Kite had become immaterial, and through her body, Eli watched the creature prowl back and forth. Tav drew the obsidian blade. Cam stepped forward.
“No,” said Eli. “This is my fight.”
“It’s all of our fight,” said Tav.
“You can’t win,” Kite whispered.
Ignoring all of them, Eli walked through Kite, faced the Guardian, and then bowed. “It will be my honour to duel you.”
“It has been a long time since these halls held honour,” it said and bowed in return. And then it leaped.
Her superhuman reflexes kicked in, and Eli spun to one side, slashing wildly with the blade of thorns. Her blade cut through the air, and then the Guardian was on top of her.
An arm knocked the blade from her hand, and Eli was flung back against the wall, forcing the breath from her lungs. She cursed her human half and lunged again.
This time, she managed to plunge the bone blade into its shoulder before the Guardian threw her down the corridor. She landed on her arm and could hear the snap of bone cracking. Adrenalin spiked in her body, and she felt no pain, only pure undiluted rage. When she looked up, she could see her knife still embedded in its shoulder, black sand leaking from the body.
Drawing glass and pearl, she flung herself at it again.
It was learning her movements and easily blocked her strike. The Guardian wrenched the glass from her hand and crushed it.
Eli screamed in agony. It felt like losing a limb. Forcing herself to keep moving, she managed to evade its next attack and stabbed upward with the pearl blade.
The Guardian caught her unbroken arm and threw her to the ground. “You will die and be grateful for this mercy.” It raised both arms to crush her skull.
Eli, looking up at this superior creature, wondered if Circinae knew that she had failed to make the perfect weapon. Lying in defeat, she watched the end come. She would die with dignity. She would face death with her eyes wide open.
“No!”
The sound of stone on stone crashed against Eli’s ears. Cam had thrown himself in front of her, using his body as a shield. Tav threw themselves on the Guardian’s back and plunged the obsidian dagger through the flesh and into the spirit that animated it. The Guardian screamed.
Eli suddenly felt cool, and a bluegreen glow covered her body. Kite was using her essence to heal her. The healing hurt, and Eli hovered at the edge of consciousness, forcing herself to stay awake, watching Cam and Tav put themselves in death’s path for her.
When her eyes came back into focus, Eli saw that the Guardian was leaking black sand in two places. Cam was shaking but still standing. Several stones had been ripped from his body and lay shattered on the floor. Blood ran down Tav’s nose. And still they stood between Eli and the Guardian. They were strong, but it was stronger. They were buying her time to escape, had chosen to sacrifice themselves for a made-thing, a killer, a tool.
Something awoke in Eli’s body, and she sat up suddenly, gasping for breath. Her eyes were pure black. Her jaw was overflowing with teeth. Her blades started to shake.
The entire chamber shook with violence, as Eli was swept up in the dance of death, moving gracefully around her companions and grasping at the smooth skin of the Guardian. In one swift motion, Eli ripped the head from its body. The body fell, cracking into a million pieces.
Its face spoke, “I tried to guard you. Now you will suffer.”
It crumbled into pieces of loose rock.
Forty-Two
Cam pulled her up. “You okay?”
“I look better than you.”
He grinned. “I told you I’m handy in a fight,”
“First time for everything,” said Tav.
Eli looked down at what remained of the Guardian. She reached down, retrieved the bone blade, and sheathed it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, fingertips grazing a piece of stone.
She looked up at the doorway that had opened when the Guardian fell. She could see nothing through the darkness. The smell of the sacred infected in the air, and they all felt the itch of the forbidden.
This is what they had come for. This moment. This room. Eli took a breath, her adrenalin-ruined body begging for rest. Not here. Not now. Eli picked up the thorn blade from where it had fallen. She stared for a long moment at the pieces of glass that were scattered across the hallway. Some broken things could not be mended. She curled her hands into fists. Took another breath. Turned to her companions.
“Ready?”
