Shadow Witch

by Isla Frost

  I turned my freezing face to the sky. Even that was mostly white. The sun’s position had changed again. Hanging low but visible on the horizon and doing nothing to warm us.

  Then Theus placed his hand on my arm—a hand he’d used to shove me through his gateway mere moments ago—and heat spread through me.

  Not the romantic sort of heat you read about in books. The magically sourced, improving blood flow and preventing hypothermia kind.

  “Sorry about pushing you,” he said, “but we don’t have time to worry about such trivial matters as my life if we want to make it back before breakfast.”

  I gaped at him. Then shut my mouth before the glacial wind could freeze my tongue to my teeth.

  Theus started walking toward one of the towering outcroppings of rock and ice. And since his magical warmth was the difference between life or death—and curiosity was absolutely getting the better of me—I went with him.

  The rock loomed larger as we neared, and I noticed this place wasn’t lifeless. Not entirely. Some sort of lichen clung to the unforgiving gray stone, and a flicker of motion in the corner of my eye drew my attention to a second thing that wasn’t white. There, in the distance, were dark specks, definitely moving. Penguins? Seals? I’d never seen either in real life, and they were too far away to make out, but I knew enough to be certain they weren’t polar bears.

  I had the growing inkling we were on Antarctica. The faraway frozen continent that no human had ever truly inhabited. A literal half a world away from my family home and who knew how many thousands of miles from France. Or the academy for that matter—wherever it was located.

  And I understood why the walkers had chosen this place for their Cache of the Last Stand.

  Antarctica was the most barren, the most remote continent they would’ve found. Too dangerous and too distant for post-invasion human technologies to traverse. And probably the least appealing destination to the Malus who fed on life force.

  It wasn’t dead, wasn’t desolate like that patch of farmland Theus had first taken me to. But it was a lot less tasty than say, the landmass that used to be the United States.

  I resisted confirming my suspicion. Theus was breaking enough rules for me. I could let him keep that secret at least.

  Ice crunched under our feet, and even with Theus magically warming me, the frigid air in my lungs made the going more difficult than it should’ve been. It didn’t help that I still wasn’t a hundred percent after the latest murder attempt.

  I was grateful to enter a crevice that I’d failed to spot until we stepped inside. No, not a crevice, a tunnel, leading downward. In any case, the wind could no longer claw at us, and I felt instantly warmer.

  We must have been getting close to the cache now. But there were no guards. The location was its own security.

  Theus was providing light as well as warmth. The golden luminescence bounced off smooth curves of ice and rock, too perfect to have been carved by anything but magic.

  Then we stepped into a grand cavernous chamber of a scale I was utterly unprepared for.

  The immense space was yawningly empty, yet every inch of the ice floor, walls, and ceiling were carved with beautiful renderings of landscapes from other worlds, and a warm light emanated from the ice itself to illuminate them.

  I suddenly understood why it was forbidden to bring any human here.

  Any human, yes. But especially me.

  It wasn’t the solemn sanctity of the place. The exquisite care to detail that spoke of its sacred significance to the walkers.

  It was the staggering, stupendous, blinding amount of life force.

  Every hollow in existence had their life energy stored here. And without the barrier of a body or thousands of miles of distance, I instinctively knew that I could drain every single one of them in an instant.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Are you insane?” I hissed at Theus. “Why did you bring me here? I could kill you all, every hollow, right now. Then use that crazy amount of life force to eliminate every walker from the planet!”

  Sure the withdrawals would likely kill me afterward, but that wasn’t the point.

  “I know,” Theus said. “But I don’t believe you will. And before you decide, there are several things you need to hear.”

  I gaped at him. Again. For some incomprehensible reason, he trusted me.

  Enough that he’d just laid the lives of him and his people in my hands.

  He gestured at several seats carved into the wall of ice. These too bore engravings.

  “You might as well sit down. This is going to take a while.”

  The raw, unprotected life force called to my magic. So loudly I could almost hear it. But I shook off the call, the shock, the temptation, the bewilderment, and sat down.

  To my second sight, the anchored life energy looked like a forest of glowing golden saplings in the vast, pristine white backdrop of the ice chamber. Beautiful. Overwhelming. And there for the taking.

  The bench was warm. Despite that not making any sense in a room carved of frozen water, I was past being surprised by it.

  Theus sat beside me.

  “There is something about the Malus that the academy will never tell you.”

  I could see tension in every line of his body, causing the lean musculature across his shoulders and arms to stand out more than usual and sharpening the edges of his cheekbones and jaw. I waited to hear what he had to say.

  “We walkers are not the heroes of this story, Nova. Nor are we the villains. Not really. Perhaps, at best, we’re the sidekick to both.” He paused.

  “What do you mean sidekick to both?”

  Theus closed his eyes, gathering his resolve perhaps.

  “I told you once what it meant to be world walkers. For our entire history up until the Malus, we slipped through the fabric of reality and explored the universe in carefree wonder. Discovering, appreciating, experiencing what each world had to offer. We were carefree, yes, but we ensured we did not upset the complex and fragile balance of those worlds we visited. Despite what you have witnessed, our nature and magic is that of life, and life cannot be sustained without balance.

