The breaths I sucked desperately through clenched teeth turned foul on my tongue. The monster within me opened a sleeping eye. I stuck my hands into the pocket of my coat tohide the tremors. Against the knotted scar bloomed warmth. The pebble Adrik had given me hummed strangely in my palm, as if an echo of his laughter lingered in the stone.
When Zora returned with tea, the panic had lost its edge. On her shoulder perched a plump robin. I accepted this without question. The scent of flowery magic had me so dazed, I would not have batted an eye had a tame bear stepped out between the vines. I peered closer, intrigued. It was not a robin at all. It was a bright-red and quite alive milk jug. Zora waved it away and it vanished with a sullen shake of its bottom into the thicket.
“Excuse him. He’s too curious for his own good. He’s the first one I enchanted and I must have overdone it a bit—rather bold that one. The others are much tamer.”
Indeed, the thicket teemed with fluttering and buzzing things. A flower-painted teapot floated close, peering into my glass as if to ask whether I needed a refill. Porcelain plates stacked with Sai’s finest treats drifted from table to table. In the back, a harp plucked its own strings.
I was no stranger to magic, and I’d seen stranger things than this, but never something quite sowondrous. The mages who dwelled behind iron-wrought gates to ward off the faeries kept to themselves above all else, and they bothered not with such small magics.
“This is lovely,” I said quietly. A pair of watering cans returned from their task of nursing bright-blossomed wisteria. “I never knew mages could do such a thing—give life to items, I mean.”
"Neither did my masters. A lack of will rather than a lack of skill, I reckon. A bunch of old bummers, the whole lot of them—concerned only with tomes and such." A sliver of caution tightened Zora’s bright features. "I began to experiment in secret. It took me ages to liven up something other than a book.”
“You were apprenticed?”
“Sure was,” she said with displeasure. “I spent five summers in a wretched tower before I returned to Wildemire. It was the eve of Adrik’s coronation, and do not tell him this, but I’m still mad he stole my grand moment.”
Hiscoronation—
I’d ignored what had been right there: Adrik’s concern for the town and its people, the strange tasks that kept luring him out into the snow. I’d never considered it, for it seemed a strange secret to keep. The faerie kings paraded their crowns with pride, surrounded themselves with large courts of powerful creatures, feasted in halls of moonstone and marble. Had Adrik not claimed he lived in a cottage near the river? He cooked for us at night, brewed potions until his hands blistered. I imagined he’d be quite bothered by a crown for how much he loved to draw his hand through his hair.
Zora had clasped a hand over her mouth as if desperately to keep more secrets from spilling. “He never told you, did he? Foolish bastard.”
There was a knot in my throat that had no right to exist. A bitter taste. Had I not kept a thousand secrets from him, too?
A draft came from the door, slamming it with a crack against the white-bricked wall. The wind hissed and filled my nose with the stench of dead things. I stiffened—
The monster lurked within me, wide awake. I’d not noticed it, distracted by the wonders of the teahouse. It drummed its claws against my ribs as it climbed forth,click click click.
Thatstench.
That smell of festering mud and half-gnawed bone. That draft, cold and hollow as it swept through the corridors of a blackstone castle in the swamp.
A flash of red in the window.
Hello, little bird.
“Are you alright?”
I laughed shrilly and strangely. My veins thickened beneath the skin, a foul darkness creeping like a disease up my arms. I stood amid tangled vines and fading roses, gasping with terror. The vines writhed in anguish, and so did the monster within me.
I shrieked, bones creaking from the strain of containing such vileness.
I splintered.
It came like the blast of ice that had frozen the river, swift and complete. Magic bled from me like tar, just as it had that night beneath the ribbon-hung elm. It hissed darkly in my ear before it seeped into stems and blossoms and vines.
I saw the scream on Zora’s face before I heard it. She stumbled as my power unfurled, as it curled its vile fingers around the vines and urged them forth. They slithered like snakes over the ground, weaving around chairs and tables, tightening. I screeched as wood splintered, glass shattered. I pinched the knotted scar but the vines crept forth—closer and closer to where Zora cowered against a crumbling hearth.
“Please!” I cried.
I knelt beside her, tearing at the vines that twined around her feet, her fingers, and soon her neck.
It took no longer than one dull, aching throb of my heart to turn life into death. To kill came to me as simple as a breath.
It had been so since I'd been little more than a babe.
FIFTEEN
