Nora cocks a brow, but her tone remains unaffected. “What? You’ve never met a magician who could heal and distill potions for magical damage like a weaver?” Nora smirks. “How sheltered.”
Valen’s expression darkens and she clips on like they’re talking about how her roof garden is faring with the thick fog. “I’m very well trained in all sorts of healing magic. With enough knowledge and mastery of a token, any magician can do what I do.”
Lucas scoffs. “Don’t sell yourself short. No magician in all Delornia can use Transformation magic like you can.”
Nora’s smile curls and her wand spins between her fingers. “Well, I am very dedicated to my work. And the Guild makes sure I have everything I need so that my backdoor is always open for the Amur’s use.”
Valen’s eyes glint with threat. “Is that so?”
Nora waves him off. “Never fear. It’s business. Dimitar gives me a concession on my tithe and he makes sure I get all the best ingredients in exchange for this arrangement. My shop is on the map as the best distributor of goods and I get my pick of the rarest ingredients.” Her gaze grows cold. “But that’s all there is.” She smiles down at me. “And Aster here is my friend. So is Lucas. You don’t have to worry about me snitching.”
Lucas nods. “Nora’s a good one. You can trust her.”
Valen ignores him, choosing to meet my gaze instead. The weight of his stare is near suffocating. Slowly, I nod. “It’s okay. Nora won’t hurt me.”
Valen gives Nora one more distrustful sweep before stepping back, his long fingers slipping away from her hand. Nora’s gaze flicks over Valen coolly before smiling warmly down at me. “Now let’s see what’s wrong with you.”
Magic tingles over my shivering body as the wand sweeps me from head to toe elegantly. Nora pauses, her eyes locking on mine. Her dark skin grows ashen and her throat works. She flicks her wand one more time before her lip quivers.
Lucas catches on to the still silence. His brow furrows. “What is it?”
My breath shudders and I can’t look away from the other woman. My friend’s eyes shine with such grief that I know what she’s found.
Nora’s warm hand slips into my ice-cold one and we grip each other so tightly that our hands tremble. My voice rasps, “You can tell them.” My eyes burn when Nora’s mist. “I’m turning to ash.”
CHAPTER 22
I sit on the edge of Nora’s worktable, a cup of steaming tea warming my hands and three thick blankets wrapped around me. They help marginally, but there’s not much body heat left in me to trap. Valen has left my side to sit in the far corner of the room. His gaze is far and tea untouched. Lucas can’t take his eyes off me, his teeth clenched and shoulders tense. I can’t bear to look at him, so I sip my tea instead.
Nora’s magic warms me from where her wand sweeps endlessly up and down. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” Her voice is barely above a whisper. “I don’t understand how you’re sitting here talking with me. Your…” The wand sparks when she waves it. “Soul is…”
My eyes slide closed. “Split.”
The air leaves the room. Nora’s wand trembles. “How?”
The weight on my shoulders is crushing. I sag, my spine rounding over my tea. Exhaustion hits me hard and the words can’t seem to make their way out.
Valen’s voice is a low command. “I believe it’s time you tell the truth about how you managed to successfully conduit three curses.”
My eyes slide open. I stare at the milky tan of my tea. “Seven years ago, I was struggling with keeping my Dual Threads apart in my soul. It’s why most Duals of Creation and Entropy are culled. The two threads war within the soul for dominance over it. This build of chaotic magic causes the Dual to detonate in a catastrophic event. For me, I was either going to erupt when my Creation Flame devoured my Entropy and take everyone with me in a ball of fire, or I was going to implode when my Entropy Flame sucked my Creation dry and turned me into ash and… also… everyone with me…
“In the months leading up to the naming ceremony, I was struggling so badly that I was on the verge of detonating nearly every other week. Vincentius would try to help me by channeling his Preservation magic into my soul to keep the threads apart, but doing that suppressed my magic. I couldn’t become stronger, I couldn’t learn new crafts, fuck, I could barely do the simplest of magics for weeks. It was hellish.
“Viola—” I hiccup, a sob threatening to break free “—she’d hoped that I would master both threads so they could live in harmony in a cycle. But no matter how hard I tried, it never was a cycle; it was a battle to keep myself from killing everyone. Viola said my only hope of surviving was to link my threads directly to the Tapestry as Heir and transcend the laws of magic. Archweavers and Heirs have all four threads in their souls with no issue. It was an easy solution that I was more than qualified for.
“Viola was my greatest champion. She spun so many plans, had all the Councilors wrapped around her finger. She was determined to save me. But it didn’t matter. My father would rather I be forever suppressed under Vincentius’ power or die.” A tear trickles down my cheek and I wipe it away quickly. “His bastard, abomination of a child, wasn’t worthy of being linked to the Archweaver line.”
The exhaustion is unbearable, the cold not helping. I almost slide to the side, but manage to keep upright for the sake of the tea. The cinnamon and ginger mixed with some other potions are keeping my stomach a warm ball within me. I sip some more and try again. “When I cursed my brother, I had a soul debt to pay. The curse is parasitic to me. It will devour my magic and soul in order to power itself to take over Alasdair’s body, ultimately consuming him and hopping to the next Heir until the Order is unsustainable. I created my grimoire as I performed the curse so I could anchor it within, like the priests would to keep their curses alive long after they were gone.”
The musky scent of the archives fills my nose, the whispering magic in my ears. The memory of hot pain and sobbing agony shivers my skin, but I push it away. “I had such a genius plan on how to survive without needing the title or the Order, while also keeping the curse from devouring my soul. I would use the grimoire to slowly feed the curse the surplus of power from my threads, thus keeping each of them from ever overpowering the other. Only problem was that I overestimated my ability to control this feed. I’d weaken one thread too much or too little, or the curse would try to feed too greedily. The resulting imbalances were incapacitating. I needed a way to separate my threads like Vincentius would without affecting my ability to use magic. That’s how I got the idea to use the corruption from the curse to my advantage.”
Valen looks at me sharply, his eyes wide. “You did what?”
I grip my tea harder in hopes that it will keep my voice from shaking. “Casting a curse on a weaver damages the caster’s soul. That’s the root of corruption. I learned firsthand that it cracks the soul, but my grimoire acted as a buffer and lightened the full impact of corruption. My crack was small, so I used my grimoire to hasten the corruption to deepen it until my soul broke in two.”
Valen’s jaw goes slack, his pale skin deathly white.
I wet my lips, remembering how I ripped the cliff within my soul into existence. “Cleaving myself apart was not as difficult as I feared. Horrifically painful, but manageable. Once I had my two halves of my soul, I bound my Creation Thread to one half and my Entropy to the other. It was a clever work-around to keep my Creation and Entropy Threads from devouring each other. They now had their own souls to reside in. I just had to keep carefully wielding the corruption to keep the two halves from attempting to rejoin. The soul likes to be whole, so, yeah, that was something new I learned.”
