Page 26 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

Blair

Blair slides off the back of her phantom wyvern and the summoned, glimmering beast with rainbow scales vanishes into thin air. She strides toward some rocks, looking for the entrance of the seer’s cave. Only her witch senses can detect the strange power lurking within those natural walls, telling her that something is hiding here in the first place.

A natural, tiny little cave in the woods, situated on the outskirts of the Black Forest and the Kingdom of the Witches, marked by the Nordriff—the range of high-peaked mountains that cuts through the continent like a ravine. High, snowy cliffs alternate with abysses—almost unconquerable if you can’t fly over them.

A reason Palisandre hasn’t yet dared to attack the witches.

The cave itself lies at the bottom of one of the many nameless, snow-swept mountains. Eventually, Blair finds the entrance, a tiny hole between a crack in the stones, almost invisible to the eye.

She has to duck because the ceiling of the den is so low. But a long tunnel stretches out in front of her, connecting the entrance with one large, cavernous hall at its end.

Inside it smells damp, and faintly of venison and dried herbs that grow in the border forest that merges with the Black Forest. The only difference between the two forests is magic. While the trees in the border forest are green, shielded from the icy winds by the mountains, and the streams crystal clear, the trees in the Black Forest are huge firs and such a dark green they look almost black, growing densely, their branches reaching so low they block out all light. The ground is barren, and the streams are muddy and brown and treacherous, with a lot of strange, hungry creatures lurking in there.

The Black Forest has become a zone of anarchy, where wild, packless wolf shifters, and worse creatures roam.

Blair shudders at what the blacksmith told her. About the Nefarians hiding out there. Nefarians, like the angels, are so feared because they can fly and attack from the air. A little like the witches on their phantom wyverns, but with more stealth. A strange breed.

Blair shakes the thought off as she reaches the hall, a floor of pressed soil covered with carpets made of spun wool. A fire crackles in a corner, and she identifies remnants of burnt goat stew. Wild goats, apart from deer, snow hares and other fae, are the only animals that still roam these territories since the great cold came.

Blair sneers at the smell, longing for human food. Then she spots the seer lying on a makeshift bed on the ground next to the fire. A slim bundle of torn linen.

“Get up,” Blair says, nudging the bundle with a booted foot.

It stirs, and Blair raises her brows as an excessively slim young woman with hair the color of corn and huge, pointed ears sits up, flinching away from Blair and her silver claws. Wide, pearl-like eyes look up at Blair, the seer’s tiny, slim body cowering.

“Please don’t harm me, witch.”

Seers. Outcasts. No one quite knows what they are. A mood of nature and magic. Shunned mainly because people don’t like hearing about futures they don’t want to have.

Blair crouches next to her bed—or rather the moth-eaten cloak stuffed with straw or dried weeds of some sort. “I want you to tell me where Caryan keeps the girl from Kalleandara’s prophecy. The girl who ends the blight. Where can I find her? Tell me and you don’t need to fear me.”

The girl angles her head up to her, her pale eyes widening. Hells, she looks skinny with hunger and half-frozen. Blair looks around but can’t find any clothes; the girl probably goes out into the cold in these rags. How she will survive the next winter, Blair has no idea.

“That girl is the one who saved your life…” she whispers, and Blair flashes her teeth at her.

“Come, seer, don’t test me.”

The girl flinches, trying to push herself into the wall and further away from Blair’s sharp teeth and nails. She wonders what the blacksmith wanted here. Why he sought this scrawny thing out.

“The Dark Lord will look for the first elven artifact. He will go to the holy mountain Silas. But she… she will die there.”

Now it’s Blair who stares at her. Will I be the one to kill her?

“Why? Why will she die?”

But the seer only shakes her head, a little desperate. “I can’t see. It’s veiled.”

“Try.”

“I can’t.”

“You better try harder, or I might change my mind about hurting you.”

The girl just shakes her head again. “I can’t. The veil around the holy mountain won’t let me.”

“Who kills her then?”

“I can’t see that either.”

Blair runs her tongue over her teeth, annoyed, and gets up, pacing back and forth before she stops. She swivels to the girl who just sits there and watches her, legs pulled close to her body. “She can’t die. She’s the one who’s going to kill Caryan.”

“Is that what you want, witch? To see him dead?” the seer asks so nonchalantly Blair wants to slap her.

“It’s what the prophecy of Kalleandara says,” Blair blurts.

