Page 21 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

It is pain, she realizes. Pain about the knowledge that she’s not only failed her people—she’s also failed that girl. A girl, as desperate and lonely as Blair has been.

Blair turns and looks out through the tiny crack in the wall that serves as a window. Outside, a storm is howling, and rain patters down as if the sky itself is weeping.

Blair doesn’t know what would have been worse for Melody—if Caryan or Perenilla got hold of her. What would be worse for this world?

She huddles against the wall and pulls her legs up close to her body before she closes her eyes. She normally likes storms, but tonight she can’t help but feel that it’s full of ghosts.

Raging.

Howling.

Just as that magic, locked away even deeper below than she. In an even darker place, where no light is ever going to reach it.

7

Blair, two years before Gatilla’s death

Blair’s long, wine-red hair had come loose from her braid during the long and draining flight back on their phantom wyverns—half-solid beasts, looking like real ones, summoned by magic, untouched by the cold or rain or wind as they cut through the night, close to the fae moon, violet up in the witches’ territories. Blair’s face was raw from the biting, wintery cold, and she could no longer feel her fingers in her leather gloves when they finally started their descent back to Akribea, the capital of the Blacklands. Its infamous landmark Windscar, the amethyst tower, punctured the impenetrable fog like a spear.

Blair rode at the front; Aurora, her second, to her left; Sofya, her third, on her right. The rest of the thirty witches of Blair’s chosen coven, the red coven, fell into formation, where they’d flown loosely before. They always fell back into their roles when they neared the tower, because her Aunt Gatilla could be watching. Or someone else might report any slight lack of discipline.

If her aunt ever caught wind of such acts of frivolity, she’d make short work of them all.

Bloodlust. Cruelty. Brutality.

The three principles the witches lived by. Her aunt’s three favorite words, not Blair’s, and she knew her aunt would rip her tongue out with her silver nails if Blair ever said that out loud.

Blair stifled a yawn, then schooled her face into its usual mask of arrogance and superiority. She held on tight to the scales of her wyvern as it plummeted down from the sky on her silent command. Blair didn’t know how it worked, the unspoken connection between her and her summoned, magical creation. It wasn’t like she controlled the creature. It certainly acted on a will of its own, although the rational part in her told her that this couldn’t be real.

It was magic, nothing else. No matter how much she wished her wyvern to be real. Hoped those half-leathery wings would become solid. When Blair leaned in, though, itwasn’tjust her wishful thinking… she could feel the beast’s heat seep into her body, smell her scaled hide, and the blood she consumed daily.

Yes, her wyvernate. Magic shouldn’t need to feed on anything but its creator. But all the wyverns did.

Also, Blair knew in her core that her wyvern was a female. How she would look if she were solid. Rainbow-colored scales and wings where sunlight would shine through. Her head adorned with beautiful, spiraled horns.

As always, her stomach shot right into her throat as the world started to tilt. Her wyvern spread her leathery wings wide at last, riding the wind currents before she banked and landed smoothly on the tower’s platform, which was coated by a treacherous layer of ice. Conditions like these had cost two witches their lives in the last century.

Blair’s knees almost gave out from exhaustion and cold, from three weeks of relentless, arctic torrents, as she slipped from her wyvern’s back. She dismissed the beast with a negligent wave of her numb hand, fingers almost too stiff to move. Gods, she was drained. Days full of snow and bloodshed, nights full of slowly eviscerating the bodies they collected and storing the harvested magic in vessels before collapsing on bedrolls on cold stone ground, their tents tucked into caves they found in the deadly ravines.

But it was where they were safe. Where no one could reach them.

It was this ability that separated the witches’ magic from allother high fae—the talent to summon a hell beast and ride it. It was what made them so utterly dangerous.

Blair heard the other witches touching base behind her, probably as chilled to the bone and tired as she.

Patience was frail these days, and tempers were high because the strain of their missions barely outweighed the amount of harvested magic. Or food.

Their rotations consisted of three weeks in a row. Her coven had three days off for Blair to inform her aunt about their movements, feed the harvested magic into the reservoir, and recover before they’d be sent back out. It was Blair’s inherent talent that made her commander of all the aerial units, her talent to feel accumulations and density of magic. The witches went wherever Blair’s instinct guided them.

This time, she and her coven had been assigned to harvest the last villages at the border to Avandal, where some hard-assed fae carved out their miserable existence, feeding on crops and the occasional mountain goat or snow hare.

Easy prey, those scrawny, thin creatures, the little magic in their veins barely worth the effort.

There wasn’t much left in the Blacklands, barely enough for the witches to still their hunger and fill their bellies with blood. These cycles of hunting had become longer over the years Blair had been flying for her aunt, the villages and targets becoming more and more distant. And dangerous.

Blair tried not to think about the witch they lost to an avalanche. Ysadora. A witch around Blair’s age—a little more than a hundred years old. She’d been hit by a mass of snow and plummeted into the chasm.

Her death meant a punishment for Blair. Maybe for her whole coven, but not if Blair could prevent it. It had been her mistake, choosing to fly the sharp and narrow formation of rocks because a snowstorm had broken loose and she deemed them safer tucked between the ancient, cruel stone than flying higher over the peaks.

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