He barely got the words out. She was upon us, all shrieks and spindly limbs. Ishqa’s sword was raised in seconds. He looked beautiful wielding it — the kind of image that seemed it should be carved in polished stone, unlike me, who fought like a creature that crawled out of the dirt. One graceful strike, and the woman should have fallen.
Should have.
I flinched at the hot spray of blood across my face. It took me a few addled seconds to realize it: she had not stopped.
She continued to run through Ishqa’s blade.
“Don’t take them…!”
The words came in the exact same intonation every time, like a fragment of a memory stuck in a cycle.
I swore under my breath as she barreled into me. I dodged just in time, my shortsword striking her gut and the dagger glancing her shoulder. The blades cut through her, but not the way I was used to feeling steel slice through flesh. The resistance was strangely weak, as if I was slicing through the half-rotten meat of a dead deer already ravaged by wolves.
And when she touched me? The pain was so intense that my breath shriveled in my lungs.
I leaped away from her. Her strange, faceless stare was locked on me. She lunged, and I dropped. Ishqa seized upon that distraction, dancing forward with another blow of his sword, another blow that the woman — the creature — barely reacted to. So quick — Mathira, so quick — she whirled around and reached for him.
“Don’t take them…!”
Ishqa’s sword impaled her, and she let out a chilling, wordless shriek as her fingers clutched at him. I could see pain in the hard set of his jaw. Her hands were clawing at his exposed shoulders, leaving bloody gouges.
I took my opening.
My blades plunged into her back. Then I pulled them up, splitting her. I should have felt the resistance of bone and cartilage, but her flesh parted easily.
For a terrible moment, she remained that way, clinging to Ishqa, and I thought we were dealing with something truly invincible.
But then, she let out an inhuman wail that sounded more akin to the whistle of wind through the rocks.
Don’t take them, don’t take them, don’t take them…
The intonation never changed, but the words faded like dissipating echoes.
The creature fell to a heap on the ground. Unmoving, she looked even stranger.
I swore, lowering myself to take a closer look, and—
A shriek. And then another. Off in the distance.
Ishqa and I shot each other a glance of alarm. “There are more,” I breathed, and he gave a serious nod, and neither of us had to say anything else before we were running out of the temple. “This way!” I said, when Ishqa nearly took us down a wrong path, grabbing his arm and yanking him turn by turn.
The air hit us like a wall. It was so much more humid, it seemed, than it had been just minutes ago, the fog thicker, the air damp and hot. The world was eerily silent as we ran through the main gates of the temple, back onto the pathways, leaping across stone blocks hovering on water so dark and still that it looked like black glass.
I slowed to a stop, ears pricked. I heard nothing.
“Perhaps that’s it,” I murmured, quietly.
“No.” Ishqa’s eyes scanned the horizon. Of course he would be looking to the skies. But my gaze slipped down. Down, to the slate under our feet, and further, to the water that surrounded us. Water so smooth that it was practically a mirror. My own face staring back at me.
My own face and…
And…
Horror rose in my throat like bile.
“Ishqa,” I whispered. “They’re in the—”
And that was when all of the eyes beneath the surface of the water — hundreds and hundreds of lifeless, disfigured fey faces — opened at once.
My blades barely made it up before they burst out of the water. They were on us in seconds. Ishqa and I only had time to clumsily fight back. Their blood spattered my face. Even that was odd, not the vibrant violet of Fey blood, but putrid and milky.
I heard a sound behind me, and caught a glimpse of gold. Ishqa’s wings flared out, a thing of pristine beauty in a world of deformed shadow. Between slashes of his sword, he reached for me. We didn’t have to speak — we both knew there was nothing else we could do but fly out of here.
But then, one of the creatures grabbed onto Ishqa’s left wing. A sickening crack split the air. His whole body lurched.
I skewered the creature, kicking it off of my blade and into the morass. But one glance at Ishqa’s wing told me it was now useless, hanging off of him at a revolting angle.
