Mia’s pulse quickened. She drew her thumb down the initials scored into the soft leather. W. M.
“I have subjected you to my prattling long enough.” Lauriel brushed an auburn curl from Mia’s cheek, the way her mother used to do. “You look so much like your mother, darling. You have waited so long to meet her, and now it is time.”
Lauriel heaved herself to her feet and headed back toward the cottage, leaving her comforting warmth behind on the lakeside. But Mia no longer felt alone. She opened the book and watched the ink pour onto the pages. Somehow she knew it would. She didn’t need fear or anger to read it now. She had love.
Mia. My Mia.
If you are reading this, then you know.
The pages singed her hands like ashes, like fire.
This book and its map and its inscription were not arbitrary or random. They had always been meant for her.
Her eyes strained in the dim starlight. Every word hurt, yet every stroke of ink drew her in further. All her life she had inhabited a glass house of lies, and those lies were about to shatter. The book was the wound, but it was also the salve.
She would peel back the secrets to see the blood beneath.
She would meet her mother.
Breathless, Mia began to read.
Chapter 43
More Than You Will Ever Know
Mia. My Mia.
If you are reading this, then you know.
You are not yet born; I feel you writhe inside me. You kick and swim and kick. But I know you are my daughter, not my son. Don’t ask me how I know. I am a Dujia; I know things.
The ink culled from the sangflur blossoms is special: it reveals itself only to Dujia, and in its own due time. The words will appear as you learn to channel the magic from your heart. When you are old enough, I will give this book to you, and when you are ready, you will know who I am.
The words I write here, the secrets I reveal, are my last bastion of truth amidst a life of fabrication. This book is the final fragment of my true self.
I am married to a man I do not love. That man is your father.
It is not so simple as you might believe.
Love is a twisty thing, serpentine, quicksilver in the palm of your hand. It is fluid in the heart of a volqano: hot one minute, cold the next.
I do not love my husband, and I have wronged him in ways too numerous to count. But I love the women I am bound to, my family of choice, my sisters. To them I am Wynna Merth, daughter of the Four Great Goddesses, Dujia.
I am not, nor will I ever be, a Rose.
Let me tell you a story.
I had come to Fojo Kara??o to study medicine, but I learned so much more than that. The sensations in my body, the splitting headaches, my strange and powerful gift for healing—this was my magic. What I found in Fojo was a community of women who fed and nurtured me, who showed me my magic was a gift.
I also found a girl.
She was everything—funny, mischievous, cocky, sweet. She had magic, much stronger than mine, and I felt dizzy in her presence. My blood hummed when she walked into a room.
I’m not enthralling you, she said. But I can teach you about desire.
And so it began. I learned how to unlock a world of sensory pleasures—to turn flesh to cinder, tease blood into a frenzy. My body was a tuning fork, and she was the song.
She taught me other things, too, darker things. She showed me how to enthrall a man, how to make him delirious with wanting. She taught me how to wield power like a blade.
We practiced on your father.
Even this was not enough for her. She was insatiable, drawn to dangerous extremes. The Second Law had always needled her. So she turned her magic on herself, began stilling the blood in her own veins, quieting her heart. The more she explored this dark strand of magic, the more I begged her to stop—and the harder she practiced.
We quarreled over that. At the end, we quarreled over everything.
I was angry. I went too far. I did an awful thing, an unforgivable thing. The people we love are always the ones we hurt the most.
She said there was only one way I could atone for what I’d done. Only one way to prove myself to my sisters and fully commit to the cause.
So here I sit. Married to a man I do not love. Doing my penance, my retribution a kind of daily death. Day in and day out, I enthrall your father, leader of the Circle of the Hunt. I am a vessel for his deepest secrets, secrets I spill and pour into the night. Secrets that save Dujia lives.
When we first met, he was a student, bright and curious about the world. Yet even then, the royal family was courting him, preparing him for what he would someday be. He was hungry for the praise, the rewards, the validation. Your father has always taken great pride in being the best at everything he does.
I sleep beside a killer. I pretend to love a monster, and worse: I make him love me. Who is the monster now?
Lauriel writes me letters, telling me about the girl I loved: that she has grown old overnight, hardened with bitterness, and now has a baby. A little girl. I couldn’t believe it. Last I checked, a baby requires a coupling with a boy, and unlike me, she never had any interest in boys. Lauriel says the father is long gone.
Soon I too will have a daughter, and we will be bound together by this thread, even as the other threads have severed. Life can be so strange.
I swore I would always live from my heart. And what have I done? Turned my heart against another human being, stripped him of his power. I’ve robbed him of his own heart and sealed mine in a tomb.
I want so many things for you, little bird. I want ferocity and love and space to breathe. I want a world where women are free to live and study, explore and be.
I want you to never have to pretend to love a man you hate.
Every day I make a choice to lie. There is no lonelier place in this world than in the heart of a liar.
I am afraid, Mia. What if I can’t love you the way you deserve? Can true love be born out of a lie?
What is true love?
I used to know the answer, or at least I thought I did. Love was a feeling. Love was an action. Love was a partnership, a fiery union of body, mind, and soul.
Now I think I was a misguided child. Is there such a thing as “true love”? Love is nothing but a patchwork of fiery sensations, an explosion of light and heat, a bursting. Love is a volqano. A volqano is beautiful, but it kills.
Griffin cuts down lives with an unrelenting scythe, while I try desperately to glean them. He lies to my face, and I hear him lying, the vile rush of blood beneath his skin.
Men have always been threatened by the power of women. But the king has taken this to new heights. He aims to keep Dujia vulnerable and frightened, and your father is leading the charge.
At night, while he lies beside me with the blood of my innocent sisters ground into his palms, I dream of revolution. What if we women joined forces and rose up against our rapists, our deniers, our abusers? What if we toppled the old world?
There is a saying in Fojuen: Fidacteu zeu biqhotz limarya eu naj. “Trust your heart, even if it kills you.” If I am saving my sisters so that they may one day rise up, it is worth it. To save one life, one single Dujia, I will die a thousand deaths.
Lauriel tells me I have saved far more than one. She writes to me of the Dujia from Glas Ddir who receive my warnings and flee to safe haven by the dozens. She tells me of the little lakeside refuge, flooded with women who without my work would be mutilated or lost or dead.
I hope she is right. I have to believe that love is the stronger choice—that love will always triumph over hate.
What cruel irony, to manufacture love out of hate, and hate out of love.
In every marriage, passions cool. But my marriage is different. In my marriage, I use magic to stoke the fire, fan the flames of desire.
My husband tells me he loves me. He kisses my eyelids and calls them two moons.
How can any Dujia trust the way her lover looks at her? How can I trust anything anymore?
All I trust is you, my daughter, growing in my womb. Waiting. Waiting.