“Very well. Come.” We followed her voice to the center of the room. “I will need blood for the draught. Flesh and coin as payment. I do not care for hair.”
We drew closer to what looked like a mound of old fabric that was heaped before a wooden crate, and that was when she came into view.
I let out a loud gasp. Shewasthe size of a child, curled up on her side. I’d expected her hair to be missing, her eyes to be wide and milky, but I’d not expected her… skin. It looked like yellowed vellum, thin and dry and brittle. The superfluous flesh beneath her eyes resembled fall leaves, crackled, veinous. She was naught but bone. I could make out the details of her knee joints, the knobs of her knuckles, the deep and hollow curve of her protruding hip bone. She looked far, far worse for wear than Rohana.
Nemea’s words came rushing back to me.She lay in a ball on the floor of her tower like a dried-up insect. She was the one who told me there was a way to gain power without paying for it. She told me how I could serve Eusia.
I nearly swayed from the realization. This was the Mage Seer who had sent Nemea to Obelia. The Mage Seer who’d urged him toward service to Eusia. It took me a moment to find my voice. “I have no coin,” I managed. “But I have a gold necklace.”
“Let me see it.” Her voice was suddenly garbled, like something moved inside it.
I glanced to Theodore as I pulled the long chain from beneath my shirt, trying to hide the spinel ring upon it in my fist. I slid it toward the clasp and when I undid it, I surreptitiously slipped the ring into Theodore’s palm.
Tentatively, I made my way around the crate that the Mage Seer lay beside. She didn’t so much as blink. I would have thought I approached a time-worn corpse if it weren’t for the faint rise and fall of her ribs. There were barely two hands between us when I knelt and let the gold chain dangle before her face.
“Will it do?” I asked.
“Hmm.” She made a soft choking sound. “What of that lovely ring on your finger?”
I placed my fingers over the jewel and looked to Theodore once more. Suddenly the idea of parting with it, of leaving it behind in this terrible place, knowing how much it meant to him, ripped at me. “It was given to me by my love,” I said with soft sincerity. “I cannot part with it.”
She snickered. “Fine, girl. The chain will do.”
Slowly, awfully, the Mage Seer unhinged her jaw. The movement was so horrific, so unnatural and disorienting, that it took me a moment too long to register the thick, many-legged insect that crept out of her mouth and over her lips. I screamed and fell backward as the insect wrapped itself around the gold chain and drew it back into the Mage Seer’s open maw. The soft sound of dragging metal was deafening as I watched and watched until the necklace disappeared entirely.
Theodore was above me, strong hands lifting me to my feet. He wrapped me up, pulled me back, and I clung to him, willing my heart to settle.
“Bugs,” I hissed. I knew that Milton of Della had power over fauna, but dear Gods. “Fuckingbugs.”
The Mage Seer gave that bell-like laugh once more, and it was made all the more disturbing to see it come from her sapless body. “Now, flesh.”
Theodore and I locked eyes. The look he gave me was more than clear—you or me?
She would only need a drop of my blood for the mixing of the severing draught, but she would need toeatthe flesh payment. Knowing she was a devotee of Eusia’s, I suspected it was more prudent to keep my identity hidden.You,I mouthed.
Theodore pulled the dagger from his belt and tugged his shirtfrom his trousers. He made the smallest cut into the unmarred flesh beneath his navel and threw it on the ground before the Mage Seer. That same creeping bug crawled out of her mouth to retrieve it and the moment his flesh passed her lips, she sucked in a gasp.
“My, you taste ofPanos.” The Mage Seer drew out the name of his ancestor cloyingly savoring it.
Theodore squared his shoulders.
“Girl,” the Mage Seer said to me. “Do you know who you wish to bind yourself to?”
I kept my voice as unworldly as I could, drenching it with the same airy tone that I’d once heard a lovesick maid in the scullery use. “A good man from Varya,” I said. “A healer, he told me. A man with very distant ties to the Great God Panos, but that is not why I love him, I swear it—”
“Hush.You twit, you wish to bind yourself to Panos’s grandson. The King of Varya. You must know it.”
I gasped and pressed a hand to my chest. “I—no, I…”
The Mage Seer cut me off with a sinister laugh. “Something is rotten… A game that either he plays with you, or you play with me.” That scuttling, rustling sound came again, there and gone, shaking the room.
Theodore stepped forward, his kingly countenance returned. “There is no rot, Mage. No game. I had wished to be unknown by her so that she might want me for reasons other than my crown and power and gold.”
A terrifying quiet ensued until the Mage Seer finally scoffed. “Your grandfather was a tender romantic too, Your Majesty. Give me your blood, girl, so I can give you your draught.”
Steeling myself, I lowered before her again. Beyond her sat a small bowl of carved bone, its belly stained a muddy brown from what I assumed were centuries of collecting blood for propheciesand draughts, but like everything else in this tower, it was coated in a thick layer of dust. “Where?” I asked. “Where do I put my blood?”
“Upon the cloth” came her little voice. The old muslin ringing her decrepit body. It was so soiled that it had come to look like fine leather in places, a smooth, deep brown. I took the dagger from Theodore and made the barest cut at the tip of my finger. I squeezed and squeezed until a few drops fell to the cloth near her head. I stepped back quickly, pressing my shaking body against Theodore’s in an attempt to sustain my meager courage.
