Bloodleaf

by Crystal Smith

  I ran alongside the waterfront road toward the castle. Above the rooftops, the Corvalis house was bowing beneath the assault of the wind as weblike fractures spread across the great, ostentatious windows. I could hear the snap and pop of the glass even over the roar of the storm. There was no chance Kellan would be able to get all those people onto a ship and out of port before it gave way.

  I careened to the left, dragging out my knife as I sprinted for a better view, leaping over chunks of stone and brick as they tumbled from caving buildings. From atop the remains of a demolished sanctorium, I made a clumsy cut just as the first glass splinters of the Corvalis manor were giving way.

  “Sile!” I cried, flinging magic out in bolts as the windows began to burst. Be still.

  Thousands of knifelike glass shards froze where they were, scintillating as they hung in the air, reflecting fragments of lightning and fire.

  I could feel every sliver straining against me as I held them in arrest, groaning with the exertion.

  Please, I silently begged. Hurry!

  And then I saw it: the mast of a schooner, pulling away from the pier.

  The glass began to quaver in the air, thousands and thousands of glittering pieces juddering against my hold. My ears were ringing, my hands shaking from the strain, but I hung on until the ship was clear of the waterfront and halfway to King’s Gate.

  Tears pricking my eyes, I watched it diminish. “Empyrea keep you,” I whispered.

  Then I let go.

   36

  The tower was the center of it all.

  To get to it, I pushed through mighty wind, over bucking earth and surging tide. I was lashed by rain mixed with glass, scraped by the tumbling rocks of the falling terraces, and scratched to shreds by thorns of the plants grown rampant and ravenous. Lightning-strike fires were scavenging the roof the castle, and burning ash was flung into the black sky, as if the stars themselves had turned to fire. Once on top of the bloodleaf field, I could make out several places where the leaves had been crushed by footsteps, though most of the brackish sap had already been washed away in the rain and red waves crashing on the rocks.

  Inside the tower, however, all was eerily quiet.

  One step, then another. Up, up, up, alone save for the howl of the wind and the painted figures on the wall, telling the tragic story of those doomed siblings who started this all. Achlev. Aren. Cael. I lingered at the last panels for a moment, gazing at their inscrutable faces. Then I steeled myself, ready to put an end to the sequence they’d put into motion all those years earlier.

  This is it, I thought, armed with Victor de Achlev’s vial of blood in one hand, my luneocite knife in the other. Then I pushed the door free and strode out onto the tower’s open pinnacle.

  Outside, the firestorm was raging, whipped by the circulating wind into a cylinder of flame. The city below was completely engulfed, the scorched streets standing out like a black triquetra-shaped brand against the blaze. Above my head, however, hung a perfect circle of star-studded sky, the eye of the storm. Marking its center was a dim void: the black moon.

  “So glad you could make it, Princess.”

  Toris had Zan forced to his knees, still bound and gagged. They were surrounded by a thatch of bloodleaf that had grown voraciously, clawing into any crack in the mortar, any imperfection in the stone. I took one step toward them, then another. Zan watched my approach with heavy, feverish eyes, shaking his head as if to say You shouldn’t have come.

  Toris tapped his knife on Zan’s shoulder. “I think the prince here was hoping you’d renege on our bargain.” He laughed. “He must not know you at all.”

  “We had an agreement. I’ve come to deliver my end of the deal.”

  “Would it surprise you to know that I never had any intention of delivering mine?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “I can’t finish my business until the last gate has fallen, and for that to happen, the prince has to die. There is no other way.”

  “So what purpose does this serve in your scheme?” I lifted the vial and unstopped the top. “Why do you need this blood so very badly?” I gave it a lazy little swirl. “The blood of our most revered Founder. It’s supposed to be just a symbol, and yet . . .” I tipped it and let a splash of blood fall out onto the tower stones. “You treat it like it has a greater importance.”

  Toris’s eyes were locked onto the vial. “Do that again and I’ll kill him.”

