“It’s funny.” She laughs softly from her place kneeling in Gavik’s blood. “I’ve been carrying around this bag for years, hoping I’d get the chance to use it. And now I am. It doesn’t feel real.” Varia darts her black-glass eyes to me. “You understand, right? Wanting something for so long and then standing on the edge of getting it.”

“Yes,” I croak. She sighs, and I pinpoint the strangeness in her gaze then. The way she looks at me is almost…hungry, as if I’m a shiny coin and she is the crow who’s spotted me on the cobblestones.

“Let me guess: the High Witches dangled your heart in front of you? Your heart for my brother’s.”

My head snaps up. “How did you—?”

“Because I know them.” She laughs, brittle.

Lucien’s voice slips between us. “What are you talking about?”

Varia throws him a look over her shoulder. “I knew Gavik would kill me eventually. Every day he stirred up more fear in Vetris, no matter how I tried to stop him. And every day he grew stronger for it. His cleverness and cunning outmatched mine. Father liked to think the royal family was untouchable, invincible back then. But I knew the truth.”

I knit my brows, the sudden flash of light from Gavik’s mangled corpse nearly blinding me. Varia doesn’t blink, her dark orbs soaking the light unflinchingly as she speaks.

“There’s a saying in Avellish: Three enemies means two of them are friends. Gavik hated me—he knew that when I took the throne, I’d never allow him to have as much power as Father did. But Gavik hated witches, too. So I sought them out.” She smiles over her shoulder, her pink lips two halves of a brilliant rose. “Father wouldn’t protect me. He relied on Gavik’s advice too much to drive him from the court. So I had to protect myself.”

She breathes out, long and soft. “I wanted to inherit the power promised to my witch bloodline. But how could I do that, with so much hate for them in our city? The crown princess, asking to meet with the witches? It would’ve never been allowed. I knew better than to ask Father—I couldn’t go through him. I had to go around him.”

She holds up her graceful hand. All five of her fingers wiggle, even though all five of them are made out of wood. Sleek, polished wood, seamlessly melding with her flesh and moving just like it. She shifts the hem of her long robe in the mud, and where the flesh of her left leg is supposed to be is the same smooth, living wood, bending with her movements.

“I faked my death with a few body parts. Sacrifices had to be made to convince the world—and Gavik—that I was dead.”