Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Night after night, with a stolen after-hours pass in hand, Vaasa entered the Library of Una.

Normally, this seven-story tower was filled to the brim with robed acolytes. They covered all seven floors and draped themselves along the upholstered chairs and circular tables, taking up as much room as they wanted, their noses in books or at least pretending to be. Some acolytes took their studies at this sodality seriously, others not so much, and Vaasa had quickly learned to distinguish between the two. And how to act like the first.

In the three months since she’d fled Mireh, only this ancient library had brought her any semblance of solace. It was the quietest place in the sodality.

She had grown to appreciate silence.

Dihrah, she’d learned, was known not only for its scholarship, but for this exact library. The rectangular atheneum plunged underground, all seven floors growing closer to the core of the world, only illuminated by the golden lights flickering upon each level and dangling down the center of the tower. Covered in polished brown-and-red marble floors, the mystical library was one of Vaasa’s greatest imaginations. The first time she’d laid her eyes upon it, she had almost gaped. Nothing in Asterya was this magnificent, despite what her prideful people wanted to believe.

The more she explored this library, the more she understood why western Icruria was so isolated—its westernmost territories guarded their cities as a secret. This was only one of Icruria’s six sodalities. Her father’s spies had infiltrated the two in the east, but none of the men he sent into the west had returned. Vaasa had not stayed long enough in Mireh to see its city. She’d cut her hair short and enrolled in this sodality with forged identification, and it was the only reason she had access to this ancient library. Only Dihrah’s students saw the inside.

Lanterns were strung down the center of the tower, hanging at various heights, fueled by the tiny spark of magic the descendants of Una carried with them. As Vaasa kept her head down and the hood of her robe up, she walked as casually as she could in the shadows cast by the golden glow.

The best place to hide was in plain sight.

If she was recognized or remembered, Reid of Mireh—and her own brother, too—would come for her head.

She shot down to the sixth floor, past the western side, where the bare section on magic was organized. She’d expected their collection to be larger, more fruitful, with updated texts. In the weeks she’d scoured it, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she was missing something. Like a truth was hidden in this library somewhere and she had yet to uncover it. So far, magic had not been openly discussed by the acolytes. Almost as if it was so sacred, so misunderstood, it could not be shared even among their own.

Padding down one of the many rows of leather-bound books, she plucked the next set of texts off the shelf—authors with the last name beginning with V. In lieu of tomes about magic itself, she’d resorted to ancient texts on the Icrurian gods and goddesses. The books were stacked up along the table she’d chosen closest to the stone wall, as they were every time she had the freedom to read whatever she wanted. And she planned to sit until the waning hours of the morning and search. She often arrived at her early classes bleary-eyed and yawning, but with a few cups of tea, she found herself again. Down here in the library, Vaasa could breathe. No one would get too suspicious at seeing her here, if they did see her at all, and most people who stayed this late were too busy with their own tasks to care about her.

Vaasa dove in, completely losing track of time.

She’d already learned of the gods and goddesses these Icrurian sodalities inherited their names from, how the magic that pulsed in Icruria was said to come from those deities themselves. She’d read about the healers and the manipulators of elements, even some historical texts about the time before Icruria’s unification, when wars over magic and bloodlines turned their rivers red. Most books detailed Una, the god this particular library was named after.

But he manipulated light, not creeping black mist and death.

She skimmed the pages in search of a description, the image of it in her mind distinct and haunting. Like a serpent. The curse felt like venom and teeth, like scales and anguish. Scanning, scanning, scanning, she came upon a word she had never read before: Veragi .

The goddess of witchcraft herself.

Most of it was an innocuous story about her love affair with Setar, the god of language and writings. But partway through the paragraph, her heart skipped.

Black mist. A senseless void with no sight or sound or smell, where only darkness does not shiver.

Vaasa’s cold fingers began to shake upon the dusty page. Ashen skin and sunken cheeks flashed in her mind, paired with eyes devoid of their irises and swallowed whole by ink. Raven hair turned gray and limp, as if the color had been taken from each crevice and pore, like the woman’s soul had been drained from her very core.

Her mother.

The empress of Asterya had been little but skin and bones when the black mist was finished with her, green silk gown flowing around her like a swimming pool.

Not a trace of blood.

Only oily black mist swirling around her skin, the rancid scent of dying flesh stuffing itself into Vaasa’s nostrils.

