37. Chapter 37
Chapter 37
Mace
T here is madness in her eyes.
Her eyes have always reminded me of a winter storm, the light gray curling and rolling around her pupils like clouds ready to unleash upon the earth.
In the light, with her face bruised and splattered by ichor, they look bright, the impossibly clear blue of the ice frozen over a lake.
Just like Himureal's.
Plume is beside me, shaking, her mouth open at the scene. I realize this is the first time she has had a front-row seat to the violence the Shadowweaver is capable of.
Two bodies, blood still slowly dripping from wounds in their necks, are suspended in the air by shadows. And in front of them is the acrimonious figure of Viola Mistflow.
The shock at the bodies and the drip, drip, dripping of their life force momentarily blind me to what actually stands before me. Her face is beaten and broken, her nose at an odd angle, and dried blood is around her lips. Her clothes are just gone, no doubt stripped away by the two men she just executed. Her body is littered with cuts that slowly ooze. And her beautiful, dark, wavy hair has been cut off, resting jagged around her ears.
And it is stark white.
She stands before us in boots and underwear, her chest wrap soaked in blood and a blade dangling between her fingers.
Plume grasps my hand tightly, her small fingers curling my wrist with fear. It feels like ages but must only have been a minute when Tulip and Morrow join us, clearly having finished searching the home next door.
Tulip shrieks when she catches sight of the scene and moves to rush forward when Morrow grabs the back of her shirt. "We don't know how much of her is there right now, wife. This could be the magic driving."
"That's not how magic works, Morrow," Viola quips, sounding very much like herself.
Too much like herself.
Shouldn't she be more affected right now?
"You just slaughtered two people!" Plume gasps.
Viola takes a couple of steps towards us before using her magic to light some of the sconces on the wall to compensate for the nighttime that fell while we were searching for her.
She looks even worse in the firelight, with the shadows casting her facial injuries and impromptu haircut and color change with shadows.
"What happened here, Shadowweaver?" Morrow asks.
I'm glad he does.
Because I cannot find my voice.
I cannot move my feet.
My brain is telling me something terrible happened here, but all I can feel is relief that she's not the one bleeding out in the back of the house.
"Oh, you know, just a normal day for Viola fucking Mistflow, it seems like." She tosses her knife onto the kitchen table and then lowers herself into a chair. We slowly enter the home, giving the bodies a wide berth so we can move to the table near her. "Avoid the chair there under the bodies. They coated it in slag, which apparently..."
"Dampens your magic." I finish her thought, shocking myself out of my silence. "How did they even figure that out?"
She shrugs, picks up her shredded shirt, and begins to roughly clean the blood off her body, scrubbing her skin until it pinks. "They must've knocked me out from behind while we were walking. I came to, and it was like my brain wasn't working. I've never felt so heavy."
Tulip silently moves to sit next to Viola and places her hand on Viola's free one. She is rewarded with a tight smile. "They were friends of Amio, and I guess they figured out that he was not a casualty of the Race but of me."
The slit throat is exactly how she took out Amio after he begged for mercy. It seems almost serendipitous that one of his friends made Viola promise to save him, and she ignored that promise.
It's not so different than ignoring mercy when you examine it closely.
"He told them we slept together," she says, still scrubbing her body with her tattered shirt. "They wanted to see for themselves if my cunt was as tight as he said."
Bile rises up my throat, and every part of my body goes rigid. The temperature in the room drops drastically with her crude words, the realization of what they planned to do hanging over us all. Viola isn't frozen over it, though. She's become hardened by the violence that seems to follow her everywhere.
"Did they… are you…" Plume can't get the words out.
Viola shrugs, looking up at Plume with cold eyes. "Did they rape me? No. They knocked me around a little, but my magic woke up before it got any farther. Well, farther than my hair." Her voice cracks on the final word and she finally locks eyes with me.
"It's white," Tulip whispers. "Why is it white?"
"What do you mean, it's white?" Viola spits, pushing herself up from the table and walking across the room. As she goes, she kicks the feet of one of her assailants. She stops in front of a mirror and examines herself. I can see her reflection, the way her eyes are empty, and her lips pressed in a firm line.
