“What the hell is wrong with you?” She demanded over the roaring winds, her gaze briefly cutting towards the ground, checking that their spectators were still unharmed. “Romana I’m not in the mood for you pulling a tantrum.”
Silver felt her grip on the demonic breeze weakening, her knowledge of how to use it limited. So it was no surprise when a spike of Romana’s fire broke through the shield.
Quickly she created a portal beneath her hellhounds’ feet that sent Asha and them falling through it and safely into the fifth demonic world. Then she created a ball of pyro-demon fire, but before she could use it, the demonic wind barrier shattered.
Another fierce wind sent her slamming back into the mountain side and she felt the just healing bones in her wings smash open again as spears of sharp rock tore through flesh and feathers and bones.
Then, Romana spoke. It was so quiet, so calm it could have been mistaken by a mortal for the passing of a breeze over desert sands. But Silver’s ears heard every word.
“You took Maria.” She whispered. “Then Llewellyn took Katelyn.”
Everything clicked into place instantly. Romana’s shocked and rage filled state was the result of grief at Katelyn’s being taken. The explosion at Morendor had likely been the moment Marten broke the news to her and Silver was being attacked because, like every other time, she was obviously to blame for this.
“How was I supposed to know he’d do that?” She roared back. “Listen, you could have just asked me to look for her. No need to get so violent about it!”
“There will be no searching.” Romana replied. “You will hand over Maria and he will return Katelyn.”
“Like hell he will!” Silver actually questioned the extent to which grief could be blamed for stupidity. “The moment he gets Maria, he’ll kill Katelyn straight away because it will weaken you and amuse him. He probably doesn’t even want his daughter! He just wants to use the excuse to keep an enemy of ours on the chessboard and take you out in one swoop.”
“He will honour the bargain.” Romana was beyond hearing at this point. “He will return Katelyn if we just hand over that creature.”
Silver shook her head, noticing a rustle in the trees that told her Keenan had come looking for her. She shook her head minutely, indicating he should stand down.
“You need to snap out of this, Romana.” Silver retorted. “Odds are she’s already gone.”
That was obviously not the right thing to say as breeze pushed her upwards along the rocks, further ripping her wings till they hung uselessly, half torn from her back.
“He will return her.”
“Romana!”
Oh great, Silver thought, the damned kingling was here.
“Sweetheart! I need you to come down from there so we can talk. I didn’t get a chance to tell you everything! Kate and Gaillean have…” His words were torn away by the wind, yet Romana seemed to hear him. Her power pulsed less forcefully as his mouth kept forming soundless words and eventually Silver managed to pull her arms free and push herself into the air. The surprise left Romana corporeal for an instant, but it was all Silver needed to push her through a portal and into one of the anti-magic cells in Morendor.
Unfortunately, her leap left her suspended in mid-air without any wings and she plummeted towards the ground. Her eyes closed with force of the wind, and she waited, with an odd feeling of patience, for her body to be smashed to pieces on the rocks below. Ice crept along her limbs as death opened its arms wide.
Chapter Twenty-One
ACUTE PAIN
Asha didn’t know what to think when she came-to on the ground of a strange world. Theria howling with grief was the only sound she heard as she realised she had somehow toppled from her aunt’s familiar’s back. Odd, since the last thing she could remember she had arrived to see her mother and her aunt facing off against each other.
It took looking around at the alien landscape to make her realise what her aunt had done. She reached out with her mind, desperate to find the links to Silver and her mother. When she realised they were both blocked she began to panic sending frantic messages that never reached the wytches they were intended to, merely bouncing back at her.
“We’re on the demonic realm.” Cicero informed her as Theria’s howls cut short suddenly. “Your powers probably won’t work here, and you definitely won’t be able to communicate with anyone on your home world.”
Asha ignored him and pushed towards Theria. “Are they alive?” She demanded.
The hound gave her a long, searching look before replying. “I don’t know.” She replied at last.
*
Kate felt the ricochets of Romana and Silver’s power from where she stood in her plane, desperately searching the realm for any sign of Katelyn. She knew what had happened before Gaillean appeared to tell her, and she fell to her knees as she realised what Romana would think of herself when she woke from the trance of anger she had fallen prey to.
“How can Asha overcome the rift this will create between the covens now?” She asked of Gaillean as he lifted her to her feet.
“The plan will work.” His voice was certain, even if the subtle trembling of his hands gave away his fear.
*
Romana fell limp under Marten’s fangs, the mark on her neck burning slightly as confusion set in. Why was she in a cell? What had happened? It felt like waking from a deep sleep.
The pain in Marten’s eyes was a slap in the face as she remembered and finally tears came to her eyes, staining her motionless cheeks as she prayed to any Ancient that was listening to help find her lost friend.
“If Keenan comes after you, we probably won’t be able to stop him.” Marten told her, sinking to the floor of the whitewashed cell with her in his arms. “Why did you go after her like that? She didn’t even fight back.” His tone was part resigned, part incredulous, and as he spoke the second part of that afternoon’s events came rushing back at her.
