The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass

by Adan Jerreat-Poole

  “Will that heal —”

  “I don’t know!” Tav tugged at their hair in frustration. “But look — if we have the source of magic, we can do whatever we want, right? We can stop the Coven. We can save Earth.”

  We can power a revolution, thought Eli. We can break and remake the world. As she stared at Tav, she could almost see the faint outline of charcoal wings emerging from powerful shoulder blades. Eli could see them at the head of an army, turning cities to ash.

  Could the human world handle that kind of power?

  Kite’s hair was trembling, and her bluegreen glow dimmed. “You want our Heart?” She turned to Eli. “What will that do to our world?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re right,” Eli found herself saying. She didn’t meet Tav’s eyes. She was afraid of what she would see in them. “Stealing the Heart won’t stop the witches, but it will hurt them. And if we can learn how to use it — well, maybe we can stop this. Without it, we aren’t strong enough to go up against the Coven. This is our best chance.”

  “Now?” Kite whispered to herself. “Is it time? Already?” Her skirts pooled around her feet like water. “I thought we would have more time.”

  “We don’t have time,” said Eli. “We have to get to the Coven.”

  Everyone started speaking over one another.

  “If we go back to the Labyrinth —”

  “I could try opening a door —”

  “The risk —”

  Kite sang an arpeggio with a clear, strong voice. The others turned to her in surprise.

  “If it’s time, then I can help,” she said softly. “I am the Heir. I will take you to the Coven.”

  Eli narrowed her eyes. After everything they had been through together, she still wasn’t sure if she should trust Kite. “Aren’t you still under a compulsion?”

  “That ended when the pine needle entered your body,” said Kite gently. “Or I would not have been able to save you from the wings of the Coven.”

  “If you can take us to the Coven, why didn’t you tell us earlier?” The stones on Cam’s chest scraped against one another.

  Kite stared at him and slowly began to chew on her hair.

  “Can you take us to the Heart?” Tav pressed.

  “I don’t know,” said Kite. “The Coven — the place, not the witches’ council — usually brings me to the library. I think it likes that there is someone who cares about its history.”

  Eli’s hand reached for obsidian and stumbled over the empty sheath. “If you take us to the Witch Lord …”

  Kite let her hands drop to her sides and turned slowly to face Eli. She tilted her head to one side, exposing her throat. “Will you use your teeth?” she asked lightly. “I’ve always wanted to see that.”

  “No, you don’t.” Cam shuddered.

  Kite smiled. “I’ve always loved monsters.”

  “You’ve always loved power.” But her words lacked bite. Kite had saved her when she could have thrown her to the Coven. Eli had to trust that she meant what she said. Eli checked her blades one last time.

  Tav was watching her. “We have to do this,” they said. “Let her help us.”

  No one disagreed with them, although Eli was troubled by the eager gleam in their eyes.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “Take us to the Coven.”

  Kite applied glamours to the humans. They would enter as servants, glowing dimly, imitating the radiant magic that flowed from every witch. No one expected servants to have strong magic, so the illusion should be enough. No one looked too closely at servants, those who failed to ascend to seats of power, as if that failure might be contagious.

  It was the perfect disguise.

  “Killing a world takes time and power,” said Kite. “Draining that much life force. Perhaps that’s why …”

  Eli could see the burning tree in her eyes. Power requires sacrifice. Power requires risk. Was the Coven willing to desecrate sacred ground in their hunger to devour Earth?

  “How long before the Coven starts devouring its own?” Eli asked.

  Kite twitched, and her body became more transparent. She didn’t want to think about the threat to her own world.

  “The tree —”

  “Yes.” Tears glittered in Kite’s eyes. “The tree. It seems the Coven is not only sacrificing daughters and lesser witches to increase their power. They will use anything and anyone in the worlds.”

  There was nothing else to say.

