“What did she hire you to do?” Roman asked.
“I was supposed to sell Karev black powder; the heiress helped broker the deal.”
The man paused. He leaned in closer to Sachia, his knife still pressed to her throat. “Do whatever she says, or you and your brother are dead.” He sheathed his knife and threw Sachia to the floor with a slam. Reid backed into the hallway to avoid being seen, but he listened carefully. His mother stood at his side, quiet as a mouse, her hand on his arm.
Roman’s boots sounded on the floor, the stairs, and then the door to the main part of the fabric shop slammed.
Reid jumped out from the hallway and rushed to Sachia, his mother right behind him. Sachia’s eyes went wide with relief, but she clutched her throat. “I didn’t—” she gasped down breath. “I didn’t tell him anything, I swear. That man works for—”
“I know,” Reid said shakily. “Vaasa told me last night.”
“Are you all right?” Melisina whispered.
“I’m fine.” Sachia curled in on herself in a way Reid had never imagined her doing. Desperation seemed to physically weigh down her spine as she pulled her legs to her chest and rocked. “We need to leave this city, Reid. Everything Vaasa has planned, it needs to be moved up. Roman knows who I am, and he’ll sell me out to Sutherland.”
“Why did they arrest Koen?” Reid asked.
It was his mother who spoke, ancient rage threading her soft voice. The kind of anger that promised retribution. “Because they thought he was you.”
CHAPTER
31
Vaasa wore all black.
With a gossamer veil covering her face and silk gloves up to her elbows, she entered the city’s mausoleum. Roman hadn’t taken her here himself, but it was no matter. One of the other sentinels had arrived, and with him, a carriage.
Though the sun still shone outside, the mausoleum was dark, save for the ever-present glow of candlelight and the kaleidoscope of color cast upon the floor by stained glass windows. The black granite building itself was stark against the city’s landscape, statues that had caused Vaasa to shiver when she was younger carved into the front face. Her footsteps echoedon the stone floor. It was entirely empty of staff or visitors; the fortress sentinels had seen to that.
She stared up at the single statue that guarded her Asteryan ancestors’ resting place. Looming in the center of the arching entryway, large wings burst from the back of an otherwise human figure who bowed their head in prayer. Andrej Kozár, the first of her family line to hold the Asteryan throne, and the man her father was named after. His ashes were incorporated directly into the stonework she gazed upon now, the custom a remnant of the old coastal kingdom of Asterya before her grandfather expanded to Mekës. They burned the bodies then, and the most important of figures were enshrined within the limestone the Asteryans used to mine before her grandfather plucked iron out of the mountains. It was he who insisted on a change in tradition; his sarcophagus remained at the highest point in the room, the first of their line to be preserved instead of burned.
And on the step below him, side by side, were the next: her father and her mother.
And the step below them, her brother.
Vaasa stared at the sarcophagi. The space next to her brother was not filled, having been reserved for his wife who never came to be. Dominik had avoided the possibility of an official heir for most of his life, undoubtedly afraid that the moment that child was born, there would be another who could usurp him.
More importantly, there was no space reserved for Vaasa. It was expected that she be laid with her husband elsewhere, and if she never married, she supposed she would have burned like the old Asteryans. Perhaps turned into the most useless of statues. Even in death, she would be apart from her family. Relegated to the periphery because she was a tool, never an inheritor. She realized it was only if she married Lord Karev that she would be laid to rest on the step below the rest of her family. Her only path to eternity in this room was a marriage to another.
The thought made her blood boil. Made her wish to topple Andrej’s guardian statue and let the candles light the tapestries decorating the wall. In her mind’s eye, she watched smoke fill the room. Watched the stained glass shatter from the heat and the stones crumble. Finally engulfed. Finally returned to the fire the way the old Asteryans had once mourned their dead.
Magic crept along the floor around Vaasa’s feet, the black mist leaking from her hands, and she didn’t bother to contain it. She wanted it to spoil the sanctity of the room. Wanted it to coat every surface.
Her footsteps echoed as she crossed the threshold past Andrej’s statue. She climbed each platform using the stairs that split the center, all the levels empty until the top. She slowed next to Dominik’s sarcophagus, unable to gaze upon it closely. Yet her magic hummed. It spilled from her in large waves of black that rose and fell like smoke, the force skittering over Dominik’s resting place. She swore she heard her power hiss. Guilt twisted her stomach, and it didn’t matter how much she told herself there had been no other choice; his journal flashed behind her eyes. It was a dichotomy—her memory of him and those drawings. It assigned him both beauty and violence, leaving her somewhere caught in the middle.
She took the next step, and then the next. Magic licked the stone beneath her feet. She landed upon her parents’ level and swore her heart lurched in an attempt to escape her own chest. She had never come here, not even after her mother’s demise. She couldn’t bring herself to.
Vaasa turned, gazing down upon her mother’s resting place. A large stone box, the lid and sides decorated with etchings of snowdrops. They covered the stone in long, twirling vines. Carefully, Vaasa ran her fingers over them, tracing some of the tangles. Tendrils of her magic kissed the stonework.
Gripping the lid, she pushed with all her might, just as she’d seen Dominik do in the vision Veragi had showed her. The stone creaked with the slide of the lid, and Vaasa’s magic ducked into the crack it made. There was a coldness on the edges of it that almost made Vaasa stop, a distinct sensation of terror that climbed up her throat.
But she pushed until her mother’s preserved face was revealed. Those sharp features, enshrined precisely as they had been when Vaasa found her in that hallway. Cheeks sunken, just a collection of skin and bones. She dropped her eyes to her mother’s neck, and there it was: the necklace. Dainty iron links that were bound to a raw, black gemstone in the center, the rough edges of which made it seem as though it had been broken off from a larger part. The necklace had been draped upon Vena’s delicate throat. Vaasa eyed the clasp.
Tentatively, she reached for it. Her fingertips brushed the iron, and she gasped as every ounce of magic in her body winked out. Like it had with the ropes they had bound her with beneath the colosseum and the chains they had used on her in the prison. The same ones still encircling Amalie’s wrists and throat.
Vaasa pulled her hand back. Magic flooded her body once more, and she could feeleverything. This was how her mother had stifled her magic. How Vena Kozár had gone years without being discovered as the witch she was. She had used this chain to block her own connection to Veragi.
The hours Vaasa had spent bound beneath the colosseum in Dihrah had been excruciating enough. The weeks in the prison without her magic had driven her to the point of hallucinations. Yet her mother had to have worn this every day foryears.