Silver crushed against a mountain side; forcing her way past magic with a shattered body; pushing Romana through the portal as her ruined wings flared briefly and then streamed behind her as she began to plummet towards the earth like a broken doll.
“What have I done?” She breathed, the words muddled because of the paralysis caused by Marten’s bite.
The Dark Coven would declare war on the Light for this. Maria would be executed because of what Romana had done, which meant that even if Katelyn was alive, she wouldn’t be for much longer.
Her eyelids fluttered shut, but even then the image of a face framed with angelic blonde curls seemed burned into the back of them. Katelyn’s innocent eyes and easy smile judged her and found her guilty as she slipped into oblivion caused by magical exhaustion.
*
Silver drifted outside of time, her body frozen from the inside out even as her mind wandered. She felt as if she was submerged in a sea of ice, and yet oddly it was peaceful.
That peace was shattered when the pounding began.
Voices, no, one voice, was yelling at her from a distance. She tried to yell back, but her lungs were heavy and cold and the words turned to racking coughs.
She slammed back to reality with a jolt, water erupting from her lungs in great waves.
“That’s it, that’s it.” A man’s voice crooned softly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You were going to die. I didn’t have a choice.”
Keenan? Coughing forced back any words she would have said even as her other senses came back to her, one by one.
The first thing she noticed was that she was soaking and freezing, so that part hadn’t been a dream. The second thing was that Keenan was sat with her between his thighs, massaging her shoulders gently as she choked up volumes of water she wouldn’t have believed her lungs capable of holding. He was also soaked through, so she could only assume that they had been swimming somewhere while she was unconscious. Which baffled her, then amused her as she tried to recall what had actually happened
“What happened?”
The words were so gravelly in between her retching that even she didn’t understand them. Somehow, Keenan got the message.
“Romana came after you.” His voice was oddly calm, as if he knew she couldn’t face him if he was emotional right now. “You shoved her through a portal and fell. I caught you but you were dying. So I froze you in ice to keep you alive and brought you back here, where I forced demon blood down your throat till your heart restarted.”
“Asha.” She choked.
“Still wherever your portal sent her with the hounds,” He replied. “Come on, you need to warm up.” He pulled her over to the steaming bath and pulled her armour off of her, piece by piece. The tenderness he showed and the acute pain she still felt told her that her wings were being regrown completely, probably having been damaged beyond repair in the fall. His hand accidentally brushed one of the stumps protruding from her back and although she made no sound, he held her closer and murmured useless things in her ear.
When she was left in nothing but her blood stained under tunic, he paused.
“Just get on with it.” She growled past the slow healing rawness in her throat.
He nodded sombrely and pulled the clinging ruined garment from her, lowering her quickly into the warm waters of the bath which quickly turned a dirty red from her blood.
Water over the wounds hurt more than receiving them had, yet her face remained impassive and she silently thanked her dead father even as she hated herself for doing so.
“You were just going to let her kill you.” Keenan growled as he ran the sponge gently over her shoulders, almost as if he was caring for a child.
“I can wash myself.” She finally trusted her muscles enough to grab for the sponge, but she missed it and ended up sloshing the dirty water over him. He ignored both the water and her attempt to grab the sponge and continued washing the dirt from her back.
“Why didn’t you fight back?”
Silver snorted. “Killing Asha’s mother was not on my to-do list.” She hadn’t wanted to be the one to see the look in her niece’s eyes once she told her the truth. Somehow, despite herself, Silver never wanted Asha to truly hate her.
Keenan frowned, and continued to bathe her in silence. She sensed his remoteness, and checked the bond between the two of them to find it closed off, but she could feel the undertones of his anger.
At a loss, she considered her next words carefully. For some reason, she didn’t want Keenan to shut her out like this, and so she couldn’t afford to let her words do any more damage. When she finally came up with an appropriate solution she almost shuddered. The Silver Eyed Wytch, she told herself, apologised to no-one.
Yet Keenan wasn’t no-one.
“I’m sorry.” She apologised, and his hands stilled their motions for a second in surprise.
“I didn’t catch that.” His tone was serious, but the bond between them opened back up and she sensed through it the undercurrents of shock and humour that he hadn’t put into his words.
“Don’t lie. Haven’t you heard the Ancients disapprove of it?” She teased.
A ghost of a smile whispered across his face and before she knew it, his lips had descended on hers.
It was incredibly inappropriate, considering she was in a bath, but she sensed his desperation through the bond and poured her apology into the kiss. He drew away, remembering himself, and finished washing her before wrapping her in a towel. When she shooed him away, informing him with more strength than before that she was capable of dressing herself, he left the room, and she managed to wobble over to the bed before collapsing.
That had been one of the closest calls of her life. If not for Keenan, she would be dead. Now she had to recover faster than ever before if she was to figure out if Katelyn was even still alive before Romana tried to force her to give up Maria.
But why did Llewellyn even care about Maria? He hadn’t so much as blinked when the other Ancients sentenced his other children to death. Of course, her freedom would be detrimental to the war between Ancients, but they wouldn’t even care about a pawn of Maria’s strength. They’d send Silver to deal with it, and she’d already proven she could.