  The mood was sombre, but with an undercurrent of anticipation. Eli felt the familiar stab of adrenalin. Tav’s fingertips played piano scales on the obsidian knife. The stones on Cam’s body trembled against one another, a grating sound that made Eli clench her teeth. Only Kite seemed calm and placid, hair undulating gently around her cheekbones.

  Eli had no glamour on — she was going as herself. It was a risky plan: Kite escorting the assassin, as if to present her as a gift to the upper ring of the Coven. It might fool the lower rings, but if the Witch Lord appeared … well, Kite’s royal blood could only take them so far. Traitors didn’t exist in the City of Eyes. They were fed to the Coven.

  “We could do this without you,” said Kite. “I could —”

  “Enough.” Eli’s voice was harsh and gravelly. “I’m not staying behind.” Sleeplessness made her eyelids twitch, and her eyes shuttered between sets uncontrollably, black bleeding over yellow, only to drain away again.

  “I can make you a glamour for that.” Kite gestured at her eyes.

  “No. We get in, we get the Heart, and we get out. We try to avoid an altercation with the first ring, but if it happens, I’ll distract them while Tav makes a door. And whatever happens — don’t wait for me.”

  Cam opened his mouth to argue, but the look in Eli’s eyes made him stop. Kite raised her arms, and a funnel of water rose from the river around her body. When she released it, droplets of water glittered brilliantly in her hair. She held her head high, eyes like frost. Eli sucked in a breath. For the first time, she truly felt that she was in the presence of the Heir.

  “At least we have our invincible assassin back.” Cam nudged Tav.

  “No one’s invincible.”

  Kite spoke a single word, her tone low and seductive with power.

  A moment later, they stood on the Coven steps. As Kite walked toward the painfully bright building, a door appeared, and behind it, Eli glimpsed a single hallway.

  Eli entered the Coven for the last time.

  Forty

  Once, when Eli was still a child, Kite had taken her into the library. The magical archives housed all the history and memory that most witches tried to forget.

  But the stone walls of the Coven remembered. Everything was alive in the City of Eyes, and the walls and turrets and passages of the witch stronghold were no exception. It had a mind of its own. Not even the Witch Lord had been able to bury the past completely — although she had tried. And despite being sealed away, burned, hidden, and drowned, the library remained. Only Kite was allowed to read the forbidden histories. Only Kite, an extension of the Witch Lord’s power, who would use this knowledge for her mother’s gain. No one else was trusted in the chamber of blasphemies.

  Kite cared for the library with love.

  Eli was made for destruction, for forgetting, for moving forward. She didn’t look back. She had never understood Kite’s obsession with old tomes and lost languages. Eli was life, furious and bright and brutal. The past was death.

  “I want to give you a secret,” Kite had breathed in her ear. “Come with me.”

  Children thrive on secrets.

  So Eli had followed, even when Kite took her into the Coven, a space the little assassin was forbidden from entering except when summoned by the first ring.

  They were breaking the rules. But Eli trusted Kite, and so she followed.

  That day, the library had shaped itself into a large cavern, with books like gemstones glittering in rock. Stalactites dripping ink speared from the low ceiling
, and stalagmites stabbed upward like a gate.

  Eli had reached out and caught a drop of ink as it fell from the longest, sharpest point in the room. Searing pain. The smell of charred flesh. When she drew back, a scar in the shape of an ink blot marked her palm. Steam rose from her hand.

  “I wasn’t made of this,” she said, eyes flashing black. “The magic here is alive.” She stepped in front of Kite as if to protect her, drawing her glass blade to reflect malevolent magic.

  “Don’t,” said Kite.

  The entire cavern had groaned, a sound like stone scraping on metal. Pages fell from the ceiling, folding themselves until they were only jagged edges with barely legible lines of print.

  Eli tore the pages apart with one swift motion. Ink bled down her blades. Kite had begun moaning a mournful melody of sorrow and fear.

  “Don’t,” Kite whispered again.

  Eli should have known better than to fight the very building of the Coven. Kite should have known better than to bring a wild animal into her home.

