Chapter 28

CHAPTER 28

Fire burned in Reid’s chest.

He tried to sit up, and suddenly there was a hand on his shoulder. Above him, his mother loomed. “Don’t,” she warned him, pressing lightly to push him back down.

Around him were faces—his mother’s, carved with misery and exhaustion, dirt-caked and tearstained. The other Veragi witches. The high witch of Zuheia. People he did not know. Their worried frowns floated in and out of his consciousness.

Colors burst behind his eyes. Black and white. Red. Purple. Shades of yellow.

The pain ebbed.

Distantly, he heard voices. Crying.

This happened over and over—the waking and the subsequent sleep. Each time he looked. He listened.

For a face and a voice he did not hear.

Until he heard nothing at all.

Reid woke to a quiet room and an empty bed.

A pillow seemed to swallow his head. He scanned the room: the reflection of broken glass beneath the doors at the edge of his quarters, the patio marred by petals and broken vines. Glass covered the left side of the room. The patio window had been blown to bits.

He knew a few things in increasing order. If he was here, he was likely alive. The city still stood, and the High Temple remained Icruria’s.

But it was his mother sitting beside his bed, not his wife.

“Tell me she is alive,” Reid croaked. He held his breath. So much of the day came in flashes and blurs—but he remembered little. Like watching his life in still sketches and paintings, he could not grasp anything real.

“She is alive,” his mother confirmed.

He turned his head to look at her, and then tried to sit up. He could. His muscles worked for him as they had before. His mother shuffled forward and gripped his arm, but he brushed off her hands. He needed to know what he was capable of. Reid rose all the way, bringing his knees up to his chest and resting his arms upon them. He rolled his wrists, then his ankles, and wiggled his toes. Everything worked. Nothing hurt.

Then he was up on his feet. Squeaking from his mother’s chair emanated around him, but he moved with alarming speed right past her, making for the armoire. He started to pass the mirror, but then he stopped. Stared. He no longer cared about the broken glass or the state of the High Temple. He looked ragged and dirty. Unkempt. His hair stuck to his cheeks and he swiped it away, his beard overgrown.

“What. Happened,” he demanded, enunciating both words not at all like a question.

“You were…” His mother paused. “You were dead, Reid. I felt it. Vaasa made a bargain to bring you back.”

Reid turned and finally looked at his mother, who seemed more tired than he was. Had she slept? He remembered the intensity of the fight—of what she had put herself and her magic through in order to hold the border around the gardens. All at once, Reid felt useless. How many days had it been since the election? Faintly, there was a part of him that cowered in terror at the words his mother had just spoken. Dead. He had been dead . He didn’t remember what happened. But he didn’t have the time to consider that, not yet. “Her magic?”

His mother nodded, her tired eyes looking like shattered stones. “I cannot feel it. It is still there, but veiled in something entirely different. A shadow.”

Vaasa had saved his life, had saved all of their lives, and yet it was still she who suffered the consequences. “How did this happen?”

“Dominik’s advisor is the Zetyr witch, and his demon is a manifestation of that power, much like my horse and Amalie’s fox. He—” His mother stopped, swallowing what Reid assumed was the urge to cry. “The creature impaled you. It killed you almost instantly. Vaasalisa struck a bargain with Ozik—her magic for your life.”

Reid’s head whirled, and though he knew he could stand, he feared his legs would fail to hold him. “Surely he cannot simply take her magic?”

“The Zuheia have written histories about his kind—about their traditions of human sacrifice, their twisted bargains. They have offered me access unlike anything the Veragi have known before. I will be going to Wrultho next.” Then Melisina bit her cheek, and her shoulders dropped. “But right now, I know nothing for certain, other than that there is something terrible at play.”

Reid took a careful account of his mother: based on the knowing purse of her lips and the soft tap of her finger against her knee, he suspected she was holding something back. “What do you know?”

Melisina looked down, and he wondered what she would not say—always keeping him just at the edge, because he was not a witch, not a part of her coven.

“Mother,” he warned.

Melisina looked up at him, perhaps reading the desperation in his gaze, and nodded. “Vaasalisa’s mother… she was running from something. I had always believed it was the emperor. But…” She shook her head. “Now I’m not so sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“On the day she left, she did so despite my pleas. I asked Vena Kozár to stay, told her we would protect her. But she said it was already over for her, that any chance she may have had was long gone. She asked me for one thing, and one thing only.”

