Witch's Pyre Read online

  Lily moved her elbows away from the wisteria. “And if you step on one?”

  “They’re smarter than that,” he assured her. “I’ve lived here my whole life and they’ve never stung me.”

  Lily relaxed a little, and then considered that maybe she shouldn’t. Watching the Worker go back to picking her way through the petals was not reassuring. They were always there. Always watching. No matter how much she wanted to find a room, lock the door, and start crying and throwing things at the wall, she couldn’t. She had to remain “calm.”

  For all the fresh air, this place is more suffocating than the oubliette, she said in mindspeak to Lillian.

  When she looked up again, Lily noticed that Toshi was standing very close to her. He seemed to notice it, too, and jerked away from her, embarrassed.

  “Well, I’m sure you’re tired,” he said, taking his leave. “Would you like me to send up some food now?”

  “Yes. Please,” Lily said, following him back inside. “And thank you, Toshi.”

  He opened the door and paused before going through it. When he looked back at Lily he seemed surprised. “It was my pleasure,” he said, and then left.

  Lily stayed at the closed door, replaying the conversation in her head.

  “Thinking of adding him to your collection?” Tristan asked. His hair was still wet from a shower and he was dressed in one of the silk tunics the men here wore, the laces at his wrists still undone. He looked furious.

  “No! I was—he was—” Lily stammered. “It’s not my fault.”

  “Forget it,” he said, turning away in a huff and going back to his room.

  “And I don’t have a collection!” Lily called after him.

  She heard him shout, “I said forget it!” from deep within the other apartment and sighed.

  Caleb came through the adjoining doors, cringing at Tristan’s wake. “That could have gone better,” he said.

  “It’s not my fault,” Lily repeated.

  “It’s a weird witch-mechanic thing. I know that,” Caleb replied. “Tristan does, too. He’s just angry that the line to you got longer.”

  “There’s no line,” Lily argued, but Caleb continued as if he didn’t hear her.

  “Don’t worry about Tristan. He’s just mad at you because it’s a convenient distraction. It’s easier to be angry at you than to be sad about, well, everything.”

  “Not here it isn’t,” Lily said, noticing that more Workers were coming in through the window. She pointed it out to Caleb and told him how the Hive had reacted when she’d started to feel anger.

  They can feel our emotions? Caleb looked disturbed.

  I doubt that, but they can certainly sense them somehow, she replied. And they don’t allow anger. Tristan’s blocking me. Tell him to calm down and show him why.

  Caleb took a moment to converse with Tristan in mindspeak, and then turned back to her. I really hate this place.

  Get ready to hate it some more.

  Lily brought Caleb out onto the balcony and showed him the ships in the harbor. She told him they were from all around world and watched as he stared at them, his breath stalled in his chest and his jaw lax with surprise. His eyes flew out over the water as he imagined other countries, other continents—all of them Woven-free.

  “How does Bower City keep the Woven from contaminating other countries?” he asked. “Because all you need is one to climb inside a crate that gets loaded on a ship—”

  “The Hive,” Lily replied. “I’m pretty sure that, apart from them, there are no Woven out west. I don’t think they let anything past them, maybe as far to the east as where they picked us up. That’s about halfway.”

  “No Woven over half of the continent,” he whispered. It was almost too much for him to accept. “How could we not know that?”

  The Workers had settled down after Tristan’s outburst. They went back to gathering nectar, buzzing in and out of the wisteria, their brightly striped bodies weighing down the blossoms.

  Toshi mentioned “restrictions” on immigration, Lily told him in mindspeak. If the Hive only allows a few people to come to the city, I doubt it lets many out.

  Caleb’s eyes angled up the edge of their roof as a Sister escaped out of his line of sight. Many—or any? he asked.

  We’ll see.

  A porter arrived with a rolling cart piled high with food, drawing Lily and Caleb back inside. The smell of hot food drew the rest of the coven out of their beds and baths and into Lily’s sitting room. While they passed plates around, Lily shared in mindspeak what she had learned from Toshi.

