Chapter 11
CHAPTER
Vaasa woke in the early afternoon and stood at the edge of the right hallway, staring at her mother’s door down the dark corridor.
Was the necklace inside?
She took a step forward. Her body felt disconnected from her, like she was floating above it and staring at herself. The seed of her panic sprouted.
She could see her mother’s body. Could smell and taste the acrid magic. The quick rewinding of time brought her right back to this place, staring at the remnant of her mother’s life, Vaasa’s future hanging in the air and suffocating amid all the wicked power.
It was my mother. Her curse passed down to me when I found her dead.
Vaasa’s breath came quicker.
Like roots bursting from a shell, they plunged down, an invasive species, this panic strangling all the life inside her.
She could feel it again—her magic bursting like a dam inside her body, spreading like blood in the water, sliding down each muscle and winding around her bones.
The visceral fear of that moment. She’d believed she was dying. She had been convinced of her fate.
Her legs wouldn’t move. This paralysis was entirely against her will. She tried to lift her leg but she couldn’t, she—
Vaasa turned away, gritting her teeth. She let out a frustrated groan and covered her face with her hands.
Her chest rose and fell with her breaths.
“It’s okay,” she whispered to herself, pretending her voice was Amalie’s or Melisina’s.
Pretending for a moment that she wasn’t alone. “It’s okay to be afraid.”
She stood there for minutes. Maybe more. Everything swirled in her mind—Ozik, Lord Vlacik, Roman.
Reid. Amalie. Her coven.
Vaasa retreated to the couch and buried herself beneath her blanket, shutting out the sunlight, shutting out anything and everything at once.
She didn’t emerge from her rooms for the rest of the day.
She didn’t see Ozik. She didn’t see Roman.
And when Lord Karev called on her, she told the attendants she was ill.
The next day, Vaasa followed the path her body had finally deemed safe into her father’s office down the left hallway of the emperor’s quarters. Sleep had evaded her, though she’d known better than to go seeking Roman again. She had been too close to her past.
She would need to rest today, to reserve her energy for more pandering with the lords. She couldn’t fake ill with Lord Karev for long, given what was at stake.
She parsed through every single thing Dominik had written, and in a file deep in a drawer, she found the letters he’d exchanged with Mathjin, Reid’s traitorous advisor.
The man’s face flashed behind her eyes—the ice of his irises, the twist of his mouth.
The sheer terror she’d felt at finding herself tied up beneath the colosseum of Dihrah, left for dead at the hands of her brother.
And yet she could still see it—the pain etched into the wrinkles of Mathjin’s skin as he spoke about his daughter and unborn grandchild, who had been slaughtered by an Asteryan soldier.
His was a death she hadn’t allowed herself time to process, either.
She wondered silently if Reid missed him, if he was experiencing the same churning, tumultuous emotions she was.
What she wouldn’t give to ask him.
She devoured every word of the letters. Every detail of the steel Dominik and Mathjin had smuggled to Ton, of the rebellion they’d stoked in Wrultho that had ultimately bled all over the Icrurian election.
She couldn’t believe that the late foreman of Wrultho had been foolish enough to make deals with the son of the very Asteryan emperor who had scorned him the first time.
Ton must have been desperate, more so than ever before.
Dominik’s notes made it clear that the brazen invasion of Icruria had been in pursuit of precisely what he’d been working with Lord Vlacik to uncover: magic.
Vaasa understood now; that was why he’d gone to Mireh.
The night he’d tried to poison her, Vaasa had all but given him a show, thinking he would believe she was struggling to control a curse.
Had he already known what her magic was?
Had that been the real reason for arranging her abduction, possibly even her death?
Vaasa shuddered. Even though Dominik’s journal of drawings sat open on the desk beside her, stark proof of his humanity, the evidence of his evil glared up at her in the form of these records.
He had tortured other witches. Had likely intended to torture her.
With Lord Vlacik and the clergy involved, conspiracy was a crack in the foundation of this city.
Of this empire. They wouldn’t stop until they had decimated what was left of Icruria’s already-dwindling covens.
It wasn’t enough to escape Mekes. She would find a way to stop them.
Which begged the question of why Ozik had left something like this for Vaasa to find. Why would he want to turn her against the very empire he intended for them to rule in tandem?
Locking everything back in the compartment in the desk, Vaasa set her head down for just a moment, just to rest her strained eyes.
“Long night?” a voice asked, and Vaasa shot up from the desk, stray hairs plastered to her face.
She sucked in a sharp breath as she stared at Ozik across the office. He stood in the doorframe, and she looked around, wondering how she hadn’t heard him enter. She peered at the clock standing in the corner. Hours had passed.
Vaasa smoothed out her wool dress and nodded.
She didn’t feel inclined to speak to him.
Part of her wanted to come right out and ask about the necklace, about all the witches he had let die, yet she knew better than to show her cards immediately.
It was an assumption that he knew the secret drawer in her father’s desk existed at all.
She had no intention of giving herself away this quickly—not until she’d managed a real search for her mother’s last gift.
He gestured for her to stand. “Come with me.”
“I’d rather not.”
He tilted his head predatorily.
She swallowed. The feeling of a fork driving through her hand was fresh in her mind, and Vaasa tensed.
She breathed in through her nose and curled her fingers against the desk, pressing down in a subtle form of grounding.
Then, Vaasa indignantly crossed her arms over her chest. “Tell me why you brought Roman here.”
A small pause. “Empresses have lovers all the time, Vaasalisa.”
