Treacherous Witch

—she is going to die.

The world turns slowly to mist. Even the presence of the silvertree fades. She will never say goodbye to her mother, her cousins, her aunts and uncles… Never again laugh or cry or stand proud. Never make a difference.

Her last feeling is anger at this world that’s dark and cold and unforgiving. Then the darkness seeps through into numbness, and she feels nothing ever again.

*

Her hands were like vices. They gripped Markus in a wave of pure, concentrated power that shot through his veins and straight to his heart. His eyes went wide. His cheeks red. Then an awful, constricted sound gargled out of his throat.

He clutched at her, and all she could see were the whites of his eyes, like a rabbit’s, bloodshot and wild.

“No!”

Valerie wrenched back control, stumbling away from the cell until Doryn caught her. She was gasping for breath. Her chest hurt. It didn’t seem real, any of it, the pain in her lungs, the sight of Markus collapsing into the sandy ground, the creeping awareness of that other presence inside her. The queen occupied not only her mind, but her entire body. They were like two children awkwardly stuffed into the same dress, fighting over the sleeves, tearing the fabric…

You know how to save him.

“Lady Valerie!”

Doryn turned her around—she couldn’t stop her chest heaving, as if she’d lost control of her body altogether—

Calm down. Here, let me—

Numbly, Valerie let the queen take over. Her breathing slowed. The trembling stopped. She wiped the tears from her eyes.

Doryn’s face was the picture of suspicion.

“I—” She hiccoughed. “Markus, he just collapsed—”

“Sorcery,” he growled.

Alarm shot through her. He doesn’t believe you! He already thinks I’m a liar.

Doryn snapped his fingers, and two guards rushed down into the dungeon to examine Markus. They opened the cell door. Shikra stared at the body. Still. Motionless.

One of the guards knelt down by Markus, checking his pulse.

Valerie would have held her breath. But Shikra’s hold over her body carried no such uncertainty. She already knew the answer.

“Dead,” the guard confirmed.

Let me explain! He won’t believe you!

Some of the panic in her head must have gotten to Shikra, because her body gave a little shiver. And then Shikra let go, Valerie catching her breath.

At once, shock and grief hit her like a tidal wave. Bile rose in her throat; she forced it back down. Forced back the tears, the shaking, the sheer pressing weight of everything she had done.

She looked up at Doryn. “He… He’s dead?”

“You did this,” said Doryn. “I saw you—”

“No.” She shook her head. “No, but it’s my fault, I… He made an oath.”

That confused Doryn enough to make him hesitate. She sensed the other guards watching her, their hostility pricking goosebumps on her arms.

She went on: “He swore under the light of a silvertree that he would kill Lord Avon. He swore that to me. And when I took his hands…” Her own hands trembled, the hands that had taken Markus’s life away. “He triggered the curse.”

“Curse?”

None of these men understood how magic worked. None of them knew what might or might not trigger a curse, so who were they to say that she was lying?

She stared at Doryn with plaintive, teary eyes. “I can explain. To Lord Avon. If you take me back to the palace—”

“No.” Doryn’s face hardened. “You’ll stay here until Lord Avon decides what to do with you.”

No amount of pleading would sway him. As the guards hauled Markus’s body out of the cell—she couldn’t bear to look—two more of Doryn’s men shoved her in.

Valerie sank down into the corner of the cell and buried her head in her hands.

Markus was dead.

Like the rest of her family. Everyone she had grown up with. Her entire village, lost. She’d let them die not once but twice, first when she had abandoned them on the night of the invasion to flee for her life, and second when she had refused the queen’s invitation to step through the silvertree and restore Maskamere.

Markus was dead, and there was only one way to bring him back.

What was she supposed to do? She had no power here. Shikra had set her world on fire, and she could either let it burn or cede control.

“You’re a better liar than that.”

That was Shikra’s voice, not a whisper in her mind, but somehow real. Present. Here.

Valerie shuddered.

And opened her eyes to the queen’s bedchamber. This wasn't the space that Valerie had adapted for herself, with her dressmaking tools and materials, but the room as it must have looked before she had occupied it. Shelves full of magical books, a standing golden harp playing a gentle melody, and the queen’s bed draped in red and gold silk.

