Page 56 of The Lies We Conjure
I swallow thickly, doing absolutely nothing to dislodge the emotion balling in my windpipe. My gut trembles; Wren sniffles.
“From there, I moved to the next closest master relic. I could see from afar the shape of a body and knew Callum was gone. Here, the master relic had been revealed to the open air, but the security wards kept it in place. I obscured the master relic and searched for the final two. The third place I tried was empty, the relic apparently undisturbed. There were footprints but not a body or signs of an injury that could have been a result of the detonation of the master relic’s security ward. No telltale sign of spell use or magical signature. The fourth location was where I found Lana, gone like her brothers.”
Ursula takes a moment here to collect herself with several breaths that bleed from one page to the next with my moving finger. When she picks up again, anger sparks in her tone, her words gaining speed and ferocity.
“I found no other bodies with them, but the evidence of coercion speaks for itself. My children are heirs to the title of High Sorcerer. Ulysses, Lana, Callum. They’d all taken their oaths to the Four Lines. They’d all produced an heir per the Hegemony custom of volunteerism and surrogate vacation of rights.”
“Wait… they werebred? Like racehorses?” Wren hisses. We don’t have time to parsethatweird witch shit—I shush her with a shake of my head and start my finger across the page again.
“It is unfathomable to me that my children, with all they had given to the Four Lines, with all they had given to me, would abandon their ambitions and abdicate their duty to protect the Four Lines by making an attempt to steal the master relics that provide order and safety to thousands of witches who call the Four Lines home. For this reason, I believe they were spelled by powerful magic to go through with this… this plot, that ultimately led to their deaths.”
Ursula’s voice trembles and my fingers shake right along with it.
“I do not know at this time if the coercion occurred from another magical group, unmagical persons, or fromwithinthe Four Lines. But I will find out who did this—and I will make them pay.”
The shiny page comes to an end.
“That’s it?” Wren asks, craning her neck, greedy fingers tugging at the pages.
The entries afterward are one bleak day after another.
An adoption ceremony for Evander, Auden, and Winter.
A joint funeral for Ulysses, Callum, and Lana.
Meeting after meeting of heads of the High Families—Ursula, Horatio, Luna, Marsyas.
And then, thumbing ahead, we find the entry for the next annual meeting, July of that year, just like the one we’d attended.
This time, there’s no stunned voice memo. There’s not even a hint of emotional edge to Ursula’s looping, confident script. Just one inflectionless paragraph.
At the annual gathering of the High Families of the Four Lines, arguments were presented, and a verdict reached concluding Marcos Blackgate of the Death Line was guilty in the coercion and ultimate deaths of Ulysses, Callum, and Lana Hegemony on March 21 of this selfsame year. Per Four Lines law established in the time of Salem, the punishment for the murder of another witch is death. I, Ursula Elvire Muscatel Hegemony, meted the appointed punishment at 11:43P.M.on this date, July 13. It was determined that the line of succession would point from Death Line matriarch Marsyas Blackgate directly to her granddaughters—Lavinia Blackgate, age seven, and Kaysa Blackgate, age six.
And that’s it. The passing of a torch, lives changed forever.
I sit back on my haunches, completely wrung out.
The Hegemony parents died while locating and trying to remove—destroy?—the very relics their children were now tasked with finding. A fact that Evander, Auden, and Winter clearly knew—they’d been there for the murder trial and subsequent execution of Marcos Blackgate.
Truly, they all saw him punished. Executed. Every person in this house. Marcos’s mother, his wife, his kids too.
How absolutely horrifying.
Wren draws in a rattling breath. Her face is pink, her eyes still leaking. “Do you think—”
A violentpopfrom the fireplace behind us cuts off Wren’s question, and we both jump—but then another voice we know booms into the room.
“Hegemony Manor guests!” Evander calls from both the fireplace flue and seemingly everywhere. “Please gather in the third-floor study. A master relic has been found.”
CHAPTER18
AUDEN
“The ‘Breath ofMorgana’? That doesn’t make any sense,” Hector sputters, rising from the study guest chair he’s claimed—the one previously reserved for Marsyas Blackgate. The patriarch takes a step toward the desk, as if inspecting the relic himself would lend a different result from what the three of us found ourselves. “Are you sure that’s the inscription?”
Evander is not in a sharing mood. And, honestly, if he barely trusted Winter to touch it, he’d certainly fight tooth and nail to keep Hector’s paws off it.
“Yes.”
