Good Witches Don't Curse (Academy of Shadowed Magic Book 3)

by S. W. Clarke

  In a moment, my mind traced all the annals of its knowledge and remembered the name of it: the thief’s blade.

  “But she’ll kill you.”

  He shook his head. “Not quite yet.”

  I stepped up to Noir’s side, even as Rathmore came to my side, his hands going around my waist as they had the first time we’d met. He lifted me onto the horse’s back, and though he hadn’t asked, I didn’t object.

  He looked up at me through the slits in his helmet. “You’ll find it in one of the closes in Edinburgh.”

  “The closes,” I echoed as I reached out for Aidan, helping him onto Noir’s back.

  At the same time, Loki leapt onto my cloak, climbing up onto my shoulder. “Let’s go. You can eat cookies and deliberate in the library later.”

  Eva helped Liara onto Siren, who stood not far off, and the two of them mounted. “Clem,” Liara said, my name a reprimand from her mouth.

  Rathmore set one hand on my forearm; I couldn’t tell if it scalded because of his magic, or because it was him. “When you go, you’ll find your mother and sister there. Be prepared.” And then he took one step toward Noir’s hind quarters, gave a bellow so loud the stallion nearly reared as he took off into a canter.

  My mother and sister.

  He’d said my mother and sister.

  I swung Noir around toward the wide plain and the end of the trefoil knot I knew lay on the other side. We could pass through the veil there. But my eyes were still on Rathmore as Liara brought Siren around to follow. “They’re alive?” I called. “My mother and Tamzin?”

  Rathmore didn’t answer. He only raised one hand, pointing in the direction of the bluff and the lake.

  There, a swarm of creatures poured down the white hill toward us.

  He’d been right: the Shade had sent more. Many more.

  Around us, the nearest creatures seemed aroused by the arrival of reinforcements. They began to move toward us, sliding past Rathmore. As they did, his sword came free once more to send them back to hell.

  I pressed Noir into a gallop in the opposite direction, gesturing to Liara. “This way.”

  She followed on Siren, and the two horses moved like light across the plain. Soon we were near the edge of the knot, and I gestured ahead. “Liara, can you part it?”

  She nodded, lifting herself to a crouch atop Siren’s back as Eva slid forward to grip the horse’s mane. A moment later, the dark-haired fae launched herself into the air, took off with wings blurring as she raced ahead of us.

  She half-disappeared in the darkness ahead, and I squinted to make her out. Behind us, I could see them giving chase, pouring around Rathmore’s flaming sword and following us.

  Careful, demon prince.

  What would happen to him if he was overwhelmed by the Shade’s creatures?

  Death. I didn’t even know what that meant for him.

  The pang of that last thought pressed like an iron into my chest, and I kept my eyes on his receding figure just a second longer than I should have.

  No, I told myself. This can’t be the last time.

  Even if that was a delusion, I had to believe it or I wouldn’t have been able to ride away.

  I turned back around, one hand squeezing Aidan’s fingers at my waist. “Almost there, North.”

  Come on, Liara. Part the damn thing.

  Then I saw it—blue air magic illuminating the tundra as Liara’s hand cut straight down through the veil. She’d started eight feet in the air, and just seconds later, a straight line of blue magic etched its way down to the ground.

  She always had been the best at that, but this speed…

  “Fast, right?” she called as she turned, waving us forward. She’d pulled the veil aside for the two horses.

  We galloped past the edge of the knot, and all at once air came into my lungs, the magic’s pressure relieved as Noir raced a second later through the veil and into the darkness of the forest outside the academy.

  I brought him to a skidding halt on the grass, turning him in time to see Siren pass through with Eva atop her and Liara flying through last of all.

  The moment she was through, she reseamed the veil, closing off the tundra before the creatures could pile through.

  And just like that, we were alone in the quiet of the forest.

  We all breathed hard, the silence almost ringing in my ears. Liara crouched low to the ground, staring at the earth, and Aidan slumped against my back.

  Somehow, we’d surivved.

