by Mary Taranta
“Here,” I say, pulling Cadence closer. “Use your coat sleeves to cover your skin. Then keep his head up and listen. Don’t let his heart stop.”
“How do I do that?” she asks, terrified.
“Talk to him,” I say. “Let him know he’s not alone. All right?”
Her eyes well up but she nods, gently easing his head onto her lap. Her blond curls are stained with ash, and we all look like nightmares today.
“Hurry,” she begs.
Turning back, I confirm that Merlock is no longer moving. Gracelessly I pull back his coat and rip open his shirt to the broken skin beneath. Bracing myself, I plunge the dagger through his chest, gagging on the feel of muscle and bone and sinew giving way like damp sand choked with algae. And then I feel it collide with the blade, hard as a stone and hot as a pyre.
The heart of a king.
Merlock goes limp when I tear out his heart, and I turn away, fighting down a rise of bile. Thread, I think. Bind it tightly. I yank the lace from my boot and begin to wrap the still-beating heart, my own a slow echo against my ribs, scattering my thoughts. Brief flashes of darkness interrupt my vision; I can hear myself gasping for every aching breath, but they never seem to be enough.
Bryn kneels beside me, watching. “I need the dagger Cadence gave you,” I mumble, and she pulls it from her cloak and unscrews the hilt, revealing the hidden vial of North’s blood tucked inside. My fingers are too slick for traction, and I have to uncork the vial with my teeth. I upend its contents across the leather, before I stop cold.
How did she know there was blood hidden in the blade? I never told her what the dagger was, where it came from, or even why I had it. Frowning, I roll the vial in my hand. Merlock’s blood from my hands smears the glass and outlines the broken wax seal.
The Dossel coat of arms.
I drop the vial. It bounces once against the tile before rolling away. My stomach sinks as I meet Bryn’s eyes.
“This isn’t North’s blood,” I say.
She offers me a wincing smile, a cruel facsimile of apology. “I was raised to be a queen,” she says. “Anything less is a waste of my time.”
Rialdo, I realize. If he was her father’s proxy, she would have known about blood-forged blades. She knew exactly what this was when she asked Cadence for the dagger.
I shake my head, fire igniting in my veins. “No. That’s impossible. You can’t even bleed—”
“How do you think I was going to kill my father and inherit Brindaigel? When I actually believed he was a king, at least.” She scoffs at my naivety—or maybe hers. “I needed a blade forged with blood. One of Pem’s vial’s worth was all I needed, long before I ever met you.”
The heart already feels heavier in my hands, not a muscle so much as a stone, a burden I cannot risk bearing much longer. If it’s not unbound soon, it will be absorbed into my body, and North will have to cut it out of my skin.
Bryn reaches for the heart, but I cradle it to my chest, revulsion warring with fury. “You’re bloodbound to North. He can still inherit even with your blood on the bindings—”
“I will kill you if I have to,” she says, and all apology is gone, replaced with the familiar look of war. “I won’t need you once I become queen.”
The injustice of it cuts too deeply—to have come this far, to have lost so much, to have finally trusted her, when all along she did intend to take Avinea for herself. With her amplification ability, there’d be no fighting her.
“You could still be Queen of Brindaigel,” I say desperately. “You don’t know how to use magic. You need North—”
She stares at me. “I have always intended to rule alone.”
The flashes of darkness are getting longer; her face flickers in and out of view. “I can’t let you do this.”
Shouts and gunfire outside are a shocking reminder that Perrote is still fighting. A moment later, he shoves through the abbey doors, flanked—protected—by only five of his original two dozen. It’s a relief to see Alistair among them, and Tobek, too, held captive by Perrote as one last bargaining tool.
Perrote surveys the damage before his eyes settle on me, still holding Merlock’s heart even as I feel its power begin to bleed through my skin, an intoxicating lure for the poison in my blood. Possibilities begin unfolding through me as my greed awakens. I could be powerful. I could be unstoppable. I could be—
No. This magic was never meant for me.