“Is it?” the girl muses.

Only then does Blair realize the girl’s sober tone is not meant to mock her but that she’s simply curious.

“Is it not?” Blair asks back, snapping her teeth toward her in a warning .

“Remember, witch, we are hardly ever what we seem. Even rarer what we dream.”

“I asked you a damn fucking question, seer. I suggest you answer it if you want to keep your miserable hide.”

The girl shrugs, utterly unfazed. “I don’t know. But the prophecy says that she will end the blight. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Caryan is the blight.”

“Maybe he is, in a sense, maybe not, but… what of it anyway? What has this to do with you, other than a broken heart?”

“I have no damn broken heart!” Blair hisses, showing the full length of her elongated, silver canines. But how many nights has Caryan’s name played in her head like a song on repeat when she tried to sleep?

The girl looks back at her, playing with a strand of her whitish, pearlescent hair and some twigs and leaves that have caught there, saying nothing. Blair wonders how old this creature is. Older than her or as young as she looks?

“It also says madness is on the threshold, that the hounds of war have been summoned,” Blair goes on, her voice still sharp, her brows raised. “Has he gone mad? Is he going to start a war?”

“Maybe,” the girl offers.

“ Foreign troubles that have been unlooked for too long... An earthborn child of ancient blood, who carries within her the light; she is the only one who will end the blight ,” Blair recites.

The girl just shrugs again.

“You don’t believe the oracles?” Blair snaps.

“I do and I don’t. They’re so vague and so moody. They can change their prophecies all over. All it takes is one tiny decision, and everything turns out differently. Sometimes it’s the tiny things that make the biggest difference. Like an act of kindness, or mercy.”

“Is that what you told the blacksmith, along with my name?”

“I told the blacksmith where to find the wounded Nefarians. He wanted to know your name. That was all he came for. He said he dreamed about you. I see he gave you the sword the Nefarian gifted him.” The seer’s eyes rest on the black sword on Blair’s belt .

“Why are the Nefarians back?”

“Maybe they were never gone in the first place.”

“Stop being cryptic, seer! Or you’re going to end up as a treat for my wyvern.”

“The Nefarians still live in Khalix, the desert lands in the west. The forgotten continent.”

Blair stares at her, truly shocked. “What? There’s nothing there anymore. Nothing but dirt and dust. And we know. We flew there once and checked. The city hewn in stone is vacated, not a soul there left.”

“Yes, you did fly there once, I know. And you saw nothing because Khalix and the City of Sky and Stone are hidden under a glamour.”

“No way. There is no one powerful enough to hide a whole godsdamn city from the rest of the world.”

“Oh yes, there is, Blair Alaric. You always knew how powerful he is, because you’re attracted to accumulations of power.”

“Caryan,” Blair whispers, a part of her unable to believe it.

“Yes.”

“But why? Why would he let them stay? Help them?”

The seer lifts her whitish brows. “An act of altruism, maybe?” she suggests, repeating the very words the blacksmith gave Blair.

“No. What does he want from the Nefarians?” Blair snaps, scowling at the creature when she just shrugs again.

“Fucking tell me!”

“You know him better than I, Blair Alaric, don’t you?”she just asks back.

Blair flexes her clawed fingers, contemplating for a moment to cut the seer’s neck and make this woman her dinner before she relents. Not her fault Caryan’s everywhere she goes, in every breath she takes. She pulls her head back and lets out a long sigh, feeling her fury ebbing and giving way to bone-grinding exhaustion. All this useless fury about what Perenilla made her do. In truth, she’s tired. Just so fucking tired.

She stalks over to the kettle that dangles over the fire and peeks inside. Empty. Boiled down to the dregs. She sighs again and looks to the girl. “Are you hungry?”

The seer just shrugs. Blair looks back at her one last time before she stalks away.

***

She returns two hours later with a dead boar around her shoulders. She’d let her phantom wyvern’s claws close around the unfortunate grazing beast. It didn’t feel a thing before the wyvern’s claws snapped its neck. Then Blair had flown to the border forest, collected berries she wrapped in her cloak, and dug out some roots she found with her acute sense of smell.

She crossed a merchant’s path on the edge of the Black Forest on his way to Silvander and bought some boots, dried herbs and a leathery skin filled with honey wine from him. She glamoured herself to pass as an elf. If word spread that a witch had passed into Palisandre, all hell would break loose.