I swore under my breath, before whirling to decapitate another creature. Their not-blood slicked the handles of my swords. My hands stung, as if it was poison. A sharp pain gripped my side. Another one was on me, razored fingers digging into my flesh. Yet another looming behind.
Too many. Too many. Ishqa and I were back-to-back, our bodies pressed against each other, but we would not last like this. We were corpses being overtaken by maggots.
We would die here.
“We fight back to the walls,” Ishqa commanded, voice straining. “Our only chance.”
Hardly a chance at all. The creatures surrounded us in all directions. We would never make it to the gates.
A grim realization settled over me.
We couldn’t fight like this. But I could do something more. Even though I didn’t want to. I didn’t want him to see what I was.
“Aefe?” Ishqa pressed, between panting breaths.
I could save us. Even if it meant revealing the ugliest piece of myself.
“Trust me,” I said, skewered two of the creatures in the eye, and, in the split seconds of time that bought me, I whirled around and buried my teeth in Ishqa’s forearm.
He nearly yanked his arm away, uttering what I had to assume was a Wyshraj curse. But I didn’t release him, my incisors digging deep, the hot warmth of his blood flowing over my tongue. I swallowed. Once. Twice.
I couldn’t hold on longer than that. It would have to be enough. And as I released him and returned to the fight, I prayed it would be.
“What in the skies were you doing?” he spat.
Claws sliced my left shoulder. More at my right forearm. Ishqa barely held off one that dove for my throat.
I waited.
And then I felt an unfamiliar magic bubbling up within me. Ishqa’s magic.
My greatest shame. My curse. This was my horrible gift — my ability to steal the magic of others. It was such a dirty, shameful thing that I barely knew how to use it. I had never done this before with magic so unfamiliar to my own, never mind a power that would force my very body to change.
I imagined wings. I felt wings. And to my frantic relief, slowly, I felt them shifting.
I just didn’t expect it to hurt so much. My back seemed as if it were splitting, my flesh parting, blood soaking my leathers.
That was when Ishqa noticed what I was doing. Out of the corner of my eye, through the fighting, I saw him lurch — saw the realization spill over his face, as he understood what I was. And thankfully, he did not spend time lingering in his surprise or revulsion.
He bought a split second to whirl to me, cutting two slashes in the back of my leather armor, finishing just in time to strike down another attacker. Making room for the wings, I realized.
“Structure first,” he ground out, as he fought. “Bones, then flesh, then feathers.”
He made it sound so simple. But whatever was shifting my back felt so heavy and strange.
I choked out, “How do I—”
“Stretch them out. Farther. They’re not big enough yet.”
More pain, as creatures grabbed onto my newly-formed wings.
“Not yet, Aefe.”
“It has to be—”
“Not yet.”
No time. This was it. We were overrun.
I pushed with everything I had. Snap, as bones cracked. Crack, as my body twisted with unnatural force.
> “Now!” Ishqa shouted, and I locked my arms around his shoulders and lurched these unfamiliar muscles in what I thought, hoped, prayed would be enough to get us into the air. Ishqa’s wings, one powerful and one ruined, pushed too.
The pain was so intense that I didn’t realize it had worked until I looked down and saw a mass of limbs squirming beneath us.
“Focus, Aefe. Stay level. Tilt to the left.” Ishqa’s arm was tight around my waist, the two of us supporting each other. Our wings tangled. My muscles burned. There was nothing graceful about this — we were flailing through the sky.
“Keep going,” Ishqa said. “Just beyond the wall.”
The edges of my vision were going grey.
Distantly, I became aware of the fact that we were falling.
“Aefe!”
The wall hurtled closer. We lurched through the air as Ishqa’s wings pumped desperately to keep us airborne.
The last thing I saw was the ground rushing towards me.
And then nothing.
Somebody was screaming — a horrifying, jagged noise.
