“Listen well and heed my words. I will not repeat them.” She put her face close to Rune’s. “You have people here. Your story, your legend, will grow. There is one here who is destined to kill you and yours, Rune.”
Gooseflesh arose suddenly and painfully upon her bare skin. “Who?”
The witch’s smile was mocking. “You know, don’t you?”
When Rune remained silent and confused, Damascus pressed the tips of her pale fingers into Rune’s temple. “You call her the little black-haired baby.”
The shock hit Rune square in the chest and left her gasping for air. Disbelief and a hateful knowledge squeezed her brain.
It couldn’t be.
It wouldn’t be.
“You’re wrong,” she said, finally.
There may have been some pity deep in the witch’s cold eyes. “I felt the same when I was told of your eventual…betrayal.”
But Rune shook her head. She pressed her fist against her stomach, where an agonizing lump grew larger and larger. “No.”
Damascus lifted an eyebrow. “Baby.” Then she sighed. “We’re nearly home.”
There were no windows, but Rune could feel the contraption speeding along with surprising smoothness. She turned her face away from the witch and said nothing.
But there was something she needed to know. “Tell me about Gunnar.”
Rune didn’t look at the witch but heard the surprise in her voice when she spoke. “The ghoul.” Her voice was thoughtful, but its softness couldn’t hide the thread of angry darkness beneath it. “Gunnar. He was my doctor. Did you know that? My very best doctor. He was born with the sight. Could see into the future—how far remains a mystery. Gunnar the Wise, he was called. I called him Gunnar the Stubborn.” She laughed.
Rune was still trying to process that Gunnar wasn’t imprisoned by the witch. He wasn’t a slave.
Gunnar had worked for the witch.
Her doctor. Her wizard.
Hers.
All the spit in her mouth dried up and she couldn’t swallow. “I’d like some water.”
“It’s in your hand.”
Rune looked down at the silver cup that had appeared in her hand, hesitated, then turned the goblet up and drank. The water was cool and fresh and tasted better than blood, even, as it slid down her throat.
“He wasn’t always a hideous ghoul,” Damascus said. “When he displeased me, I had him made into one. I couldn’t kill him—death is too easy. Too forgiving.”
“And you wanted him to suffer,” Rune said. “The way you want everyone to suffer.”
Damascus shrugged. “He helped me capture my Nicolas. But that was a mistake on my part, because in the end they were the ones who plotted and schemed against me and they were the ones who took you away.”
“Because you were going to kill me,” Rune said. “Snow told me.”
“Shame,” the witch corrected. “And it is the most fitting name imaginable for that one.” But she didn’t disagree that she’d been preparing to destroy the infant Rune.
Why should she? As far as she was concerned, Rune was hers. Rune was trapped, broken, and hers.
“Did you give me a name?” Rune asked, and she held her breath as she waited for the answer.
Damascus smiled. “I called you Sinister. I meant that name in the most flattering of ways.” Then she gestured impatiently. “But then I was informed that my baby Sinister would grow up and end me. You can understand how that might have hurt my feelings.”
“Maybe you were lied to,” Rune said. “Maybe that was the lie that set this whole thing in motion. I wouldn’t have needed protection against you had you not tried to kill me, and you would have groomed me into being the child you wanted.” And she shuddered at the thought.
Sinister, indeed.
She was growing stronger, mentally. The crawlers no longer had her.
And Damascus was no more her mother than the shimmer lords were her fathers.
I was made, not born.
I have no parents.
Part of her didn’t want to believe it, but there it was.
The truth, at last.
“It was not a lie,” Damascus said. “My doctors told me. Gunnar was a wise wizard but he wasn’t my only one. When I asked him if the others spoke the truth he lied. But I could see into his strange little brain.” She giggled, and Imp put small fingers over her red bow of a mouth and giggled with her.
“That’s when he became the ghoul?”
“What? Oh. No. I hit him with that little spell when he…”
Damascus’s hesitancy was so peculiar that Rune couldn’t leave it alone. “What? He did what?”