Page 36 of Her Blind Deception (The Dark Reflection #2)

Chapter Thirty-Six

I woke to Gwinellyn’s face peering into mine.

‘Rhiandra,’ she repeated, and I realised she was gently shaking me.

I licked my dry lips and stretched the tight muscles of my neck. I’d dozed off still sitting in the armchair. But the windows were dark. It looked like it was the middle of the night.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, when I realised Gwin’s expression was pinched with worry.

‘There’s something happening outside,’ she said, her voice barely audible.

‘Something? What do you mean?’ Fear pricked in my chest. Had he found me already?

‘I don’t know. Come and look.’

Pushing out of the chair, I followed her to the window and peered through the foggy glass. The shifting glow of flames lit up the night.

‘Where’s Baba Yaga?’ I asked quietly.

‘I think she might be out there,’ Gwinellyn replied, her face close to mine as we stared out, and I thought I caught the glimpse of a figure by the fireside, swaying, spinning. Dancing. Surely not.

‘Maybe we should go and… check on her?’ Gwin’s tone was hesitant, and I was sure some of the same thoughts were going through her mind. What did the old woman want with a bonfire in the middle of the night? Was she simply mad, or was something more sinister afoot? There were all those tales, the witch in the Yawn who cut men up and put them in her supper pot. Who could command the trees and stones. Who communed with the dead. Perhaps she had taken us in only to use us for something nefarious. Perhaps I had been a fool to put my faith in her.

I opened the door to the night. Wind gushed in, tangled with the rhythmic beats of a drum and the humming sound of a song in words I couldn’t quite make out.

‘Stay here,’ I said before stepping out onto the muddy path.

The enormous pit of flame beckoned as I approached, and the sound of singing—chanting–-weaved around me, racing over my skin and calling to something in my blood. It became clearer with every step that the figure was Baba Yaga. Firelight flickered and twitched over her swaying form, and she took two steps to the right, then another to the left, her bare feet stamping down against the earth like they were trying to wake something slumbering below. She spun, locked eyes on me, and paused in beating the small drum she held to crook a finger.

‘Come, children,’ she cackled, a small gasp behind me letting me know Gwinellyn hadn’t stayed in the house. ‘Join the circle.’ Something in the wild, almost savage energy of her movements, her expression, her eyes, made her age seem to melt away. I could see her in my mind’s eye as a young woman, fierce and strong, straight-backed and formidable. And perhaps I should have locked myself back inside, fled whatever madness seemed to have possessed her, but that stirring in my blood was making my skin prickle with affinity, and my very bones shivered with some ancient, forgotten song.

‘What are you doing out here?’ I demanded with a confidence I didn’t feel. The rhythm, I realised, hadn’t ceased when she’d stopped drumming. It sent a chill creeping down my spine.

She didn’t answer my question, but took my hand and drew me closer as she began her singing again.

‘The wilful beat of brittle heart

The meet of feet with hallowed ground

The yearning deep for shattered bars

Not all forgotten should be found

Last in a line of banished daughters

Wake to carve and wield old bones

Womb-dark whispers passed to another

Sapling maiden, to mother, to crone.’

Her voice was rough, harsh, the song like the turning of stones, the creaking of trees. She moved beyond me to meet Gwinellyn and take a hold of her hand now. I expected the girl to look frightened, but though she was wide-eyed, there was something about her that seemed to speak of acceptance, of welcome even. She returned the witch’s grip and let herself be led closer to the fire.

‘You have led bound lives, children,’ Baba Yaga rasped. ‘It is time to run with woods, to waken the song in your blood. Your Aether may be god of sky and sun, but it is from Madeia’s flesh we all come, and to her flesh we return. Your priests, your druthi, your fathers, your kings, would have you forget the old power of women. High time you learned what they have kept from you.’

She began singing that same song again, and the drumming that filled the night grew louder as she swayed, stamping her feet in time with the rhythm, circling the fire. When Gwinellyn followed her, moving cautiously, slowly, precisely, I wanted to declare them both mad, but before my eyes the girl’s movements grew bolder, wilder, until she was dancing, twirling along behind the witch, stomping her own bare feet against the earth in time to the drums. She added her own voice to the song, high and sweet as a nightingale.

‘Last in a line of banished daughters

Wake to carve and wield old bones….’

A restlessness gripped me, like there were things moving under my skin, prickling the soles of my feet. It was an urge that twisted far beyond my usual impulses, that bound and gagged the part of me that wanted to watch and calculate, that wanted to sneer at behaviour like this and then put it in my pocket for dissection, that wanted to pin the pieces to the little webs I carefully curated on each of them, on everyone; silvery threads of prediction, of possible motivators, of what they cared about and how that could be leveraged.

Baba Yaga had lapped the fire and drawn towards me again, her eyes gleaming with something that might have been joy.

‘There is no place for your fear here, iaral.’ The words sounded like they belonged to her song. ‘You must leave it. It only pretends to serve you and keeps you from who you could be.’ She pressed a gentle touch between my shoulder blades and gave a push, but I balked like a mule .