Hands were on me, on my back. Gods, my back, something was terribly, terribly wrong with it. Something was being torn out of me, or plunged into me, or both.
I looked up, through blurring vision, and saw my sister leaning over me.
My perfect sister should not be in a place like this.
“Put her to sleep,” a voice was saying. “She’s…she can’t stay like this.”
I blinked. The face looking into mine was not Orscheid’s. No, it was Siobhan’s, lined with concern.
And then I realized that the screaming was mine.
“She can’t,” another voice said. “That’s why she needs to be awake.”
Awake? No, I couldn’t be. Surely I was dying. I had to have smashed into the ground and shattered into a thousand pieces.
“Aefe. Aefe, look at me.”
Fingers turned my face. Ishqa was there, the waning sunlight spilling from behind him.
“You cannot stay this way. Do you understand? You need to shift back.”
I don’t know how, I tried to say.
“The wings are a part of you. Bring them back within, like you are drawing air into your lungs.”
“I can’t,” I choked out.
Warm fingers curled around mine. Caduan stared down at me. The touch of his hand felt like the touch I’d press against the Pales, now so far away — steadying connection.
“You can,” he said. “You must.”
He said it as if it were a truth, and I allowed myself to think that it could be.
The pain tore me in two. I heard cracking sounds. My fingers trembled around Caduan’s hand.
“I can’t,” I sobbed. “I can’t, I can’t…”
“You can,” he repeated, firmly.
It was going to kill me.
But one more time, I drew in breath, curled all of my limbs in on each other. Let out a ragged scream.
CRACK.
The pain dimmed my vision. I felt hands running over the bare, smooth skin of my back.
“There.” Siobhan gave me a shaky smile. “You are done, Aefe.”
I fell back into darkness.
Chapter Twenty
Tisaanah
It is strange to call war mundane. But that’s what it became, conflicts running together like blood between rain-soaked cobblestones.
When the Kazarans had retreated, they had taken with them breathless whispers of Zeryth’s foreign witch, who had brought down the cliffs and soaked the stone in blood. Overnight, my reputation caught fire.
I was grateful for it. Those whispers were my greatest weapon. Zeryth wanted to win, and he wanted to do it quickly. I had no choice in fighting for him — the only thing I could control was how I did it. I could wield death, or I could wield a powerful performance.
We were to conquer six districts, all of them relatively close to Korvius. The first time I rode out, I had to keep stopping to vomit in the bushes, careful to make sure no one saw me. It wasn’t Reshaye’s magic making me ill, just my own nerves.
Reshaye picked apart my anxieties as if unraveling a piece of embroidery.
{Why do you so fear what you are capable of?} it whispered, confused.
I’m not, I replied. I just believe we can be better. And it is easy to destroy.
It was a poor answer. Still, I felt it consider the thought.
The night before we arrived at the next city, I pulled Sammerin far enough away from camp that no one could hear us.
“If I lose control, tomorrow,” I told him, “do whatever you need to do to make sure I stop. Do you understand?”
Sammerin gave me a long, serious look, and nodded grimly. “I do.”
“Promise me, Sammerin.”
He put a firm hand on my shoulder. “I promise.” He made it sound like an unshakable truth, and I was grateful for it.
That would become a ritual before every attack. Before the crest of dawn, I would go to Sammerin, and ask him to make that promise one more time. And to his credit, he always did.
But he never needed to fulfill it.
I showed these cities exactly what I was capable of doing to them. My spectacles embodied the shattering of their greatest strengths. I collapsed the stone around the most fortified district, as if to whisper to them, I can tear your walls like paper. In the one sheltered by the sea, I roiled the waves until they were ten, twenty, fifty feet high, to show them, I could swallow you whole. I made mountains shudder and fields wither; I filled the sky with smoke and snarling eyes.
Upon every target, I unleashed hell.
Or at least, I appeared to.
