Chapter 32

Zephryn's lazily arrogant claim about having enough gold to buy the largest army in the history of the known world brought the meeting to a quick close and thank the gods for that, because now I was finally doing something I actually wanted.

Creeping down a dark set of steps that might very well be haunted.

"I'm the only one who's been down here in three hundred years," Bella whispered, the constant breeze battering her torch so badly there were heart-wrenching moments of almost total darkness as we descended the spiraling stairs.

"Vireena boarded the library up but didn't think books were important enough to guard."

The flickering torch revealed the boards nailed haphazardly over a door twenty feet tall, the frame engraved with strange symbols. "Follow me. It's through here." She ducked beneath a loose piece of wood and disappeared through the narrow opening, the keys at her waist jangling faintly.

I crouched beneath the boards and lost my breath when she lifted the torch over her head.

The coven's library rivaled Torin's room at the Citadelle, shelf after shelf of books in all shapes and sizes stacked to the ceiling, unused rolling ladders covered with thick cobwebs and an inch of dust.

If abandoned had a smell…this was it.

Opulently rich and desiccated and dusty at the same time, but gods…I took another deep inhale. I could smell this scent all day and never grow tired of it.

"Welcome to the great depository of the High Barrens Coven." Bella swept her foot over the dusty floor, revealing an inlaid symbol—a triangle within a circle—of deepest black against the once-beautiful wood. "Besides me, you are the first person to set foot in here in three centuries."

"Since Vireena became priestess," I murmured, my faint whisper creeping over the cold stone walls. "What did she do? Challenge your old priestess and kill her in the Arena?"

"Hardly." Bella shot me a sideways glance while she set the torch into an iron holder.

"She murdered our old priestess while she was on the throne, ripped the crown off her head, and sat down in the pool of blood. Then she ordered her loyalists to kill anyone she marked as enemies. More than a hundred innocents died that first day alone."

"So she staged a coup?" I didn't like where this was heading. "Do you remember anything about the Wynters? Lord and Lady Alaric Wynter?"

Again with that knowing, sideways glance. "I know the Wynters' story all too well," she said quietly. "After she took the throne, the first thing Vireena did was send Alaric and Zephora to Tempeste with enough wealth to buy the entire kingdom. The next we heard, they were part of Carex's inner court and had built a palace high in the mountains."

She leaned her hip into the table. "I heard Lady Wynter blackmailed half the royal court and made a fortune off the Fae. Raked our mortal enemies over the coals, though it sounds like the Wynters' sins caught up to them in the end."

I didn't have the heart to tell Bella the Oracle had had the Wynters killed to further her own schemes. "How do you remember them when that happened so long ago?"

I fully expected her to show me some written history of that day, but Bella laid her hand over her chest.

"Without a library, we resorted to telling our stories aloud, and a favorite was how the Wynters had pulled the wool over the Fae King's eyes and stole his magic right out from under his nose." She scanned the library. "I suppose it's my job now to keep a record of all those stories. Write them down so future generations don't make the same mistakes we did."

Bella crossed her arms over her chest. "Vireena's mistakes are too great for me to list, but her greatest one…"

We both froze when something moved in the shadows. A mouse skittered into the light then scampered across the floor between the other bookcases.

"Vireena betrayed us all when she forged an unholy alliance with that thing you call the Oracle."

Bella went quiet. "In the end, my mother lost her tongue, my aunt lost her life, but this entire coven…we lost our way."

"How did that alliance come to be?" The quiet down here was so dense, our whispers rang off the walls like the cracks of a whip. "A brand-new High Priestess and the Fae King's Oracle forging some unholy alliance. Seems too good to be a coincidence if you ask me."

"My mother thought so, too. But from that moment, we—our entire coven—have served a different master." Her glimmering eyes rested on me a shade too long as if she was making a decision. The hair went up on my arms, every inch of skin prickling in warning.

"There is something I must show you."

Bella rolled back her sleeve. I was too shocked to do anything but stare at the thin black line running from her wrist and disappearing, presumably heading straight toward her heart.

"The day Vireena forged her alliance with your Oracle, every witch in the coven was marked like this. Every child born since has been marked as well, no exceptions."

"The line terminates in a circle?" I asked quietly. "With a symbol inside?"

She was pale when she nodded, pulling down the collar of her dress to show me. Her mark was fainter than ours, like a shadow, or a reflection. The symbol was nothing that I'd seen before, not even on that polished floor in Corvus's lair.

Nor the floor here in the library.

A circle within a circle.

"We all have the same one. As if Vireena sold her soul—and ours—to that creature."

I hesitated, cursed myself for a fool, then lifted my shirt enough for her to glimpse the lightning mark running down my side. She took a step back, her pale eyes filled with a wary curiosity as I briefly described everyone's markings, explaining the more I used my magic, the more defined our marks became.

"I've seen those marks before…somewhere. Wait here. I think I remember which book that was." She hurried into the darkness, then the faint sound of clanking metal echoed, the dull scrape of something heavy.

A book, maybe.

More rustling while I debated how much more information to safely reveal.

I'd come here with so many questions, and not only were none of them answered…we still had no allies. We didn't know where we were heading next. I couldn't remember feeling more adrift, even after I'd escaped Tempeste and was running from Solok.

