carried across 83

83 I’m Not Doing That For You 

Sera 

I stood there in the center of the room. A full minute passed in complete silence. My mother slowly pulled herself up from the floor. She sat on the very edge of the bed. She looked exhausted, pathetic, and deeply ashamed. 

“Sera,” Irina started. Her voice was weak. “I am sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing. The fear in this fortress… the way that savage looks at you… Torin was just…” 

I waved my hand sharply, cutting her off mid-sentence. 

“Save your pity story for someone else,” I said bluntly. “I don’t care who you fuck. I don’t care about your excuses. I am not here to judge your morals.” 

Irina stopped talking. She blinked, clearly caught off guard by my complete lack of emotional reaction. She wiped a streak of sweat from her forehead. 

She frowned, looking closely at my face. She saw the dark, calculating intensity in my eyes. She saw the dried blood on the edge of my sleeve that belonged to Kael. 

“Then why are you here?” Irina asked. 

“I need something from you,” I said. 

Irina stared at me. She pulled her shoulders back, trying to regain a fraction of her maternal authority.” What could you possibly need from me right now?” 

I stepped closer to the bed. I looked directly into her eyes. 

“I need you to recreate a face for me,” I said. 

Irina stopped breathing. The color completely drained from her cheeks, leaving her skin stark white. She stared at me in absolute, horrifying silence. 

She thought I didn’t know. 

She thought her secret was buried safely in the past, hidden behind the high walls of the palace. But I knew exactly what she was. 

My mother was a witch. 

I didn’t learn it from a book, and she never sat me down to confess it. I learned it when I was ten years old. 

My father had been away on a long diplomatic mission to the western borders. Lyra was still a very young toddler, sleeping in the nursery. It was the middle of the night. A frantic Valdris noble had arrived at the palace gates on a foaming horse, carrying a small, wrapped bundle in his arms. 

It was his daughter. She was roughly my age. Her family’s carriage had been attacked by a splinter group 

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But she looked entirely different. 

My mother had changed her face. The jaw was sharper. The nose was thinner. The eyes sat slightly further apart. The raw materials of her ruined flesh had been rebuilt into something entirely new. She was completely unrecognizable. 

The noble parents had returned to the study the next morning. I watched from the balcony as they looked at their child. They didn’t fall to their knees in gratitude. They screamed. They cursed my mother. They yelled that she had ruined their child, that she had stolen their daughter and replaced her with a stranger. They were incredibly ungrateful. 

My mother had stood there, cold and completely unbothered by their tears. She calmly explained that she didn’t know what the child looked like before the wolfsbane melted her features. She had no visual reference. She couldn’t fix the clay to match the original, so she simply built a new face. 

My father returned a week later. The issue was quietly settled with a massive sum of gold and a strict demand for silence. The noble family moved away to the far borders. 

But it left me with the information. My mother could change faces. She could mold flesh and bone with her strange clay and her dried leaves. She never knew I watched her that night. She never knew I kept her secret for nearly a decade. 

Until right now. 

I watched the realization hit her. I watched the panic flood into her eyes as she sat on the edge of the bed in the freezing Ironmaw guest room. 

“You…” Irina whispered. Her voice trembled. “How do you know that?” 

J 

“It doesn’t matter how I know,” I said. I crossed my arms over my chest. “What matters is that I need you to do it again. Tonight.” 

Irina stared at me. Her chest rose and fell rapidly. The shock slowly started to wear off, replaced by a defensive, stubborn wall. She pulled her shoulders back again, her jaw setting into a hard line. 

She looked at my dark Ironmaw clothes. She looked at the blood on my sleeve. She realized I was asking her to use her witchcraft to help the northern savages she despised so deeply. 

Irina shook her head. She looked me right in the eye. 

“I am not doing that for you,” she said. 

*** 

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