Page 41 of The Heartless One
Finding the old bat took time. She was far from the wing where she’d placed her visitors. Elric meandered through the darkened halls, seeking the only person who could give him answers. Unfortunately, he found himself far too distracted in the center of the home.
Halfway between the entrance and the back exit of this house, there was a hall of portraits. He stopped to look at them, admiring the craftsmanship in every paint stroke. But he froze when he saw a particular portrait that made him feel as though he had seen a ghost.
Olwyn had been high in the coven when he had last died. She looked as though someone had painted her soul into the canvas, every strand of her golden hair perfectly depicted. Her vivid blue eyes were just as beautiful as he remembered, as was the wicked grin on her face. The artist had painted her with her signature brown hawk behind her, the golden eyes of the animal the only indicator that it was her familiar.
She’d been ruthless in life. This was the first witch to suggest sacrificing him, but not just that, sacrificing all of them. She’d been willing to die in a blaze of glory to save the kingdom, even if it meant she wouldn’t see the end result. A gravesinger of indescribable power, she was one of the best.
But all he could see was the knife she’d held in her hands. How she had slit the throat of her sisters, one by one. How’d he’d been forced to kneel there, chained to a stone altar while he begged and pleaded for them to see reason. The sickness could be fixed, if only they would take the time to find a new resolution. Instead, they were determined to sacrifice themselves. As though such self-mutilation would make history look upon them with kindness and not hatred.
He’d cried, watching them all die in front of him. Tears streaming down his cheeks while their blood reached for him, stretching across the floor in banners of pain. She’d been the last one standing with that bloody knife clutched in her hands and victory on her face.
“I am the last gravesinger,” she had said as she approached him. “I sacrifice you so that all in this kingdom might be free of the gods. So that the land can right itself and this sickness will come to death with us. Withyou.”
He still remembered the cold slide of steel across his throat and the wicked grin of victory on her face.
“I will join you soon, Deathless One,” she’d said. “Soon, all of us will be bound for all eternity.”
The ghosts of the past screamed in his mind. He could feel the gravesingers in their cage of his in-between realm as they rioted at the memory and the sight of their sister who had brought them to victory. The chains aroundtheir wrists rattled in his ears like the reckoning of a tide coming to sweep him away.
“Lost in memories?” another voice interrupted him, this one rattling with old age.
He startled, shadows coiling up his wrists and spreading out from his shoulders like massive wings before he snapped them back into his body. Agnes didn’t deserve to speak with a man made of shadows, after all. He was a gentleman.
“How did you see me?”
She tapped the side of her head. “I grew up with witches, boy. They were the last of their kind, using up the magic their mothers gave them. I know how to see a hidden figure when there is one.”
He hummed under his breath, turning his gaze once more to the portrait on the wall. He didn’t have words to describe how that history still terrified him. How he knew that if he was asked to do it again, he would. All of his long life had been in sacrifice for them. There was no changing what he was made to be, even if he wished for that.
Elric barely heard her step closer to him. But he felt her hand on his arm as she tugged him to look at her.
Agnes’s face bore the markings of time. Wrinkled and sun worn, she reached up with curled fingers to gently brush her knuckles across his cheek. There was the faint feeling of coolness before she drew her hands back down.
“Tears from a god,” she murmured. “I’m sure there’s some kind of spell or potion that would use these.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“What could bring you to such emotion seeing my ancestor?”
“You’re Olwyn’s granddaughter?”
“I told you I grew up with witches. But I do not know Olwyn. She died when my mother was a child, and I was born very late afterward.” Agnes looked at the portrait, her brows furrowed as though she were seeing it for the first time. “My mother’s stories painted her as ruthless and unkind. I know she was a hard woman.”
“They all were.”
“They had to be.”
He shook his head. “The further I get from those memories, the more I wonder if they didn’t have to be, but they chose to be.”
He wasn’t out here to have this conversation with an old woman, though. The past was in the past. There was no reason to dig it up.
“What do you want, Agnes?” he asked.
“I should be asking you that. You’re the one wandering my halls in the middle of the night.”
Elric held up the stone in his hand, the runes burning his palm. “Was this one of hers?”
“It was.”
