She smiled a gentle, sympathetic smile, wide and sweet. It took all my effort to resist her magic and remind myself that she was a monster, not a mother.
“I think he was a little sentimental about you,” mused Clarissa. “Well, he is very young, after all, and still a little squeamish about our work.”
She was moving toward me, slowly, speaking softly, as you approach a horse you don’t want to startle. Her wide skirts swayed like the sound bow of a bell, rustling and releasing a faint, teasing perfume.
I couldn’t get any further away from her without melting into the planks. All the skin on my front felt like it was trying to crawl round to the back, as far away as possible. It was an interesting sensation that I didn’t care to have repeated.
“Come,” she said. “I will make it quick and painless. It will be better than living here and longing for him, day after day.” Her gaze flickered from my head to my toes. “He would never have touched you, you know.”
“I know that,” I said, too quickly.
“We do use our thralls that way, sometimes. Colin is one such. We keep them, for a little while, before discarding them, in almost the same manner that we keep our servants ... although with other, sweeter duties. I’m sure my brother would have availed himself of that little perk with one of his thralls, some time or another. But it would not have been with you, poor thing.”
Her voice was warm, sympathetic. Loving. The voice I would have wanted my mother to have. The voice I had imagined my mother having. I had felt guilty thinking about her, a little, because my Da had tried so hard to be Mam and Da both for me, but a girl can’t help wondering what her Mam would have been like.
For a moment, the sorceress seemed like everything I had wanted: a kind and beautiful woman who loved me and wanted the best for me, giving me the best advice she could, even though she knew it might hurt me to hear it . . .
No. I shook my head a little, involuntarily, to clear it. She was not kind. She did not love me, nor want the best for me. She was a sorceress who wanted me harvested, gone,dead,and she was coming closer, and I had stood frozen by the glamor in her voice for too long.
She was barely an arm’s length from me now. Almost close enough to reach out and touch my chest with one of her long, painted nails.
“Get away from me,” I said, although my voice shook. She halted and seemed a little surprised, and then smiled.
“I cannot charm you as easily as I would another, it appears,” she said. “Perhaps it is your much-lauded resistance to magic—or because you have already been taken up by my brother. Interesting. Still, we have other ways.”
I could smell her perfume. She had a wide, warm smile on her perfect face. I could have bitten into that smile like a cool slice of melon. I would have done anything to make that smile appear again and again. Even now, I found my own lips twitching, desperate to return the smile, to please her. Such was their power.
I felt anger boiling up beneath my awe and worship. I managed to draw enough saliva into my mouth to spit as forcefully as I could. It hit her cheek and trickled down.
“You stupid child!” she shouted. “You don’t understand anything. None of you do. You sit there in your little huts and think that the world turns for your benefit.”
“And you believe it turns for yours?” I retorted.
“Of course it does,” she said. She came closer to me and smiled directly into my face. Despite myself, I smiled back. Then she thrust her hand into my chest, the one holding the knife.
It was a thousand, thousand times worse than the heartsickness, worse than anything I had ever felt. Not only did it hurt, but there was a terrible sense of violation, of wrongness, as if she had opened up the top of my head and rummaged about in my thoughts, then spread the worst and most shameful ones out on the ground for all the world to laugh at. Her knife-wielding hand had passed through me like a ghost, leaving the skin of my chest unblemished, but I could feel it moving about beneath my ribs.
My whole body cringed and shrank. I could not have spoken even if I had the words—my tongue had grown fat and sluggish in my mouth, and it was as much as I could do to force air into my lungs.
Clarissa pulled out the knife, which was somehow as unbloodied as before, and tossed it onto the table. Then she reached into my chest again, stirring up all that sickness and shame once more, and when she removed her hand once more I saw what looked like a perfect half of my heart in her grasp. I gagged. She turned the piece of heart over in her hands, each touch a torment.
“Please,” I managed to say.
She put my heart down into a little dish on the table. I collapsed, almost sobbing. It was a relief, to no longer feel myself held by her poisonous hands, but now I felt cold and exposed.
Whatever that oil was in which the hearts floated, it obviously guarded the original owners from feeling the full pain of the missing heart, and it preserved and protected the hearts themselves, or the Snagged would have been in constant torment. I didn’t know how much longer I could bear it.
“It’s very interesting,” she said conversationally, leaning in to examine it.
“What are you going to do with it?” I whispered.
“Merely look at it, for now,” she said. “This process will take a while. I’ll need to examine the other half too, of course, once we have a better understanding and can risk taking it out. And then the king will do the same.”
“And you expect me to just lie here like a lump while you do so?” I gasped, still barely able to speak.
Her lips turned up in a maternal smile. “There’s very little you can do about it, my dear, as you see.”
She took out a little jar on a chain, full of oil, from one of her voluminous sleeves and shook it gently, then dropped the piece of my heart inside it. The agony eased immediately, but I felt my throat close with longing and revulsion.