Perrote strides forward, leveling his pistol at me. “Give her the heart,” he commands. When I don’t move, he changes direction, releasing Tobek and grabbing Cadence by the arm, yanking her to her feet. North’s head hits the floor with a dull thud, but he doesn’t move. The soldiers sweep through the abbey, muskets trained on Bryn and me.
“Give. Her. The heart,” Perrote repeats.
I look to Bryn, but it’s not hate that squeezes so tightly in my chest. It’s pity, that for every choice she’s made, there was an alternative. In another life, this could have been our shared success. We’re not so different, after all. We are both willing to fight for what we want, no matter the cost.
But she chose a path paved with vices that she will be doomed to circle for years to come as she tries to understand why her heart can hurt so much when she never offered it to anyone. Because a weak heart breaks, a broken heart bleeds, and blood can be poisoned.
“I forgive you,” I say, and Bryn frowns, bemused. “And I hope that one day you can forgive yourself. Because greed costs, your majesty.”
Dropping the heart, I grab North’s dagger and plunge it through the bindings, striking stone on the other side. A pistol fires, its sound swallowed by a blast of heat that bellows through the abbey, knocking me onto my back. I roll onto my side, watching as Bryn tries to salvage the heart with frantic, panicked gestures. The knotted leather lacing begins to fray, unravel, and rot, turning to ash before spinning away in a rising eddy. Bright white light splinters the air, fragmenting my view of her features, and I close my eyes, turning away. I feel knots of magic unraveling inside me—the binding spell, the remnants of the spell my mother cast—all dissolving like a thousand sunset skies melted into liquid starlight.
Sounds come caving back in with a rush of air and adrenaline. My ears ring, and I open my eyes. My vision clears to see Perrote standing over me, furious, pistol aimed at my face. “What have you done?!”
But then a single shot, a single gasp, and the world inches further off course.
Perrote sags back, pistol dropping. His eyes slide to Bryn with open accusation as the hole in his heart widens and turns a bright, blinding red. He falls to his knees and then slumps over. Dead. The loyalty spells that protected him were unraveled the way my spells had been, and his men now watch with wide, startled eyes and a choice to make. Who is their real enemy?
Bryn stands, fierce, unflinching, furious, holding the gun I stole from the guard in New Prevast—the one Merlock swept aside. Her eyes meet mine, and I see the anger behind them before she turns, angling for a dark doorway at the back of the altar.
I roll onto my knees and then my feet, growling with pain as I stagger after her, down a short hallway and into an outer courtyard. The Herald Mountains beckon from above the abbey walls, and I stop.
She’s going home. She didn’t kill her father to spare me; she did it to ensure her contingency plan. With her father dead, her husband victorious, and her power over me dissolved, she has no hope of taking Avinea.
Bryn spins to face me from several yards away. “I owe you nothing now,” she says.
“Bryn—”
“Do not come after me,” she says. “Do not make this war, Faris.”
“You can’t survive in the mountains forever,” I say, slumped against a column for support. “That was your father’s mistake.”
“I am not your enemy now,” she says, “but I will become one impossible to defeat if you test me. I will fight, and I will never stop. Remember that.” Her eyes flick past me, back inside. “Both of yo
u.”
My legs buckle, and I slide down the column in a smear of blood as she crosses the courtyard and vanishes beyond the walls on the other side. The cold air is blistering against my face, and I close my eyes, rocking my head back, swallowing a mouthful of bile.
North. Is he even alive?
But I can’t muster the energy to move.
“Here! She’s out here!” Cadence. I turn toward her voice, full of words I can’t articulate. Her slim hand slides into mine and squeezes hard as footsteps surround me.
“Sofreya!” a familiar voice shouts. Alistair? “She needs to be excised immediately or she’ll never make it home!”
Home.
And then callused hands on my face, my throat, my arms. “Faris,” Alistair says. “Hold on. This is not your last fight.”
Bright white stars dot a curtain of black behind my eyelids as I’m lifted into someone’s arms.
For the first time in months, I look to the stars and I make a wish.
