I stood there, burning with shame, my hands trembling at my sides. I was a child watching adults. I was the antisepticthat cleaned the wound; she was the fire that cauterized it. I had touched his wrist to check a pulse; she had felt him unravel inside her.
“Do you see?” Kelda’s voice slithered around me, coming from the stone walls. “He kept himself cold for you because he spent his fire onme.”
The scene shifted one last time, jarringly bright. It was the present day. Fenrik, fully clothed but looking at Kelda with an expression that drove a spike through my heart. He cupped her face in his hands, his thumbs tracing her cheekbones. There was no fear in his eyes, just pure adoration. He kissed her softly with a promise of forever that he had never offered me.
“He was always mine,” Kelda said, stepping out from behind the illusion to stand beside the real, tortured Fenrik hanging in his bone-cage. “You were a patch, Lysa. A tool to keep the vessel alive until I was ready to take it. Did you really think a man like him could want a little hedge-witch with no real education?”
The illusion-Fenrik pulled back from the kiss and looked at me, his lip curling in disgust. “You are useful,” he said, “but she is vital.”
“No education?” The words scraped out of my throat. I planted my feet on the vibrating stone, forcing myself to look past the fading image of Fenrik’s sneer and focus on the woman pulling the strings. “I learned more from treating the wreckage you high-born mages leave behind than I ever would have learned sitting in a lecture hall learning how to pour tea with magic.”
Kelda laughed. “Oh, darling. You think the Academy expelled you because you were toopowerful? Because you were a danger to the established order?“ She tsked, stepping closer, the silver light of the fissure catching the cruel amusement in her eyes. “How pedestrian. You were removed because you were embarrassing. A mage who cannot disguise her intent is like a butcher who cannot sharpen his knife: messy, brutish, and utterly devoid of art.”
“I don’t hide what I am,” I said, though my hands were shaking. “At least when I touch something, I know it’s real.”
“And that is why you fail,” she countered. “Civilization is built on the polite lie, Lysa. On the gentle redirection. You? You are a sledgehammer in a world of glass.” She circled me, though her physical body remained by the fissure; her illusion-self walked right through me, chilling my blood. “You could never learn the Veil because you lack the subtlety of a true mind. You only know how to stop things. How to end them.”
“I heal them!” And I couldn’t care less about the Veil.
“Do you?” Kelda stopped. “Let’s see the evidence, shall we? You claim you tried to save her. But deep down... didn’t you always wonder why the silence came so quickly?”
My stomach dropped into my boots. “No, don’t.”
But the walls dissolved into the amber-lit warmth of my childhood home. The infirmary. I was twelve years old again, standing by the operating table, terrified and small. My mother was there, her face focused, her hands steady on the heaving flank of a maddened familiar, a shadow-wolf with foaming jaws.
I watched my younger self raise trembling hands. I felt the echo of that panic, the desperate need tostopthe noise, tostopthe fear.
“Watch closely,” Kelda purred in my ear.
In my memory, the real memory, the wolf had lunged, and I had been too slow. But here, Kelda sharpened the focus. I saw the wolf snarl, its muscles bunching to snap at my mother’s throat. I saw twelve-year-old Lysa scream, stripping the restraints from her magic. A pulse of gold flared from the child’s palms.
“See where you aimed,” Kelda said.
The gold ripple bypassed the creature, seeking the loudest, strongest source of life in the room. It hit my mother. I gagged, as I watched the illusion play out in slow motion. The magic slammed into her chest; it did exactly what I commanded. My mother’s face went slack, and her hand fell from the wolf’s fur. She collapsed backward, her heart silenced mid-beat by her own daughter’s panic. The wolf, confused by the sudden vacuum of magic, merely trotted away, unharmed.
“No!” I shrieked, clawing at the empty air. “That’s not true! She died protecting me! The wolf killed her!”
“The wolf didn’t touch her, Lysa,” Kelda said, the scene freezing on my mother’s glassy eyes. “Look at her. No blood. No bite marks. Just... silence.YourQuieting.”
The logic of the nightmare was impeccable. It preyed on every doubt I’d nursed in the dark for eleven years.Why did shedie so fast? Why didn’t I save her? Why does my magic feel so cold?
“You don’t cure things, Lysa,” she said, her voice sounding like a verdict from the Gods. “You don’t fix what is broken. You stop the movement. You stop the pain. You stop the heart.”
The illusory corpse of my mother stared at me, accusing.
“You are death,” Kelda finished softly. “And you are doing the same thing to Fenrik right now. Every time you touch him, you kill him a little more.”
My strength ran out. My knees hit the stone, but I barely felt it. My hands fell uselessly to my sides, heavy and stained with invisible blood. I couldn’t look at Fenrik. I couldn’t look at anything. I stared at the floor, waiting for the silence to take me too. I didn’t try to get up. I stared at the jagged stone, waiting for the end.
Kelda could probably sense my surrender. The heavy, suffocating pressure of her Veil magic receded, no longer needing to hold me down. She sighed, a sound of theatrical regret that echoed off the wet walls.
“It is a mercy, really,” she said.
I heard the wet, tearing sound of raw magic being ripped from the earth, and I dragged my gaze up. Kelda stood over the fissure, her hand raised high. She held a spear of concentrated waste magic silver. It crackled like a trapped lightning bolt, ready to turn me to ash. A thought passed my mind that my magic had always been silver and cold as well, just like hers. No goldenmagic could have hit my mother, because my magic had only found its warmth since I met Fenrik.
She drew her arm back to throw, and the cavern shook. I didn’t really know if it was shaking because of Kelda or against her. I looked past the woman to the marionette stringing up the man I loved. It was probably time to say goodbye.
Fenrik’ eyes, now open and burning with a terrible violet light, were locked on me, then drifted on the spear pointed at my chest. He threw his head back and screamed, his body bowing outward against the calcified shadow-tentacles. There was asnaplike a green branch being twisted apart. Then another.
