Chapter 36
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
EMBER
Strength in covens, you say? Why then, have I always found, the easiest way to get people to join me is by not inviting them?
— Jaxan D’Oron, Echelon to the
School of Dark Magic
Iawoke in a prison cell, cold and damp, but I was so bone tired from the sedative and the Ring of Greatest Fear that I didn’t have the capacity to be bothered by it.
Prison was a place to nap, which is what I did, in and out for most of my first day in that cell.
If I awoke at all, it was only in the tilting, surreal state that exists between wakefulness and dreaming, and when I fell back asleep, I slept deeply, any brief moments of consciousness utterly undisturbed by my propensity for wayward daydreams.
The cell was spacious, and though it was cold, I wasn’t freezing. I was in Leland’s sweatshirt, the silver foil blanket draped around me.
A crusty slice of bread was slid under the narrow slot at the base of the bars to my cell. I left it there, next to the first slice of bread I still hadn’t touched. Had I been here eight hours? For two meals? The small window high on the wall showed only darkness, so . . . maybe it had been longer.
Through the thick walls of stone, I heard a shovel scrape the floor of the cell beside me.
Moments later, a pungent smell infiltrated my nostrils.
I peeled a sharp stick of hay from my cheek and scooted back from the rough mound I’d slept on, now worried about what I’d slept on. But the straw was dry and clean.
Prison hadn’t come up in conversation when Leland had Healed me in the temple.
In the state he’d found me in, he wouldn’t have mentioned it.
I suppose consequences were expected, and a prison sentence was no worse than waking up in the Allwitch temple, shattered, unsure if my brain would ever recover from being smashed to muddled pulp.
Today though, the heaviness was in my body more than in my soul. I gazed out at the dark hallway. And felt . . . maybe not happy, but I was here, and I was trying to be.
Hours passed, and my mind never wandered to Gray.
I was certain I was officially done with him.
I tried not to think about Leland. Sometimes, I thought of Helen, and for the first time since I was old enough to understand she’d left, no nauseating feeling gnawed at me, and no inner voice told me to block it out by thinking about something else.
Skye had been right about that too. She’d wanted me to find out why Helen left.
And now that I knew she thought she was doing it for the realm, my heart felt less like a hole and more like something old and nicked.
With a little attention, maybe one day it could be good again.
I ate the hard bread and watched the jailer make his rounds. He had the same vacant expression I assumed I’d once had. Dead and distant eyes. A gloomy, dark-blue aura. But unlike me, he had deteriorated. If I asked him to toss me the keys, I imagined he’d numbly keep walking as if he hadn’t heard.
I marinated on the problems in Everden, and there were many of them.
Allwitches exiled. Aspirants deteriorated to nothing more than machine labor, forced to work for the Council.
Dark Witches were a subclass. Women were dying in childbirth.
I’d let them convince me I was the problem that needed to be fixed, but the threat was never me or my half witchness.
The threat was what the realm was already willing to put up with.
I’d just been too busy fighting to breathe to see it.
By the light of the small window, I guessed it was the following day when a marshal arrived outside my cell.
He unbolted the heavy iron door, instructing me to follow.
I tried to get information from him as we went down three sets of narrow stairs.
Was I free to go? He didn’t say. Were my friends okay?
No answer. I knew better than to ask about Dashell, his body having been relocated to the desert to look like a coincidence I shouldn’t know about.
I was marched through the long, marble halls, busying myself with the task of straightening my appearance to keep me upright.
Fixing my matted hair and patting down my curtain bangs, which were sticking straight up.
There wasn’t much I could do to salvage my outfit, but I ran a hand down my face and massaged out the straw-shaped depressions and hard lines wrinkled into my skin, until, at last, we reached Jaxan’s office.
He was at his desk chair with his arms folded squarely over his chest, swiveling his back to the gigantic windows illuminating his decadent two-story office.
“Door,” he said to his staff.
It was shut at once, secluding me with Jaxan’s smug smile and his thousands of bottles of oozing dark magic.
Because I knew Jaxan wanted me in Everden bad enough to sacrifice the Everblade for it, and because I was so worn out from all I’d been put through in the last forty-eight hours, I wasn’t particularly concerned about being civil.
I was irritable, and there was strength in it.
