Chapter 41 Toran
Toran
Nes was the Witch.
Toran watched her flail in the shallow water.
He watched her without emotion. Which, of course, was just another lie. His insides were tangled, so knotted with various threads of feeling, they’d come together to form a thick blanket that smothered it all.
He’d lied to her earlier. When he said he could love her, those had been the words she needed to hear to trust him again.
The only truth to come from his lips as he stood beside her in that Ditch gambling den had been how he didn’t want to lose her.
Because if he lost her, then he’d have once again failed his king.
I won’t let you drown.
He’d once made her that promise. And he’d kept it. He made no such promise today.
He knew she couldn’t swim. But, watching her now, he saw it was more than that.
She was fighting the water. Fighting and losing fast. Every time she reached for the surface, she was tugged back down from her middle. Her mouth opened, and her silent screams filled the pool.
He’d been suspicious of Nes from day one. From the moment he caught her eye in the Drowning Square, saw the word forming on her soundless lips. Fire. Seconds before the platform exploded.
And then came the explanation that she could smell magic. It was an explanation that served him well. So well, he let it dampen his suspicions. Never mind he’d never heard of such a connection to magic.
His suspicions had reared up again out in that rowboat. But even then, even seeing her in the ocean, he’d let the promise he made rise higher than his hunch. Let his growing feelings overcome sense.
It wasn’t until he killed Fell—until he saw the wound on her neck heal before his eyes—that he realized how foolish he’d been to ignore his intuition.
Still, he’d wanted confirmation. He’d gone back through the books of prison records until he’d found the entry on Nes’s father.
He’d been arrested for deserting the King’s Guard four years ago.
But he’d deserted the Guard eight years before he’d been caught.
And then, in a margin note, Toran had found what he’d been looking for.
Six years before deserting the Guard, Nes’s father had put in a request for family leave for the birth of his daughter.
Six years prior, not seven. The math didn’t lie.
Nes was eighteen years old. The exact age the current Witch should be.
Nes wasn’t his ally or his friend. She wasn’t anything more than the Witch. The magic inside her belonged to the Goddess, and without the Goddess’s rightful hand to guide it, the magic in Nes would do despicable things.
It was his mission to capture her. He’d promised himself, promised the King, he wouldn’t fail another mission long before he’d made any sort of deal with her.
What was it she’d said to him that day on the docks?
Deals can be broken, but promises are meant to be kept.
He’d had to choose a side. In the end, it was really no choice at all.
He looked up from the water to the opposite side of the pool. He knew she’d be there, waiting.
Loriana’s ghost stood in that same white nightgown, the solemn expression on her translucent face marred by the jagged edges of the cavern wall behind her. Palm up, she raised her hand, gesturing to where Nes drowned in shallow water.
He wanted to shout to her. Proclaim that he had done it—done what she’d come to Gadore for, he’d found the Witch. That he had done all of this for her.
Loriana’s eyes were swallowed by the dark of the rock, but her hand remained clear. He understood. This wasn’t over yet.
Toran bent down to the lip of the pool. He plunged a hand into the water and, grabbing Nes by the arm, yanked her up and over the edge. She lay panting on the stone, her blue eyes wide and unseeing, the cut in her stomach still spilling blood.
Suri broke free from Genna’s grasp and crouched beside Nes. She whispered something to her friend, rubbing her hands over Nes’s quaking limbs. She unwound the scarf tying back her hair and passed it to Nes, who pressed the piece of cloth to her wound.
Suri’s actions, he realized, held no slip of shock. She’d already known.
Toran stared down at Nes’s vulnerable form. He felt nothing. Nothing.
He shifted his gaze back to the King. “This, Your Majesty,” he said, gesturing to Nes, “is the true Witch.”
“No.”
The word made him balk. Like he’d been slapped in the face, he drew back.
Suri stood beside Nes, who still lay on the floor, shivering. Suri lifted her chin, her dark brows furrowing in the flickering light, determination set in her jaw.
She pointed to Nes. “She is not the Witch,” Suri said. Her eyes moved to meet Toran’s, her defiance as heavy as a boulder. “I am.”
Impossible.
Toran addressed the King but didn’t take his eyes off Suri. “She’s lying. She’s not the Witch.”
There was only one Witch.
But Suri didn’t back down. She rose up, her lips twitching with a grim smile. She held up her right arm. “If you’re so sure, then how do you explain this?”
Around the room, eyes latched on to Suri’s arm.
She held them prisoner there as she pushed up her sleeve to expose the skin underneath—skin that flashed with colors as vibrant as a field of wildflowers.
Red, then blue, then green. Violet and pink and yellow.
Suri’s arm retained its shape, but the skin stretched over her bones and muscles changed to every color of the rainbow before settling back into her usual brown.
Toran hadn’t given Suri enough credit. The girl was clever.
All of Gadore knew the King blamed the Witch for the odd color of his eldest son’s hair.
Kohen had been born with locks of deepest black and had been found seven years later with hair of the purest white.
A change that had come from magic. And now Suri was showing the King exactly what he wanted to find—a girl who could change color on a whim.
“I am the Witch,” Suri repeated, lowering her arm and letting her sleeve fall back into place. “I suggest you arrest me now. Wait any longer, and I promise I won’t go quietly.”
“You won’t go at all.”
The voice was a rasp, every vowel full of hastened breath, every consonant buzzing.
Nes was on her knees, one arm wrapped around her middle. Blood stained her fingers like rivers on a map, filling in lines, breaking up the land. Her hair was plastered to her face and her clothes clung to her form. She tugged a foot out from under her and slowly pushed to her feet.
