Their songlike voices come to me from far away, through the sudden buzzing in my head. “Ah. I think she sees it now.”
I do see it.
I think back, seeing that night when I fled into the woods so clearly, from my family, from my life, the words I spit out beneath the hungry watchful eye of the moon.
I wish I could just disappear.
After I uttered those petulant, selfish words, the air had stilled, swelling with a buzzing energy. My magic. Happy and fed, it sizzled along my every nerve.
I see it all so clearly now. What I couldn’t see then.
I had said those words.Me.No one else. No other magical creature watching and waiting to ruin me.
Iruined me.
It all falls neatly, horribly into place.
The truth.
The harpies are right.I’m a witch.
I did this to me. To myself.
The witch I’ve been hunting...is me.
37
A Voice in the Void
I’m alone again.
The harpies did me the dubious favor of lifting me out of the hole and leaving me above ground.
The truth settles over me like the surrounding cold, seeping past skin into blood and bone. I don’t even feel the freezing sting of it. A fine sheen of snow powders me, accumulating on my clothes. My body forgets to hurt. It’s enough that my heart hurts. My mind. My soul. Unforgiving thoughts and memories careen, spin violently through me.
The knowledge of what I am, what I’ve done, what I’vefailedto do...
That was perhaps the worst thing of all.Everything I failed to do.
I no longer care what happens to me. Fighting on? Continuing like this now that I know what I am, now that I know what I’ve done? It all feels so pointless. The decade I spent suffering, stumbling through life...
I curl into a tight ball, arms hugging my knees.
I could have saved myself and ended the curse that I started...or never even cast the fucking spell on myself in the first place.
I could have saved my father and family from their heartache, saved Linnea and her child. This is perhaps the greatest offense of all. The sourest poison to swallow. The thing I shall never overcome. I could have grabbed Ulrika, swept up that sweet baby before she took her fatal tumble into the fire.
The mountains loom over me, casting thick shadows where Icurl up on the snow, inches from the jagged hole that delivered me to the harpies and the awful truth, the reality that now holds me in its teeth. For all I know, the ground beneath me is equally unstable, but I would have to care enough about that, about my life, to get up and move. My umbrella is long gone, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters. I don’t care if anyone finds me, if any dragon sees me from the sky.
My mouth opens with a thick sob. Turning, I press my face into the snow and scream, blaming myself, hating myself. Me. A witch.
I hear myname like a gnat buzzing, insistent, relentless, intruding on me where I hover in that hazy in-between. A voice in the void. In between sleep and awake. In between mindfulness and nothingness.
“Arden!”
I whimper, trying to dive back into the numbness.
“Arden!”
