Suddenly, darkness falls over the vision, and new images swim through it—unfamiliar images, that are of no place I know, no place that exists in Sempera I’ve seen. There are round structures made of heaped fur on a field of ice, a set of stone steps rising from a steaming, deep green forest, and what I think must be Sempera’s great palace by the sea, but half torn down and burning.
A young woman on a dark plain, her face in shadow, raises her palms toward me. For a moment, she is like the statue come to life. Wind whips her dark hair into a frenzy around her face, the same wind I can feel battering at me as I run toward her. There is a knife in my hand, and there is something I need from the girl, something that will have to be bought with blood.
It’s only when I get closer that I realize my enemy has a knife too. She throws it, and it pierces the air, flying straight toward my heart. . . .
21
I wake, gasping for air.
The perfume of the hedge witch’s home is cloying, but I drag it in, like I’ve been pulled up from deep water. The old woman across the table gapes at me. The blood has fled from Ina’s face, and Caro looks at me as if I’m a stranger. I see the whites all around the edges of her eyes.
Something drips into my lap—the bottle of potion, which I must have upended in my trance. A dark, scented stain is spreading over the tabletop.
My voice comes out raw. “What happened?”
The witch doesn’t respond. Seeming to recover herself a little, she reaches out and rights the bottle, stopping the liquid from glugging out over the table.
Ina is the one to break the silence. “You were talking,” she says, eyes wide. “We . . . we couldn’t understand all of it. Some didn’t sound like Semperan.”
A chill runs down my spine, and I push myself away from the table. “I’m sorry for making a mess.”
“It’s all right.” The old woman looks paler than before. After a long moment, she just nods and peels the stained cloth from the table. “Would either of you like to try?” she asks, looking at Caro and Ina, forgetting to put on the accent. She sounds like any old woman from the wrong part of town, voice scratchy and a little scared.
Caro shakes her head right away, but Ina looks at me, at the hedge witch, and back at me. I can see the desire in her wide eyes and trembling hands, the same as at the gates to the orphanage the other day. Maybe Ina can sense that we share this, this consuming, fatal desire to know ourselves, where we came from—even if the story turns out to be an ugly one.
Slowly, she nods. She comes over and takes my place at the table, across from the witch.
My legs still feel wobbly and uncertain beneath me, but I retreat to Caro’s side, where she’s leaning against the wall to watch, her arms crossed over her chest, the flickering candlelight making her eyes seem even bigger and darker. While Ina drinks from the bottle and the old woman reads from the book, I lean close to Caro’s ear.
“Do you think it’s real?” I ask softly. I’m not sure what I want anymore—to think that what I just saw was a figment of my imagination or the truth.
Caro’s eyes flick to me, her brows drawing together. “If you weren’t putting it on?” she whispers.
I shake my head vigorously.
“The drink might be drugged, and it was a hallucination.” She looks at Ina. “We’ll soon find out.”
That hadn’t occurred to me, and my skin crawls at the thought—and Caro’s terse words. We turn toward the table at the same time, where Ina has drunk from the green bottle.
But from the expression on the princess’s face—she’s frowning, her forehead creased in concentration—and her hands folded primly in her lap, it’s clear she experiences nothing. Caro watches intently, her gaze shifting between Ina and the old woman. The woman is watching too, periodically looking up to glance at Ina. The cadence of her voice rises and falls with the text, but Ina doesn’t seem to do anything out of the ordinary.
After a while, the woman lets the words peter out. Ina opens her eyes, looking both disappointed and relieved.
“Nothing, Ina?” Caro asks.
Ina looks down at her hands. “Nothing.”
For a moment, we all stand there in silence. The mood in the room is different now—even Caro and Ina seem to regard this as no longer a game. Then Caro gives herself a little shake and reaches for her belt. She withdraws three day-coins and hands them to the hedge witch. Outside the window, the sky has begun to lighten a little over Laista’s streets.
As we make our way out, the witch catches me by the arm, her bony fingers digging into my flesh. “Can you stay a moment and help me clean up that stain, dear?” Her eyes bore into mine, bloodshot and urgent.
Caro and Ina have stopped, looking back at me. I motion them toward the door. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
When the door closes behind them, I turn back to the hedge witch, the old woman. I have an odd, terrible feeling I know what she’s going to say. But I ask anyway: “What is it?”
She drops my arm—and when she speaks, she’s dropped, too, all traces of the affectation she put on for Caro and Ina. Her words to me are plain and direct, in the accent I’ve grown up hearing. “You’ve surely guessed this already: it’s all a show what I do, girl. There’s nothing special about that book, that poem I read.” She fingers the coins Caro gave her like good-luck charms.
My stomach plummets. I’d suspected as much, but it’s something else to hear it, to know for sure. “What about the drink?”
“Mava and honey and a little madel,” she says. “That’s all.”
I feel dizzy. “So, back there, that was . . .”
“I don’t know,” she says. “But it wasn’t my doing.”
Back at Everless, we cling to one another, still swaying a little as we make our way to Ina’s room, intending to collapse on her giant bed. My head is spinning with the visions from the hedge witch’s house, and her words after. Liam’s notebook, pressed into my skin beneath my cloak, seems trivial now.
But after Ina unlocks the door to her room, she stops short in the doorway. I slam into her back, and my blood turns to ice water as I look over her shoulder and see the Queen waiting there in the dark. Her frame stands tall, straight. Her hair, arranged in a simple braid down her back, is nothing like the knotted mess I saw earlier.
The Queen is resplendent and terrifying.
“Your Majesty,” Ina squeaks, and even she seems to tremble in terror at the apparition. “What are you doing here?”
“That is an impertinent question.” The Queen’s eyes seem to look straight through Ina, searing into me instead. Beside me, Caro looks as though she’s going to be sick. “Come with me,” she intones. “All of you.”