CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE #2
And held it. Her heart lifted. He was hesitating.
But hesitating would only make things worse for both of them.
“Go on,” she whispered, quiet as she could. “I trust you.”
He laid his hand upon her chest. Felt her hammering heart. “I hold you to your oath as a spellscribe.” He paused. “You may do no harm to her Ladyship in this house, so long as you live.”
There was no outward sign of the curse, but Anya felt the magic lay upon her like an itch.
Fuck. That did complicate things a bit, but, fortunately, she had spent the past two weeks arguing the finer points of said oath with David, Sabina, and Bertrand – whose opinions on what constituted harm, having had his right hand crushed by scribes, were appreciatively nuanced. Nothing had changed.
“Very gallant of you, my sweet,” Mira cooed. “Not very interesting, though, is it?”
With barely suppressed alarm, he turned to her. “My lady?”
“You want to keep him? Impress me.”
Already, Anya had lost what fragile footing she’d gained. “I dare say, there’s really no need for all this, Your Ladyship. I’ve only come to deliver your license, and I’ll be on my way–”
“Impress me enough,” Mira said over her, “and we may renegotiate what we discussed before our guest interrupted.”
Sy darted a fearful glance at Anya, one that stopped her heart. Having seen him face down monsters and magic, she could not imagine what he was threatened with to put that look in his eye.
She did not have her weapons or the golden pen, but she did have Sy’s ink pen, in his kit on her shoulder. But if she reached for it now, Mira would turn her hands to hooves or her fingers to worms.
His face had gone pale and shining with the strain of resisting. “Please, my lady. I do not want–”
“Do not mistake my grace with you for caring one mote what you want.” Her tone changed; no longer wheedling, threatening, but issuing a command. “Take away his tongue.”
“If–”
“This instant, or I’ll turn his eyes into ant hills and have you peck them clean.”
Something broke. “Forgive me,” he said softly, taking Anya by the ears.
She hardly had time to feel surprised, or delight at his touch. He blew onto her lips, and a shiver of longing ran up her spine before she realized what he had done.
Unable to look, he turned away as she felt the magic tingle against her skin. She started to gasp, but her lips barely parted before they sprang shut. In horror, she reached up to feel them.
They were sutured together, threaded with a spider’s web. She felt the horrid sensation of the silk wrapping around her tongue, spreading beneath her skin, strings of it seeping into her jaws, between her teeth, growing up and around her veins. Turning her very blood to sticky silk.
Fixed as she was on the feeling of her blood slowing, on wonder that she was even still alive, it took her a moment to notice the spiders.
Climbing all over her face, into her hair.
Had her hair become spiderwebs? Heart hammering, she tried to brush them off, but for every one that fell onto the stone floor, another took its place, sealing her mouth in a cocoon of silk.
Well, that was going to fucking well complicate things, wasn’t it?
A setback, no doubt, but the game wasn’t lost yet. She willed her lungs to slow – but not too slow. The king’s emissary would be terrified by this point.
Anya hated to admit it, but, frantically brushing a particularly large spider off her chest, she was halfway there herself.
“Delightful,” Mira clapped. “You aren’t as dull as you pretend.”
“You are too kind, my lady,” Sy replied.
“Now,” Mira said, unperturbed. “Let us allow our new pet to finish his task before we go on. I will take what I am owed before I repay him for trying to steal my prize. Then we’ll have such fun together.”
Once more, Anya unfurled the forged scroll, thinking rapidly.
It helps if I speak my intention, Sy had said. The magic of the forest was the same magic the scribes used, but ancient, wild, unfettered. If it was captured, directed – with, say, glyphs, like the ones on the enchanted arrow – it could be managed.
And what if it was directed with speech?
When Anya told the others all this, David had been skeptical to the last, but Sabina had mentioned she had seen Perrine do unaccountable things with her speech. And Anya’s explanation of how she had been cursed was almost enough to convince him what she had planned would not backfire spectacularly.
That was still a risk, though. More so now, since what she had planned relied on the use of her tongue.
It came as a whisper in her ear, a humming in her chest: Ah, but aren’t there other ways of speaking?
