The Scorned Read online

  The Scorned

  Maggie Sunseri

  Join Maggie’s Newsletter

  The Scorned

  Maggie Sunseri

  https://maggiesunseri.com

  * * *

  Copyright © 2022 Maggie Sunseri

  eBook Edition

  This work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  * * *

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review or article.

  Also by Maggie Sunseri

  THE LOST WITCHES OF ARADIA

  The Discovered

  The Coveted

  The Illuminated

  The Hunted

  The Scorned

  The Claimed

  * * *

  THE AWAKEN SERIES (Young Adult Series)

  Awaken

  Arisen

  For those who see beyond the veil of Maya and to the formless connection beneath.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Note from Maggie

  Also by Maggie Sunseri

  About Maggie Sunseri

  Chapter 1

  I watched the woman drape herself over my father, his hand low on her waist as she perched sideways in his lap. She lifted a slender hand to his cheek, but he pushed it away. His bearded face was flushed red as he roared with laughter with the other men. I was the only child here, sitting around a fireplace with the highest-ranking men of the Order as women offered food, drink, and their bodies with empty eyes and wide smiles. Father told me it was an honor I was allowed to be here—that I wasn’t like the other children. That I was just like him.

  I sat very still, my arms crossed and back straight. I lifted my chin, and I forced my face to be blank and uncaring, even as I seethed with hatred so burning and sorrow so vast they could fill an ocean.

  Because as my father laughed and drank with these men with a servant in his lap, my mother was crying in her chambers alone. He called her his guiding light, his North Star, and yet the bruises he left on her skin were shades of midnight.

  My throat was tight, and my eyes burned, but I knew that crying in front of my father’s men or, heaven forbid, my father, would earn me a swift and unrelenting punishment. I refused to be humiliated, for that thick shroud of shame to join the other shadows that trailed me like ghosts.

  I learned that lesson quickly. I learned every lesson faster than the other children. My father said it was because I was destined for greatness, just like him, and that the other children were weak-minded and polluted by heretic blood. He taught me that he and I descended from the true gods—gods that ruled above all things, unknowable and unreachable to everyone but us.

  But I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe rulers of the universe would ever choose him and forsake my mother. Nor did I believe I was smarter, faster, stronger, and more powerful in magick than the other children because I was meant to rule the realm with my father.

  No. I wasn’t chosen by any gods. I made myself this way. I took what I needed, said what I must, read every book I could get my hands on—forbidden, human, and Order-approved alike—and I forged my greatness with help from no one.

  In the coming years, while I made myself stronger, I would sit in these rooms with my back straight and chin lifted, and I would never let them know I cried. I would never let them know how much I felt; I would instead let them believe I no longer felt any pain at all.

  Nor would I let them know how much I dreamed.

  When I was strong enough, I would fashion the whole world into something better. Just like Angelina taught my father, and just like my father taught me.

  Belief that the world was malleable, never fixed, was the only gift of value my father had ever given me.

  “Don’t you have a daughter Lucius’s age—what’s her name? Christine?” Father slurred at Eric.

  Pure of blood, thankfully. That’s what you need, he said only to me.

  Eric took a sip of his whiskey, the ice clanking against glass. “Just as useless as her mother. Not much going on up here.” He tapped his finger to his temple.

  “That’s all right,” Father said after a short burst of laughter. “Unnecessary for our women.”

  The two men exchanged a glance, and Eric shrugged. “He’s a little young.”

  “Never too young to learn how to deal with females,” Father replied.

  She’ll be good practice, Father said. But not worthy of anything more.

  Then, aloud, he said, “Ten years is plenty old enough to show an interest in girls. I’m starting to worry the heretic servant boy is more interesting to him than a pair of tits.” Father’s eyes darkened, as if imagining the implications of such a truth. “And I don’t raise flowery crystals-and-herbs boys, do I, Lucius?”

  Eric’s eyes flashed anger for a moment, linking Father’s words to his daughter. But I knew he would never stand up for her to anyone in this room.

  “I’m insulted by the insinuation that I would ever fall for the help,” I said, speaking for the first time that night as I took in the scene.

  Eric’s eyes widened as I spoke. “I’m unnerved every time he speaks,” he said. “I’ve never heard a child talk like that.” He laughed heartily as Clarice, a woman in a formfitting red dress, refilled his drink.

  Clarice smiled at me sadly when she was done. She had always been kind to me, helping me find books in the library when the men weren’t around.

  “Reads too much,” Father muttered. “I’d have hoped you would’ve been more insulted by the idea that you were a perversion of nature.”

