Page 67 of Cursed Crowns
Once Wren returned to her bedroom in Grinstad Palace, she swept the hair out of her eyes and tucked the hand mirror safely back inside her satchel. She grinned as she set her jar of dirt on the table. “Well, that was an adventure.”
Even after eighteen years of living as a witch, she still marveled at the boundless possibilities of magic. Sometimes she could forget just how long it had lived—no,thrived—in Eana, how powerful the witches had been before Oonagh Starcrest had cursed her sister, Ortha, and shattered their craft into five different strands.
Wren blew out a breath, the knot of her anxiety uncoiling in her stomach. She was grateful for the chance to speak to her sister, though she could have done without her warning at the end. Of course Tor had meddled and tipped Rose off. But Wren couldn’t think about Tor right now. Or her sister. She had been relieved when the sapphires winked out, saving her from making a promise to Rose that she would only have to break.
Still, part of Wren wished she could have stayed with Rose in Amarach and woken in the morning to watch the sun rise over the lost towers before journeying to find the Sunkissed Kingdom together. Butthe strands of her destiny had tugged her north, and, right now, she had to concentrate on getting herself—and Banba—out of Gevra in one piece. And whether Rose approved of it or not, there was only one way to do that.
Wren had vowed to resurrect Prince Ansel, andthatwas a promise she intended to keep.
She sat at her dresser and removed a fistful of dirt. The earth glinted amber in the firelight, a whisper of ancient magic tingling against her skin. Wren smiled. This was good earth,powerfulearth—watered by the falls of Amarach.
She positioned a dead mouse in front of her and scattered a pinch of dirt over its lifeless body. She conjured a new enchantment, willing the creature to come back to life. The earth shimmered as it disappeared, but the mouse didn’t so much as twitch.
Wren huffed as she reached for more. “Rise, you useless rodent!” Another spell—tighter, shorter. Nothing. She bit off a curse as she worked on another. And then another, and another. Minutes turned to hours, the fire slowly dwindling in its grate. Wren’s patience was wearing thin, and, to make matters worse, a blistering cold had started to seep in from outside.
“This is a waste of time,” she muttered, as she slumped in her chair. She should have known it wasn’t going to be easy. It would take more than a handful of silt and a crafty rhyme to pry a spirit from the jaws of death and reanimate its stiffened corpse. If she couldn’t wake one measly mouse from the dead, how was she ever going to resurrect Ansel?
Wren tipped her head back with a groan. Once Alarik figured out she had no idea what she was doing, he would take his anger out on Banba. She had made an impossible deal with an impossible man, andthe longer she sat in her room, staring at those dead mice, the tighter his noose felt around her neck. She rolled to her feet, pacing the room to keep warm. Outside, a blizzard raged in the starless dark. The wind moaned, and the mountain creaked like an old house.
There is a darkness that moves in Gevra, echoed Banba’s voice in her head.The wind is heavy with it. It feels like old magic.Taintedmagic.
Wren’s stomach twisted. Maybe it was the dead mice or the howling blizzard, but fear was taking root in her. She knew that if she let it grow, it would douse the flame of her magic, and enchantments of any kind would soon prove impossible. She needed to see Banba again, to beg the secret of death magic from her grandmother before Wren’s incompetence destroyed them both.
She grabbed a white fur stole from the wardrobe and threw it around her shoulders to keep warm, then removed another a fistful of dirt from her jar, carefully folding most of it inside a handkerchief. She knocked on the door urgently, and when it opened the earth flew from her palm and sent Inga slumping to the ground in a heap.
Wren stepped over the soldier’s body and out onto the fourth floor of Grinstad Palace.
She retraced her journey to the dungeons from earlier that day, winding down one flight of stairs and then another, the echo of her footsteps lost in the ragged cry of the blizzard as it pounded its icy fists against the windows. They were packed with snow, the flickering hallways eerily silent. The soldiers on duty were half asleep at their posts, their beasts slumbering at their feet. It was later than Wren thought.
