“Yes,” he confessed from where he knelt on the ground. He leaned forward, his hands on the gravel, his back rising and falling with breath.
“I hate you,” she spat, not even sure she believed him.
“I know,” he whispered. “But I have given you everything you need to finish what she couldn’t.”
Ozik had turned Vaasa into what her mother had been, a tool to fight his battles. And Reid was going to die anyway. He would be executed on the iron pole in the middle of Mekës. Ozik had given her nothing—all he’d ever done was take. He’d taken her mother, her life in Icruria, and now…
“Do something,” Vaasa demanded, her voice edging with violence. “We had a bargain, Ozik. Reid’s life for my magic. Sodo something.”
Ozik rose. Black oil slathered his face, one of his eyes sealed closed as he rolled his shoulders, his jacket tattered and frayed. The skin of his cheek peeled back and dripped black blood.
But all traces of red were gone.
Slowly, the wounds on Ozik started to heal. His skin sewed together, his bruises faded, all evidence of her attack disappeared with each breath he took. He leveled her with his gaze. “I sent Karev to arrest the wrong man.”
Vaasa froze. “What?”
“Reid of Mireh is waiting in your family’s apartment as we speak. It is his friend that Lord Karev arrested.”
Vaasa scurried to her feet, but as she caught her balance, Ozik’s tired voice drifted across the greenhouse.
“In the quest for your hand, I’ve situated the lords perfectly to be conquered by Icruria. They are on the verge of a civil war, and Karev is the single person holding them back. And because I am the one who taught you to steal thrones, this is something you already know.”
It had all been a trick. A brilliant, terrible scheme. She had been just as much a pawn as the men had. She just hadn’t realized why. “Why build an empire you plan to break?”
“Because when you carry the power of a god for as long as I have, conquering a nation is a worthwhile goal… until you fall in love. When you do that, there is no higher purpose than delivering the world to your partner’s feet. Your mother asked for an empire, so I gave her one.”
Vaasa curled in on herself.Your mother saw a spider, so afraid of being crushed beneath everyone else’s feet.What would being married to a man like Vaasa’s father do to a woman? To spend a lifetime in the shadow of men who saw her as nothing but a pawn to further their own ends?
Perhaps it wasn’t her father’s evil that Vaasa had inherited, but her mother’s burden.
“You want to destroy Asterya,” Ozik continued. “And I will help you. But in return, there’s something you must do for me.”
Rage coiled in her with such intensity, Vaasa went dizzy. “Another bargain?” She shook her head. “No.”
“I was twenty-four years old when my father unsealed Zetyr from his tomb.” Ozik dragged in a breath, a sorrowful rattling. “Every day he grows stronger, and it won’t be long until I can no longer hold him back. The witches in your coven are the onlyones who can reseal him. He won’t stop until he kills every single one of you, just like he did your mother.”
Vaasa stopped breathing.
“I never laid a hand on her, and I never would have,” he swore. Vaasa had never once thought she could find sincerity on Ozik’s face, but there it was. She gazed at nothing but a shattered man. “When I fell in love with your mother and realized what it would mean to reseal Zetyr, I gave her that necklace. A simple chain that stifled her magic, and something else she never understood: a third of my family’s anchor. A talisman powerful enough to hold off Zetyr and circumvent the consequence of breaking a bargain.”
Vaasa’s lips parted in shock. The necklace in her pocket could keep her alive. It could prevent Ozik’s bargain from killing her? That was why he had trained her. Why he had shown her the pathway to channeling his magic—it was a breaking of their bargain, but she held the necklace, so she survived. “Why not just release her? Release me?”
“You cannot be released from a Zetyr bargain once it has been made. The terms must be met. So I armed her with the only thing that would grant us more time.”
Vaasa grit her teeth. “And she didn’t know?”
“Not until that summer she went to Icruria. She began in Mireh, but she soon fled to my homeland, to the place where the last third of the anchor is hidden. Wrultho.”
Vaasa’s breaths came heavier. She stared at the olive tree in the back of the greenhouse, at the very thing Julianna and Elena had once sat beneath. This entire place, a relic of the life Ozik had lost. He had carried it with him, had grown it here in Mekës like a torturous testament to his past. “What happened next?”
Ozik looked down in shame. It was perhaps the first time she had ever seen him reveal such a thing to her. “I have spent hundreds of years carrying two pieces of my family’s anchor,and for a time, that was powerful enough to hold off Zetyr. But when I gave your mother the necklace, it meant limiting my own protection. And one night, I couldn’t fight him. I… lost control. I told her to never take off the necklace, but she was trying—”
Ozik stopped speaking, his hand upon his throat as if he could hold back his emotions.
“She was trying to give it to me,” Vaasa said.
He closed his eyes.
