Page 6 of Mortdale

“We have a pact. It’s one of the conditions.” Vampires were not disloyal. When they swore on their saintly Chronicle, sealed it in blood, they would stand true to their word. They took that stuff pretty seriously.

“They seem to have found their way around it, as baptised witches are buried in their soil. They are under no obligation to give them back then. It is in the fine print.”

“Baptised?”

“Forcibly, I presume. No half-honourable witch would take their vows of magical abstinence. That’s self-inflicted horror.” She braced her hands on the tea table, slowly crawling closer to me. Her dark brown eyes paced between mine as she put a finger to my chin and raised it. “If only I could get someone in there to see what this mysterious illness looks like.”

I shook my head. “No one would make it even past the Silver Wood. There are hunters stationed by the edges of the forest looking for witch meat to sell on the black market.”

Or so Ethel had told me. She’d come across one herself in one of her many drunken escapades. And for someone who doesn’t terrify too easily, that one encounter had frightened her straight. Silver Woods was essentially a strip of no man's land. Uncontrolled by any guard or police. Unmanned and unsubjected to any laws. It was finders, keepers, slayers and shooters in there.

And even if you could make it past the woodland, there was another more pressing matter. Though vampires and witches had been sharing a border and a pact for hundreds of years, they had not been entirely peaceful hundreds of years. There was no trade of ours passing through their lands besides the weapons we sent to the vampire king, and most of our kind caught on their lands almost always ended up being sent back cut up in tiny little pieces and boxed up neatly in the finest of silks. Their king had a grisly sense of humour for someone so extremely pale.

“Besides,” I added, “tampering with the pact would mean tampering with peace. We’d start a war with the vampires.” Though we both knew that if war came again, the Blood Chalice curse would be the lesser evil.

She stood and stopped by a window, tucking a long dark strand of curls behind her ear. “That is not what I meant, Willow.” She sighed as she traced a line down the fogged glass. “Moira isn’t marrying the Duke of Darkheim tonight.”

I blinked fast. “Which red maiden is marrying him?”

“You are.”

The mirror above the mantelpiece cracked in half, breaking the stiff silence that fell between us.

A nervous laugh slipped past my lips before I could seal them shut. I stared at her, my mouth a little agape. “M-me?” For some odd reason, despite the madness of it all, my eyes dropped down my dress. I wasn’t scared of vampires, or worried about an unhappy married life—not even taking into consideration I didn’t know exactly how much of it I had left. But I wasn’t homely, and I was surely not handsome. I’d started turning grey at a very young age. My eyes were a little too big, I'd been told. Too unsettling and a brown so dark so they looked black, so I’d eventually taught myself not to stare at things for long. And I didn’t think I owned a single proper gown. Everything I wore had been modified for comfort, to help me move around my work room—not to mention stained with blood, bile, formalin, and whatever else only Lady Death knew. I had never thought I’d be anyone’s wife. I didn’t even look like I could be anyone’s bride. The closest I’d gotten to a man that I’d not examined posthumously was to pay the carriage fare. I didn’t know how to talk to them. How did one talk to them? They were entirely untalkable creatures, grunting and groaning all the time. I couldn’t grunt or groan for the life of me. How would I ever communicate with him? Lady Death! I’d never speak again. Sure, I’d spent time with a vampire before. But the vampire had been long dead, and the only conversation I’d managed to have with it was an autopsy report.

The only words I could muster were, “I am not a red maiden. They’d know something is wrong with me.”

With a sigh, Agnes lowered her teacup of sherry onto the table and looked at me with a pair of imploring brown eyes. “I cannot send another girl to die in their hands. Moira is too weak to be wed to Logan Duncan and we both know it. Her fate will be the same as the others.” She took my hands in hers. “You are not a red maiden, but you are also not just any witch, Willow. You’ve handled creatures and monsters of all sorts without using a lick of magic, and I trust that you out of everyone will be able to deal with this one. Far better than any of my other girls could ever. I want you to find out why and how they have been killing our sisters. I want this to stop now. The Duke of Darkheim is the commander of the king’s guard, so his position is one of the highest in Mortdale’s parliament. If there’s any news at all, it will pass by him first. If someone is hurting our sisters, he’d be the first to know something about it.” She pulled my hands closer to her as she brightly whispered, “I hear the king trusts him with his life. This would be our only opportunity to ever get this close.”

“And then what?” I asked, sounding a little breathless. “If I find out who has been hurting the red maidens, what is it that you want me to do?”

“I want you to kill them.”

Just as the room started spinning, Agnes let go of my clammy hands. “You’re the only one I trust can do this.” She stood, pacing back and forth in front of the window, her long delicate fingers lacing and unlacing. “No one knows anatomy and ailments and poisons better than you. You have the knowledge of how to block one singular alchemical node and make it look like they died of a common cold. You can convince someone they’ve died of nail fungus, for Lady Death’s sake! If there were no peace in Epiron, you’d be a weapon. Such a waste of good talent.”

“Talent,” I emptily echoed, staring into the depths of my teacup where leaves had sunk to weave a treacherous path of fate.

I jumped back when she landed on her knees before me, taking my hands in hers again. “You will not suffer long in their hands.” Her hand rested against my shoulder, over where my witch’s mark was covered. “You’re way past its due course. No one has ever survived a malediction as long as you have. I suspect your pain won’t drag on for much longer. Your sacrifice would save so many more.”

I forced a smile, hoping to mask the agony that’d been maturing in my heart for so long. No one was more disposable than I was. And I was a sacrifice she was willing to make.

Her fingers came under my chin. “You will do it, won’t you? You’ve always been such a good, obedient girl.” She dragged a hand through my hair. “You and Ethel, both. Such good, obedient girls.”

My attention snapped back to hers.

Her nails dug into my jaw. “When I saved you two—”

“You bought us,” I interrupted her. “You didn’t save us from anything. You bought us with money.” Two young witches in an orphanage full of humans were worth more dead than alive. It was a miracle that the matrons had even let us live there for so long. Untrained witches were a liability. So much chaos in one little body with no outlet. Point somewhere wrong, stare at someone too long, touch something that doesn’t belong to you, and you’d risk killing someone. We’d been only seven years old when Agnes had shown up at the orphanage’s doors and bargained with the headmistress like we’d been a couple headless chickens for her next stew.

“Then you must remember what our deal was. Ethel was and still is worthless to me and the Crimson Weaver. Her magic doesn’t weigh even in pennies; she hasn’t been able to cast a proper spell in the nineteen years she’s lived and trained with our coven. It was you I wanted back then.” She smiled softly, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Such a special girl you were. You agreed that if I bought Ethel, too, you would always do what I asked of you. You’d do anything.”

The threat was not even mildly veiled. She’d told me plainly that she’d discard Ethel at the nearest hour if I didn’t marry the duke. And a covenless witch was better off dead than alive. Covensteads made deals with humans and merchants, to keep us safe and grant us passages through the city zones. They housed and fed us and found us employment. Meridian was our city, but no one would employ a witch without a coven token. Too much of a liability. And witches were born marked; it was not like we could hide it.

I pushed her hand off my face. “I will do it. But I want reassurance that Ethel will be safe and protected even when I am gone—even when I die. That she will have a home here forever.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” she said, making a cross over her heart, a slow smile stretching on her face.

“When?”