Like the bitter edge of a hangover, I trudged forward, uncaring if I was silent or smart or docile.
“Have I been imprisoned long enough for you to convince the Council you didn’t set me up to do this?” I asked, approaching the vacant chair across from him.
“Don’t sit,” he said, frowning at my stained and disheveled attire, the prospect of it contaminating his expensive, antique furnishings. Part of me wanted to sit out of spite, but then he stood.
While Jaxan methodically adjusted his shirt cuffs underneath the sleeves of his suit jacket, I narrowed my eyes at a shelf of dark magic, nearly choking trying to picture myself drinking it and becoming a Dark Witch.
“Reconsidering?” he asked with an intrigued expression, then fastened the button of his navy jacket with aggravating slowness.
I had to laugh. After what he’d put me through in the catacombs?
“No.” My eyes flicked away from his collection of dark, swirling liquid.
“I’m still not interested.” Though I did wonder if Leland knew something I didn’t, if there was more to why he said I should be a Dark Witch on the night before I thought I lost him.
“Besides,” I went on, gesturing to Jaxan’s door and the trial room beyond it, the place where they’d decided I should attend the Creation Academy Unselected until I proved I wasn’t a threat.
“I’m on probation. No spellcasting until I’m fit for it. ”
“For now,” Jaxan said, and his pale lips twitched like he knew something. “The Council will meet to decide your fate shortly. After you give your statement about your search for the Aspirants leading you to Rye Cackrin and the Allwitch temple, and how you were held hostage by him there.”
“Rye Cackrin held me hostage in the catacombs,” I said angrily, because I suspected Jaxan sent me there, knowing full well I wouldn’t find Leland, as much as he knew I would never fight my way out.
Then it dawned on me. That had been his plan.
He wanted me to frame Rye for being the Shadowrealm, so Helen wouldn’t get in trouble for it.
“You want me to frame him,” I said, about to tell him I wouldn’t when a Shadowcurrent dove into my mouth.
My lips stretched painfully wide to accommodate the brutal width of black shadows stuffing my throat, my mouth unable to move as it was tightly packed with what felt like a hefty bundle of dried, stiff cloths.
I coughed from the back of my throat to try to push the shadows out, but Jaxan forced them back down.
He knew the truth of what happened in the temple.
I knew he did, because of Leland’s Death Bond, his oath to report to him.
But it was clear the story Jaxan wanted me to tell was a different one.
“You see,” he explained, “your mother bought you eight months in the human realm by trading me her votes. That makes her seat on the Council useful to me. I intend to keep her there until her usefulness ceases.”
I tried to breathe calmly through my nose, but as time passed, panic increased. His shadows barricaded the passage to my lungs, causing a tight feeling in my face. I was sure I was turning purple.
“Yes, I know,” he drawled. “You want justice. Justice for how Helen’s treated you. Justice for the Aspirants. But justice was meted when her beloved partner was killed, was it not? Could any other justice possibly be more of a lesson to her?”
The uncomfortable sensation of blood vessels bursting in my eyes prevented me from answering.
“You were taken hostage in the Allwitch temple by Rye Cackrin’s coven of Dark Witches,” he continued, adding as an aside. “It might surprise you to know they were in on it — Helen contracted them for Shadowcover.”
I endured a pain that felt like I was going to explode as Jaxan cruelly admired the way my face broke out in sweat.
“You found everyone in the temple and used your gift to get them out.”
He reeled in his shadows like he was hauling in a heavy rope, tugging them out of my open mouth, tendril by tendril. My chapped lips collapsed like a stretched rubber band.
I rushed to wrap my hands around the column of my throat as I recovered, gasping.
“Cackrin. Temple. Gift. Understand?”
Saliva flooded back to my mouth, and after letting it accumulate, I spat a dollop’s worth on the polished diamond pattern floor, narrowly missing his well-polished shoes.
“No,” I said voicelessly, then paused to swallow. I wiped the corner of my mouth and waited for my voice to return.
A reserve of shadows flickered from the dark undersides of Jaxan’s long fingernails as he readied to suffocate me again, and though I wasn’t sure I’d recovered enough to survive a second round of his Shadowcurrent, my face set into a cool expression.
I was in no rush to give Jaxan obedience, not unless he offered me something.
And I’d been holding something in mind that I wanted.