The Shadowglass (The Bone Witch, #3)(38)

Fox. The barrier between our thoughts was back, and it may as well have been made from the strongest steel, for I could no longer feel his mind.

I couldn’t blame him.

Even Hestia and the other elders’ undisguised glee did nothing for me. Maybe they were right. Maybe I deserved this.

I was confined to a true cell this time, with cobwebs and rats and no asha-ka comforts. I gave up all introspection, content to count down the days until I was tried in court, until a verdict was passed and I was sentenced for my execution. There was nothing else to do but wait to die.

Not even Kalen could reach me. He visited every day, always under the watchful supervision of soldiers and brother Deathseekers. I would close my eyes and turn away, so he wouldn’t bear the shame of facing a murderess, a kinslayer.

“I still love you,” I heard him say once, and my instinct was to reject those words, to relegate them to some reality where I never had to hear him say them. He couldn’t. I had done far too much to justify understanding, much less forgiveness. I had lost his friendship once after meddling in his head. Surely murder was worse.

The words gave me more hope than I wanted to deserve. But I didn’t want him to love me, not like this. Not in a dank prison surrounded by strangers. It was better for Kalen to distance himself from me. I didn’t want him to take away my isolation. It was all I had left.

Others had tried. Likh pleaded and cried, asking for answers I couldn’t give. Zoya was belligerent and demanding, yelling through the bars at me for giving up so easily. Mykaela came by every day, to talk to me in soothing tones like I had stolen another asha’s hua and only needed to apologize to make things right. Althy said nothing when she visited but forced fresh clothing on me and better food than the standard fare provided by the prison wardens. Of all who came to visit, she understood best.

Even Rahim took part, staring at me with his puppy-dog eyes. “Whatever else you might say, little uchenik, I refuse to think you are what you claim.”



It was hard to agree when Fox believed otherwise. While I paid little attention to anything during those terrible days, I couldn’t shut out Fox’s voice. Fox, telling the association how he had witnessed me murder my own sister. Fox, telling Mykaela and Mistress Parmina of my frequent blackouts and visions. Fox, telling Empress Alyx of my black heartsglass that I had kept hidden for three months.



It was ironic that the brother I had raised from the dead was providing the evidence necessary for my forthcoming execution, knowing it would kill him as well.

Would Inessa protest? Perhaps as a concession I would live, stripped of all companionship and warded for the rest of my life. I had killed Daisy. I deserved everything they did to me. I only hoped they decided Fox did not deserve it too.

Daisy.

Once, as a little girl, I was a target of the older boys and girls who ridiculed my preference for books over outside play. Their antics culminated in a book being snatched from my hands and stomped into the dirt.

I had barely started to cry when Daisy dashed into view, knocking out one boy with a punch to the face before the rest were even aware of her presence. She snatched up a fallen branch and swung at the rest, keeping them at a distance. “You want to hurt my sister?” She had snarled, “You get to go through me first.”

She fended them off long enough for Fox to come running, my brother making short work of the rest. For the next two days, I followed Daisy around like a young duckling trotting after its mother, until she grew irritated and demanded I go away as payment.

I soon lost myself in memories of her. I couldn’t retrieve and store memories in vials the way Khalad could, but had I access to that magic, I could’ve bottled them myself, so vividly I remembered her now that she was gone:

The confident way Daisy had with boys, breaking their hearts when she deemed them unworthy of her affection, and how right her assessments often were.

Her often-successful attempts to play matchmaker for other boys and girls in the village, sometimes more in love with the idea of love than being in love herself.

Her fantastically bad cooking, which did not dim her enthusiasm for it. She had no real aims in life, she used to joke, beyond finding a good man who would tolerate her meals.

The way she curled up with me and my books at bedtime after Fox left for war, asking questions about them, which I’d been so proud to know the answers to.

I wanted to collect every memory I had of Daisy, bundle it in a spell so I could keep her the same way I did Fox. But the elders wouldn’t let me. I was no longer trusted. Not that Daisy wanted to be forever tethered to her killer anyway.

The days blurred with me so caught up in the past that I soon lost track of the present.

Khalad was the last to visit. He sat next to my cell, saying nothing for the longest time. I concentrated on a crack on the wall above his head and thought about the time Daisy had danced at Kingscross’s Heartsrune ceremony. It was the last I’d attended before Fox died and I raised him from the dead. I remembered my jealousy, watching her twirl in the prettiest red dress, knowing I could never be as graceful.

“I want to see your heartsglass,” Khalad said.

I made no response.

I heard him leave and engage in discussion with one of the guards. Warily, they allowed him entry to my cell. He crouched beside me and took my heart in his hands. I stared ahead as if he weren’t there.

“I’ve known about the black in your heartsglass since Prince Kance exiled you from Odalia.”