Kite walked back to the sword. It had protected her, saved her, risked its life to fight off the dead witches for her. And maybe she had the power to compel it, or to drink its magic and become as strong and sharp as a blade herself. But Kite was not the future Witch Lord. She was a second-hand witch, a daughter who had learned how to cheat at games without getting caught, a reader who missed her books so much it hurt.
She would not use the power her mother gave to her.
Kite brought her face close to the blade’s edge, so close she felt the desire to press her skin against it and give her life to it. “You are home, my love. Thank you for saving me. We are going into battle now, on the other side of the world. Will you come with me and risk your metal again, or will you stay here?”
A long moment followed her question. The blade darkened, and red patterns swirled across the alien alloy.
The sword was thinking.
Kite waited patiently, her hair gently swaying around her face.
A flash of light. Kite stared down at the sword, and saw her glowing eyes burning in the silver. Then there were a hundred eyes opening across the blade.
Kite flushed with pleasure. Tenderly, she reached out and slid her arm against the edge, leaving a thin line of silverblue in her skin. Kite watched the sword drink her blood and murmured to the blade, so low that no one could hear her, “Thank you. I will make sure you are not lonely.”
“Are you ready?” Cam asked quietly. Kite stared at him. A piece of algae drifted across one of her eyes, briefly obscuring her vision. She blinked, and sent it skittering back to the corner.
Kite wondered what he saw when he watched her bent over the blade, singing to its sharp edge, letting her blood bead along the surface. Was he curious? Aroused? Jealous? Kite had never been able to reach inside the skull of a human and unravel their thoughts.
“Does that matter?” she asked, frowning. Was she ready to see the world change completely in a few sharp moments? Was she ready to face Clytemnestra, or Eli, or her mother? What did it mean, to be ready?
The sword warmed under her touch.
“It’s okay,” Cam repeated her words back to her. “It’s going to be okay.”
Kite felt the laugh taking flight from her chest like a murmuration of starlings. The human was comforting her! No wonder Eli had fallen in love with one. They were so different from the daughters of this world.
Her grip tightened on the blade, and her hair whipped across the back of her neck. “I’m ready.”
The portal opened willingly.
In Between
THE LABYRINTH
The Labyrinth was angry.
For millennia, the Labyrinth had lived only to eat, ravenously hungry for magic and flesh. But as the years wore on, it grew sick of the taste of blood that was spilled in its halls. Then it had offered shelter to the lost and lonely. It had nurtured little witches and strays of all kinds, keeping them safe from the prying eyes of their parents.
The Labyrinth was growing weary of being forgotten. Of watching little witches turn their backs on it.
Cam felt its loneliness. As he fell through the darkness of the portal that had opened up in the wastelands, through the very mantle of the planet, images crowded his mind.
He watched a witch girl with flashing eyes and a devilish grin step through a shadow door and leave forever. He missed this girl and wondered what happened to her. The iron masks of the Coven overlaid the image of the young girl stepping through the door, forever leaving.
How they hurt us, he thought. How they abandon us.
The images changed, and he saw his grandmother’s face. Cam felt a pang of remorse that he had never learned to speak Vietnamese fluently. The Labyrinth felt this pain with him. Flashes of streetlights and broken glass and running shoes collided with images of dying bodies trapped in the wall, slowly rotting, caught in the stone like a bone caught in a throat.
What do you want? he thought, and already the question was changing to What do we want?
A glittering world, bleeding into the galaxy.
A body pressed against his.
A wall, stretching across the City of Ghosts, reaching outward to the stars. A body of stone. The spine of the planet.
We, too, desire to be free.
Cam felt the blood slow in his arteries, magma cooling and transforming into andesite.
All magic requires sacrifice.
The portal through the core had asked a lot of the Labyrinth, and the living stone needed something in exchange.
Something, or someone.