Before long she made it to the top of the grand atrium staircase. She paused to take in the magnificent glass dome and the sky, white and whirling, beyond it. Wren felt for a moment like she was trappedbetween a fairy tale and a nightmare, the glacial beauty of this faraway world howling as it loomed ever closer, threatening to suffocate her. She dipped her chin to assess the lower floor of the atrium and froze with her foot on the topmost stair.
The woman in white was back. Queen Valeska. It must be. Just as before she was sitting at the glass piano, as still and marbled as a statue. Pale, slender fingers rested on the keys, too light to make a sound. Wren placed a hand on the crystal banister and tiptoed to the next stair, her eyes straining to make out the woman’s face.
Why did she come here, night after night, to brood at that glass piano? Wren moved to the next stair. And then the next. She was planning to sneak around her on her way to the dungeon, but as she drew closer to her, she couldn’t look away from the pain on her face. Her strange stillness. Her—
The woman snapped her chin up, snaring Wren in her pale gaze. Wren froze. She raised one long, spindly arm, as though to skewer Wren with the point of her finger.
Alerted to the sudden stir of movement, a slumbering snow tiger poked his head out of a nearby alcove. Wren turned on her heel and tried to bolt back up the staircase, but her foot caught on the step and she stumbled, her arm flying out to stop her fall. She grabbed on to the crystal balustrade, hissing as its jagged edge cut into her palm. She quickly hauled herself up, her blood leaving behind a crimson stain as she hurried back up to the landing.
If the queen screamed or the snow tiger decided to chase Wren, she wouldn’t just lose her newly acquired dirt but possibly her life. She sprinted back to her bedroom, her breath bulleting out of her as she leaped over Inga and deftly sealed herself inside. She closed her eyesand waited, but no one came. The snow tiger hadn’t followed her.
Wren’s bedroom was darker now; the fire was nearing its last embers. She shrugged off her stole to find her blood all over it. She flung it into the corner of the room and stood beneath a sconce to examine her palm. The wound was deep, about the size of an almond, and bleeding badly. Wren winced as she pictured the incriminating trail of blood that now led from the atrium stairwell all the way up to her bedroom. She slumped onto her bed.
Wren wished Rose was with her. Not just because she missed her sister more than she thought she would, but because Rose was a healer. Now she would have to make do with her own wits. She returned to the dresser in search of cloth to bind her wound. The dead mice looked eerie in the dimness, their white fur matted with dirt.Wasted dirt, thought Wren sourly. And they were beginning to reek. She wrinkled her nose as she rifled through the top drawer, leaving her left hand palm up and still bleeding on the dresser. Her pinkie finger absently brushed against a mouse, sending a sudden shock of heat through her.
Wren froze. The fingers on her injured hand were tingling. And the blood itself... Wren blinked, just to be sure, but there was no denying it. Her blood wasglowing. Her stomach lurched as she tried to make sense of the soft red glimmer that now emanated from her skin. Her eyes focused on the dead mouse lying beside it; its fine white whiskers, its curling pink tail, but her mind was miles away, back in the Amarach Towers, and the voice in her head was not her own. It belonged to Rose.
Don’t you remember what happened to Oonagh Starcrest when she turned to human sacrifice?You cannot play with death, Wren. It’s forbidden.
Wren stared at her bleeding palm, feeling magic tingle beneath it. If human sacrifice resulted in the most potent magic—the kind that hadtoppled an entire empire of witches, then what could a single drop of blood do? Not just human blood but witch blood.
Herblood.
Suddenly, the answer was obvious.
“Blood magic,” whispered Wren, recalling what the old seer, Glenna, had told her before her death. One thousand years ago, Oonagh Starcrest had turned to blood magic to become more powerful than her sister, Ortha. She began with animal blood, but in time she had turned to human blood. Human sacrifice.
Wren sat bolt upright, remembering that Banba had said something similar down in the dungeons.