Kingdom of Mirrors and Roses

by A. W. Cross

  As I brought down the knife, I had the strange feeling that my choice would lead to a certain destiny: as if before now, there had been two possible paths toward destiny, and when I plunged the knife into Duncan’s chest, right next to the infected veins, I would’ve made my choice and one destiny vanished and the other become reality.

  But I had a feeling it was a destiny I wouldn’t like at all.

  The earth shook with power, and part of me started to wonder if this was really me doing it, or if this was someone else. How could I wield this type of magic, so advanced that even my mother had struggled with it? Death magic?

  It almost seemed as if… As if someone else was doing this.

  I had no time to analyze it; the knife had already drawn blood. I plunged it deeper into Duncan’s chest, gritting my teeth as I cut out an oval shape around his heart. As I pulled the skin away, I saw his heart, beating ever so softly. It was dying, that much I could tell.

  Then, it was George’s turn. He looked at me with a mix of awe and fear in his eyes. Wind circled around us—where it was coming from, I had no idea. The door nearly burst off its hinges from the strength with which someone, or multiple someone’s, were smashing into it from the other side.

  “Sacrificium cordis,” I stated, speaking the ancient words as I looked George straight in the eyes. “Mors est ex vita.”

  I stabbed him in the chest with the knife, right next to his heart. The organ, beating strongly for now, skipped a beat. As I had done with Duncan, I exposed the chamber of the heart, until the entire organ was visible—one brother with a heart beating strongly, the other with a heart barely beating.

  The wind dancing around the room became so violent that it knocked a chair over. The door flew open too, and the barricade George had made was violently pushed to the side.

  Clarice stood in the doorway, but I could barely see her. She was hazy, as if I was seeing her underwater, thanks to the bubble I had created around this. But what I could see, terrified me. Blood streamed from the corner of her eyes. “What are you doing?” she screamed, but she seemed like someone else.

  Or was I someone else?

  I couldn’t stop now. George had thrown his head back, crying in agony from the open wound in his chest. I had to end it. Soon.

  I reached into the cavity in George’s chest, my hand wrapping around his heart.

  His mother, the poor woman, who was standing behind Clarice, promptly fainted.

  The heart pumped in my hand. It was strong—it would suffice.

  Squeezing it with all my power, I pulled my hand back, using all my strength to rip the heart.

  George lived for about a second more, his eyes wide with shock, before he collapsed in the chair, dead.

  “Mors est ex vita!” I screamed at the heart in my hand. “De vita lapsis!”

  The heart became harder, encrusted with a layer of harsh, red stone, as strong as granite. It was still shaped like a heart, although with sharp edges.

  Like the heart beating in my own chest, this was a heart of stone, impenetrable, too strong for the Blight to destroy it.

  A heart sacrificed for a loved one turned into a heart made of the strongest stone on this planet.

  With my left hand, I quickly pulled out the dying heart from Duncan’s chest, and with my right hand, I plunged the stone heart into the cavity, all in a matter of seconds.

  Duncan instantly woke up, gasping for air. He panted, struggling to breathe. The color returned to this skin in minutes. His eyes were no longer phantom white, all the life that had been drained from him now came pouring back in.

  I had done it. I’d completed the spell.

  I stared at George, but it wasn’t him I saw, and I almost screamed.

  It was my Mother, having collapsed on top of me, while I was revitalizing, brought back to life in the same way Duncan had been, a near-phantom saved from impending doom. I remembered the weight of my Mother’s body, how cold she felt, and how I didn’t dare move for fear that if I did, I would kill her—stupid, considering she was already gone.

  I collapsed to the ground but didn’t feel any pain; it still felt as if this was happening to someone else. I barely saw how the bubble collapsed and Clarice could finally reach for me.

  It vaguely registered that Duncan got up and wobbled toward his brother, the shock in his features slowly being replaced by anger.

  My gaze looked for Philippe’s, but he couldn’t even look at me. The moment I found his gaze, he looked away, anywhere but at me. It hurt, even if I was pretty sure I didn’t really love him.

