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With my friends seated deep in my heart, the place inside of me they had healed, the one and only place they were truly safe, I stepped over the threshold.

82

VEYKA

She was beautiful and terrible to look upon. A face untouched by time, even though she’d been captive in this tower for thousands of years. A curtain of perfectly straight, perfectly black hair fell past her shoulders, the edge as sharp and straight as one of the knives in my scabbards. How it stayed that way… how her clothing maintained its rich sheen… I didn’t waste my questions.

I fought the urge to look too closely at any of the details. I could not be distracted; not now, when I was so close. I kept my eyes fixed on the witch. She was seated, staring at the ground, as if I wasn’t there at all.

I curled my hands tightly into fists until my fingernails bit into the soft heels of my palm, and forced the words out. Words we’d crafted so carefully, based on the scant information Parys had dredged up from the library and our own memories of childhood legends.

“I have conquered the terrors of the tower. I come bearing blades and power.” Not magical power, obviously. But she didn’t know that. Besides, I’d brought three powerful magic wielders with me, even if they had not made it all the way here. Just short of a lie. “You are at my mercy. You will answer my questions.”

Slowly, so slowly I thought at first that she wasn’t moving at all, the witch lifted her head. Her cheekbones were high, marked by not a single freckle or wrinkle. And her lips… so thin that they stretched to nothing as she fixed me with a horrifying smile. Each tooth was as sharp and pointed as one of Arran’s canines.

But the eyes were the worst.

I thought at first they were pure white, like my hair. But as I adjusted to the sight, as I forced air in and out of my lungs, I realized there were irises and pupils the same as mine. But each were a shade of opalescent white that glimmered unnaturally.

A voice, ageless and wispy, filled the room, swirling through it, leaking in through my ears, my nostrils, my mouth. “Blades you have, and you wield them well. But you bring no magic to face me today, Veyka Pendragon.”

“How—” I swallowed the word, refusing to be tricked. “You know my name.”

A soft, approving laugh. “Very good, Young Queen. You have me at your mercy. Are you brave enough to ask your questions?”

Another trick. To try and get me talking, so that I might fumble and unwittingly let a question slip into the conversation.

“Hold your tongue and listen well,” I said sharply. Parys had found that order in one of his books.

The witch grimaced, recoiling back. I couldn’t quite make out what she sat upon, her thick, dark skirts billowing out and obscuring her legs and the seat as well. But she was silent, for now.

It worked, then, to still her trickery. But only for a few moments, that same text had advised.

We’d tried a thousand variations on the first question, but had decided to keep the most important of our three queries the simplest, most straightforward.

“Who conspired to murder my brother, King Arthur?”

The witch started rocking softly on her perch. Back and forth. Back and forth. A vague, vacant expression on her face, as if she was not present in the room at all, but her mind had gone to a different place altogether.

My mind pricked in memory.

But then that eerie voice was speaking once more. “The one who has seen so much, seen too much, to make her still. The one who pulls you closer, to have you at her will. Roksana,” she hissed, drawing out the ‘s’ in a long whistle through her horrible teeth.

I didn’t have it in me to be surprised, not after the events of the last twenty-four hours. It made sense, in some ways. But why… and could it possibly have been her alone? Not Elora, or any of the others? Such a massive plot, to conspire to kill first Arthur, then me as well—

“So many questions, swirling in that head of yours,” the witch crooned. She spoke the word, ‘questions,’ as if it was a treat, a savory morsel on her tongue. “Ask me, Veyka. I will tell you what you want to know.”

“You will trick me into wasting my questions.”

“I only seek to help you, dear child. I can hear those questions that haunt you. So many mysteries in your young life. A mother who so desperately tried to change you, but why, oh why, would she visit such horrors upon her daughter? Arthur, dear Arthur, stolen from you so soon. Why was he taken? Why should you become queen?”

“Stop.”Make it stop.

The witch could see into my mind. She could read the horrors of my past, name the feelings that even I couldn’t acknowledge. This hadn’t been in any of Parys’ books.

“Perhaps you’d like to know about your betrothed, the storied Brutal Prince. Oh, how I’ve relished tracking him across the centuries. Such a beast, that thing that lives inside of him. You know that he burns for you, but do you want to know why? I could tell you, my sweet. I could tell you why you can hear the beast growl, why you feel yourself being pulled back to him, again and again. Why he’s made you question every conviction, even your most jealously guarded quest for revenge.”

The room began to swirl around me. The world itself. I could feel the darkness pulling me down. The darkness had taken me after Arthur’s death. I’d stopped it after Cyara’s attack, but only just.