I stared at my hands.The space between the notes.
“Kelda said I was feeding the beast,” I said.
“Kelda Morvain wouldn’t know a beast from a teapot cozy,” Maren scoffed. “If you were feeding it, it’s because it was starving, Lysa. Starving for someone who could hold the weight of it.” She brushed the crumbs from her hands. “Now eat the muffin. It has sage for clarity and a ridiculous amount of chocolate for self-pity. And stop believing that woman just because she speaks in fancy sentences.”
nineteen
Kelda
The pestilent girl was gone and the silence in the study was mine at last. I stood over Fenrik, smoothing the shadow wrinkles in the air with one sweep of my hand. He looked peaceful, slumped in the leather chair where I’d levitated him, his head lolling back against the dark hide. To the untrained eye, he appeared broken.
“Thirteen years.” I reached out, my fingers hovering inches above his chest. Through the barrier of his shirt and skin, I could feel the pulse of my greatest creation. The shadow-dragon coiled around his heart didn’t beat like an organ; it slithered. A magnificent, dragon construct I had pulled from the void the day I watched his parents die.
They had been fools, the Stormgardes. Arrogant in their belief that they could tame the convergence without sacrifice. I had corrected their errors. When the ley-lines snapped, shatteringthe wards and their bodies, I hadn’t fled like my other coward colleagues. I had reached into that blinding, violent tear in reality and woven the raw trauma into a leash.
I pressed my hand flat against his sternum. Beneath my palm, the shadow surged, ecstatic to sense its mother. It had fed well on his grief, grown strong on his isolation. A subtle shimmer in the corner of the room caught my eye.
“Clean that up,” I said, not bothering to turn my head.
One of my Veil-servants stepped out of the shadows. To anyone else, he would look like a footman in standard livery, perhaps a bit pale, perhaps a bit quiet. I, of course, saw the truth beneath the glamour I’d stitched over his mind. His movements were fluid, devoid of the jerky hesitations of free will. I had taken his fear, he was just a debt collector I’d found trespassing months ago, and replaced it with a singular, silent directive. My servant moved to the smashed remains of a vase near the door, sweeping the shards into a dustpan. He didn’t blink or breathe loudly. He was perfect. People were so much more palatable when you removed the messy variables of their personalities. I turned my attention back to my work.
Fenrik groaned, his brow furling as consciousness threatened to surface. I brushed a thumb over his temple. I let a pulse of Veil magic bleed into his skin, a soft, grey fog to cloud the mind.
“Ssh. You don’t need to remember, memory is such a burden, Fenrik. Let me carry it for you.”
I felt the resistance in his mind, the edges where that little healer girl had tried to anchor him, and I smoothed them away.Erasurewas an art form. Over the last decade, I had sculpted his reality, removed the days where he felt hope, excised the moments where he might have realized he was strong enough to fight. I had curated him. Why should he suffer the confusion of his chaotic potential? He was a vessel of unstable magic, a danger to everything around him without my guidance. I was the dam holding back the flood. I was the gardener pruning the rot. If I had to hollow him out until he was nothing more than a husk for me to inhabit, a key for me to turn in the lock of this estate’s power... well. That was the cost of order. The servant finished cleaning and stood motionless against the wall, fading into the background until he was essentially furniture.
“She’s gone, my love,” I told the sleeping man, admiring the way the shadows beneath his skin moved in deference to my proximity.
I walked to the high arched window and with every step toward the glass, the air grew colder. By the time I reached the casement, a biting chill swirled around my ankles, aggressive and so deliberate. The manor was throwing another tantrum. It hated me, this sentient pile of rocks. It slammed doors in my face and tried to convince its master I was a threat, but buildings, like men, could be broken. Once the binding was complete, I would strip the enchantments from these walls layer by layer.
I pressed my palm to the freezing glass, looking down at the cliffs and the sprawling valley of Abberwyn below.
