“Where will you go?” asked Clytemnestra.
“I’ll stay here,” said Tav.
“This world is dying,” said the unnamed. “You would do better to hide in the forests or open a door to the moon.”
“I’m staying here,” repeated Tav.
“So am I,” said Kite.
“You are no longer the Heir,” said the unnamed. “You could return.”
Kite reached down and petted the Beast.
“I understand,” said the unnamed.
Now that the battle was over, and some had lost, and some had won, and the Heart had been returned, the witches were starting to return to the City of Eyes. In twos and threes, they trickled across the rift like meteorites flashing through the night sky. The unnamed nodded once to Tav, and then left, leading her people back to their home, and to freedom.
“The Children’s Lair will be such a mess,” said Clytemnestra. “Do you know how hard it is to get tooth marks out of an ivory comb?”
Soon, the sea of glitter and light faded until only Kite and Tav and the Beast remained. Overhead the cracked sky glittered with stars and souls and wishes.
“A Witch Lord in exile.” Kite smiled, and brushed a finger along one feather. Tav shivered at her touch. “It suits you.”
“Something’s missing,” they said.
Kite’s smile faded. “Eli.” She sighed. “I loved her, too.”
“Yes. No. Yes.” Tav stared up at the rift. “We haven’t saved the Earth.”
“Not yet,” corrected Kite.
“I dreamed —” They cut themselves off, feeling stupid.
“You dreamed?”
“Someone was under the ice.”
“Let’s look, then.”
“It’s stupid.”
“Is it?” Kite tilted her head, her eyes like two moons. But there was softness in them, and they belonged to only one person. They always had. Kite didn’t wait for an answer. She and the Beast started wandering the frozen river, peering through the black glass, looking for any sign of movement.
After a moment, Tav joined them. Something felt unfinished. Something important.
KITE
Kite sensed the wall before she felt it, its soft ridges curving up under the ice.
“What’s a piece of the Labyrinth doing in the City of Ghosts?” she asked the Beast, who grew a vestigial wing and started chewing on it.
She called Tav over. “Look,” she said, but what she really meant was feel.
Tav understood and pressed a hand against the ice. After a moment, Kite placed her palm on top of Tav’s and their joint purple-and-green flames lapped at the ice, melting it, making space for the stone and dirt underneath.
The ice cracked, and someone walked out of the river.
THE WITCH LORD
It wasn’t like the dream, not exactly. There were no spears of obsidian stabbing the sky; no earthquakes knocking Tav to their knees. The river didn’t tear itself in two, although the split sky was reflected in the ice and made it appear just as shattered and broken.
Watching Cam emerge from under the river was like a bird hatching from an egg, the webbing of cracks spreading inch by inch. Cam climbed out of the frozen darkness, emerging from a staircase of limestone and frost. Part of the Labyrinth had crossed between worlds, had wound its way under the river that stretched black and bright under a star-studded sky.
Pieces of ice clung to his hair, which was getting long — I’ll have to cut it for him when this is all over, Tav thought vaguely. The pair of scissors in the bathroom drawer.
His body was covered in stone, or it was stone — gleaming anthracite arched along his cheekbones, mica dust brightening his eyelids. Playful chips of jasper danced against fragments of agate on his wrists. His chest was mottled granite and rhyolite seamlessly embedded in skin and bone. His shirt was gone, shredded by rock, and Tav could make out the curve of his ribs in granite like a fossil. He looked thin. He looked like he belonged in the earth.
In his arms hung a limp figure, her arms and legs hanging at impossible angles. Fragments of quartz glittered where it had broken through skin. Bangs sticking with sweat to a pale forehead. Long arched teeth protruding from a human mouth. Dried blood under her nostrils.
“Give her to me.” Tav’s voice broke with exhaustion.
They watched the dream unfurl from their memory and onto the ice, the black feathers tipped in red scattered around their feet. The unnatural stillness in the air, the smell of overripe plums. Red and orange streaks like dying fires lighting up the steel-grey storm clouds.
Cam stopped and stared at Tav, at the long wings extending from their shoulder blades. Hawthorn curled from Eli’s fingernails and wound around her wrists, torso, ankles, tangled with the stone body that had once been Tav’s best and sometimes only friend.
Tav pulled another feather from her wing, its tip sharp as death.
“This ends now,” they said. “You can’t have her.”
The voice of the Labyrinth poured through Cam’s body like an echo in a cave deep underground.
“We have waited a long time to be remembered,” said the Labyrinth. “The witches forgot our language and kept the sacrifices for themselves. They thought they could chain us, but now we are free.”
Tav’s grip tightened on the steel feather. The taste of metal in their mouth. “I said, give her to me.”
The Labyrinth’s human body knelt down, the stones ringing out in a chorus of bells. He gently laid the girl on the ice. His eyes found Tav’s, and this time when the creature spoke, they could hear the timbre of Cam’s voice tossed with gravel and smooth round stones clattering over a pebbled beach. “Tav, we found her body. We healed her.”
Tav hesitated; in the dream, his eyes had burned amber and the ground had shaken under their feet with tremors. Nothing from the City of Eyes could be trusted. Tav wanted to trust him. Tav didn’t want to be stupid. Didn’t want to hope. Felt hope rising like heat from asphalt.
“We healed her, Tav. We tried. But it wasn’t enough.”
“You came here to destroy us,” they said. “To get revenge for how the witches treated you.”
The stones sang in mourning, and a flash of
