Tabitha
I come back to myself in Luka’s arms, and I know, with a certainty that arrives whole and quiet like a key turning, exactly how I’ve been getting this wrong.
It’s not a spell. Valerian’s right, there’s no rite in the book, no clever working, no artifact. I’ve been waiting for one of them to find the magic words that make Tabeitha leave, and there aren’t any, because that was never the problem.
The problem is me.
I’ve spent this entire nightmare fighting her the same way, over and over, and losing ground every time.
I fight her for the wheel. I claw for control of a body I think of, deep down, as half hers.
Because that’s the story I’ve been told and the story I’ve believed since Valerian first explained it in that library months ago: I carry Tabeitha’s soul, I’m the vessel, the power is hers, the throne is hers, the realm is hers, and I’m the poor cow born holding it in trust. Every time she comes forward, I fight her like a tenant fighting the landlord for the keys to a flat I’ve always known, deep down, isn’t really mine.
And you can’t win a fight when you’ve already conceded the ground it’s fought on.
The Oracle told me. Over and over. You keep reaching for the throne like a woman borrowing a coat she means to give back.
Stop asking the ghost for permission to be what you already are.
And I nodded and called it a fortune cookie because I wasn’t ready to hear that the ghost’s claim on all of this was one I’d been agreeing with the whole time.
“Tabby?” Luka pulls back to look at me, wary of the sudden stillness. “Talk to me. Is it you?”
“It’s me.” I wipe my face. My hands are shaking, but my head, for the first time in this whole book, is clear. “Luka, it’s me, and I’ve been an idiot.”
“You’ve been possessed,” Azaan says. “Slightly different.”
“No, listen.” I get up. My legs hold, because they always hold, and I hold onto that now not as a comfort but as evidence.
“You told me on that ridge. I always get up. That’s mine.
Not Tabeitha’s. She ruled realms, her realm fell, she died, and she’s been a bitter fragment ever since, and in all this time she has never once done the thing I do every single time.
Get up. Come back. Keep going.” I turn to Valerian.
“You keep telling me the realm won’t recognise me because I won’t recognise myself.
And I thought you meant I lacked confidence.
Give myself a pep talk, throw a coronation, sit on the chair and shout mine.
” I laugh, and it comes out cracked. “That’s not it, is it. That’s not what you meant at all.”
Valerian’s grey face has gone very still, watching me, and there’s something dawning in his blue eyes that looks almost like hope.
“Tell me what I meant,” he says softly. A test. Or a prayer.
“You meant I keep thinking I’m the vessel.
” The words come faster now, sure. “I keep thinking the power is hers and the throne is hers and I’m just carrying them for her, and so every time I stand up to her, I’m standing on her ground, asking her permission, fighting her for the keys to a place I’ve decided in advance belongs to her.
” I press my hand to my own chest, over my own heart, my own five heartbeats and theirs.
“But it’s not her body. It’s mine. Grown from my blood.
It’s not her fire. It answers to me, only me, always has.
And the throne, the realm, the crown, they’re not hers either.
She lost them. Three hundred years ago. They’re not a coat I’m minding for her until she’s whole enough to take them back. ”
“They’re yours,” Valerian breathes.
“They’re mine.” And saying it, out loud, standing up, meaning it, I feel something enormous shift in me, a foundation moving, and deep in the dark of me I feel Tabeitha flinch, actually flinch, for the first time not gloating, because she’s felt it too.
“She’s not the landlord. She’s a squatter.
And you can’t fight a squatter for the keys, because the second you fight her for them, you’ve agreed the flat might be hers.
You don’t fight a squatter.” I meet his eyes.
“You evict her. Because it was always your name on the door.”
The spell room is dead silent.
And then the air by the cold hearth shivers, and she’s there, the Oracle, pale and drifting, in my Fortress where no pond has any business being. For once she’s smiling, and it’s not cryptic at all.
“There she is,” the Oracle says. “The Queen of Sanguisca. It only took you dying three times to hear me.”
“I’m a slow learner,” I say. “Bookish. All theory, no practice.”
“You have the practice now.” She glides closer, and the men tense.
I lift a hand and still them, because I understand at last that she was never the enemy, she’s been trying to hand me the one weapon that works since the very first pond.
“You cannot destroy Tabeitha with magic, little Queen. Valerian is right. Her soul and yours have grown together at the root. But you were never meant to destroy her.” Her pale eyes hold mine.
“You were meant to claim what she thinks is hers. All of it. The body. The fire. The throne. When you take the throne fully, as yourself, not as her vessel, there is no longer any ground in you for her to stand on. Her power stays, because her power became yours generations ago. But her, the fragment, the ghost, the claim, it has nowhere left to live. And it goes out. Like a fire with no fuel.”
“So I claim the throne,” I say. “Properly. As me.”
“As you. Deeper. Innate. No thinking. No permission.” She’s already fading, her work at last done.
“But understand the cost of the timing, Queen. To claim the throne you must go to it whole and unafraid, and Mordecai will come for you the moment you do, because a claimed Queen is the one thing that can end his hope of his ghost forever. And the Sorcerers are at your border. The scout has reported. They come within days.” Her voice is going now, thinning into the air.
“You wanted the war. Here it is. All of it. At once. Claim your throne, evict your ghost, end your grieving demon, and turn a world’s army back from your gates.
There is no more slow way. There never was. ”
And she’s gone.
I look round at the four of them. Luka, who hauled me home up a road no magic could close. Azaan, who told me I matter on a burning ridge. Gavriel, whose shield’s been stuck to my soul through three deaths. Valerian, grey and spent and looking at me like the sun’s come up.
“Right,” I say, and I feel my HellCat stir, warm and certain and mine. “No more slow way. Let’s go claim my throne. And then let’s win a war.”
“On foot?” Azaan asks, deadpan, and I love him for it.
“On foot,” I say. “Obviously. But this time, we’re going home to do it. To the Palace. To the chair I’ve been too scared to sit on.” I roll my shoulders, and for the first time the leather doesn’t feel like a costume. It feels like armour. It feels like mine. “Let’s go and be the Queen.”