The Crimson Crown, page 45
“By the Spirits,” I mutter.
It appears as though the queen really was searching for the stones. Had she found them, as I suspected? Was she working with a witch? I scour the map, desperate for answers. The queen indicated only one other chamber. It takes me a moment to place it—the High Priest’s rooms. My brow furrows. Ignatius? Written within the circle is one word: Underground?
The hair on the back of my neck prickles. What does this mean? I rifle through the remaining pages, but they don’t contain notes or anything else that might explain the queen’s reasoning. Instead, the sheets of parchment are inked with illustrations. The first is very similar to one I saw in the library’s history text—Braxos is in the center, a witch on one side of him and an Order priest on the other. In fact, this might be a copy of the same drawing, for the priest appears strikingly similar to Ignatius. The queen circled his face. Why?
The next illustration details a different king with a priest, one whose face is also circled—and who also resembles Ignatius. The similarity isn’t as noticeable as the first, but it’s close, especially in the eyes—that unsettling amber. Questions tangle in my mind. Why was the queen collecting these drawings? Did she want evidence of the High Priest’s vanity? I pause at the final page, yet another illustration, one noticeably older than the rest. Its edges are crumbling and the ink fading, but I can still discern the gathering of men wearing Order robes. One face is marked. It’s a small drawing, but there’s no mistaking those eyes. It’s Ignatius.
And there, scribbled in the bottom corner, I discover something even more horrifying.
Age of the Covens 2300.
“By the Spirits,” I whisper, the roots of my hair prickling.
This isn’t possible. If the date is accurate, this drawing is centuries old. I’m not sure that any witches are alive today who can claim to have seen this year. How could Ignatius…
Nettle yowls a warning, and I wheel around, one hand flying to my knife. I’m too slow.
“Mistress Ayleth,” a voice in the shadows says. “It appears I am once again in your debt.”
I’m just able to catch the sheen of flame-colored robes before I hear a low growl and a rush of cold wind slams into me, plunging me into the dark.
Dull pain throbs in my head.
My leaden eyelids struggle to open, hazy surroundings sharpening slowly into focus. I’m lying on stone. And it’s too bright. What must be a hundred torches flicker around me. But no. I blink. Not torches. Mirrors. Dozens of them hang on the walls or are propped on the floor, reflecting the light. What is this place? How did I get here?
Ignatius.
The name fights through the sludge in my skull, and the last hours come careening back—Joan and the queen’s rooms and the hidden papers in the tapestry. Ignatius’s face in the drawing from hundreds of years ago. His voice in the shadows, followed by that ominous growl, exactly like what I’d heard in the crypt and the archives.
Had he brought me here? Where is Nettle? My stiff muscles complain as I stagger to my feet. Tall shelves stretch along the walls, stuffed with vials and bottles and books. Dried herbs hang from the ceiling. There’s a long table in the center, its wooden surface strewn with various instruments. My brow furrows. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this looked like our workroom at Stonehaven. But that can’t be right.
I shuffle closer to the shelves. Colorful powders and liquids fill the jars. In some, animal feet, or even the head of a raven, float in a yellowish substance. My skin crawls, recalling Mother’s silver-eyed creature. I pull down one of the books. The Eye of Meira stares back at me from the first page, surrounded by a series of meticulously recorded notes:
Connect the magic?
How much power required?
Magic? I flip through the rest of the book, discovering lists of ingredients and diagrams. These are…spells. Not the sort I learned at Stonehaven, though. These call for carrion flowers and grave dirt and fresh, still-beating hearts.
Like calls to like.
Footsteps echo and I slam the book closed, wheeling around. A staircase curves down the wall on the other side of the room.
Underground? the queen had written on the map.
Is that where I am? Some secret lair below the palace? Panic drums in my chest and I reach for my knife, relieved to discover that it hasn’t been lost. The blade glints as I point it at the figure descending the stairs. It’s a woman, I think, humming a strange, tuneless melody. Torchlight slides across her face.
It’s…Marion.
