Witch's Pyre

by Josephine Angelini

  Rowan put the matching iron-and-diamond cuffs on her wrists and locked them shut. The cuffs came complete with rings ready to chain her to the pyre.

  Lily turned her wrists over and heard the metal clink. Every gesture she made would be accompanied by the sound of iron chains. She watched a slow smile spread on Rowan’s face as she realized that she was a prisoner as much as she was a queen.

  “So this is what it is to be a warmonger witch,” she said, breath fluttering.

  “You are chained to your claimed as much as they are to you,” he replied. “And if you fail, you burn.”

  Lily looked up at him and knew he would never let that happen. He’d pulled her from the fire before, and he’d do it again because he loved her.

  Tristan appeared in the doorway, sensed that he was interrupting, and dropped his eyes. “They’re ready for you, Lily,” he said.

  Rowan and Lily took a guilty step back from each other.

  “We should go down first,” Rowan said to Tristan and then turned back to Lily. “Wait five minutes and then come down.”

  “You’re not coming with me?” she asked, her voice piping with nerves.

  “This is your moment,” he replied with a little shake of his head.

  Instead of going to the door, Lily crossed farther inside the room.

  “They’re expecting you,” Rowan said, not understanding what she was doing.

  “I know,” she replied, and went to the wall behind the bed. She started feeling around the chinks in the masonry. “I’m not going to claim them one at a time. There are too many. I have to use the speaking stone. Like Grace does.”

  Lily felt the catch and pressed it. The hidden doorway swung open and she gestured up the secret stair.

  “Will you be able to claim them that way?” Tristan asked.

  “Yes, she will, as long as they consent to it,” Rowan answered for her.

  They climbed up the secret staircase together, Tristan in front of her and Rowan beside her. She could feel the flurry of their mindspeak swirling about her head like a buffeting wind, but she didn’t need to be a part of it.

  She pulled Rowan’s arm against her side and let herself feel the shape of his arm under his sleeve. She felt cold and pressed the solidness of him against her. He glanced down at her cautiously, like he was watching something wild and rare that would run off if he looked too closely.

  She could hear the low murmur rising up from the throng of people waiting for her before she reached the edge. She placed a hand on the cold granite of her keep and leaned out so everyone could see her. Silence fell over the multitude.

  The drawbridge had been lowered, and the doors of the castle had been opened onto the bailey. People filled the hall and the bailey; they streamed over the drawbridge and, for all Lily could see, they were packed several streets deep into the city. All of them waiting to be claimed. In the silence, Lily’s iron shackles clanked. She looked down at her wrists already rubbed red by the rough metal and felt their eyes on her like a watchful sea. She raised her head, ready now. For a moment she saw herself as they saw her—terrible and glorious as a blizzard.

  “Are you willing to be claimed?” she asked. Her voice drifted through the silence and came to each individual as if she had whispered it privately in his or her ear.

  “We are,” they answered together.

  She crossed to the speaking stone and looked into its soft lights. At first she couldn’t think how to connect with all the waiting willstones below her. Before, she’d always had to touch a willstone to feel its unique vibration, and then once she had the pattern of it, she could use the vibration to unlock the bearer’s mind. She had to think of a way of finding the vibrations without touch, but she knew that if Grace could figure it out, so could she.

  Nothing came to her. She took a step back and tried to calm down. Strangely she thought of the shaman, and of the time she spent with him in the oubliette. She wiped her mind of any expectations. This wasn’t a contest between her and Grace.

  She stared into the speaking stone and waited.

  “Those funny little lights. Look at ’em go,” she murmured to herself. She giggled under her breath at how alive they looked. Each little thread of light quivered through the lattice of the crystal in its own way. Some swam up, quivering quickly. Some swooped down slowly. Others looped sideways, making tight corkscrews. Each one moved in a unique pattern, each one an individual mind. Lily laughed aloud when she figured it out.

  She realized that the speaking stone worked like a net, gathering up the vibrations of every willstone nearby and displaying each of them as a vibrating string of light. Lily worked as fast as she could, her eyes skipping through the speaking stone as she learned the thousands of different vibrations. She imprinted each inside her willstone before moving on to the next. When she had them all, she played the strings’ vibrations back like many voices singing one sweeping song, and claimed them all. Lily blinked her eyes and sighed.

  “It’s done,” she said.

  Rowan and Tristan escorted her back down to the bailey where the rest of her mechanics were waiting. They stood arranged in front of her pyre, which they’d built right in the middle of the bailey. The pyre was splintered and thorny, and the stake stood tall in the center, its chains dangling. A thrill ran through her, equal parts fear and hunger.

  Can you jump this many? The question came from Rowan, but she knew her whole coven was thinking it. She didn’t answer because she didn’t know.

  Lily climbed the pyre, pulled the chains through her shackles herself, and locked them with a small snick. The new additions to her army watched. An anxious susurration rose from their ranks.

  “Light it,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Toshi and Ivan were in their wordless flow, silently agreeing that the latest virus they had concocted to wipe out the Hive had to be scrapped because it would most likely kill everyone in the city along with the Hive, when Grace walked into the lab.