It’s a pity though that the elves had woven glamour-stripping spells around every major town. Otherwise, the witches would have long infiltrated the elven courts.

The glamour ebbs off as she soars back through the sky. Her wyvern screeches like a real one as its huge, clawed feet touch down in front of the den. To Blair’s surprise, the girl comes running out, her eyes wide as she takes in the whitish beast, half-translucent and half-solid, its rainbow scales glimmering in the moonlight.

“She is beautiful,” the girl remarks, her voice full of awe.

Blair squints. “How do you know it’s a girl?”

“I just know,” the seer retorts in that unnerving manner of hers. “Can I… touch her?”

Blair nods once, frowning as her magical creation nuzzles its snout against the seer’s outstretched hand before disappearing into thin air on her command.

“It’s just magic,” Blair mutters under her breath, stalking back into the den .

Later, they sit by the fire, the girl with her new shoes on and huddled in Blair’s cloak, spooning the boar stew with roots up like a hungry wolf.

Blair eats little of hers to leave more for the seer. She’d sliced the boar up, skinned it, and showed the girl how to prepare its hide, how to preserve its meat with salt she found in a burlap sack in a corner, along with some clay pots and weed baskets. How to cook out the fat and keep it too. Things she learned from Aurora and Sofya.

She grabs the wineskin and takes a hearty swig before she passes it to the girl, who takes it and drinks, scrunching up her delicate nose. “Ugh. That stuff is strong,” she mutters.

“Not strong enough,” Blair remarks, running her claws over the ground.

“Where did you find all the ingredients?” the girl asks, gesturing to the stew in her hand as if she hasn’t heard.

“My nose. And my claws.”

The seer eyes them as if seeing them in a new light. “I wish I could be like you,” she admits very quietly.

“What happened to you?”

“My father wanted to… use me for dark purposes. I escaped, and since then, I’ve been hiding out here.”

A growl of thunder rumbles outside and Blair looks toward the corridor. Great. Now she will have to stay the whole night or get soaked. She’s careful to hide her annoyance when she looks back at the girl though. She stretches out her legs, settling deeper into the mattress. If she has to stay, she might as well get comfortable.

“I am… I’ve always been so lonely,” the seer adds, like an afterthought, taking another mouthful of wine before she hands the skin back to Blair, who matches her.

She leans her head back and closes her eyes for a moment, listening to the rain. Then she says, “So have I.”

When she looks back at the girl again, she finds her studying her face.

“You know, when I was a child, I used to summon that phantom wyvern in a baby form and play with her. I wished she’d one day become real, so I’d have a…” Blair cuts herself off. What the hell is she doing here? Must be the mead, going to her head.

“A friend,” the girl says.

And for a second Blair finds it hard to breathe. “I still sometimes wish she was… real.”

“You could go to the Abyss, ask one of the beasts dwelling there whether it wants to be yours.”

Blair stares at her before she finds her speech again. “Going to the Abyss would be suicide. And I don’t have the power to harness a demon.” Unlike Caryan. Does the girl not see that? Does she want her to die?

But the seer just shakes her head. “I wasn’t only talking about demons. But… demons, not all of them are evil, you know. They will sometimes join someone if they want to.”

“They’re fucking lethal. That’s what they are,” Blair contradicts, horror in her voice.

The girl just drains another bowl and some color’s creeping back into her gaunt cheeks. “Aren’t we all, if we want to be?” With that, she rolls up next to Blair, placing her head on Blair’s thigh, the blonde hair spreading wide.

Blair just watches her, spellbound. Unsure.

The girl turns her head to look up with sleepy eyes before she whispers, “Nothing’s ever written in stone, Blair, not even a prophecy. It always comes down to choice. Your fates are linked, Blair. The girl’s and yours.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Speak, seer.”

“I cannot see more, because I do not know, Blair Alaric. I told you all I know. But remember, you don’t have to be the witch from the story—the one who hid her heart so it would always stay broken and finally turn into stone.” Then she turns back, her breathing becoming deep and even.

Blair just looks at her, too afraid that, if she moves, the girl will wake up. But the longer she watches, the more the seer looks like the girl. Like Melody. Her hair is no longer light, but dark. Her face no longer so sharp, but softer. Her body no longer so bony, but long-limbed and muscular.

She still looks that way, still asleep, wrapped in Blair’s cloak, when Blair leaves at the first gray of morning, not looking back.