Malice, Heather Walter [hardest books to read txt] 📗

“If I can open that door, you can. There’s nothing keeping you here.”

“No. I—” He looks at the halo of light at the entrance like a drowning man spotting a piece of driftwood. A muscle flickers in his jaw. “I am bound to the darkness of this tower.”

A wave pounds against the cliff. That’s impossible. But I study the charcoal shadows twining around his ankles, clutching him as tightly as chains. His dark cloak, rippling slightly in a current of wind incongruous to the breeze I feel. The way he is so careful not to step into the shafts of dappled sunlight sneaking through the cracks in the roof. My mouth goes dry.

An enchantment. But who and, most important—“Why?”

“A punishment.” He winces.

“For what?” I press. “It would take strong magic to bind you here. Surely you did something worth remembering.”

“It is strong magic,” he confirms. And I note the rigid set of his shoulders. His shadows sharpen to spears. “I—it was during the war.” He sinks to his knees, one hand clutching his chest. “Please, I cannot say. It is forbidden.” A horrible gurgling sound escapes him.

“All right.” I rush forward before I can stop my feet, understanding flooding through me in a rush. “The enchantment keeps you from speaking of it?”

He nods, gulping down air.

“Dragon’s teeth,” I whisper, kneeling beside him. A tingling suspicion raises the hair on my nape. The only creatures I know to be capable of such magic are the Fae. But they can only summon light magic—surely not this sort. Even so, I have no desire to trifle with them, one in particular. And yet—if the stranger’s crime was so terrible, he would be known. There would be chains and guards and locks. I wouldn’t be able to just stroll inside his prison on a Friday afternoon. “You mentioned a war. Do you mean the War of the Fae?”

He grunts something like assent. And he must, for there isn’t any other war in Briar’s history. But that was centuries past. And this man has been rotting in here ever since? It’s impossible. And yet…here he is.

“Does the enchantment keep you from telling me your name?”

“K—” He heaves a ragged breath. “Call me Kal.”

“Kal.” I test the name on my tongue. “I’m Alyce.”

After a few more hacking coughs, Kal calms. He looks at me, a fine line wrinkling his forehead. “You look. No. It cannot be.” He scrunches his eyes closed and opens them again. Without warning, he seizes my forearm and yanks me toward him.

“Let me go!” But he’s stronger than I imagine. And so painfully cold. Like frosted steel through the sleeve of my dress.

He examines the tracks of green on my wrist. “You are Vila.”

An all-too-familiar shame trickles down the back of my throat. “Half.”

“Your mother. Who was she?” His grip tightens.

“I don’t know,” I admit, heat burning in my cheeks. Perhaps this man is telling the truth about his captivity. Even the youngest child in Briar knows the story of the Dark Grace, and I don’t appreciate being made to retell it. “She left me. When I was an infant.”

“Twenty years ago.”

A cold that has nothing to do with Kal prickles across my shoulder blades. The sea crashes outside. “How do you know that?”

He smiles, a real smile this time. He glows with it. “Because I knew her. Lynnore.”

The breath leaves my body. Lynnore. For twenty years I’ve wondered, haunted by the specter of parents who abandoned me near the harbor like I was no better than a basket of rotting fish. I pictured my mother a hundred thousand ways. Weak and destitute, hoping someone would take pity on her cursed child. Indifferent and shrewd, willing to cast me off for her own gain. Terrified and lost, having birthed a defective Grace and too afraid to claim it.

And now those ghosts have a name: Lynnore.

“Why should I believe you? My mother left me to die in an alley. If you were her friend, then—”

“She did not leave you.” The prisoner’s black eyes flash. “Lynnore entrusted you to a woman in the Common District, where you would be safe while she came here to help me. Free me from this tower. And then we were going to leave together—all of us.”

A wind whistles through the cracks in the stone. The fishmonger. He could have had a wife. I imagine the woman waiting with me as the hours ticked by, apprehension building. And then, when my mother never came back for me, she panicked. Her husband would have wanted nothing to do with a hideous infant and her unknown powers, and so he delivered me to the Grace Council. Which means my mother might have walked these very stones. Smelled the salt and the mold and the reek of fish. It takes me a moment to find my voice and I struggle to disguise how much Kal’s words have affected me.

“She was—she was Vila?”

“Only partly. Like you. Oh, Alyce. I can see her in you. The same mouth and nose.” He lifts my hand. “The same fingers.”

I remove myself from his grasp and retreat farther into the sunlight. “Why would she have wanted to help you?”

Hurt flits across Kal’s features—an expression I know well from the number of times I’ve been brushed off or shoved aside—but he continues. “They did not know about her Vila blood. She disguised it well. And she found me here, much as you just did. We were kin, in a way, as both of us hailed from Malterre. And she understood the cruelty of this prison. No one deserves this fate.”

“But how did she hide from the Fae ambassador? I couldn’t.”

Endlewild.

A full-blooded Etherian appointed to the royal household and tasked with holding together the alliance between the Fae courts and Briar. It was he who recognized my Vila blood when I was dumped in the lap of the Grace Council. He who led the experiments to see if I was Vila enough to kill, or just a darker version