Chapter 31
CHAPTER
Vaasa wore all black.
With a gossamer veil covering her face and silk gloves up to her elbows, she entered the city’s mausoleum. Roman hadn’t taken her here himself, but it was no matter. One of the other sentinels had arrived, and with him, a carriage.
Though the sun still shone outside, the mausoleum was dark, save for the ever-present glow of candlelight and the kaleidoscope of color cast upon the floor by stained glass windows.
The black granite building itself was stark against the city’s landscape, statues that had caused Vaasa to shiver when she was younger carved into the front face.
Her footsteps echoed on the stone floor.
It was entirely empty of staff or visitors; the fortress sentinels had seen to that.
She stared up at the single statue that guarded her Asteryan ancestors’ resting place.
Looming in the center of the arching entryway, large wings burst from the back of an otherwise human figure who bowed their head in prayer.
Andrej Kozár, the first of her family line to hold the Asteryan throne, and the man her father was named after.
His ashes were incorporated directly into the stonework she gazed upon now, the custom a remnant of the old coastal kingdom of Asterya before her grandfather expanded to Mekes.
They burned the bodies then, and the most important of figures were enshrined within the limestone the Asteryans used to mine before her grandfather plucked iron out of the mountains.
It was he who insisted on a change in tradition; his sarcophagus remained at the highest point in the room, the first of their line to be preserved instead of burned.
And on the step below him, side by side, were the next: her father and her mother.
And the step below them, her brother.
Vaasa stared at the sarcophagi. The space next to her brother was not filled, having been reserved for his wife who never came to be.
Dominik had avoided the possibility of an official heir for most of his life, undoubtedly afraid that the moment that child was born, there would be another who could usurp him.
More importantly, there was no space reserved for Vaasa.
It was expected that she be laid with her husband elsewhere, and if she never married, she supposed she would have burned like the old Asteryans.
Perhaps turned into the most useless of statues.
Even in death, she would be apart from her family.
Relegated to the periphery because she was a tool, never an inheritor.
She realized it was only if she married Lord Karev that she would be laid to rest on the step below the rest of her family.
Her only path to eternity in this room was a marriage to another.
The thought made her blood boil. Made her wish to topple Andrej’s guardian statue and let the candles light the tapestries decorating the wall.
In her mind’s eye, she watched smoke fill the room.
Watched the stained glass shatter from the heat and the stones crumble.
Finally engulfed. Finally returned to the fire the way the old Asteryans had once mourned their dead.
Magic crept along the floor around Vaasa’s feet, the black mist leaking from her hands, and she didn’t bother to contain it. She wanted it to spoil the sanctity of the room. Wanted it to coat every surface.
Her footsteps echoed as she crossed the threshold past Andrej’s statue.
She climbed each platform using the stairs that split the center, all the levels empty until the top.
She slowed next to Dominik’s sarcophagus, unable to gaze upon it closely.
Yet her magic hummed. It spilled from her in large waves of black that rose and fell like smoke, the force skittering over Dominik’s resting place.
She swore she heard her power hiss. Guilt twisted her stomach, and it didn’t matter how much she told herself there had been no other choice; his journal flashed behind her eyes.
It was a dichotomy—her memory of him and those drawings.
It assigned him both beauty and violence, leaving her somewhere caught in the middle.
She took the next step, and then the next. Magic licked the stone beneath her feet. She landed upon her parents’ level and swore her heart lurched in an attempt to escape her own chest. She had never come here, not even after her mother’s demise. She couldn’t bring herself to.
Vaasa turned, gazing down upon her mother’s resting place. A large stone box, the lid and sides decorated with etchings of snowdrops. They covered the stone in long, twirling vines. Carefully, Vaasa ran her fingers over them, tracing some of the tangles. Tendrils of her magic kissed the stonework.
Gripping the lid, she pushed with all her might, just as she’d seen Dominik do in the vision Veragi had showed her.
The stone creaked with the slide of the lid, and Vaasa’s magic ducked into the crack it made.
There was a coldness on the edges of it that almost made Vaasa stop, a distinct sensation of terror that climbed up her throat.
But she pushed until her mother’s preserved face was revealed.
Those sharp features, enshrined precisely as they had been when Vaasa found her in that hallway.
Cheeks sunken, just a collection of skin and bones.
She dropped her eyes to her mother’s neck, and there it was: the necklace.
Dainty iron links that were bound to a raw, black gemstone in the center, the rough edges of which made it seem as though it had been broken off from a larger part.
The necklace had been draped upon Vena’s delicate throat. Vaasa eyed the clasp.
Tentatively, she reached for it. Her fingertips brushed the iron, and she gasped as every ounce of magic in her body winked out.
Like it had with the ropes they had bound her with beneath the colosseum and the chains they had used on her in the prison.
The same ones still encircling Amalie’s wrists and throat.
Vaasa pulled her hand back. Magic flooded her body once more, and she could feel everything. This was how her mother had stifled her magic. How Vena Kozár had gone years without being discovered as the witch she was. She had used this chain to block her own connection to Veragi.
The hours Vaasa had spent bound beneath the colosseum in Dihrah had been excruciating enough. The weeks in the prison without her magic had driven her to the point of hallucinations. Yet her mother had to have worn this every day for years.
Vaasa stared wide-eyed at the stone in the center of the necklace.
It was a strangely alluring gem, the onyx color so black it swallowed all the light around it.
Despite herself, Vaasa reached for the necklace again, hissing when she touched the chain.
She quickly undid the clasp and pulled the necklace from her mother’s body.
The moment she did, color crept from the top of Vena’s head, glittering black, coating her face and neck and shoulders. Right before Vaasa’s eyes, Vena Kozár turned to…
Stone.
What Vaasa stared down at was stone.
She reeled backward, panic cinching her chest as her hands covered her mouth to prevent a horrified scream. Still, Vena’s body hardened to glittering onyx, veins of gold and silver running along what used to be skin. It was uncanny, the resemblance. The immediate connection to…
The statues in the greenhouse.
Vaasa’s magic roared around her, released in a whipping wind as fear shot down the cords that bound her to Ozik.
Cords that had felt distant these past two days, perhaps because they had been coated in her magic instead of his oily power.
Vaasa approached the sarcophagus with bile churning in her stomach, her hand still on her mouth.
She closed the lid, nausea climbing up the back of her throat.
Her other hand clutched the raw black gemstone of the necklace.
Something shifted in her body.
The cords that bound her to Ozik twisted and tightened, and the energy from the pendant shot up her finger and arm.
It filled her entire body with a power that was both familiar and new, a whisper of her own magic wrapped around Ozik’s, her shadows and his oil mixing into something Vaasa had never felt before.
And then a story wrapped around her and pulled, plunging Vaasa into another vision, but this time…
She saw the world through Ozik’s eyes.