  “One hundred and fifty years ago, a walker slipped into a new world. This world was not like the others. The life there was twisted. The land empty of all but evil. And the evil saw the world walker. It watched as he opened the door back to our world, and some of that evil slipped through with him.”

  My heart pounded at Theus’s words. At the implications. That must mean—

  “We are responsible for unleashing the Malus upon the worlds.”

  Anger surged through me at this matter-of-fact admission, but it was quickly cooled by a level of reluctant understanding. It had been an accident. A horrendous, destructive accident, yes, but how could they have known? How many centuries had they been walking the worlds without incident before one unfortunate happenstance had them stumbling across the Malus world?

  I was mad at the walkers. It was undeniable. And yet… I’d learned how easy it was to destroy something simply because you didn’t understand it. I well remembered the day I’d come through the runegate and damaged Millicent’s wall. Not to mention the lives my magic had taken without my intention.

  The walkers had screwed up, it was true. But it was a mistake that they’d surely paid for a million times over. And they were trying to fix it.

  “There’s more though,” Theus said. And this time when he closed his eyes, he didn’t open them again. As if he couldn’t bear to look at me.

  “When the Malus had devoured our world and we retreated here to yours, we knew it would follow. More than that, we wanted it to. It was that or allow it to slaughter every hollow we were forced to leave behind, over half our number, and render us forever homeless. But we came here knowing that it would destroy your planet too—unless we could uncover a new way to fight back.”

  The knowledge of that reverberated through me like a discordant gong, and all empathy fell away. Th
ey had chosen—knowingly chosen—to bring about the deaths of billions of people?

  My initial burst of anger had been like a flash fire—fast and bright yet fast to fade too. But now the hot embers of rage were building inside me.

  How dare they? How dare they sentence so many to death for a tiny hope of their own salvation? Why hadn’t they had the grace to lie down and die with the rest of their world?

  Oh yes, I had rage aplenty. But there was panic too. They’d failed. We had just ten years left before they’d doomed us all.

  Or maybe not all of us. Maybe the walkers would just move onto a new world. To repeat the cycle of destruction all over again.

  The wealth of life force shining around me was a reminder that not all the walkers would move on. The hollows at least would suffer the same fate as the rest of us.

  Small consolation.

  The revelations brought back an old familiar fury. I had come to the academy with the secret goal of learning everything I could about the monsters behind the Agreement that forced human families to give up their firstborn child. To learn about those monsters, then destroy them.

  The first three months of life-and-death trials they’d subjected to us hadn’t dampened that resolve. I’d gathered each surge of fresh anger and tucked it away along with the old. Weaving them together in a tapestry of purpose and determination, held in abeyance for the right time. Because I’d known, promised myself, the time would eventually come for me to act, and that when it did, I would need to channel every ounce of that anger.

  There was so much of it. Anger at the walkers’ cold condescension even as they ripped us from our families and forced us to risk our lives without explanation. For the grief and sorrow of those we’d left behind, every family that had been broken, never to be whole again. For the heartbreak and homesickness of knowing I’d been sundered from my father, sister, brother, and mother forever. For the tears on Mila’s chubby cheeks as I’d left her on that rooftop. For my brother’s fingers clutching my shirt in unspoken anguish. For my own unmet longing for my father’s embrace. For the terrifying changes I’d glimpsed in Fletcher that had drained him of the warmth and light that had once defined him. For robbing Ameline of the innocence I’d wanted to preserve. For the terror Bryn must have felt as she lay paralyzed before the shadow stalker in a desperate effort to save her friends. For every casual cruelty. For every life they’d needlessly risked in the ruthless trials and dangerous transformation ritual. And for every seventeen-year-old who would never make it to their eighteenth birthday.

  I’d vowed to myself I would avenge them all, that I would tear down the Firstborn Agreement and set these things to rights.

  And this was an excellent opportunity to follow through.

  Yet I’d learned a great deal since then. Not the least of which was that the walkers demanded their own families give up a child for the fight against the Malus too.

  And it occurred to me uneasily that if the walkers had indeed chosen to bring the Malus with them, logic suggested they could have left it behind. And if they had that ability, they could have instead chosen to dump the devouring darkness on our world and leave us to deal with it alone.

  Either way, the threat from the Malus was real. I was convinced of that much.

  Which meant killing the hollows would mean wiping out the bulk of the specially trained soldiers who could stand before the Malus without being drained dry. Which in turn would necessitate the sacrifice of even more human lives.

  But could I trust what Theus had told me? Could I trust that the walkers’ true agenda for the academy and the hollows and the firstborns was what they claimed? That although they had chosen to unleash the Malus on our world, they were now determined to save us?

  They’d lied and deceived and hidden so much from us. What else might they have lied about? All the walkers’ actions according to the human side of history, even the actions I had witnessed in my short lifetime, had seemed to cause only death and suffering.

