Chapter 27
27
GAbrIEL
F or an agonizingly long moment, the cavern was still, the only movement the ragged heaving of Evangeline’s chest as she panted, wide-eyed and distraught. There was an answering spasm of pain within me. I could feel the grief and confusion roiling inside of her, along with her desperate attempts to push it down. I knew the feeling all too well, and I wished desperately that I could have spared her that pain. I tried to send her calm thoughts, although I doubted they would help. This was something she would have to push through herself.
Damien lay still on the glossy obsidian floor, his hand still wrapped around the hilt of the marlinspike dagger. Someday, I would respect his sacrifice more than I would loathe the pain he’d caused Evangeline, but not today.
Morgana lay in a crumpled heap near Damien’s body, neck bent at an unnatural angle. I had the foolish hope that the fall had somehow been enough to kill her, but then her form began to flicker, spasming talons and horns and tails as she drew on more of her stolen magic and pushed herself up onto her hands. Evangeline was still frozen, not even looking at the witch.
Time. Evangeline needed time, and I could win it for her. I had to keep Morgana distracted until Evangeline got her bearings. My physical attacks had barely done anything to the ancient witch. She fought dirty, using powers stolen over the centuries. I couldn’t hold back; I needed to use all the tools at my disposal. I surged forward and threw myself onto Morgana, slamming her back down onto the floor, and did the only thing I could think to do. If she was going to use her power, so would I.
No wonder she had chosen this place as her lair—Morgana’s mind was just as cold and alien. The severe beauty and wickedly sharp edges must have called to her. She had barriers up, not walls, but a twisting, intricate maze. She was too dazed to keep them up, and I was too strong for her to stop me. I crashed through them recklessly, and in the center, the whirlpool of her memories dragged me under.
The world had felt small back then. Small and grubby. The days infuriatingly boring. Mucking out the pigs. Splitting the skulls of the animals the others hunted, and using the brains to tan the hides. Gathering stinging nettles to dry and beat and spin into yarn.
Back in those days, giants still roamed the hills. One day, when she was just a girl out gathering cockles on the beach, she saw a giant through mists, striding across the cliffs above on feet the size of her entire village. It was as chalk white as the cliffs themselves, strong and untamable as the ocean waves. Never had she seen anything so beautiful. She had felt longing then, so fierce and overpowering it had scared her. She envied that giant so strongly that she was nearly sick with it. The little knife she used for foraging seemed pathetically small, even though it was too big for her hand.
Something about seeing that giant changed her. When she was very small, she had been cautious, always listening more than she spoke. After seeing the giant, she became a disobedient child. She answered back, asked too many questions. One of the village elders raised a hand to her for talking too freely about the fair folk, and that night, the thatch of his hut burned. He’d burned with it. The villagers thought a spark must’ve flown up from one of the clay oil lamps, but she knew better. She had done that.
Her mother had known it, too. After that, she looked differently at the girl, always watching. One by one, the other villagers started to watch her as well. The girl wasn’t right, they said. Fae-touched. Her magic grew, as did her control over it. The constraints of her tiny, pathetic village chafed more and more, and she hid that fact less and less. Then one year after her blood had started to answer the call of the moon each month, there was a snap of cold. The crops failed. The wild plants withered. The animals they hunted were lean and hungry, and so were the animals who hunted them. The people of the village decided their gods wanted an offering. They dressed the girl in her finest clothes, bedecked her with jewelry, and used their strongest rope to bind her hands.
When they pushed her off the cliff, she was calm. The ocean was an old friend of hers. When she hit the water, it parted for her, welcomed her, pulled the rope from her thin wrists. She kicked her way to the surface, walked back to her village, and burned it to the ground.
When the witches found her, she was still watching the flames. They’d mostly died down by then, but the oily smoke was still rising. The girl’s dress had dried stiff with seawater, her dark hair a wild tangle. The witches were clean and beautiful and huge—not in body but in spirit. When they saw her, they knew her to be one of their own. When they asked the girl her name, she bared her teeth in a feral smile.
Morigena, she told them. Sea-born.