Reid paused, his body frozen as he watched his mother recall a memory she’d likely never mentioned to another soul.

“She asked me to protect her daughter.” Melisina raised her gaze to meet his. “To bring her here however I could.”

“The marriage agreement,” Reid whispered.

“It was the only sure way I could think of.”

He closed his eyes, remembering the day his mother had asked him to take Vaasalisa Kozár, their greatest enemy’s daughter, as his bride. He had trusted her implicitly, had barely bothered to ask questions. She’d made it sound like the perfect political move, and by all means, it was. He’d never been good at politics, never possessed that particular, cunning ability to see behind the curtain of people’s words into their intent. Not the way his mother did. Not the way his wife did. “You believe her mother was running from the advisor?”

“I believe there is more to this story than we have even begun to uncover,” Melisina whispered, standing on tired, wobbly legs. She reached for the chair next to her, leaning her weight against it. Melisina’s eyes started to water, and she pulled in a ragged, exhausted breath. “He did not just take Vaasalisa. Amalie, she… she abandoned her post. Went after them. I could not stop her.”

Reid swallowed back tears. In every way that mattered, he had failed the two witches. His mother had lost two of her coven, and he could all but see the tears she held in. The high witch of Veragi, with what must feel like a limb missing. To keep the coven safe was her life’s goal. Now she could barely hold her weight against the world, and he had nothing to make a difference. “The Zuheia witches, they’ve healed me?”

“They didn’t even find a trace of injury.”

Reid flexed his feet, then bent his knees. Lifted his arms. Everything worked. He felt as though he had never tasted death—as though he could walk right into battle. “How many days has it been?”

“It’s been a little over a week.”

Reid’s jaw tensed. A week? It somehow struck him as both a blink and an entire lifetime. He opened the armoire and began to gather his things, no plan coming together in his head yet, but he was certain he’d have one by the time he reached the docks. “I need a ship.”

“You can’t go,” his mother said.

“Try to stop me.”

“You are headman elect, Reid.”

Reid paused and stared at his hands, now curled around Vaasa’s clothes. He couldn’t look away. “They held the election?”

“Once you were given a clean bill of health, yes. They voted you headman. We need to figure out how we’re going to utilize that to get her back. Until we know where they are, you’d be traveling blind.”

Reid lifted his gray shirt from the drawer in front of him, and a dangerous spark of violence ignited in him. “Where is Koen?”

“In a rage, waiting for you,” his mother said.

Reid threw a shirt over his head, tucking it into the breeches he wore, and started for the door.

“Reid.”

He paused, his mother’s voice sounding weaker than he’d ever heard it. “I will take the witches. We will scour every book that has ever been written. You have my word. But you cannot march into that empire without a plan.”

“I command armies. Entire fleets—”

“Your armies are no match for what is to come, Reid Cazden,” she exclaimed, and hearing his father’s surname, the one he had exchanged for his title, made his entire body freeze. He could count the few times since his adolescence that she’d called him by it. Melisina shook her head, as though Reid was missing an integral piece of information. And he always was. She sat, the chair groaning beneath her. For the second time, she looked fragile to Reid. She had always seemed so large, so otherworldly to him. “She has spoken to me for the first time in years. For the first time since the day Vena Kozár walked into my sodality.”

“Who?” Reid asked.

“Veragi,” Melisina murmured, raising her eyes to meet his with purpose. “She told me where to find Vaasalisa when she was down in the catacombs, but since the gardens, I cannot hear her. All I feel is pain—immeasurable, insurmountable pain.”

Reid’s heart beat faster, the pounding reaching his ears.

“This is beyond even us,” Melisina told him. “This is much more than a war between mortals. This is about a wrong committed many, many years ago, one I think the goddess intends to right.”

“I don’t understand,” Reid said.

“There is one question we must ask ourselves, something you must consider with every move you make. If we have a goddess on our side, my son, then who—or what—is on Ozik’s?”

Reid grasped the handle of the door, every muscle telling him to go forward now, to tear apart the continent and cut down anyone in his path. To find Vaasa, and to finally set her free. “There’s something you’re forgetting. Something even Ozik himself can’t deny.”

His mother tilted her head. “What?”

“Dominik is dead. I am married to Vaasalisa Kozár, the last remaining heiress to the Asteryan throne. So though I am the headman elect of Icruria”—Reid opened the door, looking over his shoulder once more at where his mother sat—“I am the emperor of Asterya, too. And I’m going to get my wife back.”