“I am not yours. I’m not anyone’s!” Eli reached for the obsidian blade but found the strap on her belt empty. Panicking, she grabbed for the glass blade, her hand drawing nothing but a broken hilt. She dropped it on the rock.
“You’re right,” marvelled Circinae. “You’re no one. And your power is running out. You broke the beautiful machine that I made. You are an abomination.” Heat surged, and boils erupted on Eli’s skin. Eli’s blades were gone, her magic was gone, and the memory of her mother was going to destroy her.
No.
Not today.
Not yet.
Circinae saw the change in Eli’s clenched jaw and the slitted pupils of reptilian eyes. The essence coiled tighter, a snake of fire and hate. “What are you going to do, broken thing?”
Eli smiled grimly. “Take your advice.”
She launched herself off the cliff.
Overhead, the gibbous moon burned like a dying ember.
Forty-Five
THE HEALER
Tav felt a surge of adrenalin mixing with something else — the dangerous sweetness of nicotine, the promise of caffeine, the heat of a backyard fire piled high with old tires and planks of rotten wood.
They had never used this much magic before. They hadn’t known it was possible.
They had created a door between worlds.
That knowledge itself was intoxicating, but the magic, too, had affected them. The sky was brighter, the stones of the wall sharper. They could hear their bones shifting position, their stomach digesting, their skin cells replicating.
Where was Eli?
Panic rose in their throat like bile. They looked around the stone room, one of the many chambers of the mad playhouse where witch children plotted treason.
No Eli.
Wait. There —
A glimmer of light on the floor, like an electrical current. The light shuddered down a body that was half there, half gone. Flick. A mouth. Flick. A hand. Flick. An ankle.
Tav had taken Eli back to the City of Eyes and the Heart had taken over, subsuming her body into light and power. Eli was suspended between corporeal and incorporeal states, between a body and a world.
Between life and death.
Without thinking, Tav moved forward, reaching for the stuttering, breaking, unstable body of the girl they loved.
The Warlord popped into the room, trailing clouds of purple smoke. She hung in the air between Tav and Eli, blocking Tav from the Heart.
“Oh no no no no nooo.” Clytemnestra clucked her tongue and waggled her finger at Tav. “The Heart is sleeping. Let it rest.”
“We have to wake her,” said Tav. “She said dreaming was dangerous in the City of Eyes.”
“Oh, it is. Very dangerous. Eli’s a naughty girl!”
“Then we have to wake her. Help me!”
Clytemnestra frowned, and then placed her chin on a chubby hand. “How do you wake a world?”
“She’s a person,” said Tav. “She’s a girl, she’s —”
“She’s the Heart,” said Clytemnestra harshly. “The Heart of this world. You can fuck a world, you can love a world — but it can’t love you back.” She shifted her face into an approximation of sympathy. “This is something all children have to learn,” she crooned softly. “It can never love you back.”
Anger choked Tav’s lungs and throat. They coughed violently, and black phlegm splattered over the witch. Steam rose from the tiny wounds Tav’s mucus had inflicted on the Warlord.
Clytemnestra calmly wiped her face with the back of her sleeve. “Come,” she said. “There’s someone who wants to see you.”
“Eli —”
“I will watch over it,” she said. “And I know more than you, little one. You’re just a baby, aren’t you?”
“I don’t trust you.”
“The feeling is mutual.” Clytemnestra offered a coquettish smile. She waved a hand and the far wall shimmered like a mirage, and then melted, the rock pooling on the floor and hardening into waves of magma.
Tav gritted their teeth. “I’m not leaving until she wakes up.”
A storm cloud formed over Clytemnestra’s head. “You’re ruining my fun!” she stomped her feet and snorted. Smoke spiralled from her nostrils. Electricity shimmered over her head as tiny forks of lightning spat sparks at Tav.
Tav didn’t back down. They stared at the storm forming around the Warlord, and then through it — into the white magic edged with peach and coral. Then, as they had done with the magic of the world, and with the many strands of magic running through Eli’s body, Tav reached into the core of the storm cloud and grabbed a handful of cream-and-pink thread.
