Bloodwitch (23 page)

“Agreed,” Kadee said. “Whatever our plan is, we must keep her far away from Midnight.”

“Do any of you have magic?” I asked. “You’re talking as if we have options.”

“We have options,” Torquil answered. “We just haven’t figured out what they all are yet.”

“Malachi will not want us to turn in the Azteka to buy him out,” Kadee said.

“As if we
could
,” Torquil replied. “Forgetting that selling Midnight a bloodwitch would mean giving them an unstoppable weapon, and ignoring all the pesky ethical questions, an Azteka magic-user would make a bloody smear out of any of us if we tried. I hate to say it, but unless we want to
become
the next generation of trainers, I think our only choice is to try to save them.”

My heart leapt in multiple directions. I had wanted to rescue Malachi, if I could do so without sacrificing myself. I
hadn’t
expected this group to suggest rescuing the trainers, even if it did appear to be in their own self-interest.

“That is not going to go over well,” Kadee answered softly. “Misha—”

“Misha is standing right here,” Misha interrupted, making us all jump. I didn’t know when she had come close to us again. How did these people move that way? I always stepped on things that cracked and crunched. Misha moved like mist, soundlessly. “And I can be
very
practical, when I need to be.”

“Can’t we all?” Kadee asked dryly. “A little
too
practical, I think.”

“Unfortunately, practicality won’t fix this problem,” Torquil said. “We need power we just don’t have.”

“Malachi kept saying we needed someone more powerful than him,” I said. “Did he mean someone specific?” I thought of the spells I had seen around Midnight and in the greenhouse. There were obviously
some
powerful witches on Midnight’s side. “I know Jeshickah doesn’t want the wrong person to know the trainers are ill, but risking the wrong person knowing
has
to be better than doing nothing, right?”

“I like that idea,” Kadee said very softly. “Jeshickah is afraid that if the wrong people know the trainers are in such rough shape, they will turn on her. So … let’s tell the wrong person,” she said, her voice more confident now. “Who do we know? We must have
some
kind of contact. We—”

“No,” I interrupted, horrified. One minute we were talking about
saving
the trainers, and the next Kadee was suggesting we actively betray Midnight. Torquil spoke the same word, though with less horror and more resignation.

“Malachi will die in that cell if Jeshickah wants him to,” Kadee said. “We can’t force her to release him, and we don’t have the power to bargain, even if we wanted to damn all our souls even further. So let’s—”

“Let’s all lose our freeblood status by trying to betray Midnight to a witch who might be every bit as much of a tyrant?” Torquil interrupted.

“Freeblood, freeblood, freeblood,” Kadee echoed. “We do everything to keep this ‘gift’ Midnight claims to give us. If we don’t cross them and we pay what they ask and occasionally give up a little flesh or a little soul or a child or a brother, Midnight
graciously
allows us to continue doing so. They call it freeblood, but it’s just slavery in an invisible cage. Right, Vance?”

She looked at me, and I flinched.

My cage hadn’t been invisible. It had been beautiful, even once I started to see the bars.

“This is too big,” Torquil said. “I don’t disagree with any specific point you’re making, Kadee, but
look
at us. If any one of us had ever had luck with making the right choice or trusting the right person, we wouldn’t be here, yet we’re talking about deciding the fate of our
world
. The four of us cannot be responsible for making this decision.”

I nodded. I was
definitely
the wrong person. I wasn’t even sure I wanted the trainers dead. I knew what they did, but that didn’t mean I could stand to play an active role in their executions.

Though she looked deflated, Kadee still asked, “If not us, then who? Diente Julian of the serpiente? Or Tuuli Thea Miriam of the avians? King Laurence of the Shantel? They already made their choices. They obey and keep their heads down. Even the Azteka, who actually have the power to
fight
, choose to avoid the conflict.”

“Fate is like the wind,” Misha said. She was standing
right next to me, but her voice seemed distant. “We can face it or we can ride it. In this case fate has handed us four dying trainers and a little bird whose blood is poison. What kind of fools would we have to be to fight that kind of wind?”

“We should ask Farrell’s opinion,” Torquil suggested. “He might—”

“Farrell is two weeks away,” Misha interrupted. “By the time we spoke to him, much less made it back here, the trainers would either be dead or have recovered, and Malachi would be in whatever state Jeshickah felt was appropriate.”

“But …” Torquil trailed off, pierced by her glare.

“What about you, little bird?” Misha asked me. Her voice had a tone to it that was both familiar and unsettling, but which I could not immediately place. “You could run back to Jeshickah to report us, or you could just run and hide, or you could help. What kind of man are you?”

“I’m fourteen!” I objected, rising to my feet to move away from her. I looked to Kadee, who hadn’t seemed much older than I was. We were a bunch of kids, talking about destroying an empire of immortals. “Like Torquil said, this is too big for us.”

“It is not too big for me,” Misha said. “Would you like to know why?”

“Why?” I asked. How could anyone make this kind of decision?

“After Diente Julian sold us to Midnight,” Misha said, “my little brother, Shkei, and I belonged first to Taro and later to Gabriel. I will not say out loud the things that were done to me in the months before Malachi was able to purchase my freedom, only that I am grateful the trainers never really had time to make me into a primary ‘project.’ Taro was very occupied with you, actually, which is why he kept me a few months and then gave me to someone with more time on his hands. Trust me when I say it was the kind of experience that makes one very … well, practical, as I’ve said. A lot of the little fears and doubts wash away with the blood.

“I have seen the heart of evil. It is called Midnight. If I can destroy it, I will. The world really is that simple.”