  “You just told me you would kill him no matter what.” I tipped the vial and spilled the blood again but more liberally this time, a long, thread-like stream. “I want to hurt you, Toris, for what you’ve done. To me, to my country, to everyone I love.” My eyes flicked back to Zan, who was struggling to breathe against the gag. “If this is how it must be done, so be it.”

  “Stop!” Toris demanded, eyes bulging. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “Tell me,” I said. “Tell me why this blood is so important to you.” I tipped it again and let it splatter on the ground. A third of it gone. A half. Two-thirds . . .

  “It’s mine!” Toris barked. Through his teeth he said, “So help me, if you spill even one more drop . . .” He lifted Zan’s chin with the point of his knife, and a bead of blood slid down the edge and onto Toris’s hands. His knife was luneocite glass, twin to my own, the one that had once belonged to Achlev himself.

  That’s when I knew.

  Toris’s visage was little more than an illusory overlay, like the one I’d used to make Falada’s white coat seem black. A simple trick that, once seen, could not be unseen. I circled him in astonishment, staring at a truth that was simultaneously incredible and intolerable, extraordinary and obscene.

  “I see you,” I whispered. “I know who you are now. Who you really are.”

  His eyes were no longer brown but a chilly cornflower blue, gleaming with a mixture of mirth and malevolence. Under my appraising stare, he regained some of his poise, straightening his clothes and procuring a white kerchief from his pocket to daintily clean the trickle of Zan’s blood from his hands.

  Order in all things. Was that not always his motto?

  I might have laughed, had things been different.

  Centuries had passed, and he still looked exactly like the man in the portrait hanging in Kings Hall in Renalt: chiseled jaw, sandy hair, lips pulled into a thin sneer.

  The Founder himself. Cael.

  “It’s been five hundred years since you stood at this point, hasn’t it?” I asked. “Stood here with your brother and your sister for a ritual of magic meant to seal up a rift. A dangerous hole between the spectral and material planes. But then, in the midst of it, you turned on Aren. You killed your sister. Why?”

  “I had to take a life, so I took one. My mistake,” he said, “was choosing Aren. She just happened to be standing closer, you see. Easier to grab. It should have been Achlev. All of this . . . this mess”—​he motioned with flippant disdain at the fallen city, the raging storm—​“could have been avoided if he’d been standing there instead of her . . .” He shook his head. “So good at seeing death, she was, yet never saw her own.”

  “You were triumviri. A leader of your order. Sent to this spot to do something good. And instead you destroyed everything you ever loved.”

  He laughed. “Love is weakness. I lost nothing because I loved nothing.”

  My eyes slid to Zan, whose breathing was getting more and more rapid, more distressed. How much easier would it be if I’d never met him? I wondered. And then: How much would I have lost if I hadn’t?

  “And what,” I asked, “did you have to gain?”

  “Eternity,” he said.

  “This is what you wanted? To wear another man’s face? To live another man’s life? Forever?”

  “Toris was a means to an end. Don’t feel too bad for him, Princess; he knew what I was when he woke me. Luckily, he didn’t live long enough to regret it.”

  “The Assembly,” I said, remembering. “Lisette said
he changed after he went to visit the Assembly. He went there as a historian. He came back as . . . you. You took his place. After you killed him.”

  “I’ve killed a great many people, my dear. Toris, Lisette. Your father. Her mother. All the fools who tried to keep me locked away at the Assembly. Soon enough it will be his turn.” He motioned to Zan. “And then I’ll get to you.”

  I eyed Victor de Achlev’s blood. Toris—​Cael—​still didn’t know it wasn’t his.

  “Five hundred years,” I said. “It took five hundred years for you to get back here, to finish the job you botched. Because your brother saw what you did to Aren and tried to save her. He was a feral mage. He worked with nature, not with blood. So he used yours and left you with only this.” I dangled the blood vial again. “How unfortunate for you.”

