Chapter 38 Nes
Nes
Magic was unbeatable. Magic was unpredictable. Magic was uncontrollable.
These were the facts Nes had recited her entire life.
They had been her mantra as she trekked out to the woods and held herself in the freezing cold of the river’s edge.
They were the reminders she held close whenever she wished someone dead and her magic jumped at the chance to please her.
They were how she’d survived undiscovered all these years.
But this girl, Damari—who was no older than Nes herself—had defied the rules. No, she hadn’t just defied the rules.
She’d rewritten them.
Corpses filled the dumpstreet. Some men, some women, a few small enough to be children. Together they stood, ready to fight. And in their center was Damari.
Damari, who controlled these corpses with magic, who controlled magic with nothing more than a few well-placed lines on skin.
Nes had never wanted to wring someone’s neck as much as she did now.
Envy curled like an orange peel inside her, coiling tighter and tighter the more she took in this false Witch. The more she saw how Damari controlled the uncontrollable. She wanted to throw herself on top of the girl and demand she tell her how she did it. How she’d learned to control magic.
Nes had always known what she did was not control. It wasn’t even close. What she did to her magic was like putting a stopper on a bottle of sparkling wine and hoping it didn’t pop. But hope never changed the fact that, in time, it always did.
There was no time to question Damari. Corpses were everywhere, all of their attention directed at Nes, Toran, and the three who’d followed her out here.
She could feel her magic stretching and spreading inside her. Roots taking hold, readying to sprout.
She swallowed, only saliva coating her throat.
She’d already finished her flask. Even if she had another full one, it wouldn’t matter.
It wasn’t enough anymore. It had been too long since she’d relinquished some of her magic.
Too long, and now the magic had gathered its strength, feeding on her emotions these past few weeks, and had built an army inside to strike everyone down.
She bit her lip. A little longer. She just had to hold it back a little longer. Help Toran capture Damari, and then she would be free to live in peace. She could let them think Damari was the Witch. The girl had killed so many men. She could let them take Damari in her stead.
She had to. For her father, who hadn’t seen a sunrise in four years. Her father, who had never deserved his sentence, who’d only wanted to protect his daughter.
It was a simple exchange. Hand Damari over as the Witch, and her father walked free. She walked free. Then the two of them should be beyond the Walled Prison before dawn. Gone before Damari was drowned. Should be gone—except, there was still Toran.
The Nes of a month ago would have left Gadore without a second thought.
Left Phineas, left Mikaud, left Suri. But she wasn’t the same girl as that Nes.
She now knew she valued a life filled with love far more than a life based solely on survival.
And as much of a risk as it would be, maybe it would be worth it to stay with Toran.
She snatched her daggers from each of her boots, tossing one back to Suri before stepping forward and squaring her shoulders. The handle was sticky in her palm, dried blood from the first corpse coating her hand.
The dagger wouldn’t help her much in this fight. It wasn’t long enough to chop off limbs or pierce the heart. But she didn’t trust herself to fight with any other weapon. She barely trusted herself to fight at all with her magic twisting and twining around her organs.
“This is the Witch?” Genna asked, her sword already removed from its sheath. Behind her, Quint had done the same, steel gleaming even in the low light.
Damari pinched her lips, confusion and dirt in every crinkle of skin. Damari wasn’t the Witch, but only she and Nes knew that.
Toran signaled for them to spread out. Nes took three careful steps to her right while Suri took two to her left and Toran one forward so the five of them were a little more than two arms’ lengths apart. Damari would have to go through one of them if she wanted to escape.
Genna glowered at Damari. “He tried to drown me because of you. You’re the reason I nearly died.”
“She’s the reason hundreds of innocent girls have died,” Suri whispered, but her eyes weren’t on Damari.
They were on Nes. Under her breath, Suri began listing names.
“Marnie Sorphel. Tatiana Zar.” The names of the girls most recently drowned as the Witch.
“Harriel Vecenta. Edin Brandt. Nasha Forin.”
Suri stopped, but Nes kept going in her head. She knew every name. There were hundreds of them. Hundreds of lives she’d allowed to be claimed so she could live.
