Thorne appeared at my side, lacing his arm through mine as I made my way to the doors.
“Will someone go and fetch my things from my mother’s house?” I asked, trying to pull my arm free from him.
“Is there anything in particular you require?” he asked, and I felt his gaze on the side of my face. I didn’t bother to look at him as I waved my free hand toward the closed doors.
They creaked open slowly, each of the six doors parting to give us our choice of entrance. It might have been an unnecessary show of magic, but it served as a reminder for me.
Stone. Earth. Nature.
Those were my elements. Those were the things I had an affinity for. The souls trapped within the Vessels were none of my concern as far as anyone else knew.
Neither was the cemetery that I could feel pulsing with the bones of the dead at the edge of the tree line. If I followed that thread, followed that instinct, it would feel as if I plunged myself underwater. As if touching it would require the ability to breathe in the depths of the ocean, and I had always been far better suited to the land beneath my feet.
“No. Just clothes,” I said, knowing that my father would sneak in now that we were gone and get rid of any evidence that I might be anything other than the Green I pretended to be.
Thorne looked down at my clothing, his gaze taking them in with a languid sweep. “You’ll be provided with clothing suitable to a Green and
expected to wear your House colors to classes. I will arrange for some clothing to be provided for your downtime as well.”
“Shouldn’t that be the Covenant’s responsibility?” I asked, allowing him to lead me through one of the open doors. The Covenant cared for the witches—saw to their needs. Students and teachers lingered in the entryway to the school as we entered, leaning into one another to murmur.
“Are you fond of the color green, Miss Madizza?” he asked. There was no mistaking the shift in energy when my surname left his mouth, the way those around me paused their conversations to stare.
“Was that really necessary?” I asked, gritting my teeth as I raised my chin in the face of their scrutiny.
“Better to face the vultures with your head held high and the truth in the open than attempt to hide a secret The Covenant will never allow you to keep. What you want became irrelevant the moment you stepped through the doors of Hollow’s Grove,” he said, guiding me to the left.
Before me, an arch supported the top of two sets of stairs that curved out to the entryway. From that arch, two more columns of stairways went to the upper floors and a spiral labyrinth of floors and levels overhead. It was all crafted in the lightest gray stone, reflecting the light and somehow calling to the shadows all at once.
“The Covenant wishes to see you immediately, Miss Madizza,” a young man said, stepping toward us. He bowed his head lightly, as if in respect that I hadn’t earned as he held out a hand. I smiled hesitantly, trying to hide my discomfort with the formality as I lifted my own to accept.
“I’ll take her,” Thorne said, tugging on the arm he still held captive. “I’m more than capable of escorting her,” the other man said, but he
drew back his hand as Thorne swept me toward the hallway.
“She would eat you for breakfast, Iban,” Thorne said, not bothering to look over his shoulder at the younger man as he guided me down the hall.
Iban’s footsteps weren’t nearly as quiet as the Vessel at my side as he followed behind us. The stone of the pathway in front of us was freshly polished, glimmering in the moonlight trailing through the massive arched windows to either side of us. On Thorne’s side, they overlooked the drive and the memorial at the front of the school. To the other, I looked into a courtyard at the center of the building. It housed what looked as if it may have been a garden at one point, but the plants within weren’t flourishing in the way they should have.
Even with the Madizzas being absent from Crystal Hollow, House Bray should have been using their magic to maintain the land if it required assistance. The trellis that should have been covered in vines of roses was nearly barren, even the thorns weakened and brittle. I resisted the urge to answer their call, allowing Thorne to guide me down the hall until we stood before the legendary doors of the Tribunal rooms.
The surface was covered in black iron, gold laced throughout it to form mechanisms. I could barely see through the gaps in the metal to the entry room beyond.
Iban stepped up beside me as I raised my hand, jerking to a stop when I waved it before the lock. The gears turned, rippling through as the rest of them followed. The bars retracted with a soft click, and when the last one moved out of the way, the doors parted open toward us.
“I see your mother has told you more than I thought,” Thorne said, tugging me forward as he stepped into the Tribunal rooms. Iban followed behind us silently.
“Fortunately for all of us, you know nothing of my mother,” I said, ignoring the weight of his gaze on the side of my face. If he’d known her, she’d have done her best to have him imprisoned in the earth. She’d have summoned the roots from the trees to do her bidding, ridding the world of him in the only way she had any ability to do.
She might not have had the blood of the Hecate line flowing through her veins, but she was the fiercest, bravest woman I’d ever known. She held the magic of all the Madizzas within her body, controlling it in a way I now understood took immense control. Even as we walked through the entryway to the Tribunal room, I felt mine pulsing beneath my skin. Writhing and twining within me as if it had a life of its own, just waiting to be unleashed upon the world.
It took everything in me not to allow it to erupt like a volcano, spraying rock and molten lava over the surface of the earth. Using my magic felt more like taking a tiny breath after years of suffocation than trying to reach for anything. It was always there.