  “I can be insulted by two things,” I said.

  I was insulted by neither. As I watched the woman in my father’s lap plant a kiss on his neck, all I felt was revulsion. Everything my father and his men did in this room made them weaker. The women, the drinks, the drugs… directly defying their own orders for everyone else as they did whatever they pleased. They weren’t meant to rule anything at all.

  I was. Just like the captured psychic in the dungeons foretold. No one else had heard him say it. It had been a message just for me.

  Until his vision manifested, I would bottle up my tears for the cruelty sustained by Mother, the other wives, and their children, and I would hide just how much I cared for my new best friend Daelon.

  Later that night, after I’d been excused from the night’s debauchery, I lay with Mother in her bed. She let me cry for all the heretics Father forced me to watch burn and die, Daelon’s parents included. I imagined if it had been my mother, and I didn’t understand why Daelon could be my friend at all.

  “Shhhh,”
she whispered. “It’s okay, it’s okay. You are nothing like him, sweet boy. Your heart is so big, and that will never be a weakness. Keep it concealed, but never let it shrink.”

  Mother was the only one I could ever show my weaknesses. Without her, I might not have been as strong. Letting these emotions out now meant I could hide them better in front of everyone else. This was another important lesson I’d learned.

  “I’m scared that because of him I will always be alone. No one will want to be close to me. No one will ever want to be my friend.” I choked out a sob. “I’m afraid that one day Daelon will break out of his state of shock and buried memories and think of me as him and nothing else. Or that girls like Christine will think I’m going to treat them how Father treats you.”

  “Sometimes, I have this feeling,” Mother whispered back as she ran her fingers through my hair. “That everything is going to change, in the blink of an eye. I think this feeling is hope—but bigger. And I hear this song, a wordless song, one that moves like the tide and crests like a tall wave.” Here in my mother’s arms, I felt safe again. She wasn’t Father’s North Star—a light guiding him through the shadows—she was mine.

  As she hummed, my tears continued to fall. Because talk of oceans made me think about Daelon’s burning village, and how I wasn’t strong enough yet to prevent any of that pain. Or anyone’s pain, ever.

  One day I would be stronger than my father and his men—and not just them, all witches, all beings in any dimension.

  The song Mother hummed pulled me in like lulling waves. I was transported somewhere in my mind, where I lay on my back in the water and I saw a night sky full of bright, twinkling stars.

  “There will be a path out of this darkness, Lucius. And when you find it, you must take it and never look back. Not for anything or anyone.”

  I wasn’t Lucius.

  I was Áine.

  The memory disintegrated, and I fell from my ocean and onto dry land. I was now in a barren field, a field void of life and energetically cold. It was the astral landscape where Lucius first presented himself to me as the Devil.

  I lifted a shaking hand and swiped at the tears that slid down my cheeks. It was my hand, I realized, and not the hand of the ten-year-old future tyrant of Aradia.

  Lucius manifested before me now in full kingly attire, and he shook with an altogether different emotion than I had just witnessed.

  Rage.

  He pointed his finger at me. His eyes reflected black flames as shadows rose all around him like a swirling, protective fortress of screams and terror. Lightning cracked with a deafening boom on the horizon. The sky darkened almost to obsidian.

  He stepped closer to me. “If you infiltrate my memories like that again, little witch, your traitor friends in the castle will start meeting fates worse than death,” he spat.

  The shadows reached for me, and an otherworldly icy cold infiltrated my body. I shivered, my teeth chattering as I hugged my arms across my chest.

  I was, of course, still in that stupid, lacy black satin slip. “I didn’t—” I faltered, still disoriented and confused. I frowned, remembering where my body was.

  It was next to Daelon, in Wren’s healing circle. I must’ve dozed off exhausting my already depleted power trying to heal him.

  Trying to expel the poison Lucius had planted into his neck like a demented vampire.

  The sadness in my heart was quick to match Lucius’s rage. I lit up his icy shadows with fire, a light so bright it reflected in Lucius’s golden crown.

  He leapt back, my power affecting him just as his did me.

  We glared at each other as the baby blue warred with the midnight black in the sky above us, battling for supremacy just as we did.

  Lucius cursed. “It’s our connection. Bond. Whatever.”

  “We don’t have a bond!” I screamed at him. “If you’re trying to play mind games with me—to feign the sympathetic villain—I’m telling you right now it won’t work. That Lucius is dead. You aren’t him. You—”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” he spat, interrupting me. His eyes flashed through so many different emotions, and his energy was too enshrined in shadows for me to understand how he was truly feeling, just like always.

