Annie Philaxis's Arc

Chapter 10 of 6

Six of them slept by the fire now. Annie kept watch. She could not sit still. The throne to the north still waited, and she still did not know how to fill her count without stealing. She turned to the young woman in the corner, the blind one who had helped her break the witches. Cassandra Vale saw the future. For days her visions of Annie had grown darker, and she would not say why. Annie crossed the room and knelt in front of her. "You have watched me all night," Annie said. "You flinch when you look at me. Tell me what you see." Cassandra's blank eyes stayed still. "You do not want it." "I want the truth more than I want comfort. Say it." The blind woman drew a slow breath. "You reach the throne with a full count. You touch it. It finds the crack in you and makes a copy. The copy walks back down the glacier wearing your face." She paused. "The copy is kind. That is how no one knows." Across the fire, Marigold woke. She sat up with a hand on her belly and listened without a word. "Which crack," Annie said. "Name it." "These people." Cassandra tilted her head toward the sleepers. "The children. The pregnant one. The broken father. You love them now. The throne will use that door." Annie went cold in a way the storm had never made her. The three witches before her had failed because they loved something more than power. She had thought she'd escaped that trap by choosing love. Cassandra told her love was still the trap. Every soul she gathered by kindness bound her tighter to people the throne could copy through. "Then I cannot win," Annie said. "If I stay cruel, the count stays at twelve. If I grow kind, the throne breaks me at the door." "That is what I have seen. Again and again." Cassandra reached into her robe and drew out a scrap of paper covered in her own scrawl. "But the vision changed tonight. Once. You did not touch the throne with your hand." "With what, then?" "I could not see. It went dark there. That is new." Cassandra folded the paper away. "The dark means you have not decided yet. The copy is not certain. You can still make it a lie." Marigold spoke from across the fire, plain and quiet. "So don't reach for it the way they did." Annie looked at the woman, then at the sleeping twins, then at her own bare hands. The seer had named the blade at her throat. She was no longer walking blind. She knew now that the old path and the new path both ended in a copy on the throne. There had to be a third way to touch it, one that used no crack the throne could find. "Then I stop counting souls," Annie said. "I have to find a way to claim it that costs me no one."