by Sara Holland
“You killed my friend,” I hiss, a tide of fury rising inside me and pushing the words out. “You burned my home.”
“I had to bring you here, didn’t I? I couldn’t let you keep lurking in the shadows.” Caro scoffs, but her eyes gleam with something like hurt. Then the hurt is replaced with a beatific smile that lights up her face. “Were you there? Did you see it?”
“I saw it,” I retort, slashing out again with the knife. I try to recall the sparring lessons Roan passed on to me when we were children, but it just calls up a wave of rage and loss. Caro dodges my swing without breaking my gaze.
“We can do wonderful things together when we combine our powers, Jules.”
Her words burn inside me. I try to ignore them, to push them away—because what does it matter now what happened five centuries ago, facing her, knives clutched in both our hands? “Amma did nothing wrong,” I hiss. “You should have left her out of this. Everyone in Crofton.”
“They don’t matter.” Her voice is wild and joyful again. “They’re ants next to us, Jules. Everyone is.”
A combination of rage and horror makes my reply stick in my throat. I lunge forward at Caro again, raising the knife high.
She whirls away from me, her own knife a flash of silver in the air. “I know you better than anyone else,” she almost sings. “You’re just as impulsive as ever.”
As she speaks, she dances out of the way of all my blows, her movements quick and graceful and efficient. She doesn’t seem to be trying to hurt me, but I realize that we’re closer together now than before. Caro is luring me to her—just like she lured me here, I think bitterly, foolishly. A storm of frustration crystallizes into movement, and I lunge forward with a grunt—and trip to my knees when Caro glides out of my path.
“Ina cries for him every night,” she whispers, a malicious curl in her voice. “He wasn’t worth a day-iron, and yet she weeps over that unfaithful Gerling boy.”
The memory of Roan’s blood burns behind my eyes, the shape of Amma’s body crumpled in rubble. Papa too, and others, a sudden chorus of ghosts in my head. For a second, the grief feels bigger than me, like it’s going to burst through my skin. I spring forward, a wordless snarl escaping my lips—
And bury my knife in Caro’s side.
She doesn’t cry out, but gasps, as if I’ve slapped her. Blood spills out of the wound. Triumph and shock and disgust crash through me. I let go of the knife and fall back, my breath coming fast. The world spins around me, but one thing stays in focus: the crude handle of Amma’s butcher knife, protruding from the lacy fabric of Caro’s dress.
Caro still grips her own knife, but her hand falls to her side, useless and slack. It’s too dark to see much—but the blood shines like black oil in the moonlight, welling up around the blade. I can’t tear my eyes from it.
“Jules,” Caro whispers, touching a hand to the wound. Her smile is gone. Her voice is small and vulnerable and makes something twist painfully in my chest.
Then the Sorceress falls to her knees with a soft, pathetic thud.
I twitch, instinct telling me to go to her, to help her, but I steel myself. No, no, no. The clever handmaid I befriended at Everless was just an invention, a mask. Caro is the Sorceress. She killed Roan Gerling. She killed Amma. She razed Crofton to the ground. That’s not changed by her ragged breathing, the blood dripping over her fingers, and the pained curve of her mouth like a gash across her face.
Her face. Something in it is wrong . . . something in it is changing, subtly, in the light of the moon. I take a step closer. Lines are spreading over her chin, cheeks, forehead. Her eyes are sinking deeper into their sockets, becoming wreathed in violet shadows. Her skin is even paler than usual, becoming the color of parchment, then bone.
With a shock I realize that her black hair is turning silver, like the moonlight is a physical thing clinging to her and painting her braid, dripping down until the white sweeps over her shoulder. She lets out a keening moan and wraps her arms around herself.
Something makes me close the distance between us in two quick strides. Without knowing why, I drop my hand and press it to her chest, over her heart.
Or where her heart should be. Because there, at least, the tales are true.
