Sweet & Bitter Magic by Adrienne Tooley (best ereader for textbooks .txt) 📕

well. She had expected the girl to show some sign of weariness, had expected the magic to take something from her. Instead she practically seemed to glow.

Which meant she was using dark magic.

“You never saw me as a person,” Marlena said, circling Tamsin predatorily. “I was only ever a thing to be pitied. But I didn’t ask for you to save me.” Her voice was sharp as steel.

“I know,” Tamsin said desperately. “I know, and I’m so sorry. It was my fault. All of it.”

“You don’t get to make my life about you,” Marlena snapped. “Every time you looked at me, I could see the guilt swimming in your eyes. It was like you couldn’t believe I could be happy if I wasn’t as strong as you. But I was. Until you made me wonder if I shouldn’t be.” She laughed—a broken, screeching sound. “So are you happy now that I have unlimited power?” She swept her arms wildly to the side so that every book tumbled from its place on the shelf. “Is this who you wanted me to be?”

The room around them began to shake. There was a canyon between the sisters, all their unspoken resentment in the silence that hung heavy. Marlena glowered, her anger palpable. Tamsin retreated into herself, her shoulders slumping, her head bowed.

If Tamsin could not match her sister’s anger, Wren would willingly step up and take her place. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that on the same day Marlena escaped from the tower, ordinary folk began to fall ill.

“Why a plague?” She tried to keep her voice level, though the magic Marlena had used to shake the room had left a pressure pushing against Wren’s chest. She struggled to breathe.

Marlena wheeled around to stare at Wren, looking at her as though she were a bug beneath a boot. “What are you talking about?”

Wren got shakily to her feet. Marlena was a passable actress. But Wren wasn’t fooled. The plague was so destructive, so all-encompassing and inescapable, that it was impossible to ignore. “Your spell is ripping open the earth, draining the color and life from things. People are sick, their memories wiped clean, their hearts broken. Your magic is hurting people, Marlena.”

Marlena merely blinked at her. “I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.”

“The plague that’s erasing memories from the minds of ordinary folk.” Wren was having trouble imagining that Marlena, regardless of the anger she might feel toward her sister, could truly be so cruel, so uncaring.

Marlena shook her head uncomprehendingly. “I have no knowledge of any such spell. I wouldn’t do something like that. I’m not Evangeline. I’m not Tamsin.”

Tamsin, who had been standing quiet and still, flinched.

“That isn’t fair.” Wren’s voice was low but full of warning. She tried to meet Tamsin’s eye, but the witch was staring determinedly at the floor.

Marlena shot her a look of disgust. “And who are you to be lecturing me about what is or isn’t fair?”

“My father is sick,” Wren said, her heart clenching as she thought of him, his presence already hazy in her mind. “He has been taken down by your spell.”

“I already told you,” Marlena said, her voice rising, “I didn’t cast any spell. I was asleep in a tower for five years, because she decided to tie my survival up with hers.” She pointed a finger at Tamsin, her arm shaking with the same venom in her voice. “I didn’t ask her to use dark magic—magic that killed my best friend and practically burned Within to the ground. But she did it anyway. And now that I’m alive, now that I have the possibility of a real life, you want to blame whatever’s happening in the world on me? I don’t think so.”

Wren exhaled sharply. When Tamsin had used dark magic, strange things had happened in turn. The fires. The destruction. The death. None of it had come from Tamsin. The chaos had stemmed from her spell.

Once the bond had been broken, the world had quietly returned to normal. The thread between the sisters had been dormant while Marlena slept, the side effects nonexistent until Marlena had escaped from the tower, pulling strength from the bond that still connected the sisters. In doing so, she had woken the dark magic that had slept beside her for nearly five years.

And then Wren understood. The plague wasn’t a spell Marlena had cast. It was a side effect of dark magic. Another consequence of Tamsin’s five-year-old spell.

“No.” The desperation in Tamsin’s voice told Wren that the witch had pieced together the answer too. “This can’t be because of me. Not again.” She glanced helplessly around the room, her eyes finally meeting Wren’s. “I didn’t mean… I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

Tamsin was haunted. Shattered. That much was clear just by looking at her. Something in Wren broke as she took in the pain behind Tamsin’s eyes.

“I know,” Wren said. And she did. Her father might be ill because of Tamsin’s spell, but that didn’t mean she would turn her back on the witch. Tamsin had started their journey harsh and arrogant, distrustful and mocking. But as they had traveled onward, the witch had unraveled, showing the soft, sweet, vulnerable sides of herself. Wren knew the plague was only a side effect. It was not magic borne from malice. It was a good intention gone horribly wrong.

She didn’t need to punish Tamsin for her choices. Tamsin was doing enough of that herself.

“What a tender moment,” Marlena snapped. “But I’m going to need one of you to explain to me exactly what’s going on.”

Tamsin glanced nervously at Wren, who nodded encouragingly.

“The magic that you hold, the power that you feel…” Tamsin swallowed hard. “It’s because of the bond of dark magic between us. It was never fully broken. That’s how you survived. That’s why you have this strength. Magic isn’t affecting you the way it used to because you’re using dark magic. You’re not the one feeling the consequences. The earth is.”