CoS21

## Chapter 21

**Chapter 21** of **City of Spells** follows **Saxony** again.

## **Full Version**

WHILE EVERYONE ELSE WAS getting ready to leave the Uncharted Forest, Saxony was getting ready for something far more important.

The rest of the camp packed what they could, gathering supplies as they prepared to head to Wesley’s safe house. He’d said that it belonged to the old underboss of Creije, who had ruled the city before Wesley took the reins. According to Wesley, he had a few scattered throughout Uskhanya, just in case. It seemed the last thing underbosses did was trust people, and so they were going to flee to the small estate, on the edge of the ivy towns, just big enough to house their army.

But before then, Saxony needed answers.

She needed the truth from the people she had never expected to lie to her in the first place.

“Saxony,” Amja said. She placed a pair of boots into a bag. “Are you ready to go?”

“I need to talk to you first.”

Her father shook his head. “Saxony, you must pack your things. The others are waiting. Wesley said—”

“Wesley is what I want to talk to you about.”

Amja kept her eyes focused on the bag and slowly placed a vest inside. “Oh?”

*Oh.*

It was the smallest word, but it made the biggest difference. It said a thousand things and the one that stuck with Saxony most was that it said her amja had been lying to her about something.

“The magic that Wesley conjured to deal with the tornado was familiar,” Saxony said. She squeezed her fists together to try to keep her voice steady. “I’ve seen it before.”

They were the same flames that had killed her mother and her baby brother. The memory was like a shard of glass in her eye as it replayed over and over, the same nightmare Saxony had for years, only now she could see it when she was awake, too.

The black embers devouring her family. It had been over a decade since Saxony had seen that magic. In all of her years, she had never known anything like it again. Until now.

“I know you recognized it too,” Saxony said. “I saw the way you looked at Wesley afterward.”

Amja sat back onto the bed. “What are you asking us?”

“For the truth,” Saxony said. “What happened to my mother and Malik? What is that magic?”

Saxony couldn’t figure out the look on Amja’s face, but at the very least she was looking at her, unlike her father, who stared at the ground and nothing else.

“You’re keeping something from me,” Saxony said. “And I won’t just ignore it. I’m tired of lies and secrets.”

Amja nodded.

Her father swallowed.

The silence that gathered around them was strange, and made Saxony almost want to turn and walk away from the conversation, since it clearly wasn’t going to lead to anything good.

Nobody started a conversation with silence if it was going to be good.

What if Wesley was somehow connected to her family’s death?

There would be no going back from that.

“Your mother was a Spiritcrafter,” Bastian said. “And she suffered for it every day.”

He took Saxony’s hands in his and they were so large that she almost felt like a child again as he knelt in front of her.

“Like you, Vea was powerful,” he said. “And sometimes the ghosts of the world were all too real. Their memories would haunt her and stay for weeks at a time. They were violent and desperate, and she couldn’t shut them out. It wasn’t a tap she could turn on and off, but a river that flowed endlessly into her mind. She could never drown out the noise of their sorrow.”

Saxony’s hands shook in her father’s grip.

Weren’t the living supposed to immortalize the dead in overly happy memories? When people were gone, they were supposed to be thought of as invincible and without flaws, as those who were left behind rewrote their histories wherever necessary. So every memory Saxony had of her mother was of a warrior, unfathomable in her grace and unbreakable in her spirit. Try as she did to think back, Saxony couldn’t recall a single moment of her mother’s tears, or when her smile faltered and her hugs weren’t warm and long.

Through the eyes of a child, Vea Akintola had been perfect, and even though Saxony couldn’t have known otherwise— even though her mother had clearly hidden it from her for a reason, because it wasn’t a child’s responsibility to know such things—Saxony felt guilty for it.

“She’d disappear for weeks,” Bastian said. “And once, when you were very young, she was gone for months. The forest gave people peace, but for her the quiet meant that the dead screamed louder. She always fled to cities, where the noise could overthrow them, and I also think her heart craved the adventure.”

