Cythera closed her eyes.
“I think I know why she would not let me be rid of Acidtongue. A blade I never wanted, nor ever learned to use and can’t even sell. She made this happen. She made me defy the Burgrave, so I would become Lord Mayor.”
“Coruth didn’t do anything of the sort.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t Coruth who cast that spell.”
Malden sat up in the bed, perhaps too fast. If it hadn’t been Coruth, then… He could feel Cythera moving away from him, flinching as if she’d been struck. That had not been his intention. “Cythera-”
“I hear the fear in your voice, Malden. And I know why it’s there,” she whispered. “Be not afraid. Ask me the question in your mind, and I’ll answer it.”
“You?” he said, almost a whisper. “You did it?”
She turned away from him. “Croy gave you the sword for a reason. He believed you were its rightful wielder, not the Burgrave. That’s all.” Which didn’t answer his question at all, but only forced another.
“Croy,” Malden said. “Who was once your betrothed.”
“Croy,” Cythera repeated. “Who is very far away now.”
She reached for him, and he took her hand. Drew closer to her, so that their faces were nearly touching. He was still Malden. She was still Cythera. Even if she was something else now, too. “You’re a witch,” he said, his lips moving against her forehead.
“Not yet,” Cythera told him. “But I’m learning.”
“But-why? Why would you want that, when you could have… something else?” he asked. When she could be his wife, he thought.
“When I was a child I begged Coruth to teach me more. So many times I begged.” She sat up in the bed. “Malden, women in this world don’t have it easy.”
“I know it too well,” he said. His own mother’s life had been a litany of sorrows. Poverty, hunger, disease. An early, painful death. Yet she had always said how lucky she was to have never married. Men in Ness regularly beat their wives as much as the law would allow. Getting pregnant was always half a death sentence-a woman would watch her belly swell with love and pride, yet always wonder if she would live to see her child’s first breath, for one of every two women died in their birth pains.
“No, you don’t. You don’t understand what we suffer, and you never can. I grew up believing I was the equal of any man. Smarter than most. Mother’s magic kept me healthy, and my father’s teaching made me strong of will. Yet when Croy fell in love with me, and asked for my hand in marriage, I understood. It didn’t matter who I was, or what I wanted to become. My life’s course was already set. I was never going to be a person of importance. I was going to be a person of importance’s wife.”
Despite himself Malden felt the need to protest. “Croy never wanted anything for you but happiness,” he said.
“Oh, I know it. He was the sweetest trap I’ve ever sprung. He was gallant, and so very kind. And he would take away every freedom I owned. Not because he wanted to harm me, or even to own me like livestock. Yet that was all he could ever offer me. A room in his castle, where I could do embroidery and read silly love poems until eventually I died trying to give him an heir. If I was very lucky, I might live long enough to hear that he had been killed on some foreign battlefield, and spend the rest of my days alone, aching for companionship. Even on the night he proposed I think I knew I could never marry him. I wanted to run away. I wanted an antidote for love, and an excuse that would let me say no to him.”
She sighed deeply, and stared into Malden’s eyes. “I knew only one thing that would make it so. I went to my mother, and I begged her to make me a witch. To train me in her art. A witch can’t be owned by any man-not even a handsome knight.”
“But that was some time ago,” Malden pointed out. “She must not have-”
“She refused me then. She said she’d seen enough of my future, and that she had reason not to give me power. She would not explain further. I hated her that day.” Cythera shook her head. “I didn’t understand. I didn’t know-she wanted me to see the world. She wanted me to know love. She wanted me to meet you.”
“She saw us together?”
Cythera shrugged. “She saw I could have some kind of life. The very thing I wanted. Even if it could only last a little while.”
Malden held her close. “It can last the rest of our lives, if you choose.”
“No, Malden. It can’t. When we first returned to the city she had a surprise waiting for me. She told me she’d changed her mind. That it was time for me to begin my training.”
“Your training as a witch,” Malden breathed.
“Please don’t look at me like that,” Cythera told him. She grabbed his hands, pulled him up so he sat facing her. Leaning forward very carefully, she placed her lips against his.
“You’ll be a witch. Like Coruth.”
“She feels the times coming upon us will be hard. Very grim. She feels I’ll need every bit of power I can muster.” He could see in her eyes there was more to it, but he didn’t press. “She feels the same way about you. It’s why she-and I-guided you toward taking this job.”
“A witch,” Malden said, because he couldn’t stop thinking it. A witch like Coruth. There were worse allies a Lord Mayor could ask for than a pair of resident witches. Though for some reason the thought of Cythera wearing shapeless robes and staring into other places with wild eyes made him feel weak and alone.
A witch could not be owned by a man, she had said. And what man would want such a dangerous creature for his own? He might have answered that question. And yet he sensed there was more at stake here than Cythera simply becoming a woman with her own power.
Where witchcraft was involved, there were always rules. Rules only a doomed man would fail to follow. Rules no man could ever know.
“I don’t understand,” he said, his body going limp with a sudden weakness.
She wouldn’t let him go. She pulled him toward her, and he lacked the strength to resist. “Don’t shy away from me now,” she said. “I haven’t even had my initiation yet. Let’s make it seven nights and a day.” She reached up and started unlacing her bodice.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Loophole would never walk easy again. When the mob seized Castle Hill, someone had been smart enough to free him from the Burgrave’s dungeon before they set the place to the torch, but one night in the torture chamber had been too much for the old thief. He had spent too long in the iron contraption known as the boot.
Malden had found him a crutch in an abandoned apothecary’s shop. It was well-made, with a comfortable pad to fit under his arm, and its shaft was inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Loophole was just able to hobble around on it, though clearly it pained him to do so. Moving at all pained the oldster now that every bone in his left leg had been shattered.
“Don’t mind me, lad,” the elder said as he winced around Cutbill’s headquarters. “Just glad to be alive.”
“Tell me everything you require,” Malden said, one hand over his mouth so Loophole wouldn’t see his fallen face. “It shall be yours. Food, wine, female companionship-you’ll be honored, old man, as only those thieves who escape the gallows are. Gold. Fine clothes-”
“It’s not the first time I got out of a noose,” Loophole laughed. “Of course, last time I was eighteen years old. I knew a trick, y’see, that you can use when they tie your hands. You tense up the muscles in your forearms much as possible, that makes ’em bigger. Here, like this.” He showed Malden how it was done. “Then later, you relax your hands again, and your bonds are loose. So when they put the rope around my neck, I waited until they started reading the charges, then slipped my hands free. I grabbed the rope over my head, like this
…” Loophole reached above his head. The crutch slipped out of his armpit and he twisted around on his good foot. Malden barely caught him before he fell.
Carefully he led the old man over to the comfortable chair behind Cutbill’s desk. Loophole gasped for breath for a while, his mouth puckering and blowing like he was a fish that had jumped up onto a dock by mistake. Blood flushed his face, and his eyes couldn’t seem to focus properly. Malden began to worry that the oldster was succumbing to apoplexy, but after a minute Loophole calmed down again. “Mayhap I’ll tell you the rest of that story some other time,” he said.