Her fingers touched the stone above the likeness of her mother’s breast. It was strange to realize all of this now, so suddenly. In hindsight, it all seemed so obvious. She wondered how widely known the truth had been at the time. Not that it mattered to anyone now. Murder was practically a sport in noble Pixie families. She supposed she should’ve hated her mother for killing her father, if that’s what she had indeed done—and Magda didn’t doubt her mother had been capable of such a thing. Her mother had not become Radiant with smiles and votes and pretty speeches like a human politician. Spilling blood was the only way to win the right to reside at Stonehigh.
She skimmed her mother’s cheek. “I forgive you, Mother, if you forgive me.”
She threw all of her weight against the top of the sarcophagus.
The lid ground and groaned. Dust shifted and ran off the old tomb in gray streams and puffed up in the air, coating her tongue and gagging her. The musty, dry odor of the mummy within, tinged by the pungent aromatic herbs and oils that anointed her mother’s linen-wrapped corpse, was strangely sweet. A mask, another golden image of her mother’s face, appeared through the wafting drifts of dust. The mummy had been clothed and heavily ornamented. Her hands, laid across her belly, were clad in her finger-knives.
Magda lifted her left hand, the pinky, the broken ghast blade. With a downward push and a twist, while her thumb engaged the locking mechanism, she was able to detach the sheath from the rest of the knives. She laid it down on her mother’s sunken chest and then grasped the gold bracer on her mother’s wrist, performing the same push, twist, and pop on her mother’s left pinky blade. She held it up. The sheath was tarnished from disuse, the figure, a rather unimpressive one, a slender tree. Snapping it onto her own pinky, she put her empty ghast blade sheath in place of her mother’s and then leaned over the edge, planting a kiss on the forehead of her mother’s death mask.
“I hope you are happy and free,” she said.
She shoved the lid back into place.
ANQA CRAMMEDher rear into the cave, fanning her feathers and kicking dirt into their faces.
“Control that damned bird of yours,” Damion barked, as he shouldered his kit and then picked up the manticore venom sack.
“Damion, you go with Honey today,” Kaelan said. “I need to talk to Magda before we meet with this witch.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Magda said. “You don’t need to ride—”
Anqa squawked, impatient.
“Yeah, why don’t I?” Damion said, letting the venom sack drop to the ground as he hefted himself up behind Honey.
Magda’s fists curled. “Damion, I said—”
He threw a grin back at her. “The nymph smells better than you anyway.”
Anqa pitched herself out of the cave, dropping before she could spread her wings and gain altitude.
Magda’s fist tightened, itching to connect with Damion’s smug face.
“Where did you go last night?” Kaelan asked.
“Oh... fuck off,” she said as Gur swooped in.
She and Kaelan stepped apart as Gur padded to a stop, his face coming between them, his wings brushing the sides of the cave.
“I don’t know what that means,” Kaelan said over the semargl’s head, “but it doesn’t sound very polite.”
She ran her hand over Gur’s mane as he maneuvered around, his tail whapping Kaelan in the face.
“You’re very perceptive,” she said. “It means it’s none of your business where I went.”
Hero clambered up her back and onto her shoulder.
“You told me he was asleep,” she said to him.
He turned his butt to her, tail wrapping around her throat.
She returned the gesture by flooding her mind with images of rats snapping in traps. He dug his claws into her skin until she stopped.
Kaelan tried to snag her, but she slid away and hurried up to Gur, who had lowered himself into a crouch. Climbing up, she slid between the branches of his wings. Kaelan approached more slowly, frowning up at her.
“You ride in front today,” she said down to him.
“I don’t know how to steer this thing,” he said.