Twenty-Eight
IT SNOWED AGAIN LAST NIGHT.
The harbor is now frozen from the Bridge of Ander all the way to the quay, and most fishing boats are moored off the bridge pilings, closer to the open water and the thinner ice. A few skiffs remain at the dockside. Every morning their crews carry them on their shoulders along the beachfront before casting off. It’s almost surreal. A whole war was fought in the Burn, and while the city remains ignorant of most of the details, the basic facts are all they needed to know: Merlock is dead, and so is the magic. And in spite of knowing that magic will never return to Avinea, the city still survives.
We all do.
I press my forehead to the frosted glass, watching Cadence and Tobek in the courtyard below, throwing snowballs. Alistair stands on the sidelines, hands plunged into his pockets and a lit cigarette dangling from the edge of his mouth.
It’s the first break he’s taken in days. Our blood was so thick with poison when we returned from the Burn, he’s been buried in his lab for more than a week, conducting transfusions. Little by little—needle by needle—Alistair is cleaning the infected blood, a heretofore impossible feat. Science triumphing over magic, just like he promised.
I bite my lip, tracing the dark veins in my arms. Having absorbed more than the others, it’s taking longer to replace my poisoned blood. Sofreya excises what she can every few days, which dulls the headaches and mutes the call of my vices, but my heart still beats twice as slowly as it should, and it leaves me tired. Too tired to risk going outside or exerting myself in any way. So from the safety of the library, I watch my sister laughing, with a shawl pulled tight around my shoulders and a fire roaring behind me.
It feels strange to stand still after a lifetime of running, and yet I don’t feel trapped in the palace anymore.
Finally I feel safe.
Alistair glances up and sees me through the window. He raises his hand with a hesitant smile, and I press my palm to the glass in return, exposing the pale scar around my wrist—a permanent reminder of the spell that once linked me to Bryn.
Cadence notices Alistair and twists, breaking into a grin as she waves. I smile more broadly this time, still giddy over our new relationship: sisters again, but something more, something that grief and tragedy have made stronger. After returning from the Burn, she swore off swords and soldiers, and Alistair promised her an apprenticeship. Now she spends every night snuggled beside me in bed, burning a candle down to a nub as she reads books from his laboratory.
She doesn’t understand most of it yet, but that doesn’t stop her from trying. Hearing her voice stumble over words that neither one of us has ever heard is a better lullaby than anything else I could imagine. A better victory than any in the fighting ring.
The fire pops behind me, and I close my eyes, exhaling slowly and steadily, fogging the glass. Turning, I look back to the wide table spread with maps, ready to resume my work, before I realize I’m no longer alone.
North stands in the doorway, leaning into the jamb for support, one hand straining on a wooden crutch. Darjin winds between his legs before padding over to the fire and throwing himself down with a soft whump.
I stare at North, paralyzed by his appearance. He’s gaunt and unshaven, his shaggy hair still more gray than black. His dark clothes hang off him like blankets, his shirtsleeves rolled up to show his skinny forearms. Puncture wounds freckle the skin where Alistair withdrew poisoned blood and returned it back clean.
But then the shock wears off and I cross the room, throwing my arms around him. I hold him for what feels like forever.
“You shouldn’t be out of bed,” I say at last, muffled against his shoulder.
One arm circles my waist, his chin on top of my head. “You don’t come to see me, so I came to see you.”
I don’t go to see him because it scares me to see him so weak, with blood and bandages and needles scattered across his bed. That he even made it back to New Prevast alive is a blessing—and a testament to Sofreya.
“Here.” Releasing him, I pull a chair out from the table, and he dutifully limps toward it, sitting down with a grimace. I take a seat across from him, nervous beneath his intense gaze.
“You killed Merlock,” he says at length.
“And all the magic,” I say. When he doesn’t reply, I lower my head and pick at the edges of the maps. “I’m sorry. I thought I was doing the right thing by destroying his heart. It was the only way to keep it from Bryn.”