She felt the guilt. Felt it every damned day. But her need for survival was stronger. She didn’t believe she’d been born this way just to be killed. It was selfish. But she would let one more girl die in her place. For her father. For Toran. For herself.
The dumpstreet was still. And then the bodies came alive with movement.
The corpses overtook them in seconds. Spread out as they were, they’d made it only too easy for the corpses to fill in the gaps between them.
The bodies’ torsos twisted at unnatural angles—spines bent and skin tinted gray bunched—so their limbs could lacerate everything they touched.
Two corpses found her, the first’s jagged fingernails digging into her thigh while another at her back sank its teeth through her shirt and into the flesh at her shoulder.
Nes exhaled through gritted teeth and slammed her dagger as hard as she could down through the skull of the corpse in front of her before reaching behind her, grabbing hold of the second corpse and tossing it over her shoulder.
It collided with the first, both crumpling in a heap of rotting limbs at her feet.
She retrieved her dagger before they could detangle themselves and start their attack anew.
Nes straightened. The dumpstreet was filled with the sounds of tearing and clawing and spitting and bleeding.
All she could see was the furious attack of the corpses.
There was no difference between the living and the dead.
No difference in the ferocity with which they fought.
The only difference Nes could make out was the smell.
Magic wafted from the corpses like smoke from a fire.
In the cramped space, she couldn’t find Toran or Suri. The living were lost, and if she didn’t start pulling hearts, soon they’d all be among the dead.
She whirled and sliced at anything and everything that came near her. She tried to aim for the chest, to drag her dagger down far enough to open the chest cavity, but the corpses were fast. Too fast. It was all she could do to keep their filthy, decaying limbs off her.
There were too many of them. She knew this. Had known it the moment she’d barged into the dumpstreet and saw the dead rise like fish to a river’s surface. Six to one. And that wasn’t even counting Damari. They wouldn’t win this. Not unless…
Her magic practically purred at the thought. Rumbling low vibrations shook her every bone. She held her jaw tight to keep her teeth from chattering and kept slashing.
She couldn’t let go. Not here, not with her power broiling inside. The results would be disastrous. She’d take out the dead, but at the cost of all the living in her blast radius, and that included everyone inside the Siren’s Hair.
Something hard and slick sank into her injured shoulder, piercing skin anew.
She cried out, turning on her attacker. Flesh tore, and she growled.
Between a corpse’s teeth was a bloody chunk of her shoulder.
Blood pooled briefly in the wound before muscle, sinew, and skin sprouted back, pushing the blood aside.
Her dagger found the corpse’s throat and her hand its chest, her fingers curling around its dead heart. She wrenched the thing out and squeezed it until it burst, congealed blood splattering her face. The corpse fell, only for three more to take its place.
They couldn’t win.
In the distance, something clanged, low and loud. The chaos faded, and she focused on the sound clawing toward her. The firm reverberations of its low pitch. She recognized it.
The clocktower chiming the hour. It rang out once. Then twice.
An idea pealed through her, as loud and insistent as the clocktower continuing to chime. Maybe they had a chance after all. Maybe they could win. If they moved fast enough.
“Back inside!” she yelled. She seized her dagger from the corpse’s throat. “Everyone, get back inside now!”
No one listened to her. No one turned from the fight.
Damn it. Did they want to die?
She shook herself. They didn’t know. None of the guards knew the Ditch as she did. And Suri, she’d been here only a few months. She wasn’t like Nes—Suri actually slept most nights. So none of them could know.
Like fall leaves in the wind, Nes caught a whip of red hair to her left.
She grabbed Genna’s shoulder, ducking under the sword that swung her way.
Genna’s eyes widened when she saw who it was, an apology tipping over the edge of her mouth.
But Nes shoved Genna back toward the kitchen door.
And then Suri was there, too, her breaths quick, her arm around Genna’s back.
“Get inside!” Nes shouted to them.
Quint was easiest to spot. Despite the plethora of bodies, he stood a good head taller than the rest. She dodged and ducked, elbowing corpses as she pushed her way to him.