“She loved you very much,” Amja said.

She looked to Bastian with a smile, warmer than Saxony had ever seen them share. They enjoyed antagonizing each other like it was a sport, but the tender way Amja looked at her father now told Saxony that she loved him as a son. That perhaps he wasn’t her blood, but he was still her family.

“What happened?” Saxony asked.

Amja’s sigh was deep. “Though Vea loved your father, his spirit was tied to the trees and hers to the wind. When she came back after those long months, she came back pregnant.”

Saxony’s lips parted, but she couldn’t find the breath to gasp or the words to demand it was a lie.

“That baby was Malik,” Amja said.

Saxony didn’t know what to say to that, and though she thought that she should have been sad or even angry with her mother, the first thought that came to her mind was: *That’s why Father doesn’t like to hear Malik’s name.* Not because his son died, but because he never had a son to begin with.

She knew it was a horrible thought, because as far she remembered, Bastian had always been kind to her brother. He’d always played with him and hugged him, and never liked to scold him even when he was being a little brat. Still, she couldn’t help but think it.

“You know Malik was destined for greatness,” Amja said. “He was supposed to be our Liege, but there was a darkness inside of him.”

“A darkness,” Saxony repeated. “He was just a baby.”

“And we couldn’t wait to see the man he would grow into,” Amja said. “But then an Intuitcrafter saw in a vision that he would bring about war and death if he was raised by magic.”

Saxony didn’t think laughing was the appropriate reaction, but how else was she supposed to handle the sincerity with which her amja spoke? A vision, one in thousands, had scared her that much?

“It can’t be worse than the war and death we’re facing now,” Saxony said. “It was just one Crafter’s vision.”

“I thought the same, until another saw it,” Amja said. “Both of them saw that future and only that future. It wasn’t just one in a hundred scenarios, Saxony. It was the only future they saw, in a hundred different ways. And so we made a choice.”

Saxony shot up.

She wasn’t prepared to hear this.

She wasn’t ready to know what they had done.

And yet—

“Did you kill him?” she asked.

“Many Gods, no,” Bastian said. “He was a child, Saxony.”

“But we knew we had to do something,” Amja said. “And so we decided to hide his powers and send him far away. We swore the two Intuitcrafters to secrecy and they carried it to their graves.”

Saxony’s breath didn’t just catch, but disappeared altogether.

“You used death magic to hide him,” she said in a whisper. “A blood spell.”

The darkest of all Crafter magic was the kind that required a sacrifice.

It was outlawed among every Kin in the four realms. It could hide a Crafter’s magic from everyone, including themselves, but performing something so ungodly came with a price: a curse over the entire Kin that would never end.

Saxony’s mother hadn’t just died in a fire. She had sacrificed her life to hide Malik from the world. Saxony thought back to that black flame, burning through the tree house. How her mother didn’t try to run and she didn’t scream; she just let it take her. Saxony always thought she’d remembered that part wrong, but she hadn’t.

She thought about how that same black fire that had destroyed her family had poured from Wesley’s fingers when they were attacked.

How the trees in this beloved forest had sung when Wesley appeared and rustled their leaves in joy whenever he made a joke, like they were laughing alongside him.

How his staves were such a bright silver against his dark skin, just like hers. Just like the rest of her Kin.

“Many Gods,” Saxony said.

It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.

“Wesley?” she asked.

Amja and her father didn’t need to nod for Saxony to know she was right.

That was how he was able to perform a spell at the consort’s headquarters all those months ago in Creije. How he was able to take on Arjun, a Crafter who had trained his whole life, without breaking a sweat. How he’d nearly killed Ashwood.

Malik was a magical prodigy after all.

“I would have tried to find another way if I knew what Vea was planning,” Bastian said. “But I think she knew it was the only choice.”

“I don’t understand,” Saxony said. “You sent Malik—”

She paused.

