Witch's Pyre

by Josephine Angelini

  “Enough to flood the continent with wild Woven,” she said. “And if you make it so they can reproduce, you’d only need to use the vats once.”

  Lily ran a finger through the film of ancient dust that lay on the otherwise-pristine vats. The questions that she’d been asking for months and the answers she’d been given that didn’t sit right with her started to come together into one terrible truth.

  “What if the wild Woven were designed to reproduce like crazy, designed to be poisonous so humans couldn’t survive by eating them, designed to attack humans even if they weren’t provoked? There are too many things about them that don’t make sense, too many rules, unless you start thinking that they weren’t an accident.” She tapped the side of the vat. “These certainly weren’t made on accident.”

  Rowan sat down hard on the dusty ground. He was looking into the empty palms of his hands, but he wasn’t seeing anything. Lily sat down next to him and leaned her back against the steel. She could feel a thousand thoughts running through his head, like clouds racing across a wind-blown sky, and she waited. The thought clouds in his mind turned dark and crackled with lightning. Finally, he looked up at her.

  “We need to find out why. I need to know what happened, not just guess,” he said. “Ivan knows. That’s why he sent us down here.” He laughed bitterly. “A parting gift before we walked out the door.”

  Lily nodded. She could feel a yawning pain building in him at the thought of all the people he’d lost to the Woven. Of the childhood that was stolen from him by violence and hunger. She wrapped her arms around him and let him squeeze her tightly to the ache in his chest. No matter how many times Lily tried to push him out, Rowan managed to dig down deeper into her. He was fitted inside her so tightly now that no blame or bitterness between them could keep her from wanting to protect him from this terrible lie he’d lived with all his life.

  Lily. Come quick. You have to see this.

  Rowan and Lily jumped to their feet, both of them feeling the urgency in Tristan’s call in mindspeak, and hurried in his direction. Lily noticed that the floor had begun to slope upward, when she slipped on something. Rowan’s hand shot out and steadied her before she fell to her knees. She looked down.

  “What is that?” she asked. She and Rowan inspected the coating on the floor. Rowan crouched down and touched the slippery substance, rubbing fingers and thumb together.

  “I think it’s wax,” he said.

  They kept moving forward and noticed that the wax also covered a pillar they passed. The rows of womb combs and vats ended, and the coating grew thicker until their feet were sinking into it.

  “I see the rest of the coven’s tracks,” Rowan said. They continued on, careful of their footing, as they went down a series of ever-shrinking tunnels.

  The passageway continued to narrow until they were walking down a thin tube. Hexagons rose out of the surface. Lily could smell something sweet in the air. She saw Rowan breathe it in.

  “Honey,” he said. He looked around. “We’re in an old honeycomb.”

  They reached a bottleneck and had to squeeze through. The cavern they entered was stuffy, and it smelled of musk and honey. Lily saw her coven’s backs. They were facing something. She felt their shock as they parted and let her through.

  Sunk deep into the wax was a giant throne. On the throne, propped up by many velvet pillows, reclined the satin-clad torso of a woman. Trailing off to the side where her legs should have been was a pale, distended abdomen that ballooned up and out of the throne room into titanic proportions. Atop the human torso were the ovoid head and bulbous eyes of an insect, and around the Queen’s neck hung a golden willstone.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Carrick couldn’t see Lily and her coven leave—they were moving much too fast for his eyes to follow—but he could feel that one moment there were people in Lily’s suite of rooms, and the next it was empty.

  He cursed silently to himself. Lillian could have used those speaking stones to send him enough power to follow them had he thought to ask, but he’d been banking on Lily’s coven staying one more night. They’d cased the city all day, and then there was that long silence this evening—which he was sure was them plotting to make a break for it—but Carrick had his little brother pegged as too cautious to leave right away with no supplies and no horses. Someone else must be calling the shots. Maybe even Lily herself. She was rash enough.

