Beneath it, a drain.
It was here, witnessed by the church and the state, that criminals were tied to a post and slaughtered. Some were kept there for days or weeks, freezing to death. The energy of the place hummed around them, the feeling of death palpable in the air. Vaasa had never considered herself superstitious, but it was as if she could feel them: each and every life that had been taken in this spot. She’d felt it since she was a little girl. As if the plaza itself held memory in the divots between its cobblestones where blood had run.
“Keep your eyes down,” Ozik instructed as they walked her into the crowded city square. The city guard surrounded her, lines on both sides fending off the hordes of people who yelled and tried to push past them. Their screams and accusations poured over her. The words settled on her skin but never sank their teeth in:whore, wasted, impure, cursed.
It was only the last one that gave her pause.
To all of them, she was inhuman. A public being, open entirely to their criticism. They didn’t care how loudly theyspoke or whether they conversed about her and her family like she wasn’t there.
Vaasa stumbled with Ozik as guards pushed through the swarms of people to create a path. The bellowing screams died down as word of her gaunt appearance spread through the crowd. The insults transitioned to new words:dirty, injured, hurt.
These people had no idea she had been kept in their own prison.
Ozik wanted them to think the Icrurians had done this to her. That Reid had done this to her.
Her eyes caught on the iron pole again—and the members of the clergy who stood beside it.
Vaasa stumbled backward in an attempt to break from Ozik, but the guards flanking them crowded in closer, containing her. Standing among the clergy was the archbishop, who watched with his beady eyes as Ozik led Vaasa up onto the platform with the pole. He looked over her in assessment with cloudy gray eyes. A man in his early seventh decade, he had a wise air about him, further solidified by his silver hair and long, brushed beard.
He stepped forward, black robes flowing around him, a jewel-encrusted blade held in his right hand. Before she could scurry back, two other members of the clergy stepped into Vaasa’s space. They tore the cloak from her shoulders, revealing her tattered clothing and dirt-caked skin. Vaasa shivered immediately, her body no longer listening to her mind. The crowd began to roar, and the archbishop placed a hand over his mouth.
Ozik gripped her wrist and yanked her arm forward. “Prove to this city that she is no witch,” Ozik said. “Her curse has been cleansed.”
Vaasa fought the urge to bare her clattering teeth. This was a useless test, entirely misguided. Her eyes landed upon theclergyman who had scribbled notes at Lord Vlacik’s behest just the day prior. He knew this would prove nothing. Witches bled the same color as anyone.
But the archbishop dug the knife into her palm and slashed.
Vaasa grit her teeth to contain a pained cry. Red blood ran over her palm and through her fingers, dripping to the stone platform below. A cut that deep would takeweeksto heal.
“There is no curse here!” the archbishop bellowed into the crowd. “After what she has endured, we should welcome our heiress home with open arms. It takes great strength to look the devil in the eyes and refuse him.”
Home?
This wasnothome.
Roaring applause and screams filled the square, but Vaasa didn’t hear them at all. Bells rang out from the cathedral, the sound echoing in her weary mind. In the haze of the onlookers and the flurry of the guard around her, Vaasa’s gaze wandered across the square until it reached the Sanctum, her eye catching the topmost room, which belonged to the emperor and his family. She remembered being nineteen and watching from that room as they executed a notorious pirate. As the executioner sharpened his blade, every pair of eyes clung to the promise of carnage. That evening, when the nobles and her father celebrated their retribution, Vaasa had slipped into one of the servant’s halls with Roman Katayev, the sentinel she had loved for perhaps her entire youth.
I wonder if justice is ever that simple, Roman had whispered in Vaasa’s ear. She’d wrung her hands, trying to forget the taste of her father’s violence and disappointment. It wasn’t reserved for only criminals; she had been no stranger to his cruel discipline, nor to Dominik’s, but Roman’s question had fueled the part of her that had been exposed to enough stories and learned to begin questioning the cruelty of the men around her.
Now, as she stared upon that building, shivering in the cold, she retreated to that tiny sliver of light and warmth, escaped into the teenage memory of Roman out of habit. After all, taking refuge in that boy had once been an unbreakable pattern. She’d tried so many times to quit, but every time he had pulled her back in, until her father’s simple justice had ended in Roman’s death.
“Walk,” Ozik hissed in Vaasa’s ear, pulling her back into the present. She stumbled down the platform, the city guard forming a wall around her as the crowd pushed and trampled to get closer. Ozik’s narrative was an easy one to believe, and Vaasa heard it whispered in the crowd: He had rescued her from Icruria, from the man who had murdered Dominik Kozár. What a brutal, terrible marriage he had saved her from.
Now she was nothing but a damaged, broken victim, harmless in their eyes. Not a witch. Ozik knew something profound about human nature—in order to be considered a threat, power was a prerequisite. To convince these people she wasn’t a danger, he had to strip her of it.
So here she was, their poor, beloved heiress, bruised and bleeding in the snow. Her clothing torn, dirt smeared across every visible inch of her. Never mind that the freshness of her bruises didn’t line up with the time it would take to journey from Icruria to Mekës. That he could have bathed her at any point along such a journey, could have let her keep her cloak to cover it all up. No, these people didn’t care.
They wanted to be fed fiction.
Behind her, the archbishop and his clergy were led into an open-top carriage pulled by two chestnut horses. Ozik remained at her side. He paraded her through the streets, forced her to walk from the public port all the way to the looming Iron Fortress. Every painful step she took, the crowd screamed in performative sympathy. Their voices closed in on her. Instead oflistening to them, she went somewhere else in her mind: a new refuge, an escape from this city.
The witches’ tower in the Sodality of Setar, vines hanging from swaying pots and the smell of parchment permeating every inch of the room. In her mind’s eye, she gazed at each shining face of her coven. Suma’s salt-and-pepper hair, her graceful smile. Romana and Mariana, the twins that never were, mischievous glances shared between them. Amalie, alive and well, her softness a strength.
Melisina, her amber eyes and deep carved wisdom. The calmness of her voice as she guided Vaasa toward healing.
And then it was a white willow tree, the Icrurian breeze passing over the veranda outside Reid’s villa.Hervilla. The home her own great-grandmother, Freya, the very founder of the Veragi coven, had once lived in. Vaasa sank into that vision, pretended she could feel the wind on her skin. The rancid smell of ocean salt turned Icrurian sweet.
It threaded with amber.