I blink, certain that I’m hallucinating. Marion was sent away. But there’s no mistaking the former courtier. Her light-brown skin is cleaned of the dirt and grime from the dungeon cell. Her raven-black hair is combed and neatly braided. And her dress is far simpler than anything I’d seen her wear at court—more like a servant’s.
“Marion?” I ask, my voice trembling.
She doesn’t even look at me as she crosses the room and sets her basket on the other end of the table. We’re only a few feet apart. She must know I’m here. But Marion only continues to hum, pulling empty bottles from her basket and standing them up in an eerily precise row. I put myself directly in front of her.
“Marion! What—”
The rest disappears in a gasp. Because her eyes are no longer dark brown but solid silver, with no irises or pupils. I can see myself reflected within the unnatural color, almost like…
“Mirrors,” I whisper.
Recognition tingles down my spine. These are the same sort of eyes that belonged to Mother’s raven, the one she’d bound to her mirror. But it can’t be. That would mean…
“Unsettling, isn’t it?”
Time itself seems to slow at that voice. My entire body freezes, like a rabbit caught in a snare, as Ignatius enters the chamber. The ruby Eye of Meira glimmers on its golden chain.
“Typically, I disguise the color with a bit of glamour magic, but I didn’t see the point,” he says, as casually as if we were discussing the weather. “After all, our dear Marion couldn’t possibly return to court after the…incident.”
He laughs, like Marion’s arrest was a joke, one of his own design. Instinct taps at the base of my neck and my attention flits around the room again, at the instruments and books and mirrors. The silver of Marion’s eyes flashes in the torchlight.
I can disguise the color with a bit of glamour magic.
Sudden comprehension slams into me. Marion wasn’t sent away—she was brought here. To him. “You’re…”
“A witch,” Ignatius replies, slow and patient. “Just like you, Ayleth.”
Revulsion knots in my belly. No. Not like me. He’s something else. I need to get out of here—away from him. Ignatius has moved so that there’s a clear path to the staircase and I hurl myself toward it, my feet tripping over themselves in desperation. But I don’t get five steps before a blast of cold knocks me back, just like it did in the queen’s rooms. My knife flies out of my grasp and I land hard on the floor, breath whooshing out of me.
“I suspected we might experience initial difficulties.” Ignatius clicks his tongue, disappointed. “But don’t mind Nox. He’s just here to make sure we can speak without any further interruptions.”
Nox? Shadows thicken in the far side of the room, coupled with a too-familiar growl. My heart rate kicks up as a shape solidifies in the darkness, black fur and claws as long as my fingers. One of its eyes is red, but the other is hollow, as if it had been shot out—or stabbed.
The king’s arrow.
Memories of the forest rush back to me—the arrow shaft smoking as it pierced the Nevenwolf’s crimson eye—and that force behind my left ribs jolts, as if in recognition. This is the same beast. It didn’t die. Or, if it did, it came back. Panic ratchets up my spine and I crawl backward on all fours, until my shoulders collide with a wall and there’s nowhere else to go.
A witch.
The word stretches and distorts in my mind. It’s the only explanation for Marion and the Nevenwolf and even this room, but I still can’t comprehend it. Male witches are rare. I haven’t heard of one living since before the war. And this isn’t our magic. Those weren’t our spells in the books. We don’t summon Nevenwolves.
Dark intents reap dark rewards.
“You’re a priest,” I splutter, unable to formulate anything more coherent.
“It is the perfect disguise, is it not?” Ignatius adjusts his ruby Eye pendant with unmistakable pride. “Burn enough witches and no one suspects you of being one.”
Rage roils in my veins, snapping me out of my stupor. “You’re murdering us! Razing the covens to the ground!”
“The covens mean nothing to me,” Ignatius barks, his expression twisting in a way that makes my heart race impossibly faster. “And I nothing to them. The Spirits made that fact abundantly clear when I faced the flames. But then, we have that in common, don’t we, Ayleth? Daughter of Millicent—or you would have been, had the coven fire accepted your sacrifice.”
