Estella Valehollow's Arc

Chapter 11 of 11

Adrian opened the grimoire and held it out flat on his palms. "I took it the night I left," he said. His voice cracked. "I have been using it. Trying to. Elena is sick, Estella. Has been since Penny was small. I needed the spells. I needed a mother for my girl." He swallowed hard. "Do what you want with me. Burn me down. Just leave them be." Estella stepped down from the throne. The book trembled in his hands. He pulled a folded square of cloth from his coat and let it drop beside his boot. It opened on the stone. Dark red bloomed across the fabric in heavy patches, layered over older stains gone brown. "That is what she coughs up now," Adrian said. "Every night. I am running out of time." Estella reached for the book, and then the doors slammed open behind him. Cold air rushed in. Her old coven stood in the threshold, robes white with snow, hands already raised. They had come for her at last. Adrian slid a thin silver band off his finger and set it on the stone between them. He did not look down at it. "That is everything I have left to give," he said. "Take it. Take me. Just let them pass." Estella looked at the small ring on the floor, then at the stained cloth, then at the white-robed line in her doorway. Her hand was already lifting. She felt the shape of the killing she had built herself for. She could end him now and turn to meet the coven with his blood still warm on her hands. That was the woman she had walked here to become. She did not do it. She picked up the grimoire instead. She closed it against her chest. "Go," she said to Adrian. "Take your ring. Take your wife the cure. Tell your daughter nothing about me." Adrian stared. Estella turned to face the open doors and her old sisters. She raised one hand and the stones beneath the coven flared with light. "He is not yours," she said. "And neither am I." The barrier rose between them like a wall of clean fire. Adrian ran. The ring stayed on the floor where he had dropped it, forgotten. When the smoke cleared, the coven was gone and so was he. Estella stood alone in her hall with her mother's book in her arms. The reckoning she had carried for years was finished, and it had not looked like she thought it would. She had wanted him broken. Instead she had let him live, and found the harder thing underneath her rage was mercy she did not know she still owned. She sat down on the cold step of her throne and opened the grimoire to the first page. Outside, the snow kept falling. She was, at last, only herself again. She read by the gray light until her hands stopped shaking. Somewhere on the road, a man was running home with a cure folded inside his coat. Somewhere a child was warm. Estella turned the page. The silver ring caught the last of the morning on the stones, and she let it lie. She had come here to take something irreversible from him. In the end, the thing she had taken back was her own name.