He woke up. “Right. Time pockets or something.” Cam looked around helplessly. “So everything’s gone. There’s no one to help us.”
Kite shook her head. The lightness of her hair threw her off balance, and a dizziness spread through her entire body. She stilled her movement, turning herself into a statue. “For someone so good at listening, you really are terrible at looking.”
Thirty-Nine
THE HEALER
Tav heard the words fall from their mouth and knew they were true. The only way to save Eli was to return the Heart to its world. They had to go back to the City of Eyes.
Once, they had dreamed with the Hedge-Witch. They had wanted to steal the Heart and use its power to change the human city, to break what needed to be broken and build something new. But the power of the Heart was not a weapon — it was a living creature, the soul of a planet. It would burn any body that tried to hold it for long. And they weren’t going to sacrifice Eli for anything. That wasn’t the revolution they wanted. The Hedge-Witch had taught them this with her betrayal.
How you do something is just as important as what you do. And Tav was not a tyrant. Just a boi with anger in the shape of an arrow — both a weapon and a sign pointing the way forward.
Tav’s anger had never just been anger.
It was justice.
It was heartbreak.
It was connection.
It was love.
You don’t sacrifice the people and futures that you want to save.
Their voice strengthened, threads of confidence and decision weaving into the words. “We return the Heart to the City of Eyes — but not the Coven. We give it to someone else. To the wall. To the wastelands. To the forest.”
Eli’s words were so soft that Tav had to read her lips. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“It will work.” Tav’s grip tightened. “If I have to cut it out of you myself, it will work.”
“But the Vortex —”
“We’ll find another way to heal the rift,” Tav cut her off. “Without the Heart. Clytemnestra is waging war on the Coven as we speak. There are other magics we can use.” They hesitated, and then offered what they were pretty sure was a lie. “My magic is getting stronger, Eli. I think I’ll be able to heal the wounds without the Heart.”
Eli sighed. Fingerprints on her glasses. Hair tucked behind her ear, a few strands falling loose. Tav wanted to reach out and stroke them into place.
“No. We need to heal the world first. We go to the source, Tav. Where this all started: the Coven. The Heart’s magic is weakening in this world — it doesn’t belong here. That’s why we failed. If we keep trying, we’ll keep failing. We need to be in the City of Eyes. We need to heal the tear between worlds while we still can. We finish what we started.”
Tav glanced at Eli’s frost blade, the sharp edge shimmering like sun on ice. They didn’t need the confirmation of the blade of truth to believe Eli’s words. Growing up in a city of lies and secrets, of diversity posters and slurs dripping from wide smiles, Tav had learned to recognize the truth when they heard it — the clean shine of skin scrubbed smooth by soap and friction.
They had to go back to the Coven.
They knew it was the truth — but they didn’t have to like it. “You want to keep fighting? You just said this is killing you!” They didn’t like the note of fear that rang in their voice. But Cam was gone, and the scent of allium nectar was the only thing keeping the nightmares at bay.
Eli carefully extricated Tav’s hand from her shoulder. To Tav, it felt like she was slipping through their fingers like smoke.
“Eli, it could destroy you.”
Eli reached out a hand and gently brushed a strand of curly black-and-violet hair from Tav’s face.
“I know, Tav. And I really don’t want to stop existing. But I have no idea how to separate myself from the Heart. Even trying could kill me. And we can’t fix the world without the Heart.” Her eyes narrowed, and her voice grew heavy with emotion. “I’ve already lost one home, one family, one way of life. I won’t — I can’t — lose another.”
Tav’s dream poured from their memory and danced before their eyes:
A frozen river torn in half, fragments of ice like a string of diamonds gleaming under the silverwhite glow of the moon.
Feathers like black flames, crackling with edges of purple and gold and green.
A crumpled body with a sprig of hawthorn growing from its chest.
A nightmare or a prophecy? Tav didn’t know. But they knew the flow of a river could not be stopped for long. They knew they had power that no one — not the Hedge-Witch, not Eli, not even themselves — understood.
They would save her.
“Okay,” Tav said. “Jesus, this is crazy, but okay. We get the children to help us. We channel the magic of the Coven through the Heart, and we finish this. And then — then we figure out how to remove the Heart and keep you alive. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Promise me that we’ll try.”
Eli turned her reptilian eyes on Tav. She placed a sweaty hand over Tav’s, their fingers interlacing like a woven daisy crown.
“Okay,” she said. “I promise.”
Eli pulled her hand away again, spat into her palm, and pulled a few strands of hair from her head. She offered the sticky promise to Tav.
Tav shook their head. “I trust you. I don’t need it bound by magic.”
Eli’s hand hung outstretched, shaking slightly. Then she took it back and wiped it on her jeans.
Tav fell back into their thoughts. It made sense. The Coven had torn open the world and only from there could it be mended. And once that was finished, they would save Eli. They would find a way.
They were going back to the City of Eyes. To the world of witches and dark magic and deadly daughters.
