“Hiding? You were trapped in the wall!”
“You sound like a human,” said Kite, standing and brushing dirt off her long skirts. Already she looked better. “What’s this?” She turned to Cam, who uncharacteristically started to stammer.
“Uh … I’m — I’m no one.”
“That can’t be true,” said Kite kindly, moving gracefully beside him. She touched one of the stones on his chest. “You are very interesting.” Her eyes glowed like a cat’s.
“Don’t eat him; he’s with me.”
“What?” Cam stepped back.
“I don’t eat humans,” said Kite. “But you really shouldn’t trust witches you just met.”
“It’s hard to keep track of all the advice I’ve been getting,” said Cam.
“Survival is hard,” agreed Kite. “Even for those of us born into magic.”
“Power,” corrected Eli. “You were born into power.”
“Eli likes to talk politics,” said Kite. She sighed.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Tav crossed their arms. “Who’s the manic-pixie mermaid?”
Eli chewed on the inside of her cheek and wondered how to answer that simple and incredibly complicated question.
“I think she’s Eli’s ex,” said Cam.
“I figured,” said Tav. “The name was familiar.”
Kite stared at Tav for a long time without blinking. “You have dangerous companions,” she said to Eli. Her tone was both a warning and compliment. Then she sighed. “Well, you’ve ‘rescued’ me from my safe place. What now?”
“We’re looking for something,” said Eli.
“Something?” Kite’s mouth turned downward. Her voice dropped. “You still think I’m a spy for the Coven, Eli?”
“We’re not children anymore, Kite.”
“No, we’re not.” Kite stepped forward and gently pressed her lips against Eli’s. She stepped back. Her laugh was a spring brook. “Well, if I am a spy, once we find your ‘something,’ we can fight over who gets to keep it. I know you enjoy a good fight.”
“Where do we go from here?” asked Cam, looking back and forth between Eli and Kite in confusion. “I thought you were leading us to the Coven.”
Eli felt a blush break out over her skin. The thread she had been following wasn’t her connection to the Coven. The most powerful flow of magic and feeling was between her and Kite. She had led them to Kite.
“Magic seems to be very emotional,” commented Tav. The scent of the sea was overwhelming, and it was making it hard for Eli to concentrate.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” asked Eli finally. “After … after the Vortex.”
Kite’s eyes grew glossy and bright. “I’ve never felt anything like it.”
Thirty-One
The Coven had felt the Vortex tremble. It cut across the magic lines of the world like an earthquake, the gears of the two worlds stuttering and halting. There were rumours that a few members of the Coven had felt it was dangerous to cross between worlds so frequently. Some had hoped that all the made-girls would fail. Eli, remembering the floating heads, wondered which ones had hoped she would die. She shivered.
The Coven had sent Kite. It was her first task since coming of age — and though there was some concern about her naive childhood attachment to a thing made out of thorns and glass (“She will cut you,” Kite’s mother told her many, many times. “It’s in the nature of the material.”) — the Witch Lord decided it was time for Kite to prove her loyalty.
Eli shifted away from her friend’s luminous face. Kite was loyal to the Coven. Not to her.
Before she left the Coven chambers, Kite had been given a blade.
“It was small,” she said, “like a pine needle. It smelled like the rain. They told me it had been made when you were made, Eli. And that if it pierced your heart, you would return to your original state.”
Eli’s breath caught in her chest. “So you were sent to kill me.” She tried to make her tone flat and matter-of-fact. Kite reached out a hand and Eli managed not to flinch as a damp finger pressed against her temple. Strangely, it was soothing.
“No, dear,” said Kite kindly. “I was sent to repurpose you.”
“Eli’s not a thing!” Cam jumped in. “She’s not an object, not like a —”
“Stone?” Kite let her glance linger over his new skin.
Cam flushed and crossed his arms, frowning. “Weapon,” he said, meeting her gaze.
“You made a friend.” Kite turned to Eli, wonder in her glassy eyes. “You always surprise me.”
“Where is the blade?”
“I’m not done my story yet.”
When Kite entered the Vortex, something happened. Her corporeal body was ripped away, torn into shreds and burned. It was very painful.
She was stripped down to her essence, her vulnerable magic self, in a place that had neither magic nor life nor heat nor cold. Naked, she went to the girl frozen in glass, trapped in a prism, suspended like a beautiful, breakable ornament. Kite knew that if she touched Eli and gave some of her essence to her, the magic would tip the scales and bring Eli safely back to the City of Eyes. But, as she neared her best friend, something strange happened. Eli refused to take her hand.
Kite had never felt that kind of rejection before. This hurt, too, but in a different way. She didn’t seem to understand the feeling and struggled to explain. “Like when a bird forgets its migration pattern,” she said.
In the Vortex, Circinae had touched Kite.
Her touch burned.
Circinae, newly exalted to the third ring of the Coven, had clearly been tipped off to this plan — the birds that built nests where the Coven slept were talkative and sly and always dealing in favours and secrets; at least, that was Kite’s theory.
“You can’t trust the swallows,” she insisted.
“She came for me?” Eli interrupted. “She wasn’t sent?”
Kite cocked her head like a curious bird. Eli wondered if she was the swallow. “I don’t know why she came.”
When Circinae burned Kite’s essence, Kite knew that she could die in a way that witches never died. She could taste mortality the way a star remembers the taste of its birth, the lingering violence of creation.
She grabbed Circinae.
They both screamed.
(Eli, trapped, had heard nothing.)
Kite had never fought anyone before. She had never expected to be fighting a witch. She was the Heir, a sacred part of the Coven’s future, untouchable. But Circinae had touched her.
Circinae was more experienced with the messiness of violence. Kite was thrown forcibly out of the Vortex and pushed back into her skin. This didn’t hurt so much as was incredibly unpleasant.
“Like climbing into a nest that is not empty,” she said, hair dancing around her face.
She had been unconscious for years (or so it had felt like). She woke on the island. Crustaceans had nibbled away the dead skin and magic while she slept and combed her hair with their tiny legs.
She also woke to a summons.