Clytemnestra shrieked. The storm vanished. When Tav opened their hand, revealing three apple seeds.
“It’s rude to touch someone else’s magic,” said the witch primly.
She swooped down and gobbled the seeds from Tav’s hand.
Tav remembered feeding chickadees like this in the winter. Their mother would take them cross-country skiing in the woods, their skis leaving smooth ribbons in the fresh snow.
“This time, I forgive you, because you are a newborn and don’t know any better,” said Clytemnestra. “But if you touch me like that again, I will eat your eyes.”
So there were rules, social etiquette, even in the savage city of bloodlust and revenge. Even among thieves and warmongers.
The regicidal girl was staring at Tav like they were a new kind of insect she wanted to stick under the microscope.
“I don’t know what you are,” she said, and ran her tongue over her teeth. “But you are interesting.”
Tav wasn’t sure they wanted the attention of the volatile Warlord.
“I’ll play,” Clytemnestra announced. “I haven’t been dream-diving since the seven seedling stars hung like pearls in the sky. You’ll need that” — she inclined her head at the sliver of obsidian that was cold as ice against Tav’s forearm — “in case any of the monsters in her head come out.”
Tav nodded. Together, they turned to the ghostly outline of a girl made of light and a power that was corroding her flesh.
THE HEART
Eli was standing on the island.
It had once been a haven for her and Kite, an escape, a fantasy. Make-believe. It had once bubbled with life — the clear brook, the crustaceans and fish and insects that came to worship Kite’s hypnotic hair. The song of the trees like a sacred hymn.
Now the water ran red with the blood of the humans she hadn’t saved. It was too late. She had failed.
“Miss me?” Clytemnestra turned a few cartwheels in the air, her Cupid’s bow mouth pursed into a perfect kiss.
Eli rummaged through her memory for scraps of linguistic shrapnel. “I never miss.” She tapped the glass blade, and the sound of a thousand chandeliers echoed against the stone walls.
Walls? Eli scanned the shadows of the trees but saw nothing. Where was she?
Was this real?
Did that matter?
Clytemnestra halted midturn, legs over her head. Her eyes widened, like pieces of white quartz. Eli could see herself reflected in those eyes.
“You’re losing so much,” scolded Clytemnestra, staring at the glass blade that had no scars, no scratches, no flecks of witch blood staining its surface. It was clean as fresh snow, as clean as the day Eli was crafted. “If you lose yourself to the Heart, I’m going to be in big trouble with that sexy boi of yours. They want their plaything back.”
“I’m not anyone’s thing.”
Clytemnestra smiled, an upside-down grin that looked like a clownish scowl. “We’re all things in here.”
“In where?”
Her cartwheel completed, Clytemnestra landed on the island. Where her feet touched the ground, yellow daisies burst from cracks in the rock, grew several feet tall, withered, died, and vanished. Standing at her full height, she only came up to Eli’s waist. Eli reached for the obsidian blade, but it was gone.
“Looking for this?�
� Clytemnestra ran the blade over her fingernails like a file. Eli froze, and then opened her mouth, crocodile teeth overflowing her small jaw.
“I was just borrowing it!” Clytemnestra squealed and threw it in the air. Eli grabbed it and slid it back into its leather skin, but something was already in there.
Trembling, Eli pulled out a piece of honeycomb. She ran her thumb over the wax hexagons and tried to remember what she was doing here.
“You should be more careful.” Clytemnestra wagged her finger.
“What game are you playing?”
“Which one?” Clytemnestra giggled and then floated up until she was at eye level with the assassin. “It’s almost time. I hope you’re ready.”
Eli narrowed her eyes. “I’m always ready.”
Clytemnestra clapped her hands together excitedly, sparks flying from the friction between her palms. They sizzled against the earth and died. “Having you around is so much fun. So many new deadly games! But don’t stay here too long,” she added. “I’ve heard the Earth is dying. And so are you.”
