Snow Like Ashes(97)
“Truth?” The familiar pain pulses against my temple, threatening to tear me to pieces if I don’t—what? I need to sit down and eat dinner and talk with Mather, tell him why I matter, because this is all I’ve ever wanted. To be here.
“Meira,” a voice calls from outside. The queen is here. Why doesn’t anyone invite her in?
I step toward the door, my toes barely cresting the threshold when Mather grabs my arm. “Where does your magic come from?” he gasps. He looks scared, desperate, his eyes reflecting my own trepidation back at me. He looks so much like Sir. The same strong jaw, the same sapphire eyes, the same emotionless veil. I never noticed it before.
“Magic comes from—” Why am I answering him? He shouldn’t ask me about this. I take a step backward, toward the door and the snowstorm. “Magic comes from the Royal Conduits.”
Mather’s eyebrows tighten. “Conduits? No, Meira.” He licks his lips, trying again. “How do you have magic? How is Hannah feeding you magic? You have to tell me.”
“I told you,” I say. “Only conduits have magic. Hannah isn’t giving me anything.”
“Meira,” Hannah calls to me. I turn my back on the room, on the warm firelight, on Nessa’s giggles and Sir calling me his sweet girl and Mather shouting for me, reaching for me. On everything I’ve ever wanted, because Hannah needs me, and I have to go to her.
The moment I leave the cottage, heat pulses behind me, a burst of warmth much too strong to have come from the fire pit. I turn as the cottage disintegrates, folding in on itself like it cannot sustain the weight of the night around it. But no, it isn’t disintegrating—it’s burning, piece by piece, into a small pile of smoldering ash. My mouth hangs slack as shadows of the night rise over the ash, swallowing it into a startlingly pure black void. The city around me follows it, everything folding into itself and vanishing until Jannuari is gone and I’m left standing in a beam of light.
“I am in control now. Not Angra,” Hannah says, her voice urgent like she’s fighting to keep us safe.
I shake my head. Angra was in control? Of what? No, I’m safe now. Safe because of Hannah, not in Angra’s black magic anymore. She’s protecting me because he pulled things out of my head. He tried to make me fall apart, but I’m safe now, safe, safe….
Hannah waits behind me, the space around us still filled with dancing snowflakes. Like we’re shielded, cupped in invisible arms that will keep the darkness from touching us. Angra can’t touch us here. He didn’t mean for me to leave the cottage. He wanted me to stay inside, where it was comfortable and I would tell him all my secrets. But I left, and Hannah is using her connection to Winter’s conduit to talk to me, like she’s been doing all along.
Her connection to Winter’s conduit, not the blue stone. There was never any magic in the blue stone. Only the Royal Conduits have magic.
I turn, snow crunching under my feet. Hannah stands with her back to me, her hair flailing in the storm. Explanations whirl around me, but not from her—from me. My mind eases here, in this space between asleep and awake, and as it does information pours into the light, sudden twists of clarity I never would have seen on my own.
“Angra broke your conduit, but magic is more powerful than even he knows.” The words tumble out of me from some delicate area of surrender, a mysterious space in my heart that connects Hannah and me. The magic. It’s known the truth all along. “You were desperate when Winter was falling, so you surrendered to your conduit. You let it tell you everything. The truth behind magic, and that if a Royal Conduit is broken in defense of the kingdom, the king or queen of that kingdom becomes the conduit.”
This knowledge springs into my head, the magic giving me this last piece that lets me put the rest of the puzzle together. The Royal Conduits are connected to the kingdoms’ bloodlines, so if the rulers had let their conduits be broken after they chased away the Decay, they would have become their kingdom’s conduits. Magic always needs a host, and with a human host, magic doesn’t have the limitations that come with object hosts. Life and pure magic would have been a beautiful combination, like a fire nursed by endless fuel. The Decay could have been destroyed with all that power, and the world would have glowed with how prosperous we could have been.
But conduit magic only works if the bearer acknowledges the magic and chooses to use it, and conduits only give answers when people put aside their selfish will and dare to surrender themselves for the good of their kingdom. It’s a passive magic all about choice.