My skin prickles. The mirrors gleam, like so many eyes in the torchlight. He’s been watching me. For how long? Does he have an army of crows circling the realm, reporting back? And how many more of his minions are in the palace, like Marion, their hearts bound behind glass? Is this why I glimpsed the countess in the mirror when Jacquetta and I were exploring her chambers? It wasn’t a hallucination—it was Marion herself, reaching out from her prison and urging me to run. I should have listened.
“But we’re starting off on the wrong foot.” Ignatius rolls his shoulders back, his expression smoothing. “This isn’t how I want our relationship to begin.”
Relationship? He’s lost his mind. In the corner of my vision, the jeweled handle of my knife glints where it fell. I start to edge toward it, but the shadows thicken and the Nevenwolf growls. I press myself closer against the wall, that force inside me humming. It’s everything I can do to keep it contained.
“First, I owe you my thanks,” Ignatius goes on. “As you likely surmised, my own search of the queen’s rooms proved somewhat frustrating. And I might have run into considerable difficulty if anyone else had discovered my little secret.”
He holds up the illustrations I’d dug out of the tapestry. His secret. So it was Ignatius in that ancient drawing. He’s immortal, or near enough. I don’t even want to know the sort of magic that would allow such a thing.
“Like you, Queen Sybil was a clever woman. Determined.” He lights a candle and then feeds the parchment to the flame. “Once, I thought we might work well together. But she, evidently, disagreed. It’s a shame when our strengths prove to be our downfall.”
I watch the edges of the illustrations blacken and curl. Are those drawings what Queen Sybil had been trying to show me before the shadows claimed her?
They always hear, she’d whispered, frantic.
The Nevenwolf rumbles a growl, as if in confirmation. Shadows waft from its body, curling toward me—exactly as they had in the queen’s room. And that’s when I realize—they are the shadows from that day. All this time, I believed I was responsible for the queen’s death. But it wasn’t me luring the Nevenwolf. It was Ignatius. He must have been watching us through his stolen mirrors. He knew what the queen was about to tell me and silenced her.
“You killed her,” I say, numb.
Ignatius doesn’t deny it. Instead, he smiles, all teeth.
“You see? That’s the sort of intelligence I knew you possessed. It’s a pity you’ve only just started using it. I expected you to piece all this together long ago—as soon as you tasted the thornapple in your wine, in fact. After all, I was sitting right next to you at that dinner. But I didn’t even cross your mind as a suspect, did I?”
The wine. By the Spirits, of course. It would have been simple for him to switch our glasses. The ridges of my ears burn at my own carelessness.
“And I left so many other clues. The thornapple in the queen’s rooms, Nox in the forest, Marion’s comb.” He counts them off on his fingers. “I practically begged you to come to me after the hunt. But I suppose my disguise worked too well.”
My mind spins with all these details—moving pieces I’d been too naïve and oblivious to see. Rhea would have guessed it, though. She’d have known better.
“Why?” I manage. “Why bother with the mystery?”
“Daughter of Millicent or not, you can’t expect everything to be handed to you, Ayleth,” he reasons. “Besides, I wanted you to prove yourself worthy of our partnership.”
“I want nothing to do—”
He holds up his hand. “Don’t be so quick to reject me. You haven’t yet seen what I’m offering. I did promise you a reward, did I not?”
He’s even more of a lunatic than I realized if he believes I would accept anything from his duplicitous hand. But Ignatius steps closer. He unclasps the chain draped around his shoulders. As soon as he does so, the ruby Eye shifts. Its color darkens to a deep red, flecked with green and black. The shape of what I assumed was a single, huge jewel splits into several—five. Roughhewn ovals that gleam in the torchlight, exactly like the one in Millicent’s portrait.
“The Bloodstones,” I whisper, hardly feeling the words leave my lips.
They’re real—not the dyed pieces of glass tossed out in the White City. I can sense them, a deep, undulating power that resonates in my very bones. How had I not felt it before? Not known that they’d been here the whole time, close enough to touch?