Her skin is freezing through her dress, as if there is a lump of ice buried inside her, sending out, instead of a beat, waves of cold that immediately begin to numb my palm. Cold emanates through me, to my fingertips, which meet the skin of Caro’s chest, the shiver traveling up my arm until I swear I can feel a claw of ice trace the undersides of my ribs and slowly encircle my own heart. The chill is cold as death. I gasp, then breathe out a cloud of frost. It hangs in the air between us, fine as a veil.
Though I’ve heard the story of the Sorceress’s heart countless times, I feel it now. On my skin. In my bones. Inside my chest. I carry the Sorceress’s heart.
For a moment, my pulse pushes me closer to her, as if the heart imprisoned behind my ribs is vying to be back where it belongs.
“I remember this,” she says faintly, more to herself than to me. Her hand, cold as bone, closes over mine.
Horrified, I look into her face. It’s still morphing before my eyes, delicate lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes and mouth—fine against the furrows of pain carved into her brow, but growing deeper and deeper as I watch.
Then—
A violent tug at my core. I slam my eyes shut and hear the world remade around me: a single, quiet shout of noise. Light, even behind my closed eyelids.
And smell—wet cedar, incense smoke, tang of blood.
Even before I force my eyes open, I know I’m no longer on the palace grounds. I’m somewhere—somewhere else.
The floor under my knees is damp, hard. The moon has been swallowed too, replaced by a dim candle. Caro is in my arms, her mouth open in a scream. The sound is unbearable.
Except it’s not Caro’s scream—it’s mine. The candle, the walls around us, Caro’s form, all are frozen in time. I register that her dress is a filthy blue, not the midnight lace-furrowed silk that my knife tore through.
Then I’m reeling again. The next breath, I’m in the courtyards at Shorehaven once more.
Caro is in my arms, her eyes closed. But the blood that spilled over the fabric of her dress is retreating back into its wound, the gray shrinking from the black of her hair.
She stirs. Opens her eyes and looks up at me. Alive, and angry.
4
I shove the revived Caro away from me and scramble to my feet. The world smears around me. She stares at me, her eyes bright and dancing, and pushes herself to her knees. Nausea folds my stomach in half. In one motion, Caro closes her hand around the knife and pulls it out from her side, then lets it fall into the grass.
The sight of the blood on the blade is too much; it makes me dizzy. I look around, backing away from Caro as I scold myself for believing a simple blade would kill the Sorceress of legend. I should remember that I have never been lucky.
I can’t kill her—
Ina. I must find Ina.
The guards brought me inside the palace gates when they discarded me at Caro’s feet. I sprint for the closest entrance into Shorehaven, an archway leading into a narrow corridor, not letting myself look at Caro, though I can see her out of the corner of my eye, still lurching to her feet.
Each step jogs my churning insides, but I push on, tearing through what’s clearly a servants’ corridor. The hall curves gently to my right, mirroring the outside wall, and to my left I can see a bit of staircase through a stone archway. I veer in that direction, hoping that if Caro follows me she won’t know if I’ve gone up or down. I choose up without thinking and pelt up the stairs, one floor, two floors, three. Soon my lungs and legs are burning fiercely, but adrenaline, and the image of Ina’s face in my mind, keep me going.
Desperately, I recall any distant memory of Shorehaven, the knowledge that I’ve been here before. I know this place. So where would a young queen go whil
e she waited to be crowned?
A pair of faint, low voices rises up to the vaulted ceilings—someone else on the staircase. Whether they’re guests or guards or servants, I’m not sure. They’ll hear my heavy footsteps, so I force myself to slow and climb the stairs at a normal speed. My heart is thudding so loudly in my ears, I can scarcely hear the chatter of servants in the hallways or the rustle of silk skirts as noblewomen are ushered into the palace.
When I get to a landing, I have to decide whether to keep climbing or go down another servants’ corridor. This time, it’s not my buried memories that guide my steps—it’s my ordinary memories of Ina at Everless. How she chafed at the guards outside her chambers and lied smoothly to the Gerling lackeys who wouldn’t let her outside the gates.
If I know her, she will want to be somewhere alone. A tower, perhaps, as far away from the guards as possible.
Up.
