Witch's Pyre

by Josephine Angelini

  “Mom,” Lily screamed, “you have to come to me.”

  Samantha startled as if waking from a dream and jogged in her loping way to the side of the fire. In agony now, Lily reached through the flames and grabbed at the willstone resting on her mother’s outstretched palm.

  “I’m sorry,” her mother yelled through the roar of the fire.

  Lily had no idea why her mother was apologizing, but then her hand touched her mother’s willstone, and she understood.

  A thousand moments almost exactly like the moment she was in, but each subtly different, stretched out in Lily’s mind like pearls on a string—she was touching the willstone, she was still reaching for the willstone, she had touched the willstone, she knocked the willstone to the ground accidentally, she caught the willstone before it hit the ground, she touched the willstone with her other hand—the possibilities refracted inside her mind, zipping through like cards shuffling in a never-ending deck.

  “Don’t try to take it all in, Lillian!” Samantha yelled. Lily realized she was making a keening sound but she didn’t know how to stop. Samantha reached into the fire with her other hand and slapped Lily across the face.

  A thousand variations on a slap hit her, and it took all of them to stun Lily into releasing her mother’s willstone and focusing on the here and now.

  Rowan’s shirt was slashed and blood flowed freely down his side. Caleb and Tristan wrestled Carrick to the ground. Simms stepped up and took on Tristan. She was a good fighter—strong as an ox and twice as tenacious. Breakfast and Una were on the other side of the pyre, fending off the officers who were swarming across the lawn in riot gear. Hiding behind their shields, the officers pulled out their clubs and beat Una and Breakfast. Just behind the line of officers, Lily saw Miller’s face—a desperate mask among the black helmets. He was shouting and trying to get to her.

  Lillian. I need you to guide me across the worldfoam, Lily called out in mindspeak.

  I’m here. Hurry. You’re already badly burned.

  Lily breathed in, and her witch wind screeched like a living thing. By the time she let her breath out again, she and her coven were in Lillian’s world.

  Lily heard someone who loved her say her name. And then the pain began.

  Toshi was surprised he was still allowed to come and go in the restricted zone.

  After what had happened with Lily and the Hive, he would have thought that Grace would lock him up, but she hadn’t. As Toshi passed under the whips of the Warrior Sisters at the checkpoint to get back into Bower City, he understood why. By allowing him all the freedoms he’d enjoyed before, Grace was showing him not only that she wasn’t afraid of him, but that he’d never been free.

  Toshi eyed a Warrior Sister as she moved aside to let him pass. He still didn’t know if Grace could see everything the Hive saw, or if they just filled her in on the things they considered important. Again, the strangeness of the Hive struck him. What did a Warrior Sister consider important? Did they have a language, or did they simply pass along images to Grace? And if they passed on only images without language, how effective was the Hive at spying for her?

  He had been forbidden to tell anyone that Grace controlled the Hive, although when she’d come to his rooms after losing Lily in the woods, she hadn’t seemed too worried that he would. She’d wanted to talk about how Lily and her coven had simply disappeared, but Toshi didn’t have a clue. When she finally believed that he was ignorant, Toshi had steered the conversation back to what really concerned him.

  “Why the lie, Grace? Why even bother pretending that the Hive is in control?” Toshi had asked her.

  “You know what I’ve learned in all my years of building and growing this city?” she asked in return. Toshi shrugged, not interested in playing guessing games. “Ninety-nine percent don’t care how the lights get turned on or how the water gets cleaned or how we make the streets safe—just as long as everything works.” She smiled at him, almost wistfully, and Toshi was reminded of one night over thirty years ago when they’d stood and talked under the stars. He couldn’t really say who had kissed whom, but he remembered being happy for a while. It hadn’t lasted long. “The lie is for the other one percent who couldn’t bear to live under a human dictator. It’s a mercy, really.” Her eyes hardened in the same way that had driven him to break things off with her all those years ago. “The lie is so I don’t have to kill that one percent.”