  “It still burns,” Aidan murmured. “Everywhere.”

  I knew what he meant. If I paid it any attention, I could feel my nerves burning like they were on fire—my hands, my arms, legs, feet. Everywhere.

  That was the power of Frostwish’s agony hex. Or maybe it was the Spitfire. Probably it was both.

  “You all right, Loki?” I whispered to the cat still on my shoulder.

  “Don’t mind me,” he said. “Though I may have wet myself. And you, by extension.”

  Then Eva and I met eyes.

  “Stables, then infirmary,” she said in a weary, hoarse voice. She wasn’t in good shape.

  As Eva helped Liara onto Siren’s back and they began riding toward the grounds, I lifted the rod in the spotty moonlight through the canopy. The chain tinkled as I did.

  My own professor had tried to kill me for this, and the demon prince had sacrificed himself so I could keep it.

  The Backbiter certainly did feel cursed.

  Nurse Neverwink wasn’t yet awake when we came into the infirmary. She stumbled down the stairs from her home into the infirmary’s waiting room a few minutes after we’d all piled in.

  Her tired eyes shifted to alarmed the moment she took in the four of us, and Loki standing at my feet. Then, to me, “What have you done now?”

  “Me?” I struggled to set one mock-offended hand to my chest, but found my left arm screaming as I did so. Where should I even start? It didn’t even matter, really. “Fire witch stuff, basically,” I said. “Do you have treatment for hexes?”

  I had never seen Neverwink so shocked. “Hexes?”

  “The agony hex, specifically.” I nodded to Aidan, who I was helping to walk with one arm under him. “Everyone got hexed, but I think he got it the worst.”

  “Hexes!” Neverwink threw her hands up. She started toward the medicine pantry, then stopped and pointed. “Take a bed, each of you.”

  Twenty minutes later, Loki was drinking from a bowl of catnip-laced milk in the corner and those of us who had been agony hexed had been given a poultice to drink. It tasted like mushrooms with the texture of slug slime, but Neverwink watched me until I’d downed the whole thing.

  Afterward, she plucked the cup from me. “The burning should subside within the hour.”

  “The hour?” I took a deep, bolstering breath.

  She clucked at me. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had to brew a remedy for a hex? Twenty years. You should be glad I even know how, Clementine Cole.”

  I knew what that meant.

  Neverwink hadn’t had to deal with the after-effects of hexes for so long, she thought maybe she was done with them. Twenty years was a long time, after all—long enough to feel like another lifetime.

  And then a fire witch had shown up and brought those hexes roaring back.

  When Neverwink left, I glanced over at Liara in the bed next to me. “Hey, fae,” I whispered, low enough that Aidan and Eva couldn’t hear from their beds on the opposite side of the room.

  Her eyes tracked toward me. “Hey, fire witch.”

  “I know tonight wasn’t what you expected.” I paused. “It wasn’t what I expected, either. I…”

  She snorted. “Do I hear a half-assed apology coming?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Save it.” She placed one hand over her chest, eyes on the ceiling. “Life never goes how you expect it to go. That’s why expectations are useless.”

  I wondered if she was thinking of her family. I
was certainly thinking of mine. Who might still be alive, in Edinburgh.

  “Fair enough.” My eyes stayed on her. “But I won’t rope you into anything else. Whatever indebtedness you felt toward me, it was paid long ago.”

  “I know.” Now her face turned to me, dark eyes hard in the dim lamplight on the beside table between us. “So we’re even. Everything I do from this point on is because I want to.”

  My eyebrows went up. “From this point?”

  “You heard Rathmore.” A strange look crossed her face, somewhere between anger and resoluteness. “Edinburgh is where we need to go. Well, aside from hell.”

  We.

  She’d said we.

  A face appeared at the end of our beds. Eva, who looked somehow good as new. Except she wore a grimness around her mouth. “Did I hear someone say Edinburgh?”

  I raised a finger to my lips, glanced to where Neverwink was puttering around in the other room.

