A Poison Dark and Drowning (Kingdom on Fire #2)(66)

“It’s not what it seems,” I whispered, struggling to get out of bed. My head still felt shrunken from the drink.

She didn’t sound convinced. “Good thing I found you before anyone else did. It’s time for his morning potion.” She uncorked a glass vial filled with that brackish liquid. Another potion. Another bit of poison to kill the monster. When Maria leaned over the bed to wake Rook, she gasped and dropped the vial. The medicine started to spill out onto the sheets, and I rescued it.

“What?” I asked, but then realized she’d noticed the bloody cloths by the washbasin, and the water that had turned a cloudy red. I was a blistering fool. Why hadn’t I got rid of those last night?

“Is he hurt?” She pulled the blankets aside and discovered that Rook was not, in fact, wounded. Her eyes scanned me. “You’re both of you fine.” Her gaze darkened. “What in the Mother’s name did he do?”

“What makes you think he did anything?” Now that I was fully awake, the horrors of last night returned in vivid color. Meeting R’hlem on the astral plane, Mickelmas’s revelation, Rook’s fever: how was any one person supposed to bear it all? My hands started sparking. “Why wouldn’t you suspect me?”

“Don’t be daft.” Maria softened. “If he’s too far gone—”

“If he is, who’s to blame? You’re the one who added poison to his treatments!” I hissed.

Maria’s eyes flashed.

“I told you there’d be only so much my methods could do.” She spoke in a harsh whisper, so as not to wake Rook.

I couldn’t listen to this, so I grabbed the bloody cloths and washbasin. If he woke up and saw them, he’d ask questions. I ran, my feet freezing on the carpeted hall. The water sloshed as I hurried. Inside my room, I threw open the window and emptied the filth onto the garden below, then put the rags in the basin and set them on fire. Maria entered and closed the door behind her, nose wrinkling as I poured water on the now-ashed cloth. Gray smoke billowed upward.

“You can’t hide what he’s done.” She sounded sympathetic, which was worse than anger.

“Leave me alone!” My skin tingled. I was dangerously close to going up in flames.

“Calm down.” She didn’t show any fear as my hands started smoldering. Something about her pitying expression drove me over the edge. Without warning, my whole body ignited, and I stared at her from behind a curtain of flame.

Maria stepped forward and summoned my fire.

Blue flame swept into her palm in a ball, hovering just above her fingertips. Putting her hands on either side of her fire, she twisted and twirled it, whirling faster and faster until it spun before her face, a perfect sphere.

She was using elemental magic.

I stood there in shock as the flames died on my skin, only a few telltale embers remaining to sizzle on the cold floor. Maria changed the fireball’s rotation, molding it until it grew smaller and smaller and, in a puff of smoke, disappeared entirely.

“If you want to have another tantrum, I’m a bit out of practice,” she said, one eyebrow quirked in a challenge.

How?

She jerked her head toward the bench by my vanity. “May want to have a seat. You look a bit put out.”

Slowly, I sat.

“Where did you learn that trick?” I whispered. Because it was a trick. It had to be.

In response, Maria merely picked up a vase of flowers from my bedside table and poured some of the water out onto the wooden floor. Waving her hands, she lifted the puddle into the air in a shimmering disc. Without a single word, she turned the water into a ball of ice. With swift, clean movements, she shaped the ice into several elegant images: a figure eight, a seven-pointed star, a perfect rectangle. With a flick of her wrist and a twitch of her fingers, the ice obeyed her most complicated desires. Finished, she melted it back to water and poured it into the vase. Her technique was perfect, beyond anything I’d seen any sorcerer accomplish. And all without a stave.

“I thought you were a witch.”

“Mam was a witch.” Maria settled the vase back on its table, primping the flowers. “But my father was a sorcerer.”

Of course. There could be no other explanation.

“Do you know his name?”

“You know it well.” Her small face became pinched with anger. “He was your own Master Agrippa.”

Back at Agrippa’s house, Maria had looked up at his portrait with that distant expression. Her eyes, such a warm brown, had been familiar to me for a reason: they were Agrippa’s eyes. I was the stupidest person alive not to have seen it. My mouth fell open.

“He met my mother when he was touring Scotland on some business for the Order, researching the highland covens or the like. He left her flat without knowing she was with child. Not that he’d have married Mam, of course.” She gave a sharp laugh. “Who’d want a witch as a wife?”

“He’d have wanted to know about you.” My first instinct was to defend Agrippa, even now.

Maria snorted. “Aye. Likely he’d have ordered me burned at the stake with my mother.” I froze utterly. “Surely you knew he was the one signed the burnings into law.”

Words of defense or explanation evaporated. There was no excusing that. Maria continued, “I only know it because I saw his name on the order. The executioners showed it when they came.” She breathed deeply and tugged at her hair. “They arrived at dawn, in those black cloaks and black boots, smashing down doors and dragging us all out in our shifts. To this day, I recall only wee bits of that morning. The chickens’ white feathers flying. Glint of the dawn’s light on a silver belt buckle. Our door splintering to pieces with one kick from the tallest man I’d yet laid eyes on. Their staves, all held in the same position.” Maria paused. “Some of the coven resisted, but the only magic powerful enough to stop them was death magic, and no true witch would use it. The sorcerers bound us and put us in carts, all on your Order’s blessing. Then they drove us up to the hill, where they’d assembled the pyres.”