Twelve mirrors circled the girl and the witch. A dozen little witches blew a dozen kisses. Eli flinched, her eyelids snapping closed and then opening again.
Clytemnestra was gone. Eli stared at her reflections, girls with stringy, dirty hair, their bodies covered in cuts and bruises and oozing sores.
Hand to her hips. As her fingers fell across pearl and stone and thorn, the blades vanished one by one, until she was completely alone in a prison of glass.
Forty-Six
THE HEALER
“She’s still asleep,” said Tav. “Try again.”
“It was boring,” whined Clytemnestra. “You do it.”
“I don’t know how to!”
Red liquid pooled under the ghostly girl. Panic pounded in their head. Tav reached forward, ready to break the rules, to twist the Heart and make it give Eli back —
“It will kill you faster.” Clytemnestra waved her hand and a gust of wind knocked Tav back. “Stupid boi. Besides, the blood isn’t hers. She must be reliving that time she killed a human by mistake — oopsie!”
“So what do we do?”
“Oh, let’s let her take care of it. She’s getting used to playing in the mud with the rest of us.”
“‘Her’?”
They smelled her before they saw her: salt and brine. Body moving like an electric eel.
“You.” A hand on obsidian.
“Me,” Kite agreed, playing with the ends of her hair. “You brought her back. That was dangerous.” It sounded like a compliment.
“She’s dying.” Tav drew the blade and watched the blue witch warily.
A tremor of light flickered through Kite, and her eyes glowed with intensity. “We won’t let that happen.”
A single word can be a key, can open a door in a wall you didn’t know existed. It can draw two people together; can shift space and time and meaning. Enemies can become allies. Rivals can become friends.
Tav saw the conviction in her face, heard it in the deep ocean timbre of her voice.
We.
Their grip loosened on the hilt. “No, we won’t.”
Kite flowed over to Eli and circled the body of light and bone and raw power. She sighed, breath like bubbles spilling from a brook. “If she doesn’t wake soon, she will become the Heart.”
“So? Who cares?” Clytemnestra was kneeling on the ground, half a dozen spinning tops twirling around her. She pulled another one out of a pocket and spun it, but her finger slipped and the top skidded across stone and stopped beside Tav. Clytemnestra scrabbled over on all fours. Tav placed their shoe over the spinning top, pressing it into the earth.
“Say please.”
Clytemnestra peered up at them through spidery eyelashes. “Cruel,” she said admiringly.
Tav clenched their jaw and moved away. Clytemnestra picked up the top in her mouth and crawled back to her play area.
“She’s just a child,” said Kite gently. “The oldest child in the world. Let her play.”
Tav ran their hands through their hair and tugged on the short spikes. “I don’t like feeling useless.”
“Oh, we will use you,” Kite reassured them. “But not yet.”
She leaned closer to Eli’s face and stared at her eyelids before the girl vanished again. Carefully, she reached out and stroked the air around where her forehead should have been.
“Oh, baby,” she whispered, salt crystals forming in the corners of her eyes. “What have you gotten yourself into?”
THE HEART
“Where am I?”
The sand stretched out, red as blood against a black sea. Sheet lightning like camera flashes lit up the empty expanse of the sky.
“You’re here.” Kite smiled, and Eli felt a new shoot grow from her rib cage. She looked away.
“There are no stars.”
“You’re angry with me.” Kite said this calmly, as if observing a scientific experiment.
Eli tried to swallow but the words caught in her throat. She spat on the sand: a black feather, a dead honeybee, and a single withered petal.
Both girls stared at the earth for a long moment. And then Kite moved with the deadly grace of the tide, sweeping the sand and sky and world with her, swallowing everything in a single step. Eli closed her eyes. She had forgotten what it felt like to watch Kite walk toward her, as if Eli were the centre of the world.
The made-girl smiled, hand resting lightly on her chest, on the Heart of the world. She started laughing. Her eyes opened, the lids sending sparks sputtering over the sand; they caught the edge of the petal and burned it to white ash.