  “Belle…” Clarice whispered to me. Her eyes had stopped crying blood, but her cheeks were still covered with the liquid.

  I touched her cheeks and blinked when my hands came back wet with blood. “What happened to you…”

  “You,” she said, as she tried to help me sit up straight. I didn’t have enough strength left in my legs to even try and stand up. “Your power grabbed me and Amélie and pulled the strength right from us. Amélie is outside, she fainted.”

  “My power has never done that before…”

  Clarice gave me a strange, sad smile. “Yes, it has. This is exactly what your power does, Belle. What it has always done.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked weakly. I could sleep for a week, that was how exhausted I felt.

  “You’re a Vessel. You latch on to magic all around you, and you pull it from it. But only when you need it.”

  I thought about the dozens of spells I’d tried before during the years, several of them with Clarice by my side. I’d never felt like I had latched on to…

  “It was never my magic,” I said, while the truth clicked into place. “It was yours.”

  This morning, when I’d done a spell as simple as washing the dishes, Clarice had suffered a temporary headache and Amélie had looked as pale as a corpse.

  All this time, my power had never been my own. Like a parasite, I had stolen the power from all those around me.

  Clarice nodded slowly. She wiped some of the blood away from her face. “And as long as it was for small spells, you didn’t even have to notice, and I would never have to tell you. But this spell… I think you pulled magic from everyone and everything that is even remotely magical.”

  “I felt something dark… Something unfamiliar…”

  Clarice pulled me up and steadied me as I wobbled on my knees.

  I couldn’t even recover, before Duncan was screaming. “George! George!” Then, he turned his wrath toward me. “What have you done? You monster! What have you done to my brother?” He screeched at the top of his lungs. Having lost his leg, he could barely keep himself up by holding on to the table, but the anger seemed to fuel his strength.

  “My son, my son,” his mother kept on sobbing while she lingered over George’s dead body.

  “The spell felt so familiar…” I was so locked up in my own thoughts, coming back to earth from the high that practicing this spell had brought to me, that I could barely focus on the horrendous scene with George and Duncan before me. “As if I’d done it before…”

  Clarice grimaced. “Just because you’ve seen Mother do it.”

  But something about that sentence sounded off, didn’t ring right. Not anymore. It was a story I’d always believed, but…

  After Mother died, Clarice was supposed to inherit her grimoire. From that moment on, the grimoire would add any spells Clarice performed, other than the ones already in the grimoire, automatically on the last page, adding empty pages as needed.

  Instead, the grimoire had passed on to me. Why? Clarice was the oldest, not me.

  I grabbed on to my sister’s shoulders, my fingers digging into her skin. The grimoire had passed on to me when Mother died. That was why she’d said, a tad reluctantly if I remembered well, that it should be mine. The grimoire had chosen me.

  And that last spell, the spell my Mother had used to sacrifice her life for mine…

  “No…” I spat out the word, my own heart
nearly stopping in my chest. “No… It’s not true…”

  Clarice’s eyes filled with tears rather than blood. “I’m sorry, Belle. She started it. She tried, but she didn’t know a spell powerful enough. I didn’t know one either—remember she’d already started to train me, not you. As the oldest, I was supposed to be the most powerful. She recited the words, but she didn’t have the strength to… to perform it completely.”

  “I forced her to….” Tears rolled down my cheeks as realization kicked in. “I killed her.”

  “No, no.” Clarice hugged me, so close I could barely breathe. “No, never think that! Never! She wanted to do it; she knew the cost. But when it came to it, she didn’t have the strength. And then, you…” She let go of me again, holding me at arm’s length. “You put a bubble around you and her. I couldn’t reach you. Just like now. It was like something had taken hold of you, something dark, something different… I thought you’d become Tainted, but that wasn’t it.”

  Tears streamed down her face as she relived the moment. “You said the words. You completed the spell. You pulled her…. Her heart…” She started sobbing, unable to complete the sentence.