When the witches left, she left with them. They traveled together to faraway places she had never even dreamed of, leaving her tiny, rain-soaked isle far behind. There was a whole world out there, full of forests and mountains and deserts. She wanted it all. Not to have, but to take it apart and see how it worked. There was something to be learned from everything if you were patient enough to dissect it properly.
Morigena grew tall and slender and severely beautiful. Powerful. The witches taught her what they knew, but she thirsted for more. Together, they pushed magic further and further, finding its limits, and breaking them over and over. They found more witches as they traveled, full of power they didn’t understand, desperate to escape their tiny lives. They recognized themselves in Morigena, and she herself in them. And so, they became her sisters.
The older witches began to grow old and bent, their magic fading. They became small in Morigena’s eyes. Some of them had begun to look at her the way her mother had. She would not allow herself to become like them, she decided. She would only ever grow more powerful, more beautiful.
The experiments weren’t her idea. All the younger witches saw what was happening to the old ones, and none of them liked it. Surely there was a better way. There had to be.
The first experiment failed. Then the second. The third, the twelfth, the hundredth. Her sisters began to lose hope, but Morigena never did. She knew what she was capable of, even if none of the others did. At least with the wand they could reclaim the power the rituals consumed.
She stopped keeping track of how many rituals they had tried. For this one, they’d rounded up an entire group— everyone who’d been in the slipshod Gallic trading post. The humans moaned and begged in their traveler’s pidgins and native tongues from distant lands. Then the potion took effect, and the spell flowed over them. One by one, they went limp, their eyes blank.
“Another experiment gone wrong,” one of her sisters said.
Morigena gripped the wand and stepped forward, ready to write this off as another stumbling block, but then the things that were no longer human began to stir. When Morigena raised her wand, the stupid creatures bolted, driven by blind, animal panic.
Morigena almost respected them for that. She understood the determination to survive.
It was the closest she’d come to success so far, and she couldn’t let it slip through her fingers. She hunted down a few of the creatures and discovered they could heal quickly. They could be killed, but only with a stake through the heart. They were fast, strong, and some of them were even clever. They fed by drawing power from others, and Morigena liked that. She could use that.
She researched and studied and experimented. One by one, her sisters began to fall away—they rejected her vision, too weak to finish what they had started. She had been wrong to think they were the same all those years ago. They were just as small as those old crones, as her village. It didn’t matter. She didn’t need them.
Morigena learned how to feed on power. She started with the creatures she’d made, and when she took her magic back from them, she found she could move the way they did. She sprouted fangs the way they did. She was strong the way they were. The experiments didn’t stop there, of course. She found the wolf-coat men and the seal-women, the under-hill folk, and the water spirits. She took their claws and their strong lungs and their glamor and their way of twisting the tides.
She took their power.
It wasn’t perfect. When they died, she lost their strength. She could compensate for that, though. It was just a question of keeping plenty of thralls to draw from.
The years passed. The giants were killed, and their bones became the hills that men built their cities on top of. The fair folk became scarcer, leaving their forests to build pockets of splendor in lands they built themselves. Mud and thatch turned to brick and glass. Humans forgot the old ways. Some of them were foolish enough to invite witches into their courts, thinking they could be status symbols, willing to waste magic making charmed diversions at feasts and scrying on the foolish men of other courts. Little kings scrabbling for dominance, so unaware of what true power was.
Her name was Morgana now, and she knew better than to pass up such a gift. She took a position in a court, where she outlasted several kings. If anyone thought it was strange that so many of them died suddenly, she simply plucked those thoughts from their minds. She selected a king she liked—one who was happy to give her all the resources she wanted for her experiments.
Then one day she looked in the mirror and saw a monster. Beneath her beauty were myriad lowly creatures, all their fangs and claws and scales. She had lost something. She had wanted to find enough power to stay pure, and now she was tainted. She was nothing like that giant she had seen so many years ago.
One of Morgana’s sisters—the only one who still answered her letters—suggested that, if she was so horrified, she could simply stop taking on more power, and the twist of creatures under her skin would die off.
