22. Chapter 22 #2
At some point, Elbort visited again, his arm red and swollen from him picking at the infection I’d predicted would happen. Usually, I took payment after the healing was completed, but no more. I watched him walk away and greeted him only when he came back with a nicely wrapped ham.
Naturally, he did everything he could to make the situation unpleasant. He hissed and cursed while I cut into the lesion, his breath sour with the ale he’d had earlier in the day.
“We’re so lucky to have you,” he sneered, his eyes narrowed as he watched my hands wielding the knife.
“You are,” I said.
He went on as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “Got ourselves a fancy witch. Fancy enough for a lord to use and toss aside.”
I imagined sending threads of magic into his body until they found the space between muscle and bone where his mind’s control lay.
I imagined snapping the spots in his shoulders and lower back that would paralyze all four limbs at once.
Sending threads to cut his vocal cords so I wouldn’t have to hear him scream.
No blade. No blood on the floor. Just Elbort’s sneer collapsing into confusion until he realized he’d only been alive all these years because I’d allowed him to be.
It would be so easy.
But wrong…
My morals had always been flexible out of necessity. Now they felt more like a door I was holding shut with both hands while the wild and menacing version of me paced on the other side, waiting for her chance to rain justice on the world.
My grip on his arm tightened. He yelped, and I didn’t care. The pus spilled thick and foul-smelling across his arm.
When he left, he spat on the frost-hardened dirt and paused just long enough to say, “We’ll be keeping an eye on those wards—and our womenfolk.”
He meant to make me feel monstrous, but all that told me was that the people of Selmont had finally realized I was a genuine threat. I’d always been one. They were simply late to the realization.
“I don’t care if you’re bleeding out—don’t come back until you can treat me with respect.”
My eyes dared him to say a single word as I watched him leave in silence. I wasn’t mad yet. Though it was starting to feel like I was getting close.
I was working in my vegetable patch the next day when Louie came by, gathering kindling for his family’s hearth.
I lifted my hand in greeting, already preparing myself for his usual flood of words—who’d fallen in the creek, whose goats had escaped, what game the village children were inventing this week.
But he just glanced at me then refused to meet my eyes again. His gaze flicked down the path toward the village before he lowered his voice. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
“Why?” I asked carefully.
He swallowed and looked away. “Mama says it’s not safe.”
The words landed as hard as a physical blow. I’d delivered him and his sister. Thorns wrapped around my chest and squeezed. “I’d never hurt you.”
“I know,” he whispered quickly, as if afraid someone might hear him defending me. “But Mama says you’re tainted now.”
I looked at the branches tucked under his arm—good dry wood, the kind I’d taught him to find—and I couldn’t speak for a long moment through the pain of yet another door closing.
“You don’t believe that,” I said finally.
“I don’t.” He looked miserable. “But they said you let a demon in…” His brow furrowed as he searched for the words he’d been given.
Smaller mouth. Same poison.
I forced myself to smile. “It’s all right,” I told him, though my throat burned. “You should listen to your parents.”
A sudden wave of relief washed over his face. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”
He gathered more branches, lingering for a moment as if saying goodbye silently, then hurried away without looking back.
I’d spent years trying to be understandable to people committed to misunderstanding me. But no more. With the adults, choosing myself had felt like rage, but this time… This time it felt like a solitary tear freezing on my cheek.
I watched the back of his head until he disappeared into the trees. He’d remember this as the day he listened to his mother. But I’d remember it as the day the village finally finished its work on me.
There would be no clean way to remain in Selmont. No way to protect the children without becoming the monster their parents had already named me. No way to keep giving pieces of myself to a village that would teach its children to flinch from my shadow.
The garden felt unbearably quiet after that, even with Muffin for company.
He’d stayed close to home, close to me, since Owain left.
Veskas were social creatures, so he likely sensed my low mood and felt it was his duty to comfort and protect me.
I worked until hunger tightened my belly, hands moving by habit alone—old patterns that were now all I had left.
The bone-deep weariness that seemed to come from whatever was wrong with my magic grew heavier with every passing hour.
The cursed king had strengthened the wards enough to last more than a week—a huge relief—but my first attempt to reinforce them after that had me stopping between stones just to breathe.
I pushed power into each, but every time it shifted unpredictably, refusing to flow right. When it finally worked, something inside me went taut as drawn wire, and the world tilted. I had to settle for reinforcing a few stones each day, which continually drained me to the last dregs of my strength.
Something was definitely wrong with me.
It wasn’t just exhaustion. It wasn’t simply grief or regret curdled into weakness, though I had plenty of both. This felt too disorganized for that, like something within me had been cut in half and needed to be stitched back together, but I didn’t have the string.
It was as though my magic was straining toward something beyond the wards, tightening its grip on me each time I tried to ignore it. It was pulling me toward him, I was beginning to suspect, across however many miles separated us.
I’d chosen endurance. Chosen the familiar weight of being needed over the terrifying lightness of being wanted. I was beginning to understand that my magic had not made the same choice. And I didn’t know how much longer I could afford to disagree with it.