  “I pulled her heart out.” The words didn’t fully register in my mind. “I’m a monster. I’m a murderer.”

  “Yes, you are!” Duncan screamed, interrupting our conversation.

  I snapped my head, looking straight at him. “I explained to your brother what the price was. He wanted to sacrifice himself for you, he did! He asked me to complete the spell so you could live. If he hadn’t, then the Blight would have reached your heart and killed you!” I pointed at his chest, at the dark veins that had frozen in time, no longer able to kill him. A stone heart was untouchable, at least for some time, until the heart began to weaken, as mine already had.

  “It wasn’t your decision! It wasn’t his!” Duncan hollered at me. He cried out in pain and touched his knee, the wound. “I was supposed to die!”

  Just like I had supposed to die. And maybe that was why I hadn’t hesitated so much when George consented, when George was willing to sacrifice himself for Duncan.

  “You didn’t kill her!” Clarice shouted in my face, trying to get my attention back on her. “She wanted to sacrifice herself for you. But when she wasn’t strong enough, you completed it. That’s why you know how to do that spell—you’ve already done it before. That’s why the grimoire is meant to be yours: it recorded that spell the moment you spoke it.”

  I stared at my hands. They were shaking, from exhaustion, from stress. “Magic like this always comes with a price.”

  Amélie appeared in the doorway, looking deadly pale. She nearly collapsed holding on to the doorframe.

  “Witches! Monsters!” Duncan kept on screaming from on the table.

  “She saved your life,” Clarice snapped at him suddenly. “Twice. First by cutting off your infested leg, and then by honoring your brother’s dying wish and giving you his heart. You should feel honored for the sacrifice your brother did for you.”

  Duncan stayed quiet for a second, and I staggered toward the door, desperate for some fresh air.

  I had killed my mother. Wanting to or not, permission from her or not, I was the one who had performed the spell, in the end. For all these years, the magic I thought I had… It had never been mine. I was a leech who stole from everyone around me. My mother. My sisters. The other handful of people in town who possessed an ounce of magic.

  I had killed my mother.

  I couldn’t move; all I could do was stand there, leaning against the door frame of the kitchen—the very room where I’d made breakfast this morning, which now looked like a hurricane had raced through it. Blood, knives, it resembled a scene from someone’s worst nightmare. How had everything turned around so fast? How could I live with myself knowing that I had done that to my mother?

  What kind of monster was I?

  And then, the alarm blared, the noise so loud it pierced my eardrums.

  11

  The alarm only blared for two possible reasons, neither of them good.

  Despite the situation, we were all trained to act in circumstances like these. I grabbed my crossbow from its hook near the wall. Gerard handed Charles, Philippe and Richard their respective weapons.

  “Keep still and don’t move,” I told Duncan. “Your leg is still hurt.”

  He didn’t argue and we all made for the door, the blaring alarm a stronger guide than the madness that had gone in our kitchen seconds ago.

  But it still haunted my mind, though. Had I done the right thing now? Did I have the right to take George’s life, even if he insisted, to save Duncan’s or had I played with forces I didn’t understand? And when I had done it all those years ago, to save myself, what egoism had drove me forward then? What kind of monster can do that to her own mother?

  The alarm shrilled even louder outside. People were running down the road, trying to make it to the town center, to gather in the church, our safe go-to place in case of a Blight attack.

  Gallant, the Master Hunter, shouted orders to the other Hunters lined up on the top of the Wall. When he spotted us, he shouted down, “How is Duncan?”

  Philippe replied, “He’ll make it.” He didn’t say anything else, but his features said enough, whatever love confession he’d said to me earlier, he no longer loved me. Maybe he even hated me. Despised me, just like everyone else did, except maybe my sisters.

  Or maybe my sisters most of all. How could they live with me, knowing I had killed our mother? How could they ever forgive me?

  My hand grasped the crossbow tighter and next to me, Clarice, armed with a sword and her magic, gave me a worried look.

