The frost blade trembled at her hip. She had known — had always known — that when the Heart merged with her body that its former host and prison had died.
The tree had never been the Heart’s true home. It had never been meant to be trapped in a single body, used as a weapon or a tool.
A small bird landed on her shoulder, folded into the shape of a swallow. Its edges were gold leaf, and it smelled of smoke. It had survived for a very long time. The swallow rubbed its wing against her cheek and then flew to the wall, stabbing at the dirt until its beak was bent and crooked. As the excavation continued, Eli could see flashes of white being exposed to the light.
Under the soil was the spine of the world — the same walls that made up the Labyrinth and the under-labyrinth, the maze of chaos and magic that was alive. It had not been made by the witches, and it did not answer to their rule.
Eli’s breath caught in her throat. The birds weren’t destroying the Coven, sacrificing their home in order to defeat the Witch Lord — they were taking it back from the witches. They were saving it.
Pearl in one hand, bone in the other. Eli joined them, stabbing at invisible eyes and tearing through spells and enchantments that had made this dark palace a place of power. Setting free the natural magic of the world.
A blur of colour in her peripheral vision, and then the wall shook as another blade pierced the witches’ magic. The hunter had joined her, broken bottles and insect wings cutting through malevolent enchantments and cursed thorns.
As more earth was stripped away, pages and letters that had been buried pulled themselves free and joined their kin.
When they were done, the library had been transformed — skeletal and stark, filled with light and colour. It tasted of dead fish and calcified plant life. The magic was not sweet or cloying like the witches’ enchantment. It was fresh and alive, deadly and beautiful, pulsing with life and death, love and sorrow.
But the birds were still dying. As Eli watched, a hummingbird trembled midflight and fell to the floor, ink seeping out of its spent body. A hairline crack in the wall was creeping upward. What would happen if the spine itself was destroyed? If the natural magic failed?
Eli was frightened, and this time, she couldn’t fight her way out. There was no rush of adrenalin or the power of self-preservation, nothing she could stab or claw or devour with wickedly sharp teeth. She didn’t even know how to do it. She felt like a child again, lost in the Labyrinth, not sure what she was running to. Only knowing what she had to leave behind.
A single feather made from the thinnest of sheets of paper, so fine it was translucent, hovered at eye level. Eli held up a hand and it landed on her sticky, bloody palm. A few words were visible, scrawled across the page.
I miss her.
Tears blurred her vision.
The handwriting was Kite’s.
Gently, Eli set the feather on the ground, and then knelt down. She pressed her palms against the root of the world and closed her eyes.
She felt the gaze of the hunter on her back. The made-girl was watching over her.
Go home, she told the Heart. This is where you belong.
This is where we belong.
We are not a body.
We are many bodies.
We are everywhere.
We are everything.
Eli felt the energy draining from her body, seeping into the walls, the earth, the ink stains. Dissipating into the air. Touching the clouds. Brightening the sky.
In her mind’s eye, she saw the leaves of the forest turning bronze and green, shining with new growth. She saw the stones in the wastelands burning with black fire, the rivers spitting sparks and ice onto a desert blooming with sandflowers. The forgotten pit that had been the junkyard was beginning to heal, feeling the rush of remembrance, the nectar of magic, as it, too, was reconnected to the rest of the world.
She saw a glittering, tangled web of connections between everything, saw the lines that had been severed by the witches now begin to be repaired. Everything had a place in the world. Everything belonged.
The Heart tasted the acidic soil of the burned forests and the dry sweetness of sand, felt the pincers of little sea creatures and saw through the eyes of thousands of stones like stars. A sense of rightness filled the Heart as she was finally freed from her cage.
Eli felt the moment her human heart stopped. She heard the silence, the rhythm of breath and blood coming to an end like an orchestra directed to stillness.
She heard the wings of the hunter’s blade rubbing against each other, making a rustling sound and then a keening whistle. Her sister was mourning her. Eli wished she had thanked her. She wished a lot of things.
Then there was nothing.
Feathers drifted over her body until Eli was completely buried in a paper tomb.
Sixty-Six
THE HEALER
The walls trembled.
Snail shells and stray magic fell over Tav and Ariel. Tav wiped sawdust from their face and shook off a scorpion made of glass and aluminum that had fallen on the back of their hand. When they brushed dead leaves off of Ariel, the plants dissolved into sugar and cinnamon.
A thousand insects poured from earth and stone and started waving their antennae and hundred thousand silk-thin legs.
Something had changed.
The goldpink light of the Witch Lord disappeared, overtaken by a kaleidoscope of colours and sensations that flooded Tav’s body, the Coven, and maybe the world.
A sense of rightness flared up in every cell. A feeling like being dipped in warm honey coated Tav’s body.
Ariel stopped, as if in awe or perhaps in homage to what was happening. The drop of witch essence was glowing like a sun. Tav
