Chum the Water

A baptism of blood. A god and his girl.

The Ectorius winter home was already burning when Invidia arrived. It was a behemoth of a building, a looming monstrosity built in the typical Tavelan style: stone and timber and daub. A building begging to blaze. No wonder it was burning. 

Its skeleton cut clear through the smog. Invidia could see its bones, its crumbling wooden carcass. The rune that had flared into iridescent life was still furrowed forbiddingly into the bone stringed around her wrist. It was a plea from her past life. Trouble, tricks, terror. Help me, sister. Help me. And Invidia, still holding onto senseless sentimentalities, still adhering to ancient agreements, had come. 

I’m here, little dove. Just as I promised. 

Too little too late, it seemed. Invidia had known it was urgent. Aella wouldn’t have summoned her for anything less. But there’d been no time to travel by horse or carriage, and at any rate, she lacked the patience to deal with the whims and wants of the border patrols. Crossing from the Witch Empire into Tavela by foot was near impossible these days, even for her. A few of the Sisters from her coven had helped transfer her from home to here, but the magic required for teleportation took time. 

She stared hard at the burning building until the backs of her eyes began to throb. 

Too much time. 

She could smell it in the air already, not the acrimony of smoke, but death. 

Invidia took a moment to clear her mind-space before making for the house. The inside of her head was a sterile subterranean space, clinical and impenetrable. Sentiments ceased to exist here. There was room only for a cold sort of calculation. Misery is when the monsters get in, her magic mentor used to say. Her mind couldn’t afford any weaknesses. Not now.   

With a brief tug on her magic, the flames parted. Pain blazed through her. Elemental magic was anathema to bonemagic. The two couldn’t manifest in a comfortable coexistence. To manipulate even the most modest of fires brought pain. Still, she carried onward, her agony pushed aside with an ironclad determination. 

The scene she stumbled onto was gory in the extreme, almost embarrassing in its excessive gruesomeness. The room had been simple to find, the only space untouched by fire in the entirety of the winter home. Aella’s magic, no doubt, pressing on after death. 

Invidia marvelled at it momentarily. Years spent slaving in a magic-less man’s court, subject to his every impulse, eating, drinking, sleeping and f*****g at his behest, and yet Aella’s magic remained this absolute colossus of a creature. Invidia trembled to imagine what she could have been had she not acquiesced to be his. 

The wards around the bedroom were pure power, almost crude in their makeup, but no less effective for it. Their presence evidenced something staggering: Aella had planned--or, rather, expected--her own death. Invidia took this realisation the way one takes a crossbow bolt directly between the eyes: painfully and gracelessly. 

She lowered herself beside the gored remains of her sister with a clinical sort of detachment. Her mind was a steel trap, bolted and barren and utterly unbendable, nothing getting in or out. 

Aella was bloody from neck to toe. It was coagulated in excess around her midriff, where a knife had been slotted into her centre as though a blade through butter. Her throat was a gaping void, sliced open with such obvious careless aggression that Invidia knew the perpetrator had been enraged. 

“I tried to tell you,” she whispered, the rasp of her voice superimposed over the crackle of the inferno still gaining momentum behind her. 

Magic-less men were either cruel or useless. The king of Tavela was worse than most; a consummate coloniser in an endless line of them. Invidia was of the firm belief that when you took away the magic, what was left of a person was as malignant and metastasizing as a tumour, pernicious and ultimately fatal. They were grasping, greedy creatures. Their utter lack left them always wanting. 

Aella’s brutalised body was evidence enough of their evil. 

It mightn’t have been the king who did this, but it was certainly one of his ilk. Invidia was no fool. Everything was political in Tavela. Aella had gotten in someone’s way, and this had been the result. 

It was then that Invidia’s gaze snagged on the bundle of red-stained cloth clasped within Aella’s stiff arms. Invidia hadn’t seen it at first. She’d been too focused on cataloguing the wounds, too busy avoiding looking at Aella’s face. It was a swaddle, she realised with a muted sort of horror. 

