Magic was unspooling, twisting out of the mayor’s control.
Voices rose from the crowd. “The Fangal!” Their horror was replaced with awe.
Behind her, the prince huffed in exasperation. The binds were giving him a difficult time. Even Brunie joined in, gnawing at the rope.
A shaky voice sang above the rest, “The Fangal demands sacrifice!”
Their god.
The once-mayor continued his revolting transformation. The vapor began to coalesce beneath him in a dull, ominous pool of black tar. The itch on Risa’s neck was insistent now, forewarning the incoming storm she could not stop.
Except—
While she had no magic, she did have words.
“Is this your god? Is this who you’ve been sacrificing for?” Risa’s tremulous voice thundered over the enraptured crowd. “Is this a blessing, or a curse?”
A voice cut through the square. “Curses are propagated by witches in order to control the populace! Beware the witch state. ReadDisputation on the Power and Magic of Witchlings!”
It sounded a lot like Maria.
An older, shawl-clad woman snapped out of her reverie anddragged Maria from the crowd. “What have I told you about books?” she admonished. “Girls can’t read.”
Maria was right about one thing: Curseswereabout control. And the festival, the maiden, even the knight—those were their own kind of curse. One held over this town for centuries, reinforced by the townspeople’s beliefs. Their happiness, their cloudless skies—all of it was to keep them sedated.
Everything made sense now.
“You’ve been sacrificing young women for a god’s own sick delight, immortalizing a curse that forces you to live in eternal sunshine, to be happy, to never question his power, to never have any power of your own.”
“Don’t listen to her!”
The voice had shed all pretense of humanity. It sounded like fingers scratching against a blackboard, the scraping of branches against a window. A storm crashing against a small boat in the middle of an ocean, ancient trees groaning under the viciousness of a violent wind. The mayor was gone, and in his place stood a shapeless form made of shadows.
The Fangal had sloughed off its shell.
Now Risa knew what she’d felt from her first step on the bridge. The tingling of magic at work, trying to remake the world in a way that was wrong. Terrifying power had amassed in Cairn, had seeped through the cracks and taken hold of the town, forcing its people to remain unwitting and vulnerable. This was far-reaching magic. Colossal in comparison to the small pond of magic she’d felt from Brunhilda. The Fangal’s magic was trying to tear her open from the inside out.
Prince Javi sucked in a breath as her binds finally fell away.
“That’s your Fangal!” she shouted, pointing at the rippling dark form. Essence dripped onto the platform, wood hissing on contact. Alarm rose from the crowd; gone were the adulation and the wonder. Now the people of Cairn were attempting to back away from the platform as one. “He’s forced you to kill for this. For his greed, for his thrill. It wasn’t enough to be a god. He wantedhumanity.”
The shadow of the Fangal trembled with anger, turned its unseeing face toward the twins. “Kill her!” it demanded. But the twins fell back, eyes wild with terror. “Without spilled blood, I will die!”
“You were right before,” Prince Javi said, hand at her elbow. “We need togo.”
Risa dug her heels in and shrugged out of his grip. She had spent her entire life being called a Bad Thing. Accused of being a monster hiding in the body of a girl. Here was a monster. Duping people into sacrificial murder for what? Control? Greed? A year of feeling the heat on borrowed skin? The answer was immaterial; no reason would be enough to warrant what had been done.
It was as if a veil had lifted. Her vision sharpened. She saw the monster clearly, how its writhing shape was made of thousands of tendrils and vines of smoke. She could follow them much like she followed the lines of her own face when she stared in a mirror, trying to find the crack that revealed her own monstrous nature.
Shedestroyedthings. And if this was the only gift she could give, then it would count for something.
“You’re nothing without their devotion,” Risa told the Fangal as the former god screeched. She focused on a tendril of shadow and pulled at it with her mind as if it were a weed that needed getting rid of. She felt it give, felt it unravel, felt it pull with it more weeds, more tendrils. She egged on the destruction, imagining the collapseof the monster’s hold on Cairn like withered vines turning to dust. “All things have to end.”
The Fangal’s shadow body blew out like a candle. Another shriek came from the crowd as Miss Rivera turned into a wisp. The hollow, echoing screams of hundreds of girls rose up into the air before the cacophony abruptly cut out.
The Fangal was gone.
Prince Javi tugged at her elbow, insistent, blond hair damp against his temple. It made her head ache.