Tav’s heart quickened. They were going back. To chaos and danger and colour. No more secret 2:00 a.m. struggles for a city that didn’t care. No more furtive magics and missed phone calls and guilt. No more trying to be human. No more following rules and obeying orders.
They couldn’t deny that the call of the witch world was strong. It claimed at least half of them. Already adrenalin was surging through their body at the anticipation. The fierce trees. The hungry stone.
If they were being honest, they knew all along it might come to this.
If they were being even more honest, this is what they had always wanted. A city in the sky. A world of power and light. The taste of magic like honey and lavender dissolving on their tongue.
A homecoming.
THE HEART
A homecoming.
Dread spread through the network of veins and capillaries and arteries that made up her ragged body of magic and flesh, pearl and granite. Eli could feel her eyes growing glassy and wet. She reached a hand up to brush a tear from her eye. She rubbed it between thumb and forefinger and brought it to her nose to sniff.
The substance was thin and smelled of formaldehyde. The Heart was corrupting her tears. She was becoming less herself with every passing moment.
Eli didn’t want to go back. She had only just started to make a home for herself in the City of Ghosts, with Tav and Cam and the promise of sunlight every morning, with logic and laughter and honeybees.
But the Heart’s power was waning. Earth was not its home, and it pined for its daughters, for the silver sap of the forests and the rhythm of the stones dancing under the earth. If they returned to the City of Eyes it would be replenished, its full power returned. And if her fragile body could hold that power long enough, they could heal the rift. They could save the dying Earth, and the many ecosystems and lives on that planet.
Eli never wanted to see the Coven again. The long white hallways, the traces of chains, the histories that whispered of control and hopelessness. Returning meant revisiting the spaces that had hurt her. It meant giving in to memory. You are a tool. You have value.
But it was the only way she could heal the ri
ft between worlds.
“So how do we get there?” Tav asked. “I’m drained, and we can’t use the Vortex.”
Eli licked the formaldehyde from her hand. “Oh, don’t worry about that. We have help.”
The succulents shook their spiny leaves at the sky.
Forty
THE HEIR
Kite watched Cam as he looked around the barren landscape. The skin around his eyes crinkled and then smoothed again. He reached down to pull a cracked dinner plate out of the sand. He brushed it clean, and then set it down again, carefully, as if to avoid cracking it further.
He was fascinating. Kite was mesmerized by the way he played with his moustache and rocked back and forth on his heels. His face was alive with feeling. And he never tried to hide his emotions, either: he let confusion and fear and wonder play across his face and body and sing through the stones on his skin.
“What?” Cam frowned at her.
“Sorry?” She tilted her head, feeling the swish of her shorn hair brushing her ears. A gentle, low hum filled her ears. The strands were mourning.
“You’re staring at me.”
“You’re just so good at being human.”
“Um. Thanks?”
“Are you setting a dinner table? Are you expecting company?” Kite sat cross-legged before the single porcelain plate. A pattern of blue roses stretched around the edge. She thought the crack through the centre added elegance to the otherwise too-symmetrical piece.
“I don’t know. No, I’m just … I don’t understand. How are we supposed to find allies here? Everything is buried.”
Kite, following Cam’s example, reached into the sand and drew a tarnished silver spoon from the earth. She placed it beside the plate. “So is much of the wall.”
“So?” He tugged on his moustache. “You have the sword. Is there even anything else useful here?”
The wind picked up, an insistent hand tugging at stray threads and souls. A warning.
“That’s not how you behave at a dinner party,” scolded Kite, retrieving a gold-and-glass goblet from its place of burial and setting it upright at the place setting. It was fuzzy with mould.
“I didn’t ask to come to your dinner party. I’m not even supposed to be here.” Cam kicked a patch of sand into a glittering gold arc. Then he sat down and put his head in his hands.
The stones made a gentle keening sound, and then fell silent. Even stone could get lonely sometimes.
Kite hummed softly, bringing forth a melody of remembered waves and the perfect curve of a fish spine. She set a stainless-steel fork on the other side of the plate.
Cam looked over at the girl with the halo of bluegreen hair, her fingertips dusted with gold sand. She picked up the plate, polished it on her sleeve, and set it down again.
“What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you to find them. You seem to have a better affinity for the buried than I do.”
“Don’t hold your breath. I’m the useless one.”
“What do you mean?” Kite began polishing the goblet.
“I’m not like Eli or Tav. I’m not magic. I’m not good at anything except parallel parking and using my body as a shield. And making jazz playlists. And now I’m trapped in your world and I’ll probably die, and my body will be perfectly preserved in this junkyard forever.”
“There are worse places to be. You’d be in good company.”
“Yeah, that plate looks really chatty. I’m sure we’re going to be best friends.”
“Is that something you need? Friends?”
“It’s what everyone needs.”
Kite turned her lamp-like eyes to him, those bright and pupil-less orbs of undersea light. “Witches are taught to need power and nothing else. My mother taught me that the first time she threw me into the wilds as an infant and told me to not come home until I had proved my value.”
“That’s … intense.”
