And then they crossed.
The door had closed behind them, but Eli could feel the seam. It was still healing, still leaking the smell of caramelized fruit and fear. Had Tav purposefully left it open for her to follow? Or was it simply that the fabric of a world with no Heart was thinning and fraying, the edges unravelling? The air felt thinner. Eli felt it would be easy to fall through the living walls and find herself in the forest, or the wastelands. The world was beginning to collapse.
But the Heart was home, if still hindered by a human-magic-machine body, still trapped in the shape of a flawed daughter. It was easy for the Heart to undo the loose and gaping stitches of the most powerful witch in the world.
All Eli had to do was let go, to release herself in every exhale, to fade into light and magic. It was a disappearing act that no one else in the galaxy could do.
The Heart slipped through the fold in the universe and followed the faint trail of smoky purple toward justice — and judgment.
Fifty-Seven
THE HEALER
Kite sat on the throne, her claws curled around alabaster arms made out of shells and pearls and gleaming fish scales.
No, it wasn’t Kite — it was Kite reflected in a warped mirror. Pupil-less eyes a little paler, with a tinge of coral; fingernails and teeth sharpened to deadly points.
But she smelled like the sea.
Tav understood, then, why it was so important to keep Eli away from her. Not just to protect the Heart — the Heart was a beast that hungered for revenge and freedom, that would drink the essence from this beautiful shell without hesitating — but because Eli was a liability.
Eli had been ready to meet an enemy, a monster, a nightmare — but not one that looked like a friend. Not one that took the shape of her lover.
The Witch Lord’s frostbitten lips twisted into a cruel smile. She was enjoying Tav’s discomfort. She must assume the dilated pupils and quickening of their carotid artery was from fear. But Tav was too shocked to be afraid.
Tav found themselves remembering Kite’s touch and shuddered with disgust and desire. The Witch Lord’s hands looked like Kite’s. Would feel like Kite’s. Would taste like Kite’s.
All those years that Eli had pressed her body against Kite’s. Was it all that different from touching the Witch Lord?
Kite’s a different person, Tav told themselves, guilt crawling up their throat. It’s not her fault.
All the pieces were falling into place: what made Kite’s relationship with her mother different from Eli’s; why so few witches had trueborn daughters, and instead cobbled them together out of orange peel and rusted hinges. Kite was not her mother’s child — she was her clone. They shared an essence. Kite was the Witch Lord’s extension and a replacement body. A second skin. A second set of eyes.
The horror of having a daughter so you could use and even steal her body rocked through Tav’s bones like an earthquake, and the taste of rotten fish filled their mouth. Aftertaste of pity. Eli’s mother had been greedy, selfish, and brutal. But a small part of her cared for her daughter. Kite had never been loved by anyone except Eli.
Movement made Tav’s eyes flick from the Witch Lord to her throne, and they realized suddenly that nothing about it was dead — fish and crabs and anemone writhed and twisted, trying to escape the magic net that bound them in service to the Witch Lord. Tav swallowed the sickness in their mouth and felt the darkness settle in their stomach like lead.
“You have been honoured with an invitation to our celebration,” said not-Kite. “Will you not drink with us?”
A figure swathed in white, eyes spinning like pinwheels behind a mask of blood-red silk, carried a thimble crafted from crystal. To the naked eye it appeared empty, but Tav could see the struggling drop of a witch’s essence, greenblack, trapped in the vial. Where was the rest of the witch whose essence had been drained to feed the elite of the world?
They struggled not to visibly react, not to pull away or flinch. They kept their eyes wide open, like their mother when she put in contacts in the morning.
“What are we celebrating?” Tav asked, accepting the crystal, trying not to stare as a thread of acid green, light and airy as cotton candy, curled over the lip of the cup.
“The unification of the City of Eyes. The return of the wayward children to their kin. We feed together, and we will never go hungry.”
As if on cue, a thousand hushed voices repeated, “We feed together, and we will never go hungry.”