The others nodded. Bracing herself, Eli led them into the unknown.
The walls were black, glittering with a hundred thousand flecks of mica and magic and old roots from trees that bloomed silver after every death. Above them, cathedral archways and Gothic spires and stone gargoyles intertwined in a tangle of styles and times and barbed-wire threats. It had begun as an idea, a thought in a powerful witch’s mind. It had grown into a shape, a space, a floor. A powerful secret. A weapon.
In the centre of the cavern was a tree.
The tree was glowing with life and magic and purpose. It was honey and anglerfish and the memory of comets streaking endlessly across a clear night sky. It was black flame and birthday candles. Lightning and dying embers. A thousand different lights flickered across the ancient tree, tracing delicate veins and arteries under the bark. They had found the living, beating core of the world.
They had found the Heart.
But something was wrong. Eli could hear it in the scattered stones like fallen stars, the malevolence blooming from the spires like ink in water. She could taste the power here — it was old and malicious — and knew that these spells hadn’t been designed to keep her out.
They were keeping someone in.
“It’s a prison,” said Eli.
Kite was glowing like a jellyfish, her brightness pulsing to the rhythm of the Heart. The stones that covered Cam’s body were twinkling, catching and holding the light. The silver of mica powder on his skin glittered until he looked like a small galaxy. Even Tav’s hair was lit up, an electric violet. And all the fault lines of Eli’s making — the line under her kneecaps, a knuckle, the tendons on her left ankle — were glowing, too, as if bathed in moonlight.
They walked closer to the Heart. Leaves unfurled, sparks shimmering around their edges. Crystalline dewdrops fell from each leaf, shattering silently on the earth.
“So much pain.” Kite was shaking, her hair wet and flat against her back. Water dribbled from each strand and flowed down her skirts.
“How —” Tav’s voice failed.
“How do we carry it?” asked Cam, and Eli knew he didn’t just mean, How do we steal the Heart with our human hands and limited bodies? but How do we carry the weight of this power and pain, the source of all magic? It would drown them. It would burn them up. It was like asking how to carry a star. It was impossible.
The smell of sulphur and aspartame. Wax dripping from the cathedral beams.
Eli felt fear slip into the spaces between her bones.
The Heart flared up, burning brighter — a lighthouse warning a ship away from a rocky death. But the warning came too late.
The world was called the City of Eyes for a reason.
A ring of white flame encircled the Heart, trapping the four of them inside. Heat licked at their skin, threatening to turn them to ash. Shadows rose up out of the flames, lidless eyes encircled by fire. The first ring of the Coven. The witches whose machinations were killing worlds.
Eli’s heart fluttered, and somewhere overhead a fork of lightning danced from branch to branch. This time, if her heart gave out, there would be no one to save her.
She turned her back to the Heart and faced the fire, the Coven, and perhaps her own unmaking.
“I brought them as a gift for the Witch Lord,” said Kite, kneeling in supplication to the ring. “The Heart is hungry for flesh.”
As Eli watched in disbelief and shock, Kite stepped out of her skin. Her essence joined the white fire.
No, El
i thought wildly. Not you. Not again.
A voice rang through her mind, like metal scraping on bone. You are no one. You are nothing. You were a weapon, and now you are broken. You have no value.
Eli reached a hand up and felt blood leaking from her ear. She reached for her knives — pearl maybe, or glass? Her hand fell on the empty sheath and panic jolted up her spine.
Her glass blade had been shattered.
Your knives are useless against us, said the voice. Give yourself to the flame. Only then will you be cleansed. Only then will you be free.
Trembling uncontrollably, Eli drew the pearl blade across her own palm. Her hand skated wildly, drawing an uneven cut in the flesh. As the blade tore matter from magic, and the light under her skin was exposed to the dark, a different kind of pain seared through her body and woke her from the compulsion.
Beside her, Cam was on all fours, crawling toward the ring of witchfire that would burn him alive. He was crying.
