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He waves his hand, and another figure steps forward, her face shadowed by the hood of her cloak. I think she might actually be standing on the platform rather than an illusion herself.
Lothar’s mouth forms a tight smile that I suspect is holding back a smirk. “You can hear just how long this poison has been tainting our city from the woman who witnessed it emerge into being. Who has come to us now to warn us.”
The woman pulls back her hood, and my heart stops.
It’s my mother. Even across that distance, with the stark shadows of the magical glow sharpening the angles of her face, I recognize her in an instant.
My legs wobble under me. I have to press my hands hard against the walls I’m braced between to catch myself before I fall.
My head spins. What— How?—?
The woman I once called “Ma” steps forward to rest her hands on the stone railing. Her face looks pale and taut as she gazes down over the gathered crowd—the expression I can remember from when she’d take the whip to me all those years ago.
The scars on my back itch.
“I had to come forward,” she says, her familiar if roughened voice flooding the courtyard through the same magical amplification as Lothar’s. “The more I heard about the vigilantes who are attacking the Order of the Wild, the ones the supposed queen is working with, the more I realized what must really be going on. If only I’d seen it sooner…”
Her voice fades with a rasp. I can barely breathe. Then she squares her shoulders and goes on.
“Thirteen years ago, my beloved younger daughter died suddenly under unexplained circumstances. My husband and I never had any proof, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was strange about our older daughter. That she might be hiding dark intentions of the kind a mother would never want to imagine.”
My fingers curl against the walls holding me up as anguish twists my gut.
She didn’t want to imagine it? But she did, over and over, no matter how much I pleaded.
She beat me and shunned me and left me hungry and loveless, all because of what she suspected but never brought herself to say outright.
Ma raises her voice even louder. “When she turned twelve, right before her dedication ceremony, she ran away rather than accept the gods. I had no idea what happened to her—until I started hearing the stories. A young woman with pale orange hair and blue eyes who seemed practiced at criminal acts. Who could call down unspeakable magic of all sorts with her will alone. It’s her, and it’s undeniable. My daughter is one of the riven, mad with her power, and she’s out to destroy all the rest of us!”
Gasps and mutterings of concern ripple through the crowd. My gut clenches tighter.
Rheave glances up at me with a matching anguish etched on his gorgeous face, his body tensed as if he could literally leap to my defense.
“If I had an arrow, I could quiet her,” he says in a low voice. “Strike her down like lightning…”
I could do the same right now with the magic she’s condemning, the power writhing between my ribs. A sour taste laces my tongue.
My magic sears all the way from my jaw to my gut, burning to be let out. To strike her down for the awful picture she’s painting, the blame she’s shirking.
But it’s not even a question.
I shake my head. The words scrape their way up my throat. “Nothing she’s said is exactly a lie. And we’d only be proving her right.”
How much does she really believe that I’m the brutal monster she’s claiming, and how much has Lothar coached her on what to say?
I’m not sure it makes any difference.
My mother is still speaking, with a quaver in her voice that makes my teeth grit. “I don’t know how anyone who claims to want the best for us could ally with a riven sorcerer. Maybe she has whatever’s left of the Melchiorek family under her control. Maybe she’s the one who murdered King Konram! But we can’t let her or the people she’s swayed to join her tear down all the good the Order has done for us.”
The murmurs of the crowd are becoming more urgent. Some are waving their fists in the air in apparent anger.
My power roars louder, and I squeeze my eyes shut as I pull my imagined vine tight around me. At my continued refusal, a slash of magic cuts across my lungs.
I flinch and clamp my mouth shut against a sob. The pain radiates through me for a few thuds of my heart before finally dissipating.
And Lothar isn’t even done yet.
He takes over the speech with a coolly forceful tone. “You’ve heard it from the mouth of the woman who endured the tragedy of having birthed this monster. Our entire country teeters on the edge of disaster as long as this ruthless riven sorcerer runs free. We must find her and execute her before she can do any more harm!”
