“Helena’s weaknesses compromised the safety of her entire coven,” Esther snaps. “They led to dozens of her own people being slaughtered, including two of her children. They led to her ruin. And now you would listen to her over me?”
Her words hang in the cold air, heavy with the weight of her own history. A history that every Darkbirch student learns during first year. I can’t argue with her record. Every magical in Darkbirch knows the stories.
Esther, during the Heathborne Incursion of ‘88, singlehandedly managed to lure Director Rothmere’s father into a trap from which he never escaped. She shattered the Crimson Hand, a clearblood cult, by turning their own purification rituals against them until their sacred grove was just a field of sterile ash. She collapsed an entire ley line during the Border Skirmishes, an act of environmental magic so audacious it crippled Heathborne’s northern expansion for a decade.
And ultimately, she sacrificed herself to protect our coven.
She is a legend. A weapon. She is the foundation upon which my entire world was built. And she is standing here, in this nightmare trial, calling me weak.
My heart thuds in my chest. Her words should sting worse than they do. Instead, I feel a strange, cold resolve coming over me.
Because that’s the problem with history: every side has their own version, their own bias, no matter their intentions. And, whatever happened in the past, I don’t feel like listening toanyoneright now, except my own instincts. My own choice… for once.
“I’m sorry, grandma,” I say with a coolness that feels so foreign when addressing her, “but you lost points in my book the moment you decided to pressure me into drinking an apex predator’s blood while withholding information that mattered. Forgive me for not rushing to do your bidding again. I’m loyal to the coven, and I’ll do what it takes to protect it, but with my eyes open going forward.”
Ergo: I’m done blindly following spirits, no matter how close, new, or ancient.
“Then you should not blindly trust Helena either,” Esther says sharply. “Her approach will lead to worse consequences.”
I inhale.Well, don’t worry. We’re still far from that. What happened just now was only in a construct. To make Helena’s wishes come true… I suppress the thoughts of steam and heat threatening to overtake me—of living that scene in the cave with Dayn… for real.
“In any event,” Esther continues, her voice softening slightly, “I could have handled matters differently, I admit that much. At Heathborne, circumstances were... urgent. But I should have told you more.” She lifts her chin, her gaze lingering on me, as if weighing something. “But what matters now is that you harness what flows in your veins: control his power rather than let it control you.”
I frown. “And what exactly do you mean by that?”
“I mean take advantage of the new, unique magic surging through you to protect your people rather than compromise them. That begins with completing these trials. So, I will leave you to that now...” She drifts backward, her form thinning slightly. “However, there is one thing I can do to counteract my past error. To help you face what’s coming.”
My frown deepens. “Help me how?”
Before I can react, she rushes forward—a cold blur of light and intent—and passes straight through me in a way she neverhas before. In a way I didn’t even know she was capable of. A shock blooms at the base of my skull, icy tendrils threading into my mind, spreading, reaching, and I feel an unbearable pressure behind my eyes. The breath punches out of me. Then she rips free, out the other side, and for a heartbeat the world goes entirely, utterly black.
31
DAYN
When the hour in that grotto shattered, the recoil was like a physical blow. One moment, she was in my arms, the taste of her on my tongue, the pulse of her still echoing in my own blood. The next, she was gone, ripped away by the trial’s inexorable logic, and I was left with the ghost of her warmth and the cold, hard reality of Merlin’s chamber.
The air here is stale with old magic. Blythe stands like a statue near the altar, her face impassive. Esme’s mother and sister are a few feet away, a tableau of anxiety. They see only the silver runes glowing on the floor where Esme’s body lies still, lost in the construct as she completes the trial. They cannot see what I just saw. They cannot feel what I still feel.
My own body is a traitor. Every nerve hums with the memory of her skin against mine. The scent of her—salt and shadow and something that is purely Esme—clings to my senses. That hour was a gamble of a magnitude I have not undertaken in centuries. I laid my own soul bare, offering her a choice whenmy every instinct screamed to simply take. And she chose. For one impossible, suspended hour, she choseme. Not the king, not the dragon, but the man who would hold her in the water and wait.
The tenderness of it is an ache in my chest, a vulnerability I had forgotten could exist. It is a terrible and exquisite weakness.
I felt the shift. The desolation of the obsidian plain. I watched through the fragile window I managed to create using our connection as the trial threw a twisted, cruel effigy of me in her path. The pain was a feedback loop; her exhaustion, her fear, the fresh sting of betrayal—it all floods back to me. I felt her horror as the construct spoke with my voice, as it threatened to unmake her memories. Our memories.
My hands clench at my sides, the urge to tear this entire chamber apart a physical force I must wrestle into submission. This is the price. To let her become what she must be—a forger of her own path—I have to allow this torture. I had to watch as she was forced to destroy the very thing I’d just begged her to trust.
But she is Esme. She does not break; she adapts. When she stepped forward, not with a blade but with her body, when her mouth found the construct’s, a shock jolted through me. It was a desperate, brilliant gambit. She was not fighting me. She was using what I gave her. She was usingus.
I felt her reach through the pain, through the violent torrent of power the trial was forcing into her, and find that quiet, golden thread spun between us in the grotto. She remembered. In the face of annihilation, she chose to remember. The fierce, defiant pride that swelled in me was so potent it nearly brought me to my knees. She took the power, our bond, our intimacy, and turned it not into a weapon of rage, but one of connection. She poured my own essence back into the construct, overloading it,forcing it to look at itself through my eyes, through the eyes of the man who would rather burn than harm her.
When the construct shattered into gold dust, the backlash through the bond was a silent scream of release. She won. She survived. She chose a third way.
But the trial was not finished with her. The scene shifted again, the air chilling, and I felt another presence. Ancient. Female. Bitter as frozen ash.Esther.
A low growl built in my throat, and I saw Blythe’s head turn slightly in my direction, her focus momentarily breaking. I forced the sound down. I watched, helpless, as the old ghost materialized, her fury a palpable wave of cold. I heard her accusations, her venomous judgment of the very intimacy that just saved Esme’s life. I felt Esme’s own rage rise to meet it, her defiance a beautiful, sharp-edged thing that caught in my chest. She defended us. She defended her choice.
And then the ghost moved.