  It happened fast. Eli tore through fibre and leather with thorn and glass, but the library was old and powerful. Within moments, Eli was buried under a landslide of books and rubble.

  She never cried out, not once. She had been trained well.

  Smoke and sparks filled the room, ink and blood pooling over the floor. Eli was being suffocated by the weight of paper.

  “Please,” Kite asked the room. “I won’t bring her again.” She had wept salt to soak up the ink. Her hair whipped around her face like a hurricane, showing her distress.

  When Eli was finally freed, covered in lacerations and burn marks, Kite led her gently out of the room. Eli had never gone back to the library.

  They were coming for the Heart.

  A thrill darted through Eli’s nervous system, senses heightened by the danger and promise of pain. This was a different kind of hunt, but a hunt nonetheless.

  Their footsteps made no sound. The hallway seemed to go on forever, and the eerie silence made them uncomfortable. Only Kite seemed unmoved by the strangeness of the Coven, walking through the halls as if she owned them.

  Maybe she did.

  The hall ended abruptly, and they entered a large room overflowing with thick tomes and dusty letters. Heavy curtains studded with paper moths lined the walls, and the ceiling was so high up Eli couldn’t see where it ended. A place where words could cut and history refused to stay buried. A place that had rejected her. The library.

  “Kite.” Eli’s voice was a warning.

  “I want you to show us,” she said.

  “I already told you.”

  Cam cleared his throat. “I don’t really understand what you told us.”

  “I’d like to see,” said Tav, watching Eli closely. “Please?”

  Eli sighed. “Okay. But we have to do this fast. We’re running out of time.”

  “You keep saying that.” Kite smiled indulgently. “But we have a few more moments before everything is destroyed.”

  Kite cleared a space on the floor and opened a large tome of gardening spells written out in elaborate curlicue handwriting. She waved her hand at the words, and the ink crawled off the paper until only an empty page was left behind. Eli knelt down, the ancient dust pricking through her jeans.

  Even the dust knew she didn’t belong here, among secrets and myths and knowledge. It was forbidden to her. She hesitated and then drew the bone blade, the tracker. The blade that always remembered.

  A rustle of paper filled the space. Eli turned and saw the paper moths fluttering wildly.

  “They’re afraid of the knife,” explained Kite. “Don’t stray from the page and they won’t harm you.”

  Eli nodded. She pressed the tip against the page, and ink soaked up through the paper. As her hand moved, dragging the tip across the paper, thick black lines traced the shape of the planet and the contour of each wound. When the drawing was complete, Eli took out the frost blade. She pressed the flat of the blade against the image and the scene came dizzyingly, wildly to life. Then she drew back.

  Before them was the scene she had witnessed standing in the space between planets. Her breath caught in her throat. The bone blade had pulled the memory from her body, and the frost blade had sharpened its truth to a deadly weapon. Its aim was true. Cam inhaled sharply. Kite’s eyes glowed more brightly, shining and wet, polished by pain. Tav stared at the drawing for a long time.

  “I see now,” whispered Kite, turning her luminous orbs on Eli. “We have so much to do.”

  “If we steal the Heart, it will weaken the Witch Lord’s power. It should slow the bleeding. That’s why we have to go now.”

  Cam was muttering under his breath. “Jesus fucking Christ. Holy fuck, oh my god, Jesus.”

  “Those wounds,” said Tav. “Those are the seams between worlds. Like the one we used to cross.”

  “Yes,” said Eli.

  “Even when the tear seems to have closed, it’s draining the Earth’s energy.”

  “Yes.”

  Tav tapped their finger against the hilt of the obsidian knife. They looked up at Eli. “The flow of magic between things doesn’t have to be hurtful, does it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “These tears, or holes or whatever, are hurting the world because the power only flows one way, right?”

  “Right. They’re draining the life force of Earth. I told you that already. Look, we have to go.” Eli felt exasperation tingling down her spine. And even though she had put away her knives, she could feel the library’s intense dislike and mistrust of her, as thousands of books watched and waited.

