Chapter 33 #2
“Don’t you ‘Mother’ me! I’ll be done before you know it.
Old Crone witness me, you act just like when you were younger,” Leyevna grumbled, pulling at her son’s shirt to uncover his wounds.
“Covered in scratches and bruises, fighting boys two times your size for that child your father adopted, and still refusing to see me so I could heal you.”
The sudden mention of Callum startled Semras. Did he know the witch he had meant to frame for Torqedan’s murder was Estevan’s mother?
It didn’t matter; human empathy wouldn’t stop a Seelie’s desire for order.
“Mother, please, spare us the childhood memories,” Estevan said, ears flushed.
His mother possessed no such pity. “What? I know; I understand why you acted out. You were just a teenage boy with an attitude and a grudge. But think of your poor mother for a moment, will you?” Leyevna inspected his neck, then his arms, and then started weaving absentmindedly as she kept speaking.
“Took you years to talk to me again, and now that you do, you barely come around! How am I supposed to catch up on so many lost years of teaching? Almost all you know about your own kin comes from the Inquisition! It’s absolutely ludicrous. ”
Estevan let out a long, suffering sigh.
An amused chuckle escaped Semras, and he pressed his lips tightly together, looking away. His neck had turned a deep shade of crimson.
A soft, private smile bloomed on her lips before she shook her head and turned her attention back to the warwitch.
With disconcerting ease, Leyevna wove the damage out of her son, then examined him once more. The matriarch had taken only mere minutes to do what she had needed hours for back when she had healed Estevan’s wounds in their tent. Semras’ eyes widened with shocked awe—and a quiet dread.
Madra had a point: the blood of Fey in the veins of witches was drying, generation after generation, and nothing might remain of it by the end of the next century. They were fading away—just like the Inquisition.
Leyevna finished fretting over her son, and Estevan breathed in relief. The tension in his shoulders and jaw vanished, leaving behind only the shadows of a past strain. He closed his eyes, a smile of relief floating over his lips.
The matriarch hummed pensively. “What curious and unfamiliar threads you have wrapped around your warp shape, Estevanya,” she said, pointing at his heart. “A mother could almost think you forgot to tell her something of importance.”
Dropping his smile at once, Estevan snapped his eyes open. “A son could definitely think you forgot to teach him about some of the more obscure witch rituals, Mother.”
“Ah, yes, I might have,” Leyevna replied, laughing. “Then again, I’d never thought you would be interested in such old-fashioned fey magic. It is not often done nowadays.”
“Can it be undone?” he asked.
Bristling at his words, Semras snapped her eyes to Estevan. He was suggesting undoing something so sacred in such a flippant tone.
She couldn’t blame him. He hadn’t known what it meant when he gave his consent; he hadn’t wanted to choose her. So, instead of snarling at him for the slap to the face his words represented, Semras hid her pain behind a stilted smile and a creased brow.
“No, son,” Leyevna replied chillingly. “No, it cannot. Not unless you want me to core your warp shape out like an apple, and then you’d be untwined. And also dead. What is it you are trying to suggest?” Her icy blue gaze bore into the inquisitor.
Estevan exhaled. “Nothing. Just … curious, Mother.”
The matriarch rolled her eyes, then turned to Semras and smiled.
“I suppose I will find his wefts around your warps, girl? You will both tell me all about it later. For now, let’s see what I must work with …
” Leyevna took her hands in hers and surveyed them.
A deep, concerned frown slowly appeared on her face.
“This looks suspiciously like cold iron burns, and some latent poisoning of the blood too … Someone did this to you. Who?”
Semras paled under the warwitch’s inquisitive stare but still held her gaze. Estevan had lied to his mother for her before; she owed him the same.
“A Venator knight put me in witch-shackles for a week,” she lied. “Este—Inquisitor Velten removed them for me.”
The warwitch raised an eyebrow. “You are lying, Semras. I can see the threads of your blood pulsing faster.”
Semras’ gaze snapped to the inquisitor. “That’s how you knew! You always went on about how you could tell lies from truths. It makes so much sense now!”
Crossing his arms, Estevan leaned back against the chair. “Mother taught me a few years back. This trick of hers was very inconvenient when I was younger and causing trouble. I learned to lie using truths very quickly.”
“That worked only on your father,” Leyevna replied.
“I still know when you try to hide things from me, my boy. And this ‘trick,’ as you call it, is a skill usually only taught to elderwitches, so be grateful you know it at all. And for the love of the New Maiden, do not let it be known you do! Even I shouldn’t know it!
” Clicking her tongue, Leyevna returned to examining Semras’ hands.
“You did this to her, didn’t you, Vanya? We’ll talk about it later.”
He grimaced. “Please do not. I will carry that guilt with me for the rest of my days. Your lecture will contain nothing I have not told myself already.”
“We talked it out, Warwitch Leyevna,” Semras added. “It’s … fine.”
The matriarch whistled. “Well, well, well. Look at you both getting along now.” Then her eyes grew dim and blurry as she peered at the Unseen Arras.
For long, anxiety-inducing minutes, Leyevna examined Semras’ hands.
At last, the matriarch came back with a shake of her head and a frown. “You tried weaving while wearing the witch-shackles, girl. I can see small lesions all across your skin.”
“ … What does it mean?” Semras breathed.
Leyevna sighed deeply. “It means you have shards of cold iron tainting the flesh of your hands. These Crone-cursed shackles are designed to act as a deterrent, and they do it very well in a very insidious way,” she replied.
