The time she had cast the sleeping spell on Beau, she’d been struck by how instantly it took effect. There had been no yawning, no heavy eyelids, no graceful slump into a chair. No sooner had the whisper left her lips than Beau’s head had connected to the floor with an audible crack.
The Mada fell the same way. One moment she was standing, and the next she was lying on her back on the turret floor. No scream. No moan. Just small wisps of dust rising in the air and the vibration fr
om her collapse still traveling through Anouk’s ankles. The thunk had been heavy enough to cause the crows perched outside to take wing.
The witch’s eyes were open. Empty. Her chest did not rise and fall.
Not a sleeping spell this time.
It was the second time in three days Anouk had seen a dead witch. She’d thought of them as invincible. Next to witches, she had always felt like a fluttery little gnat beside ancient willows—?an inconsequential, ephemeral thing. And yet she had outlived both Mada Vittora and Mada Zola. She had mourned the death of the first; the death of the second brought her only a feeling of increasing dread, a tightening hollowness where her pulse should have been, because the crown prince of the Shadow Royals did not take a witch’s life and spare hers without a reason.
“Now that it’s just the two of us,” Prince Rennar said, rolling up his shirtsleeves over sinewy forearms, “I really think you should reconsider my offer.”
Chapter 38
Seven and a Half Hours of (New) Enchantment Remain
The witch’s body blocked Anouk’s path to the door. There would be no escape; in the time it took for her to move one step, Rennar could send her tumbling to the floor with lifeless eyes just like Mada Zola. A gust of wind blew through the turret windows, carrying notes of lavender and ash.
To be a crow, she thought with a stab of longing. Able to take wing and fly away.
But that was impossible too. Even the crows were under Rennar’s control.
Rennar clutched at his right leg, wincing. Anouk frowned. She hadn’t seen any injury; there had been no bullets or falling objects. But his fingers pressed against his thigh as though something inside were fighting to tear through, and a memory came to her. Once, in a fit of anger, Mada Vittora had used magic to kill a Pretty who’d knocked her over in the street. Almost at once, the vitae echo had doubled back on her, crumpling her body like cardboard, and she’d clutched her side in that same grasping way. Later, Anouk had overheard Luc researching herbs that might reverse a liver turned to clay.
Sweat dripped from Rennar’s brow. His breath was coming fast. Slowly, he let go of his leg and straightened, but there was something unnatural to the way he stood now, as though the leg weren’t a leg anymore but something heavy and stiff, like stone.
“The vitae echo,” she said, realizing what had happened. “Because you took a life.”
His only answer was a grimace.
“Why?”
He knelt next to the fallen witch. With a touch of powder on his lips and a whisper, the golden bracelet around Mada Zola’s wrist fell to the floor. He picked it up, pooled it in his palm. “Because she isn’t the princess I need.”
His eyes met hers, and she felt a jolt of dangerous exhilaration.
“You are, Anouk.”
She nudged the witch’s body with her toe and spat, “No, merci, I’ve seen what you do to your brides.”
His lips curved. “Fair enough, but remember that your raw magic is far more powerful than mine. You could kill me ten times over before I’d even get out the first syllable of a whisper. Once you’re trained, that is.”
Behind him, the caged mouse who had been Luc twitched its whiskers anxiously, its big black eyes fearful. Rennar didn’t spare it a glance. Her anger solidified once more. He didn’t care about Luc or anyone else but himself.
“Your time is over,” she said firmly.
His eyes flashed their dark sheen. “So young you are. The world must seem so clear to you, like black-and-white drawings in a book. I envy that certainty. Don’t you think I have asked myself countless times if our time has passed? Each surge of Pretty development, I have watched their ingenuity with respect and thought that, perhaps, at long last, they were ready to stand on their own. And yet each time, I’ve also been witness to the catastrophic results. Do you know what coincides with each of their advancements?”
She didn’t answer, nor did he seem to expect her to.
“War. Pretty wars that have nothing to do with us. War between Pretties who have and those who haven’t, between those who believe in gods and those who don’t, between those who live on the sides of a border they invented. Those wars led to massive deaths, poverty, and inequality that we have been trying to rebalance ever since. But every time we shape a better world for the Pretties, their instinct is to drive it into chaos again. That’s their nature. They are like children governed by primal emotions—?jealousy, fear, greed. If we didn’t control them, they would destroy themselves.”
He poured the golden bracelet from palm to palm in a way that made a soft, musical jangle that she found oddly hypnotic—?until reason snapped her back to herself.
“The Haute is no better,” she spat. “The Goblins live like paupers.”
“The witches oversee the Goblins, not I.”