Page 133 of The Witch Queen

Blodwyn thumbs the edge of her page. “What’s between you two, anyway?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes,” she comments dryly, “it certainly seems that way with how you keep whispering with your heads bent together.”

“We don’t—” I stop short, frustrated. “It’s complicated.”

“Complicated.” Blodwyn makes a noise in her throat. “I’m starting to think that’s a word people use when they don’t like the truth.”

“That’s—”

“Complicated?” she asks, arching an eyebrow. “Deny it all you want, but I can tell that you’re more than friends. So how did you wind up on opposite sides of this war?”

I suppose there’s no point in continuing to hide it. She’s only going to keep poking.

“We…” I begin, vainly grappling for a way to summarize the disaster of our history. “We have differing ideas about magic.”

Blodwyn snorts. “All of this overdiffering ideas?”

From her lips, it does sound ridiculous. Childish, even. But it isn’t. The witches deserved their fate. If they weren’t so obstinate, they could join me.Jacquettacould join me. But she’s turned into one of them. Malum rumbles behind my sternum, as if in agreement. But its presence isn’t as comforting as it usually is. Jacquetta’s words from last night still hound me:

Enjoy your crown. Soon enough, it will be all you have left.

“Are you going to interrogate me or help me search for answers?” I ask Blodwyn.

She just smirks at me in a way that looks annoyingly like Callen. But she opens the next book and starts to read.

“What is that one, anyway?” I ask.

“Mother’s journals again,” she replies with a sigh. “I know I probably shouldn’t be spending so much time on them, but…”

She trails off and I recognize the grief in her silence. Some of my irritation softens. “I understand. Reading them probably helps you feel closer to her.”

“Yes,” she agrees. “But…I don’t know. Somehow it makes me feel worse as well. Perhaps that’s strange to admit.”

It isn’t. After Rhea died, I used to sneak into her chamber and smell her blankets and clothes. But the brief flash of happiness I felt at inhaling Rhea’s scent was always followed by a deep ache in my chest. In theend, I don’t know if I was more heartbroken or relieved when the last trace of my sister faded away.

“Not at all,” I tell Blodwyn. “It was the same for me after I lost Rhea.”

She shifts in her chair. “Does it…get easier?”

A thorny question.

“It gets…” I hesitate, pressing my thumb into the remnants of my sister’s mark. “Smaller, perhaps. But the grief, the void, never really seals completely.”

She frowns, considering. “You said you were able to bring your sister back. What if—”

“No,” I interrupt, guessing the direction of her thoughts. “That’s not how it works. I meant what I told you in the garden. You can’t go back, and you can’t bringpeopleback.”

“But what if Mother could tell us what she meant? She might be our only hope.”

“She doesn’t belong here, Blodwyn,” I insist. “What you saw with the creature should be proof enough of that.”

Blodwyn is quiet a long time. Then, “Do you think Mother summoned her somehow? The lost princess?”

“I don’t know how she could have. Sybil wasn’t a witch.”

“No,” Blodwyn agrees. “But maybe she knew of one. Maybe she was trying to resurrect the princess the whole time. Because she thought that I can’t…that I shouldn’t be here.”