Chapter 6 Nes
Nes
Nes followed her feet as they wandered the streets of the Ditch.
She’d spent much of the last week like this—lost in thought, unaware of the dirt beneath her own feet.
Nes had seen death before. The Ditch was where everyone dumped their bodies. But she didn’t want to remember Mikaud as a corpse.
They hadn’t been close, she reminded herself.
She didn’t know his favorite food or even what drink he ordered when he stopped by the Siren’s Hair.
And yet, some part of her had liked him.
Liked him enough to tell him her real name.
Now she would never hear that name—taunting or sensual—from his lips again.
Just as she would never hear it from her father.
No.
So she’d lost her plan and her backup in the same day. That didn’t matter. She’d found her way to Gadore on her own. She would find another way to free her father.
Something stirred inside her at the thought. Something that unfurled just enough to remind her she already had another way. Magic.
She took a sip from her flask. The liquid rioted, salt water burning its way under her skin as it ran down the back of her throat.
Calm washed over her as she inhaled, scanning the street for other sources of magic.
Nothing tickled her nostrils, no scent that didn’t belong.
But she did feel a phantom finger slide up her spine and settle on the back of her neck. Eyes. Someone was watching her.
She turned, but there were too many people to determine whose gaze was heaviest. Twisting the cap back on, she stowed her flask.
She’d need to refill soon—probably one of the reasons Phineas was having her followed.
No doubt he believed she’d come crawling back to him, tail between her legs, once she ran out.
She didn’t want to consider the other reason he’d have her followed.
Not for the flask she carried but for the power in her arsenal.
She was too valuable for him to let go. At least that meant he wouldn’t kill her—for now.
Someone knocked her shoulder, and she stumbled forward, nearly falling to her knees. As she straightened, someone else bumped her. More and more people pressed in against her.
They came from all sides, like a herd trying to escape the threat of a wolf. Except these people weren’t terrified. No, they were…excited, their faces marked by wide eyes and eager lips pressed thin.
Nes had seen these markers before and knew what they meant. Another suspected Witch was being sent to her death.
Nes tried cutting through the mass, using her elbows to propel her, but she was forced back. The crowd continued to thicken around her until she couldn’t have carved her own path if she were as heavy and tall as a bear.
Dread coiled tight in her gut.
“Excuse me,” she croaked, her throat suddenly dry. “I need to get through.”
She pressed a hand to someone’s shoulder, trying to squeeze by, only to be pushed back into place by someone else.
“Let me by,” she tried again. No one listened. Her plea was nothing but a lone bud in a field of weeds.
People continued to pour into the square, filling every possible space until they stood shoulder to shoulder, Nes unable to move.
In the center of the open area was the platform. And in the middle, poking through the wooden planks, stood the Witch’s Well.
When Nes first came to the city, she’d foolishly thought the platform was a stage—meant for dramas and comedies people all over the continent might come to see. And the platform was a stage. One only set for tragedies.
Guards gathered around the stacked stones. Two held a girl between them, their grip on her arms tight enough to bruise.
The accused Witch lifted her head, and Nes lost all ability to move.
Marnie stood on the platform in front of the Witch’s Well. Nes knew exactly how she’d come to stand there. Nes had walked away. Turning Marnie in was Phineas’s way of getting back at her.
A guard began speaking. She did not hear the words. She heard only Marnie’s cries. Felt her fear like it was her own. She couldn’t tear her gaze away as Marnie was thrown, screaming of innocence, into the Witch’s Well.
Nes’s knees buckled. Bent and bowed, they dropped her to the cobblestones.
Her flask clattered to the stone, and she scrambled to retrieve it.
She felt like she was swimming through sand.
Her hands were too slow, and every time she reached out, the crowd was there to fill the space.
No one looked down. Their eyes were all on the sky, awaiting the spark of green light that would tell them finally, this time, they’d gotten it right—they’d drowned the Witch.
But they hadn’t. All they’d found was a girl desperate to live. A girl who Nes herself had taken advantage of. She’d handed Marnie over to Phineas, subsequently handing the girl her death.
She pushed her palms to the ground but couldn’t stand. Her feet weren’t there. Fabrics swished around her, squeezing her in and taking away all air. She couldn’t breathe. She was drowning above water as Marnie drowned below.
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t—
“Nes!”
A hand snatched up her flask. Another was on her elbow. It yanked her, pulling her up beyond the stomp of boots and the shuffle of worn leathers. Wobbling, she found her feet and stood, all the while clinging to whoever had dared reach for her.
“Nes,” the person said, “are you okay?”
She blinked against the backdrop of sunshine hanging behind her savior’s head. “Suri?”
“Are you okay?” Suri repeated.
She squeezed Suri’s arm a little harder.
“Fine,” she gasped out. She wiped at the sweat on her temple. “Just lightheaded. What are you doing here?”
Suri stood beside her, dressed from head to toe in brown. A brown button-up ran into brown leggings, and a pair of brown boots kept the color scheme together. She even had a brown scarf tying back her long, dark hair. Only her green eyes stood out against all the brown.
“On my way back to the Ditch, I got sucked into the crowd.” Suri glanced around. “You’d think they were handing out gadots by the number of people that showed up today. Is this normal?”
Nes shrugged, but it came off as more of a shiver. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t make a habit of coming to these things.”
And she’d warned Suri to avoid them, too. It had been one of the first things she’d said to Suri upon the girl’s arrival in Gadore nine months prior.
Suri stared out at the thousands of heads filling the square before her gaze landed on the guards atop the platform. Her face soured and she turned away. “I can see why.”
But Nes paused. Not on the guards around the well but on a lone guard standing by the stairs.
