“Privateer,” he corrected, “and even then, I never made a habit of butchering the dead. Care to tell me why you’re…”
He trailed off as she set the saw aside and began to pry open the man’s rib cage with her bare hands. Alucard felt bile rising in his throat. He took a step closer to the mint and citrus taper as Nadiya withdrew her bloodstained fingers long enough to retrieve a narrower blade, then resumed her work.
“Now, the Faroans also believe that the body is a vessel for the spirit,” she continued, “but that, in the time the two are fused, they mark each other, like a hand in wet clay. The body is shaped by power. The flesh retains memories.…”
Her tone was casual, as if they were in the gallery, having tea and toast and—
Alucard tried to put the thought of food from his mind as her hands made a sucking sound inside the man’s chest, and finally came free.
Holding his heart.
“The Hand plagues us because we know so little of them. We have yet to learn what they want.”
“What all enemies want,” he said. “To cause chaos, and call it change. To see the end of the Maresh rule.”
“Those are ideals, not answers,” she said, weighing the heart. “The Hand is a mantle, a mask, but masks are worn by people. And people all want different things.” She looked at the bloody organ in her hand, eyes bright. “What did he want?”
She carried the heart to an altar, the surface of which was covered in a delicate tracery of spellwork, written out not in ink but sand. No, not sand. Sulfur. As Alucard approached, she set the heart in the very center of the pattern. She tipped out a vial of oil onto the heart, and snapped her fingers, and a small spark dropped from her hand onto the organ. It didn’t ignite so much as consume itself, a blue-black flame swallowing the heart before sending slow fingers out along the lines of the sulfur spell.
Alucard had never had a gift for writing spells. He could read a basic one, and use it well enough, but he’d always favored elemental magic, the simple clarity of wind or earth or water in his hands over the more abstracted application of someone else’s power.
Because of that, he never really thought of spellcraft as magic. But watching a new spell, one he’d never seen before, it felt, well, like the sorcery Bard sometimes spoke of, the strange, fanciful stuff relegated to stories back in her world, things dreamed up without being understood.
It felt to Alucard like watching the impossible made real, and realizing the only thing that separated one from the other was talent.
He couldn’t imagine how Nadiya’s mind worked, how she constructed her spells, but he could see the threads, woven as carefully as any garment. Here was earth, and water, to simulate the movement of blood in the veins. Here was fire, to emulate the spark of life.
“What I would give,” said the queen, “to see the world as you do.”
Alucard looked up, rubbing his brow. He was so used to blocking out the strings of light, to seeing past them, that apparently when he focused on the threads themselves, he squinted slightly, a furrow forming like a groove between his brows. It had given him away—the keen-eyed queen had noticed the squint years before, and he’d made the terrible mistake of telling her the truth of it.
“Do you think it’s your mind, or your eyes?” Nadiya asked, as the spell continued to burn. “Eyes are, I believe, the seat of perception. Look at Antari magicians, the way the magic claims their ocular nerves. But then again, the mind makes sense of the world and processes its sights.”
“Does this matter?”
“Of course,” she said, affronted. But there was a fervor in her voice, and her pupils were as large and dark as a lover’s in the throes of passion.
“I don’t like it when you look at me like that,” said Alucard.
“Like what?”
“Like one of your projects. Like something you’d like to take apart.”
“I’d put you back when I was done. I do hope it’s your eyes,” she added with a smirk. “They are much easier to study. And such a lovely shade of blue.”
“You cannot have my eyes.”
“No bother,” she said with a shrug. “I’ll take them when you’re dead.”
The soft sizzle of magic died between them. The heart had stopped burning and now lay, a blackened lump, in the center of the sulfur diagram. The spell was done. Nadiya held her breath, and Alucard approached, and together, they looked down at the altar.
The lines had rearranged themselves, no longer an intricate circle around the heart. Now they branched out in every direction, like spokes on a wheel. Or spikes on a star. Or branches on a tree.