  “Grace the Merciful,” he said bitterly.

  Half her face pinched into a condescending smile. “No one mysteriously disappears in Bower City. People aren’t being bullied or silenced. They have jobs, rights, wealth, and great schooling for their kids. There’s no crime, no poverty, and no sickness. No one wants that to change. They don’t want to know the truth, and if you told them, what I’d be forced to do to quell any uprising would be your fault.” She brushed his shoulder like the lover she used to be, and he recoiled. She dropped her hand. “Leave the lie alone, Toshi.”

  When she left she didn’t even bother to close the door behind her. And why should she? Privacy was an illusion.

  Toshi hadn’t wanted to believe her. He thought that there had to be malcontents—people who wouldn’t be bought out by the perks of perfect living. So far, he hadn’t found anyone. After two days of talking in code with family and friends, he was leaving the restricted zone more frustrated than when he’d entered it. He’d thought that if ever there were a place to find rebels, it would be there. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  The people in the restricted zone didn’t care one way or the other if the Hive controlled the city or if Grace controlled the city by controlling the Hive. They just wanted to be a part of it.

  His father’s advice was given in Japanese. The closest equivalent in English was “don’t rock the boat.”

  Toshi spent a day in his family’s apothecary shop, trying to feel out customers to see who would rise up if they knew that Grace, and not the inscrutable and invincible Hive, had kept them poor and sickly. He’d asked hypothetical questions that were met with blank stares and embarrassed laughs. They lived in a world where it was acceptable, even normal, to curse the Hive, but beyond curses all anyone seemed to want was to be accepted by them—to be ushered past the checkpoints and into the shining city by the sea.

  At night, Toshi sat with his dying mother. He could see the cancer in her growing by the second, thinking how easily he could pluck it from her body. Like picking spilled seeds off the floor. But he wasn’t allowed to do that.

  Toshi asked his mother why she didn’t want change. She placed her shriveled hand next to his smooth one and smiled up into his eternally young face. “You are not sick. You will never be sick,” she said.

  And that was enough for her. It seemed to be enough for most in the restricted zone. As long as they had the hope that their children would live charmed lives in Bower City, they didn’t want change.

  Toshi jumped a trolley and hung from the bar, glaring hopelessly out the window. The clean streets glittered at him smugly and the legions of fit people mocked him with their healthy bodies and pretty, smiling faces.

  Grace was right. They would probably fight him—not her—if Toshi tried to change anything. That was the genius of what Grace had done. Her victims were far away and somebody else’s problem. The punishment was to be locked out of Bower City, and so everyone wanted in.

  He got off the trolley and walked the last few blocks to the Governor’s Villa. Grace hadn’t even hinted that she was going to throw him out or demote him in any way. Still, Toshi was certain now that he had no hope of ever learning how to grow willstones. Grace would never trust him with that. If the formula for growing willstones was ever leaked it would end Bower City’s stranglehold on magic and therefore its dominance in the world.

  But, as Toshi considered it, he realized that he’d never had a chance of becoming Ivan’s second. Grace had stopped trusting him enough for that when he saw the hardness in her eyes and ended their brief roma
nce. She knew that if he didn’t love her she couldn’t control him, and Grace would never allow anyone she couldn’t control to know the secret of willstones. He wondered what Grace had on Ivan.

  Toshi went inside, but he didn’t go up to his rooms. Instead, he went to find Ivan. He wove through the myriad rooms and down passageways that led to other buildings. The façades of these buildings were made to look like they were separate, but behind them, nearly all the buildings in the governing area were connected. They all led back to Grace.

  Toshi found Ivan in the power relays. The windy, stadium-size room was humming with the electricity being generated by the three dozen crucibles and witches who were transmuting energy for the city. They each stood in their niche in the marble walls, suspended in a gentle column of witch wind, their faces underlit by their glowing willstones. They looked like lovely floating statues. The mechanics grouped below them and monitored their bodies, making sure they didn’t transmute to the point of taxing themselves. Salt and herbs were strewn on the floor. A banquet of food was ready in a niche to refuel them when they had completed their shift. Out of respect, the food was always presented spilling out of a cornucopia.