Bella returned with two books, one thick and well-worn with a silver symbol embossed on the front—the triangle within the circle, obviously the coven's symbol—a blackened, hand-forged chain draped over her arm. A book valuable enough not to be let out of this room. The other was smaller, with a plain black cover and no writing or title.

Completely unremarkable except for the dark whisper of power surrounding it.

"I found the book with the marks…" She dumped both onto the table. "But here is why I brought you down here in the first place." She leafed through the bigger book, the vellum rustling as she searched for what she needed.

"Ah. Here, this is it."

I squinted in the flickering light. "That's a spell."

"A spell that heals any illness of the flesh. Your friend who is sick? Is he the white wolf?" she prodded gently, and I nodded, blinking. "We will honor our word, Anaria, as you honored yours. We will heal him in exchange for the crown."

"What about Zephryn?" I traced my fingers down the well-worn page, as if this spell had been used many, many times before. "His leg…I'm not sure what happened, but if he could walk…"

"We will heal the dragon as well. But this magic works on physical injuries and illnesses only." Her pale eyes caught the light. "Not what's in their minds."

"I understand."

"Now, as far as these markings." She pulled the plain black book closer, flipping open the cover, and the air in the room throbbed in response.

"Let me find it…I'm sure it was in here…toward the beginning, I think."

That hollow rustling crept through the chamber again from some far-off corner, echoed by Bella flipping pages so fast they became a blur. She stopped suddenly, her finger pressed to a dark, familiar symbol etched on a page.

"This is what I found. Here is our coven's mark, the one that appeared when Vireena struck her bargain with the Oracle. I don't know what any of this means, we don't even know where this text originated from, and none of us can translate the language. But this is our mark."

Her eyes flicked up to mine as she dragged her finger over to a hand drawn lightning strike. "And this is yours."

I scanned the page. Each and every one of our markings was there, including every single one off the floor of Corvus's cave. Not only that, they were all surrounded by notes as if someone had labeled them.

"There are so many," I muttered, wondering what, if anything, this meant.

Once, a very long time ago, someone had known what these symbols stood for.

They'd written everything down in painstaking detail.

I leaned closer and squinted at the neat, careful handwriting. Someone had taken the time to keep a record for whomever came after them. But to sing the praises of these gods?

Or tell us how to destroy them?

"This book is called The Etheric Codex, or The Codex for short. According to ancient coven lore, this is the oldest book in the library and contains our earliest known records. I doubt anyone has seen this book in a millennium." Her finger dragged down the page, pausing on that circle within a circle symbol.

"I searched this library for years, trying to figure out what our marks meant so I could undo the hold the Oracle has over my people. Imagine my surprise when I found exactly what I was looking for but in a language that cannot be deciphered."

"Your marks all appeared at the same time?"

"At the exact same moment, during a welcome banquet given by the new High Priestess to celebrate our new alliance with the Oracle. Until you killed her, I had believed Vireena either swore a blood oath or made a blood pact with that foul creature, but now I know that's not the case."

"Why do you say that?"

Bella's eyebrows rose. "Because we still have them. If Vireena used blood magic, her death would have broken the pact and the symbols would have disappeared from our skin."

"What is blood magic?" I asked, trying to wrap my head around how this worked. "I wasn't raised a witch; I know nothing about magic."

"Yet you possess every last drop of the Fae magic." Bella's eyes narrowed as if she was trying to decide whether I was lying.

"I'm still learning how to control that power. I never learned formal spells or casting because until a few months ago, I was still in Varitus. Living as a slave."

Bella's eyebrows hit her hairline. "By the Mother, you mean no one has taught you about your power? That's dangerous, Anaria."

"There hasn't been anyone to teach me. When I left Varitus, I couldn't even ride a horse, but I learned." Anger, quick and bright, flashed through me. "I'll learn this, too. Tell me how blood magic works and why you think that's how the Oracle controls you?"

"Blood magic is spilled blood combined with a binding spell. A thimbleful, even a few drops are often enough depending on how complex the spell. Blood magic is that powerful if you are willing to pay the cost. According to our histories, the earliest of my kind used blood magic to protect themselves from the Mystara."

"What are those?"

"Our ancient enemy, but they disappeared so long ago, we must have exterminated them or they died out. But once, they hunted our kind for our magic and our blood." Her eyes dipped to the markings. "There were once fifteen. These were their symbols."

"Those were…" I tried to catch my breath. "You called them the Mystara?"

She nodded. "A long time ago, but now they're nothing but myths."

The witches and the Fae had been fighting the same enemy—different names but the same enemy.

And blood magic had worked against them.

"So all my years of research"—the breath she blew out was filled with decades of frustrations—"are nothing but a dead end, I'm afraid."

I opened my mouth to tell Bella her research wasn't a dead end, to make her tell me everything she knew about blood magic and how to fight the Mystara, but the rustling sound echoed again, this time from the far corner where the shadows were so deep, I swore they could hide the entire Solarys army.

"Damned mice. They love to chew on the vellum. Even though I have a protection spell woven around the books, it doesn't keep the vermin out completely. I think the little beasts enjoy taunting me." Bella flashed me a crooked smile and lifted the torch, the light spreading outwards in a rippling circle until the outer edge kissed the bookshelves.