The wind kissing her cheek. A cricket’s silence on a clear night. The color of the sky. A path, well-trodden. A map inked in blackberries.
A secret look. A smile. A tender caress in the dark.
The feeling he filled her with even now, a feeling for which there were no words, except perhaps the desperation of a sunrise, or the longing for summer moons.
She trusted him; she’d told him she trusted him. When he cursed her tongue, he did not speak a word. That silence said something. Or maybe it didn’t.
Nonsense, she thought. Utter nonsense.
Then, with a grin she could not suppress, and that no one would see, As if nonsense never killed a person, nor saved their life.
Caught up in her machinations, already assured of her victory, Mira was oblivious.
“A license is a start,” she said, approaching Anya.
She took the scroll. Anya felt more layers of magic drift over her like strands of silk as Mira enchanted her.
“You will deliver this to Sangfeder, and then you will return here. While you are in ?bender, you will secure monetary compensation and lands from Edgard on my behalf. I’ve heard the Degen estate is unclaimed.
And let him know if he can prove he is properly penitent, I may be willing to share my prize.
” She lifted a testy hand in Anya’s direction.
“Did he turn your brain to webs, too? Give me the pen, you dolt.”
Anya was only too happy to obey. From her satchel, she withdrew a simple ink fountain pen. The polished nib gleamed silver in the white room. Mira reached out to take it.
Anya could not harm her. She wouldn’t dream of it. Couldn’t.
With a swift, jerking motion, Anya lifted the pen and, grinding her teeth, sliced the skin of her own hand.
As she had hoped, Mira froze, baffled that her thoroughly caught prey might still struggle.
Quickly, before she could catch on, Anya dipped a finger into her own welling blood. She reached out, touched her bloody finger to Mira’s forehead and drew the spell, short and simple.
Still.
Not harm, they had all decided when Sabina taught Anya the spell. And besides; it was one Sy had made himself, and on paper, he was dead; no longer a king’s wizard or a scribe. Academy rules hardly seemed to apply.
Anya knew their rules said she must purse her lips, must blow.
She knew life itself was an endless game. A series of moves and counter moves, of struggling until your struggle ran out, until someone or something stronger stifled your body, snuffed out your spirit like a light.
At least, it was if you saw it from a certain perspective.
From another, life was not a game; it was many. Always changing, never ending, the rules as fluid and varied as the weather. You could not make or break the weather.
Rules, though. Rules were made. What was made could always be unmade. Remade.
The rules certainly didn’t apply in the forest, where, without a single law or regulation, a woman could change into an insect and then change back again, where the earth drank blood to sprout rowan and birch, where flowers of every color could bloom underground.
As the blood touched Mira’s skin, she froze in place, as she had frozen Anya moments earlier without even a touch. Anya did not need to speak or share her precious breath.
But the only way to free Sy from Mira’s bond was to kill her. Bit difficult to argue around that one doing harm.
She had a plan for that, too. But she would need his help.
He watched Anya, almost as stunned as Mira, his eyes wide with fear, or perhaps wonder. He still thought she was a stranger; might still think she meant to take him back to ?bender, to the king, to another gilded prison.
Holding his gaze, she took the ink pen, still wet with her blood, and scrawled across her palm, in letters tinged red as rebellion:
Trust me?
He closed his eyes. She held her breath.
Then he stepped forward, reached for her, and ran his hand over her mouth.
Where his fingers touched, she felt the silk pulling from her lips like string from cloth. Then she felt her blood running free, felt her lungs fill with air.
With a grin, she turned to Mira, still frozen, her eyes wide with fear. “I could now, and oh, how I want to, but I will not harm you, Your Ladyship. You will do that yourself. You will let this spell turn you as cold and brittle as your greed, as your fear, as your empty, grasping heart.”
With her blood, she drew the spell once more atop the first.
She blew.
As her breath touched Mira’s skin, it turned white. The color spread, growing, covering her face, her hair, her burnt orange suit, her eyes endless blue. If she could, she wouldn’t have time to blink.
In an instant, the witch of Bosquet Mire had turned entirely to white, solid stone.