  She looked at the petri dish, took its contents apart with a glance, and then looked up at Toshi and Ivan with eyebrows raised.

  “I hope that’s not going around,” she said, alarmed.

  “It’s just a sample. There’s no host,” Ivan replied with a small shake of his head.

  “Good.” Grace smiled and looked between the two of them like they were her dear friends. “You two have been busy lately, although I can’t quite tell with what.”

  Toshi didn’t react. He’d gotten good at burying his feelings over the past week and a half. If he felt anxious that Grace was actually here in the lab to see what they’d been up to, he quickly snuffed it. Whether she was physically in the room or not, it made no difference. She was always watching, which was why Toshi and Ivan hadn’t even attempted to become stone kin. It was a good thing they knew each other well enough not to need mindspeak in order to read each other’s minds. Toshi glanced at Ivan, who was even better at appearing calm. But then again, he’d had almost two hundred years of experience hiding his emotions from Grace and the Hive.

  “We’ve been updating the inoculation roster. Would you like us to walk you through the new diseases we’ve identified?” Ivan asked, with an ever so slightly belabored breath to indicate how tedious that would be for all of them.

  “The flu is doing something interesting,” Toshi added with a listless shrug.

  Grace declined their unappealing offer by wrinkling her nose. She started wandering around the lab, peering into jars and touching instruments. “It’s been a while since you’ve been down here,” she said to Toshi. When she turned to face him, she gave him a glassy-eyed smile. “I wonder what prompted you to become so hands-on again?”

  Toshi knew there was no point trying to act too innocent. She knew something was going on, but had decided that finding out what they were doing was more important than stopping them. For now, anyway.

  “Just looking for meaning in my life now that I’ve discovered everything I
’ve ever thought to be true was built on a giant lie,” he rattled off as if it were of no consequence. She laughed aloud at his audacity. “What are you doing down here?” he asked in return.

  “Alright. No more dancing around it, then.” She stopped her wandering and faced them. “I want to know if your renewed interest in the lab has anything to do with how Lily and her coven disappeared into thin air.”

  “You’re really obsessed with that, aren’t you?” Toshi asked, not having to fake his surprise.

  Grace’s eyes flashed with anger. “My scouts can’t find her. There’s no trail, no scent markers. Nothing. I’ve sent half the Hive clear into Pack territory, and there’s no sign of her.”

  “I don’t see what you expect us to do about that,” Ivan said irritably. “We deal in real materials in the lab, not hocus-pocus. Toshi and I can’t help you if she’s been”—Ivan waved his hands about, searching for the appropriately derisive expression—“spirited away.” “Spirited away.” Grace laughed at the foolishness of that under her breath, and then caught herself. “Spirit walking.” Her smirk dissolved and her eyes moved about restlessly. “Maybe she wasn’t lying about the shaman.”

  Toshi hadn’t entirely understood what Lily was talking about when she was pleading for her sister’s life in the redwood grove, but he did know that she had been about to tell Grace how she could be in two places at once. She’d talked about spirit walking and a shaman, and Grace had dismissed it out of hand. It seemed she was changing her mind about that now. Dread roiled in his stomach. The last thing Grace needed was more power.

  Grace started heading for the door, already forgetting about Toshi and Ivan now that she had new quarry.

  “Where are you going?” Toshi asked. “Grace!” he called out as the door shut behind her.

  Lily’s spirit flew up and out of her tortured flesh. Down below, she saw herself writhing in flames. Out and beyond, she saw that the overworld had taken on the shapes of vast swaths of forest and rolling hills.

  Lillian was out there somewhere, waiting for her. That wasn’t Lily’s first stop. She had to find Alaric and her braves. She turned away from Lillian’s faint call.

  Lily scanned the virgin tracts of land for a beacon. As her body burned she felt it tugging on her spirit, like a child pulling on a balloon. But she was calm here. Patient. She couldn’t jump without some kind of tie to the land she was going to jump to. She needed the vibration of the land in order to unlock the key to that particular place in the same way she needed the vibration of someone’s mind inside their willstone in order to claim them.

  She thought she’d managed it with Pale One. But Pale One was so close to the earth, so in tune with where she was that unlocking the vibration had been easy. Finding a human with that kind of awareness of the land he or she was standing on was going to be a bit harder. Until she found a suitable host to gather the vibration for the unknown place she had to jump to, all she could do was soar through the gray overworld.

  Her body tugged with increasing urgency. Time was short. She looked one way and saw the silvery fog of the Mist right on the edge of the overworld. She looked the other way and saw a golden haze. She chose to let her spirit fly there. As she got closer, she understood what it was—the minds of her claimed still under Alaric’s rule.

  Lily hoped that what she was about to do either went unnoticed or, at the very least, didn’t cause her host to feel violated. She scanned her Outlander claimed and found a girl gathering water from a stream. Her hands were in the stream and momentarily a part of it, but Lily pulled back, knowing that it wouldn’t work. Rivers flow over the land. They are wanderers, and not tied to any place.

  Lily left the girl and went back to scanning the huge host. They were all moving about too quickly. None of them were tied to the place they occupied, but rather focused on where they would be tomorrow or the day after.

