Page 184 of A Kingdom of Shadow and Ash

Her eyes flicked down—to the dagger.

It gleamed against the darkness, the hilt carved from bone, ancient runes burnt into its length like whispers of the past.

‘Because you have something I need.’ Mal’s voice did not waver, though she felt the weight of the words lodge deep in her chest.

Her hand lifted, pointing at the cursed blade.

‘I’ve come to break the curse you cast upon us, TabithaWysteria.’

A slow, wicked smile spread across the Seer’s lips.

‘Have you, now?’

…

Mal’s breath was steady, measured, despite the pulse of unease rippling beneath her skin. The dead had begun to gather, their hollow faces peering from behind the blackened trees, their whispers rustling through the skeletal branches like wind through a graveyard. The silence was alive, pressing in, watching.

‘You were here, this entire time,’ Mal said, stepping deeper into the cursed forest. The air thickened around her, heavy with waiting souls. ‘Why?’

The Seer lifted a hand, slow, deliberate, and dragged her fingers down her face. The transformation was seamless—as if she were shedding one reality for another.

Gone was the owl-eyed creature with her feathered crown, her twisted elegance of half-human, half-otherworldly.

Now, in her place, stood a witch.

A woman with long, white hair cascading like moonlight over her tattooed hands. Dark skin inked with symbols older than the very soil beneath them. And eyes—purple, deep and endless, mirroring Mal’s own.

‘After Hadrian was murdered, I vanished from the world,’ the witch said, her voice steeped in old grief, as if time had never softened the wound. ‘I cursed the kingdoms for what they had done to him, but I stayed here in the land where he was from to be close to our child.’

‘Your child?’

Tabitha’s expression was unreadable. A carved mask of a woman who had lived too long.

‘Do you know the tale of the two brothers, Mal Blackburn?’

‘Of course,’ Mal replied cautiously. ‘My parents told us the tale every night before we slept.’

‘Then tell it to me.’

Mal clenched her jaw. ‘I do not have time for this, Tabitha.’

The witch hissed, her power thrumming through the air like the first warning of a storm. ‘You want the dagger?’ She touched the hilt at her side, her voice curling with venom. ‘Then you must understand first.’

Mal exhaled sharply, her frustration curling into a thin mist in the cold air. But she began, her voice a practiced cadence from childhood.

‘Once upon a time, during the Great War, two brothers were found. One was drakonian, the other wyverian. They were raised in secrecy, hidden from the world by their adoptive parents, secluded from all eyes. But as they grew, they were discovered—and each was sent back to their own kind. The drakonian was revealed to be the lost son of Princess Aithne and Prince Sorin, while the wyverian boy became one of the fiercest witch hunters in the seven kingdoms. So fierce was he that the king himself married him to his daughter—’

Mal stopped.

Tabitha’s laughter was a slow, rich thing, like the breaking of an ancient spell.

‘The wyverian boy,’ she murmured, ‘was Hadrian’s son.Ourson. We were being hunted, so I hid him away, but by the time I returned, he was gone. Years passed before I found him again—by then, he had become a king, married off to his…aunt.’

Mal winced. A cruel twist of fate.

‘They did not know,’ Tabitha continued, a shrug rolling overher shoulders. ‘Or they never would have arranged it. But what does it matter now?’

‘How are you still alive?’ Mal asked, her voice quieter, unsure if she truly wished for the answer.

---