Part Two: Homecoming
Forty-One
THE HEIR
The portal led back to the Children’s Lair. There was an affinity between the strange hoarding of the children and the junkyard. Between the children themselves and the discarded magics of the wastelands.
The sword glowed like a burning ember in Kite’s hand, scaring away a few shadow spiders that had gathered to greet her.
“Hush,” she told the sword. “Leave them alone.”
She looked around her at the collection of things she had brought from the forgotten side of the world: puppets and playthings, shoes and arrowheads. She had brought an armoury for the children, living shields and weapons longing to destroy. The thirst for revenge was palpable, and the walls around her shrunk back, trying not to touch the sharp edges of broken dining sets or the toxic chemical fumes of banned toddler toys.
“What’s happening?” Fear broke through Cam’s voice, and she reached out for him instinctively.
Her hand met stone. “It’s okay,” she whispered, luminous eyes watching a boy turning to stone. “You’re still beautiful.”
“Kite! Help me!” But the stones were growing, stretching over his skin, pulling him into the wall. “Don’t —” His words faded to the sound of gravel on sand, and then there was silence.
Cam was gone.
The walls had claimed him.
A sense of dread gathered in her essence, making her hair lie flat and sticky against her forehead. She hung her head, wondering if Eli would forgive her for misplacing her friend.
“That’s where he belongs,” she murmured, trying to convince herself. He would be happier as part of the Labyrinth. It had freed him once, and it was right that it should reclaim his body.
“Where did the strange boy go?” asked Clytemnestra, who burst into the room with dirt on her chin and a velvet cape draped across her shoulders. “The sharp one who glitters? I wanted to play with him.”
“He’s gone home,” said Kite. She looked at the mischievous child who was also the devious Warlord.
Kite had grown accustomed to the frayed hems and yellowed lace, the dirty knee socks, and scuffed Mary Janes. She wasn’t sure what to make of Clytemnestra’s red-and-gold costume. It looked like she had interrupted playtime. The scent of baby’s breath and hemlock was overpowering, and Kite slithered away from the girl, turning back to the comforting taste of found things.
“We don’t need him,” said the Warlord. “We have our army.” She picked up a rusted Campbell’s soup can and then yelped. “It bit me!” She stuck her finger in her mouth and threw the can back on the pile of junk — now treasure.
“All things bite, little one.”
“They don’t bite me.” She scowled.
“Are the daughters ready?”
The Warlord’s eyes sparkled with wickedness. “We have many daughters now. More came when they heard of our cause. So many bad girls, runaways from home!” She adopted a sing-song voice. “They’re going to be in so much trouble. They’re going to be so much trouble.”
Clytemnestra waved her hand and the wall behind her melted away. Made-daughters and dirty children entered the chamber.
“Finders keepers!” cried Clytemnestra, diving headlong into the collection of things from the wastelands.
“You have to ask their permission,” Kite told the soldiers. “They have their own spirits and thoughts. Some will want to fight on th
eir own. Others will mould themselves into arms.”
“We are already armed.” The unnamed stepped forward, her pale eye like milk froth.
“Then don’t make a bond with a wastelands survivor.” Kite’s fingers skittered up and down the moon sword. “But there is … power in it.” She hadn’t meant to say power, she meant something like companionship or maybe love, but the words slid off her tongue like oil and left her with the only word burned into her memory by the Witch Lord.
The unnamed nodded and turned to the assassins. “Speak to the objects, if you wish.” She had clearly become their spokesperson.
Kite watched as the girls sifted through each stone and toy and metal contraption. She looked at the new girls, the runaways who had abandoned their mothers to fight for freedom. She felt a little in awe of their rebellion.