  Didn’t matter. They had vanished and now Carrick had no excuse to give Lillian. Mala didn’t concern him. She wanted Lily gone one way or another, so she wouldn’t care much that they had fled the city. Mala had served her purpose by giving him enough cover to get him out of his plush jail cell. Lillian, however, would demand to know where Lily went. He was supposed to be watching her and filling in the gaps of information that Lily wasn’t sharing with Lillian in mindspeak, like the existence of the speaking stones and Grace’s fixation on solving the riddle of the two Lillians. Lily had been very forthcoming with Lillian, but that didn’t mean she was sharing everything, and Lillian wanted to know everything about Bower City before she attacked.

  Carrick scanned the smooth floor. He didn’t think he’d be able to track Lily and her coven across marble, but he had to at least try. Still angry with himself for his miscalculation, he started down the main stair and through the foyer. Something told him that the coven had headed toward the government buildings. Maybe it was Lily’s power he was sensing, or his brother’s ever-lingering sadness, but he followed his hunch all the way to a door into nothing.

  He had no choice but to call to Lillian and explain what had transpired. She was tired when he contacted her. Her sickness was unraveling her at the very moment she most needed to be whole. Carrick didn’t doubt that she would live to see her plans through, though. And if she didn’t, there was always Lily.

  Lillian looked through Carrick’s eyes at the door into nothing. I think they went down there, he told her. I can’t make the jump without your strength, My Lady.

  I can fuel you, but once you go down there I won’t be able to reach you to give you more, Lillian replied.

  Then I’ll have to be careful with what you give me, Carrick said.

  Very well.

  Carrick was so consumed with receiving Lillian’s strength, so focused on the fearlessness he felt as he plummeted into the darkness, that he didn’t notice the Warrior Sisters following him.

  Lily staggered closer to the Queen, staring at her. Workers were shuttling up and down the Queen’s body, some of them cleaning her, while others marched to her mouthparts and away again, delivering a steady supply of royal jelly. Her gargantuan abdomen heaved, and the Queen’s human hands, claw-like with tension, gripped at the velvet pillows.

  “What are you doing?” Una hissed when she saw Lily move closer.

  “She’s in pain,” Lily said.

  There was no way to read the Queen’s face. Her black faceted eyes held no emotion, and her mouth—a wet, tubular proboscis and waving mandibles—was downright nauseating, but still Lily could tell she was suffering. She stepped forward and took one of the Queen’s human hands as her pale abdomen heaved again.

  Lily wanted to comfort her, but she didn’t think spoken words could be heard or understood. She tried to reach out to her in mindspeak and felt a distinct vibration clashing with hers. It was a harsh sensation that made Lily draw back immediately, like ice-cold water washing across a sore tooth. Lily knew what it meant, even if she’d never experienced it before. She looked at her coven, truly afraid.

  “She’s someone else’s claimed,” Lily said. “A witch controls the Queen.”

  “Grace,” Juliet said, needing to voice it aloud to make it real.

  “If Grace controls the Queen, does that mean she controls the whole Hive?” Una asked.

  “That’s a good bet,” Breakfast said, grabbing Una and pushing her back toward the bottleneck. “We need to get out of here. Now.”

  Lily saw Caleb pull a pilfered st
eak knife out of his boot. She put out a hand to stop him. “No, don’t! If you kill her, the entire Hive will be alerted. We’ll never get out of here alive,” she said.

  “Oh, we’re getting out,” Rowan said. He snatched Lily up into his arms before anyone could tell him not to and started kicking at the wax around the Queen’s belly to get into the room beyond.

  “Rowan! Where are you going?” Tristan snarled.

  “We’ll never be able to jump up that long drop. We have to go this way,” he snarled back.

  The Queen’s belly spasmed next to Rowan’s head. Lily laid a hand on the swollen skin as she suffered through another contraction.

  “Poor thing,” she whispered, torn for a moment and wanting to help.

  She saw the look of distaste on Rowan’s face as he went back to kicking his way through to the next room. The rest of the coven seemed to collect themselves from their initial shock and joined him. The wax was thick and soft, and it absorbed their blows rather than shattering, making it difficult to move aside.

  Lily thought for a moment that the Workers covering the Queen would attack them, but they didn’t. In fact they hardly took any notice at all, and continued on as if blinded by their single task of tending the Queen.

