He kept moving toward me, smoothly, unhurriedly, and I kept moving backward.
“Ah, Sylvester,” the king said. “Sylvester’s magic is ... chaotic. It’s a shame. I had high hopes for him. I tried over and over again to create a male magic-worker, but I’m afraid all my experiments had to be discarded.”
All his experiments. Each one a human child.
“Sylvester was the first one that worked,” he said. “Or seemed to work. He is certainly powerful but lacks the discernment and focus of his sisters. He seems squeamish about performing his duties, and his spells often go awry. Snagging you, for instance. Still, without him, I wouldn’t have you, so his clumsiness is good for something after all. We’ll have to see if he is worth sustaining after I have finished here, or whether it would be better for him to ... retire.”
The way he said “retire” made me think he didn’t mean to a nice little cottage in the woods.
“What are you going to do with him?” I asked sharply.
The king did not answer me, but stood turning the little jar in his hands, smiling a little. “We will need to use both halves of your heart, eventually. Clarissa did a neat job of bisecting it, and the cross section is of course very useful, but not enough.” He enfolded the jar within one of his elaborate sleeves, and it disappeared.
“Give that back!” I shouted, but my voice rang hollow, and he knew it. I could do nothing. I felt the terrible miasma of his magic creeping around me—a sickening, head-muddling blend of fog and sharp-pointed malice slowing everything down, my heartbeat, my breath, my thoughts. It was worse than Clarissa’s magic—there was no dark beauty, no false hope in it.
I knew it was useless to run, but I ran anyway, as you run in nightmares, your legs heavy. With each stride, I slowed further. I heard the king chuckle a little as I passed him, and I felt his gaze on my bloodied back—a cat allowing the mouse to scurry a little, for sport.
I was almost to the door when it flew open. I flinched back, expecting guards, or another of the sorceresses, but it was Sylvester, with Cornelius perched on his shoulder, tail lashing.
Sylvester was wearing his many-caped black traveling coat, and it flew out about him in a wind I couldn’t feel, a wind that lifted the hair from his scalp and blew the hem of my underdress about my ankles.
“Sylvester,” said the king in a surprisingly calm voice. “Do not be a fool.”
I saw that Sylvester had a handful of jars of his own, hanging from his belt.He’s come to finish me off,I thought madly.He wants to be the one to do it.
“Let her go,” he said to his father. Then he looked past the king to the still form of Clarissa on the floor, and a flash of emotion I couldn’t quite identify passed over his face.
The king took advantage of that moment to raise his hands and send a pulse of sickness toward his son, a nauseating heave of air like the heave you give before you vomit. The air smelled of poison. I was now completely frozen, suspended in the fog, like one of the hearts in the golden oil, my limbs stiffening and losing their life even as I expended all my energy trying to force them to move.
“You will throw your life away for this peasant girl, then?” said the king. He swept a glance over me. “Strange tastes you have.”
“I have no life to throw away,” retorted Sylvester. “You took it from me long ago and left me with this poor semblance instead.”
The king huffed a laugh. “A poor semblance? You live in luxury of which none other of my subjects could even dream. You and your sisters command more power than anyone but me. If only you would just learn to use it properly, rather than wasting your time on silly toys.”
“I tried,” said Sylvester. By now I was completely frozen, my eyes fixed open and unblinking, and I could only stare at him through their clouding surface. “I tried to learn. I tried to please you. And gods know Clarissa tried to teach me, for all the good it did her.” Another unreadable, flickering glance at her body.
“Don’t be foolish,” said the king coldly. “Stop this nonsense. We have work to do.”
Don’t listen to him,I screamed silently through my paralyzed throat. Even my saliva had congealed in my mouth.He’ll kill you anyway, if you serve him or not. Clarissa knew it.
Sylvester pushed back one billowing sleeve, as Clarissa had just before plunging her hand into Colin’s chest. He thrust his arm out, calling the jars of hearts from his waist to his hands and holding them, hovering about his open palm.
The hearts flared in their oil and then seemed to turn to dust. A ripple of hot, metallic air passed through the room, leaving it shimmering, and then Sylvester let the jars clank to the floor and roll away.
The king dropped to the floor. His spell released me so suddenly that I collapsed, my body tingling with pins and needles all over.
“Did you kill him?” I panted, clutching my head as my blood jumped to life again and set it pounding.
“Come,” said Sylvester, stretching out a hand. And then more forcefully, “Come!” when I did not move. “I am not powerful enough to kill him. He is sleeping. Eventually he will wake. We have to go.”
“The room is full of hearts!” I cried. “Use them! Kill him!”
“It is not that simple!” said Sylvester. “Come.”
“He still has my heart,” I said.
We stared at each other for a moment, something unreadable flaring in the sorcerer’s eyes. Then I turned and ran as quickly as I could to the king’s side.