The gentle hum of insect wings rubbing together made its way to Kite’s ears, and she turned to see one girl who had hung back, uninterested in forging a bond with something that did not live in her blood. Kite’s eyes brightened at the body before her — all muscle and sinew and tendon. Muscular biceps and thick thighs. A powerful body. Kite’s eyes shifted upward, catching the steel eyes that had no pupils but seemed to glow with an inner light. Then the assassin turned slightly, and the swords strapped to her back took Kite’s breath away —
Thousands of iridescent insect wings, like a stained-glass window in a cathedral, only with more venom. Hundreds of Phillips-head screws and broken bottles — green, brown, and blue. A mosaic of death. A work of art.
“You’re the Heir.” The girl’s eyes met Kite’s.
“For a little while longer,” Kite agreed. “Your design is ingenious. Artistic. I’ve never seen anything — anyone — like it. Who was your mother-maker?”
The daughter hesitated. “I’d rather not speak her name.”
Kite nodded. “Names have power. I understand.” Her eyes lingered on a dragonfly wing at the sword tip. A familiar smell hung around the daughter, and Kite tried to remember —
A bloodcurdling cry from behind her caught Kite’s attention like a butterfly in a net, and she turned to see Clytemnestra wrestling with another child over a piece of chain mail woven from candy wrappers and aluminum foil.
“I saw it first!” whined the Warlord.
“I got it first!” yelled the boy.
The chain mail wrenched itself away from both of their greedy claws and affixed itself to one of the junkmade monsters that were assembling themselves from the flotsam.
Clytemnestra stuck her tongue out at the other child, who threw a spitball at her.
Kite turned back, but the daughter was gone. Her signature scent still lingered in the air, and now she could recognize it.
The daughter smelled of espresso and rusted nails.
Forty-Two
THE HEALER
Tav sprinkled the dirt of another world over the ground, and Eli used her knives to mark out a circle to try to contain their cut. They wanted to make a small incision in the material of the universe, not another bleeding wound that would only quicken the Earth’s death.
Eli rubbed one eye with the back of her hand, smearing dirt across her forehead. She was sweating, and her body had started fading again, the light of the Heart under her rib cage pulsing with anticipation of the return. She turned to Tav.
“Do you need me to —”
“I don’t think so,” Tav cut her off. They had started to understand that Eli’s magic was a limited resource. And unlike most powers, they weren’t sure that Eli’s would regenerate. They would save her magic until they really needed it. “You’re here, I’m here, and so is part of the Hedge-Witch. It should open for us without you having to use the Heart.”
“Okay.” Relief frayed the edges of the word.
“Ready?”
“Never.”
Eli and Tav smashed all the plants at once. The flowerpots shattered on the rock, shards of pottery covering the ground. Dirt on their ankles and knees.
A silence, a breath, and then a shoot of bluegreen uncurled from a crack in the stone beneath their feet. From the shrapnel of pottery emerged a small forest of vines and leaves, reaching upward.
Trying to get home.
“Hold on to me,” said Tav. Eli gripped their arm. Together they watched the enchanted succulents breach the sky, tearing through cloud and atmosphere and the laws of physics.
Tav brought their mouth to Eli’s ear. When they spoke, they were rewarded with the assassin’s shiver at the feeling of their breath on her body. “You know, the Hedge-Witch was right.” Mischief danced in their eyes. “You really have changed.”
“Oh, fuck —”
The doorway cut her off.
Forty-Three
THE HEIR
The world trembled. Kite felt the earth shaking in excitement, felt it shiver and quake and laugh. Felt the lungs of the world strain for breath, gasping for air. Felt the blood of the world, every drop of water, begin to boil.
Kite could feel it in the small of her back, in the cycle of magic that slipped through the fine hairs of her arms and along the curve of her calves.
The smell of burnt sugar, and warmth like honey flowing over her body, flowing into her very essence. The bluegreen lights that twinkled under her skin brightened.
Her hair started growing, lapping up sustenance like a plant photosynthesizing.
Excitement surged through Kite.
Eli was back, and she was in danger.
Kite had to find her. Her hair whipped around her neck and Kite’s eyes danced with light as she sought out the Warlord at the centre of the war party.
