Oak realizes what she’s doing, but he has no idea how to stop her. And he understands now the despair that others have felt at the sight of him throwing himself at something, not caring for the consequences. “Wren, please, no!”
She takes the storm into herself, drinking down the rain that pelts her, letting it be absorbed into her skin. Wind whips her hair, then stills. Dark clouds dissipate, blowing away on her breath until they are no more.
The pale moon shines down on Elfhame again. The wind is still. The waves crash no more against the shores.
With the last of her might, Bogdana sweeps her hand at Wren.
A bolt of lightning cracks through the sky to strike her in the chest.
Wren staggers back, bending over with the pain of it. And when she looks up, her eyes are alight.
She glows with power. Her body rises into the air, hair floating around her. Her eyes open wide. Hovering in the sky, she’s lit from within. Her body is radiant, so bright that Oak can see the woven sticks where bones ought to be, the stones of her eyes, the jagged pieces of shell used to make her teeth. And her black heart, dense with raw power.
He can feel it like a gravitational force, pulling him toward her. And he can feel when it stops.
CHAPTER
24
W
ren collapses, her skin bruised and pale, her hair plastered across her face. Her eyes closed. The stillness of her is too profound for sleep.
Oak cannot seem to do anything but look at her. He cannot move. He cannot think.
Bex kneels beside Wren, pressing on her chest, counting under her breath. “Come on,” she mutters between compressions.
Bogdana leans down to place her overlong fingers on Wren’s cheek. Without her power, she looks old. Even her long nails look brittle. “Get away from her, human girl.”
“I’m trying to save my sister,” Bex snaps.
Jude stands behind the mortal. “Is she breathing?”
“You destroyed her,” Oak snarls at Bogdana, holding his sword pommel so hard that he feels the edge of the hilt dig into his hand. “You had a chance to undo what you did, to save your only daughter. No one tricked you this time. You did the very thing you knew would kill her.”
“She betrayed me,” Bogdana says, but there is a hitch in her voice.
“You cared nothing for her,” Oak shouts. “You terrorized her so that she would come into a power that you could use. You let those monsters in the Court of Teeth hurt her. And now she’s dead.”
The hag narrows her eyes. “And you, boy? Are you so much better? You’re the one who brought her here. What would you do to save her?”
“Anything!” he shouts.
“No!” Jude says, nearly as quickly, putting her body between his and the storm hag’s. “No, he would not.” She takes Oak by the shoulders and shakes him. “You can’t just keep throwing yourself at things as though you don’t matter.”
“She matters more,” he says.
“It’s possible that Wren can be woken,” says Bogdana.
“Deceive me in this, and I will bury you, so do I vow,” Oak says.
“Her heart is stopped,” says Bogdana. “But hag children don’t need beating hearts. Just magical ones.”
Oak recalls the Ghost giving him a warning when they were aboard the ship. It is said that a hag’s power comes from the part of them that’s missing. Each one has a cold stone or wisp of cloud or ever-burning flame where their hearts ought to be.
He’d dismissed it as a piece of superstition. Even Faerie found hags and their powers troubling enough to make up legends about them. And the Ghost had clearly been worried over Oak’s plan to marry one.
The prince lowers himself back to the ground. He kneels in the wet sand on the other side of where Bex is working. She scowls at him as she counts. He puts his hand on Wren’s chest. Desperately hoping the storm hag is right. But he feels not a single thrum of a pulse nor the movement of breath in her lungs. What he does feel is magic. There’s a deep well of it, curled up inside her body.
Pulling back his hand, he doesn’t know what to think.
Mother Marrow told him that Wren’s magic was turned inside out. A power meant to be used for creation, warped until all it could do was destroy, annihilate, and unmake. Twisted on itself, a snake eating its own tail. But perhaps taking apart the storm and being struck twice by lightning was more than even her magic could devour. Maybe some of it spilled over.
Though she set all her matches alight and burned up with them, maybe something new could emerge from the ashes.