  She found one of her claimed sitting on a rock. His mind was exactly where his body was in space, but the rock was too full of quartz for Lily to get a vibration from the land under it. Time was running out. Frantic now, she pulled up and out and saw what she was looking for. One of her claimed was digging in the ground, waist deep in the earth. He could feel it all around him—the smell of it, the texture, the thisness of that particular spot. His whole being was tuned into that particular patch of the planet because this was the place he was going to bury his best friend. She thought of calling to him by name, but stopped. She didn’t want to let him know she was there.

  As she let her spirit dive into his, Lily tried to comfort him wordlessly. She was with him. The horizon pitched, there was a dizzying swirl of perception, and then it was her blistered hands on the shovel, and her heart that was aching with irreplaceable loss. She invaded his willstone with a small apology, and used it to sound out the vibration of this place. When she had the particular pattern locked, she dove out of him like a bungee jumper reaching the end of her tether and plunging upward.

  As her spirit sped away from the ground and back up into the gray of the overworld, she saw him pause and clutch his chest. He glanced at the wrapped body of his dead friend and then up into the clouds above.

  Lily spooled back into her body, still locked in the jaws of the fire. In agony, she let out a piercing scream that echoed around the bailey. Rowan pivoted and came charging toward the pyre, an ax already in his hands. Before he could reach her, a thunderclap tore through the sky, and with the roaring sound of air suddenly being emptied of over ten thousand bodies, Lily jumped them all hundreds of miles.

  They appeared around the man burying his friend. He was still clutching his chest and staring at the sky. One moment he was alone, and the next he was surrounded by a multitude. Ten thousand men and women stood facing him in an ever-expanding circle, their staring faces manifesting out of nothing among the trees.

  Lily appeared right next to him inside the half-dug grave. She made a whimpering sound and the shackles on her wrists clanked as she fell forward. He caught her burnt body in his arms.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. Relieved it was over, she placed her head on the man’s shoulder and took a few deep breaths. She could feel Rowan’s tattoo cooling her burns from the inside, and every breath she took loosened the pain a little more.

  Rowan ran to the edge of the grave and knelt down. “Give her to me,” he demanded, reaching with his hands to take her.

  The man held Lily to his chest, his arms reluctant with shock. The man was an Outlander, so Rowan repeated his order in Cherokee. The man started nodding, but still had to be coaxed into giving Lily over. When he did, she heard him saying one phrase over and over.

  “What’s he saying?” she asked as Rowan carried her away from the grave.

  “He said he felt you before he saw you,” he replied. He lowered his voice and put some distance between them and the rest of her mechanics. “He said that you were with him, and then he pointed at his chest.” Rowan’s tone was tight. “What does that mean?”

  “You know what that means.”

  “You possessed him.”

  The word hung between them while Lily tried to decide if Rowan was censuring her or not. She refused to get defensive. “I took nothing from him. I even tried to comfort him a little, which is why I think he sensed me,” she said plainly. “There was no other way to jump us.”

  He sighed and nodded. “Let’s just hope the rest of them don’t find out,” he said, and focused on her injuries. “These don’t look too bad.”

  She gritted her teeth to keep the pain at bay as he peeked through one of the burn holes on her dress. “I want to speak with Alaric as soon as I can,” she said.

  “I’ll see to it,” he replied.

  Carrick had been riding hard for three days. The mount Lillian had given him was a tame Woven—part horse, part something with scales. It was called a runner. Carrick had no idea what the non-horse part was, and he hadn’t asked.

  The runner’s dagger teeth and the reptilian feel of its bl
ack hide had made him a little hesitant at first, but it rode like a regular horse and he’d gotten the hang of it soon enough. The thing hadn’t needed food or water until that morning. Carrick had fed it a raccoon, which it swallowed whole, and then they’d been on their way. Efficient.

  Carrick had left Lillian’s army on her orders and backtracked to find Alaric’s. As his silent mount picked over the trail, Carrick noticed how differently a city army traveled from an Outlander tribe. Lillian’s tightly packed army had trampled everything in their path, leaving a swath of dead bodies and spoiled land in their wake. The Outlander army fanned out, traveled lighter, and killed less and died less along the way. Carrick had to really look to find them as they slipped from hollow to vale, riding spread out by day and sleeping in their camouflage tents by night. But he was an Outlander like them. He knew how to look.

  Yet as observant as Carrick was, the thing he was looking for had eluded him so far. Now that Lily was back in this world and had pledged to join Lillian, Carrick had been given his old orders again. Find the last bomb and dismantle it.

  There used to be two. Now there was only one. Carrick had asked about the other, but Lillian hadn’t answered him.

  He’d been annoyed that one of her other legmen had taken care of it, mostly because he guessed it had to be one of those pompous Walltop soldiers. Carrick was used to being looked at with distaste, whether it was for his stringy hair, his unnerving stare, or the blood under his fingernails that never seemed to entirely wash away before he found himself wrist deep in it again. But even the most squeamish sidestepping that was done to avoid crossing his path was done with a certain level of respect.