Chapter 26 #3
Heart thundering in her chest, Vaasa looked around as if an attendant would be there any moment, but they were alone, as safe as they could possibly be. “I have so much to tell you,” Vaasa whispered.
Melisina walked to the couch where Vaasa had been sleeping and sat down, hands on her knees. “Do tell.”
She walked to Melisina and sat upon the floor in front of her, knees curled to her chest. Vaasa didn’t know where to start, but the moment she found words, everything came flowing at once.
She recounted everything: Ozik’s connection to her, the notebook she had found in her father’s office, her suspicions about her mother’s necklace.
She told Melisina about the red eyes and the dark ancient thing she could feel on the other side of her connection to Ozik.
They discussed Ozik’s morning trainings and the strides Vaasa had managed with her magic, the way Ozik urged her to feed on other people’s emotions, and the frightening confrontation they’d had in the hallway.
Melisina’s hand flew over her mouth, then fell after a moment. “That is dark magic,” she whispered. “After feeding on others, do you not feel burned-out? Consumed?”
Vaasa shook her head. “It’s… easier, actually.”
“Have you considered that you might be channeling Ozik’s magic in the same way he is channeling yours?” Melisina asked. “Because fueling Veragi magic with an outside source is incredibly difficult. I have only accomplished it once or twice in my lifetime, and it left me sick.”
Vaasa’s lips parted, then closed. Channeling Ozik?
A bargain goes both ways, he had once told her.
She hadn’t once considered that she was leeching magic from him the way he was leeching from her. But then she remembered Ozik’s outburst in the greenhouse: Get out of my head!
“You might be right,” Vaasa murmured. But that hadn’t been a part of their bargain; she’d given up her magic, not him.
Yet she felt it: The cord that bound them tugged at her then, as if her own body could confirm the suspicions.
She pictured it coated in her own dark Veragi magic, tendrils of smoke wrapping around it.
The longer she had been here, the more she’d gotten used to the feeling of their bargain.
Now that her magic was back at her command, even temporarily, all her senses were heightened.
“Look at this.” Vaasa stood and guided Melisina down the hallway her mind and body had finally somehow deemed as safe into her father’s office.
Melisina gazed around, wide-eyed, at all the books.
Vaasa unlatched the secret compartment in the desk and pulled out Dominik’s notebook, scurrying to where Melisina stood.
The high witch looked down upon it and watched as Vaasa flipped through the pages, landing on the one that held the intricate drawing of her mother’s necklace.
Melisina let out a small hum. “She did not wear this in Mireh.”
“What can you tell me about her time there?” Vaasa asked.
“It was brief,” Melisina said. “She only had interest in a cure. But she practically lived in our library, reading books at every hour of the night. She never seemed to gain control; her magic was more unpredictable than even yours.”
Vaasa wondered if her own mother had bargained her magic to Ozik in the same way Vaasa had. If the unpredictability of her mother’s magic had perhaps been due to whatever a connection with Ozik offered. “Do you think she could have been channeling Ozik?”
Melisina merely shrugged. “I don’t understand how your bargain works, so I can’t say.
But one day, I woke to her gone. She left a note asking for a marriage agreement between you and Reid.
I brought it to him, and when news of your mother’s death swept the continent, I knew the only way to save your life was to heed her request.”
Vaasa trembled despite herself. Her mother’s last act in Mireh had been to find a way to send Vaasa there. To give her some semblance of safety. She’d also tried to protect her with this necklace, yet another thing Dominik had stolen from her.
“She left me this note.” Vaasa unfolded the parchment, showing Melisina the Asteryan writing.
She translated, “ ‘A wedding present. There is so little I can pass down to you other than pain. But I can give you this: my necklace. It is the only thing that will protect you from him. Whatever you do, stay in Mireh and do not unite the pieces. The price is far too great.’ ”
Melisina darted her eyes between the note and the drawing of the necklace. “Who is ‘him’?”
Vaasa’s fingers tightened on the notebook in frustration. “Ozik, Dominik. I don’t know. But the necklace isn’t in here. I don’t know where Dominik hid it, but he never brought it to me.”
“Hmm,” Melisina mused.
Vaasa pointed at the stone drawn in the center of the necklace, her finger tracing the raw lines of it, particularly on the right half. “It looks broken. And Ozik wears this ring that holds a similar stone. I’m beginning to wonder if they are two halves of a whole.”