  Una eyed the nearest flower arrangement warily and saw a Worker waddle out of the wide throat of a bloom. She elbowed Lily and tipped her chin at it.

  Lily gave a faint nod and stood. They’d been sitting there silently for too long. “I think I’m the only one who hasn’t had a bath yet,” she said.

  Converse out loud, but be careful, she told her coven in mindspeak. I don’t know how much the Workers can or can’t understand and I don’t want the Hive to know anything private about us—especially not about where Breakfast, Una, and I come from. As far as anyone in Bower City is concerned, we come from this world.

  Does that include Toshi? Tristan asked in mindspeak.

  Lily didn’t bother to respond. She knew he was fishing for something to feel other than sad, and he needed someone to blame. It wasn’t helping matters that Lily couldn’t look him in the eye. Not yet. Not so soon after.

  She went through to the bedrooms and found that Juliet and Una had left her the largest room, and understood why when she studied the flower arrangements. The bouquets were made up exclusively of every different kind of lily that Lily could recognize. Her smile at Una’s and Juliet’s sweet gesture to leave this room for her turned hesitant as she considered whether or not their host’s flower choice had been intentional or coincidental. Lilies are commonly used in arrangements, so it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to think that this was just a happy accident. More to the point, there was no way anyone in Bower City could have known Lily’s name ahead of time. Still, it nagged at her.

  Lily undressed self-consciously while she filled the generous soaking tub. One of the casement windows had been left slightly ajar and a tall glass vase held a bunch of enormous, long-stemmed tiger lilies by the full-length mirror. Lily couldn’t see them, but she knew the Workers were there, free to come and go out the open window.

  The bath soap she drizzled into the water was so heavily perfumed it made Lily sneeze. The scent was lovely, but so concentrated she knew that her skin would smell like it for the rest of the day.

  Either the Workers liked it, or it made the people easier for the Hive to track. Either way, Lily found herself unable to enjoy it knowing that it was, somehow, for the Hive.

  As she soaked, Lily watched as the last of the burns on her hands faded away. She looked more carefully at the decanter of soap, and saw that it contained a strange chemical that was almost like the burn salve, but that she had never encountered before. The water grew cold as she tried to pick its composition apart with what she had learned of medicines. The most she could discern was that it had regenerative properties. She was so engrossed in trying to figure it out she nearly called out for Rowan to come and take a look. The thought of him stopped her breath, and she dropped the image of him as if it had stung her.

  He betrayed me.

  Lillian was listening. The memory of Rowan taking her willstones and locking her in a cage flew from Lily’s mind to Lillian’s.

  He didn’t want you to turn into me, Lillian replied. After what I did to him, can you blame him?

  Lillian shared a memory of her own . . .

  . . . I can hear Rowan coming down the hallway. Gavin is trying to stop him, but it’s like a sparrow trying to distract a bull. I’m aching to see him, and I dread it. All I want is to be held and comforted, healed and cared for by Rowan. But he can never touch me again or he’ll see. He already knows something�
�s wrong because he keeps reaching out to me and I won’t let him in my mind. If I let him touch me, he’ll see the illness I brought back from the cinder world, and there’s no way I’ll be able to keep the whole story from him. No way I’ll be able to hide what happened in the barn.

  He bursts through the door, his riding clothes still travel stained from the Outlands. He’s been looking for me since I disappeared three weeks ago and his eyes are tired and his skin is pale with worry. He’s gorgeous. My throat closes and I swallow the urge to say his name. I want to beg for him to come to me and make it all better, but I’m not a little girl anymore, and no one can make it all better ever again.

  The only thing I can do is take steps to make sure that my world doesn’t become one of the millions of cinder worlds I see closing in around us. I’ve seen that the number of cinder worlds is growing as versions of Alaric detonate their thirteen bombs inside the Thirteen Cities. It’s only a matter of time before that happens here. Unless I am ruthless.

  “Where have you been?” Rowan asks. His voice is shaking. He knows something is terribly wrong. He knows that we, and everything we ever were to each other, are over. He just doesn’t know he knows it yet.