  The only things that marred the hypnotic beauty of the relays were the thick cables that carried the electricity out to the city, but since they were the whole point, the cables were regrettably unavoidable. Ivan made sure they were kept out of the way nonetheless. A serene witch was a productive witch, and it just made sense to keep the generators of the city’s power happy.

  Ivan was checking an output gauge when Toshi came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and smiled when he saw his protégé.

  “I didn’t see you on the schedule today,” Ivan said, his smile falling as he took note of Toshi’s expression.

  “Can we talk?” Toshi asked.

  Ivan waved someone over to take his place. They went down a corridor and through some back doors in silence until they got to Ivan’s laboratory. Unlike the grand and stately space of the relays, Ivan’s laboratory was a cramped, untidy room full of glass beakers and tiny crystal vials of strange potions.

  There were few places in the world where Toshi felt as comfortable as he did here. It was filled with memories of his childhood. After being chosen by the Hive and the subsequent commotion of bonding with such a large and impressive willstone, Ivan’s laboratory was the only place that reminded Toshi of his parents’ apothecary shop. It was unheard of for Toshi to wish himself back to the restricted zone, or to even speak of it, and so Ivan’s acrid-smelling, usually sticky, and occasionally explosive laboratory became the only place Toshi could go as a boy to ease the homesickness he was told he shouldn’t feel.

  Pickled creatures, half created before they were destroyed, yellowed in their chemical baths along one wall. Each shelf was a trial and error in a series of experiments carried out on the Woven ages ago.

  Toshi had asked Ivan once what they were for, and Ivan had replied, “To remind me of what not to do.”

  “What’s troubling you?” Ivan asked, bringing Toshi back to the present with a small jump. Ivan perched on the edge of his scorch-marked desk and placed his hands properly in his lap, waiting with the same kindly patience he’d always given Toshi, even when he didn’t deserve it.

  “Did you create the Hive for Grace?”

  The question brought an end to the decades of good memories Toshi had of that room and, like a bad smell lingering close to good food, tainted all of them.

  Ivan looked down and let out a long, tired breath. “How did you find out?” he asked.

  “You are the master of kitchen magic. And it’s the only thing I could think of that she could use to keep you silent. You would have had to have done it in order to want to keep it hidden for so long,” Toshi answered. “What about the rest of the Woven?”

  “I can’t claim full responsibility for them, but I was a part of it.” He swallowed. “A large part. I made Grace the kitchen, as it were, for her to make the Woven.” He swiped his hands over his face, his eyes older in an instant. “Bower City was just an outlawed trading post, scared to death that Salem would find out we existed and kill us all. We couldn’t stand against the Eastern Covens. Then Grace had this idea about the Woven. I was young and angry and, I swear to you, I never thought the wild Woven would last more than a generation or two. I certainly never considered that she would learn how to make them grow willstones inside their bodies so she could control them. That’s no excuse, but it’s the only one I have.”

  “How many other people know?” Toshi asked.

  “They’re all long dead,” Ivan said. “Like I should be.”

  The irony of it was suffocating. Ivan was the one who created the soap that slowed aging to a crawl, which Toshi had improved until aging and the slow decline of the body into decrepitude were essentially stopped, but you didn’t have to use that soap if you wanted to grow old and die.

  “Why aren’t you?” he asked, cruelty flaring inside of him.

  Ivan smiled down at his folded hands, accepting Toshi’s anger and feelings of betrayal. “I knew I could never make up for what I’d done, but if I helped enough people, maybe my life wouldn’t be a complete travesty.” Ivan laughed softly. “Why aren’t I dead yet? Because I have so many sins to repent before I die, I just might have to live forever.”