Morgana burned the letter. Foolish. What would the point of that be? No, there had to be a way to fix this without reducing herself back down to that sea-soaked girl who’d watched her village burn.
Her sister’s shortsightedness didn’t matter. Morgana would undo this and find a truer way. She just needed a little more magic, and then she could fix everything. She needed pure magic and knew exactly where to find it.
It turned out her rituals worked just as well on the witches she’d once called sisters as they did on anyone else. Witches lived a long time. Their power would stay with her for centuries as long as she had someone keep them alive. Their strength was almost enough. Morgana was so close. She just needed a little more magic.
Just a little more, and she’d be able to make things perfect.
I tried to pull myself back from Morgana’s mind. It grasped at me, hungry and frigid, trying to keep me in. I had been wrong before. The walls of her mind weren’t weakened, they had been built to crumble. A lure, a way for her to put up enough of a show of resistance that I would blunder forward without question.
Every part of Morgana had become used to stealing power, and her mind was no exception. It refused to let me go. The dark waters of Morgana’s memories tried to pull me deeper and deeper, sending cold tendrils of poison into my mind as I reached into hers. An icy slush penetrated my brain. It would be so easy to keep sinking. I could let go, let myself become part of something bigger, free myself from having to make choices. I could return to the comforting subservience I’d been raised to be used to. I could stop pretending I knew what I was doing.
In the freezing ocean of Morgana’s mind, I could no longer tell which way was up. I was suspended in the dark, numbing cold.
There was something there with me. Not an element of Morgana, but a ghost made up of animal, twisting rage and hunger, thrashing and snapping at nothing. It wanted to bite the whole world, but it couldn’t close its jaws around anything. I knew that anger. It had traveled with me, dormant but waiting, ever since I’d entered my father’s mind. A final piece of Roland’s fury that had hitched a ride in my mind, and now found a place much more suited to it.
Then light. A golden glow far in the distance, brilliant and strong even through the murkiness surrounding me. I knew that light, too.
The furious creature made up of everything that had driven my father through the world rose up beneath me. It had laid dormant in my mind, but now it was growing, twisting its coils through the frigid ocean of Morgana’s thoughts. It snapped and thrashed at the water, and Morgana’s pain echoed through our linked minds as if someone had struck a church bell I was trapped under.
I refused to bring my father’s monstrous rage with me, but I could use it as solid ground. The one final favor my father would grant me would be the ghost of his anger, and the ability to get away from it. I braced myself against the creature’s huge, frenzied body and launched myself upward, fighting through the clinging darkness toward Evangeline’s glow.
Her magic reached me like a hand plunged into the water to rescue a drowning man, and I surfaced, gasping for air. I was back in the cavern with Evangeline’s presence warm and safe at the back of my mind, helping me slough away Morgana’s poisonous grasp.
Morgana writhed, flickering with the shadows of a hundred different shapes and powers, a hundred different stolen lives.
But it wasn’t just her own intent making her writhe. I knew the expression on her face all too well. It was the look I’d seen on everyone whose mind had been savaged by Roland De Montclair. He was getting his revenge after all, I realized, as that scrap of him I’d left behind started to chew its way through her brain.
After delving so deeply into Morgana’s mind, my own body felt distant and alien to me. Regaining control was a challenge. The witch flailed beneath me, snarling and snapping up at me with teeth that changed every time she opened her mouth. I finally managed to get my limbs to obey me and scrambled away from her, springing to my feet just as she lunged up with a mouthful of teeth that belonged to the worst sort of deep-sea creature.
Evangeline stepped forward. Was she glowing, or was it just in my mind? Some aftereffect of the visions I’d been pulled into? No, no. It was real. The light caught and reflected on the oily edges of the rough obsidian walls, painting the dark cavern gold. I could feel her power burning within me, hot and glorious.
No wonder Morgana had wanted Evangeline’s power. Compared to her patchwork, wriggling magic, Evangeline was a monolithic presence. Huge and undeniable as a giant striding over the cliffs. She was everything Morgana had ever wanted to be, and she would be the one to destroy her.