“You know, I was forbidden from coming here as a girl. Too dangerous. I wonder how many witches came, anyway, just to see its beauty. If I had to die, there is no other place I would choose.”
A shooting star streaked overhead. The stone was warm at her throat, like the touch of a lover. Like Eli’s hand. She always had a firm grip. A few pink shells rained from Kite’s eyes and clattered over the black glass. Kite kept her eyes open. Cam stilled, and then set his shoulders back. His grip tightened around the stone blade. He stared into her eyes, the glowing orbs of bluegreen light. His grip relaxed.
“What am I doing?” He pulled on his hair, making it even messier than before. Kite felt the blade pull away from her body, and a rush of cold air replaced its warmth. She let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Seawater dripped out of the side of her mouth.
“You were eliminating a possible threat,” said Kite.
“I’m not a killer.”
“No?” Kite cocked her head. “Then it’s a good thing I found you before you got eaten.”
“How do we get out of here?” His voice was harsh, grating. The sound forced out of his mouth. “Where are we?”
Kite stood gracefully. “The Witch-Killing Fields. It’s where the obsidian is harvested to create weapons like Eli’s blade. The power isn’t just the obsidian,” she told Cam. “I discovered it in my research on how to free a made-daughter assassin. The essences of witches were fed to the ice, and their magic changed. The stone you stand on is a grave, and the ghosts of our dead is what lends the obsidian blades their strength. They are hungry for more witches.”
“You wanted to free Eli?”
“Of course. All things should be free.” Her voice was light as air, bright as a firefly bobbing in the night.
“But you’re the future Witch Lord.”
“Yes, that was my fate.”
“Was?”
She turned her luminous eyes on him. “All things should be free.”
He stepped back and the knife dropped to his side. For a moment, he looked like a lost child stranded on the ice, needing to be rescued. But then the moment passed, and he was a monster again — part man, part stone. A blade edge sharpened by fear and loneliness.
“You can get me back to Eli and Tav?” The longing in his voice was palpable. He was alone, and he was never alone; or at least, he tried to never be alone. They had failed him, Kite realized. They had not sent him across to harvest the black ice. They had lost him. Misplaced him. No wonder he was so afraid.
Kite looked down, letting her hair cascade over her knees and onto the glass. “I can’t promise that. I’m not here to help you. I’m going to the junkyard and then I’m going to end my mother’s reign.” She looked up again through a pool of bluegreen. “Will you help me?”
Cam turned his back on her and stared up at the sky. She wondered if he was looking for his home planet. Finally, he turned back, all the stones on his body shaking as if an earthquake was tremoring through his bones.
“I’ll help you, but if you betray us again —”
“Then you will take me back here and trap my essence in the ice. I understand.”
He reached out a hand. Kite stared at it for a second, and then grasped the tip of the stone blade instead. A single bubble blossomed from her palm and hung in the air.
“Now you.”
He reached out and tentatively touched a piece of hair that had been creeping toward him. It cut like barbed wire, and he hissed in pain. Kite blew on the bubble, and it swam toward his bleeding, burned hand and popped on it. Then she pressed her own wound against his. When she drew her hand away, both were healed, but she could feel the strangeness of blood and sediment in her magic body.
“So.” Cam cleared his throat. “Why are we going to the junkyard?”
She smiled, and her eyes glowed with the light of a pulsing jellyfish swimming through an undersea universe. “We are building an army. The unwanted are wanted again.”
Thirty-One
THE HEART
Tav’s shaking hand managed to find the keyhole and turned the ignition. They leaned back for a moment against Eli’s chest, and Eli could smell honey.
“Do you trust me?” Their voice was rough with worry.
Eli felt the prick of a thousand thorns as her throat undulated with the lie she wanted to regurgitate. The world around them seemed to freeze; leaves hanging in midfall, the moon pausing its rotation for a single moment, tides arched in spikes and curves across the globe.