  Then, just as I wished I knew what he felt, something shifted.

  I tasted shame on my tongue. Embarrassment. Wonder. Longing. Curiosity. Confusion. And a feeling so strong I couldn’t put it into words—like an internal war, an unrelenting torment that couldn’t be overcome, a darkness so suffocating that Lucius was forced to beg for just a trickle of light, just a fraction of what he heard in that song—

  My reading was cut off when Lucius impaled an icy black curse into my chest.

  I stumbled backward, gasping for air as I clutched my heart. My vision turned to inky splotches as my throat closed up.

  I thought I heard Lucius apologize as the world faded to nothingness, but it was merely a choked whisper, words spoken just as low as his clandestine conversations with the mother he killed.

  “Áine?” Daelon whispered.

  I jolted awake, where I lay facing him on a blanket in Wren’s healing tree circle. “How are you feeling?” My voice came out breathless, so I steadied myself in the flecks of gold in his dark brown irises.

  “I feel fine,” he answered. “This wave of sickness has passed.”

  But the poison was still there. I bit back tears, my heart breaking in two. Every time I tried to neutralize it, the poison produced another violent wave, just as it had for the Icieran healers.

  The air smelled fresh and dewy, springtime rolling over the land with a gentle breeze. Dusk arrived and bathed us in a pink and gold glow. The energetic hues of love. The fiery, descending orange sun, however, was the color of scorn and fight. I drew the flames into myself, heating the sadness and desperation until they had transformed into a determined anger that burned clean.

  I flinched when a second pair of arms wrapped around me from behind. Daelon’s lips turned up, though his eyes flashed danger.

  “Hi, Chosen One,” Ali’s voice was at my ear. “I’ve decided to forgive you for being scary and snappy earlier.”

  “How very generous of you,” I muttered.

  Mer sighed, and I felt her energy nearby as a third hand reached past Alejandro to rub my arm. Skye settled in on the other side of Daelon, but he knew that the terms of their bromance did not include spooning rights. He left a bit of space and kept his hands to himself.

  “Come on, Prair-bear, join the cuddle puddle,” Ali said. He kept his tone light, but his energy couldn’t lie.

  We don’t suffer alone. We only suffer together, Meredith had said when I first arrived.

  Prairie sighed, just as touch averse as Daelon. But she lay down at Skye’s back, and she met his hand when he reached it over his hip and gave it a squeeze.

  As long as Daelon was in pain, so were all of our new friends.

  “Are we…” I swallowed, the tears I’d been holding back finally springing to my eyes. “Are we Icieran?” I asked. My power, this ancient magick that was forged and sustained by community, ignited at my words. I saw its brilliance in Ali’s arm draped around me, in the gold specs of Daelon’s eyes, in Prairie and Skye’s auras behind him.

  “For as long as you want to be,” Mer replied, and we were all illuminated.

  Chapter 2

  A few days passed, their march as slow as a funeral procession. I stood in Prairie’s guest bedroom, half looking in the mirror and half looking at nothing at all.

  My power had never been stronger.

  It had also never been so violent and difficult to control.

  I couldn’t rely on Daelon to tame these turbulent waves or anchor me back down to earth, not when he needed all his energy to fight this unrelenting curse. He just had to hold on and fight Lucius’s hex until I found a way to heal him. I was the healer of the entire world; this was what I was made for.

  I’d already beaten death once. I would do it again, no
matter what it took—because I would not watch my soulmate die. Not when he’d barely had time to live, to be free, to make his slain parents proud and rebuild his scorched village.

  Nor would I give Lucius what he wanted. I would not let him force me into that decision. Because with Daelon’s life on the line, I no longer felt like the world’s healer. I felt like a harbinger of destruction, a hurricane on a collision course, everything vengeful and chaotic that ruled above witch notions of morality and balance.

  And it was that realization that terrified me. I wondered now if this had been what Wren saw in my soul all along.

  I snapped out of my spinning thoughts at the sound of Daelon calling my name.

  I didn’t pack anything into my lightweight satchel but water and a snack. I knew the Coven of the Aurora Aurea would have everything we needed.

  Including warriors. That was what I read from the island with the towering volcano I’d seen when I followed my intuition to send a burst of light as a signal to Cyrus. There was an ancient fighting magick there that quilted the earth like vines of red and orange flames.

  Cyrus really was a knight in shining armor, on an island full of them. I knew they would help us liberate the dungeons and defeat Lucius’s men, another set of allies put on our path at the exact right time by the Universe, the Great Goddess, the Goddess of Witches and all things divine.