He was tall and he wore a uniform more decorated than any city or prison guard she’d ever seen.
Though he stood high enough for the whole square to see, he did not hide his expression.
Despair burdened his every feature, and something flickered in her chest at the sight.
“Nes?”
She pulled her gaze from the lone guard.
Suri eyed her as she ran her fingers through her smooth ponytail. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
People began to leave the square, their eagerness fading as time revealed no green spark.
She searched their faces. Plenty of disappointment, but not one held a hint of remorse.
She shouldn’t be surprised. They used to tear infants from their mothers’ arms to drown them.
Some mothers were so afraid their children would grow up to be the Witch that they threw their daughters down the well themselves.
Fear could do despicable things to a person’s heart.
She held out a hand for her flask. “I’m fine.”
Suri took her outstretched hand in hers, slipping Nes’s flask back onto her belt where it belonged and tugging her shirt down over it. “You say that, but you look like you were run over by a carriage.”
She huffed. “So no different from normal.”
Suri’s smile was soft. “Hey, how about we find a quiet café and grab a cup of tea? We can talk.”
Talk. As in Suri did all the talking and Nes tried not to let her mind wander too much. “I’d prefer coffee.”
“But how will you sleep at night?”
“I don’t sleep.”
Again, Suri eyed her, curious concern creeping in.
She gripped Suri’s hand tightly, ready to drag the girl out of the square and her thoughts. “Come on. Tea, coffee, and if we’re lucky, there’ll be doughnuts, too.”
“You know I like the sound of that.”
She turned, every part of her keen on taking the escape Suri offered. She swore she could already smell the doughnuts in the air. She took three steps and stopped.
No, those weren’t doughnuts. Slowly, she turned back toward the square.
Magic punched her in the gut, and she gasped.
Some magic—the strongest magic—she didn’t just smell. Sometimes, she could hear it. It spoke to her, whispered its plans as if they were back to back, head to head.
Everyone knew pure magic was dangerous. What most people forgot was magic—pure or diluted—had a sentience to it.
Magic was a leech. If someone held pure magic while their heart was brimming with happiness, the magic would take that happiness.
It could become light stronger than the sun—a light bright enough to blind—or grow into a sea of flowers large enough to drown in.
Magic took whatever emotion a person was feeling and amplified it exponentially, usually to the point of detriment.
She tasted this magic’s eagerness on the air, lush and boiling. It had waited so long for a purpose. Some fool had given it one.
She drew in a sharp breath, searching for the truth under the sweetness. It was filled with bursts of heat and ash. She felt the slosh of the contents of her flask in her stomach and she knew. Rage fed this magic.
“Run,” she told Suri.
“What?”
“Run!”
She squeezed Suri’s hand and pushed away from her, dashing for the platform in the center of the square.
The source. She had to find the source of the magic.
She shoved her way through the crowd, looking for someone who wasn’t moving, wasn’t leaving the square like everyone else. But she was too short to see more than a few people ahead of her. As far as she could tell, she was the only person fighting against the tide to get to the platform.
The guards on the platform were standing around, talking casually—as if killing an innocent girl was some menial task. Maybe these men deserved to die. She could slip away with the rest of the crowd, pretend she didn’t know a thing.
But then she remembered the devastation on the face of that lone guard. She didn’t know these men. All she’d seen today were the results of someone else’s orders.
The closer she got, the more she felt like she was breathing in smoke. A short distance from the platform, she felt like she was so near a burning fire, she choked on it. The magic’s rage could contest the sun, singeing her nose and throat.
She pushed on. It’s not real, she reminded herself. Not yet.
The lone guard stood atop the platform with his back to her.
“Run,” she tried to shout to him, but her word was no more than a croak, lost to the sounds of shuffling feet. She could tell herself the taste of fire on her tongue wasn’t real, but that didn’t mean her body listened.
She scrambled up the stairs, her lungs begging her to turn back.
“Run.”
The word was only a whisper. The fire—the magic—was so strong here. Too strong. Her belly warmed and she bent over, collapsing in on herself under the weight of the magic. It was here. Beneath them. Poised to erupt.
Her knees collided with the wood of the platform.
He turned toward her. She wanted to scream, but the magic burned it out of her.
She lifted her head and met the eyes of the lone guard.
Wrinkling her nose, she coughed but forced herself to keep eye contact with the guard.
She rubbed at her throat, her nose, anything to make the heat fade, to make the imaginary smoke in her lungs dissipate, but it was no use.
Run, run, run, she pleaded, shouting her thoughts at him with every second his gaze remained locked on hers.
His eyes widened, recognizing her fear but nothing more.
A word, just one word, was all she needed. She dredged it up, protecting it as it surged past her searing throat and over her boiling tongue.
“Fire,” she rasped.
And then the fire she felt was real.
It roared vengeance into the world. Flames sprouted under their feet like hungry vines, twisting and snarling.
Something hit Nes hard in the side, and she was flung from the platform.
She was in the air, falling, when the whole thing exploded.
Planks and splinters—scorched and burning—pricked and sliced every bit of her exposed skin as the cobblestones loomed closer.
She hit the ground, smacking her head, and pain lashed down her limbs, making her eyelids heavy.
Her head felt like a boulder. She fought the darkness back.
Fought to see through the fire, the debris, the smoke, still searching for the one responsible.
Through it all she caught a glimpse of a face. Eyes darker than a moonless night stared back at her. Nes couldn’t look away. Those eyes…In them, she saw a fire far stronger, far greater, than the one burning around them.
The fire consuming them wasn’t the magic’s twisted perversion of this person’s emotion. No, this devastation was exactly what they’d wanted.