They walked closer to the Heart. Leaves unfurled, sparks shimmering around their edges. Crystalline dewdrops fell from each leaf, shattering silently on the earth.
“So much pain.” Kite was shaking, her hair wet and flat against her back. Water dribbled from each strand and flowed down her skirts.
“How —” Tav’s voice failed.
“How do we carry it?” asked Cam, and Eli knew he didn’t just mean, How do we steal the Heart with our human hands and limited bodies? but How do we carry the weight of this power and pain, the source of all magic? It would drown them. It would burn them up. It was like asking how to carry a star. It was impossible.
The smell of sulphur and aspartame. Wax dripping from the cathedral beams.
Eli felt fear slip into the spaces between her bones.
The Heart flared up, burning brighter — a lighthouse warning a ship away from a rocky death. But the warning came too late.
The world was called the City of Eyes for a reason.
A ring of white flame encircled the Heart, trapping the four of them inside. Heat licked at their skin, threatening to turn them to ash. Shadows rose up out of the flames, lidless eyes encircled by fire. The first ring of the Coven. The witches whose machinations were killing worlds.
Eli’s heart fluttered, and somewhere overhead a fork of lightning danced from branch to branch. This time, if her heart gave out, there would be no one to save her.
She turned her back to the Heart and faced the fire, the Coven, and perhaps her own unmaking.
“I brought them as a gift for the Witch Lord,” said Kite, kneeling in supplication to the ring. “The Heart is hungry for flesh.”
As Eli watched in disbelief and shock, Kite stepped out of her skin. Her essence joined the white fire.
No, Eli thought wildly. Not you. Not again.
A voice rang through her mind, like metal scraping on bone. You are no one. You are nothing. You were a weapon, and now you are broken. You have no value.
Eli reached a hand up and felt blood leaking from her ear. She reached for her knives — pearl maybe, or glass? Her hand fell on the empty sheath and panic jolted up her spine.
Her glass blade had been shattered.
Your knives are useless against us, said the voice. Give yourself to the flame. Only then will you be cleansed. Only then will you be free.
Trembling uncontrollably, Eli drew the pearl blade across her own palm. Her hand skated wildly, drawing an uneven cut in the flesh. As the blade tore matter from magic, and the light under her skin was exposed to the dark, a different kind of pain seared through her body and woke her from the compulsion.
Beside her, Cam was on all fours, crawling toward the ring of witchfire that would burn him alive. He was crying.
Tav was sweating, hand gripping the obsidian blade. As Eli watched, their hand dropped to their side in defeat. The blade fell to the ground.
Eli could see the nightmares coming to the surface: bruises and broken glass, cigarette butts and bathroom stalls. Only this time, their human fears were changing, growing, metamorphosizing into something else, something terrifying —
The witches were coaxing the memories into life.
Tav coughed raggedly, and sand spilled from their mouth. They were being buried alive.
She had to help them, she had to —
You are nothing. You are no one. You are broken.
The voice pulled her back under, and nothing existed except the voice and her loneliness and the promise of fire.
The stench of burning flesh and rock. Cam had reached the witchfire.
An image cut across her field of vision — the single red scar on Kite’s shoulder from the red wind. The scent of oak leaves and rain.
Eli awoke. She threw herself at Cam and wrenched him away from the witchfire, his stones blackened and skin blistering.
“It’s so dark,” he whispered. He was trembling. He looked at her, but he was seeing someone else. Someone who had hurt him.
She looked around desperately for help. Kite, Circinae, someone. Anyone. Lightning flashed above her. Sweat dripped into her eyes.
And finally she understood. No one was coming to save her. She would have to save herself.
She grabbed the obsidian dagger from where it lay near a crooked fiery root and pressed it into Tav’s hand. When their hands touched, sparks burst into life.
Tav’s pupils slowly focused on Eli. “I’m here,” they said.
“Stay with me,” said Eli, drawing thorn and stone. She felt the Heart at her back, its wild magic struggling against invisible chains, its lightning as fierce and dangerous as the Coven. She looked at Tav, their human body breathing heavily, their eyes on Eli. They were caught between two powerful magics, and there was only one way out.
Eli faced down the witchfire. She stabbed the thorn blade into the earth, and a rose bush with long sharp spines burst into life and raced furiously toward the flames. The thorns breached the flame, and the fire flickered weakly. Eli’s heart soared.
The roses caught fire. The flame ran along the thorns to the hilt of the blade and jumped to Eli’s hand.
Pain blocked out everything else.
There was no love or hate or fear. Only pain.
There was no hope or regret or revenge. Only pain.
A single thought broke through, like a lullaby in a minor key. The Heart is hungry.
Kite was trying to tell her something. But Kite was part of the flame, the Heir to the Coven, the girl who had danced with Eli under a pink moon.
The Heart.
Eli turned and stared up at the great tree.
We feed broken weapons to the Heart, Circinae had told her.
Circinae had taught her how to read and thrown her into the universe to escape the Coven’s fury. Circinae had hurt her, lied to her, used her for her entire life. There were no easy answers. Nothing was certain. But time had finally run out, and she had a choice to make.
As she stepped toward the trunk, a stray spark singed a strand of her hair, and she felt the angry bite of a wounded animal.
It could burn her or drown her or save her.
“What are you doing?!” Tav’s voice crawled through the space. It sounded like it came from far away.
She made a choice.
Eli touched the Heart.
Forty-Three
Eli felt heat and a new kind of pain. She looked down to see her bark peeling off in blackened, charcoal curls.
She was being punished.
No, the Heart was being punished, and somehow she was the Heart.
The pain dulled, and Eli felt something new — the absence of something that should be there, like a phantom limb. She was looking, searching for it, but it was out of reach. Something had been lost, forgotten, while the Heart was trapped in the darkness. There were places its roots no longer touched. The pain of this forgetting was tattooed on her soul.
Other images flashed through her mind — she was rain-soaked and dirty, shivering outside a charcoal door that wouldn’t open. Her children were bleeding the sap from her great trunk and drinking its power. She was standing alone on the island waiting for someone who wasn’t coming. She watched as her children wounded one another and turned away from her light. She was alone. She was alone. She was alone.
She was not alone.
Eli felt the fear and hurt and anger surging through the Heart. And underneath the fury, there was a question. Eli wasn’t the only being who was struggling for freedom.
And sometimes we don’t have to struggle alone. Sometimes we need each other.