Chapter Nine Simran #2
She crumpled the pages a little, then thumped the book down. The noise of the book hitting wood made Meera wince—and concealed from her the paper cut Simran managed to scythe into her own thumb, drawing blood.
“Lavinia Morgan may seem like us, Elsewhere-blooded, but she’s a different breed entirely,” said Meera.
“Her father is a government minister from an old bloodline. They have an estate in the countryside, and a house in Kensington with a garden. She was raised in the Palace. She may be brown-skinned and illegitimate, a scandal to her family name—but she has an old Isle name, and old Isle duty, and she knows what she must do. She doesn’t need the guidance our kind do. ”
“Fine. Say I trust you, work with you, learn from you: What does that actually look like? I’m a prisoner either way,” Simran said.
“Don’t think of it as imprisonment,” Meera urged.
“You must understand. Every change to an incarnate tale is a ripple, an alteration, a torn seam in a tale, a step toward the tale becoming no tale at all, a stranger to itself. There are dangers to the Isle, everywhere. And in a way you’re part of it, you see?
But you’re also part of the answer to putting it right.
” She placed a hand lightly on Simran’s shoulder, as if she had the right.
“You can be a hero. You can overcome your flaws and be the witch you must be.”
“I think you’ll find I’m meant to be a tragic villain,” said Simran, and slammed the book into Meera’s head.
“Ah!” Meera stumbled back, more from shock than pain. “What the hell? Did you think hitting me with a book would hurt me?”
“No,” Simran said mildly.
Bloodred lines began to spider across Meera’s skull from the point where the book had touched her. Her eyes widened, her fingers reaching for her own skin. Too late for that. Simran began to hum the first strains of a lullaby, and Meera’s eyelids fluttered. Her eyes rolled. She crumpled.
Awkward magic, tied with just a little blood meeting paper, but enough.
Simran felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Slowly, she turned her head and looked at the wyvern.
It was awake, watching her. It hadn’t moved, but its eyes tracked her.
She had to walk over its body to reach the window—and she wasn’t going out the door, where the ladies-in-waiting would be.
She took a step. The wyvern made a noise, its scales trembling.
It craned its neck. The collar around its throat looked painfully tight, and Simran couldn’t help but pause.
If someone had stuck something so small on Maleficium’s neck, she and Mal would have gutted them.
“Please don’t bite me,” she muttered, and, against her better judgment, leaned down. She brushed a hand against its collar and froze. The velvet was no velvet at all. It was liquid. Ink. She snatched her hand back, fronds of ink moving with her, leaving the collar frayed.
The wyvern’s eyes widened, awareness seeping into the narrow slits of its pupils. Simran shook her hand clean and went for the window.
“I’m sorry,” Simran muttered to the unconscious heap of Meera on the floor. She was, a little. “Don’t you dare eat her,” she said to the wyvern, for what good it would do.
She struggled with one stiff, creaky window latch.
The door behind her rattled. In the night-dark glass of the still-closed window she could see the reflection of the door as it creaked open. Cold, white fingers curled around the doorframe. The ladies-in-waiting had followed her after all.
She wrenched the latch. It shattered. She shoved the window wide and looked down at a wall of hedgerow, thick and ominous, in the moonlit garden. It would be a long jump down, but Simran wasn’t afraid of that. She crawled out of the window, snagging her skirt momentarily on the frame, then leapt.
She landed with a thud, dragging what felt like half a bush down with her. She struggled to her feet.
Simran found herself in a maze made of dark, shining leaves embroidered with spindly thorns. There was a strong scent of blossoming roses, but no visible flowers. She looked up at the window—heard both windows rattle—and made the decision to keep on running deeper into the tessellated hedgerows.
She turned—left, right, right, left, left, right again—she was already losing track of where she’d been. She hit a dead end, a wall of green. Turned back, and took a left instead, and heard the hollow, rustling noise of the blank-faced ladies-in-waiting, somewhere in the distance behind her.
A hand grabbed her firmly. Her stomach plummeted. She tried to fight, but she was wrenched immediately into a gap in the bushes, a body-sized hollow, where she met the knight’s deep brown eyes.