She couldn’t say Wesley’s name.

“You sent him to *Creije*?”

“It wasn’t a magical mecca then,” Amja said. “It was just a dreamer’s paradise, and the Intuitcrafters said that of all the futures they saw, the ones that had Malik in Creije felt the most hopeful. They said being there would grow his heart. We had allies there who we knew and trusted. The Liege of the Creijen Kin took him in.”

The Liege.

*The Creijen Kin was small*, that’s what Theodora had said when Saxony and Asees summoned her. *Their old Liege and his entire family were killed by buskers twelve years ago.*

Twelve years ago, when Wesley had become a busker.

The floor felt unstable beneath Saxony’s feet, like it was made from wet soil instead of wood and Saxony was preparing to sink into it.

“They promised to keep Malik safe from all magic to stop that future from coming true. They stopped practicing to protect him.”

“And he became an underboss,” Saxony said bitterly. “He grew up as an orphan on the streets, until Ashwood groomed him to be a killer. That’s the future that gave him the most hope? Zekia and I could have had a brother! Being with us could have saved him because we would have *loved* him. You stole that.”

“Zekia wouldn’t—”

“You shouldn’t even say her name,” Saxony snapped at her amja, angrier than she had ever been in her life.

Amja blinked back the surprise of it.

“Because of you, Zekia grew up with the weight of a Kin on her shoulders,” Saxony said. “You destroyed her future.”

“We couldn’t tell anyone the truth about Malik,” Amja said. “We didn’t know if the Kin would accept our choice.”

“So you lied and let them thrust his destiny onto my little sister? Because of what you did, she was driven into Ashwood’s arms, just like Wesley.”

As soon as Saxony spoke the words, something in her mind clicked.

That was the reason that Zekia had been able to stumble into Wesley’s mind and forge a connection in the first place. Not just because they shared the same specialty, but because they shared the same blood. And that was why Zekia and Ashwood hadn’t been able to use the Loj elixir on Wesley while they held him captive.

A Crafter couldn’t be swayed by their own magic.

*My magic is your magic, my blood is your blood.*

Zekia had told Saxony once that the only reason she was able to overcome the Loj was because they were sisters. Saxony shared Zekia’s blood and so that made her immune to her sister’s elixir.

Wesley was the same.

His sister, *their* sister, had no magical hold over him.

“You shouldn’t have kept this from me,” Saxony said. “I spent years by Wesley’s side. I could have done something to prevent all the death Ashwood brought. If Malik, Zekia, and I were together, we could have stopped him as a team.”

Amja went to grab her hand again, but Saxony stepped back, disgusted.

“You told me to kill him,” she said.

She wanted to be sick.

“Back in Granka when we were first trying to recruit Asees, you told me that the underboss of Creije had to die, no matter what.”

“Saxony—”

“You should feel ashamed of yourself, standing in place as Liege of this Kin,” Saxony said. “You’re not worthy of it.”

Her amja hadn’t just lied, but she’d cursed their entire Kin with dark magic.

That was the reason no children had been born to them since. It wasn’t because they were waiting for their rightful Liege. It was because they had been damned by the magic and lies of Saxony’s family.

“Everything that’s happened is your fault,” Saxony said.

She turned from them, but Amja stepped quickly in front of her, face desperate and frown deep enough to look like a wound.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m going to speak to my brother.”

Amja grabbed hold of Saxony’s shoulders. “You can’t tell him yet,” she said. “He isn’t ready.”

“I’m not going to turn my back on him like you did and I’m not going to lie to my family like you did.”

“Please, listen to me,” Amja begged.

“I’m done listening to the two of you.”

Saxony snatched herself from Amja’s grasp and ran from the room. She didn’t care what they thought or what two Intuitcrafters thought. The future wasn’t set and she had already wasted years that could have been spent by Malik’s side.

Saxony might have lost her mother, but she could still save her sister *and* her brother.

She could still have her family.