Their mouth on her shoulder blade. Their hands on her lower back.
Eli remembered the fervor in Tav’s voice when they spoke of using magic to take back the city, the way their eyes had burned with hunger when they stared at her glowing body. The Heart of a world.
They would use you. You know they would. They would make you their tool.
But they haven’t, not yet.
There’s still time. Everyone lets you down, in the end.
“Do you trust me?”
The pain in Eli’s body whispered louder than the street. The frost blade burned at her hip. She swallowed.
“Yes.”
THE HEALER
Tav felt the surge of caffeine mingle with adrenalin and anxiety. Their hands were shaking. Their heartbeat was amplified in their ears, a heavy bass pounding out the last few seconds between safety and danger. Only this time it wasn’t their life they were putting in danger, but Eli’s.
She trusts you. She believes in you.
Fuck.
The path was so familiar they could have followed it in their sleep. Their chosen home. The place where they found hope. Love. Power.
No bells rang when they opened the door to The Sun.
The jitters intensified. Tav could hear their teeth rattling in their jaw, and wondered if Eli could hear it, too.
Eli went first. She was, after all, Tav’s bargaining chip. Tav’s property. Tav clenched their jaw, hating that they had to do this to her. They wanted to apologize, to beg for her forgiveness. But that would come later — if there was a later.
Tav watched as Eli let the tendrils of furious plants wind themselves around her legs, arms, throat, torso. She didn’t resist.
She trusts you.
Their eye started twitching. Their heartbeat was deafening. Fuck fuck fuck.
“You’ve been keeping a secret, Tav. I taught you well.” Pride laced the Hedge-Witch’s voice like arsenic in tea.
“A bargain is a bargain,” they said shortly. “You shed blood for us, and I give you the Heart.”
The Hedge-Witch’s eyes swirled black and white, mixing into cement grey. She stepped forward to inspect the assassin, strands of light blossoming along Eli’s veins and the cracks in her chapped lips. “Fascinating. It merged with her organic body?” She walked a slow circle around the girl. “So this is why I couldn’t find her. Why my daughter struggled to find her — she’ll be punished for the failure, of course. The Heart would blot out any other magic signature. It’s more than her.” She smiled. “I wondered what would happen when you touched it. It was smart of you to use her as a vessel. The weight of the Heart might have shattered the one who wrenched it from the Coven.”
“Did you think it would shatter me?”
The Hedge-Witch raised her gaze to meet Tav’s eyes. “You are extraordinary, Tav. I never doubted that you would come home.”
The vines tightened their grip on Eli, who still said nothing. Just watched Tav with those yellow reptilian eyes.
The weight of faith was heavier than loss, heavier than pain, than sleepless nights and waking nightmares.
Tav felt the sharp edge of obsidian against their forearm.
“The Coven —”
“I don’t want to hear it.” The Hedge-Witch raised a manicured hand. “You’ve been caught up in delusions, Tav. The real battle is here. And it’s just beginning. I will lead your people to victory.”
“My people?” Tav frowned.
“The humans,” she amende
d. “The humans need to be shown the error of their ways. I will make a new world for you. For us. With the Heart, I can —”
“You can?” Tav interrupted. “You used to say ‘we.’”
Eli laughed shortly. “There is no ‘we’ with witches,” she said. “Only one can rule.”
“We are not all the same,” said the Hedge-Witch. “I am sorry we will have to destroy your body, daughter of the Coven. You were so useful.”
Eli glared at her, and then let her eyes slip back to Tav.
“Why are you so tense?” The Hedge-Witch’s voice was soft as sin. “Today we start a new future. You and I together, like we always planned. We’ll start with this city — but why end there? We can conquer the entire world. I will rule, of course, but you will be at my side. We can decide what justice is. We can decide who lives and dies. You will no longer be powerless, Tav. I will give you power.”
Their grip on the hilt was slippery, their palm coated in sweat. Hands still shaking.
