“What gift can we give you, what crown can we bestow, to honor what you shall do for us?” her grandmother mused. “You have a fine blade, a fearsome coven”—the Thirteen all allowed a hint of a smirk—“what else could we give you that you do not possess?”
Manon bowed her head. “There is nothing I wish for, save the honor which you have already given me.”
Her grandmother laughed. “What about a new cloak?”
Manon straightened. She could not refuse, but . . . this was her cloak, it had always been.
“That one is looking rather shabby,” her grandmother went on, waving her hand to someone in the crowd. “So here is our gift to you, Wing Leader: a replacement.”
There were grunts and curses, but the crowd gasped—in hunger, in anticipation—as a brown-haired, shackled witch was hauled forward by three Yellowlegs cronies and forced to her knees before Manon.
If her broken face, shattered fingers, lacerations, and burns did not give away what she was, then the bloodred cloak she wore did.
The Crochan witch, her eyes the solid color of freshly tilled earth, looked up at Manon. How those eyes were so bright despite the horrors written on her body, how she didn’t collapse right there or start begging, Manon didn’t know.
“A gift,” said her grandmother, extending an iron-tipped hand toward the Crochan. “Worthy of my granddaughter. End her life and take your new cloak.”
Manon recognized the challenge. Yet she drew her dagger, and Asterin stepped in close, eyes on the Crochan.
For a moment, Manon stared down at the witch, her mortal enemy. The Crochans had cursed them, made them eternal exiles. They deserved to die, each and every one of them.
But it was not her voice that said those things in her head. No, for some reason, it was her grandmother’s.
“At your leisure, Manon,” her grandmother cooed.
Choking, her lips cracked and bleeding, the Crochan witch looked up at Manon and chuckled. “Manon Blackbeak,” she whispered in what might have been a drawl had her teeth not been broken, her throat ringed with bruises. “I know you.”
“Kill the bitch!” a witch shouted from the back of the room.
Manon looked into her enemy’s face and raised her brows.
“You know what we call you?” Blood welled as the Crochan’s lips peeled into a smile. She closed her eyes as if savoring it. “We call you the White Demon. You’re on our list—the list of all you monsters to kill on sight if we ever run into you. And you . . .” She opened her eyes and grinned, defiant, furious. “You are at the top of that list. For all that you have done.”
“It’s an honor,” Manon said to the Crochan, smiling enough to show her teeth.
“Cut out her tongue!” someone else called.
“End her,” Asterin hissed.
Manon flipped the dagger, angling it to sink into the Crochan’s heart.
The witch laughed, but it turned into a cough that had her heaving until blue blood splattered on the floor, until tears were leaking from her eyes and Manon caught a glimpse of the deep, infected wounds on her chest. When she lifted her head, blood staining the corners of her mouth, she smiled again. “Look all you want. Look at what they did to me, your sisters. How it must pain them to know they couldn’t break me in the end.”
Manon stared down at her, at her ruined body.
“Do you know what this is, Manon Blackbeak?” the Crochan said. “Because I do. I heard them say what you did during your Games.”
Manon wasn’t sure why she was letting the witch talk, but she couldn’t have moved if she wanted to.
“This,” the Crochan said for all to hear, “is a reminder. My death—my murder at your hands, is a reminder. Not to them,” she breathed, pinning Manon with that soil-brown stare. “But to you. A reminder of what they made you to be. They made you this way.
“You want to know the grand Crochan secret?” she went on. “Our great truth that we keep from you, that we guard with our lives? It is not where we hide, or how to break your curse. You have known all this time how to break it—you have known for five hundred years that your salvation lies in your hands alone. No, our great secret is that we pity you.”
No one was speaking now.
But the Crochan did not break Manon’s stare, and Manon did not lower her dagger.
“We pity you, each and every one of you. For what you do to your children. They are not born evil. But you force them to kill and hurt and hate until there is nothing left inside of them—of you. That is why you are here tonight, Manon. Because of the threat you pose to that monster you call grandmother. The threat you posed when you chose mercy and saved your rival’s life.” She gasped for breath, tears flowing unabashedly as she bared her teeth. “They have made you into monsters. Made, Manon. And we feel sorry for you.”
“Enough,” the Matron said from behind. But the whole room was silent, and Manon slowly raised her eyes to her grandmother’s.
In them, Manon beheld a promise of the violence and pain that would come if she disobeyed. Beyond that, there gleamed nothing but satisfaction. As if the Crochan had spoken true, but only the Blackbeak Matron knew she had done so.
The Crochan’s eyes were still bright with a courage Manon could not comprehend.
“Do it,” the Crochan whispered. Manon wondered if anyone else understood that it was not a challenge, but a plea.
Manon angled her dagger again, flipping it in her palm. She did not look at the Crochan, or her grandmother, or anyone as she gripped the witch by the hair and yanked back her head.
And then spilled her throat on the floor.
•
Legs dangling off a cliff edge, Manon sat on a plateau atop a peak in the Ruhnns, Abraxos sprawled at her side, smelling the night-blooming flowers on the spring meadow.
She’d had no choice but to take the Crochan’s cloak, to dump her old one atop the body once it fell, once the witches gathered around to rip her apart.
They have made you into monsters.
Manon looked at her wyvern, the tip of his tail waving like a cat’s. No one had noticed when she left the celebration. Even Asterin was drunk on the Crochan’s blood, and had lost sight of Manon slipping through the crowd. She told Sorrel, though, that she was going to see Abraxos. And her Third, somehow, had let her go alone.
They’d flown until the moon was high and she could no longer hear the shrieks and cackles of the witches in the Omega. Together they sat on the last of the Ruhnns, and she gazed across the endless flat expanse between the peaks and the western sea. Somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, was a home that she had never known.