Chapter Eighteen
Ena
The next day, Ena felt an undeniable glow. She’d woken up with a smile on her face, even though Ty had had to leave early to go tend to some things. She caught herself dreamily smiling while in the bath, and she dressed in a daze.
When Turner came to the door to take her to the Archives, he took one look at her and laughed. “Good night, huh?” he asked, a shit-eating grin on his face.
“What do you mean?” she asked, her face going hot.
“Well,” he began, as they walked down the hall. “You guys left pretty quickly after everything that happened with Cole, and then I distinctly remember hearing some…screaming come from this part of the upper level.”
Ena covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh Gaia, are you serious?” she asked, mortification seeping in.
Turner laughed again, the sound lighthearted and mirthful.
“Fuck, that’s embarrassing,” Ena said. “I thought Ty was kidding when he said he wanted everyone to hear, not that they actually would.”
“It’s fine, Ena. Don’t be embarrassed. It’s good, actually.”
“How is it good?” she asked incredulously. “Everyone in the Underworld heard me have a screaming orgasm.”
Turner grinned, the bastard. “It’s good because it’s expected. Everyone knows you’re Ty’s witch-slave. If he wasn’t…staking his claim, so to speak, it might invite others to.”
“That’s fucked up,” Ena said.
“It definitely is,” Turner agreed. “But I don’t make the rules. Neither does Ty.”
Ena sighed in frustration, but she knew that, unfortunately, he spoke the truth.
“Speaking of fucked up…” she began, feeling the need to change the topic. “I’m sorry about everything that happened with the imperi last night.”
Looking sideways at Turner, she saw his smile fall, a look of guilt passing over his face.
“Is…is the man okay?” she asked gently. “Ty told me that you’re…responsible for them.”
“Yeah,” Turner said, as if grateful that she’d asked. “He’s okay. But just for the record, none of that was your fault.”
“I know,” Ena said, nodding to herself. Didn’t mean she felt great about it, though.
She knew she’d done the safest thing for everyone by playing along with Cole’s fucked-up game, but she still hated that she’d been a part of it.
“So what is it you do for the imperi?” she asked. “Just like…look after them?”
“Something like that,” Turner said, looking away again and turning quiet.
They walked the rest of the way to the Archives in silence, so many follow-up questions on her tongue, but she got the sense that whatever Turner did for his father and the imperi, he didn’t like talking about it, so she held it.
Once they arrived, Turner escorted her to her usual alcove before leaving to attend to his duties, and Ena turned her focus to figuring out the final piece to the binding ritual.
Now that they knew what all the symbols on the amulet represented and how they worked, Ena needed to understand the mysterious spellwords that she’d heard in her vision.
Spells had so much to do with intention, and if she didn’t know what the words meant, she wouldn’t be able to get the intention right to reverse it, and then the spell would fail.
So, for what felt like the hundredth time, she decided to look through the best resource they had—the witch’s journals Ty had gotten from Petyr.
But as she flipped through one of them, seeing the same old references, she found herself wondering yet again who the witch who wrote them was.
The journals gave no indication about their age, gender, Gift, or even which Coven they were from.
But that got Ena thinking…how would this witch, whoever they were, know about the amulet’s existence at all unless they were from Occidens?
It made sense for them to be, but she hated to accept that as fact without evidence.
Besides, the journal looked old, and there was always a chance that the amulet had at one time been with one of the other Covens.
Maybe it would be helpful if Ena could determine the witch’s Coven of origin for sure, so she started to flip through the journal looking for clues about that instead.
It was extremely dry stuff, and Ena’s eyes were starting to glaze over when she found an obscure trade reference near the end of the journal:
A man from Tyndell requested two vials of a pest resistance potion for his orchard, however since the fallout with the other Covens after the dark spell, trade with Tyndell is no longer allowed by the treaty, so his request was rejected.
The passage was short, and the mention of the “dark spell” so innocuous that Ena almost didn’t catch it. Could it be referencing the binding ritual? She wasn’t sure, but the “fallout with the other Covens” had to be referencing the rivalry between Occidens and the other two Covens.
This told Ena several things, because if this witch had been no longer allowed to trade with Tyndell, she must’ve been from Occidens—Tyndell was located near Aquilo, and on their side of the treaty line.