“I understand you feel empathy for the made-thing,” said the Hedge-Witch. “I will let you say goodbye before I use her.”
Tav turned to Eli and gently laid a hand on her cheek. They stared into her crocodile eyes. Let their eyes linger on the spot on her neck that they had kissed over and over again, nibbling and biting until Eli had moaned their name.
They leaned forward and pressed a kiss against Eli’s forehead. Heartbeat like thunder.
“Goodbye,” they whispered.
Then they stabbed her with the obsidian knife.
Thirty-Two
THE HEIR
The deadly plains stretched to the horizon like a never-ending nightmare. Kite shivered as she stared down at her feet, bare and pale against the dark obsidian. She could almost hear the cries of the dead witches under the surface, and when the light hit the black ice she could see arms reaching up at her, trying to drag her under.
“Kite?”
She looked up, letting the horror bleed from her eyes. Ink dripped down her face, the same colour as the stone.
“Are you okay?” Cam looked at her nervously, tugging at his moustache.
“We need to find the junkyard,” she said. “Ask the sword.”
“The staff — sword — hates me.”
“Then you must free it,” she told him.
“How?”
She swirled her hair into a nest on top of her head. Maybe a bird would come to rest, and they could dine on feathers.
“I don’t know.” She turned around stared back at the obsidian. So beautiful, and so deadly. Like Eli, she thought wistfully. “You don’t need that, by the way.”
“Need what?”
She could taste the guilt spilling from his body like spoiled fruit, could hear the moment he stopped raising the blade, pulled upward by uncertainty and fear.
“We made an agreement. That can’t be broken. I can’t break that oath. If I do, I will immediately be summoned here for execution. It’s what we agreed.”
“Eli told me not to trust witches.”
“Isn’t it a little late for that?” She turned back and stared at the thousands of stones studding his body. Basanite. Siltstone. Mica. “Shiny,” she said, and licked her lips.
Cam rubbed a piece of blue granite absentmindedly. “So we free the sword, then it can take us to the junkyard, and then you’ll get me home.”
“Oh, I never promised that,” she said, smiling sadly. Her broken reflection didn’t smile at all. “I said I would remake the world. Perhaps at the end of everything, you will find a home. I would never have agreed to an impossible promise.”
Forked lightning danced across the earth. It really was like walking on the sky, knowing at any moment you could plunge to your death. Death wasn’t something Kite thought about a lot. It was hard to kill witches, and harder to kill the Heir to the Coven. The trembling worsened. She didn’t understand why her body was like a violin string being played by a fine bow.
“Have you ever stared at your death?” she asked Cam conversationally. “It’s such an interesting experience.”
“It’s just a rock,” said Cam, as if he wasn’t half rock himself. He knelt down and placed a palm on the surface. He frowned. “It’s hard to hear.”
“Stones aren’t meant to be tombs, but we keep abusing them,” she sighed.
A faint smile played at the corners of his mouth. “The voice of the stone is quiet, but still there. Let me talk to it for a while. Maybe it knows how to break the curse.”
“Being bound to another thing isn’t always a curse.”
“If one of them is unwilling it is. Maybe be quiet and let me work?”
Kite drew back and let him commune with obsidian. The Beast pressed his body against her legs. He was panting heavily.
She missed the library. She missed the Labyrinth. In her own way, she even missed Clytemnestra.
This was the most dangerous thing she had done in her entire life. The absurdity of it overflowed her lungs, and damp air, stringy with seaweed, exhaled from her mouth. A spoiled Heir who knew nothing of war, who knew nothing that wasn’t in a book — how could she overthrow the Witch Lord?
Staring at the graveyard of dead witches was depressing. She almost wished she had held grimly on to the fierce playfulness of her child’s shape, the way Clytemnestra had. But it had been impossible; she had to pass as an adult, and her shape had changed the way she thought, the way she felt. She couldn’t play the way the Warlord played, not anymore. She was a strange thing, a half-grown witch, too old for the Children’s Lair and too young for the halls of the Coven.
