on Tav’s back, the movement of her fingernails retracing a map of inter-generational trauma and reopening more recent wounds.
The haunted orchestra continued to play, the music reminiscent of a waltz — but it sounded like a symphony on acid overlaid with the sounds of grinding teeth and cicadas.
“We will finish our dance,” the Witch Lord said finally. “And you will show me your secrets. Then I will eat you.”
Tav didn’t need Eli’s frost blade to tell them the Witch Lord was speaking the truth.
Tav kept their eyes on the burn mark on her chest, hoping that their body held other secrets that could save them.
Sixty
THE HEIR
The water was up to her thighs now. The shimmering coils of her skirts floated around her limbs like the stingers of a jellyfish. And still the Coven wept, offering every bit of moisture to Kite’s procession.
She was the Witch Lord’s weakness. Her betrayal would hurt; and her death, when it came, would scar. After all — Kite’s pain was the Witch Lord’s pain. They were the same.
She looked down at her pale blue skin and watched the glimmer of whitegold swim across the surface of her left knee. Stolen power. A kind of necromancy.
The Beast had taken the form of a feathered dragon-bird and perched on her left shoulder. He nuzzled against her neck. She had told him to stay behind in the Children’s Lair, but he was stubborn. “Try not to die, my sweet,” she whispered. He chewed on her hair.
She hoped the children would make a new world worthy of being remembered.
The flow of water around her ankles changed; she turned her head and caught the scent of rosehips and ferocity. The white marks on the made-daughter’s brown skin were
