Bloodwitch (The Witchlands, #3)

“They will be brought to the border and sent home.”

True. Safi’s lungs released. “Thank you, Your Majesty. Thank you.”

Vaness swatted her away. “Do not thank me for what I always intended. Simply wash up and get ready for tonight.”

“Of course, Your Majesty.”



* * *



Adders led Safi the short way back to her quarters. For several minutes, as they strode through the hallways, she could almost pretend nothing had changed. She walked where she was led, a troop of black around her, and she was court Truthwitch. Nothing more. There were no Hell-Bards tortured inside the island, no Habim with plans to break her free, and no Empress cracking beneath the weight of her crown.

And there was no uncle arrested for treason.

When Safi reached her door, she found Rokesh waiting. His left shoulder hunched several inches higher than the other, as if wrapped in a bandage.

“Nursemaid,” Safi said. “You got hurt.”

A bob of his head. “It is my job.” His eyes flicked briefly sideways, and Safi knew that in that moment, he remembered other Adders. Ones who had died at the Well. Ones who had died in the Contested Lands.

He opened her door for her. It swung on silent hinges, and her room beyond shimmered in the midday sun.

Safi did not go in. “How many Adders died yesterday?”

“Seven.” He offered this without inflection, without emotion. And that absence was a lie, lie, lie.

Seven women and men whose faces Safi had never seen had battled the flame hawk so Vaness could live. And a hundred soldiers had died too.

“I’m sorry,” Safi said. “Did you … did you know them well?”

His dark eyes shuttered twice. Then a faint wrinkle formed between them, as if he frowned beneath his shroud. As if he did not know what to do with her question.

Until finally he seemed to find words. “In Marstok,” he said thoughtfully, “when magic such as ours manifests, we are given two choices: enter the healing schools or become an Adder. We all choose this life, and we all choose it at the same age. So yes, I knew them very well.”

Safi swallowed, suddenly struck by how big this was. How much space Rokesh’s grief must fill inside his lungs. How much weight Vaness’s doubt and exhaustion must place upon her head. And Safi had no idea how to help them.

“Magic … such as yours?” she asked eventually. Silly words to fill the silence. “You mean Poisonwitchery?”

A soft sigh—almost a laugh. Then a gentle shake of his head. “Waterwitch healing is what I and every other Adder is born with. But the power to cure life can also be the power to take it away. There are two sides to every coin, Truthwitch. Two edges to Lady Fate’s knife. Magic is no different. It is merely what you make of it.”

The truth of that statement bowled into Safi. Like lightning to a tree, it hit her with such force, her whole body snapped upright. For of course magic was what she made of it. And of course there were two sides to every coin, to Lady Fate’s knife.

The answer to the Truthstone had been in front of Safi all along, but she had been so preoccupied by both sides of the coin, she had never considered she could only use one.

“Thank you,” she murmured absently to Rokesh, already swirling away. But she paused after two steps, a fresh bolt of inspiration rising in her chest. She glanced back. “How do you make your poison darts?”

If he was startled by the question, he didn’t show it. He simply said, “When we carve them, we tell them what we want them to be.”

“I see,” she said—and she did see. Just like Threadwitches reciting words to their stones, just like healers embedding their power into the act of creation.

Without another word, Safi left Rokesh and hurried to her desk. She knocked everything off the table. All the books with their matching covers, all the stones and threads and tools that served well for other witches.

Then she turned and faced the telescope outside. She had been so focused on stones because they worked for other Aetherwitches that she had failed to consider other tools. She had failed to consider that she needed to assemble something.

That old crow had been right all along.

Safi marched into her garden, but before she hefted the telescope high, a clack-clack-clack sounded from the garden wall. Chills prickled down Safi’s arm as she swiveled her gaze up—and met two dark eyes.

“You aren’t just a bird, are you?”

Another clack that Safi suspected meant, No, I am not.

“Do you belong to … someone?” As Safi asked this question, she realized it was a stupid one. All of this was ludicrous, actually. She was talking to a thrice-damned crow and expecting him—believing him—to answer.

A crow that saved your life by showing you a magic doorway.

And a crow that first suggested this very telescope to you, as well as Truthstones.

Nope. Safi was not going to talk to birds or entertain the possibility that they might be sentient. So even though its clattering laugh skipped after her, she lifted the telescope, returned to her room, and slammed the garden door behind her.

Then Safi worked. Piece by piece, she disassembled the telescope. Lenses, frames, mirrors, screws. While she turned and twisted and plied, she thought about Iseult. She thought about Habim, and she thought about the Hell-Bards, tortured and poisoned below. She thought about Vaness unmasked, and she thought about how wrong the world had become.

She put all her thought, all her energy, all her being into that one sensation, that one piece of her magic’s power. False, false, false. Lies, lies, lies. She sank into the way untruths made her skin crawl and her ribs rumble. The way they pinched her spine and squished her organs. She thought of Cleaved. She thought of Red Sails. She thought of every rotten, wicked person she had ever met.

Three times, she heard the chimes clang. No one disturbed her, so onward Safi worked, following the intuition that had always guided her. And now that she followed the right path, it was as if her magic wanted this—it craved freedom as much as Safi did. It rushed out of her, filling glass and brass and screw.

Until, hours later, Safi finished.

It lay gleaming in the gauzy sunlight: a tiny spyglass assembled from the telescope’s eyepiece, several interior lenses, and bits of thread and quartz.

A Truth-lens.

Then Safi staggered to her bed, her mind and body a husk, and she slept.





THIRTY-SIX


The lines of the Cleaved did not lead Merik back to Esme’s tower. Instead, they looped him west, up a hill clotted with forest. If there had ever been buildings here, no signs remained now.