Do It, Witch

You don't think. Thinking is for people with time.

You drop your cup and grab the prince's arm with both hands and yank him toward you, and at the same moment you snap the knot at your wrist cuff, the little guard-knot you tie every morning out of habit, and throw the spell out of it with your whole body.

It hits the server like a slammed door. Not hard enough.

The blade comes up anyway. It catches you across the inside of your forearm, where your sleeve is still pushed back from the courtyard, and keeps going, and opens a line across the prince's arm right below yours. One cut. Two arms. Your blood and his, mixing on white stone.

Then the hall explodes.

Guards shout. Somebody screams. The server is already gone, vaulting the low wall between the pillars, and as he goes something tears loose from his collar, a thin gray cord, and his face changes as it falls. The elven features slide off him like water. You get one glimpse of round ears, a stranger's face, before he disappears into the white trees.

"Glamour," you say stupidly. "He was wearing a glamour."

"Witch!" someone shouts. "The witch's man!"

Then a dozen Thornguard blades are pointed at your throat.

You are on your knees. You don't remember kneeling. The prince is on his knees too, across from you, holding his arm. Blood runs between his fingers, and the edges of the cut are already going dark, a purple-black stain spreading under the skin like ink in water.

You look at your own arm. The same stain. The same spread.

You know that color. Every witch in Thistlewick knows that color.

"Blackthorn," you say. Your voice sounds far away. "It's blackthorn venom."

"Witch-brew," snaps Chancellor Maelor from somewhere above you. "Of course it is. Seize her."

"Wait." The prince. He's very pale. His green eyes are fixed on your face. "How long?"

You could lie. You don't. "An hour. Maybe less. It goes for the heart."

"Cure?"

"There isn't one."

The hall goes quiet in a horrible, spreading way, the quiet of a hundred elves realizing their heir is going to die on the floor of his own feast.

King Caradhel is on his feet. "Healers," he says, and his voice cracks down the middle. "Now."

They come running in green robes and sing over the prince's arm in that high, strange elven harmony that makes your teeth ache, and the black stain slows. Slows. Then keeps spreading.

"It isn't elven poison," one of the healers says helplessly. "Our songs don't know it."

Your arm is starting to burn. It's a cold burn, creeping toward your elbow. Your heart has started to pound in a heavy, uneven way you don't like.

Think, Ava.

And there, in the middle of the noise, you hear your grandmother.

You are nine, sitting on the floor of her room in the Wickhold, surrounded by red thread. She is showing you knots nobody else bothers to learn anymore because they're old and slow and dangerous. This one is the Concord, she says, tying it around two of her own fingers. It was made for treaties, little heir. When two people swear the same oath, it ties them together until the oath is kept. What hurts one, hurts both. What poisons one, poisons both. She pulls it tight. Which means a poison meant for one can be shared by two. Half a dose of anything is easier to survive.

You never tied it. Nobody living has tied it.

"I can split it," you say.

Nobody hears you. You say it louder. "I can split the poison!"

That gets their attention. A Thornguard blade presses under your jaw. Maelor's beautiful face leans down into view. "You will not touch the prince with your filth."

"Then he dies," you say. "And so do I. And you can explain to both our peoples why the peace summit ended with two dead heirs on the first night."

"What does splitting it mean?" Thalion asks. He's breathing too fast. So are you.

"There's a knot. An old one. A treaty binding. We were swearing the same oath when the blade cut us, so it'll take. It ties us together, and the poison spreads across both of us instead of killing each of us. Half a dose. We'd survive half."

"Ties us together how?"

"I don't know exactly." Truth. Your vision is starting to blur at the edges. "Until the oath is kept. What hurts you hurts me. That's all I know."

"Highness, this is witchcraft," Maelor says. "You cannot."

"I'm aware it's witchcraft, cousin, she's a witch." Thalion doesn't look away from you. A muscle jumps in his jaw. You can see him weighing it, actually weighing it, the way he'd weigh a sword. Then he holds out his bleeding arm across the space between you.

"Do it, witch."

Your hands are shaking. You pull the red cord out of your braid. Your grandmother's cord, the first one she ever gave you. You press your cut forearm to his so the wounds lie together, blood on blood, and you start to wrap.

Over, under, through. Twice around. The words come up from somewhere very old in you, in the witch-tongue no elf has heard spoken in this hall in two hundred years. The cord grows hot. Then it glows, a deep, ember red, and you feel the knot catch like a hook in your chest.

Then you feel him.

A heartbeat that isn't yours. Fast and hard and afraid, right under your own. The cold burn in your arm doubles, then halves, then pours away like water through a sieve, sliding across the knot into him and back again, spreading thin.

His eyes go wide. He felt it too.

"Pull it tight," you whisper. "You have to choose it too."

He takes the cord's end from your fingers and pulls.

The last thing you see is the stain on both your arms fading from black to purple to an ugly bruise yellow, and the King's face, frozen in something that isn't relief yet. The last thing you hear is the prince saying your name, the first time he's said it. "Ava?" Quietly, like a question.

Then nothing.

You wake in a bed that isn't yours, under a ceiling of white branches.

Moonlight. The smell of linden and cedar. Your arm is bandaged to the elbow and it aches the way bruises ache, dully, almost pleasantly. Around your wrist, over the bandage, the red cord has melted into your skin. It isn't a cord anymore. It's a knot-shaped mark, glowing faintly, warm as a coal.

There's a heartbeat under your own. Slower now. Steady.

You turn your head. He's sitting in a chair by the bed, still in his bloodied feast clothes, his own arm bandaged and the same red mark burning on his wrist. He looks terrible. He looks like a painting someone left out in the rain. It's deeply unfair that it still works.

"Where am I?" Your voice is a croak.

"Awake. Good. Ava Ravelwood, you have been unconscious for nineteen hours."

"My chambers. The healers wouldn't separate us." His voice is low and very precise and slightly unsteady. "Apparently we can't be separated."

You lick your dry lips, wince, and realize you've bitten the inside of your lip at some point. You taste blood.

Across from you, the Crown Prince of Aelwyn flinches. He touches his own mouth with two fingers and looks at them, as if he expects to see red.

"When you bit your lip just now, witch," he says, very quietly, "I tasted blood."