Seven Witches

ten

                  

Vladimir;

Vladimir had five strings on his fingers. The first two strings connected to the necks of his two consolers, one misstep and he'd pull it and their heads would roll on the floor. The third was around Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, also known as the king of Persia from the Qajar dynasty.

The fourth was around every citizen in Russia. This specific string terrified Vladimir because he never wanted it to ever be pulled.

The fifth was a bright red string that wrapped around his own neck which he soon realised did not begin on his finger. The string seemed to come from somewhere else and tangle into his ring finger and then his neck

He used to have six strings instead of five, but he had pulled one of them and ended his father's life.

Earlier he had received a report from the lieutenant who was assigned to follow the escaped witch who happened to also ruin a perfectly crafted door and an expensive ball.

The maids had returned the coat Cythera had borrowed, and now as he wore it, he recognised the scent of her hair—musk essence and lavender oil. Vladimir put the collar to his face and took another deep sniff.

Memories from the ball haunted him under the darkness of the night. Somehow, he seemed to have experienced the entire spectrum of human emotion in three days. But nothing was like the moment of fear and then the sudden confusion of when Cythera had unwittingly saved everyone.

Amabo te. He remembered that exact word from their peculiar conversation. It wasn't because the phrase has interesting pronunciation that he remembered it, but because it rang a bell in his head. He'd heard it before from the witch his father had burned that day. Amabo te! Amabo te! Amabo te!

The connection started an itch in the back of his neck that wouldn't go away. It wasn't that Latin was hard which stressed him, it was that the one common thing all the witches had was that language.

Cythera could be lying about how she learned it, he hoped she wasn't. If she was indeed lying, how would that explain the absence of the mark? The maids found clear skin and no bandages anywhere.

Tsar Vladimir took off the coat and wore his robe, trying it around his waist. Sleep was an old childhood friend who was too busy to come visit tonight.

He went the library and found the librarian asleep, head on the desk with a pen still held in her fingers and papers neatly stacked. Gently, he took the pen off of her fingers and set it on the table, screwing the lid over the bottle of ink.

Another thing he loved about his home was the enormous library. He could spend several hours just sitting among the books without reading any, clinging to the nostalgic scent of old paper and wet ink.

One other talent no one knew he possessed was that he knew every book in this library. Some days he wondered why he couldn't just become a librarian instead of this tired lady.

Picking the Latin-Russian dictionary, he flipped the pages, reading random words and memorising some interesting ones, mostly some vulgar curses. Consiste. Also a word he heard Cythera say. Seems like she was truthful about trying to stop the girl.

It was no use to look for the meaning of a phrase in a word dictionary so he tried another book. Then, he also found some other interesting curses that he wrote down.

Finally, he reached the meaning he was looking for. Amabo te: I love you/I will love you. Vladimir frowned. Was she confessing her undying love to a little girl she just met? And was that other witch spewing confessions while she burned?