It was this thing that Vaasa could feel. It had choked the air from the room and clawed its way out of her throat in the form of a curdling scream, one that echoed off each corridor and breezeway. That was the first time she felt the serpent in her stomach. The guards had appeared, the world had bent and blurred with the razor-sharp passing of time, and before she could even begin to process the tragedy, her newly minted emperor of a brother had her shipped off to Icruria to marry Reid of Mireh.

They said grief had taken her mother.

Dominik swore that not a soul could know the truth, or they would know it had infected Vaasa, too. Then they would question him. Magic would not be tolerated in Asterya, and certainly not in its emperor. The Asteryan lords would turn on him. Their father’s closest advisor, Ozik, had snuffed out any word of what had happened before Vaasa emerged from her mother’s rooms. If a guard had seen any of it, they’d died quietly.

Silence , Ozik had warned her. Thrones are as precarious as one’s humanity.

The series of events made no sense. If she had never married, she’d never have been a threat to Dominik. A daughter could not take the Asteryan throne alone—only if she was married and the last living heiress could her husband become emperor. Dominik had spent a lifetime removing every threat to his ascension, then subsequently created one. Though this way, when Vaasa died in the same way their mother had, he would at least get something for her existence.

Salt, Mireh’s most precious resource.

Her hand and her life had been worth salt.

Vaasa’s heart tightened. The Icrurian spring she now lived in could not chase the cold away. That thing still coursed through her veins when the intrusive thoughts sank their claws into her mind and burrowed into her chest.

It fed on her.

She swore she could feel it there, sliding nails across her muscles and tendons, gurgling in her veins. As if the force itself was sentient, it went in her body where it wanted. For long moments, Vaasa focused on her breathing. She tried to dismiss the sense that something crawled beneath her skin. Tried to push it all away. If she died here, it would start a war and give Dominik everything he had ever hoped for.

She slammed the book shut.

“Aneta?” a trilling voice asked as the sound of robes swishing along the floor rounded the stacks. A simply dressed dark-haired woman appeared, her soft smile already full and her kohl-less brown eyes sparkling. So different from Vaasa’s home, this lack of adornment and makeup.

Aneta . Not even her name. A fake one she had scribbled upon the folded parchment she submitted for entrance into the sodality.

Vaasa dove into her mind for a name, a name , of the woman she remembered from her morning instruction on the first wars of Icruria—of which there were seven. “Brielle,” Vaasa remembered, pulling her lips into a smile as she shoved her hands into the folds of her robes beneath the table to hide any possible trace of black mist.

Go away , she commanded the choleric force as it drained from her fingertips and ducked back down somewhere in the twisting of her organs and tissues. Still present, still there, but willing to hide. Coiling back into her belly like a cobra, the magic lay in wait.

Brielle placed her hands upon the book nearest Vaasa, her dark brown skin richening beneath the flickering lanterns strung from the ceiling and placed along each wooden tabletop. “I didn’t realize you’d found your way into a night pass so quickly.”

She hadn’t. Vaasa grinned, flashing the silver pass as if it was just as surprising to her. She didn’t elaborate further or invite more conversation, hoping Brielle would bid her goodbye quickly.

The woman did no such thing. Brielle slid into the chair across from Vaasa and scanned the books upon the table, taking note of each one. Vaasa got the distinct impression that despite Brielle’s warm demeanor, she possessed a wicked intelligence. She wouldn’t be likely to forget a single title of the books she’d seen.

“Are you excited?” Brielle asked suddenly.

Vaasa’s brow furrowed. “Excited?”

“For the foreman?” Brielle tilted her head. “He’s visiting tomorrow. Isn’t that why you left class a few days ago? Aren’t you going to escort him? That’s the rumor, anyway.”

Vaasa’s heart leapt into her throat. “Which foreman?”

“Koen?” Brielle said as if it was obvious. It should have been. “He’s here for the guest lecture in a few days.”

The foreman of Dihrah. Not Vaasa’s unfortunate husband, the one she’d conveniently, albeit violently, escaped. Images of him sprawled upon the bed, hands bound and throat bleeding, pulsed in her head. Vaasa let out a breath and shrugged. “No, actually, I just wasn’t feeling well. I’m having a hard time adjusting.”

This should be interpreted as a weakness, an embarrassment. She silently hoped it would make Brielle uncomfortable enough to leave.

“Oh! I can help you. Now that you have the pass, we can meet here after our classes and study together.”

“Oh, that’s really not—”

“I insist. Someone helped me when I first came here; I’m only passing along the favor. It must have been so hard to come to this place. Someday, you can help someone, too.”

