The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(56)

From that day, they worked together. Her ambition ran into his like a tributary into a river. He reminded her of her earliest wish: to peel up the corners of the world and see the workings that lay below.

Anyone who seeks to bend the world to their wishes, with words or science or magic or sheer will, must operate by a code. The girl was not good, but she had a code: she did not undo what she could not put back together. But rules can be rewritten, letter by letter, by a man with a velvet voice, who touched her mouth with his thumb tips and said her name like it was dipped in honey.

When he asked her the first time, he said it lightly.

Hands, he told her. There’s so much magic in hands. If we needed them—if you needed them—could you get a pair of hands?

Yes, she said. Of course. The city has no shortage of corpses.

Not like that, he said, choosing his words as delicately as grains of rice. There’s a power in ending a life. In the dead giving of their body to make something new. An ending births a beginning, becoming that much more powerful.

The girl understood, then, what he was asking for.

She took one hand from her seamstress. Clever hands, neat and quick. She took another from her cook, blurred with scars but strong. And her lover was right: the women were alive, then dead, choking on poison on Abelia’s sitting room floor. That was their end. But when Abelia took their hands, it became a beginning, too. She could feel in the hands’ heaviness all the knowledge that pooled there, all the ability. She wrapped them in yards of heavy satin and had a rider carry them to her love. The rest of the bodies she disposed of.

All of it was easy after that.

One foot came from a housemaid who’d always moved lightly through the castle, with the darting joy of a bird. The other from a messenger boy who spent his days running between the castle and the city.

When her lover asked for a tongue she solved two problems at once, cutting it from the mouth of her father’s silver-tongued right hand. He’d grown too powerful of late, too sure of his place. She didn’t tell her father it was she who’d solved his problem.

For the pair of eyes the mage requested, she ventured into the city, her anonymous face her disguise. A man in a tavern there was bragging of all he’d seen in his travels, how far he’d come from and where he’d been along the way.

She gave herself a lovely face and form just long enough to lure him into an upper room, where she took his life and his eyes that had seen so many wonders.

Now, her lover said when she’d given him all these things. He could not hide the thrill in his voice. Now we need only a heart.

This was harder for the girl to obtain. She did not lack nerve, or even appetite. But she could not decide on the heart. A good one—but who could tell what secrets might lie inside it? A hard one, then—but what rotten softness might hide within?

She considered the riddle so long her lover grew impatient. If you don’t have the stomach to do this, he warned her, I’ll find one that will.

The girl did not like to be threatened. She didn’t answer his threat, because she hungered to know what great magic he was building, whose purpose he still hid from her. She only bit her tongue and noted, with a scholar’s fascination, how a slice of the love she bore for him shriveled and fell away.

The arrogant magician hadn’t noticed it when her magic exceeded his own. He did not understand that by teaching her ruthlessness, he’d made her more powerful. And he didn’t recognize that her ambition had grown greater than her love.

Finally, impatient with her, he chose a heart himself. The finest heart he could think of: the heart of a king.

When she learned he’d killed her father, the mage imagined she would cry, as women do. Be angry with him. He imagined she would rage, strike out with attacks he could easily defend against, and require many kisses to return her to herself.

But his imagination was limited.

When he showed the girl her father’s heart, she did not need his words to recognize it. It was shaped like her own, just barely scarred with love. The scars belonged to her, and those on her own heart, faint as they were, belonged to him, her father, not to this man she’d briefly thought worthy.

She knew, too, that her heart would not be scarred again. Her father was dead, her heart impermeable, and the man before her already gone to dust in her mind.

She lifted a hand as if to touch his cheek. He smiled, that it should be so easy, that she should already be tender with him. He was not ready for the knife in her other hand. With strength born of fury and a hand driven by magic, she divided him from himself. Her face was set and steady. She did not seem to hear his screams.

She knew enough of magic to guess at what must be done with the pieces she’d gathered: the eyes, the tongue, the hands, the feet. She laid them out in the semblance of a body, and in the center of them she placed her father’s heart. Her hands were still red with her lover’s blood, and it touched the pieces like a covenant.

It was not long before the pieces shivered and shook, and the air among them thickened with gristle, with tendon and blood and bone. When they stood up together, they formed a figure, that did the thing it was made for: it pierced the wall of the world. It made in that wall a door to what lay beyond, a great nothingness waiting to take form. The figure breathed in the life of the world behind it, and blew it into the gap.

Then it moved aside for the girl to step through.

Before her, stretched out like a sleeping beast, lay the thing her lover had used her to kill for. A new world, waiting to be given form: a night country, fresh-made, created through magic and blood. As she stepped onto its giving ground, she felt it opening its arms to her. She became its master, and its servant. It laid its cuts on her unreachable heart.