And sitting on that bed…

No longer a ghost, no glowing figure with the light of the goldentree blazing around her. The queen was as solid as the room itself and more magnificent: wearing the scarlet gown that Valerie had made for her, the Kestrel’s Eye around her neck, the Masked Crown upon her head, and the Golden Sceptre in her lap.

All the trinkets that Valerie in her hubris had worn that night she’d entered the temple, imagining that she would one day be queen.

Shikra patted the space on the bed beside her. “Please. Sit.”

Valerie didn’t move. “Get out of my head.”

“I’d like to.” Shikra clasped her hands. “But first we must return to the temple.”

“You killed Markus.” Her voice trembled. “To make me go back. Stupid move. They know now, they’ll know it was you. They’ll kill us first.”

“Avon won’t kill you. If he was going to, he would have done so already.”

“He already did!” She shook her head, pacing around. This was… insane. All of it. Dying, waking up, talking inside her head to the dead queen. “Why are you doing this? What do you want?”

“You already know. I want to save everyone. All the horrors you’ve experienced, all the suffering, all the loss… We can make it stop.”

She almost laughed. “Stop? You murdered him!”

“And you can save him. This timeline is a dead end. But we can make a better future.”

Shikra’s tone was infuriatingly gentle. All those years she had admired the queen, wished she could be like her… And yet, looking at Shikra now, that beautiful, ageless face, those eyes so full of wisdom… Valerie saw only an empty facade.

“Don’t pretend we’re in this together,” she spat. “You want to use me like everyone else.”

Shikra rose to her feet, and Valerie took an instinctive step back. The queen towered over her, and she moved with a regal grace that made Valerie feel clumsy and coarse. Her bare feet sank into the soft carpet, the silk gown brushing the floor as she closed the few feet between them.

“How then will you save Maskamere?” Shikra asked. “Do you believe you have a future with Avon? He will only ever seek to control you.”

“Funny.” Valerie gritted her teeth. “I’m getting the same impression from you.”

The queen’s eyes flashed. “I am trying to free us! To unshackle us from the tyranny of Drakonian rule.”

“So we can go back to living under your rule.”

“No, so that we can save the thousands of lives lost to this war! Was I such a terrible queen? Did you suffer under my reign?”

Valerie looked away. No, she hadn’t. She had longed for nothing more than to return to the Maskamere she had once known, the place where she had been happy. But not as the queen’s puppet. She didn’t trust that for one second.

But if she didn’t go back, her family and Markus would be lost for good.

“Why?” Shikra asked. “Why do you reject me? Why did you side with the oppressors?”

“I didn’t.”

“You saved Avon. You killed my brother.”

“You killed—” She stopped, pursing her lips. “Avon killed your brother. I just made sure it was a fair fight.”

Shikra laughed. For a moment it was as if the mask slipped, a dark, ugly look shining through her eyes. Then the queen shook her head.

“Men like him are very beguiling, but—”

Irritation prickled her skin. “He’s not beguiling. I didn’t choose him. I chose myself.”

A long moment of silence followed, softened only by the soothing melody of the harp and the gentle breeze from the open window. The bed drapes fluttered behind them. Shikra exhaled, then turned around, going to her desk where she picked up a golden pen.

“Choosing yourself only means you’ll end up alone.” She began scratching a few lines on a sheet of paper. “And none of us can survive on our own. When I first met you, you were nearly broken. A vicious little thing. I took pity on you. I took you in and you blossomed. You had an instinct for manipulation, and you never gave up. That’s how I knew you’d be perfect for this mission.”

Valerie’s heart raced. The queen was talking about a previous timeline, some other incarnation of Valerie that she had erased from existence. And wasn’t that a form of mass murder, if one really thought about it? Every single life in every single timeline that Shikra had ever turned back… gone forever.

“That wasn’t me.”

“You even deceived me,” Shikra went on, the nib of her pen scratching against the paper. “I believed you when you told me how much you loved your family, how deeply you missed them. And yet you refuse to save them.”

The words were a stab wound. Valerie had no answer when she’d been wrestling with the same dilemma herself. Hadn’t she as good as killed her own family by refusing to go back and save them? Wouldn’t anyone else have jumped at that chance in a heartbeat?

