Chapter 23 #2
Instead, she simply whispered, “Burn.” It wasn’t a spell she’d been taught, but she knew words made a spell happen. There was ritual, reason, meaning behind every single spell. There were candles to light and bowls to offer sacrifice. But those rules had never gotten her anywhere.
Jessamine dug deep inside of herself, pushing for that connection to magic that she’d found through Elric. She begged. “Burn, please,” she whispered.
And then she felt it. The writhing beast inside of her seemed to ease. It unraveled like there had been a tangle inside of her, knotted by expectations and rules and requirements and chains that she had wrapped around herself.
That unraveling released something that had desperately been wanting to get out.
Her fingertips heated, and then she could feel the searing ache of fire on her hands.
It spread out from her fingertips and as it did, it burned away the vision of organ meat and pulsing blood.
Like a piece of paper she had lit from the middle, the room revealed itself as she burned the rug where the magic had been woven.
Every moment she gritted her teeth and endured. Her fingertips burned with it, sizzling as she smelled the scent of her own cooking flesh. But then it was done, and the fires were extinguished.
It wasn’t much of a room. It wasn’t even that big. If she had known it would take only a few more steps, she might have mustered the courage to keep walking.
Gasping, she stood on shaking legs and cast her eyes around the nearly bare room.
The rug burned at her feet, and that was almost all that was in here.
A few portraits were covered with faded sheets.
Bare boards lined the floor, worn from years of people who had walked over them and never once sanded or refinished.
A small chest in the corner had seen better days and looked like someone had taken an axe to it.
But on the far side of the room was a balcony overlooking the back garden. A balcony where Fortuna stood with a cigar in her hand and smoke coiling around her. She didn’t look back at Jessamine. Instead, she just stood there, gazing out over the gardens like the room wasn’t burning behind her.
“I caught you,” Jessamine rasped, her voice still aching with the pain that was a dull echo behind her ribs. “Now you are going to tell me his plan, Fortuna.”
Fortuna lifted the cigar to her lips, and then blew smoke rings out toward the stars that laid out above them. With a long sigh, she turned so Jessamine could see her profile. The moonlight played across her satin-smooth hair. “You burned down my pretty spell. You never did have any tact.”
“What is he planning?” she asked again, joining the other woman on the balcony. The air was so much better out here. No cloying perfumes to distract her, nor the murmur of people to cloud her mind.
Just the silence of the stars and the sweet smell of roses wafting up from Fortuna’s beautiful garden.
And beyond that, the glow of the Pleasure District.
Even from here she could see men and women on the streets, drunk and laughing.
The faint trill of distant music coiled into the air, along with smoke from the cigar dens.
“This is the city you’re fighting so hard for?” Fortuna asked, waving a hand at the scenery. “It’s full of crooks and robbers. People who only think about themselves at the best of times. No one here gives a shit whether you live or die.”
“I know that.”
“Then why are you fighting so hard to take it back? Let Leon have it. Let the gutter trash live with all the other gutter trash. Get on a ship, Jessamine. Go somewhere beautiful with that new god of yours and learn how to take a kingdom there. Perhaps that would be more worthwhile for you to fight for.”
“This is my home.” She leaned against the railing of the balcony, staring out at the speckles of light that continued far past the Pleasure District.
All the way to the very edge of her kingdom, where the moonlight played on the sea.
“I will fight for it until the very last of my breaths. And you are the first to know what Leon is going to do with this place. So excuse me if I cannot let it go. I will kill you if I have to.”
“I know you think you will. But you’re only angry at me because you’re losing, Jessa.” Fortuna took another drag off her cigar, the smoke pouring out of her lips and nose. “You’re going to lose. This place will be his dumping ground, and in case you were unaware, it’s going to get a lot worse.”
“How?” If Jessamine had to play this game, then she would. She would ask all the questions that Fortuna wanted her to ask.
But Fortuna shook her head and sighed. “I just need a little of your blood and you’ll see.”
“My blood?”
There was a dagger in Fortuna’s hand. She didn’t know when it had shown up or if Fortuna had been hiding it in her skirts this whole time.
It flashed in the moonlight, and Jessamine didn’t even think to dodge it.
She just stood there, allowing Fortuna to swipe that blade across her cheek even as the blood welled and the pain slowly registered.
“Why?” she asked. “You are no witch.”
“I think you’ve forgotten that there aren’t only witches, Jessamine.
Even without a god, magic always wants to be used.
” Fortuna rubbed the line of blood from her cheek.
“And now you’re going to realize why you’re so dangerous.
Not because you’re connected to a god or because you have a coven that follows you.
But because you are a royal, and royal blood has so many uses. ”