Clytemnestra had felt it, too. She was wearing only one shoe and a helmet forged of candle wax and barbed wire. She didn’t even try to stop a tiny child from running off with her other shoe. Her gaze met Kite’s.
“She’s here,” said Kite. “Take me to her.”
“Who?” Clytemnestra began combing her hair with a plastic fork. Her hair flowed, long and golden and thick, brushing the floor.
“The whole world has to know the Heart has returned. We’ve all felt it. The Coven will be coming for us.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Clytemnestra rolled her eyes and stuck her grubby hands in pockets filled with sweets, Barbie doll shoes, empty wrappers, and crayon stubs. “They already have.”
A flash of gold. The signature scent of overripe plums and sugared dates. Kite caught the card that Clytemnestra tossed from the bottom of her pocket.
Dread twisted in her liver like a worm on a hook. The Beast whimpered and pressed against Kite’s legs. He was mammalian again, with six canine legs and a long, whip-like tail.
“An invitation from the Witch Lord,” she said softly, her hand gripping his fur. “To a masquerade.” She looked up. “Those things are bloodbaths.”
“Of course they are,” said Clytemnestra. “Even grownups know how to have fun once in a while.” Eagerness and excitement slipped into her tone, and she lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Who should we send to the slaughter?”
“An invitation,” Kite repeated, turning the card over in her hands. It was made of pure gold, the lettering written in dark blood that refused to clot. “So we’ve worried her.”
“We had better find some nicer things to wear,” said Clytemnestra, eyeing Kite’s ragged skirts. “The Witch Lord wants to parley.”
Forty-Four
THE HEART
She was standing on a cliff looking out over the ocean. It was black as ink, as if all the books in the world had bled into a single bay. Eli knew that if she touched the water it would leave a stain.
The cliff was silverwhite, reflecting the glow from the crescent moon that hung overhead in a mocking smile. Looking down, Eli stared at her filthy and bloodied toes (one was missing a toenail — it had been ripped clean off) marring the raw beauty of the rock. Monster. Human. Something that didn’t belong here. Had never belonged.
She looked up again, drawn to
the call of the moon, to the whispers of home and the intoxicating hurt of a lost homeland. She frowned; she had been wrong, it wasn’t a crescent moon, it was a quarter, and it illuminated the entire bay. The water shimmered as if a coat of gasoline covered the surface. She could almost feel the slime against her tongue.
“I wouldn’t swim, if I were you,” said a voice.
Eli forced herself to turn around slowly, wincing as each step rubbed the skin from her soles, exposed flesh scraping on sharp stone.
A crow cocked its head at her, eyes like two black buttons, shiny and empty.
“What would you recommend?” Eli switched to her own black set of eyes, and saw a strange, struggling magic fighting to escape the feathered cage. Dark red and black, like dried scabs.
“Flying, of course.” The bird landed on her shoulder. “I thought your mother taught you how to fly.”
“She pushed me.”
“Sometimes fledglings need to be pushed.” He drove his beak into her shoulder. She cried out, grabbed the bird, and bit the head from the body. Then she stumbled back in horror as a smoky magic uncurled from the corpse.
“Thank you for freeing me, little bird.”
A gust of air, hot and malicious, burned Eli’s eyes. They watered, stung with grit and heat.
The redbrown sand rose in a cloud and started to form a familiar shape.
“So you’ve come back to me. What an obedient daughter.”
Eli stumbled back. “They killed you.”
“Killed?” Circinae’s essence slowly moved toward the wayward daughter, a cyclone of possession and intent. “What a romantic notion. You’ve spent too much time with the humans. I’m disappointed in you. No, daughter, they didn’t kill me — they transformed me. They trapped me. But here, I am free. And you are mine again.”
“I’m not your daughter.”
“I made you!” The storm formed a hand and reached for Eli, but it passed through her body. “What did you do? How did you do this?”
The Boi of Feather and Steel Page 17