The answer hit her like a wrecking ball.
Llewellyn didn’t want Maria back. He’d known Silver was the one keeping her and he’d known that Romana would blame Silver and one of them would kill the other in the ensuing struggle. This was all a plot to weaken Gaillean and Kate, by killing Silver and driving Romana mad with grief. And at the same time, a war would start between the covens, removing any danger from the inhabitants of this world, because there was no other group of people diverse enough to summon the races to war side by side against the rogue Ancients.
“Keenan!” She called, stumbling out of bed. “You have to tell them I’m dead!”
He was there in an instant. “What are you talking about?”
“Kate and Gaillean have to report me dead to the Ancient’s, and they have to say the covens are at war.”
“What? Why?”
Silver grinned as she fished out a set of wytch armour from her wardrobe and let the threads weave over her like a second skin. “Because, perception is everything,” She answered. “If I’m dead and the coven is at war Llewellyn will think his plan worked. They’ll see this world as weak; we’ll have the element of surprise and if Gaillean charges them with interfering in another world we’ll have more time.”
“But won’t they just point out that you attempted to start the war when you snatched Maria?”
“No. I was hired by the Ancients to do a job.” Silver replied. “I was never discharged from that duty. To avoid discord between the covens on who gets to kill Maria we’ll let Asha do it.” The execution would solve the problem of proving Asha’s suitability as ambassador to the dark wytches.
“But what about Romana’s plan to trade her for Katelyn?” Keenan asked. “We can’t condemn an innocent to death when we can just as easily kill Maria on the battlefield later.”
Silver shot him a sad look. “She’s gone Keenan. He won’t have let her live. Even if his plan failed, Romana’s grief would be enough to destabilize her coven. My guess is he’ll leave Katelyn’s body somewhere soon. The location he picks will either be very public or personal to Romana.” She strapped on her weapons and struggled for a moment – trying to force what was left of her wings into their pockets in the skin of her back.
“How do you know this?” Keenan asked, suspiciously, halting the fluttering of the stumps on her back with a gentle hand and then tucking them away for her.
Silver looked him square in the eye as she gave him her shameless answer, “Because it’s what I would do.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
A WOMAN WITH THORNS
When Asha saw the portal open up in front of her, she leapt through without hesitation, Theria directly behind her. She’d been on the hellhound home world for just over a week and her mind had been coming up with all sorts of plans to try and get home. She’d been preparing to try and summon her grandparents to teleport her back when the watery oval had appeared and told her that her aunt was still alive.
However the moment she arrived through the portal she felt herself emerge into a windowless room covered in heavy shields. A glance at the stone revealed her to be in the Temple of the Dark Coven. A glance at the huge round table in the middle revealed all of the Dark Coven, her grandparents and other Ancient’s she knew of but hadn’t officially met and her aunt standing around it pouring over maps that she knew showed different worlds and planes of existence.
“Asha.” Silver was quick to grab her attention and she remembered to hide her relief at her aunt’s survival at the very last second before she looked into those cold, calculating silver eyes.
“Aunt Silver.” She gave a traditional wytch bow with her hands crossed over her chest. Knowing it was less formal than the bow reserved for usually greeting an Ancient, yet overly formal to the other Wytch Queens. It seemed to suffice, as the ten Ancients around the
table nodded slowly and Silver gave a slight head tilt to indicate her approval.
“War is coming, but we have an unexpected opportunity.” Silver got straight to the point and it took Asha a moment in the dark of the room to realise that her aunt had merged her wings into the skin of her back, which was rare for her these days. Then she remembered the way her wings had been broken upon the mountainside and almost gasped, Silver was probably being forced to regrow them completely after that. The new wings were merged into her back to stop the others from seeing her weakness.
Perception is everything, Asha thought.
“When Llewellyn leaves Katelyn’s body on display it will be obvious that he did it to provoke a response against Kate through Romana.” Silver informed the group. “I am told, by our godly friends that this counts as an act of war, and the rest of the logical Ancients will cut Llewellyn off from their group at this point. That makes him easy prey for us, or as easy as killing any other super powerful and very old being can be.” There were a few dark chuckles from around the room but Asha barely heard them over what her aunt was implying.
Katelyn was dead.
The girl who had been like an older sister to her, and had helped teach her to ride and just over a week ago had sat at the same table and laughed as Romana made Asha eat her carrots or face going without pudding. Numbness spread over her like a blanket, and though she knew she should feel upset by the news, she could feel nothing; as if the pain was so great her mind feared it and had chosen to cut off the ability to feel instead. She seized on that and displayed it to those gathered at the table.
“We will execute Maria in retaliation. Asha, to make it fair, as a member of both covens you will be the one to kill her. It will be done publicly, in front of the entirety of dark wytchdom.”
“Yes, Aunt Silver.” She acquiesced quickly, and even numb as she was, the possibility of her first kill in equal parts thrilled and terrified her. It made sense that she would have to be the one to seek retribution for Katelyn’s innocent lost life.
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