“No one else is going to die for me,” Nes announced. She turned to face Suri. “Especially not my friend.”
“Captain Roada,” King Harkett said.
Toran straightened, but his eyes did not leave Nes.
“There cannot be two Witches. Unless you can prove otherwise, I am inclined to believe the one with the flashing arm is the true Witch.”
Toran opened his mouth, but Nes spoke first.
“If you want the true Witch,” she said, “then you know not to ask for proof.”
The King leaned forward. “You speak like you know the burden of magic,” he said.
“I’ll give you proof,” Nes murmured, too low for anyone but Toran to hear. She’d stopped shaking, her hands forming fists at her sides. “But you won’t like it.”
King Harkett sat back, his shoulders filling the width of the chair. “I will not stop you should you choose to condemn yourself.”
Nes nodded once, a firm, resigned movement.
With practiced ease, she began stripping her wet clothes from her body.
Layer after layer fell to the floor. Fabric peeled away from skin—ocean losing contact with the Witch—until she stood before them all, before the King of Orlonea, in nothing but her underwear.
Despite everything, Toran felt heat rise as flashbacks to the night they’d spent together popped to the front of his mind. But those memories vanished the second Nes closed her eyes. Because when her pupils disappeared behind her eyelids, the ground began to shake.
Toran’s gaze flew to his feet. But he saw nothing. No movement. No tilt or shift of the ground to reflect what his body felt. Around him, Quint and Genna looked just as confused. Damari looked like the young girl she was, terrified of something out of her control. And Suri…
Suri was smiling. Not just smiling—the girl was jubilant at the forthcoming display of Nes’s power. His stomach churned at the sight.
Toran looked over to Loriana, hoping she would somehow have the answers he sought.
She still stood on the opposite side of the pool, observing all, but her frame became muddied.
Her form, already no more than a wisp in this world, turned blurry, her features blending together like snow melting into mud. Something was wrong.
A wave hit Toran from behind. He fell to his knees, hands bracing his impact. That power hit Loriana, and the ghost of his love vanished.
“No!”
But he was too late. Whatever magic Nes had released seemed to have stripped Loriana of her hold on the living world.
Toran clenched his hand into a fist, fingernails digging into his palm. He pressed his knuckles to the shaking dirt and rose to his feet again.
And then the ground truly cracked, split open like a chasm, and he could see it. See the depth of it, see the dark and the jagged edges yawning apart like the world’s largest set of crooked fangs.
This, he realized, was what all those soldiers must have seen that day in the Disputed Land twelve years ago. The jaws of death come to swallow them whole.
Try to leash me, and you’ll find I bite.
The shaking stopped. The ground was solid, and when Toran took a step forward, it remained so. But it was not a second before he was thrown from his feet, something large crashing into him.
He blinked, his whole body unsteady, and stared at the thing surging to life over him. He rolled out from under it, pulling himself up into a sitting position.
A tree. A full-grown oak had sprouted from between the ground’s fangs. In front of Nes, its trunk expanded. Its branches stretched and grew with wild abandon. One shot toward him, and he rolled out of the way.
There was a gasp behind him, and he whirled at the sound.
Genna was on the ground, blood streaking from a cut on her side, and on the branch next to her, a long slash of dark red.
But before he could react, another gasp and a grunt.
His heart seized. He knew that pain. Had heard it thousands of times during training.
Through a thicket of branches, he caught sight of Quint on the ground, his friend’s face scrunched with an agony Toran had never seen before. He rushed forward, his sword out, slicing through the growing wood until he was at Quint’s side.
A tree branch stuck through Quint’s right shoulder. It pierced his flesh and pushed through muscle to clear the other side, where it continued to stretch and grow. Beneath his jacket, blood drenched Quint’s shirt, staining it crimson.
Toran didn’t think. He raised Cavallis and brought the sword down on the branch. It took several swings before metal sliced through wood and severed the branch from the tree. He watched in horror as the branch stuck in Quint continued to grow, continued to lengthen.
He rolled Quint onto his side and chopped off the end poking through his back. It did no good. What was left inside his friend kept growing.
“You can’t stop it,” Quint said through clenched teeth. His breaths were getting shorter. Quint reached inside the satchel at his hip and pulled out something long and silver. The siren hair fluttered as if caught on an invisible wind.
Stretching his hands in his leather gloves, Toran took it. He couldn’t stop the magic. But he might be able to stop her.
He clasped Quint’s hand. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “Just stay awake.”
“Go,” Quint urged.
So he did. Leaping over and ducking under expanding branches, a few smaller ones knocking him, he crossed the room to Nes.
Her eyes were still closed, her body eerily still compared to the commotion surrounding her.
The base of the tree sat at her feet, the trunk rising from her back.
He blinked. It was no exaggeration. Roots spurted from the cracked rock beneath their feet, but there were others.
Other tangles of roots fueling the ever-growing tree that swelled directly out of the smooth skin on Nes’s bare back.
He was going to be sick.
Magic grew on trees. But this, this was a tree growing out of magic. Too strong and too fast for any of them to stop it.
Something hit him on the head, and he glanced up.
The tree had hit the ceiling, but it hadn’t stopped.
Branches nicked bits of rock away, wood scraping at stone.
If he didn’t stop her, this would never end.
The tree would keep growing. It would break through rock, shatter the ceiling to reach the world above, and they’d all be buried alive.
All except Nes. Who could only die if she drowned.
He wasn’t going to let any of them die. This would not be like Aeos.
He was the chosen Crown. The one who always found a way to get back up. The one the King trusted. Had always trusted. The one who could capture the Witch.
Siren hair in hand, Toran bent down and wrapped his arms around Nes.