Chapter 33 #5
“Do something,” Vaasa demanded, her voice edging with violence. “We had a bargain, Ozik. Reid’s life for my magic. So do something.”
Ozik rose. Black oil slathered his face, one of his eyes sealed closed as he rolled his shoulders, his jacket tattered and frayed. The skin of his cheek peeled back and dripped black blood.
But all traces of red were gone.
Slowly, the wounds on Ozik started to heal. His skin sewed together, his bruises faded, all evidence of her attack disappeared with each breath he took. He leveled her with his gaze. “I sent Karev to arrest the wrong man.”
Vaasa froze. “What?”
“Reid of Mireh is waiting in your family’s apartment as we speak. It is his friend that Lord Karev arrested.”
Vaasa scurried to her feet, but as she caught her balance, Ozik’s tired voice drifted across the greenhouse.
“In the quest for your hand, I’ve situated the lords perfectly to be conquered by Icruria. They are on the verge of a civil war, and Karev is the single person holding them back. And because I am the one who taught you to steal thrones, this is something you already know.”
It had all been a trick. A brilliant, terrible scheme. She had been just as much a pawn as the men had. She just hadn’t realized why. “Why build an empire you plan to break?”
“Because when you carry the power of a god for as long as I have, conquering a nation is a worthwhile goal… until you fall in love. When you do that, there is no higher purpose than delivering the world to your partner’s feet. Your mother asked for an empire, so I gave her one.”
Vaasa curled in on herself. Your mother saw a spider, so afraid of being crushed beneath everyone else’s feet. What would being married to a man like Vaasa’s father do to a woman? To spend a lifetime in the shadow of men who saw her as nothing but a pawn to further their own ends?
Perhaps it wasn’t her father’s evil that Vaasa had inherited, but her mother’s burden.
“You want to destroy Asterya,” Ozik continued. “And I will help you. But in return, there’s something you must do for me.”
Rage coiled in her with such intensity, Vaasa went dizzy. “Another bargain?” She shook her head. “No.”
“I was twenty-four years old when my father unsealed Zetyr from his tomb.” Ozik dragged in a breath, a sorrowful rattling.
“Every day he grows stronger, and it won’t be long until I can no longer hold him back.
The witches in your coven are the only ones who can reseal him.
He won’t stop until he kills every single one of you, just like he did your mother. ”
Vaasa stopped breathing.
“I never laid a hand on her, and I never would have,” he swore.
Vaasa had never once thought she could find sincerity on Ozik’s face, but there it was.
She gazed at nothing but a shattered man.
“When I fell in love with your mother and realized what it would mean to reseal Zetyr, I gave her that necklace. A simple chain that stifled her magic, and something else she never understood: a third of my family’s anchor.
A talisman powerful enough to hold off Zetyr and circumvent the consequence of breaking a bargain. ”
Vaasa’s lips parted in shock. The necklace in her pocket could keep her alive.
It could prevent Ozik’s bargain from killing her?
That was why he had trained her. Why he had shown her the pathway to channeling his magic—it was a breaking of their bargain, but she held the necklace, so she survived. “Why not just release her? Release me?”
“You cannot be released from a Zetyr bargain once it has been made. The terms must be met. So I armed her with the only thing that would grant us more time.”
Vaasa grit her teeth. “And she didn’t know?”
“Not until that summer she went to Icruria. She began in Mireh, but she soon fled to my homeland, to the place where the last third of the anchor is hidden. Wrultho.”
Vaasa’s breaths came heavier. She stared at the olive tree in the back of the greenhouse, at the very thing Julianna and Elena had once sat beneath.
This entire place, a relic of the life Ozik had lost. He had carried it with him, had grown it here in Mekes like a torturous testament to his past. “What happened next?”
Ozik looked down in shame. It was perhaps the first time she had ever seen him reveal such a thing to her.
“I have spent hundreds of years carrying two pieces of my family’s anchor, and for a time, that was powerful enough to hold off Zetyr.
But when I gave your mother the necklace, it meant limiting my own protection.
And one night, I couldn’t fight him. I… lost control.
I told her to never take off the necklace, but she was trying—”
Ozik stopped speaking, his hand upon his throat as if he could hold back his emotions.
“She was trying to give it to me,” Vaasa said.
He closed his eyes.
The weight of what he told her bore down heavy in the air, smothering Vaasa. Her voice wavered, sadness coating every word. “You aren’t the reason she’s dead. I am.”
Ozik shook his head, dropping his hand. “Don’t ever say that again. I am, without a shadow of a doubt, the reason your mother is gone. If she had never loved me, if I had never learned of her magic and tried to trick her into resealing Zetyr, she would still be alive.”
Tears pricked Vaasa’s eyes. Ozik couldn’t guarantee a thing like that; the magic might very well have killed Vena Kozár even if Ozik had never intervened.
Of this, Vaasa knew intimately. It was when Vena removed her necklace, when she tried to hide it for Vaasa, tried to give Vaasa something that would protect her—
Vaasa covered her mouth with her hand and choked back a sob. The image of her mother turning to stone lapped ceaselessly against the walls of her mind. “She tried to give me the one thing she knew would save her own life.”
“I know you have doubted your mother’s favor; I have seen it since you were a child.
But to love you openly, to show you any affection…
it would have put you in danger. You were your father’s daughter, but you were caught between two people who could not stand the life of the other.
Your mother wanted to tell you what was coming, wanted me to train you, but your father wouldn’t allow it.
He was hell-bent on finding a way to cleanse you of what he believed was a curse.
That was when the torture of witches began. ”
Her father knew. He’d known that Vaasa would someday inherit the magic crawling beneath her mother’s skin. “He conquered a continent in search of a cure?”
“When your mother inherited her magic and your fate became clear, your father demanded you be able to read any book you came across, to converse with even the eldest of history-keepers. If there was a way to eliminate magic from his bloodline, from you, he believed you would find it. Your parents were complicated people, Vaasalisa, but you must understand that they loved you and your brother, even if the only way they knew how to show it was how their parents had shown it to them.”
Tears slid down Vaasa’s face. Every language, every nation, every violent upheaval that Vaasa had been forced to witness, was in pursuit of saving her life. Her family had been fundamentally fractured, and now here Vaasa was, alone and still standing with the remnants of their choices in her hands.
And the remnants of her own.
Vaasa stared at Ozik, shocked that she could feel such pity wrap around her ribcage, such sorrow and compassion for a man who had calculated every moment of these weeks with precisely this exchange in mind. To steal her. Train her. Use her.
He was no better than her father. Selfish, ambitious men.
And once again, she had no choice but to bend to their schemes.
“Fine. State your bargain,” she said.
Ozik didn’t smile. Even though she knew he had been leading her to this exact moment every second she had been back in Mekes, satisfaction was nowhere on him.
Not on his face, not in his voice. “I will help you and your friends escape this city if you will go to Wrultho and finish what your mother could not.”
Vaasa’s fists opened and closed. It was all she could do to stop herself from twitching. “What is the cost of reuniting the anchor? Why wouldn’t my mother do it?”
“Because,” Ozik said, voice leveling out, “in order to reseal Zetyr, you have to kill me.”