  Eva gave a half-smile. “Don’t tell her this, but Neverwink’s hearing isn’t great.”

  Liara flicked a hand up and down Eva’s body. “How do you look so…good?”

  “Healing magic.” Eva shrugged one effortless shoulder. “You probably won’t be surprised to know I’m aces when casting it on myself. Do you want…?”

  “No,” Liara said at once.

  “I hear a conversation happening without me,” Aidan’s voice called from across the room. “And I have a feeling I want in on it.”

  “Yeah.” With a silent leap, Loki came floating onto the end of my bed the way cats do. He wavered with enormous pupils. “I hear three conversations, actually. Gods, I’ve got to get into Neverwink’s catnip stash.”

  Even Liara laughed at that.

  Aidan limped over, closing the curtain around our beds, and took a seat at the end of Liara’s bed. He still wore pain on his face and in his slump, but he didn’t complain. That wasn’t his way.

  In fact, no one was complaining.

  “What do you think’s happened to Frostwish?” Eva asked. “Will she come back?”

  I shook my head. “Rathmore said she’d slander me.” I didn’t think she was dead, but she wouldn’t be returning to the academy. “But I doubt she’ll be returning here.”

  Not after I told Umbra about where her allegiances lay. In fact, after my last conversation with Umbra about Lucian the prince, I had a feeling things between us had changed.

  She was willing to tell me more truths, and I was willing to do the same with her.

  I had a feeling she knew more answers to my questions than she’d ever let on.

  “And Rathmore?” Eva whispered.

  Pain lanced my chest when I heard his name. I still didn’t know what had become of him.

  Liara shifted on the bed with a sigh. “Like he said: his life isn’t important. It’s getting Clementine to the thief’s blade in Edinburgh that matters.”

  I tried to ignore that first part. “He mentioned a ‘close.’”

  “Which close?” Aidan’s palms went out. “There are loads.”

  “What even is a close?” Liara asked, then glanced around at us. “I’m from Singapore.”

  “Old roads under the city proper,” Eva said. “Edinburgh was built atop itself over the centuries, and the ancient city lies under the present-day one.”

  I sat up in bed. “So we have to go under the city.”

  “At night,” Aidan said. “During the witching hour.”

  “And you have to figure out how to summon the thief’s blade,” Liara said. “While avoiding the formalists and the Shade’s army.”

  And facing whatever I may find there. Including my mother and sister.

  Finally, I met eyes with Loki.

  “Let’s not burn the whole place down, shall we?” he teased.

  At that, Rathmore appeared in my mind, his words in my ear—

  Remember yourself.

  No matter what came, I couldn’t let the Spitfire consume me. For everyone’s sake.

  Of all of us, I was the last to leave the infirmary. Neverwink had insisted I stay because I was in the worst shape, it seemed. And so I’d urged the others to go on without me, that I would find them that afternoon.

  But when I came out of the infirmary with Loki later that day, it was Maeve Umbra who stood in the clearing.

  She turned toward me, sorrow written all over her features. Someone had told her what had happened. But it was more than that.

  Umbra was worried.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Outside the train window, the Romanian countryside swept by, all hills and sun-kissed trees. And amongst them sat my faint reflection, so much red hair and freckles.

  “Have you ever been on a train?” Maeve Umbra asked from the seat across from me. Her robes draped proud and regal over the seat, her staff propped against the empty one next to her like a second passenger.

  I met her gaze. “Only the metro back home, and that was mostly underground.” Then, “Why didn’t we just take the leyline?”

  She gave a long, satisfied sigh. “When you’ve parted veils for as long as I have, you begin to relish traditional means of travel. I find, when I have nothing else to do and nowhere to be, I can think better.”

  It’s more than that. But I knew this was as much as I would get from her.

  We were otherwise in agreement on travel, except for one part: trains meant I was in motion. As a teenager, I’d preferred to be in motion, to be moving away from things. To never be caught.

  Beside me, Loki slept. A pot of tea and cookies sat on the tray between us, and I wished I had asked if Eva could come along.