“It was the right thing to do. I don’t know that I could have done it, no matter how much I wanted to.”
“But magic will disappear now,” I say softly. It already has, in the area around the abbey. With no heartbeat to feed it, the Burn has begun receding on its own.
“It’ll take time,” he agrees, shifting in his seat. “A few years, maybe longer, depending on how quickly it’s used. But at least if it’s gone, it can never be abused again. We’ll have to learn how to solve our own problems now. And I admit,” he adds with a ghost of a smile, “knowing that my children will not have to kill me to inherit their futures is something of a relief.”
I force a smile only to realize he’s staring at the scar on my collarbone, an ugly, puckered welt of shiny flesh and innumerable stitches, each one ringed with yellow bruises. I adjust my shawl to hide it again. For some reason I can’t look him in the eye, and my nerves are on fire, kicking my heart into frantic motion.
“Your mother would be proud.”
“So would yours,” I say.
North acknowledges me with a dip of his chin before he pulls the maps closer, expression guarded. “Are you leaving?”
“In the spring.”
His fingers tighten along the map. He tries to mask his hurt, but it colors his voice. “Where are you going?”
I push back from the table with a screech of wood and join him on his side, shoulder to shoulder as I lean over to point. With no more magic in our skin, there’s nothing for the poison in either of us to respond to—no danger in a touch. No darkness, no vice underneath, only a soft blooming pleasure that makes my heart race.
A tantalizing, promising maybe.
“We’ll start here in Cortheana,” I say. “And from there we’ll go north, toward the mountains. This marsh here”—I tag it with my finger—“turns into a river. We’ll follow it to a cavern, and a tunnel, and a staircase carved from marble that will lead us into the dungeons.”
North stares at the map, incredulous. “You’re going back to Brindaigel?”
“The Burn now encompasses two thirds of Avinea, and Bryn is sitting on the largest hoard of magic left on the continent,” I say. “Merlock is dead, but you are far from saving Avinea, your majesty. We could wait a few years for the magic to dissolve on its own, but I say we press our advantage. Force an agreement. You are the rightful king, after all, and your people know it now.”
North turns, watching my profile with a look of amazement.
“She’ll want land,” I continue with a flush, grat
ified by his expression. “Resources, trade routes. She’ll also want protection for her borders, which means she’ll be willing to compromise on her demands.”
“Or it could mean war,” says North.
“Yes.” I swallow, fingers curling into a fist. “There’s a possibility that Bryn will fight. In fact, I know she will. But we have all winter to prepare. It’ll give you time to prove yourself to your people, to prove that they need you more than they needed your father’s magic. You are strong, North, and we’ll show them that. So that when the moment comes, they’ll finally be willing to fight for you.”
“We,” he says, turning to face me.
I smile, but it quickly fades as I stare at the maps until the edges blur out of focus. “Offer me a seat on your council,” I say. “And then treat me as an adviser and nothing more. Avinea needs its king, and the king still has a wife.”
He rubs his mouth, looking away. Like all the other spells, the bloodbound spell linking his heart to Bryn’s was dissolved in Kerch, but marriage proclamations have already been received by dozens of courts around the Havascent Sea—not to mention across his own kingdom. Until a suitable dissolution can be presented, he must play the part of scorned husband. “Of course,” he says, strained. “But—”
“But,” I say.
North looks over, lips parted.
My hand slides over the map until my little finger hooks through his.
“Thank you for coming back to me,” I finally say, forcing myself to meet his eyes.
“I held on as long as you did,” he replies, just as softly.
The fire crackles and hisses from the other side of the room as North lowers his head. “Not that long ago I offered you and your sister the best rooms in the palace.”
“And all the books I could read,” I say. “There was also a promise of tarts, which has yet to be delivered.”
“And of a kiss,” he says quietly. “That offer still stands, and more. So much more. You were the seedling that Avinea needed. But this”—his finger tightens around mine—“is all I have ever needed. You are my greatest weapon, Faris Locke, and I need you in the months ahead. Name your price for staying until I’m free.”