  Perhaps the best gift I could give humankind was to wipe out the walkers and leave the post-invasion survivors with just one enemy.

  And yet… Theus.

  He stood as a shining exception to all of that.

  I shifted to look at him. He was watching me, patiently waiting for me to process. To react. To ask questions.

  He was here, I was here, because he was risking his life to save mine. And as furious as I was at walkerkind, Theus hadn’t even been born when his people had elected to come to our world, bringing the devastation of the Malus with them.

  He was no more guilty of those actions than I was. And his life was worth no less than mine. Yet he was prepared to throw it away. For me.

  Could I truly dismiss and reject everything he offered me and repay it with betrayal?

  Jeez, my heart and head hurt. I’d been planning, scheming, preparing, fighting for this moment, this opportunity, my entire life. To have the walkers vulnerable before me. To hold the power to right the wrongs and protect the people I loved.

  And now that I had it, I wished I didn’t.

  Because nothing was clear-cut anymore. One of the people I wanted to protect was on the wrong side. And tearing down those I had believed to be our enemies might only lead to more death and pain and destruction.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” I demanded of Theus. “Do you want me to slaughter you all?”

  He had to have known what I could do here. And yet he’d brought me anyway. Why?

  And what was I going to do about it?

  Despite the suffering he’d undergone at the hands of his family and race, I had never sensed a thirst for vengeance…

  Theus reacted as if I’d slapped him. “No. I’m telling you because I trust you. Because I’ve seen you, Nova. Watched you. Wherever there is a chance to choose life, to choose mercy, you take that option. So long as it doesn’t cost the life of someone you’re trying to protect.

  “You could’ve killed Ellbereth, killed Healer Invermoore, and every walker there that night they tried to strip you of your magic. Anyone else might have hated them for what they did, but you saw their side. Their heart. And chose to spare them even if it meant they’d come after you again.”

  That wasn’t the whole story. I’d also spared them because I probably would’ve been executed if I hadn’t. Or had that just been my excuse?

  “Besides, you have the right to know the full truth before you risk everything to face the Malus.”

  Theus’s observations did not help my indecision. Why was he offering me his life, his trust, his loyalty when even I didn’t know what was inside me?

  My gut writhed with the agonizing conflict of it. Of having the power to choose—truly choose—for the first time in my life and not knowing the right path to take.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  “But I have still more to tell you,” Theus said, “if you’re ready to listen?”

  I managed a curt nod.

  “I know the loss of life is inexcusable, but there was a reason we chose your world, Nova.”

  My stomach twisted in misery. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this.

  “Lirielle’s grandmother had a vision before she died. A prophecy that foretold salvation would be found here.”

  I was too dumbfounded to respond. That was their big justification? The ramblings of an old woman on her deathbed?

  Ramblings that, according to what Cricklewood had said, most of the walkers themselves must place little faith in.

  But then Lirielle had predicted my wildcard gift, hadn’t she?

  “We tried to get around it,” Theus continued. “For a hundred years, we tried… But in the end—”

  “In the end you slaughtered billions to save your own skins,” I snapped. “There is no reason that could make that okay!”

  Theus bowed his head in concession, but his eyes never left my face.

  “I know. But are you so sure you would not do the same? To save your family? Your loved on
es? Everything you hold dear?”

  My gut twisted with realization and fresh misery. Hell’s breath. He had me dead to rights. How could I argue when I was sitting here contemplating wiping out thousands of walkers to do just that?

  And I had even less reason to believe the ends would justify the means.

  Not that a prophecy was all that great a reason.

  Except in a world of magic, where Lirielle had known about my wildcard gift before it had happened, maybe it was.

  I wrestled my seething storm of emotions—rage, guilt, grief, fear, shell shock, and a whole lot more guilt—under a semblance of control. Then asked, “What was the prophecy?”

  Theus recited it by heart.

  Here is the hope that never grew

  Here is the dream that never flew

  Here is the heart that never beat

  This is the sound of worlds’ defeat

  Wait for the firstborn human witch

  Wait for the world walker magic glitch

  Wait for the reversal of life and death

  Then the nightmare will be laid to rest.

  Theus cleared his throat. “That’s a translation of course, but an accurate one.”

  Ugh. It was so damn vague except for the human and firstborn parts. But the Agreement, the academy, and the walkers’ desire for wildcards made a whole lot more sense now.

  So long as you were prepared to stake the fate of two worlds on the ramblings of an old woman.

  But my conscience twinged again at being so dismissive of Lirielle’s grandmother. Lirielle herself was strange and difficult to understand—but strange and difficult to understand didn’t mean wrong.

  Theus apparently hadn’t finished dropping bombshells today.

  “Lirielle believes that the firstborn human witch is you.” He shifted uncomfortably. “And that I’m the walker with the magic glitch.”

  Shock and disbelief ricocheted through me.

  Theus’s green gaze hit me with an intensity that penetrated anyway. There was something in his eyes that I couldn’t read, or maybe it was something I didn’t want to read.