Tav nodded. “We feed together, and we will never go hungry.” They raised the vial to their mouth and then stalled. “This glass is empty,” they said, raising one eyebrow. “Did one of your servants get thirsty?”
After a strained moment, like the agony before the snapping of a violin string, not-Kite laughed, a harsh sound like a ship scraping rock. The rest of the Coven echoed her, a laughter like electronica and static, recorded and mixed and twisted into strangeness.
“It is a symbol of the power we will drink from our enemies and from our prey, to grow strong. Only the strong survive.”
The crowd echoed: “Only the strong survive.”
Silence fell. The Coven waited for Tav to drink.
The Coven waited to feed. The Coven was hungry.
Tav smiled and raised the vial, keeping their eyes on the Witch Lord’s glowing orbs. The faint pink tinge was like a drop of blood in a cup of milk.
“To you,” they said, and raised their voice. “To strength. To unity. To power.” They turned to their bike, the inanimate contraption of gears and glass, filaments and spark plugs. “With the gift of this drink, and in honour of the Witch Lord, I christen you Ariel.” For you, Cam.
They smashed the glass over the motorcycle.
The drop of essence from a poor witch, long since forgotten by her sisters, crawled into the skin of the motorbike. Ariel purred, the engine revving on its own. It was good to have a body again.
Tav knelt down, exposing more of their spine for a brief moment before looking up at the statue of the Witch Lord who seemed to emerge from the throne like the figurehead of a ship. If she was angry that Tav had not fallen for her trick, she did not let on. Her face was as blank and beautiful as tumbled amazonite.
Tav spoke, willing their words to sound as light and creamy as the gauzy fabric that cascaded from the Witch Lord’s ethereal frame. “Will you honour me with a dance?”
The Witch Lord smiled. The needle-sharp teeth like sickly saplings promised imprisonment and starvation. She leaned forward, arching her long neck closer to the boi and their bike. The stench of salt was suddenly overwhelming, and Tav’s eyes began to water.
The Witch Lord waved a hand lazily, and a throng of witches materialized before the throne. They wore masks of silver and copper, satin and lace, slate and shale, adorned with scalloped shells and razor blades, colourful feathers and strips of duct tape cut into tassels. The witches were soft feminine, butch, androgynous, hard femme, hipster masculine, and genteel dandies.
And underneath their fleshy exteriors, Tav could see the curling smoke of purplegrey, the coiled yellowgreen, the airy and shimmering pinkgold essences pulsing and dancing and fluttering through every eyelash and strand of hair.
“Choose,” said the Witch Lord.
Tav turned again to take in the full brunt of those alien eyes, brimming with power — and something else. Calculation. Curiosity.
Clytemnestra told you that she likes to play games. You can’t let her get bored. Clytemnestra’s sending her soldiers into the Children’s Lair now, this very second.
What if Clytemnestra’s plan fails? What if we fail?
What will happen to Eli? To the Earth?
They already knew that this creature was not capable of mercy.
Panic flared up, hot and thick in their lungs. Tav bent over, gasping for breath. White candle wax splattered over a shining black square of polished onyx.
The witches watched silently and waited.
Tav stood and shook the
ir head. “I choose you,” they said simply. Keep her interest. Buy them time. Kite will come.
The Witch Lord frowned. The assembled witches seemed to become even more still, even less alive. Then she hissed, and steam poured from the gaps between her teeth.
Ariel revved her engine again in warning, or perhaps in fear. She remembered the wrath of the Witch Lord. Tav placed a hand on the warm leather seat, but the bike would not be soothed. The vibrations jumped to Tav’s hand and jittered up and down their extended arm.
“You are not worthy,” the Witch Lord finally said, each word falling like a guillotine.
Tav had made a mistake. They had been too bold, too daring. The Witch Lord wanted a game, but they wanted to run it. Tav’s request had been too much of a challenge.
The air was thick with salt.
Tav’s vision swam behind a veil of tears.
“I’m not worthy,” they repeated, lowering their head. Maybe if they grovelled, they could draw out the execution.