Tav was sweating, hand gripping the obsidian blade. As Eli watched, their hand dropped to their side in defeat. The blade fell to the ground.
Eli could see the nightmares coming to the surface: bruises and broken glass, cigarette butts and bathroom stalls. Only this time, their human fears were changing, growing, metamorphosizing into something else, something terrifying —
The witches were coaxing the memories into life.
Tav coughed raggedly, and sand spilled from their mouth. They were being buried alive.
She had to help them, she had to —
You are nothing. You are no one. You are broken.
The voice pulled her back under, and nothing existed except the voice and her loneliness and the promise of fire.
The stench of burning flesh and rock. Cam had reached the witchfire.
An image cut across her field of vision — the single red scar on Kite’s shoulder from the red wind. The scent of oak leaves and rain.
Eli awoke. She threw herself at Cam and wrenched him away from the witchfire, his stones blackened and skin blistering.
“It’s so dark,” he whispered. He was trembling. He looked at her, but he was seeing someone else. Someone who had hurt him.
She looked around desperately for help. Kite, Circinae, someone. Anyone. Lightning flashed above her. Sweat dripped into her eyes.
And finally she understood. No one was coming to save her. She would have to save herself.
She grabbed the obsidian dagger from where it lay near a crooked fiery root and pressed it into Tav’s hand. When their hands touched, sparks burst into life.
Tav’s pupils slowly focused on Eli. “I’m here,” they said.
“Stay with me,” said Eli, drawing thorn and stone. She felt the Heart at her back, its wild magic struggling against invisible chains, its lightning as fierce and dangerous as the Coven. She looked at Tav, their human body breathing heavily, their eyes on Eli. They were caught between two powerful magics, and there was only one way out.
Eli faced down the witchfire. She stabbed the thorn blade into the earth, and a rose bush with long sharp spines burst into life and raced furiously toward the flames. The thorns breached the flame, and the fire flickered weakly. Eli’s heart soared.
The roses caught fire. The flame ran along the thorns to the hilt of the blade and jumped to Eli’s hand.
Pain blocked out everything else.
There was no love or hate or fear. Only pain.
There was no hope or regret or revenge. Only pain.
A single thought broke through, like a lullaby in a minor key. The Heart is hungry.
Kite was trying to tell her something. But Kite was part of the flame, the Heir to the Coven, the girl who had danced with Eli under a pink moon.
The Heart.
Eli turned and stared up at the great tree.
We feed broken weapons to the Heart, Circinae had told her.
Circinae had taught her how to read and thrown her into the universe to escape the Coven’s fury. Circinae had hurt her, lied to her, used her for her entire life. There were no easy answers. Nothing was certain. But time had finally run out, and she had a choice to make.
As she stepped toward the trunk, a stray spark singed a strand of her hair, and she felt the angry bite of a wounded animal.
It could burn her or drown her or save her.
“What are you doing?!” Tav’s voice crawled through the space. It sounded like it came from far away.
She made a choice.
Eli touched the Heart.
Forty-Three
Eli felt heat and a new kind of pain. She looked down to see her bark peeling off in blackened, charcoal curls.
She was being punished.
No, the Heart was being punished, and somehow she was the Heart.
The pain dulled, and Eli felt something new — the absence of something that should be there, like a phantom limb. She was looking, searching for it, but it was out of reach. Something had been lost, forgotten, while the Heart was trapped in the darkness. There were places its roots no longer touched. The pain of this forgetting was tattooed on her soul.
Other images flashed through her mind — she was rain-soaked and dirty, shivering outside a charcoal door that wouldn’t open. Her children were bleeding the sap from her great trunk and drinking its power. She was standing alone on the island waiting for someone who wasn’t coming. She watched as her children wounded one another and turned away from her light. She was alone. She was alone. She was alone.
She was not alone.
Eli felt the fear and hurt and anger surging through the Heart. And underneath the fury, there was a question. Eli wasn’t the only being who was struggling for freedom.