"My father had to shave his head every year. Mother didn't like it long, and that was their compromise," Viola says, taking her blade and slowly pulling it across her scalp, taking strands of hair with it. "He didn't mind. He would look at it as a fresh start, a way to close the book on the memories of the year and open yourself up to new ones." As she speaks, she continues doing her best to shave her head with the side of her blade, making multiple passes until all that is left is a slightly uneven fuzz.
We stare at her in silence, our broken God, as she examines herself. She rubs her hands over her scalp and sighs, shaking her head at what she sees. "I don't know why it changed. I just know I don't want it."
"Maybe it was a magical response to the stress?" Plume asks, looking at Morrow and I as if we could know.
Morrow shrugs and adds, "It's possible that when the slag dampened your magic, and it came back in full force, you took on a trait of Himureal that was lying in wait, similar to the sunfire you received from Solarius since you're no longer human."
We contemplate that possibility in silence, and to me, what both Morrow and Plume are saying makes sense. Regardless of the reason, if Viola hadn't shaved her head, her hair would've been the twin of Himureal's.
She breaks the silence. "We need to hurry up and get the Spring artifact. Maybe that will grant me some beauty to go with this rage."
We don't laugh.
How could we?
Just a day or so ago, she confided in me and Tulip about being assaulted during the Race. While her words were strong, the pain she still felt was evident. Today, that pain received a bedmate that will lay with it for the rest of its days.
Viola turns away from the mirror and looks at us with eyes like voids. "My clothes are gone. My nose is broken." They're not pleas, just statements of her situation.
I can't see any of us blaming her for what she did here. Is it jarring to remember just how easily Viola can and will kill someone? Yes. But these men clearly deserved it.
She locks eyes with Tulip, and I see desperation on her face. "I didn't just kill them, Tulip. It's important to me that you know that. I read their blood first."
My body stiffens. "You confined them and read their blood?" I reiterate. She nods but looks confused as she does it. "Himureal would be called in on difficult judgments, according to Lucinda's journal. He'd read the blood of the accused and then execute them accordingly."
Knowing she had the control to read the men's blood before she executed them shows me maybe she isn't as far gone as it would seem, and it gives me hope that Viola can be the God we need her to be.
"Well then, like father like daughter," she says with a bitter laugh. "This one," she points to the one hanging on the left, "had some very creative ideas of how he wanted to use my body. It was a loop in his head, all he could think about." She shudders and wipes non-existent blood off her hands. "But that one," she stands and walks to the body on the right, "That one is special."
She trails the nose of her blade across his body as she walks around him, almost reverently. Hesitantly I stand and follow her, trying to determine what she's seeing when she stares at the gash in his open neck. "His blood kept showing me gloves. Sure, I saw the horrendous things he had planned for me, but the magic kept pulling forth memories of him in a pair of smithing gloves. I questioned him, and he said they'd been in his family for as long as anyone had known. I think they're what we're looking for."
Plume walks towards her slowly, like Viola is a wild animal. "Why don't we go to the Foxgrove home, Viola? Bean was not in on this at all. Why don't we go get cleaned up, talk to them, and get the gloves in the morning?"
All of us are still rigid, exchanging glances of worry. She taps her fingers together, eyes sweeping the room. "How do we know for sure that Bean wasn't a part of this?"
Morrow's eyes shift towards me, and I nod tightly, telling him to expose what he learned about his magic. There is no keeping it from the group at this point. "I learned recently that Light magic can reveal secrets. It can bring forth truths that others want to keep hidden. I used it on Bean, and nothing untoward surfaced."
"That will be useful, then. Blood and Light will be unstoppable in pulling out the truth." Her grin is manic, but Morrow doesn't show fear at the crazed look in her eyes. He just smiles softly and tilts his head towards her in acknowledgment. She heads towards the door. "Let's get the gloves."
I reach out to grab her by the arm. "Why don't we come back in the morning, numen? I'm sure the Foxgrove house will take us in for the night." The pet name just slipped out, and for a moment, her eyes widen and go misty. But it's incredibly brief, and then it's gone, and she wrenches her arm away.
Before I can recover from my blunder, Viola is already stomping out the door into the orange moonlight, barely dressed, dripping in blood, with a broken and bruised face and missing all of her hair. "No, thank you. I'll get the artifact first, then we can have a social visit. I'm not risking these disappearing."