Invidia reached for the bundle, tugging remorselessly at Aella’s cold arms. The babe came free in a flurry of congealed blood and cold limbs. The moment Invidia touched the babe skin-to-skin, she felt it. Not the magic of the rune, traced slapdash on her skull, but soul magic, necromantic magic. 

My, my, Aella, what have you been up to? 

Invidia tucked the child into the crook of her arm. She was cold, but not yet stiff. If Aella had done what Invidia suspected, then there was still time to save her. 

In the babe’s swaddle, Invidia found Aella’s bone dice, two ivory pieces of bone, a string that had been snapped in the middle, and a letter with Astrea (Invidia) scrawled in a harried, messy cursive across the back. 

Dear Astrea (Sister Invidia of the Sanctum), 

I have no time to try and parse exactly what I would like to say, no time for pretty pleasantries or fond farewells, and at any rate, I don’t think you would appreciate them. In short: the babe is named Avice. Avice Valeria Ectorius. She is the true-born daughter of myself and King Erastus. 

For two days now the bone dice have landed dark-side up. I’m sure you know what that means. 

It’s my belief that the B*****d Prince Casimir will kill me once news reaches him that the babe has been born. His place in court is constantly under question due to his parentage; Erastus’ continued refusal to name him heir doesn’t help matters either. To be ousted from his position as the king’s only child by a girl must gall him, I’m sure. We both know his type. 

I’ve very little time to prepare contingencies. If you knew my plan, you’d probably hate it. It’s your least favourite kind. The sort where there’s only one way it can work right and it’s a bit of a moonshot. But then, cold calculation was never my forte so much as yours.  

Firstly, I’m relying on Casimir’s intent to cover up my and the babe’s murder. I imagine he’ll burn the winter home down and call it an accident. If so, I can keep our bodies protected for a little while from the elements, hence the wards. 

Secondly, I intend to protect Avice via Anima Securitas. Her soul will remain suspended between this world and the next until you arrive to retrieve her. Terribly illegal, I know, but what are the Vigilae Magus going to do? Arrest my corpse? At any rate, I don’t intend to commit any murders to pay the blood debt. My own grisly demise should balance the scales, don’t you think? I know it will also require illegal magic from your end, but given that you’ve made illegal magic somewhat of an art form, I don’t imagine you’ll mind over much. 

With the magic out of the way, I suppose there are only a few things left to say. Our relationship has always been a hard-bitten, bitter thing. It complicated itself far too much and far too long ago for us to ever unknot it. You’re a creature of malevolent chaos, Invidia. I said that once, and I stand by it. I’ve no doubt you’ll raise my daughter to be another of your simpering sycophants. 

And yet, despite all of this, as I put quill to parchment and plan the bloodmagic that will summon you, I know, without doubt, that you will come. Even after all these years, even after every fight, every falsehood, every failure to fix what happened between us, you will come. You will come in that intractable way of yours, like the cataclysm you are, and you will swipe up my daughter and use her as you please. And I will watch from the Beyond, thanking you nonetheless, because at least she will be alive. 

Beyond everything I feel, through the grey haze of reminiscence and regret and rage, I know one thing with a clarity only imminent death can inspire: I love you. I miss you. 

Goodbye, sister. 

Yours in (literal) spirit,

Aella Eos Castrov 

(P.S. There’s another letter hidden in the lining of my pillow. It’s for my Avice. Please give it to her when she’s old enough to understand what happened to me. What happened to us both.) 

Invidia glanced up from the parchment, dry-eyed. There was a steady thrumming in her head, her blood, her bones. Aella had made her choice. Her stupid, senseless choice. She’d chosen silks and stagnation in Tavela over power and prestige in the Witch Empire. It wasn’t a choice Invidia could fathom in any tangible sense, certainly not when it led to this. 

She thumbed the paper, calluses brushing the signature at the bottom. Castrov. Not Ectorius. A recognition of their shared name, even when Aella had so despised it. 

Invidia’s mind-space trembled. 

