City of Spells (Into the Crooked Place #2) - Alexandra Christo Page 0,65

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.