Melisina sighed in frustration, shaking her head. “I wish there were more of us. That all of our texts hadn’t been burned in the fallout of the war. I swear there are a thousand puzzles that could be solved if the pieces hadn’t been erased by the ambitious and the frightened.”
Vaasa closed the notebook, letting it hang at her side. “Ozik keeps saying that the Witches’ War was more about the deities than it was about the covens. That without any witches behind them, the deities can be defeated.”
Melisina’s eyes lifted, a warning laced in the way she laid her hand on Vaasa’s shoulders. “Ozik is like any other person with power. He will only teach you what it serves him for you to know. He can tell the story of history however he pleases.”
Vaasa’s heart sank. It was a fair assessment, and the way knowledge sat at her fingertips but couldn’t quite be grasped felt like a noose around her neck. “Do you think…” She shook her head, the idea so outlandish even she couldn’t entirely believe it.
“What?”
Vaasa worried her lip. “What if Ozik is a deity? What if that’s why he didn’t die when I stabbed him?”
Melisina shifted her weight and then leaned on one of the chairs. “I don’t know. I think you’d need to find the necklace before anything else, though.”
“There is one place I haven’t checked,” Vaasa confessed.
Melisina quirked a brow.
“My mother’s room. I…” Vaasa trailed off, trying to control the panic that squeezed her chest. “I haven’t been able to walk down that hallway. It’s where I found her. Where I inherited my magic.”
Melisina closed her eyes in a shared understanding and sorrow.
“I can’t do it. But you can,” Vaasa realized. She ran to the desk and put the notebook back, latching it. “You can go in there.”
“Come,” Melisina said, gesturing to the door.
Together, they left her father’s office and returned to the entertaining room, finding Sachia laying out swatches of fabrics upon the floor.
While Vaasa knew it wasn’t to serve the purpose they claimed, it at least kept up the ruse, should any attendants walk in.
“It’s there,” Vaasa whispered, raising her hand to point. She didn’t often stare at the carpet or down the walls any longer because even as she did so now, her throat closed. “The room on the left,” she managed.
Melisina extended Vaasa a hand. “Together,” she said.
Vaasa shook her head, tears already pricking her eyes.
“One witch is a problem,” Melisina whispered.
A tear, unbidden, rolled down Vaasa’s cheek. “Please. I can’t.”
Melisina spoke again, still so soft, so gentle. “A coven is a nightmare.”
Vaasa looked at the woman, the many roles Melisina filled seeming to spin around her. Mentor. High witch. Mother-in-law. And it had been so long since someone had offered her a hand with such pure assurance, since a moment of progress had been coupled with kindness instead of pain.
Hatred for Ozik spun itself out in Vaasa’s body.
For the things he had stolen from her, for the tactics he used now to teach her.
As she stared at Melisina’s hand, it was as if Vaasa stood in the witches’ tower of Mireh.
As if air came easy and warmth floated throughout the room.
The same choice Melisina had given her from the very start: Walk forward together or stay standing still.
Not an ounce of judgment to be had for the direction Vaasa took.
Hands shaking, she took Melisina’s outstretched palm.
Melisina curled her fingers around Vaasa’s and squeezed. “Even slowly, forward is forward.”
And then they began to walk, Melisina leading and Vaasa trailing her. Her body tensed, and panic caused her breaths to speed up. She took one step. Another. Faintly, Vaasa knew she was shaking.
She stopped. Stared.
The memory appeared fresh in her mind. The body on the floor.
The jade of her mother’s dress. The sunken cheeks and scent of rancid burning flesh in the air.
In Icruria, it had been easier to picture the world as turning, to feel time as it passed.
But here, in this city, time stood still.
It froze on the moment she’d found her mother and hadn’t moved past that place.
In so many ways, these weeks had presented her with snippets of the past like dogs barking on her heels.
Roman. Lord Karev. A path to the throne.
All choices she might have made had she never known Icruria.
Had she never known love and a coven and the way comfort could be found in the hearts of others.
Vaasa felt so desperately lost.
She looked up at Melisina, who still held her hand with a firm grip. Reassurance emanated from the high witch’s eyes.
And so Vaasa looked at the hallway, and the world began to turn again.
She saw her mother’s body disappearing. The jade dress disintegrating into ash that blew away with the cold. The rug clearing of blood and that one single moment being replaced by every moment after.
Feet walking down the hallway.