  “I can’t tell you,” I reply.

  He laughs, like the thought of one of us not being able to tell the other anything is ridiculous. I stare at him until his face changes. “You’re serious,” he says, still not really believing it.

  He enters the room and tries to come to me. I do something I haven’t done since I was eight and he was ten. I possess his body and stop him in his tracks.

  “That’s far enough,” I whisper. When I let him go he draws a panicked breath, not because he’s winded, but to reassure himself that he can breathe again on his own.

  “What’s going on?” He’s terrified. Now he knows. I’m going to break his heart, and he has no idea why. It’s like watching someone fall—his panicked face slipping farther and farther away as he tries to hold on to nothing. I’m thin air, less than smoke, and he slides right through me.

  If I love him more than I love myself, he’ll never know. Not even when he finds out that I’ve arrested his father and sent the order to hang him at dawn . . .

  That’s enough, Lily said, ending the memory. I don’t want to think about him. She pushed the image of Rowan’s face forcibly out of her mind.

  You never want to think about him anymore.

  No. I don’t.

  Lily had shelved all thought of him since he betrayed her. The entire trip cross-country she’d skirted around the mountain of emotion any thought of Rowan entailed, and she still didn’t have the strength to climb.

  Lily got out of her bath and wrapped a thick towel around her. She opened the closet and found three light kimono-style dresses for her to choose from. As she slid her fingers across the buff-colored silk of one of them she imagined how perfectly this particular shade suited her redheaded complexion. A sapphire-blue kimono, and one more in jade green, hung next to it. She took the green one off the hanger, slipped in on, and stood in front of the mirror to tie the darker emerald obi around her waist. It matched her eyes perfectly.

  She rubbed some conditioning cream into her curls and wound them up into a twist. She stabbed the twist with one of the many ornate pins, combs, and clips that were in a tray by the sink. A strange thing to offer, she thought. Unless you knew your guest had a lot of unruly hair.

  Lily took one last look at herself, resisting the urge to sneer at the pampered woman reflected back at her. The way she looked couldn’t have been more at odds with what she felt, and the disconnect disgusted her. She wanted to look as warped as she felt.

  Hide two of your willstones, Lillian reminded her.

  Lily tucked her pink and golden stones into a fold of her obi and adjusted her smoke stone so it lay prominently on her breastbone.

  On her way out of her room, Lily passed by the bed with its crisp linen sheets and wondered why she wasn’t tired. Instead of resting, she went back out to the sitting area and found her coven fed, bathed, and dressed in their hosts’ colorful clothes. Toshi had rejoined them, and he must have just said something funny because everyone was laughing. Even Tristan, she noticed. Laughter didn’t feel right, and Lily stepped into the room irritated by the sound.

  “Lily,” Toshi said. He stood and smiled, his eyes washing up and down her. “That color looks lovely on you.”

  “I was just thinking that it’s a tricky color, jade green. You almost have to be a redhead to pull it off.” She watched Toshi carefully. “Are there many redheads in Bower City?”

  “No,” he said. “There are some fairer people of Russian descent, but mostly we have darker complexions.”

  “What an amazing coincidence, then,” Lily remarked.

  “I guess so,” he replied. There wasn’t even a flicker of discomfort in him and Lily wondered if maybe that’s all it was. Coincidence. “I was just telling your coven that I’d be happy to show you some of the city,” Toshi continued when it became clear that Lily was not going to comment further. “You seemed interested in the docks.”

  “I’d like to see them,” Juliet said.

  Lily looked around at her coven and saw that they were curious about the city. They should have been tired, but no one was. She gestured for Toshi to lead the way. He brought them down the grand staircase they had come up, but then took them in the opposite direction across the high-ceilinged entry room and out through a different door rather than going through the Hearing Hall. It let out onto a wide boulevard. Across the street was a well-manicured park, surrounded by stately villas.

  “So is this the nice part of town, or the nicer part of town?” Una asked.