Vaasa’s head whirled, her sacred alone time slipping between her fingers and out of her reach. Where were the brutal, evil monsters her father had cursed? The unforgiving leviathans her brother had whispered about? Vaasa had met and negotiated with others from the east—ill-mannered and easy to burst. Was western Icruria so different?

All she had met were warm people with their happy smiles and contented ways.

The acrid taste of resentment and frustration washed along Vaasa’s tongue, spilling out of her in a snap. “I do not require your assistance, Brielle.”

The woman’s eyes widened just a fraction, hurt flashing in them, and then they reverted to a neutral simmer. “Forgive me for offering.”

Brielle pushed to a stand and plodded to the end of the stacks, then looked over her shoulder. “The books on magic aren’t kept in the main library,” she told Vaasa, eyes flicking to the table where Vaasa kept all of her texts. How had she put together what Vaasa was searching for?

Shit . Vaasa started to speak, but Brielle sauntered off without another word. Vaasa didn’t blame her, not for a moment. It was Vaasa who had ruined the first opportunity she’d had at insight—of course there were tomes missing. Where was this hidden section of the library? If she didn’t find it, she was dead.

The sharp pang of guilt and fear in Vaasa’s chest forced her to look down at her shaking hands.

The unholy force skittered around her fingertips in a mist of glittering black. It seemed to swallow her hands the more Vaasa’s fear rose—the more she felt. Feeding.

Vaasa stuffed her hands into her robes again, eyes darting around, but Brielle had disappeared behind the wooden shelves of books. It was just Vaasa, alone.

She had always been this way—sharp. Maybe that was why the magic had made a home in her.

Vaasa’s chair gave an awful squawk along the stone floor as she stumbled backward, shaking her hands. Tears began to prick at her eyes. The mist only grew. It devoured her wrists and forearms, panic searing down her spine, and she pressed against the wall and into a corner as if she could sink into the shadows and never be seen again.

Did it have something to do with the goddess she’d just read about? Veragi?

It was her one lead. Her only lead in months.

She wasn’t making any progress. The only way to get to the truth was through the help of someone else, but there wasn’t a soul she could get close enough to trust. Maybe Dihrah wasn’t where she could find answers, after all.

Behind her eyes, her brother’s face twisted into a grimace. She could hear herself begging, being so forlorn she was willing to beg , that he not sentence her to death in this nation. She’d always known her family was cruel, but Dominik’s proclivity for torture extended far past that of their parents.

Vaasa and her father had a deal. For all the awful things she’d borne witness to, this was never to be her fate. But now she was a threat to Dominik’s succession, and there was no force in the world that could convince her this marriage wasn’t his doing.

The demonic magic began to creep along the wall Vaasa pushed herself against, shadows licking the stone and devouring any light. As if it had a life of its own, it hissed and whispered in a language unfamiliar to Vaasa’s ear.

Through gritted teeth she whimpered, begging the force to dissipate, begging it to leave her and never come back.

It grew and grew and grew.

Would this be the moment it took her? Would she look as her mother had, drained and colorless on the floor?

Her eyes squeezed shut and she forced herself to breathe. To think of anything else.

She pictured the books. She lent herself to the task of learning with every fiber of her fractured heart. Reminded herself that there was work to do.

It snapped back into her skin with a fiery hiss.

She stumbled backward a few steps as nausea overcame her, threatening her already tightening throat. Vaasa doubled over and gripped her knees through the sweeping red acolyte robes.

Slamming all the books shut, she hauled them back into their proper spaces on the shelves she’d diligently marked—not upon the rolling carts the strict librarians used to track use of each tome. She carried them one by one, her back groaning with the effort, until the table had no trace of her at all. Even in her sickness, she memorized the title of the tome with her only lead.

Her robes whispered against the stone floor and her leaden feet dragged up the stairs, stomach turning and thighs straining, until she reached the main floor. Avoiding each pair of eyes around her, she rushed for the exit.

One pair caught her, though, the darkest and warmest ebony, coated in sadness.

Brielle, who watched Vaasa with pity as she coasted out of the library and into the nearest latrine.

Vaasa’s knees cracked against stone. That foul smell of rotten flesh and burning hair swirled into the bowl and crept along her gagging face. The same scent that had surrounded her dead mother. That had haunted her dreams and her waking hours.

Vaasa expelled the contents of her stomach. Twice. Three times.

And when the hurling finally ceased, when breath rushed back into her lungs and all she had left was the awful taste in her mouth, the sight of her vomit caught her eyes.

Black.

Like the mist.

Like the final color of her mother’s eyes.