  We may not be so lucky with the Sisters, Rowan said in mindspeak, picking up on Lily’s thoughts.

  He broke through the wall of wax and put Lily down. Protect Juliet, Lily told them in mindspeak. She’s the only one besides me who can’t fight.

  Breakfast, Caleb, and Una formed a circle, keeping her and Juliet in the center as they moved out. The rest of the Queen’s abdomen lay alongside them as they moved forward.

  Careful, Tristan warned them all in mindspeak.

  There were lines of little Workers scuttling to and from the body of the Queen on the floor and the coven had to tread gently not to step on them. The Queen’s body was at least thirty feet long and ten feet high and supported by wax buttresses that obscured the end of it.

  Stop, Rowan said, raising a hand. There was movement up ahead. Rowan looked at Caleb and tilted his head. Caleb slid forward silently at Rowan’s command and melted in the shadows. A few moments passed.

  I think it’s safe, Caleb said. Just move slowly.

  They came forward and saw Warrior Sisters lined up at the end of the Queen’s abdomen. Lily stopped short when she saw them, and then noticed that these Sisters looked different. They had lighter bodies, wore no armor, and they didn’t carry whips; nor did they seem to see anything but the task before them. With each spasm of the Queen’s abdomen, a translucent white egg the size of a backpack dropped from her tail into the waiting arms of a Sister. After the large egg was birthed, the Sister waited with her other hand held aloft for a drizzle of tiny Worker eggs that she caught and cupped protectively to her chest before hurrying off with the whole clutch.

  I think I’m going to be sick, Una said.

  Steady, Rowan replied. Everyone stay calm. Act like you belong here and they probably won’t even notice us.

  Rowan led them past the docile line of Sisters to one of the less-used hexagonal tunnels that led upward. The passage let out into a storage chamber that had two dozen wax sarcophaguses. As they weaved their way through them, Lily saw male bodies squirming inside. Their pale and heavily muscled limbs were twisted up with black veined wings. She was glad they all had their faces turned away.

  Drones, Tristan said. Keep moving, Ro.

  The next ramp opened into a huge cavern. Towers of wax held six-sided cells, each with the dark shape of a growing Sister just behind a protective film. Along one wall Sisters were bringing the newly laid eggs to empty cells. Next to them, Sisters were bricking up the cells with wax from their mandibles. Rowan led them away from the action.

  They made their way up a series of ramps and tunnels, and the smell of pollen and honey grew stronger. Workers by the millions buzzed in and out like a black fog. She was scared to inhale and possibly swallow one of them. The walls dripped with honey and Lily could taste pollen dust, bittersweet and chalky, in the back of her throat.

  These Workers are coming back to the Hive from the outside, Caleb said. Where are they coming in?

  Breakfast spotted it first—a black haze of bee bodies that obscured what was probably the exit. The coven made its way there slowly. True Warrior Sisters, the big-bodied, thick-armored, whip-carrying kind, hovered around the exit. They perched on the dripping walls and licked the honey with their long, tubular tongues. Their heads twitched lightning fast, constantly on alert, but their senses were directed out into the world beyond, not back inside the hive.

  This is insane, Breakfast said in mindspeak. Lily felt his heartbeat quicken.

  A Warrior Sister detached from the wall and landed in front of the coven with a smacking sound. Her human hand reached back to milk her stinger for venom as she tasted the air, uncertain and trying to decide if there was a threat. She paused, transfixed on Rowan, who stood point. His chest was pumping with blood and breath.

  Lily could feel fear rising in her coven like a swelling tidewater that lifted them, weightless and kicking, off the safety of the shore. The rolling draft from a million shivering wings spun the scent of panic throughout the hive in an instant. The rest of the Warrior Sisters by the entrance turned as one.

  Rowan was the first to empty his heart of fear and goad the rest of the frozen coven into action.

  Move.

  Lily felt herself gathered up against Rowan’s chest before the coven swept forward with preternatural speed that blinded her.

  They made it outside the hive and into a dark forest before they were caught by dozens of armored bodies. Lily had the chance to catch half a thought going through Rowan’s head.

