“You’re accepting? You admit you need me?” I gaped. I hadn’t expected such a quick victory.
“Don’t push it,” he said, his irises a hard violet, as if steeped in ice, while he released my wrist and cleared his throat. “You’ll have to prove your worth before I admit to anything. You’ll have to improve, until you’re able to create a recipe for me.”
I sat back down. “What kind of recipe?”
He tilted his head, just a fraction, as though measuring my reaction. “A recipe made with sucremort.”
I froze. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs refused air, and my sugar-skin bristled. Something cracked. Maybe me.
“No…” The word slipped out strangled. “That’s not possible. The sucremort is forbidden. It’s… it’s cursed. It doesn’t exist.”
Even speaking the word left a metallic tang on my tongue.
“It does exist,” the sorcerer cut in. “Every magic has its opposite. The sucremort was born from an apple rotted to its core and the cruelty of men.”
Nyla had told me about the sucremort. A sugar you don’t cook, you don’t tame. A sugar you shouldn’t even think about. Violet sugar that healed nothing. That fed nothing. A sugar that bred only suffering, evil, and destruction.
He leaned toward me, his smile as lethal as that sugar. “And with the sucremort, I want you to make the elixir that will kill me.”
My heart dropped out of my chest like a stone. “But…” I choked out, frowning. “I don’t want to do that.”
“And I don’t want you here. Yet here we are,” he pressed, tapping the table with his fingers. “Either I die or you die from your curse. And between the two of us, you seem far more attached to life than I am.”
“Why do you want this?”
“There’s that damned verb again, ‘want.’”
A knot seized my throat, locking my whole body still.
“Fine. Let me explain. I’m going to kill the Wish Witch. And to do that, I need to take back my human heart.”
My fingers fidgeted, fumbling to piece together the fragments piling up in my mind. “She… has your heart?”
The sorcerer rolled his eyes, exasperated. “Yes. She clings to it the way humans cling to their toys.”
“But… what does that have to do with your death and sugar?”
“If you’d stopped interrupting me every two seconds, I’d get there faster.”
I pressed my lips together.
“The more I use my magic, the further I damn myself. When I kill her, I’ll become a Cursed forever. So your elixir will kill me before I become a mindless creature, condemned to wander for eternity. You understand, don’t you? No one would want such a fate.”
I stared at him, mouth parted. The Cursed were born of black magic fused into them. But for Arawn and me, it was different. We bore the curse from within. Confectioner and sorcerer, hearts forged of magic and sugar. The greater the heart, the more rot there was to consume. Our very essence turned against us until nothing remained.
Suicidal. That was what it was.
Suicidal… yet, somehow heroic, for a sorcerer I had judged selfish until now.
“And with my heart,” he said, “Zelda will be able to control me in my monstrous form. That’s what she wants. That’s why I must destroy that useless thing.”
I nearly choked. This sorcerer was even more insane than I thought. “You want… to destroy your own heart?”
“It’s useless to me.” He shrugged. “I refuse to be anyone’s puppet.”
“And what if you tried to get it back to lift your curse?”
He burst into a harsh laugh, drawing every Spirit’s eyes to us. “It wouldn’t work. Only a monster can defeat another monster. And besides, who would want to become weak again, like your kind?”