Always waiting.
The doors to the inner Tribunal room were open wide, and I forced my chin just the slightest bit higher as I drew in that breath. Air filled my lungs, the scent of the stone surrounding me washing over me and calling to that
Green magic of the Madizza line. I answered the call, feeling the hair on my arms rise as my magic awakened from the miniature slumber I kept it in.
Thorne stiffened at my side, the slightest hitch in his next step alerting me to the fact that he felt it. I squeezed his arm lightly as I glanced up at him from the corner of my eye, his steely eyes darkening as he recovered and strode forward.
If I had to face the Covenant, if I had to stare into the empty, hollow bones of the beings who had made my mother’s life such a misery that she fled the only home she’d ever known, I would do it with her magic coating my skin.
With her death, I’d inherited all of it until my brother came of age and some of it passed onto him. Susannah Madizza might have been the greatest witch of her age, but the power that had made her so was no longer hers to command.
It was mine.
We stepped through the magical barrier that waited just inside the Tribunal room, keeping what was spoken within a secret from any who might have snuck into the entryway. It sunk into my chest as I passed through, formed from a representative of each of the original houses. Only the Madizza and Hecate lines were missing, but that barrier seemed to recognize something within me. It lingered, holding me trapped in the center as it swirled around me. At my side, I was vaguely aware of Thorne stepping through, of him tugging at my arm as if he could pull me along with him.
I held his gaze as I raised my free hand, turning my palm to face the sky. The shimmering, translucent power of the barrier washed over my bare skin, sliding beneath my nails deep enough to draw a single drop of blood. I let out a startled gasp as it pulled from that spot.
Red floated amidst the barrier, intertwining with the shimmering mist. There was a flash of light as it released my hand finally, spitting me out the other side. I caught myself on my next step, only stumbling for a brief moment as Thorne tightened his grip on my arm and offered me an odd sort of support.
I couldn’t resist the slightest urge to lean into him as I clenched my free hand into a fist, hoping that whatever the barrier had sensed, the magic hadn’t revealed it to any of the witches staring back at me. Thorne guided me to the center of the circle, passing between the gap in two of the chairs.
They were each marked with symbols of their house, the witch perched within wearing robes the color of their magic.
Two of the chairs were empty. A quick glance at the Hecate throne revealed twisted black iron carved into elaborate spires of darkness. At the top of the throne rested a single skull forged in iron, the bones of a spine sliding down the center and skeletal arms draped over the top.
I didn’t allow my gaze to linger as I moved it to the other empty throne. Where Hecate’s seat on the Tribunal had been crafted from darkness itself, the Madizza throne was formed from vines that still moved. They lived where it was not possible, sprouting through cracks in the foundation to form the empty seat of my ancestors.
At the top of the throne, a single rose bloomed back to life as I watched. Whereas before, it had been nothing but a withered husk, the petals spread wide, and color returned. Red tipped in black, as if the edges were tainted by death itself.
We stopped in the center of the circle, and it was only then that I turned my stare toward the two figures waiting on the small dais. The cloaks that covered their forms were black, an affront to the memory of the Hecate line. The forms were near identical, and I knew it was because there was nothing but bones left beneath them. The Covenant had no flesh to cover their skeletons after centuries of life after death, and anything that had made them human was long gone.
They swept their hoods back in unison, revealing the skeletal faces within. Susannah Madizza and George Collins rested upon their gilded thrones, with their necks crooked to the side as the only indication of how they’d died.
“I present Miss Willow Madizza to the Covenant,” Thorne said at my side.
I didn’t allow my stare to break from the figure staring back at me, from the intense, eyeless gaze of my ancestor upon me. She searched my face, probing for any sort of information she could glean as her skeletal fingers grasped the arm of her throne. She pushed to her feet, walking forward as the bones of her feet tapped against the floor with a lightness that shouldn’t have been possible.
I heard each bone connect with the stone tile, from her heel to her smallest metatarsal, with each step. I refused to allow the nerves I felt to
show as I stood beside Thorne. Part of me wanted to force him to release my arm, but something in that contact felt like it grounded me.
I hated him. Hated his kind with every fiber of my being, but he was predictable.
Familiar.
His motives were clear. His intentions simple.
The ancient witch who stepped toward me was a mystery, the bones of her neck grinding together as she tilted her skull to the side. She stopped only when she was a breath before me, her figure taller than mine as she stared down at me with empty sockets.
“You look nothing like your mother,” she said, the first words she’d spoken to me washing over my skin with disapproval.
She raised a hand, grasping the ends of my hair between her finger bones as I turned my attention to the way her skeleton rolled the strands as if she could feel them. My mother’s hair had been brown, the color of the earth.
As had her mother’s before her.
Mine was a distinct, deep auburn, like the darkest merlot. Or as my father liked to call it, hair the color of old blood—like what pulsed in our veins.