“Shh,” the knight breathed, hushing her. “You’re being chased.”
“I know I’m being chased,” snapped Simran. “Let me go so I can keep on running away, you fool!”
The knight shook her head. Simran was just about to kick her, when the knight swayed into her and then, with infuriating grace, crumpled to her knees in front of her.
The knight was still clutching Simran’s skirt in two fists.
Her head was tipped forward, baring a golden-brown neck and her dark brown curls.
Simran looked at those strong hands on her skirt and felt a shivering, embarrassing flush of heat in her stomach.
“Let go,” Simran ordered.
The knight did, slumping backward. Reflexively, Simran grabbed her to steady her. Lavinia Morgan’s skin was blisteringly hot under her hands, kindled with fever.
Simran heard footsteps, close as a kiss. She froze, her body bowed over the knight, with the knight’s neck hot against her palm.
She breathed shallowly. She could feel the knight’s warm body, smell her hair, apple-sweet like sunlight.
From the corner of her eyes, through the gap in the hedgerow, she saw the ladies-in-waiting drift by, velvet masks turned forward. They didn’t turn. In a blink, a breath, they were gone.
Simran exhaled with relief.
The knight was shaking in her grip. Simran, panicking, tilted the woman’s head up… and realized the damnable knight was laughing.
“Stop it,” whispered Simran, outraged. “This isn’t funny.”
“I’m afraid it’s a little funny,” said the knight, still laughing. “You—you can let go of me now.”
“Will you fall?”
“Probably,” the knight said lightly. “But I’m not afraid of a little dirt.”
“What about of cracking your skull?”
“I have a hard head.”
Simran clapped a firm hand against the knight’s forehead.
“Right now it feels like your hard head is on fire,” Simran said. “Are you sick?”
“No,” the knight said. “I’ve just had a lot of wine.”
Simran kneeled down until they were at eye level with one another, the ground soft beneath her feet, the maze prickling her spine.
She held the knight steady by one hand to the back of the neck.
The other, she used to trace a line from the knight’s forehead down to her feverish cheek.
The knight stopped laughing. She watched Simran, solemn, almost entranced.
“This isn’t wine,” Simran said. “I can feel the magic under your skin. What have you done?”
“Nothing we can discuss now,” the knight said hoarsely. “You’re trying to run again. You won’t be able to do it in this maze. The Queen’s women know the labyrinth too well.”
“Not well enough to find us here, apparently,” noted Simran.
“Oh, this hiding spot? This is a secret place. Sometimes the Queen comes here with her paramours when she wants privacy.”
“And how do you know that if her own women don’t?” Simran demanded.
The knight winked, then said, at the look on Simran’s face, “I’m joking, I’m joking! I’m not her type. I’ve just got a good ear for gossip. But forget about me. We were discussing your newest escape attempt.”
“Are you going to stop me?”
“Do I seem like I’m in any state to stop you?”
Under Simran’s fingertips, the knight’s skin was humming with magic, teeming like a river full of fish.
It had to be painful. Simran had no desire to be kind to her knight, no—but it was against her professional decency to let this kind of magical malfeasance stand, when she wasn’t the one who’d inflicted it.
“I can pull this magic from you,” said Simran.
The knight’s eyes widened in alarm.
“Don’t!”
But Simran had already pressed one paper-cut thumb to the knight’s cheek and tugged a thread of magic. A groan left the knight, and light flushed her skin. Simran gave a hiss.
What lay under the knight’s skin wasn’t a witch’s curse, or even a cunning folk’s blessing. It was complex, liquid light that spiraled and changed under the tug of Simran’s own magic. It was a contract with language, a trickster’s pledge, written in words instead of blood.
A fae geas.
“Don’t,” the knight repeated. She heaved a sigh of relief as Simran let the magic go. “I made a bargain.”
“With a fae? You fool.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the knight said earnestly.
“How can I not? What did you give up? What’s been demanded of you?”
“Oh, Simran,” the knight said. “I didn’t know you cared.”