  “Nice-er, I’m guessing,” Breakfast said. He waved the air toward his face and inhaled. “I smell money.”

  “Right?” Toshi flashed his ready smile, his eyes crinkling around the sides. “This area is where most of the legislators have their homes because it’s close to the Forum,” Toshi told them. “But where I grew up, we called it Bullshit Row.”

  He won a chuckle from Una and Breakfast.

  “Where’d you grow up?” Lily asked, purposely interrupting the light moment. The sound of laughter grated on her.

  “I’m bringing you near there, actually,” he said, his eyes drifting down. “We have to catch a trolley, though. It’s a long way away.”

  At the end of the block they crossed a street busy with foot traffic and waited at the curb. Lily studied the tracks that ran parallel to the sidewalk, but couldn’t find a third rail. There were no wires overhead, either.

  “What fuels the trains?” she asked.

  “They’re electric,” Toshi answered. “Rechargeable power packs on the bottom allow for about twelve hours of use before they need to visit an energy depot.”

  “And what powers the energy depots?” she asked.

  “Electricity from crucibles and witches, just like in your city,” he answered with a shrug.

  “And mechanics?”

  “Since we can’t transmute, we aid them by monitoring their bodies while they work, but mostly mechanics focus on creating new materials, medicines, and other things the city needs. We may not be claimed, but we contribute.”

  “Like the bath soap,” Lily said.

  “Interesting stuff,” Tristan agreed, his eyes hooded in thought.

  “That formula was created by a mechanic. Many years ago,” Toshi said. He watched the street as he spoke, his expression neutral—even disinterested.

  Lily smiled at the trick. The quickest way to make something seem boring is to act bored by it.

  “What else does it do?” she persisted. “Besides heal and energize?”

  “Slows aging. Helps the body fight off sickness . . .” He trailed off. “It’s something all citizens have in our baths.”

  A trolley swung into view and Toshi turned to it and pointed. “They only stop completely every fifteen blocks, but they slow enough for people to hop on and off i
f they see you waiting. Is everyone okay to jump on?”

  They all nodded their assent. As the trolley neared, it slowed just enough for their party to step up into it. Lily felt Toshi take her elbow as she hopped aboard.

  “Take the rail,” he said, guiding her hand to the brass rail that stood out at about head level.

  “What about old people, or the handicapped?” Juliet asked. “How do they get off and on?”

  “See the inside track?” Toshi pointed to a rail line that ran down the middle of the street. Awnings with benches under them were provided every few blocks and Lily saw a woman with a baby and an armload of packages waiting at one of them. “That one stops completely every five blocks. It goes much slower so it can be accessed by people who are less mobile. But we don’t really have that many people who need to use it because of an infirmity. Our medicine is quite advanced here.”

  “You got that soap,” Una said.

  “We got that soap,” he agreed, chuckling.

  Lily’s eyes fell down to his dark garnet-colored stone and guessed that he must have been part of some of the medical advances here. There was so much potential in his stone she could see it glimmering inside the facets of his willstone, like whispers shushing down a dark hallway. The train slowed for more pedestrians to jump aboard, making them sway where they stood. The motion tipped her closer to Toshi, and jarred her out of staring at his stone. She looked up to meet his eyes and saw a slow smile spreading on his lips.

  Caught, she looked away quickly and busied herself by searching the crowds for anyone that could be considered less mobile. She saw older people, but no one seemed infirm. Even the most silver-haired among the citizens had straight backs, robust complexions, and the vigorous strides of much younger people.

  So this is what you can accomplish when several generations of mechanics are free to focus on healing rather than fighting, Lillian said. Rowan would love it here.

  Lillian shared another memory of Rowan before Lily could block her out . . .

  . . . I sneak up behind Rowan. The room is darkened. His shoulders are set with concentration, and the magelight coming from his willstone is a deep red. He’s casting a complicated spell that has all of him ensorcelled. I hate that something other than me has so much of his breathtaking focus. I admit it. I’m jealous of anything that takes his eyes off me, and I’m going to punish him for it.