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I push onward. “My parents didn’t know what happened. Not for sure. My mother was too far gone when I used my magic to realize, and my father wasn’t there… I was so scared and confused, I just kept quiet. They said Linzi must have had the same sickness but it hit her all at once because she was so little. I don’t know how much they believed that, though. They didn’t know for sure what I was, but my mother definitely suspected.”
Alek’s jaw tightens. “You said she’d beat you.”
“She took the belt to me anytime she got frustrated, which was a lot, and she didn’t feel I deserved much in the way of food, and most of the time she couldn’t stand to even look at me.” I form a tense smile. “She said I brought a curse on the family. And her attitude rubbed off on Da. He loved Linzi so much, and losing her suddenly shook him hard.”
I spent so many nights huddled in the corner trying to sleep, my stomach pinching from hunger and my back throbbing from the lashes of Ma’s belt.
But none of it hurt more than the ache of loss and guilt that never left me.
Stavros’s eyes are fierce with accusation beneath the fall of his dark red hair. “Youknew what you were.”
“I figured it out,” I acknowledge. “We’d been to see a riven execution the year before, but I didn’t totally understand… The next time one was caught, I heard some of the older kids in the neighborhood talking about the kind of magic they work, and I made the connection. But I knew my power wasn’t a good thing even before then. It would tug at me, telling me other things I could do, but I just wanted it to go away.”
The former general snorts. “At seven, you had the self-control not to give in to a magic that would provide you with anything you could possibly want?”
My back goes rigid. “I killed my little sister. That’s what this fucking magic is to me. It can’t give me Linzi back, and there’s nothing I’d have wanted more. Nothingterrifiedme more than wondering what else I might lose.”
Stavros’s expression hardens, but it takes him a few seconds before he replies. “And you’re trying to tell us that you never used it again until tonight?”
“No,” I say, unable to stop an edge from creeping into my voice. “You haven’t let me finish. Unless you’d like to tell the story for me, since you’re apparently so sure of how it all happened?”
It might not be the wisest move to snap at the man most likely to send me to the gallows, but my nerves have frayed too much for me to care.
Stavros holds my gaze for several unsteady beats of my heart, with a tick of his head as he adjusts his vision. Then he waves his prosthetic hand. “By all means, continue.”
I gather myself. “Even if I didn’t use my magic again, what I’d already done with it was obviously horrible. So I didn’t want the gods noticing me. The morning of my twelfth birthday, when my parents would have taken me to a temple out of obligation to have me dedicated, I ran away. I got by on the streets by stealing and begging and finding shelter wherever I could.”
“And no magic.”
I ignore Stavros’s skeptical tone. “And no magic. Until a little more than a year later, a man cornered me in the abandoned house where I’d holed up and pushed me down and—”
My mouth presses flat before I can go on. “I’m sure you can imagine what he meant to do. I was too small and weak to fight him off, so I panicked, and I threw him off me with my magic. I wasn’ttryingto kill him, just stop him, but I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly…”
That memory is doubly sickening. The revulsion of the man’s hands pawing at my tattered clothes congeals with the horror of seeing his lifeless body, knowing I’d done it again.
At least you wouldn’t have killed anyone to kill him,Julita says in an apparent attempt at optimism.
A choked laugh hitches out of me. “That wasn’t even all of it. Ending his life made more life to balance it out, but I couldn’t control that either. All these bugs came streaming out of the walls of the house—they swarmed the whole street, got into people’s food, their gardens—people who barely had enough as it was…”
I hug myself. “I never wanted to feel like I had to use my power again. So from that point on, I did everything I could to prepare myself for whatever I might face the way I was living.”
“You learned to fight,” Casimir suggests.
“Yeah. I found a dueler who was willing to teach me in exchange for stealing various things. He trained me here and there for a few years. And I hoarded information on all kinds of subjects from listening in on conversations, reading every book I could get my hands on, studying and observing… It worked, well enough. Since that day when I was thirteen, I hadn’t given in to the magic again until yesterday when I was dying. And not for lack of it badgering me, you can be sure.”
Alek shifts forward on his perch against the desk. “You asked me about techniques for magical suppression, but you never brought it up again. That was actually for you, not stopping the scourge sorcerers, wasn’t it?”
I shouldn’t be surprised the scholar would be so quick to put those pieces together.
I meet his penetrating gaze with a half-smile. “I mean, I wouldn’t have minded if it’d been useful against them too. But I did have an ulterior motive. My power has gotten… increasingly more insistent over the past year or so. I didn’t want it distracting me. But I found the pipe fleece—it didn’t do any good that I could see.”
Julita hums to herself.Ah. A lot of things make quite a bit more sense now.
She doesn’t sound all that upset with me. But then, she’s been inside me all this time, aware of everything I’m doing. She knows I haven’t been secretly going around carrying out malicious magic behind the men’s backs.
With my confession over, I slump against the shelves. “So, what now? That’s all of it.”
“All of it?” Stavros guffaws. “Other than the fact that you could ruin more here with a snap of your fingers than the scourge sorcerers have managed to in months.”