Reluctantly, we follow her through the streets, which are thankfully deserted. The image she casts makes her look like a God of death, which may not be too far off from the truth. Shadow is happily wrapped around her neck, his head pushing below the wrap to rest in the sunfire symbol on her chest.
Looks like both of her magics are getting along well.
We've reached the end of a street on the north side of town when she points to a blacksmith shop with a green tapestry hanging on the outer wall. The interior is locked, no doubt storing the tools and materials for the evening, but that does not seem to bother Viola one bit. In fact, stealth does not seem to matter to her anymore because specks of red magic wrap around the locks and melt the metal.
Plume, Morrow, and Tulip have been silent, barely keeping up with Viola's manic movements throughout the town, but they don't flinch at her breaking into the shop. I move to follow her through the door, and Viola shakes her head. "I won't be but a second."
True to her word, Viola appears moments later with a pair of oiled leather gloves. There is age in them, for sure, but they are exceptionally preserved and well-made. "There was a rumor in his family that anyone who wore these made the strongest weapons that fetched the most money. "
I inhale sharply. "Geomancy and Prosperity. That must be it."
With a wild grin, she says, "There's only one way to find out," and slips the gloves on her hands.
I expect her to collapse on the ground as she did with the amulet. Except she doesn't. Lightning cracks around us, lighting the sky up with its wild electricity. My hair stands on end at the charge of it in the air, and my magic responds in kind, whirling under my skin in happiness.
Viola's eyes are hooded, half open, her mouth slack. "How do you feel?" I ask softly, grabbing her chin and turning her face to try to get her unfocused eyes to land on me.
"Like I'm alive. Like how I feel when you kiss me."
Morrow chokes on his laugh behind me. "I'm sorry, Shadowweaver, what did you say?"
She shakes her head, trying to clear the thoughts that are fogged in her mind. "I'm not kidding, Mace. I know I'm not much to look at right now, and you're still pissed at me, but kiss me. I need to see something." Her gloved hands grab my face, and I quickly acquiesce, longing to feel that closeness to her despite the conflicting feelings I have. My body leans into hers, and I press our lips together.
That electricity between us is still there, rolling down my spine and warming my center. Her tongue gently pushes into my mouth, and I let it enter, where they tangle together in passion.
But as soon as the kiss becomes heated, she pulls away, her breath slightly labored and me wanting so much more.
"I knew it," she whispers, looking up to the sky.
"Knew what?"
She gestures around her. "No lightning. Your magic isn't rogue anymore."
I glance around and see she's right. The shocked look on our friends' faces confirms it. "How can that be?"
"I think your magic was trying to find a home in me. When I put on the gloves, it was like I was drinking a warm cup of tea, cozied up in front of a fire as snow fell around me. Your magic wanted to be a part of mine." She looks down at the gloves, turning her hands over as if she could see the magic drifting off of them.
"If I had been with someone else, it probably would've happened with theirs, too." My chest constricts at the thought of her being with another. Even if I am frustrated with her, I can't imagine not having her around. Her voice drops low, and in a whisper, she says, "But it was only you. It was always only you."
I don't think those words mean what I want them to in this context, but I still let them wrap around me as if they do- as if Viola's feelings towards me could be so simple, so clear. It takes me longer than I care to admit to recover from the vice grip those words placed around my heart.
Tulip reaches for Viola's hands, gesturing for her to remove the gloves. "Oh, right, yeah. I have the magic, it would seem. I don't need to wear these anymore." As she pulls them off, Plume stifles a gasp and runs forward, grasping Viola's hands tightly in hers.
From the tips of Viola's fingers down her palms and across the backs to her wrist are lines of black decay. The ends of her fingers are solid, and the closer to her wrists, the more the lines thin and space out. It almost looks like bolts of electricity made of rot. She flexes her fingers, not looking away from them, and then turns her hands over in Plume's.
"Do they hurt?" Plume asks softly as pink magic begins to swirl Viola's hands.
"Not at all. It's a part of me." She brings her fingers closer to her eyes, and I catch sight of the branches of rot that run down her palms. Something about seeing my magic literally running through her veins excites me, and I want to touch it, to kiss those fingertips and drag my tongue down the lines.
"But hey, Plume?"
Plume looks up from the hand she's been examining, brow furrowed. "Yeah?"
"Could you fix my face? Can't meet my long lost family this way."