  The two of them watched a Worker crawl across Ivan’s thigh. Toshi saw the loathing in Ivan that he never dared show before, and he just knew.

  They had worked together as teacher and student for over fifty years, so it was easy for Toshi to read the subtle shift in Ivan, a shift that signaled he wanted to get to work. Over the years they had cured the incurable, mended the irrevocably broken, and essentially ended the need for people to grow old and die. That much time working together solving the biggest biological problems gave them an advantage over the myriad eyes that watched them.

  Without even changing the attitude of their bodies, Toshi and Ivan agreed to solve this together. Toshi stood up, took off his jacket, and went to get a lab coat. They were going to find a way to exterminate the Hive.

  CHAPTER

  10

  At some point in the night, Lily became aware of the fact that she was thrashing about in a big, white bed.

  She felt hands soothing her and smelled the grassy scent of Rowan’s ointment cooling her charred skin. No matter how many times Lily went to the pyre, burning on it never got easier. The trauma was not something the body could ever allow to become commonplace, and if she couldn’t—or, in this case, wouldn’t—transmute the heat fast enough, agony was the sacrifice she had to make.

  When it became too much, Lily found Lillian waiting for her in the Mist. They sat on the raft, facing each other, their feet pulled in and their chins resting on their knees.

  But you didn’t go to the pyre, Lily said in confusion. Why are you here?

  I am here every night now, Lillian replied.

  Your cancer is that bad?

  Lillian smiled at Lily as they bobbed on top of the dark water. It won’t be for much longer, she replied after a quiet spell.

  Lily thought of Toshi’s deep red willstone, and regretted not claiming him, if only for Lillian’s sake.

  Can I help you in any way?

  Yes. You can help me destroy Bower City.

  Lily didn’t reply. She thought of all the people in Bower City who had no idea what Grace had done. They didn’t deserve to die. Lily had no idea how to keep them safe, though, once the war began in earnest. While she was thinking about this, Lillian asked her another question.

  How did you get your coven from the sand dunes to Salem?

  I can’t tell you that yet.

  Why not?

  I need you to wait for me and hear what I have to say.

  I can’t wait. I’m dying.

  Hold on, Lillian. I’m coming.

  Lily woke with the sun. Her stinging eyes peeled open to see stone walls, wide windows, and on the far side of
the room, a fireplace large enough for her to stand in.

  She knew this room. She was in Lillian’s bedroom in the Citadel.

  Lily sat up and saw that she wasn’t alone in the bed. Rowan lay next to her, a bare arm thrown over his eyes to block out the light. Tristan was there, too, down by her feet. Juliet, Breakfast, Una, and Samantha were draped uncomfortably over various pieces of furniture. The only person missing was Caleb.

  She felt Tristan twitch as he shook himself awake. His blue eyes opened and he sighed with relief when he saw her.

  Hi there, he said. You’re looking much better.

  I still feel like hammered garbage. Lily smiled at him. Where’s Caleb?

  Tristan’s eyes unfocused as he searched for his stone kin. Off somewhere with a friend. He’s still angry, Tristan answered.

  Have I lost him? The thought tightened her throat.

  He hasn’t decided yet. He had to smash his first willstone when he was still a kid to get away from his first witch, and he has no desire to repeat the experience.

  Lily remembered Caleb telling her about his brief time training at the Citadel. He’s been claimed by a cruel witch who used to possess him for fun. He’d never shared any of those memories, and Lily hadn’t pushed it. It occurred to her that she had done the same thing to him, although for very different reasons. She could only hope that her reasons were good enough for Caleb and that he came back to her. For now it was out of her hands.

  Not sure what to do, Lily glanced around absently at the basins of bloody water, the shreds of gauze pads, and the bottles of herbs piled around her. Detritus from the battle to heal her. Her coven slept deeply and in odd positions, as if exhaustion had hit them like the tide and left them scattered like driftwood.

  It was quite a night, Tristan said in mindspeak. Lily caught glimpses of it from his mind.