The fools at the Academy saw a quaint mountain town. Below the surface, beneath the cobblestones and the happy littletea shops, the ley-line pulsed like an artery. The Sump. The lowest point in the valley, where all the waste magic, the chaotic byproduct of their comfortable, heated lives, drained down to fester. For centuries, the Stormgardes had acted as glorified janitors, using their own bodies to filter that poison. They absorbed the entropy so the town wouldn’t detonate. Such a waste of potential.
My reflection in the dark glass smiled back at me. All this wild wasted power could be harnessed. If I controlled the convergence point, I wouldn’t just be the silly Lady of the Manor. I would be the most formidable Hearthcrafter the realm of Lumenvale had seen in five ruined generations. I wouldn’t be enchanting teapots or warming floorboards like all the fools calling themselves mages. I would hold the leash of the land itself. I could rewrite the weather, reshape the cliffs, turn the very soil into my weapon.
Fenrik was merely the valve I needed to turn to open the floodgates. I still had to deal with the Lysa Emberlin peasant, though. I should have crushed her the moment she stepped foot on the driveway. I had miscalculated, I’d thought her reputation as a “Quieter” meant she suppressed magic, a useful, temporary sedative I could work with. But I had watched her while she worked on the beasts in the manor, and I had seen the truth of her gift. She didn’t just suppress magic, shetransmutedit and was oblivious of it, ignorant like all her teachers had been. The people in that wretched village talked, but they’d been morons, leading me to believe the girl had been expelled fromthe Academy for being stupid. Apparently I’d been the stupid one for trusting peasant knowledge. She’d been dangerous then and she was dangerous now. She’d scared the shit out of her teachers.
My beautiful shadow-construct, the dragon I had engineered to feed on emotion and enforce order, was a creature of chaos and entropy. It was designed to choke the life out of the ley-line’s guardian. But Lysa... when she touched him, she somehow organized the chaos instead of fighting it like any normal witch should. For so many years, I had carefully managed Fenrik’s decline, letting the dragon calcify his will, turning him into a hollow I could step into. I had planned for a quiet inheritance, a marriage so I could gain access to their stupid bloodline wards, a tragic decline of his mental faculties, a grieving widow left in charge of the estate. It was elegant and clean. The girl had ruined my elegance. Every time she laid her potion-stained hands on him, she undid months of my work. She made the dragon recoil. She made Fenrikfeel. And feeling is the enemy of control.
I turned away from the window, the cold draft following me.
“You force my hand, little healer,” I whispered to the empty room.
I couldn’t wait for him to fade away naturally anymore. If I left them together, she would eventually untangle my masterpiece. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any more time for subtlety.
The valley lay spread beneath me, unsuspecting and so ripe. I pressed my palm against the glass and reached for the weave.
Veil magic was misunderstood by the masses. They thought it was merely tricks of light, illusions to make a ballroom look grander or a dress more vibrant. Small minds. True Veilcraft was the manipulation of perception, and perception was reality. I’d never needed to lie outright. People did that work for me.
I visualized the town of Abberwyn below, pinpointing the hum of its domestic magic. I didn’t need to conjure monsters, I merely needed to suggest them. With a flick of my mind, I sent a pulse rippling down the cliffs. I never needed to deal a hammer blow, it was a whisper. I targeted the simple minds of the valley’s beasts: the delivery dragons, the stray cats, the nesting drakes. I merely peeled back the layer of their perception that recognized humans as “safe.” I replacedsafetywiththreat. I turned the concept ofhomeintoterritory.
My logic was flawless, as always. The town was already on edge. By amplifying the aggression of the local wildlife while Lysa Emberlin was in proximity to the ley-line, I would create a correlation that even the dullest mind could grasp. They feared her “Quieting” gift because it felt unnatural, like death. If the natural world screamed in response to her presence, they would run her out of the valley with pitchforks.
She was the anomaly. I was only helping nature reject the infection. Once she was gone, Fenrik’s hope would shatter, his resistance would crumble, and the Final Binding would be mine to claim.
A cough interrupted my thoughts.