  “Achlev”—​he spat out the name—​“wasted my blood to make this monstrosity.” He indicated the thatch of bloodleaf, crushing a shoot beneath his heel. “But while I do require blood to work magic, like you, and my own blood was singularly potent, it doesn’t have to be my blood I use. I quickly found an excellent alternative source through the Tribunal.” He grinned. “Of course, it was much more effective when the guillotine was our primary method of executing witches. Beheadings went out of vogue during my involuntary confinement at the Assembly. I’ve been pushing for the practice to make a comeback; I have to interrogate subjects for days to obtain a fraction of the blood I can get removing a head.”

  I closed my eyes. “All the countless people who have suffered and died to serve your vendetta against magic . . .”

  “I have no vendetta against magic, only against those who might have more of it than I do. Achlev took mine, so I merely found a way to compensate for the loss. The Tribunal was my best idea. My greatest legacy,” he said proudly.

  “Destroying it will be mine.”

  “You’re not going to make it from this tower, little girl. I need you to die so that I can finally open the rift and set my mistress free.” He tilted his head. “Can’t you hear the whispers? She’s calling for you.”

  Come to me. Find me. Free me. The voice was soothing, comforting, cajoling, demanding . . . Let me out. I looked up at Cael, startled. He had his ear cocked to the wind, a smile playing on his lips, letting the silky whispers lull him into obedience.

  “Everyone worships the Empyrea so blindly,” he said, “never wondering about the other powers. There were always three of them, you know. One to rule the sky, the other the earth . . . But the last sister . . . she was given the refuse to rule over. The dead and the damned and the souls deemed too corrupt to be given life. They call her the crone, but they are wrong. She is perfect. She is beautiful. My mistress. The mistress of all blood mages, really. And she chose me that day, to do her work: Take a life. Open the portal. Set her free.”

  I was inching closer to him as he spoke. “Your mistress made you ageless, undying, just in time for Achlev to take all of your blood and stop your sacrifice. So you failed her, and then you fled, and he built this monument and the entire city and the wall to keep you from fulfilling your bargain with her for five centuries.” I shrugged. “I can’t imagine she is well pleased with your work.”

  He kicked Zan to his side and dove toward me but skidded to a halt as I hovered the vial over the abyss.

  “Name your mistress,” I said. “Name that dark force to whom you sold your soul.”

  “Malefica.” He spat out the name. He was so close, I could see the serpentine red vessels in his glassy eyes.

  I said, “May you find joy in your reunion.” And I threw the vial down. It fell with a clink, trailing an arc of blood behind it, rolling to a stop at the statue Aren’s feet.

  Cael let out an animal snarl and leaped after it, scraping his fingers across the splattered blood as if trying to gather it back into the vial. I flew past him and scrabbled to Zan, who was still lying on his side. As I worked my knife through the ropes binding him, the wind rose from a whistle to a scream and the tower swayed as a dozen funnel clouds spooled down from the sky to the ground. The air was hot and electric as the earth gave a deep, primal groan, and the three marble men at King’s Gate splintered into pieces that tumbled into the roiling ruby water of the fjord.

  It seemed that my gamble had paid off. Victor de Achlev’s last remaining blood had worked in place of Zan’s for the sacrifice. King’s Gate was falling, and it was the last anchor; its loss catalyzed the wall’s final decimation. All around the city the ancient, indestructible stones of Achlev’s Wall began to shake and crumble. Below us the blue-white lines of magic seared across the black expanse, snapping back to their original course, one after another after another. I clutched Zan close as they intersected in the earth deep below us, a throbbing tangle of energy and light.

  “I’ve got you,” I murmured into Zan’s shoulder. “We’re going to make it out of this. We’re . . .”

  But Zan was slumping against me. When my hands came away from his back, they were red with his blood.

  I let out a wrenched cry.

  I was wrong. It was not Victor’s blood that had broken King’s Gate but Zan’s. Cael had delivered his death strike before I ever arrived at the tower. Aren’s final foretelling was coming true right in front of my eyes, and I was helpless to stop it.

  “No,” I begged, lowering him onto the bed of bloodleaf and tearing his gag away with my bloody fingers. “No.” My voice was breaking. “Please, Zan. Don’t go.” I took out my knife and held it to my palm. “I can fix this,” I said. “Like I did before. I can—​”

  “Nihil nunc salvet te,” Cael rasped from behind me.