Silently, Shikra held out the sheet of paper she had been writing on. Valerie took it.

I saved your life. I can save them too.

Valerie looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Have you dreamt of dying?”

A shiver ran through her. Wait—she had. Before she’d woken up in the coffin, she’d dreamed about the Drakonian invasion again, except that in the dream she hadn’t escaped. She’d been shot down like all the other girls, stabbed in the back and left to slowly bleed out.

Maybe that was her brain’s way of processing the impossible reality of surviving her own death. Or maybe…

“You… did you do that?”

“No,” said Shikra. “I dream about it too. The past isn’t wiped out. We all lived it. It’s our curse to remember it.”

“You’re saying it was real?”

The queen nodded. “If I hadn’t intervened before the invasion, you would be dead.”

The idea unnerved her. Not only that she had survived thanks to Shikra manipulating events, but also the thought that all of those alternative futures had in fact happened, she just didn’t remember them. How many were there? Would she dream of them all?

A stab of pain twinged through her forehead.

Valerie swallowed. “I don’t know that. None of this is real. We’re dreaming right now, aren’t we? If this is some vision you put in my head…”

In answer, Shikra held up the instrument she’d been writing with. A golden fountain pen, one that looked familiar…

“The pen…” Realisation struck.

“It cannot lie. And nor do I.”

Shikra had been writing with the golden pen she kept in her chambers, a pen spelled to only write the truth. In the waking world, the pen no longer existed. Valerie had smashed it after using it to convince Lord Avon that she needed a third blessing to open the door beneath the temple.

But this was a dream-vision, not the real thing. She couldn’t trust it.

“I won’t abandon our people.” Shikra’s eyes glistened. “Your loved ones are gone, but they’re not lost, Valerie. Please. Help me save them. Save your family. Save Maskamere.”

Valerie shook her head, but she had no answer. She’d meant to leave the queen behind, trapped with the goldentree. Instead, they were stuck together. And Shikra had already made it clear that she would destroy whatever remained of Valerie’s life to get what she wanted.

Could she fight the queen? Push her out somehow? But she’d tried that, wrested back control only to lose it again. And she wasn’t sure if she wanted to push it further. If she could destroy the queen, then the queen could most certainly destroy her.

“Well?” said Shikra. “Will you do the right thing?”

“Not like I have a choice,” she muttered.

“Val?”

She started. Avon's voice pierced her consciousness, echoing through their dream. Of course, Shikra heard it too.

“Time to wake up,” she said.

And just like that, the queen’s bedchamber dissolved away. Valerie opened her eyes.

She was hunched in a corner of the cell. Her back ached from where her spine had pressed into the wall; without thinking, she healed the bruises away.

Lord Avon stood outside the cell looking in, iron bars once again separating them. For once, she was glad of it. His precautions were keeping him safe.

Shikra’s voice whispered in her mind. Convince him to take you back to the temple.

She would have punched her own face if only it wouldn’t hurt her too. Maybe I’d have a chance of doing that if you hadn’t murdered my friend.

He wants you alive, Shikra responded. Appeal to him. I’ll take over when I need to.

She shivered.

Avon tapped his fingers on the prison bars. “Well,” he said. “I’ll admit, you’ve surprised me.”

She looked away. “Did Captain Doryn tell you what happened?”

“He did. Is it true?”

She’d lied to everyone else. But she couldn’t lie to Avon. She was still bound by her oath to tell him the truth.

Which gave her an idea.

Valerie braced herself against the dungeon wall. Would she stay upright? She hoped so. If this gambit worked, she wouldn’t want to wake up with a concussion.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, “but you need to listen. Really listen.”

He frowned, then nodded.

Valerie took a breath. “Queen Shikra didn’t kill Markus. She didn’t possess me, and she isn’t watching you right now.”

For a moment, silence reigned. Avon stared at her. Even if she hadn’t told him to listen, he seemed utterly bereft of anything to say.

Why would you say that? You’re giving us away—

She felt Shikra’s will close in, but not before drowsiness swept over her. The curse was kicking in. Her limbs became heavy. Her eyes fluttered shut.

And like a light going out, Valerie fell into slumber.