I force my thoughts away from the coldness of Caro’s chest. I pass a few gold-suited servants on my way up the stairs and through the narrow corridors where my feet take me—but they look almost as harried as I do and don’t give me a second glance.
No guards. A small voice in me whispers that this is wrong—it’s another trap—but I can’t stop to consider, afraid that I’ll look over the railing and see Caro’s eager face looking back up at me. My feet take me up and up and finally down a window-lined hall, to a set of double doors at its end.
I push into an airy, high-windowed chamber, lit by a few lamps and much moonlight. Through the multicolored glass I see the gleaming slopes and spires of Shorehaven’s roof, and beyond that, the glitter of the sea. Inside the room, there are stacks of books, cloth dolls, clothes scattered all over like flower petals.
But then I see her, and my heart contracts in shock.
Ina.
The new Queen—my sister—stands in front of a tall mirror, her back to me, powdering her face. The memory slams into me of the night I entered the old Queen’s chambers convinced that she was the Sorceress, and seeing her making herself up like this, as pale as a ghost in the mirror. But Ina is not the old Queen. Not a shell, not doomed.
Pulse racing, I take a step into the room, eyes fixed on Ina. Taking in her slumped shoulders, her dull eyes, the way she moves, like every motion costs her. My friend.
My sister. Born to the same mother in Briarsmoor the day time splintered there, taken by the Queen and Caro to Shorehaven while Papa spirited me away. It hits me suddenly that now, she’s the only family I have left.
Ina meets my gaze in the mirror. The powder slips from her fingers, hitting the polished vanity and bursting into a cloud of shimmering dust around her. Ina whips around, her eyes flying wide.
For a sliver of a moment, I think she’s going to run and embrace me—I see the impulse flit across her open, trusting face—but then an icy-cold hatred floods into the white shock of her eyes. Her hand shoots to a silver bell sitting under her mirror. Her fingers hover over it. Ready to bring guards swarming.
“Ina.” I stare at her, my mind slow, my mouth dry. “Please, just listen to me.”
Ina moves slowly, almost as if she’s in pain. She takes up the bell from the vanity as well as a silver dagger that I hadn’t previously seen, and rises from her cushioned chair.
“Caro told me that you were captured.” Her voice is calmer than I expected but colder than the coldest, darkest winter day I ever experienced in Crofton, even when Papa and I were near starving.
My friend. My queen. My sister. Glaring at me with something like hate in her eyes. But it’s the pain buried there, only half hidden beneath her fury, that I cannot bear.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper without meaning to. A hoarse plea for mercy, for understanding.
“Why?” The word comes out in a hiss. “I know you’ve had a hard life, Jules. I can understand why you might have hated my mother, or the Gerlings. But I never did anything to you. Roan helped you.” Her voice is shaking, but her dagger is steady. “I trusted you.”
“Ina,” I say brokenly, raising my hands palm out. “Ina, I didn’t—”
I mean to tell her that I didn’t kill Roan. But before I can get the rest of the sentence out, Amma’s face flashes behind my eyes. The way she’d embraced me in the shed, and then dead on the burned ground of the butcher’s shop, her blood pooling around her.
I convinced Amma to trust me. She believed me. And she was still taken from me.
My voice dies in my throat in a way that has nothing to do with magic.
Ina stalks closer to me, seeming to radiate cold. I can feel tears start to prick at my eyes. “I only ever tried to be kind to you, and you ruined my life. Caro always said people would take advantage of me for kindness. I should have listened.” She stops a single pace away from me, the dagger held tightly at her side. Her fingers curl around the handle so tightly that the blade seems to be a part of her: a single, sharpened claw.
One tear, then another, tracks down my face, but I don’t wipe them away. I didn’t kill Roan or her mother, I’m not the monster she thinks I am—but that doesn’t make her words any less true. They are dead because of me, both of them. And Ina is alone with Caro. With Caro, who’s probably coming up the tower steps as we speak.
I swallow the speech I’d prepared for Amma. It’s safer if Ina believes a lie.
Summoning an image of Caro, of Ivan, of the interchangeable Gerling faces that stole every blood-iron from my papa’s belt, I twist my face into a mask of anger.