A single tear fell from the damp, mucous membrane of their human eyes and plunged toward the ground.
Tav, keeping their eyes downcast in a show of reverence, watched the trajectory of the water droplet. It glittered under the pink chandeliers like a black diamond bathed in rose perfume. When it touched the onyx tile, it didn’t break. Instead, it wobbled for a fraction of a second, and then extended, stretching across the tile, shifting, fading, changing, until the single tear was gone.
In its place was a glossy black feather.
The smell of salt retreated. Tav glanced up — the Witch Lord had pulled back in surprise. She rested her elbow on the writhing spine of an eel and contemplated Tav again, looking them up and down.
She waved her hand and the witches vanished, flowing back to their poses behind pillars and next to tapestries. Everything in the room was art, a decoration for the Witch Lord’s palace.
Tav remembered the taste of witchfire, the ash and despair that had lingered on their tongue for days after escaping the Coven with the Heart. They wondered where the witches of the first ring were lurking, those closest to the throne, and most deadly — were they hiding in the underbelly of the Coven, waiting to strike? Were they leading malicious magics and enslaved essences into the Labyrinth?
Were they dressed in furs and wrapping paper, watching Tav behind masks of barbed wire and begonia, hiding among the sycophants?
The Witch Lord flowed down the throne, and Tav’s lungs struggled for oxygen as the sea washed over them.
“You should be careful what you ask for,” she said, and offered a hand.
Tav took it. The Witch Lord’s hand burned like ice and the kind of loneliness that turns geometry protractors and broken rulers into weapons in girls’ bathrooms.
Tav flinched at their touch, at the way the Witch Lord seemed to find their most painful memories and play the bruises like a world-class pianist. They knew immediately that the flinch was a mistake — the Witch Lord smiled, and Tav thought, If she keeps smiling like that, I will find myself headless, and the witches will feed.
But that will not curb their hunger.
Dimly, they realized that an orchestra had materialized, cellos and violins playing themselves. A waltz played at an impossible speed. The pink lights burned brighter, and a headache split across Tav’s skull.
“I’ll lead, Messenger,” said the Witch Lord. Their voice was a net scouring the ocean floor. It sounded so much like Kite’s — a soprano and mezzo intertwining to create a hypnotic harmony. Her hand on Tav’s waist left the tingling itchiness and pain of jellyfish stings. She leaned closer, her lips to Tav’s ear. “You should not have trusted the Warlord. I don’t think you will enjoy this.”
The dance began.
Fifty-Eight
THE HEART
The Heart looked around the ancient cavern, feelings she was unaccustomed to stretching through every synapse in her cramped body.
Fear. Confusion. Panic.
Witches drifted through the space, glowing with life-force. Giant pillars of black marble rose out of the tiled floor like oceanside cliffs.
To the Heart, the witches were like dandelion seeds cast about by the wind. No more important than a pebble, no less important than an ocean. She turned away from the revelry to the living, breathing, feeling, hurting, hating structure itself.
The building that had once been the Heart’s reluctant prison.
The Heart looked up into the vaulted ceiling. Cracks snaked through the stone. Ruin was everywhere. No amount of gold leaf paint could hide it. She drifted away from the chessboard adorned with pieces of lacquer and gold. She needed to face the place where she had been imprisoned for so many revolutions through the galaxy. The darkness that had kept her bound and had isolated her, had choked off her freedom. The place where her power had been drunk like thin, sugary sap.
She walked through walls, shells, the carcasses of animals of all kinds.
The roots caught fire. Her tree-daughter was screaming, the pain arching up and down the bark of her spine. The Heart was helpless, unable to rescue her.
The pain would teach her to behave, to stop reaching out with wishes and seed and shadows. To stop trying to touch every part of the planet.
Mouths on her limbs, sucking, draining the pure, raw honey of lifeblood from her trunk. Draining the world.
The memories surged like a shot of adrenalin, the stinging bite of a needle in skin and the aching hurt of trauma that was never past, and always now.
Now. Now. Now.