I looked at Kadee, who was looking at Misha. When the young serpiente’s eyes returned to me, I saw fear in them, coupled with knowledge. The trainers might not have broken Misha as a slave, but something inside her was broken all the same.

Her fury still burned bright.

I shuddered. “It can’t be …” My protest trailed off. I wanted my innocence back, but it was too late. I couldn’t form an argument for why Midnight should stand, because now that I had seen its dark core, I knew that all the beauty in the world wasn’t enough to justify it.

Jeshickah and the others had raised me the way they did not because they loved me but because it would allow
them to control me. Midnight hadn’t wanted me. It had wanted my magic.

I loved them, but I could not let them continue.

You have never been asked to die for something, or someone
, Malachi had said.

Was this what freedom tasted like?

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

“I don’t know what you can do, on your own,” Kadee answered. “We obviously can’t just
let
the trainers die. If we want to try to save Malachi, we need someone with the power to take the heart from the empire, swiftly. Do we know a witch who might be on our side?”

“We could ask the Shantel,” Torquil suggested. “They would probably help, if they could.”

Kadee scoffed. “A Shantel witch doesn’t sneeze without meditating on the matter for a month and then consulting the king,” she grumbled. “Even if we could find one, we would need to wait for a royal audience before they would even
listen
to our proposal. Malachi will be dead and the plague will have run its course long before they decide to act.”

“There’s a Shantel guard in the marketplace,” I said.

“He’s loyal to Midnight,” Misha replied.

“I don’t think he really is.” I remembered my conversations with the guard, about how he followed Midnight only because he didn’t see another option.

“Do you honestly expect us to put any faith in
your
opinion of who we should trust?” Misha snapped.

No one spoke up to argue with her, though Kadee cast me an apologetic glance. Any suggestion I made, I suspected, would be met with the same response.

No other choice, then
, I thought. I couldn’t justify it to my companions here in the Obsidian guild, but I couldn’t get the idea of the Shantel guard out of my head. The increasingly frustrated conversation around me seemed to dim, and his face rose in my mind instead.

Without waiting to ask or hear if they would actually let me leave, I shifted shape. I pumped my wings harder when I saw Misha snatch at my fleeing form and made it above the tree line without further interference.

We weren’t far from the road; I was able to find paths I recognized and made it to the market in a short time, even on foot. It was late now, and the only movement in the market was merchants making last-minute deals and packing their wares into wagons so they could flee before the Azteka returned. The Shantel I needed wasn’t present, but the other guards were able to give me directions to his home.

It didn’t take me long to locate his one-room cabin. I knocked on the door, trembling at the enormity of what I was doing.

Who was I to make this choice? What if Kadee, Torquil, and Misha were at that moment coming up with another
option? Surely they knew more about the world than I did.

The guard came to the door, his steps heavy with sleep as if I had woken him. His eyes widened when he saw me, and he asked, “Do you need me?”

Desperately
, I thought.
I’m out of other choices
.

“CAN I TALK
to you for a minute?” I asked.

“Sure,” the Shantel guard answered, giving me an odd look. “Should I put on a pot of tea?”

He didn’t wait for me to respond before turning from the door and setting a kettle over the fire.

Though it was about the same size as my “home” in Brina’s greenhouse—about the same size as some of the sheds off Midnight’s stables—this tiny cabin had a very lived-in feeling, from the tidy bed in the back to the chest and woodstove nearer to the front. There was a knife on the one-person table, sitting next to an unfinished carving; I couldn’t tell what the piece of wood would someday be, except that it was obviously intended to be decorative, not practical.

The room was cold despite the hearth. My breath
fogged in front of my face. Even so, the one-room domain had a distinct advantage that my more luxurious cabin had lacked: the real world was outside the door. That made it much bigger, all things considered.

“This is nice,” I said. I meant it.

“Thank you,” he answered. “But I doubt you wanted to talk to me about how to set up house.”

I wasn’t sure how to start. I knew he didn’t work for Midnight out of loyalty to the vampires, but that didn’t necessarily mean he would be willing to stand up against them. His life was comfortable enough. He might not want to jeopardize that.

“How did you end up working for Midnight?” I asked.

He sank into the chair in front of his whittling project with a sigh. There wasn’t a second chair, and I wouldn’t have felt comfortable sitting on the bed, so I stayed standing.

“You don’t know me, Vance,” he replied softly. “You don’t even know my
name
.” Before I could rectify that problem, he shook his head. “Don’t bother. I work for Midnight because I once believed I could make a difference here. When I lived among my own people, I spent my time in the
sakkri
’s temple, and shared the visions, and chose my path … or they chose my path, or she did. I don’t know. But I left because I was told to leave, and then I was told I was never allowed to return. The Shantel do not accept traitors back.”

“What is the temple?”

“At any point in life, if one of us feels lost or uncertain, we can choose to dedicate ourselves to the temple for a time—a day, a month, a year, or more. It is supposed to provide guidance. Some stay to study magic. Others learn a new trade or find their mate. It made me restless. I felt as if I had seen the world for the first time, and it was larger than I had ever imagined. I sought stillness by studying with the deathwitch, who prepares the dead for burial, but eventually the
sakkri
told me that the visions I had seen in the temple had left me unfit to remain on Shantel land.”

“So you didn’t have a choice but to work for Midnight?”

“I work for Midnight because I still feel like I can do … something good, somehow,” he answered. “We can’t kill the vampires. They’re too strong. We can hate them all we like, but if we make them into enemies, they will destroy us completely. Our only choice is to work with them so we can make ourselves strong enough to survive.”