Some of it was a facade. Zeryth gave Eslyn those vials before every fight, and each time, she would support me, drawing Stratagrams to bolster my magic and protecting me while I was distracted. I couldn’t have done any of it without her help, enhanced by the power Zeryth fed her. Each time, I came so close to the breaking point — the point where my skin and muscles and blood were burning, and Reshaye clawed for more power, a hair’s breadth away from breaking out of my control.
With each performance I would have to fight harder, dig deeper, sacrifice more of myself. Sometimes I would look down to see the ground itself withering to rot beneath my feet, as if death literally surrounded me. I would look at my arms and see the darkness crawling over my veins, spreading by the second.
Every time, I would have to cede more to Reshaye, and I would think, This is it. This is the one I fail.
But in the end, just when I thought it was over, our opponents would surrender.
The battles, though, were far from bloodless. Yes, there were dozens of corpses instead of hundreds; sometimes hundreds instead of thousands. But the armies still clashed. I became a target quickly, and when you’re a target, it is impossible to survive without killing.
I wished I could say that I remembered the faces of every person whose flesh rotted beneath my magic. But the truth was, they blended together quickly, struck down in panicked moments of barely-tethered control. Sometimes, those deaths were the only thing that kept Reshaye’s hunger at bay.
Still, I would dream of decaying faces.
For days, I would dream.
Reshaye grew more and more restless, and yet, it was also more withdrawn than ever. Our performances exhausted it so much that I would often go days without hearing it whisper. But at night, our dreams would tangle. I had the strangest, most vivid nightmares — dreams of blinding white and betrayal. I dreamed of Reshaye as I had seen it in the Mikov estate, in the deepest level of magic. And I dreamed that someone was reaching for me, and for reasons that I could not understand, that was the most terrifying thing of all.
The battles took their toll. I was careful to make sure that no one saw anything but strength, there or after, but as soon as I was alone in my room, I would collapse. The sickness was stronger every time. The deeper I dug, the higher the cost.
Nura would always be there, holdin
g my hair back when I vomited or forcing water down my throat when I wasn’t. I never asked her to. Once, I croaked, barely conscious, “Why are you doing this?”
She’d given me a cold stare. “Would you rather I leave you here on your washroom floor?” she said, dryly. “Or would you prefer I call someone else to help wipe up your vomit?”
I’d had nothing to say to that. The truth was, I was too sick to be alone. And I didn’t want to let anyone see me that way — not even Sammerin.
We never spoke of it again.
Between battles, I remained in Korvius. I attended Zeryth’s meetings, though they grew more frantic and less measured. His own carefully-cultivated performances were disintegrating. Sometimes, when we were in close proximity, my magic could feel something strange pulsing off of his — like a song that was off-key in a way I couldn’t pin. As time passed, the notes grew more sour. After one meeting when Zeryth could barely string a sentence together, I noticed that his wrist — the same arm where my curse was tattooed on his forearm — was bruised and swollen. He was always in the worst condition after our battles, although he himself never fought.
I thought of the vials he gave Eslyn before each battle, and concocted a weak theory.
“He is sick the same way I get sick, isn’t he?” I asked Nura, afterwards. “Because of the potions he gives to Eslyn. It makes her… stronger. Better. But I can tell that it isn’t…” I struggled to find the right word. “Normal magic.”
Nura gave me a pointed look. “I have been instructed not to discuss this.”
The tone of her voice made it clear we both understood it to be a confirmation.
Still. I took no pleasure in being right. Because if Zeryth was dabbling in deep magic to do whatever he was doing to help Eslyn, that meant the curse may not be outside the realm of possibility.
“And what about the spell binding my life to his? Is that part of it, too?” I said. “Does that mean it’s real?”
Her expression flickered, and she shook her head. “That, I don’t have the answer to.”
No one did, it seemed. In my spare time, I combed through books, searching for information about whatever he had or hadn’t done, and whether it was truly possible. Hopeless. I found nothing.
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