Treachery Queen (The Callistra Chronicles #1)

TWO

Chapter Two

Pasiphae stumbled back in darkness. Screams resounded into the night, both from surprise and from fear. She could see nothing but the cratered moon, staring down in like-minded horror.

One by one, the lights bled back as the witches came to their bearings, reigniting the fires. Pasiphae stepped out of the aisle in a stumble, breathing out a cold puff of air.

That was when the whispers started.

"Traitor," someone hissed, and in that moment, Pasiphae jerked like she had been hit, whiplashing again and again as words kept coming.

"No!" Pasiphae shouted, finally finding her voice. "You've got it wrong!"

Her frantic gaze found the witch who had been holding the stone. Hilstan was staring slack-jawed at the sacred ritual instrument in his hands, now charred at the centre, bearing a hairline crack.

"No," Pasiphae said again, this time to herself, barely a whisper.

There was only one existing cause for a witch to be unable to reveal their power at the ceremony: being in contact with a faery. But she hadn't. That much she knew, if everything else around her was a mystery.

Two council members advanced on her, and before she could run, they had her by the arms, toward a waiting carriage.

"What are you doing?" she gasped. "Please."

"Treason is punishable by a life sentence," the one on her right replied.

Pasiphae gaped. "Treason?" she shrieked. "I haven't done anything wrong!"

"You're sick," the one on her left whispered.

Even uncomprehending, her brain was making connections.

Only the fae could take magic from witches, borrow and drain from their very source. Only the fae could make them vulnerable. And what Pasiphae just displayed were the exact effects.

Pasiphae tried to dig her heels into the ground to no avail. She threw her head back desperately, struggling to see over her shoulder.

"I didn't do anything wrong, someone help me!"

Not a soul nearby wanted to respond, shrinking back from Pasiphae's pleading instead. She had lost sight of Circe and her parents within the surging crowd.

"My magic has been missing since I was fourteen," Pasiphae panted, begging for the iron grips around her arms to understand. "Listen to me, I've never seen a faery outside of textbooks in my entire life!"

But that was untrue, and everyone in Eo knew it. I had been found with a child, she wanted to scream. A faery no older than I was at the time.

"This is all just a misunderstanding!" she tried again. "Something is wrong with me but it has nothing to do with the fae."

"That's for us to determine," one of them said, careful to keep calm. But the other was enraged, already making claims that Pasiphae couldn't begin to decipher.

"You're bringing the sleeping sickness in, aren't you?" Something wet landed on the ground near her feet, and she suspected she had just been spat at. "The fae aren't going to rest until they've ripped apart the new world too. As if Earth wasn't enough. Callistra is dying because of people like you."

Pasiphae felt nauseated by the ire in the accusations. The sleeping sickness? It had only seen cases in Taika and Fusun, the westernmost parts of the continent. It hadn't even touched Eo yet!

"I don't know what you're talking about," Pasiphae claimed. "And if you would listen instead of jumping to conclusions and hauling people away like savage brutes from the Isles, you'd know I'm a victim not a traitor."