“What are you doing to her?” Ead had dismounted in an instant. “Leave her be.”
“Only an illusion,” Kalyba said, pacing around Margret. “Still, I suppose mortals do tend to suffer in the grip of my enchantments. Sometimes their hearts give out through fear.” She held out a hand. “This is your last chance to give me the sword, Eadaz. Do not let Lady Margret Beck pay the price for your broken oath.”
Ead stood her ground. She would not give the sword up. She also had no intention of letting Margret die for it.
The orange tree had not gifted her its fruit for nothing.
She turned her palms outward. Magefire scorched from her hands and consumed both Margret and the witch, burning away the illusion.
Kalyba let out a soul-wrenching cry, and her body contorted. Every auburn tress was cooked from her scalp. Flesh melted from her limbs and cooled again into pale lines. Black hair rushed and rippled to her waist.
Aghast, Ead forced her hands to close. When the flames dwindled, Margret was on all fours, one hand at her throat, eyes bloodshot.
And Sabran Berethnet was standing beside her.
Ead stared at her palms, then back at Kalyba, who was also Sabran. Margret pushed herself away. “Sabran?” she coughed out.
Kalyba opened her eyes. Green as willow.
“How?” Ead gasped. “How do you have her face?” She drew one of her blades. “Answer me, witch.”
She could not tear her gaze away. Kalyba was Sabran, down to the tilt of her nose and the bow of her lips. No scar on the thigh or the belly, and there was a mark Sabran did not have on her right side, under her arm—but otherwise, they might have been twins.
“Their faces are their crowns. And mine is the truth.” The voice from those lips belonged to the witch. “You said you wanted to learn, Eadaz, that day in my Bower. You see before you the greatest secret in Virtudom.”
“You,” Ead whispered.
Who was the first Queen of Inys?
“This is no enchantment.” Heart drumming, Ead raised the blade. “This is your true form.”
Margret scrambled to her feet and hastened to stand behind Ead, her girdle knife thrust out again.
“Truth you desired. Truth you received,” Kalyba said, ignoring their blades. “Yes, Eadaz. This is my true form. My first shape. The shape I wore before I mastered sterren.” She clasped her hands at her midriff, making her look, if possible, even more like Sabran. “I never intended to reveal it. Since you have seen, however … I will tell you my tale.”
Ead kept her gaze fixed on her, the blade angled toward her throat. Kalyba turned her back, so she faced the moon.
“Galian was my child.”
It was not what Ead had expected to hear.
“Not a child born of my womb. I stole him from Goldenbirch when he was a nursling. At the time, I thought the blood of innocents might help me unlock a deeper magic, but he was such a charming baby, with his eyes like cornflower … I confess that I gave way to sentiment, and raised him as my own on Nurtha, in the hollow of the hawthorn tree.”
Margret was standing so close, Ead could feel her shivering.
“When he was five and twenty, he left my side to become a knight in the service of Edrig of Arondine. Nine years later, the Nameless One emerged from the Dreadmount.
“I had not seen Galian for many years. But when he heard of the plague and the Nameless One wreaking terror in Lasia, he sought me out again, pleading for my help. His dream, you see, was to unite the warring kings and princelings of Inys under one crown, and to rule a country according to the Six Virtues of Knighthood. To do that, he had to earn their respect with a great deed. He wanted to slay the Nameless One, and to do that, he would need my magic. Like a fool, I gave it him, for by this time I loved him not as a mother. I loved him as companions do. In return, he swore he would be mine alone.
“Blinded by love, I gave him Ascalon, the sword I had forged in starlight and in fire. To Lasia he rode, to the city of Yikala.” She let out a huff. “What I had not realized was what else Galian wanted. To unite the Inyscan rulers and strengthen his claim, he desired a queen of royal blood—and when he saw Cleolind Onjenyu, he wanted her. Not only was she unwed and beautiful, but in her veins ran the old blood of the South.
“You know a little of what happened next. Cleolind disdained my knight and took up his sword when he was injured. She wounded the Nameless One and disappeared with her handmaidens into the Lasian Basin, there to bind herself forever in marriage to the orange tree.
“I expected Galian to seek me out, but he broke his promise and my heart. I was sick in love, and oh, I raged.” She turned away. “Galian began his journey home without glory or a bride. I followed.”
“You do not seem the sort to resent being spurned,” Ead said.
“The heart is a cruel thing. His hold on mine was firm.” The witch paced around them. “Galian was crushed by his failure, lost to hatred and anger. I did not know then how to change my shape. What I did know well was dreams and trickery.” Her eyes closed. “I stepped out of the trees, in front of his horse. His eyes glazed over. He smiled … and called me Cleolind.”
Ead could not tear her gaze away. “How?”
“I cannot tell you the mysteries of starcraft, Eadaz. All you need know was that sterren gave me a foothold in his mind. Through an enchantment, I made him believe I was the princess who had rebuffed him. Half in dream, his memory blurred, he could not remember what Cleolind had looked like, or that she had banished him, or that I had ever existed. His desire made him malleable. He needed a queen, and there I was. I made him lust for me, as he had for Cleolind on the day he saw her.” A smile touched her lips. “He took me back to the Isles of Inysca. There he made me his queen, and I took him to my bed.”
“He was like your son,” Ead said. Disgust coiled in her belly. “You raised him.”
“Love is complex, Eadaz.”
Margret pressed a hand to her mouth.
“Soon I was with child,” Kalyba whispered. Her hands came to her belly. “Birthing my daughter took a great deal of my strength. I lost too much blood. Finally, as I lay racked with childbed fever, close to death, I could keep hold of Galian no longer. Clear-eyed at last, he threw me into the dungeons.” Her voice darkened. “He had the sword. I was weak. A friend helped me escape … but I had to leave my Sabran. My little princess.”
Sabran the First, the first queen regnant of Inys.
All the scattered fragments of the truth were aligning, explaining what the Priory had never understood.
The Deceiver had himself been deceived.
“Galian ripped down every likeness of me that had been painted or carved and forbade any more to be created for the rest of time. Then he went to Nurtha, where I had raised him, and hanged himself from my hawthorn tree. Or what was left of it.” At this, the witch grasped her own arms. “He ensured his shame would go with him to the grave.”
Ead was silent, sickened.
“I watched a house of queens rise in his place. Great queens, whose names were known throughout the world. All of them had so much of me, and nothing of him. One daughter for each, always with green eyes. An unexpected consequence of the sterren, I suppose.”
It was almost too strange a tale to believe. And yet magefire had not burned away that face.
Magefire never lied.
“You wonder why Sabran dreams of my Bower?” Kalyba asked Ead. “If you will not believe the truth from my lips, believe it from hers. My Firstblood lives within her.”
“You tormented her,” Ead said, voice hoarse. “If all of this is true—if all of the Berethnet queens are your direct descendants—why would you make her dream of blood?”
“I gave her dreams of the childbed so she would know how I suffered birthing her ancestor. And I gave her dreams of the Nameless One, and of me, so she would know her fate.”
“And what is her fate?”
“The one I made for her.”
The witch turned to face them then, and her face fractured. Her skin divided itself into scales, and her eyes became serpentine. The green bled into the whites and burned. A forked tongue lashed between her teeth.
When the last piece of the puzzle fell into place, the very foundations of the world seemed to tremble beneath Ead. She was in the palace again, cradling Sabran, blood slippery on her hands.
“The White Wyrm,” she whispered. “That night. It was you. You are the sixth High Western.”
Kalyba returned to her true, Sabran-shaped form once more, a faint smile on her lips.