Morrigan Vex's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The stool grew hard under her. Morrigan stood and faced the truth she had been circling since the spell took hold. The binding ran one way. He was being pulled toward her by a tether hooked deep in his chest. Her end of it was still tied to nothing. When he stepped through her door, the spell would look for her half and find a stranger. It would snap back and burn her out from the inside. She had until he arrived to fix it. She pulled the pendant from under her collar. Two sigils, interlocked, one for him and one for her. His side glowed faint orange. Her side was cold silver, unlit. She had built the working to catch him. She had never built her own half to catch anything back. She crossed to the work table she had spent the evening disguising and stripped it back down. Jars of tea went to the floor. The mortar went with them. She set the cauldron in the center again, lit the single candle, and laid the tangled thyme and rue where her hands would find them without looking. The rune plates along the table legs warmed under her palm. She cut her thumb on the pendant's edge and pressed the blood into the silver half. Then she sat. Chaos would not be chased. She knew this. She closed her eyes and made herself the still thing in the room. She thought about a man she had never seen. She thought about the shape of a shoulder next to hers at this table. She thought about handing him a cup. She did not push. She waited for the crack in the glass. It came slow. A wrong-angled seam opened in the air above the candle, green where it should have been clear. She did not grab it. She let it settle into her chest, into the cold half of the pendant, into the place where her side of the tether was supposed to live. It hurt. She had expected it to hurt. What she had not expected was the wanting that came with it — not for a soulmate, but for the person she had invented in the waiting. She let that in too. The silver half of the pendant warmed and began to glow, blue against the orange. The seam closed. The candle steadied. Morrigan opened her eyes. The tether held on both sides now. She could feel him at the far end of it, moving, closer than he had been an hour ago. She could also feel, for the first time, what she had done to herself. She had bound her wanting to a face she did not know. If he turned out to be cruel, or married, or already dead when the cottage reached him, she would not be able to unwant him. Under her feet, the floor tilted. The cottage had picked up speed.