“If you do not weave, you are fine. But if you do it, they will cut your hands to let particles of cold iron into your flesh. And then …”
Estevan leaned closer. His expression had turned into a blank mask, but his eyes spoke loudly of his worry. “And then?”
“Well …” Leyevna gave them both a thin smile.
“We will not learn about that today. You’ve kept your fingers moving, girl.
That’s good. It means the cold iron within your flesh hasn’t aggregated to a critical level.
Not yet, at least, so let’s see … let’s see if I can draw it all out and save your weaving. ”
“She can be healed, then?” Estevan asked. “Her hands can return to what they once were?”
“Possibly. I think.” Leyevna hummed, then clicked her tongue as she slid her attention back to Semras.
“Just one way to find out. This will be tricky, even for me, but at least you haven’t aggravated your case by trying to weave excessively.
Back in the day, I’d seen too many witches weave enthusiastically after being freed from shackles they had fought against. The result was always ghastly. Poor girls.”
A violent shiver rattled Semras’ bones. Had she tried earlier to stop Estevan by weaving, then, maybe …
maybe she’d have spelled her own doom. Even before then, she had been weaving on borrowed time—each instance that made her think her hands would get better had only brought her closer to her own destruction.
“However …” the matriarch continued, “what I will do will hurt you. Immensely. I am not only using the Path of Flesh to heal you, I have to mix in knowledge from the Path of War. I don’t know if it will work as intended, and I don’t know if it won’t cripple you instead.
So choose accordingly. I cannot promise anything about the results. ”
Semras’ breath shuddered out of her. Fighting back the bile rising in her throat, she took a moment to compose herself, then said, “Please do it. I’m ready.”
If one could ever be ready for such a thing. But what other choice had she?
“I will not stop once I start,” Leyevna said softly. “I have heard screams enough in my lifetime that yours won’t sway me.”
“I understand.”
The warwitch nodded. “Good. Close your eyes and do not look. What I shall do will disturb you enough that you shouldn’t have to keep its memory too.”
Trying to ignore how cold and clammy her hands were, Semras did as she was asked. She shuddered; her stiff chest seemed unable to let her take in more than short, shallow bursts of air. In the darkness behind her eyelids, no one stood by her side to soothe her apprehension.
Hands took hers in, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Deep instincts screamed at her to snatch them back, but a tight grip held them firmly in place. “Don’t fight me, girl,” Leyevna said.
“I-I know,” Semras replied in a small, quiet voice. Fear twisted her entrails into knots. “I’m sorry. I’m just—”
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t sit here alone and go through the promised agony without knowing what awaited her and if it would work, or if she’d end up crippled instead, or worse, or—
Against her chest, her heart thundered loudly. Her eyelids fluttered, fighting to open up or stay closed—she couldn’t tell anymore. Shivers of panic shook her every limb.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t. She couldn’t. She couldn’t—
Warm arms embraced her from behind. The smell of musk and wood essence filled her nose as a chin came to rest on top of her head. It kept her firmly grounded in the present.
“It will be over soon, Semras,” Estevan whispered. “It will be over soon, and then you will have your hands back as they once were. You will see.”
“… You’re lying, Estevan,” she breathed. Her eyelids settled down, staying firmly shut as she leaned against him.
Burying his face into the crook of her neck, Estevan held her more tightly. “I am not. I cannot be lying—I cannot.” He breathed deeply. “I am sorry, Semras. I am so sorry for everything I did to you. I am so, so—”
The world became agony.
Something was ripping the veins of her hands, peeling them off and unravelling them into threads of blood and flesh and torment.
Her eyes flew wide open—only to meet the palm of a hand. Estevan was shielding her vision from whatever the warwitch was doing. Words spoken in his deep voice roamed all around her, but she couldn’t hear them. Someone was screaming too loudly.
Was it her?
Her throat hurt. Her hands hurt. Skin once shielded them from air and now didn’t anymore. Or perhaps it was still there, coated in a layer of anguish so thick Semras couldn’t feel her own skin anymore.
She wished she couldn’t feel anything anymore. Pain blinded her eyes, plunging her deeply into the Night only to heighten her other senses. Living felt unbearable. Bones, ligaments, blood, skin, nails—every single aspect of her burned, and burned, and burned, and—
And then, Semras felt it. Something was lurking between them all, something nearly impossible to perceive yet pervading her hands entirely.
The Night? Or was it the shards of cold iron?
Before her agony-addled mind could understand it, something else yanked on it.
It resisted the pull; it dug its claws into her warp shape.
Then, all at once, something snapped and let go.
Clarity flooded her mind.
“It’s over,” Leyevna said. The matriarch’s voice sounded fresh, pure, like spring water rolling down the smooth rocks of a brook.
Estevan moved his hand away, and Semras blinked her tears away.
She was still inside his mother’s home. Seconds ago, she had felt so far away, so deeply entrenched in the blackest Night, and now … now it was all gone, and she was back, safe and sound.
Looking down at her hands, Semras found them almost pristine. Only the shadows of bruises lingered on her skin in blotches of fading yellows—the sole traces of the torment the witch-shackles had inflicted on her.
Leyevna had barely stepped back when Estevan took her place to kneel in front of her. “How are you feeling?” he asked softly.
“I’m … I’m fine. I’m feeling … a bit dizzy, but fine. Quite fine, actually,” she replied in an amazed tone. “And my hands …” Her questioning gaze darted to the warwitch.
“Try, then we’ll see,” the matriarch said, rubbing the ache of weaving off her fingers.
Semras lifted her trembling hands, contemplated them, and then …
Then she wove.