“They speak to you, don’t they?” Ignatius asks. “I knew they would, given your lineage.”
But there’s something else beneath the low hum of the Bloodstones’ power, like cutting open a piece of fruit to find it rotten and worm-ridden. Every nerve in my body rebels.
“What have you done to them?”
“Improved them,” Ignatius replies smoothly. “Made them my own. And together, we can make them ours. Yours.”
That deep urge rises up, hungry and insistent. “That’s not possible.”
He tilts his head at me. “Just like it isn’t possible for me to command a Nevenwolf?”
The beast prowls nearer. That invisible tether pulls taut, like calling like. I fight against it.
“Or for me to do this?” Ignatius snaps his fingers. “Marion, get on your knees and beg Ayleth’s forgiveness.”
The former courtier, who has been drifting, wraithlike, along the shelves, instantly sinks to the floor. “Forgive me. I’m so very sorry. Please, forgive me.”
“Tell her you are nothing,” Ignatius prompts.
“I am nothing,” Marion parrots, her mirrored eyes fixed on me. “Nothing at all. I—”
“Stop!” I shout, clapping my hands over my ears.
“Why?” Ignatius’s robes whisper on the stone floor as he approaches. “Doesn’t it feel good to see her like this? Does she not deserve such a fate?”
That dark part of myself whispers that yes, she does, especially after every unkindness and cruelty she’d bestowed upon me. But I shove that down.
“It’s not right.”
“Says who?” Ignatius lifts an eyebrow. “The covens? The Ancients? What good did those witches ever do for you? You’re here alone, Ayleth.”
The wound of my coven’s—of Jacquetta’s—rejection opens and bleeds.
“If you’re going to kill me, just do it,” I say through clenched teeth.
“Kill you?” He laughs. “You mistake me. I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. We’re going to accomplish great things together.”
“And what great things could I have accomplished in the dungeon? You were quick enough to send me there. Let me rot for days.”
“You have my apologies for that.” He presses a hand to his chest. “And it was only a temporary arrangement. After all, I had little choice in the matter, seeing as the king received that note. I take it your companion wrote it?”
She betrayed you, that voice whispers.
I dig my fingernails into the skin of my palms, fighting the sting of tears.
“As I said before,” the High Priest continues gently, “you and I have more in common than you might care to admit—both of us shunned by the flames. Cast out by our covens. Deserted by those we allowed into our hearts.”
If he thinks to gain my trust with such a speech, he’s sorely mistaken. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“No?” A corner of Ignatius’s mouth lifts. “I know what it means to have a door slammed in my face. To be convinced of my own worthlessness. That is, until I discovered my true purpose.”
“Butchery?” I throw at him, ignoring my own good sense.
His amber eyes glitter. “Justice.”
The word crackles through my blood, stirring that deep impulse.
“I see I’ve captured your interest.” Ignatius returns to his worktable. “When the flames rejected me, I was desperate to prove myself—convince the Spirits to change their minds. But then I met others like me. Like us. Those who could instruct me in the true nature of our craft.”
Does he mean Wayward witches, like Mathilde? But no. Mathilde may not have bound herself to a coven, but she wasn’t like…whatever Ignatius is.
“Soon,” the High Priest continues, “I came to understand that the teachings of the covens were nothing more than a method of control. And I refused to be controlled. I would bend magic to my will—show the covens what power truly entailed. And on the day I crossed paths with an Order priest, I knew precisely how I would accomplish it.”
The torches burn hotter.
“At that time, the covens were at the height of their power, the Order all but forgotten. I realized that I could use the faith’s obscurity to my advantage. And so I hid among those doddering priests, deciding how best to strike. Eventually, the answer came.” Ignatius holds up the Eye. “I realized that these five stones were all that bound the covens together. If I had them, I had everything. It would take time, of course. Patience and strategy. But by then, time was something I’d learned to harness. All I needed to do was wait for the right moment. It was simple, in the end. An entire age undone in a single night. The covens, for all their power, never even saw it coming.”