“No,” she sighed, “it was perfectly normal. I sometimes envy you humans — all the feelings that I can see on your body, the intensity of mortality, how much you care about Tav and Eli and the stones that are now part of you. Everything matters so much, and it’s always now. For witches, there is rarely a now; there is always later, and time doesn’t matter. Love doesn’t matter. Death doesn’t matter. Only power matters.”
“That sounds … lonely. Do witches get lonely?”
Kite’s mouth twitched slightly. She did not understand.
Cam shifted a little closer to her. “If only power matters, then why are you here?”
“Oh, that’s an easy question.” Kite smiled brightly, and then paused to lick sand from her forearm. “The time is now.”
The plate, fork, spoon, and goblet picked up the melody of Cam’s stone-sutured body.
Kite stood, gestured toward the place setting, and then skipped aside, so light on her feet that she left no footprints in the sand.
Witches were more magic than substance — especially when they had been weaned by the Witch Lord.
Cam inhaled sharply. “I can’t do this.”
“You can.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Kite let her hand drift to the sad, short hairs on her head, and soothed them with slow, gentle strokes.
“Because I’ve seen what humans can do. And because Eli trusts you.”
Cam’s face hardened, and in the sharp line of his cheekbone Kite could see the stone that lived under the skin, as well, the layer of hardness he had used to protect his soft heart and fragile bones. Armour woven from laughter and music and moustache wax.
Witches were not the only creatures who could cobble together a life from scraps. Kite saw in the tremble of Cam’s throat that he had crafted a life out of bits and pieces, and this mosaic of identity had become strength, flexibility, survival.
So many bodies struggling to survive.
It was time for them to live.
Like Kite, the wastelands could feel Cam’s emotions, could hear his knuckle bones rubbing against one another, the friction generating heat and energy. Could smell the sweat of his body mixing with the calcium of stone. There was no one in the worlds like him.
He crawled closer to the place setting, tucking his legs under him. The sand swirled up at his movements and stuck to his slick sticky salty skin. Humans carry places with them.
He closed his eyes, and Kite watched with interest as his eyeballs twitched and jerked under the lids, as if they were dancing.
It made Kite want to dance, too.
So she did. She swayed in place, her hair rippling around her ears and neck; her arms waving like leaves fluttering in the wind. She moved, and she watched him.
She watched his breathing slow, his heartbeat drop to a gentle murmur. She watched as Cam pressed his palms to the sand. She watched as he sank deeper and deeper into the earth, until he was waist-deep in sand.
But the sand didn’t take the goblet, the plate, or the spoon. Instead, objects began rising from underground. More plates — plastic and glass and metal, with gold leaf edges, scratches, and stains. Forks with tines missing, chopsticks, tiny silver dessert forks that had fallen out of fashion.
Cam gasped, and his heart rate accelerated. Kite could see his pulse twitching like a fish tossed up on shore, writhing under his skin. His face was pale, and he was shivering.
Kite caught him before he fell, and he slumped to one side. She pressed her cheek to his and let her hair heal his fever. Finding the lost took a toll on a body, and humans were not invincible.
She needed to remember that.
“You’re okay.” She repeated the words she had heard Eli speak. “You’re going to be okay.”
“They’re angry,” he whispered.
“They should be. They have not been treated well.”
“No, we haven’t.”
His eyes snapped open. Kite peered into their red depths and saw her own eyes, glowing turquoise lights, reflected back. And something else, swimming in the murkine
ss of his pupil —
A few grains of sand.
A smile tremored through her entire body, and she felt her essence burning with a brighter light.
“Stop that.” Cam winced and drew back, shielding his eyes from the light. But Kite couldn’t hold in the excitement and anticipation that swam through her arteries.
“You said we,” she whispered back. “We.”
She would not have to force them, not have to ensorcell the bitter and broken lives in the junkyard. She would not have to steal their stagnant magic like a spider lurking in a web. Only now did it occur to her that Clytemnestra might have wanted her to fail — she must have known the lost things would not trust the Heir. Perhaps the Warlord wanted to get rid of a potential threat. Or perhaps Clytemnestra fully trusted Kite’s power, trusted in the violence of her pet Heir. But there would be no fighting or force, and no one would die today on the lonely wastelands of a heartless world.
They wanted to come. Because of Cam.
“You are amazing,” she told him, and kissed the top of his head.
He blinked in astonishment and then grinned. “Parallel parking is harder than you think,” he told her.
“I’ve never wanted to learn.”
Other creatures were rising from the ground: bone-white trees slashed with deep red; monsters made out of aluminum and peach pits, and more stones than a rocky beach, their jagged edges glinting in the light.
This was an army to tear the Witch Lord from her throne.
“They can take us back to the Labyrinth,” said Cam. “Is that safe?”
“Of course not,” said Kite. “But we’ll go, anyway. Just … wait.”
There was one more loose end before they left. Kite found that she was a little sorry to be returning to her home of marble and glitter and Lycra. There was something lovely about the bronze desert, something comforting about the moraine of fury and passion that lived underneath the sand. But it was time for the ugly things to be seen, and for the pretty shine of power to be worn away.
The Boi of Feather and Steel Page 16