Bile threatened to push up her throat. He would know. He had been the empress’s lover—her mother’s torrid affair. She curled her lip in disgust. “I have no interest in a lover.”
“Then don’t have one,” he suggested.
Vaasa narrowed her eyes, though she didn’t get up from the desk.
Ozik gave a heavy sigh, as if she were nothing but a petulant teenager.
The sound of it was so familiar, a relic from the days he had tutored her.
“I thought if you could see yourself here, perhaps you’d be more willing to rule.
It is nothing more than that. I’ve known he was alive for quite some time, and when he arrived here, I agreed to let him stay.
It was the least I could do, considering your brother and father sent him off to his death. ”
“I don’t believe you,” Vaasa said. “What’s his bargain?”
Ozik arched a brow. “Not everyone I come across is a person I waste magic on. Sometimes, old-fashioned politics are enough.”
Again, she said, “I don’t believe you.”
He pursed his lips like there was a thought caught between his teeth, then relaxed his shoulders. “Your skill for observation is a gift, dear Vaasalisa. Don’t ever underestimate it.”
Vaasa wasn’t certain why she’d asked the question in the first place. Ozik was never going to give her a straight answer. She looked down at the desk for a moment, composing herself.
“I’ve answered your question. Now, come,” he said.
The cords between them circled one of her ribs and gave a sharp tug.
Pained breath pushed out through her lips, a reminder that his willingness to answer her questions at all wasn’t a compromise; it was a gift.
She fell back into whatever version of herself she had been before Icruria, pliant and obedient and afraid.
Uncrossing her arms, her body moved without much thought. She stood from the chair.
She hated herself for the way he grinned.
They exited the emperor’s wing without a word, neither of them speaking to each other as they walked.
Sun poured through the stained glass windows, throwing color all over the floor and walls in particularly well-lit passages.
A cold gust of wind bit at Vaasa’s cheeks as Ozik opened the door to the courtyards at the back of the fortress, all placed at different levels on the mountain and connected by large stone bridges.
Snow piled on the capstones in soft white, a few flurries falling harmlessly from the red and orange sky.
Ozik took one set of stairs after another, reaching a new level each time, until he led them to a familiar stone walkway on the far side of the fortress near the entrance to the game park, which sprawled in a valley behind the fortress. She realized quickly where they intended to go.
“The greenhouse?” Vaasa asked.
“It’s warmer there,” Ozik said as if it were explanation enough.
She hadn’t considered the intensity of being back here in Mekes, of what it would mean to see everything from a time in her life that she had become so good at making hazy. Every place her father had stepped, every hallway she’d seen Dominik in and then spun on her heel. Her mother. Roman.
She hadn’t grieved, not in the way that provided closure.
She had simply pushed it down as far as it could go.
In Mireh, her exploration of magic had felt like ripping off all the carefully placed bandages she’d used to staunch the bleeding of her youth.
She had bandaged it over with something new.
But now every time she rediscovered a memory, that wound ripped itself back open.
“Vaasa,” Ozik called.
She looked up. Towering on the other side of the fortress, the sloped roofs of the greenhouse poked out from behind walls of berry-colored holly.
Built of iron and half-silvered glass, the building comprised three major rooms, two in the front and one larger chamber in the back.
The glass gave the illusion of light bouncing, making one see their own reflection instead of whatever was inside.
Each chamber of the greenhouse felt like a world of its own.
Being embedded into the treacherous cliffside with no expansive path to the main fortress, it was an impregnable area, and an assault from the water was fundamentally ill-conceived.
It was one of the few places that stood mostly unguarded.
Vaasa quickly followed Ozik inside. He walked along the glimmering gravel pathway that wound through the greenhouse, providing access to all three chambers.
Heat wafted around them, a perfect balmy temperature to grow the sorts of things that could not thrive in the snow.
Vegetables and legumes grew in the front two rooms, yet the room tucked at the back, closest to the ocean cliffs, was covered in flora so unlike the daphne and primrose that burst through the snow along the courtyards.
It would be impossible to see from the outside, even with the floor-to-ceiling glass walls that provided an unobstructed view of the ocean, given the peculiar glass they’d used to build it instead of the stained glass most of the fortress utilized.
It was unexpectedly refreshing to gaze out at the world without viewing some artist’s rendition of her family’s sins.
Stone-hewn statues of people Vaasa did not know, set into the ground sporadically as the path intertwined on itself, guarded the greenhouse.
Veins of gold and silver threaded through black stone, and when the light hit them just right, those lines seemed to pulse.
Sometimes she wondered if they were frozen there in time.
When she was younger, she’d made up stories about them—each a character in the life she’d planned to live.
Like Icrurian air coasting along her skin, she reveled in the heat for a soft, stolen moment. Warmth mingled with her memories of Mireh, and it became a cavern in her chest. She shed her cloak as she entered the farthest room.
Vines hung from the ceiling with purple and pink buds exploding from them like droplets of rain about to slip off the leaves.
Vaasa entered slowly, eyes trailing over every detail.
The gravel pathway continued, lined on each side by flowers in pink and white and lavender.
Bushes filled the empty spaces and iridescent stones decorated the pathways, all of which led to a gnarled olive tree in the back.
Vaasa stopped.
Roman stood there, waiting.
Vaasa’s heart slammed against her chest. “What—” she started.
Roman stepped to the side, revealing a bench beneath the olive tree and a woman who immediately stood from it.
Amalie.