Chapter 17 #3
“My mind gift is powerful. I can make them stop. Not forever, but long enough to spare her life.” If she were fae, she’d live.
It would be a painful existence, even with the magical speed of fae healing.
The witch fire had already stripped away too many layers of her skin for healing to be simple.
But with enough time, she would be whole again. Her body, at least.
A tear slid down Koryn’s cheek. “You can’t.”
I pressed my palm over the back of her hand where it was splayed against the column. “I can.”
“They won’t trust us.”
“They don’t trust us now.”
“But there is a mutual… understanding.” Another tear fell, leaving twin tracks down each side of her face. “They need us, and they think we need them.”
Maura and the king, she meant. Whatever game they were playing, whatever unholy alliance they’d struck…
Koryn was a vital player in it. Now that I was bound to her by the Lifebind, I was, too.
They did not know that the tattoo on the inside of my wrist was the least of my dedications to her.
But most of all, they did not know or understand her heart.
It would cost her to let this woman die.
The woman I’d fallen in love with had a heart too big for the existence consigned to her by fate. Witches were supposed to be evil, but Koryn… she was good to the very depths of her soul. Three hundred years had not been enough to corrupt her. Death had stopped her heart, but it had not broken it.
There was only one variable that made any sense.
“What did he tell you, Koryn?”
She looked away. “It’s what he didn’t that scares me.”
“He is keeping secrets.” I’d known that from the start.
“Yes.” There was not a single note of doubt in her voice. “But until we know what they are, we cannot reveal ourselves.”
Despite the terrifying gravity of that statement, hope lit in my chest. “Us against them, and us against him?”
A shadow crossed over her eyes. “It won’t be that simple. And there is no us,” she said, even though she was the one who’d used the word ‘us.’ But the shaking anger from the night before was gone. It was more like a statement of fact, and that worried me even more.
Beyond us, on the other side of the pillar, a new sound took shape.
The witches began to chant. I did not recognize the language.
It did not belong to Velora or the continent I’d lived on before.
It was not the ancient language of the fae that Margeaux had forced me to learn.
Perhaps it was the language of the Dark God himself, the creator of the witches.
He was the root of all this. He’d made the witches. He’d claimed Koryn. And despite his statements about her, he’d done nothing to protect her since her arrival in Balar Shan.
The chanting was not the only thing that changed. The coppery tang of blood filled the air. The room was fairly large, circular, at the very center of the tower, and the spiral that circled up above it. There was not a single window, and the scent filled every inch of the space.
Maura had slashed open her own forearm and now sprinkled her blood over the woman. As it splattered against her burnt, blistered skin, she started screaming again. The chanting only got louder, all three witches’ voices in perfect unison.
“Blood magic,” I breathed. Maura had insinuated as much in the gorge after the Memory Gate, but I’d never seen it.
“It’s all blood magic,” Koryn whispered.
I did not know what that meant, and the pain on her face stopped me from asking. She turned away, pressing her forehead into the pillar once again and closing her eyes. The smell of the blood, the sound of the chanting… it was overwhelming her.
She could not watch anymore.
I did.
I watched as Maura pressed her fingers deeper into the wound on her own arm until her blood flowed in a steady stream down the woman’s chest, into her mouth, until she choked on it.
She writhed, but those cuffs of flame held her in place.
Her burnt skin came away in shreds. The gurgling sound of blood filling her throat muffled her scream.
Finally, abruptly, it stopped.
“She is dead,” I said. Koryn surely knew, but I said it anyway. I had to at least acknowledge what had just happened.
“Then there is no reason to linger,” Koryn said. Her cheeks were wet.
There were plenty of reasons. Maura’s motive might reveal itself.
The Dark God had not told Koryn any more about the supposed talisman that Maura was making, but its existence had been enough to sway her to stay in Balar Shan, so it must be powerful and important.
But we might be discovered, and when it came to the witches, Koryn had the final word.
I pulled her hand away from the column where I’d held it through the entire ordeal. “We should go see if Isanara has returned.”
It was a feeble excuse. When the dragon returned, Koryn would know it.
But she nodded. We slipped out through the door we’d left ajar.
There was no repairing the damage she’d done to the locking mechanism.
The witches would know that someone had broken in.
We could only hope that they had enough enemies in this castle to spare us their attention, at least for a while.
I walked two paces behind her, ready to catch her if another wave of power hit, or if her strength gave out.
But Koryn did not look back over her shoulder.