  When Maeve Umbra had approached me in the clearing earlier that day, she had invited Loki and me to stay with her for the summer at her family’s home in Zurich. When I’d found Eva in our dorm to talk to her about it, she had said to me, “You don’t turn down an offer like that from the headmistress.”

  So I didn’t. I’d said my goodbyes for the summer and I had gone with the headmistress.

  And not just because of protocol; I had a feeling she had a specific reason for inviting me along besides being oh so fond of me.

  “Now that we’re alone,” she said into the otherwise empty car, “I have wondered for some time now: how do you hide it?”

  I straightened. “Uh, hide what? My latent self-loathing? I don’t.”

  “The weapon.” Her violet eyes fixed on me. “The Shade’s weapon.”

  Both Loki and I started at the same time. His head rose in the seat beside mine, and my hands went over my armrests. “I don’t…” I began.

  “You obtained the key two years ago,” she said almost dully. “You retrieved the rod from the labyrinth last year. And I assume, given the time of year, your injuries, and the fact that Ora Frostwish has left the academy with some suddenness, that you’ve raised the chain from the lake.”

  I shook my head, fully astonished. “But you hid the key. You locked it away because it was too powerful.”

  “And it was gone from the safe that very afternoon.” She raised her teacup from the tray next to her, took a sip as though we were gossiping about her next-door neighbor. “Apparently you’ve learned well how to harness that power.”

  Umbra had known about the key all alone. She had known and allowed me to keep it.

  I stared. I didn’t know what to say.

  “If you don’t want to tell me,” she said into the silence, “you’re welcome to keep your secret, of course.”

  As I considered the past three years in terms of her role, a strange constellation began to emerge in my mind.

  It was her who had taken me to the maze. Had she known the rod was there? She must have. Which meant she’d been…helping me? She had, after all, suggested Lucian had sent me to Siberia. And she had been right.

  If she knew the chain was buried in the lake, then she also knew about the prophecy.

  I met eyes with Loki.

  “She hasn’t killed you yet,” he offered.


  He was right. Of course, she could be taking me away to Switzerland to kill me away from any witnesses.

  Umbra set down the teacup, some real gravity finally entering her expression. “I understand your hesitation, child. The reason I ask about the weapon is because now more than ever, you’ll need to keep it close to you.”

  But my mind was still stuck on Umbra’s involvement in all this. “Did you know about Ora Frostwish? Is that why you had her teach me hexes?”

  “I knew her allegiances were historically…uncertain.” She sighed. “I’m sorry for what you must have endured. I had hoped she would be your defender in what is to come.”

  “‘What is to come?’”

  Her gaze shifted out the window. “The Shade’s power grows faster than I had ever anticipated. A second battle comes, Clementine, and soon. She draws allies to her each day, and from places you wouldn’t expect.”

  I swallowed. “Callum Rathmore is Lucian the prince. But I guess you knew that.”

  She gave a slow nod. “I suspected so, though I wasn’t certain if he had taken up the mantle from his father.”

  His father. The mantle.

  “William Rathmore?” I whispered.

  “Yes,” she said. “The Rathmore line has served the Shade since the Battle of the Ages. Lucian the prince has been many mortal men over the centuries, the most recent of whom is Callum. Though I have a feeling he’s the most noble-hearted of any of them.”

  “Is that why you brought him to the academy as a professor?”

  “Yes,” she said, eyes piercing mine. “After he had been estranged from his father for years. You can imagine the kind of allies Rathmore and Frostwish would have been. I suppose Rathmore is still in question, isn’t he?”

  I closed my eyes, sighed. She knew it all, so there was no real point in lying about what had happened. “He saved me. He was the reason I was able to escape Frostwish.”

  She gave a slow nod. “Well done, Callum. So perhaps one of them has been saved. No doubt Frostwish will return to William Rathmore’s side and curse your name far and wide. She does not take defeat lightly.”

  I set a hand on Loki. My rock, my comfort. “Why are you taking me to Zurich? And don’t tell me it’s to see your family.”