But the flames on her legs climbed up her body. She tried to thrash away, but the fire that encircled her neck found her hair, and then her entire head was alight. Pointed ears poked through her hair. She was fae.
Suddenly, all the flames extinguished.
“You do not have to suffer,” Maura said. The fae woman whimpered.
Koryn’s body began to shake violently.
“I can compel them to stop.”
Koryn tore her eyes away from the scene. “You can?”
She blinked up at me, her eyes glazed, not quite comprehending. The force of her trauma was too powerful.
“My mind gift is powerful. I can make them stop. Not forever, but long enough to spare her life.” If she were fae, she’d live. It would be a painful existence, even with the magical speed of fae healing. The witch fire had already stripped away too many layers of her skin for healing to be simple. But with enough time, she would be whole again. Her body, at least.
A tear slid down Koryn’s cheek. “You can’t.”
I pressed my palm over the back of her hand where it was splayed against the column. “I can.”
“They won’t trust us.”
“They don’t trust us now.”
“But there is a mutual… understanding.” Another tear fell, leaving twin tracks down each side of her face. “They need us, and they think we need them.”
Maura and the king, she meant. Whatever game they were playing, whatever unholy alliance they’d struck… Koryn was a vital player in it. Now that I was bound to her by the Lifebind, I was, too. They did not know that the tattoo on the inside of mywrist was the least of my dedications to her. But most of all, they did not know or understand her heart.
It would cost her to let this woman die.
The woman I’d fallen in love with had a heart too big for the existence consigned to her by fate. Witches were supposed to be evil, but Koryn… she was good to the very depths of her soul. Three hundred years had not been enough to corrupt her. Death had stopped her heart, but it had not broken it.
There was only one variable that made any sense.
“What did he tell you, Koryn?”
She looked away. “It’s what he didn’t that scares me.”
“He is keeping secrets.” I’d known that from the start.
“Yes.” There was not a single note of doubt in her voice. “But until we know what they are, we cannot reveal ourselves.”
Despite the terrifying gravity of that statement, hope lit in my chest. “Us against them, and us against him?”
A shadow crossed over her eyes. “It won’t be that simple. And there is no us,” she said, even though she was the one who’d used the word ‘us.’ But the shaking anger from the night before was gone. It was more like a statement of fact, and that worried me even more.
Beyond us, on the other side of the pillar, a new sound took shape. The witches began to chant. I did not recognize the language. It did not belong to Velora or the continent I’d lived on before. It was not the ancient language of the fae that Margeaux had forced me to learn. Perhaps it was the language of the Dark God himself, the creator of the witches.
He was the root of all this. He’d made the witches. He’d claimed Koryn. And despite his statements about her, he’d done nothing to protect her since her arrival in Balar Shan.
The chanting was not the only thing that changed. The coppery tang of blood filled the air. The room was fairly large, circular, at the very center of the tower, and the spiral thatcircled up above it. There was not a single window, and the scent filled every inch of the space.
Maura had slashed open her own forearm and now sprinkled her blood over the woman. As it splattered against her burnt, blistered skin, she started screaming again. The chanting only got louder, all three witches’ voices in perfect unison.
“Blood magic,” I breathed. Maura had insinuated as much in the gorge after the Memory Gate, but I’d never seen it.
“It’s all blood magic,” Koryn whispered.
I did not know what that meant, and the pain on her face stopped me from asking. She turned away, pressing her forehead into the pillar once again and closing her eyes. The smell of the blood, the sound of the chanting… it was overwhelming her.