‘I don’t… like fire.’ I dropped my eyes to the earth as I said it, feeling small and ashamed.

‘And you cannot simply kill all fire for wronging you, can you?’ she cackled, drawing my gaze back up. Did she know what I’d done in the palace?

‘A terrible thing was done to you,’ she continued. Behind her, Gwinellyn continued to sway and spin and sing. ‘But revenge will not soothe, and fear will ever steer you wrong. Forgive the flames, child. They are neither a force of evil, nor of good. Come closer and see.’

The drumming was growing so loud that it felt deeper and more resonant than my own heartbeat and I couldn’t hear that voice inside me that ridiculed them and belittled the compulsion to join them. Something wanted to pull me from myself and give me over to the night and the song and the flames that repulsed yet beckoned with their heat. When Baba Yaga began to dance again, I followed her, slowly, hesitantly, as she took up her song. Gwinellyn took my hands and pulled, her face alight.

‘You should be resting,’ I yelled over the drumming and the singing, but she only laughed and spun us around. I whirled, caught in her orbit, and something that had been binding me loosened and slipped away. I threw my head back, leaned into the spin. The stars whirled past. The ground seemed to thud with the drums. I kicked off my shoes, relishing in the feeling of earth beneath my feet, something I had not felt in a long time. Gwin dropped my hands to twirl her arms above her head, and I was drawn along after her, mesmerised by her joy.

The cold rush of the night air. Stamping feet. The rhythmic DUN dun dun dun DUN dun dun dun of what felt like a hundred drums. And there were more voices now, surely, than just ours, adding new lines to the refrain.

‘What chains and blood divided

Lightning strikes to raze them all

Earth to ashes, new hope rises

And beneath, the mighty fall.’

The pain and the heartbreak and the rage fell away for a moment, and I laughed. I laughed with the wind in my hair and the night in my eyes and dirt between my toes and my skin flushed with the heat of the fire, and I didn’t feel like Rhiandra Tiercelin, the woman who had been a maisera, who had been a queen, who had lied and betrayed and schemed and killed, who had been the daughter of a mother who hated her for existing and a father who didn’t care that she did. Who had been in love with a man who hankered for war and destruction. I felt like a woman who laughed, who danced, and who loved these two women singing either side of me with the sort of love born of fierce gratitude.

And so we danced. A resurrected princess, a forest witch and an exiled queen. We danced our way into the darkest hour of the night and sang our way out of it again. We danced until my feet were numb with cold and my heart was as light as stars, and my mind was blessedly silent of anything but the drumming and those chanted words.

‘What chains and blood divided,

Lightning strikes to raze them all…’

When the drumming suddenly died, I thought for a moment that I’d gone deaf. It was like the entire world stilled, like the air froze and the trees turned to stone, like my ears were full of water, and I stopped dead until the sounds of the night slowly began to register: the chirping of crickets, the hoot of an owl, the crackling of the flames, the rustle of the wind in the trees.

A rattling, hacking coughing.

Baba Yaga was doubled over, hands on her knees as she gasped for breath between coughs.

The exhilaration of our mad dance leeched away at the sound, and I went to her quickly, bending down to touch her back. ‘I think that’s enough,’ I said, but she only swatted at me, hissing like a cat.

‘Don’t baby me,’ she grumbled. Then, without warning, she sat down hard on the ground.

The flames died, extinguished like they’d never been there to begin with.

‘We’ll take you inside,’ I said, my voice tight, and I bent to take one arm as Gwin took the other.

Baba Yaga battered both of us away. ‘If I want to sit here in the dirt, then I will. I’ve been alive for longer than the two of you combined. I’ve earned the right.’

She dropped her head back and looked up at the stars, heaving a great sigh, before she began coughing again. Gwin was standing with her hands over her mouth, clearly at a loss for how to help. I reached out to rub the old woman’s back, but she snatched my hand out of the air and yanked me towards her. Her hand in mine was cold and rough, but her grip was strong. ‘By the terms of our deal, this gift is yours,’ she rasped, ‘but be wary of what you choose to do with it.’

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘Listen, girl, and I’ll tell you.’ She tugged me close enough that I could smell the sour scent of her breath, could see the moon gleaming in her amber eyes. ‘You’ve a great destiny weighing on you, and mayhaps it is one of terrible destruction. I’ve no concern one way or another, I merely need this burden lifted. But if there comes a time when you resent this moment and me, do not say I did not warn you.’ With that, she caught my other hand and squeezed. Pain shot through my fingers and up my arms, racing along my nerves like molten lightening, leaving muscles wracked with spasms in its wake. I tried to tug away from her, but her hands were like shackles fused to me, and the pain slashed down my spine, consuming my organs, incinerating my bones, and I was screaming. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?!

Another pulse of pain tore through me, and when it reached my head my vision burst into white light, then to red, then darkness.