  “But you can travel both ways,” Tav tapped the centre of the page, where the widest chasm had been depicted: the Vortex. The killing blow. “What if it wasn’t a hole. What if it was a door?”

  Eli stared at them. “A door,” she repeated. Her eyes widened. “If you opened the door, the magic would flow both ways.”

  “And the planet would heal.”

  “How would we …” her voice trailed off. The look of fervour had returned to Tav’s face. She already knew the answer to her question: only the Heart could power that kind of transformation.

  And only Tav had the power to make doors.

  Forty-One

  Kite pressed her palm against the horror sketched out before them. The ink drained back to the pages it had been borrowed from. Then she took a moment to coax the floral handwriting back into the book. Once in place, the letters quivered slightly, as if they could feel the texture of death in the fibres of their home.

  “Do you think you could?” asked Eli, hands twisting around the hilt.

  “I don’t know.” Tav’s eyes shone, and Eli was reminded of her vision of black feathers.

  “You haven’t tried.”

  “I know that.”

  “You could do more damage.”

  Tav laughed shortly. “I think now is the time to take a few risks, don’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?” Cam interrupted. He was rubbing a piece of marble that lived in the webbing between his thumb and pointer finger.

  The sound of rustling grew louder. The paper moths were coming.

  “My loves don’t want you here,” said Kite. “You can understand why they aren’t quick to trust, after the way they’ve been treated.”

  Eli shivered, remembering the taste of ink in her throat and the weight of history on her chest. She had broken three ribs, and Kite had not spoken to her for weeks.

  “Tav thinks they can close the doors,” she said simply. “I think they’re crazy.”

  “My therapist says you aren’t supposed to call people crazy,” said Cam.

  “I’d rather be crazy than a ghost,” said Tav. “That’s what will happen to us if Earth dies.”

  Ink began falling from the sky. A storm was brewing.

  Kite stood, her body pulsing with a clear aquamarine light. “Stay close, and the Coven will guide us.”

  “It’s dan
gerous,” said Eli.

  Irritation coarsened Tav’s tone. “I know that, what do you think —”

  “And if you die —”

  “Oh, I get it, you’re the only one allowed —”

  The library melted away.

  Silence fell like a guillotine. They were back in the hallway, closing their eyes against the piercing whiteness. The hallway itself was keeping them silent, forcing the sounds to stay in their bodies. They followed Kite, who kept one hand on the wall and whispered to it; she seemed to be, in turns, cajoling and threatening the ancient building.

  The hallway ended abruptly, and they found themselves in a chamber glowing with hatred and malice.

  “No,” whispered Eli, the chamber allowing the fear in her voice to be heard. Her knees locked. She had stood here too many times to count.

  The floating heads.

  The prodding fingers.

  The death warrants that had passed through this space.

  Eli had allowed herself to be their tool. A tear threatened to spill down her cheek, but she took a breath and kept moving through the empty chamber. Cam’s hand on her shoulder helped.

  They passed through dark rooms filled with venomous plants spitting acid, golden halls that moaned, vast chambers filled with diamond insects suspended in the air. Finally, the rooms collapsed back into a hallway, but it was now stained a sickly greenblack and smelled of infection.

  “Here.” Kite stopped. Her hair floated around her head, like antennae smelling the air. “I’ve never been here before.”

  Someone stepped out of the shadows, and Eli stifled a scream.

  If the body had a face, it had been worn away with sun and wind and rain. A smooth blank head on a smooth blank body. It moved so gracefully that Eli felt like a clumsy mechanical object in comparison. She had never seen anyone move so fast, as if swimming through the air. As if every step was part of a complicated dance.

  She knew, in that moment, her destiny: to fight this creature, and perhaps to die.

  “I am the Guardian,” said the faceless one. “I protect what is inside, and I protect what is outside. Turn back or die.”