Our Crooked Hearts(72)

She shook it off. “You rule nothing and nowhere. You’re a queen of smoke. Everyone who knew your name is dead, and no one else will ever learn it. No one is coming to release you. It’s over. Open the goddamned book.”

“Sheep scat. Eavesdropper. Rank slut!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Marion said, no stranger to Astrid’s rants. “But I’m right, too.”

“You are nothing.”

“I am what you made me.”

“No,” Astrid replied, decisive. “Here is the last thing I will tell you, the very last. You were always an apple without a core. Why else would you have stolen another worker’s book?”

“There’s nothing you can tell me about myself that I don’t know. After all this time. I know a few things about you, too.” Marion looked into the occultist’s faded eyes. “You’re tired, Astrid. We’re tired. Let’s make an end of this.”

The two weary witches considered each other. Astrid breathed in but didn’t speak. She sighed instead, her cruel and beautiful face settling into new furrows, as if passing time had finally found a gap in their eggshell world.

She took her book from Marion’s hands. Slowly she traced a sharpened fingernail over the book’s fearful binding, then inserted its point delicately among the pages. She opened it.

Their pale heads pressed close as they read the name of the spell.

To unravel your cage.

The occultist had nerve. No one could say she didn’t. After a pause just long enough to skim the spell, taking in its dimensions, Astrid began the incantation that would unwind their world.

As she incanted Marion closed her eyes against a vast melancholy. Inside the tender dark of her head she watched the walls come down and time drift in like salt, which gnaws you to nothing then eats the bones. She saw all the dimly, deeply recalled treasures of the occultist’s brief life fur over whitely, then shudder to dust.

Maybe Marion would unwind with them. Maybe she’d bob like a bottle, shoot like a star, evaporate or explode or hold on tight, too used to consciousness to give it up so easily. She didn’t open her eyes, even when Astrid clawed at her—with terror, in the end? With gratitude?—and when the clawing stopped she still would not open them.

Ivy, she said. Ivy. And a third time, Ivy.

Marion thought she’d seen too much to ever be scared again, but there was no terror so pure as what seized her when the grip of Astrid’s fingers broke apart with a sensation of pattering sand.

She held on to herself amid a whipping storm that wished to reduce her, too, to stardust. Its fingers plucked her clothes to tatters, then molecules. It didn’t matter, there was so little she’d ever been allowed to keep. Only the righteous burning sword at her center, because Astrid was wrong. She did have a core. It was intent on a single end.

Ivy.

Knowledge and faith are all you need, plus will tempered by time into steel. All of you yearning toward what you seek. Marion felt whipping wind, gritty with the remains of the released occultist. For a bright empty instant she felt nothing.

And then.

Vastness. A world without walls.

She opened her eyes onto stars. True ones. Stars in a real sky and a tepid breeze that ran over her like … like a goddamned breeze, it was itself and there was nothing like it, not anywhere. All around her was the massive breath of night and inside it she felt drunk and sick and wild.

She was out. Astrid’s world was dead, and she hadn’t died with it.

Marion’s feet were bare. Beneath them was the wet black grain of that shining-dark stuff machines poured out to make roads in summer. Asphalt, she thought, and laughed. She looked up into a bell jar of endless sky, up and up, to the place where three stars gathered in a row.

That meant something. It was called something. She was reaching for the words when the sound she’d registered only in her spine, as a tingling rising anxiety, became a white-eyed monster bearing down on her.

Fixed halogen gaze and clunky bullet of a body, tearing the air. Marion froze in a fog of toxin and terror before the monster changed course, screaming away from her, and only when it was still did she think, Car. I almost got hit by a car.

Instinct sent her toward the trees. The lash of branches and everything that tore at her was a gift, she was laughing at the wealth of it, the pain of opened skin and the itch of sweat and the sheer spiraling pleasure of the wind on her naked skin.

She smelled water—or heard it, maybe, all her senses were shaken up like a cocktail—and it washed her clean of anything but the desire to submerge herself. Out of the trees and over an abbreviated bank, then she stumbled face-first into a sluggish creek, sinking ankle-deep into its bed. The rest of her floated with the current. It gentled her, seduced her. She was laughing and delirious, slapping at her body just to feel that she had one.

Then: a pen-sharp point of light, cast on her from the trees. Two shapes lingered there, watching her.

People! Marion hadn’t had to be human in so long, but she welcomed it. Every new thing. She shouted at them, something goading, something crude, wanting them to come closer. When they didn’t answer she felt, not fear, but the first inkling of a grander awareness: she was just one animal again, in a world full of them.

She reached for magic first, but it didn’t come. That wasn’t too surprising, she was out of practice in this place. Next she reached for a big stick.