Simran pushed her away. The knight landed with a thump.
“I’m not staying,” Simran said. “I can’t stay. I need to find Hari. And the answers the stranger wanted.” His name and why he couldn’t die, and godsblood, how was she going to do that?
“That makes sense. If you want to find your friend, you’re going to need to do what the stranger says. That is how bargains in tales work.”
Simran could sense a but.
“But he isn’t playing by the rules of stories,” the knight went on. “He’s killed more than you can even know. For generations, he’s been plucking incarnates up.”
“The archivist told me that already,” Simran said.
“Do you know how to kill him?”
“Do you?”
“The fae gave me the key,” said the knight, face still flushed, eyes bright. “It’s you.”
“Me? How in the hell is it me?”
“I don’t know,” the knight said, and Simran resisted the desperate urge to throttle her.
“Then you made a bad bargain,” Simran said instead.
“The fae were sure,” the knight insisted. “You can end his immortality. But you can’t kill him alone. Surely. Let me come. Let me help you.”
“Why by the Isle would I let you come with me?” Simran laughed jaggedly, still reeling from the idea that she was the answer. She’d shot the stranger, and it hadn’t been enough. What else was there? “Letting you near me is just a way of making sure I’ll die before I can get Hari back. No.”
“You need me if you want to escape. You don’t know this maze.’”
“I know how to burn a path through it.”
“Then let me come with you because I need your help,” the knight said, voice low and earnest. “Let me come because I can’t live in a world where that man is still alive.
He killed a friend of mine. You must understand how I feel.
” The knight straightened, expression sharpening. “People are getting close,” she said.
Simran heaved a deep breath. Her head was buzzing—with panic and anger, but most of all with determination.
“Fine,” she said. “Get me out of here, and you can come with me.”
She could always abandon the knight later.
The knight laboriously climbed to her feet. She still looked feverish, but the golden flush was fading from her cheeks.
“There’s an escape route used by the gardeners,” she said softly. She stepped out of the gap in the hedgerow and crooked a finger. “Follow me.”
Simran crept after her through the maze.
She could see lights in the distance drawing closer; hear shouting voices and the distant strum of lutes from the banqueting hall.
At one point she heard running; the knight drew her into a curving path to the left, and they stood there silently until the guards had run by, calling Simran’s name.
The knight led her to a cleverly concealed exit: a path at the angle of two hedges. It was only broad enough for one person to walk through. “Let me go first,” the knight whispered, and Simran gave a curt nod. Followed her.
Dark, cloying walls of green around them. In the shadows, Simran followed the knight’s breath, and warmth, and her footsteps. Her heart was pounding in her ears. She could almost taste freedom. Then the knight stopped, and swore softly under her breath.
“What is it?” Simran demanded.
“The garden is changing,” the knight said. “The Palace does this—it shifts and alters at its own whims. I just hoped it wouldn’t do it now. We’re trapped.”
The voices were getting closer. Desperation clawed up in Simran. She had no tools of magic. She was almost powerless here.
“Will you fight when they find us?” Simran asked.
“If I must.”
“Don’t lie. Of course you won’t. This is your home.”
“It doesn’t matter where my home is,” the knight said. “Your friend Hari is what matters.”
“And why does that matter to you?” Simran demanded. “Don’t tell me about vengeance for your friend or whatever lies you want to spew at me—why did you try and spare me from the witch hunters in Gore? Why do you keep helping me? Why—why—?”
“Because it’s right,” said the knight sharply. “Because you don’t deserve this and I… I want to help you while I have a choice. Soon, neither of us will.”
Their eyes met. Held. Then finally, the knight’s gaze slid away from her. A look of relief suddenly graced her face.
“The gardens have changed,” she breathed.
“I know that,” said Simran.
“No. Look.”
Behind them, the maze had withered. In its place lay a hollow in the soil—a door leading down into the darkness.
Simran didn’t wait, and didn’t question. The knight strode into the tunnel, and Simran dived in after. She paused, as the darkness swallowed her. A twist of magic, her hands to soil, and the way closed behind them.