  They’re moving too fast . . . before she felt herself ripped from his arms.

  “Lily—no!” he screamed, his hands grasping at her forearms, her wrists, and then sliding to the tips of her fingers and releasing with a snap as they were separated. Lily saw a bright spot at the base of the Warrior Sisters’ throats and knew that under their skin they must have willstones, and that a witch must be fueling them.

  Rowan reared up from under a cluster of shiny black armor and yellow-and-black tiger-striped skin, wrenching heads from necks and tearing off wings and limbs in a blur of fury and desperation. No matter how many he killed, more Warrior Sisters came at him. Lily felt a barbed hand grabbing the back of her neck and slamming her down to her knees. The ground was dry and prickly with fallen needles. She looked up and saw her coven fighting among the trunks of colossal redwood trees. Her coven had formed a circle around Juliet to protect her, but their strength was failing.

  Lily. Save us, Una pleaded in mindspeak. She was covered in Workers, each of them poised and ready to sting. They were holding back, waiting for the order from their witch.

  Lily took a breath and the wind followed, spinning and screaming as it fell toward her. Digging deep, she searched for anything left inside to give her coven.

  Lily, don’t, Rowan said. You’ll be using what you need to stay functioning. Your body will shut down and you’ll die.

  The Warrior Sisters looked at her. The air stopped dead, debris hanging suspended in the air, as Lily prepared to drain herself dry and transmute the last of her strength.

  “You can’t win, Lily Proctor,” said a familiar voice. “You’ll only get your coven killed if you keep fighting.”

  Lily raised her eyes and saw Grace being held aloft by a host of Warrior Sisters. Her black willstone was surrounded by a halo of eerie purple-green light as it transmuted the energy she was feeding her claimed. The Sisters brought Grace to the forest floor. She stepped down from their inter-clasped hands with such practiced ease it was clear she’d done it an uncountable number of times before.

  “You have no pyre and nothing left to give your already-overtaxed coven, while my claimed are fresh for a fight,” Grace continued, stepping forward smoothly.

  “Your claimed,” Lily snarled. �
��I thought you didn’t do that here.”

  “I said we don’t claim people here. The Woven are not people,” Grace said. “Tell your mechanics to stop struggling. You’re vastly outnumbered and out of options.”

  Lily sagged between the two Warrior Sisters holding her by the arms. She reabsorbed the dregs of her strength and the witch wind let go of its half-drawn breath, allowing the floating debris to fall back to earth. Lily’s heart continued to beat, her nerves kept firing, but every muscle went lax with exhaustion.

  Rowan bucked against the hands restraining him. Grace nodded once and he was released. Stumbling with fatigue, Rowan pitched himself forward and fell to his knees in front of Lily, trying to pull her away from her captors and into his arms. Another nod from Grace, and the Warrior Sisters backed off and let him. He ran his hands lightly over Lily, scanning her.

  “You see, Toshi, as touching as Rowan’s display may seem, he’s actually her slave,” Grace said.

  Lily’s head snapped around and she saw Toshi being brought to the ground by the Warrior Sisters. His uneasy look and stumbling steps made it clear he’d never traveled by Hive before.

  “It isn’t love. If she dies, he’s left without his addiction,” Grace continued, acting the part of benevolent teacher. “I spared you a lifetime of dependency and servitude.”

  Toshi nodded and put on a studious face. “I see. Yes. Of course you’re right, Grace.”

  Lily gave him a sad smile. He looked shell-shocked and sorry. Ivan had been right. Toshi hadn’t known how Bower City worked, and now that he did it was too late. The Hive ran Bower City, but Grace controlled the Hive.

  Lily had to look away, and as she did she saw a flash of white and a long, pale tail disappearing behind one of the towering redwoods. Lily shook her head, knowing she must be delirious. That couldn’t be who she thought it was.

  They’re trying to separate us, Caleb said.

  Lily looked and saw Juliet being pulled out of Caleb’s protective grip. Lily started to panic. Out of all of them, Juliet was the most vulnerable. The Hive could sense that, and she knew they were going to exploit it. But Juliet was not the type to shut her mouth and go quietly.