Gasping for breath, fumbling with the alien shape of bronchioles and trachea, the Heart flowed through this strange, dark space that smelled of hatred and apathy and something else … something familiar …
Sea salt. The island. Hands stroking her hair. The golden leaves from ancient sycamores raining over her body leaving patterns like gold leaf pressed into her skin.
Eli turned and saw crystals of salt on the cavern walls, like fingerprints left by a wayward Heir who dared to love a made-thing.
The panic stopped, and in its absence was a void that quickly filled with numbness. The exhaustion of a soul in pain blotting all out all other colours, feelings, thoughts.
“We’re okay,” said Eli. “We’re okay.”
“No,” said the Heart. “We’re not.”
Eli flickered into existence for a moment, scraping her hand against the sharp edge of a shell trapped in dirt. She stared at the trickle of blood and thought how strange it was that after all this time, after all the magic that had gone into her making, she could still bleed.
“We’re not okay,” she said again, closing her bloody hand into a fist. The truth settled onto her body like starlight over the fields of the moon civilization that had once shone across an entire world. When she opened her palm again, the scratch had been closed by a seam of quartz that glittered under the dim glow of phosphorescent moss.
Not all wounds are empty; some grow gardens.
THE HEIR
The Coven was falling apart. Dead leaves littered the ground; vines were withered and moulding on the wall. Kite reached up and touched a white starflower. The petals burst from the stamen in that final exhale of death and crumbled to fine powder as they fell. She raised her stained fingers to her nose and breathed in. Smell of rot and fear.
Without the Heart, the Coven was dying.
All that knowledge, all those handprints and memories and passions, ground under her feet. Lost forever.
She licked her thumb, grimacing a little at the acidic taste of an empty home. It wasn’t too late. There was still time to save it.
Kite closed her eyes and pressed her body against the wall. Behind her, the army waited.
Water began to leak from the stone; just a trickle at first, but then a steady stream, flooding the hallway. Higher and higher it rose; tiny crustaceans and little electric blue fish swam eagerly in this strange new world.
Leading the rush of water and foam, the froth of algae and dead skin and wat
er skimmers, Kite made her way toward the ballroom, ready to face her wicked, twisted destiny.
THE HEART
The stale air of the caverns tasted of melancholy, as if the Coven itself was in mourning.
Someone was going to die, and the Coven knew it.
And not just anyone — so many lives had been sacrificed to the Witch Lord’s greed, her thirst for control, her need for power.
The one marked for death was someone the Coven loved.
Eli stumbled forward, trying to keep herself together, trying to stay invisible, just a breath passing through a lung. Shadow and light.
Water lapped against her feet. Not bile excreted from an old stalactite; not the tears of a crystal.
Water.
And there were waves. There was movement. The water was moving as if guided by a little moon.
Eli only knew one person who could call the tides, who could coax tears from sand and dirt. Only one person who walked through the Coven with gentle footsteps.
How could the Heir defeat her own mother? How could she give back her birthright, the power she had been born into?
She couldn’t.
Eli didn’t know what was going to happen, but she knew, deep in the unfurled buds of her being, that Kite was in attendance tonight, and that she didn’t expect to come out of it alive.
What was Clytemnestra playing at? Why had she sent two sacrifices to the Witch Lord? Kite and Tav. A girl with salt on her tongue and a boi with oil stains on their jeans.
Eli could lose everyone she loved tonight.
We could lose more than that. The Heart’s thought pooled like warm honey in her mind. We could lose the whole world.
Eli was a ghostly figure of shadow and light that sometimes flickered with the hint of bone, the coy arch of a rib, or the playful curve of an eyelash. She was the Heart. And her planet was dying.
Eli wondered what would happen if she surrendered to the honeygold warmth that flowed through her veins, letting her skin and stone and glass evaporate into dusk and earth. Maybe the world could be saved. Maybe it wasn’t too late to save the forest and the walls and the deserts from the Witch Lord’s destruction. Maybe if the Heart returned, it could pulse new life into the crumbling core.
The Boi of Feather and Steel Page 22