“Can you make a circle?” asked Cam.
“That’s such a lovely idea,” she said, watching the stone body bent over the stone universe. “What kind?”
“I don’t know, exactly.” He bit his lip. “The stone seems to think that we can use the essences of the dead witches to free the blade. But we need to … re-enact our bond, and then break it? Does that make sense?”
“Of course. Rituals have power.” She didn’t say that she was afraid of what lay under the rock, and that her own essence had already been defeated once, by Circinae.
She was not the strongest of her kind.
“Then let’s do it now.” He stood. “Lay the sword beside me.”
Kite did, watching as the stones on his body began to shake; listening to the sharp hiss of the blade as it came close to the hand that had claimed it and wrenched it from its resting place. “It really does seem to hate you,” she observed.
“Thanks for reminding me.”
Kite bent down and rubbed the Beast’s ears. “Stay out of the way, precious. This could get messy.” The Beast barked once, ran a few paces away, and turned invisible.
Kite bent down and breathed on the black surface until it milked over in pearly white. Then she spat on the white and rubbed her hand in the spit. Slowly, she repeated the process all around the boy and the blade, until she had made a complete circle.
Nothing happened.
Pulling on a clump of hair, Kite whispered a few words to the circle, encouraging it to take life. It flared seafoam green for a moment and then flickered out, like a candle being toyed with by the wind.
“I think you need to cut,” she said to Cam.
“Okay.” He swallowed, and then approached the circle.
“Don’t cross it,” she said, and he stopped, nodded, and then knelt down. Using one of the chips of quartz on his knuckle, he scratched a thin line over the saliva on the glass. When the circle was completed he stepped back into the centre. The light flared up again, little flames of white and green, but then died down, leaving only piles of white ash like salt.
“Pain,” Kite said reluctantly. “All magic requires sacrifice.”
“I know,” he said. “The obsidian told me. I was just hoping it was lying.”
He picked up the sword made of gears and spikes and hatred.
The smell of burning filled the air, and Cam let out a small whimper. B
ut he held on despite the pain and dragged the heavy blade with him. Together, they traced the circle for a third time, cutting deeper into rock.
“It hurts you both,” she said. The blade was bleeding just as Cam was, black with an oily sheen of silver dripping between Cam’s fingers.
Gasping he dropped the blade, hands burned raw and bloody, face ashen. “Do it,” he managed.
She could feel the magic now, bubbling to the surface. The fear inside her flared up, hot and sticky. This magic didn’t obey her. It was outcast, destroyed, it wanted nothing and therefore had nothing to lose.
Kite had much to lose.
But she had sworn a promise, and she had a mission to fulfill, and so, compelled, she stepped forward and bit her wrist with an elegant tooth, and let a single drop of sacred witch blood fall into the circle.
The flames raged up, higher than the tallest tree, higher than the Coven.
“This circle is your bondage,” she said, sweat dripping down her neck. “Now you must break it, and from one become two.”
“From one become two,” muttered Cam. “From one become two. From one become two.”
And then Kite heard nothing more because the sword had started screaming.
Kite waited several long minutes before Cam walked through the fire, his body singing a melody of the underworld, of dirt and damp darkness.
He stepped across the threshold and collapsed.
As he crossed the circle, the flame was extinguished, the bond broken. Relief settled in her fingernails like the caress of an insect’s antennae. She stepped forward to retrieve the sword.
A hand made of light reached from the cut in the obsidian and grasped her skirt.
The dead witches were rising.
Thirty-Three
THE HEALER
Tav watched as Eli’s eyes grew large in horror, like two mirrors that reflected Tav’s dirty face back to them. Then the girl looked down at the sliver of obsidian lodged in her body.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered, shock blotting out all other sensations like a lunar eclipse.
The Boi of Feather and Steel Page 13