Kite stopped. She was an ice sculpture, beautiful and untouchable.
Eli kept laughing. There was something repressively funny about being this beacon of light, of power, even as it was killing her. The laugh turned to a hacking cough. This time she spat up blood and phlegm. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and then faced Kite.
“Looking for this?” The Heart glowed, making visible the delicate arches of bone and glass underneath her skin.
“Not yet,” said Kite. “Soon — but not yet.” She started walking again, but the spell was broken, and she was only a girl getting dirt on the hem of her skirt.
“When?” Eli let her hand fall to her side; the glow dimmed.
A flash of lightning made Kite’s face appear ghostly white. Maybe they were both ghosts. “You’ll know.”
“I’ll die, you mean.”
“Maybe.”
Kite stopped a hand’s width away from her friend, lover, sister, enemy. Where the black surf touched the land, salt crystals formed intricate designs. A wave brushed across Eli’s feet, salt stinging the sores on her skin. She winced.
“It hurts you,” said Kite quietly.
“Salt cleanses the wound. You taught me that.”
“You had many wounds.” Her eyes were glassy and wet with the dampness of the sea that she always carried — or were they tears? Eli had no way of knowing. Such a human thought, she reprimanded herself. Witches didn’t cry. Witches didn’t grieve.
Tav grieves.
Kite knelt down and carefully gathered the bee, ash, feather. She rose and offered them to Eli.
“Don’t give these away.” A smile slipped across her lips like an arpeggio.
So many times, Eli had opened her mouth and swallowed for Kite. Blood, berries, sea urchins, flower stems. Now she stared at the sickly greenwhite hand and its offerings.
Kite’s eyes filled with pearls and wept, the tears clattering like hail over the sand. “Don’t give them away. Eli.”
The black feather. The vision of Tav with wings like night. Or had that been a dream, as well?
Maybe it was the invocation of a boi with anger in their eyes and gentle hands. Maybe it was the sound of her name, and the rightness of its shape in Kite’s mouth. Eli closed her eyes and opened her mouth.
The bee felt like velvet as it slipped down her throat. T
he ash was still hot and warmed her cold body. The feather fluttered in the back of her throat before slipping back inside. She closed her mouth again, her teeth grazing Kite’s fingers.
Kite leaned in, and Eli vanished.
She was still there — she was always there — but also somewhere else; the world looked faint and incomplete, and she felt that she could see through it, or move through it. What would happen if she vanished entirely? How would the City of Eyes hold her ghostly form?
As the Heart, Eli could only see Kite as an essence. The seafoam green that Eli had seen only once before, when Kite and Circinae had fought over a girl trapped in a box of black ice, suspended between worlds.
A tendril of Kite’s essence reached out, shyly, like a new bud. May I touch you?
Eli could feel the question; could feel the electricity dancing around their strange incorporeal bodies.
Yes.
Kite reached into Eli’s translucent body and grabbed the Heart. She squeezed. Hard.
Pain seared through Eli’s bodies — Heart, flesh, magic, human. She blacked out.
She was back in the Children’s Lair. The beach and the sea were gone. Eli looked up at the stars raging overhead, burning with greed and desire. And somewhere out there, the chosen point of orbit for the witches’ world — the City of Ghosts.
She could still feel the ticklish sensation of feathers at the back of her throat. Eli pushed Kite away and stumbled back, clutching at a wall adorned with thick vines and chokeberries.
“You didn’t used to dream,” Kite said. “When —” “Get out,” gasped Eli. “Leave me alone. And stay out of my dreams.”
Kite left, trailing pearls in her wake.
Only later, when Eli looked down at her healed feet, did she realize that by wrenching her out of a dream Kite had probably saved her life.
Forty-Seven
THE HEALER
“You’re awake!” Tav threw their arms around Eli without thinking, pulling her into their embrace. “You scared the shit out of me.”
The Boi of Feather and Steel Page 18
