The world was dying, and she had failed to save it.
She forgot who she was, and what she was doing there; she forgot about Tav and Kite and the Witch Lord; she disappeared into shadow, mourning the dead with a light that burned as dim as the stub of a candle.
And then she was gone, falling through time and space, lost in the maze of the Coven, lost in her own nightmares.
THE HEIR
The battle raged around her. Kite stood like a single water lily in the flood. She watched as a made-daughter was torn apart by several older witches. They started chewing on her bones.
The water lapped against her hips as it rushed through the broken wall and poured into the war room. Words in serif typeface and words handwritten in ancient languages brushed against her thighs.
Kite turned her palms and face to the sky, eyes closed, basking in the light and shadow that played across her skin. For a moment everything was still and silent; the sound of breath and sweat muffled by centuries of dust and knowledge. She blocked out the chaos and focused only on the words, only on the feeling of vellum against her cheek.
She knew this place. The Coven was her home. She had grown up with paper cuts and paper airplanes, with notebooks bound in leather that still remembered being animal, with myths and epics scrawled on the backs of receipts and sociology papers.
They had followed her from their prison, slipping through the cracks in walls, wrapping their pages around her hair and fingertips. She was covered in text.
Kite knew that the skeleton of the Coven was made of poetry and feeling.
She pushed away the power to command that danced in her veins, the stolen strength that swam in the marrow of her bones. Her mother’s magic.
But Kite was not her mother, even if they shared a face. Even if they shared an essence. They had made different choices. They had fallen in love with different objects.
Please, she asked. Please fight with us.
The books came to life.
The papers folded themselves into an army of birds, all shapes borrowed and stolen from the City of Ghosts — cranes and pelicans, crows and ravens, small hummingbirds that moved so quickly they were only a blur; paper and cloth eagles with wingspans longer than a body.
“I love you,” whispered Kite, and tears of ink dripped down her face.
She dropped her hands.
Pages ripped themselves from volumes older than planets. The sound of broken spines and damaged bindings filled the room; the carcasses of ruined covers littered the earth.
Kite had declared a side, and the library had declared with her.
The birds fell on the witches, slicing through the flesh and magic essence of the Coven’s minions with a thousand paper cuts, each feather lacerating the bodies of her mother’s army.
The witches shrieked in pain, the fine cuts welling with black-and-silver blood; some of the cuts smoked or burned or spat hot sparks, catching the wingtip of a peregrine falcon and sending it up in flames, its history lost forever,
Kite wiped her face with the back of one hand, ink mixing with saltwater. Her hands up to her elbows were black and slick, as if dipped in diesel oil.
Clytemnestra fell out of the sky, laughing uncontrollably.
“Burn it down!” she cried as she tumbled through the air, her golden ringlets a tangled nest on her head. Her skin was pink and unblemished as if newborn.
Kite wondered why it had taken her so long to join the battle.
A paper albatross caught the tiny witch midfall, or perhaps midflight, and carried her across the cavernous ballroom. Reaching into her many pockets, Clytemnestra grabbed fistfuls of jacks and iron nails and chips of obsidian, throwing them like confetti over the partygoers.
Kite watched her soar through the crumbling stronghold, envy irritating her vocal cords. The Warlord was ecstatic, caught in the revelry of violence and passion. Clytemnestra’s essence pulsed brighter than any other prism of light in the room.
She was a shooting star, a beacon of hope soaked in sandalwood cologne and blood, a float in a parade — the kind with a million balloons that sometimes burst and cause infants to cry.
And Kite was a historian watching what she treasured most sacrifice themselves to fire and water. Watching the ink drain from their wings. Her hair curled into question marks of loss.
An origami periwinkle fell from her hair and Kite caught it in her hand. It unfolded its petals and Kite saw that it was a note Eli had left for her on the island a long time ago. A single word, a simple question, holding within it a universe of meaning, a history of limbs and tongues intertwined, a secret cache of promises and shared dreams.
Tomorrow?
Kite stared at the word for a long moment. Then she curled her fist around the note, and felt her skin absorb the ink, felt the question mark settle into her sternum. Then she opened her hand again and let the blank sheet tumble into the waves.
Kite took a breath, and then launched herself into the battle.
Sixty-Three
THE HEALER
Ariel purred at their touch, the witch-infused bike recognizing the texture of Tav’s palm on its leather seat, responding to the timbre of their voice as they leaned close to the painted mermaid and whispered, “We got this, okay, girl?”
Ariel revved her engine in excitement and emitted a cloud of exhaust.
Tav climbed on, adrenalin shrieking in their tendons and ligaments. Gripped the handlebars. Took a deep breath, letting their rib cage expand. One of the glass buttons on their vest popped off. Tav looked down and realized that the remaining buttons were shaped like the phases of the moons. The one they had lost was the waning gibbous.
It felt like a sign. They were a waxing moon, chasing away the darkness.
They looked out over the sea of bodies — bodies of text, bodies of water, flesh-and-bone bodies, incorporeal beings