  A spidery blue light burst from Zan’s body and spiraled into the clouds. Beneath him the bloodleaf vine was coiling, stretching, straining toward his trickling lifeblood while his spirit materialized above. I lifted my head from his prostrate body just in time to see his ghost glimmer and fade, as if swept away into the swirling storm.

  I let out an angry sob, pressing my forehead to his chest and twisting his shirt in my fists. His hand fell limp to his side, and from his cold fingers tumbled his mother’s ring. It fell onto the blanket of bloodleaf just as the first tiny, white petals began to unfurl.

  Blood on the snow.

  I reached for the ring and stood up to slip it onto my finger, now filled with a terrible calm.

  Cael was amused. “Well played,” he said. “Using someone else’s blood. But I got you one better, didn’t I?”

  The last king of Achleva had fallen, and with his death the final seal holding the wall’s magic into place gave way, and the plane of the spell cracked into tiny, jagged shards. Above us the black moon oversaw it all, a portal into darkness itself.

  I turned to Cael, knife in hand.

  He tilted his head. “Your weapon is useless against me, girl.”

  “It’s not for you,” I said.

  Sorrow and rage burgeoned inside my body, corrosive and catastrophic. I wrapped my fingers around the glass blade and gave a quick, searing yank. Then I fell to my knees and pressed my hands against the stone, feeding the energy of my loss into the tower and deep into the power below, letting it expand and grow until I was not simply me; I was the tower. I was the storm. The magic. The bloodleaf.

  Then I lunged and closed my bloody fingers around Cael’s neck. The force of my grip sent him reeling, slipping in Victor de Achlev’s blood and falling backwards against the bloodleaf-ridden battlement. He was stunned for a moment, before throwing his head back to laugh.

  When the first vine of bloodleaf wrapped around his throat, the laughing came to an abrupt stop. “You can’t hurt me,” he said as more vines encircled his arms, his legs. “I cannot die.”

  “I don’t want you to die,” I said. “I want you to suffer.”

  I clenched my fists, and the bloodleaf tightened in response. Lines of red were spreading from the veins of the leaves across his skin, leaving black trails behind them, like the spirits of Achlev’s gates.


  “My mistress will destroy you,” he said, choking. “She is angry, she is wrathful, she does not forgive—​”

  “Nor do I,” I said as I unleashed the last of my magic into the vines holding him.

  The bloodleaf absorbed him, consumed him, became him. It ate away his body, separating cell from cell, until he was nothing but a pile of blackened leaves and thorns that fell into dust, whipped away on the wind.

  “Nihil nunc salvet te,” I said, and sank to my knees.

   37

  When I gathered enough strength to reopen my eyes, it was to a world of white.

  The Harbinger was watching me.

  I blinked. No, not the Harbinger herself. The image reflecting in the stain was not flesh and blood or spirit. It was Aren’s statue. I pushed myself away from it and then saw him.

  Prostrate on the bloodleaf lay Zan.

  Blood on the snow.

  But of course, it wasn’t snow, I now knew. He was lying motionless on a bed of drifting white petals. His eyes were closed, one arm bent beneath his dark head.

  I sobbed as I knelt beside him and tried to gather him into my arms, hating how chilly his skin was, how blue his lips were.

  This was it—​Aren’s vision made real. Zan was gone. Dead and gone and cold, and here I was, surrounded by bloodleaf flower when it was already too late to use it.

  Then a single petal floated down and landed on Zan’s lips, as fragile as a frond of frost at the break of day. I stared at it there and remembered: Had not bloodleaf flower overcome death before? Had I not gone to the other side and come back myself?

  Ever so carefully, I brought my lips within an inch of Zan’s and let out a slow, soft breath into his mouth, sending the petal fluttering between his parted lips, where it dissolved and disappeared.

  Nothing happened.

  I rose and slammed my fist into the foot of Aren’s statue, violently resentful of her impervious, stony expression high above me. I hit and punched and kicked at it until my knuckles were torn and bloody.