When I came to, I was sprawled on my back in the dirt. My muscles were still spasming, twitching, sending little jolts of pain stabbing through me like shards of glass as I blinked up at the sky. Dawn was coming, a slow spill of grey from the horizon, gently drowning the stars one by one. Heavy footsteps pounded against my ear drums, each one inflaming the headache that was clamped like a vice around my skull, and then Gwinellyn’s face was floating above me, clenched with worry, and she said something. It took me a moment to latch onto the words, and another to force my groggy brain to make sense of them.

‘Are you hurt?’ she repeated, her fingers touching at my face and body as though she was searching for wounds. I brushed her off, tried to push myself up, but the world spun and my stomach reeled until I dropped back down .

‘Where is that witch?’ I groaned, pressing my palms over my eyes. ‘She did something to me, and it hurt. Bring her to me so I can throttle her.’

Gwinellyn was silent for a long moment, long enough that I peered around my hands at her.

‘What? Am I not allowed to be furious? Look what she did to me.’

‘It’s not that,’ she said quietly. ‘But you can’t throttle her. I think she’s dead.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. She was very much alive a few moments ago.’

‘You’ve been unconscious for a while. After you fell, I tried over and over again to wake you, and she wandered down the path. I just went and… maybe you should come and take a look.’

With much gasping and pausing to wait for a head spin or wave of agony to subside, Gwinellyn helped me to my feet, and together we hobbled over to a gnarled old tree at the edge of the clearing, where we found Baba Yaga sitting between the roots, head resting against the trunk, face tilted towards the sky, like she was watching the clouds pass overhead. But her eyes were blank and unseeing, and when I touched her, I found her skin already cold.

I yanked my hand back with a hiss, panic gathering in my throat. After everything that had happened already, now this? Who would protect me from Draven now? How would I keep Gwinellyn safe?

‘What should we do?’ Gwinellyn asked quietly.

‘Nothing while I feel like this,’ I said, pinching the bridge of my nose against the throb of my headache, my limbs prickling like my circulation had been cut off. What had the old witch done to me? And how could she have done it and then wandered off and died? ‘ Let’s go inside. We can figure this out over a drink. She must have a bottle of liquor stashed away somewhere.’

The pain in my head felt like it was getting worse, the throbbing spreading down my spine, through my shoulders and arms until it seemed to be pressing against my skin. We made it almost to the door before I dropped to my knees to clutch my head and groan. All the hair on my arms and neck was standing on end, like the air was full of static.

‘Rhi—’ Gwinellyn reached for me, her voice frightened, but as soon as her hands made contact with my skin I shrieked and jerked away.

‘Get away,’ I moaned, rocking back and forth. ‘Something’s going to happen. Get inside. Get inside!’

The pressure built. My vision blurred. I was rocking back and forth, groaning, clawing at my hair, my face. I wanted out of my body. Something was in here with me that didn’t fit. And it hurt. The pressure in my arms turned to needling, then to burning, and those throbbing pulses made me cry out with the pain of it. It needed to be out. Out!

I flung my hands before me, like I could shake out the pain and the throbbing and the pressure, and with a burst of searing heat, twin bolts of light shot from my palms.

I screamed.

My voice was drowned out by a crack! Followed quickly by a deafening boom! The pressure in my hands subsided, leaving behind a profound sense of relief. No more pain, no more throbbing. But the huge tree, the one Baba Yaga’s body was leaning against, was burning .

That enormous trunk was split down the centre, the two sides leaning away from one another as flames licked at the branches.

It was impossible. Completely impossible.

‘Rhi…’ Gwinellyn’s voice was hushed and tight with horror.

My blood was rushing so loudly in my ears that I barely heard her. Because I’d looked down at my hands.

I raised them before me, my jaw slack, mouth gaping. My hands. Familiar and constant. Slender fingers, a dark freckle on the back of the left, veins just visible over tendons, nails more chipped and worn than usual.

They were sparking.

What looked like tiny bolts of lightning crackled and popped up and down those familiar fingers as I watched, causing little pricks of heat when they connected with my skin, but no pain now. As I watched, they became less frequent, until they died away completely and it was only my hands one again.

‘What was that? Are you… alright?’ Gwinellyn again, and this time I spared her a wide-eyed glance. She looked terrified.

And Baba Yaga’s words came back to me.

This gift is yours. You’ve a great destiny weighing on you.

Slowly, a grin began to spread across my mouth, my whole face, and then I was laughing, turning my hands over in the air before me as a manic, triumphant glee poured out of me. Resent her? How could I ever resent this? This was magic. She had given me magic. I could still feel it, thrumming in my hands, up my nerves. Just a gentle vibration now, like a whisper of reassurance that it was still there, that even though I had no idea how those bolts of light, of lightning, had emerged from me moments ago, I could find a way to make it happen again .

I laughed and laughed and Gwinellyn shrunk away from me like I’d gone mad, but that’s just because she couldn’t see, couldn’t understand.

If I could split that tree, I had more power than I’d ever had as queen.

The Guild, the Crown, the whole country had no idea what was coming.

Draven had no idea what was coming.