And sometimes we don’t have to struggle alone. Sometimes we need each other.
Yes.
The visions faded. She was back in the Coven, surrounded by witchfire. The husk of a great tree stood before her, its leaves blackened by rot and decay. She knew that it was empty, a dead shell.
Her entire body was glowing. She was brighter than the flames, brighter than the gold flecks in Tav’s eyes. She was the brightest thing in the world.
“Eli.”
She looked up. Tav was staring at her, wide-eyed.
“Take it.”
Tav handed Eli the obsidian blade.
Eli walked to the witchfire and cut through the smoke. Cut into the shared essences of the first ring. She had seen a witch die. She knew they could be killed. She was an assassin, an artist of death.
The essences screamed.
The witchfire flickered out, leaving only smouldering embers and ash in a circle around three sweaty bodies and a dead tree.
The witches were fleeing.
The essences of the witches that made up the first ring re-formed outside the dead circle, no longer joined. Balls of light, of energy, wavering and trembling at the sight of the glowing girl. They were afraid.
But they would fight back, and Eli couldn’t fight them all. The Heart had been locked down here for too long, and the vicious magic of the chains that had bound her yearned to wrap themselves around her ankles and keep her here forever. She had been weakened by the shearing of her roots, by the burning of the forest, by the breaking of a glass blade. She was vulnerable.
And the Heart had a human body now, and bodies were fragile. Already hairline cracks were reopening along an arm that had recently been broken.
Eli turned to her companions. Now that the ring had been broken, Cam was breathing more steadily and struggling to stand up. Tav wiped the sweat from their face, leaving a streak of ash behind. They spat out a mouthful of sand and grimaced. They were both readying themselves for another fight, and it made her heart ache.
“Tav?” Her voice was heavy with fatigue, but the question was tinged with hope. She offered them the obsidian knife. When Tav took it, Eli sent a surge of honeygold power into their body — sharing the power of the Heart, the power of the world. Then Eli gripped their wrist tightly. “You can do
this,” she said. Tav reached out with their free hand to take Cam’s.
Eli’s hand fell to the fragment of china that still hung around her neck. Please, please let this work. Take us somewhere safe.
Tav reached for the threads of magic that wove the world.
A door opened.
Forty-Four
They fell for eternity.
Eli saw the junkyard of lost and discarded things. Something in her reached out to it, but it was too late —
They fell through stone, through the underbelly of the Labyrinth, through tree roots and fossils.
For a moment, Tav, Cam, and Eli hung over Earth. The planet was a beautiful and broken piece of glassware, cracked and glittering with millions of gold lights. It looked very fragile. Then it was gone, and they were falling again.
Doors kept opening and closing, images rushing by as they fell through the City of Eyes again and again and again.
Tav was panicking. They needed a safe haven.
Eli squeezed Tav’s hand, sending a glittering thread of power from her hand to theirs. Tav grabbed for the knife at their belt and tried to shove it into a doorway, to drag them out of the tunnel and into a space — something, anything. It slipped through brick and stone and wood and bone, caught on patches of spirit and shadow and gaps in the world, but skittered off as they kept falling down, down, down.
“Breathe,” whispered Eli. “You can do this.”
Eli watched as Tav took a deep breath and closed their eyes. The magic crackled and swirled around them. She could see the tension in their shoulders and neck from a lifetime of fear and fury. Eli wanted to smooth that tension away, to kiss the base of their neck, even as she remembered the way the witch had been torn open at their touch.
She pressed the chip of bone china, the pendant gifted to her by a child of the Labyrinth, into their hand.
“Take us here,” said Eli.
Colours and light flashed around Tav, moving through their body, the magic threads mapping a spectrum of wild and messy emotions. In one quick movement, Tav threw the pendant into the void as both sacrifice and anchor.
A moment later, they collapsed on a stone floor.
The Girl of Hawthorn and Glass Page 19
