I shake my head. “No. I’m not. And I won’t. I’m done, Mother. I won’t hurt another soul for you. And the fact that you thought killing my sisters would…” My eyes burn like someone’s shoving pins into the backs of them. “That this horrible, pointless thing would make me see anything but how monstrous…” I break off, my throat too tight to waste another bit of breath arguing with Mother.
“Don’t lie to me,” she says, “Or to yourself. I saw you—when you came here, you were one thing. Now, you’re another. You know the kind of betrayal that makes forgiveness impossible, that sets an inalterable course for the future and consumes you, body and soul.” She takes a step closer, her voice dropping to a chilling whisper. “Now you understand that, as much as you need me dead at your feet, I need him to know that there is no escape. Sooner or later, I will see mankind remade and his mind unraveled like all the rest.”
“What did he do? What on earth could be worth all this?” I ask, unable to imagine any love-betrayal as horrible as what she’s done.
“There was a child,” she says, her eyes narrowing on mine with a knowing look I don’t care for. At all. “Not my child. Hers, the wife he swore he would leave as soon as he mastered enough magic to survive in the garden with me. I was his teacher, you see, but I was also his love. Or…so I believed.”
She lifts her chin, gazing out across the garden, toward the feeding trees. “But he was in love with her the entire time, using the magic he stole from me to conceive the babe they wanted so desperately they were willing to risk deceiving a witch.”
Her eyes return to mine. I do my best to keep my face expressionless, to conceal the horrible feeling I know this man—and the boy that baby grew up to be.
“He thought he knew enough magic to protect them,” Mother continues. “I’d been foolish enough to tell him a witch who uses her magic to murder a mortal will lose it, and he thought my magic was everything to me.” Her lips curve up on one side. Sadly. Cruelly. “But he was everything. And humans are so fragile. One hardly needs to use magic. Just a few herbs slipped into a tea to make a baby come early, in such a rush of blood neither mother nor child could survive it.”
Even the notion that she failed—to kill the baby, at least—can’t hold back revulsion at her words. “Killing his wife and child wasn’t sufficient revenge?”
That knowing look narrows her eyes again. “The boy lived,” she says, making the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end. Fear for Declan swells inside me until there’s barely room for my heart to keep beating.
“But he was small and sick,” she continues. “His father begged me to save him. Swore he would be my devoted slave until the end of his days, if only I would use my magic to spare his child. So, I planted the boy in healing waters and did my best to make him worthy of being raised in a witch’s garden.” She nods toward the feeding trees and the land beyond, out of sight from this vantage point.
My pulse leaps.
Is she telling the truth? Was there a time, when I was a girl and Declan was a boy, that we soaked in the same starlight? Could he have been right there, so close he could have heard me call his name if I’d known it?
Mother sighs. “But all he did was cry and whimper and claw at my skirts, begging to be lifted and held, too human to understand the soil was the only thing keeping him alive. I cared for him as best I could, but he was…disappointing.” Her lip curls as she adds, “And as he grew, he looked more and more like her, the woman my love wanted more than he would ever want me, no matter how many baby boys I grew him or how much magic I gave him or how many times I swore I was sorry about those herbs. That choice.”
“But you weren’t sorry,” I whisper, needing to hear it for some reason, to know that even back then she was a monster. “Were you?”
She holds my gaze, unflinching. “No. And I’m not sorry about your sisters, either. I didn’t know there was another way, someone else you love who could have paid the price for your disobedience.” She lifts a hand, cupping my face with a tenderness that makes her words even more terrible. “When I let your sisters starve to teach you a lesson, I didn’t know you were on a warded island falling in love with a boy. I only knew that you were hiding from me, refusing me your service, and that you must suffer for it. Suffering was the only way to make you see.”