Despite all her talk of illegal magic, Aella hadn’t left Invidia much to do. The blood debt for such magic had been paid with her own life; the two pieces of bone in the swaddle, coming from a living and dead person respectively, kept the soul suspended in a sort of limbo. Invidia’s magic just had to act as the hook to reel her back in. 

It was with indefatigable focus that Invidia took the pieces of bone in hand and summoned her magic. It welled in her stomach with familiar warmth. It was almost an act of self-immolation, the way she seemed to burn in her own kindling, the magic blazing up, up, up, from gut to chest to hands. Her mind-space maintained its alert readiness. Magic and mind. When one goes, so does the other. Symbiosis is essential for magic to work as it should. 

“Reditus.” It came out of her mouth in a sharp hiss. A demand more than a plea. Return. 

Her magic latched onto Avice’s lingering soul and held fast. Moments later, the baby’s pulse began to thrum. Avice opened her eyes silently. No squalling. Not a sound. Her eyes were black--entirely black. No white, no pupil, no iris. Invidia experienced a moment of disquiet; and on the heels of that disquiet, a burning, furious joy. 

It felt almost preordained, this moment. A god-touched child. And this was certainly no gentle daughter of Tsara. Avice had been in limbo for hours, her soul subject to the tender mercies of the Dark God Leviathan. Avice had been ordained by death. 

A god and his girl.  

Invidia finally forced herself to look at Aella’s face. She met those open, sightless eyes with a hard gaze of her own. Her eyes were (green, green, so green) dull and glazed. Her black hair spilled down her shoulders like an oil slick. The slack look on her face seemed to drive home the grim finality of her death. Something unfurled inside Invidia. She felt a sudden untethering. A weightlessness that could have been either grief or relief.

(Relief. Relief. Can’t grieve what you no longer love.) 

And yet. 

Invidia cradled the babe. She was momentarily off-centre, vertiginous. Her well-trained talents were failing her here. What farewell did you offer to your long-despised dead sister? 

“Thanks for leaving me your weapon of a witchling. I’ll use her well.” 

That’d do. 

Invidia told herself it was easier to pity her sister than to grieve her. Grief suggested a closeness Invidia no longer acknowledged. She could pity Aella because she would never be her. To grieve her felt like a lie. Aella had gifted her a baby, a witch-child, a stolen princess. She’d given her a weapon. This was transactional. There was no love in this act, no matter what Aella had said in her letter. Those were the words of a dying person. A terminal woman’s sentimentalities. The love had worn itself out a long time ago; gone rusty from disuse. 

Invidia drew herself upright, Avice still silent in her arms. With careful hands, she lifted Aella’s string of bone and dice from the swaddle and placed it alongside the letter. 

It was then that Invidia noticed the extra few words scrawled in small print along the bottom of the parchment: Chum the water. 

“Throw them to the sharks,” she murmured. 

It was an old childhood saying between them. An epithet said in halves. The same way they had been halves, two parts of an impalpable whole. It was a thing they said when their tutor patronised them, or an old letch puckered his lips at them, or their mother scolded them. It was uncertain whether Aella had meant it to be a reminder of what they had once meant to one another, a call to vengeance against Casimir, or just a general f**k them all. 

Reeling with some strange, indefinable emotion, Invidia moved to the bed (grimed with viscera, brown-black in the half-dark) and fumbled for the pillow. Within, she found Avice’s letter, which she tucked carefully into the pocket of her breeches. 

She felt it when the wards began to give out, the last of Aella’s magic--the last of any of her, really, aside from the empty shell of her corpse--buckling beneath the flames that were beginning to eat away at the wood of the doorframe. 

The heat of it was close. It brought moisture to Invidia’s eyes. 

(Not tears. Never tears.) 

She didn’t look back as she pulled the babe close and summoned a wind to separate the flames, and she continued her onward march--don’t look back, don’t you dare look back--until she’d vacated the Ectorius winter home entirely. 

And if later that night, with the babe sleeping soundly in a new bassinet, she downed six glasses of her strongest Deadterran red, held fast to her sister’s sundered string of bone, and wept…well, there was no one to see.