Ena felt relieved—that was at least one mystery solved—but now there was a new one too. Because if the “dark spell” was indeed referencing the binding ritual, and she described the fallout as being due to that spell…was the binding ritual what originally caused the rivalry between the Covens?
That would be huge, if so. None of the witches truly knew what had caused the rivalry between the Covens—it had simply always been that way, for as long as they all remembered.
Of course, now she wondered if the matriarchs had known all along, and if it was just another thing that had been kept from her.
But, either way, it being the cause of the rivalry would only make sense if the Coven matriarchs disagreed about the spell somehow.
Ena wracked her brain trying to remember what she could about the three witches in her vision—what they looked like, what they felt.
One witch, the one with brown hair and blue eyes, had seemed to take satisfaction from the daemon woman’s pain and punishment. She’d clearly been the ringleader of it all.
But the other, the one with pale-blonde hair and hazel eyes, had seemed…
concerned—trepidatious almost. Was it possible she didn’t fully agree with what was done?
And if she were from Occidens, that could explain why there was a falling out between the Covens afterwards.
If their matriarch didn’t completely agree with what was done to the daemons, or came to regret it afterwards, that would explain the discord between them, and the subsequent treaty keeping them in separate territories.
It was a good theory, but there were still so many unanswered questions—like how the amulet ended up in Occidens anyway, and she still wasn’t any closer to deducing what the spellwords meant, but still, she felt pleased to have made some progress.
She was still flipping through the journals, looking for further confirmation of her theory, when a voice greeted her.
“Hey, beautiful,” Ty said as he approached her table.
“Ty,” she greeted, her face instantly lighting with a smile that felt beyond her control. “What are you doing here? It’s only midday.”
“I know. I finished up early for once and wanted to come see you. And help with the research, if you need it,” he said, sitting down at the table. His large frame seemed to take up so much space, and she couldn’t help but blush as he got close to her, thinking of last night.
“I’m glad you’re here, for several reasons,” she said, scooching a bit closer to him. “But mostly because I think I figured out something important.”
Ty looked around the Archives, making sure they were alone before he nodded at her to continue.
“I think a disagreement over the binding spell is what caused the rivalry between the three Covens,” she said.
Ty’s brows jumped up in intrigue. “Really? What makes you think that?” he asked, keeping his voice low just in case.
Ena explained about what she remembered from the spell, how one of the witches seemed less enthusiastic than the others, and the brief mention of the “dark spell” in the journal being the cause of the severing of ties between the Covens.
“That makes a lot of sense,” Ty said, his brows creasing as he pondered the new information. “So you think the Occidens matriarch was against it, even though she participated?”
“Yes,” Ena said. “Either she was forced into it, or maybe changed her mind after the fact, I don’t know, but either way, I think somehow the Occidens witches ended up taking the amulet, and maybe the other Covens didn’t like that.”
Ty nodded, going quiet. He seemed troubled by all this talk about Occidens, and she thought she maybe knew why.
“Ty…” she began, feeling a bit awkward. “There’s something else we haven’t really had a chance to discuss after…everything happened at Occidens.”
He looked up at her, his green eyes piercing as he waited for her to continue. Had it really only been last night he’d had her on her knees, so commanding and dominating? Because right now, he seemed different—vulnerable and unsure, as if he was on the edge of something she didn’t quite understand.
“When we were held captive there, the Occidens matriarch—Syrelle, her name was—she came to see me. And some of the things she said, well, it made me think that maybe your mother was an Occidens witch.”
Ty looked away, huffing out a rueful laugh. “Yeah, I figured that out myself when they kept asking me questions about her,” he said bitterly.
“What kinds of questions?” Ena asked.
“Mostly they wanted to know if I knew where she was.”
“How do you think they even knew who you were?” Ena asked gently. They hadn’t talked much about his mother. Ena knew it was a sore subject for him, so she wanted to proceed with caution.
“My eyes. Apparently, they look like hers,” he replied, keeping his attention on the books in front of him, as if this conversation didn’t matter to him at all. “But clearly, it wasn’t enough of an association to spare my life,” he said, anger creeping into his tone.