She opened her mouth to tell him to go back inside, but what came out was “Where’s Toran?”
Because she hadn’t been able to find him. Not yet. And if she couldn’t…
Quint pointed off to his right, and she turned. There, in a sea of dead, was Toran.
He moved like nothing she’d ever seen. He was a tree, his branches cutting every which way, and the corpses attacking him were the wind.
They blew hard, but they couldn’t touch him, every attack hitting nothing but empty space.
She remembered watching him fight in the brawlhouse.
That had been nothing compared to this. This was why he was the Crown.
This was why everyone thought he’d win the duel.
He didn’t just win a fight. He became the fight. And he could not be conquered.
Glancing back at Quint, she pointed to the building. “Inside!”
Then she was shoving her way through a maze of the dead to Toran.
He spotted her immediately, taking her hand and pulling her to him. Her cheek hit his chest, and she caught the rapid thump thump thump of his heart before he severed a corpse in two. As the body fell, he looked down at her, a frown gathering on his brow.
“We have to get inside,” she yelled, answering his unspoken question. Time was running out. They’d been lucky so far, but that luck wouldn’t last.
Toran nodded. “Stay behind me.”
He cut a path through the corpses to the door, her hand at his back as they moved.
Arms, sliced off at the shoulder, and legs, cut from torsos at the thigh, dropped into piles on either side of her.
Still, the corpses pushed in on them. But Toran did not give them a speck of space from the front, and with one hand still at his back, she shoved the other through chest cavity after chest cavity that appeared behind them, leaving hearts to pile up with the limbs he severed.
What was only a couple of seconds felt like minutes as they reached the kitchen door together. Everyone was inside, Quint guarding the opening. The soft lights of the kitchen illuminated the wrecks that they were—dirt and blood and death coating them as if the sky had rained with it.
Toran stood in the open doorway, a hand out to her. She didn’t take it.
“Stay inside,” she told him.
Then she turned her back on him, faced the mass of corpses. Toran shouted her name as the dead came between them. He tried fighting his way back to her, the slick swish of his blade against flesh a sound she couldn’t have tuned out if she tried. But she didn’t need him.
These corpses were moving because of magic. Magic Damari was controlling. Magic Damari had stolen. She didn’t have to steal it as Damari did. Inside or out, magic was a part of her. And if she summoned it, it would gladly heed her call.
The magic was the only living thing among the dead.
It beat behind its prison of decaying flesh like fists on bars.
She felt it as surely as she felt her own heartbeat in her chest. Her every sense focused on it as if she were a scope and it that one thing off in the distance she simply had to get a glimpse of.
She heard the corpses still. Nes closed her eyes and took a deep breath in.
No breath rushed her lungs. Only magic. The air was clogged with it—maple dressed with decay, pine sprinkled with bone dust, lemon sewn through rotting skin.
It filled her every pore, snuck in every crevice.
The rush of it was like a blizzard. Frigid and fierce and forceful.
A blizzard caught in a bottle, her body nothing but glass holding it in.
She stood against it. She would not break.
She was not a husk. She was a prison. And she would lock up all the magic.
She could hold out against its storm.
One by one, the corpses in the dumpstreet fell. One by one, they crumpled as she sucked the magic from them, drawing it into herself. The bodies dropped until there was only one left standing.
She opened her eyes.
Damari stood, dark eyes wide with shock. Or maybe it was fear.
The storm inside Nes roared with delight. She thrust a hand out and snatched Damari by the neck, her fingers wrapping around, pressing down on the girl’s throat. Damari made a choking sound, her hands clawing at Nes’s arm. But the girl couldn’t break her hold.
Nes squeezed, cutting off her airway. She lifted her, just enough for Damari’s toes to skim the ground, and slammed her head against the wall.
Stone met skull with a harsh thud. Nes pulled Damari back, checking the wound before throwing her to Toran and shoving them all back under the safety of the doorway.
Nes had just crossed the threshold when the rumbling began. She turned in time to see the large metal plow charge past, clearing the dumpstreet and taking the bodies away. When it was gone, all that was left were the bloodstains.