“Neither do you,” I said, my voice remaining calm and casual. One of the witches in the thrones about the room gasped, and Thorne fought back a chuckle at my side.
But the Covenant’s lipless mouth twisted into a wry smile. “No, I suppose I do not, child,” she said, dropping my hair and clasping her hands in front of her.
“I’m not a child,” I said, even if the words felt futile when faced with an immortal being such as Susannah.
“I suppose you’re not. We were robbed of the opportunity to know you when you were. And it does not seem lost on my headmaster that you have very much come to us as a woman,” she said, turning that eternal, empty stare to where Thorne still held my arm. There was no movement on her face, no shift in her bones, but I somehow could still sense the way she raised her brow at him.
If she’d had one, anyway.
“I am merely her escort into an unfamiliar life,” Thorne said with ease, the words rolling off his tongue. If I hadn’t heard all his promises of being
in my bed for myself, I might have believed them.
“Good. My granddaughter is very much off-limits to you and your kind, Headmaster Thorne,” she said, reaching forward to unwind my arm from his. He didn’t fight when she guided me toward the dais, stopping as I stood just before the two thrones.
“That’s not entirely true,” he said, and even without looking back at him, I heard the smirk in his voice. But my mother had warned me that my seduction would need to be a secretive one—that the Covenant forbid relationships between witches and Vessels.
“We both know I am not speaking of that unfortunate exception.” The Covenant sneered at him over my shoulder, taking the first step and releasing me.
She returned to her throne as I stood, allowing silence to permeate the room. I would not be the first to speak, wouldn’t reveal my discomfort with the way they watched me.
“It is customary to kneel when presented to the Covenant,” one of the witches said, forcing me to turn my gaze to her. Her voice was not unkind, as if she understood that I had been uninformed of their ways. Her pretty face was partially hidden behind a white cloak and hood, the slightest hint of gem tone purple hair peeking out from beneath.
I smiled, taking some of the sting out of my words. “Do I look like I care about your customs?”
“You will kneel,” another witch said. This one was male, his cloak green as he swept it back to reveal his angered face. His throne was crafted from the wood of a birch tree, leaves sprouting as he pushed to stand.
He moved forward with a hand extended as if he meant to touch me, and I watched from the corner of my eye as he took three quick steps toward me.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” Thorne warned, taking a single step forward as I turned my gaze toward the Bray witch. I didn’t speak an incantation or so much as twitch my fingers.
I let loose a single breath, the tiniest bit of magic erupting through the room. The Bray throne grew, branches snapping forward to wrap around the front of his chest.
“Please have a seat, Mr. Bray.”
He glanced down at those branches in shock, his mouth parting as he leveled me with a dark stare. In the next moment, they snapped back to the
throne, taking him with them. They tightened around him as he struggled, holding him firmly seated. As the other line of Green witches, the Brays were always destined to have some animosity for my return.
“You’ve been trained,” the other Covenant said. His voice was deeper than Susannah’s, a single remnant of the fact that he’d been a man when he was alive.
I didn’t answer him as I shifted my attention to him, letting him feel the weight of my magic in the air before I drew it back to myself. Only when Bray settled in his chair did I speak. “Just because my mother hated all of you doesn’t mean she hated what she was.”
“To be a witch with no Coven is to suffer unnecessarily. We should not be alone in this world,” George Collins said, forcing me to laugh.
“She was far more alone here than she ever was in her life amidst the humans, and that’s saying something since they feared her half the time. At least there she was more than just breeding stock,” I snapped, knowing fully well what fate would wait for me if I remained too long.
“Saving an entire lineage is an honor that your mother never understood,” Susannah snapped, her fingers squeezing the arm of her chair.
“Not if she believed that the lineage needed to die,” I answered, smiling serenely, as if I hadn’t issued a grave insult. It was nothing against House Madizza. The entirety of Crystal Hollow was corrupt.
They all deserved to die.
“Is she always this difficult?” Susannah asked the headmaster. She pinched her nose bone between her fingers, sighing in dismay.
“Given what I’ve seen since meeting her, she’s being fairly cooperative at the moment,” he said with a chuckle.
I turned to him, glaring, but I didn’t bother to fight it when a grin took over my face instead, and I giggled in acknowledgement. “Think of it as something to look forward to,” I said, spinning back to where the Covenant looked irritated.
“Iban, would you show my errant granddaughter to her room, please?” she asked, ignoring Thorne’s growl and pushing to stand and moving out of her throne. “Do try not to eat him on the way, Willow.”
I refused to look at Thorne to see his reaction, refused to acknowledge the way his hand clenched at his side in the corner of my eye. Let him think I was wholly uninterested in his ridiculous jealousy.
“Eww,” I said, pressing a hand to my chest as I feigned disgust. “I would never do such a thing. Burying him alive is much more my style.”
The Bray witch blanched as I smiled at him, reaching up to pat his cheek and leading the way out of the Tribunal room.
The woods seemed like a good place to hide a body… or ten.