“Your mother and the Gerlings ruined my life,” I spit. The old anger swirls in me, awakened by the barbed words on my tongue. “They killed my father just for stepping inside Everless. But only after they couldn’t starve us, along with our entire village.”
She hasn’t yet mastered the art of hiding the feelings that cross her face. Even through my tears, I recognize them—confusion, anger, shock, anger again. Each one lands like a blow as I grope for words. Even now I want to take back what I’ve said, searching for something to say that will show Ina the truth without putting her in danger from Caro.
But there’s nothing, no part of the truth that will keep her safe. I reach and reach, but there’s nothing there.
“The Queen was a blight on Sempera, siphoning the blood of the poor. What are our years worth to you? To your mother? To the Gerlings? I watched people die while you and Roan gorged yourselves on feasts and the blood-irons of the starving,” I choke, sputter, but I push on. “The Queen deserved to die.”
Ina rings the bell.
The loud, clear chime cuts straight into me. I hear footsteps, many of them, thundering down the hallway outside. A high female voice cuts through the stampede with a shouted command.
Even though I told her I was the monster she was expecting, my throat clogs up with shock and betrayal as she moves forward—with more deadly grace than I knew her to have at Everless—and presses the tip of the dagger against my chest. But I meet her stare, longing to communicate the truth of me, of us, with only a glance. Remembering the silent language Amma and her sister kept between them as lovingly as a secret.
The muscles around Ina’s mouth tighten. Confusion and wariness war on her face. The silence between us stretches, more deafening than the onslaught of footsteps on the other side of the door. I stare at her, tears trickling down, torn between pushing her away and betraying the truth in spite of all reason.
Finally, just as the door opens and shouting guards pour in—Caro’s skirts swirling in the midst of them, a spot of deadly calm in the center of the storm—Ina draws the dagger away from my chest.
Then something strikes me hard in the temple, and everything goes dark.
When I come to, the shape of Caro’s face swims slowly into view, her sharp features and green-glass eyes, as lovely as a poisonous vine. For a moment, I imagine that I’m back at Everless, collapsed in a bed with her after a long night, like the day she, Ina, and I went to Laista and drank madel to celebrate Ina’s impending wedding to Roan. And for the spa
ce of a heartbeat, I feel happy. I feel safe.
Then the pain comes back to me, and awareness with it. The rest of the room clarifies around us. Tall windows show a star-spattered sky, reflected in the mirrors that circle us, so that everything seems to be silver and stars.
Still in Ina’s room, then. But Ina is gone.
Caro—her face young and lovely again, no sign that I put a dagger in her side—is above me, cradling me in her arms. With one arm she supports me, half upright, and with the other hand she’s trailing a finger across my brow. A chill goes through me. Caro holds her hand out away from herself, examining with fascination the blood on her fingertips, turned black in the starlight. She whispers a word in a language I don’t understand—and flames spring from her fingertips, flaring bright like candles, and then blink out before I can move, leaving her hands clean. Like the flame is feeding on my blood.
Dimly, I think how foolish I’ve been. I thought I was becoming a match for her, with my paltry control over time. But her powers are so far beyond my understanding. From the wild look in her eyes, I’m not sure even Caro herself understands them.
“Stop toying with me,” I hiss through my dizziness. “If you’re going to kill me, kill me.”
Caro freezes, then tilts her face down toward mine.
“We’ve been over this, Jules,” she says, and despite the eerie expression on her face her voice sounds normal, low and musical as always. A bit impatient. “I will never hurt you until I must.”
“Until you can break my heart,” I grit out.
“Exactly.” Her eyes fix on me. “Now, tell me—”
A sudden, distant swell of music cuts off her words. It’s such a foreign sound here, in the midst of this horror, that it takes me a moment to make sense of it. String instruments, many of them, muffled through walls. Distant drums that make the floor tremble, so slightly that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I were on my feet.
Caro draws in her breath, her forehead creasing in frustration. “The coronation. I’m afraid I must leave you for now, Jules.”