  Father was standing on the Wall, close to Gallant. What was he doing there? I tried to remember when I’d last seen him: in our kitchen, when I’d asked him to go get Duncan’s brother and mother, which he obviously had. But then he hadn’t come back in… Why? Had he gone straight to here? Did he know something was about to happen?

  For a second, I thought he was looking at me with the bottomless grief reflected in his eyes, but then I saw his gaze went past me, to Clarice, resting on her with a sad resignation.

  She took a deep breath, shuddering.

  “Clarice, what’s going on?” I asked her straight on, realizing the two of them had exchanged a secret message I was unaware of.

  “Belle…” Clarice took a deep breath. “You know the nightmare I told you about? When I was talking to Father, it was because I… I started to remember more about it.”

  “What did you remember?” I didn’t like the sound of it, didn’t like it all.

  Her beautiful face, now disformed because of the blood caked to her cheeks, became a mask of sadness. “I remember I dreamt about you cutting out someone’s heart and turning it into a stone heart. Of amputating a leg. But I also dreamed of a dark carriage taking me away.”

  “No…”

  “Of the body of a Tainted deposited in front of our Wall, with a bloody rose on it…”

  “No…” My voice cracked. The bloody rose. It couldn’t be; it had only been three years since we’d received the last Sign of the Beast, and since Fiona Waters had been sacrificed.

  Once every few years, one of the Tainted lay dead in front of our Wall, not killed by any of us but by an unseen force. A gift, our ancestors probably thought at first. A silent protector from within the woods, trying to help us.

  But none of it was less true. The Tainted would be marked by a rose covered in blood. Roses, that normally didn’t grow in town, nor in the fields outside, a rose so rare it could only come from deep within the forest.

  The roses were a sign of death and mayhem. When our ancestors did not respond at first, a gigantic Beast appeared in front of the Wall. The Tainted didn’t attack the Beast, nor did the Beast care for the Tainted monsters, instead focusing all its anger on the living.

  Four Hunters died attacking the Beast, and then the Beast disappeared, dragging one of the Hunters with
him, into the forest. Search parties looked for the Hunter for months, but he never turned up, and neither did his corpse.

  This was the legend of the bloody rose, the legend of the Beast.

  The village thought they were saved, but five or six years later, another Tainted corpse showed up on our doorstep, decorated by a single bloody rose. The next night, the Beast came. A beautiful young girl, according to legend the most beautiful girl in town, whose brothers were both Hunters, told the Beast she would go with him if only he did not attack the town. The Beast obliged and the girl disappeared with him.

  Ever since, when a Tainted corpse appeared with a bloody rose to it, a sacrifice was made to the Beast. A few times throughout the years, our town had rebelled against this, or so I had been told by Francois.

  It never ended well.

  People died, and the Beast was unkillable, as if he was made of stone. Even back when we still had Mages, like in the days of old, sorceresses like my mother and my sisters, none of them could harm the Beast.

  “No, no, no,” I repeated, my heart hammering in my chest. “The Beast can’t ask for a sacrifice. It’s only been three years.”

  “But it’s time. I understand the signs, sister, and I’m ready.”

  “What?” I frowned at her. “You’re ready for what? No.” I grabbed hold of Clarice to stop her. “No. You’re not going to do this.”

  We stopped having volunteers as sacrifices eons ago. No one ever volunteered. We held a Lottery, and whatever unlucky victim came out of it, they were tied up to a three outside, waiting for nightfall. In the middle of the night, we sometimes heard screams, but come daylight, the person in question was gone.

  It was a barbaric ritual and I hated it. Why didn’t we fight back? Why didn’t we at least try to fight this Beast?

  I could still remember the previous sacrifice, Fiona Waters, a beautiful young girl who had her entire life ahead of her, until she was sacrificed and tied up outside. Tears streamed down her face and she cried for help as she was dragged out of town by the Hunters that were supposed to protect her but no one, not even her family members, came to help her. If you helped someone who was chosen a sacrifice, you would be banished. That was our law, put in place because our town feared the Beast perhaps even more than we feared the Blight.