Chapter 3

I am eighty-nine years old, and I still remember the day I became Suprema.

It wasn't glorious.

It was heavy.

Like carrying an entire mountain on your shoulders and realizing the mountain is never leaving — that you sleep with it, wake with it, breathe with its weight on your chest every day for the rest of your life.

My name is Dagnar Rahen. I have been the Supreme Witch of the Lunar lineage for sixty-one years. Before me, my mother carried this weight. Before her, her mother. The lineage has never broken. I won't let it break now.

The Suprema's Mansion has stood for three hundred years.

Anyone who passes through the main gate sees a beautiful house. Large, yes, with sprawling gardens and tall windows and the kind of old architecture that makes tourists take photos from outside. But it is only a house to those who don't know how to look.

To those who do, it is something else entirely.

The walls were built with moonstone quarried from a mine that no longer exists. Every brick was laid with the magic of three different Supremas — layers upon layers of protection, enchantment, intention.

The mansion breathes. Literally. When I stand in the main corridor in the small hours, I hear it. A low, constant pulse, like an ancient heart beating slowly inside the walls.

Thirty-two rooms. Fourteen suites. Three potion laboratories on different floors so the energies don't cross-contaminate. A library holding manuscripts that exist nowhere else in the world. A lunar garden in the back where the plants grow against the normal seasons, blooming in winter and sleeping through summer.

And money.

A great deal of money.

Outsiders assume that wealthy witches are wealthy because they steal or manipulate. Some do — I won't lie. But the Lunar lineage's fortune was built differently. Supreme magic multiplies. That's the only way I know to describe it. Every investment made with magical intention yields three times what it should. Every venture touched by the Suprema's energy grows in ways that human accountants can never quite explain.

My current fortune exceeds eight billion.

And when I'm gone, it doubles.

Because half of every witch's magic in this family transfers to the new Suprema automatically. It's ancestral law, not a choice. The lineage witches don't lose their gift entirely, but they weaken enough to depend on the Suprema in ways that go beyond money.

Magical protection. Enchanted health. Longevity.

Without the Suprema, the family dissolves within a generation.

That is the weight I have carried for sixty-one years.

And it is the weight I need to pass to someone before my body decides the time has come without giving me proper notice.

I have four granddaughters. Beatrice, Latoya, Janiely, and Ellowen.

Three of them I know completely. Beatrice is ambitious and cold, wields beauty as a weapon, and thinks ten steps ahead in any situation. Latoya is crueler than she appears — her gift for manipulating emotions has developed beyond what I expected, and she uses it without hesitation. Janiely is unstable, makes decisions too quickly, but possesses a raw power that frightens even me at times.

And then there is Ellowen.

Ellowen is different from the others in a way they cannot see because they are too busy laughing at her.

Winter magic had not appeared in this family in two hundred years. The last witch who possessed it was considered the most powerful in the lineage's history. Not the most elegant, not the most beautiful, not the most admired. The most powerful. There was something about the magic of cold that ran too deep, that touched layers the other magics couldn't reach.

Ellowen still doesn't know what she has inside her.

She still thinks her winter is a weakness because her cousins spent years convincing her of that. She still apologizes for the cold when she should be learning to wield it as a weapon.

That worries me.

But the ancestral magic doesn't choose by convenience. It chooses by truth. And the truth is that from the day Ellowen froze the entire garden at sixteen, I knew.

I just didn't know how to make her get there on her own.

The condition I announced wasn't cruel for cruelty's sake.

It was necessary.

Ellowen will never reach for her own power if someone simply places it in front of her. She needs a reason that hurts enough to make her move. I know her. I know the way she lowers her eyes when her cousins talk, the way she leaves the room slowly so no one notices the air freezing around her. She has swallowed humiliation for years.

It's time to spit it back.

The announcement was made.

Beatrice smiled in that way that makes me feel sorry for her — the smile of someone who thinks she's winning when she's about to lose. Latoya went too quiet, which meant she was already scheming. Janiely stared at her own hands nervously.

And Ellowen left the hall with the air around her cold enough for me to see my own breath.

Good.

Anger is the first step.

I stayed in the hall after they had all gone. I poured a cup of tea that cooled before I could finish it, as always happened when I was thinking too hard, and stood looking out the window at the garden.

Sixty-one years carrying this mountain.

I know exactly how my body is doing. I know what the tests show, what the magic tells me when I'm quiet enough to listen. I have less time than the girls imagine. Perhaps less than I'm willing to admit to myself.

Three months is enough.

It has to be.

Because when I'm gone, the power won't wait for a prepared heir. It will go to whoever is ready — or it will disperse, and dispersed magic without a vessel causes a kind of damage this family doesn't recover from easily.

I need it to be Ellowen.

Not out of favoritism. I have never played favorites.

I need it because her winter is the only magic in this lineage that can bear the weight of what comes after. The other three will break. Not immediately, but later, when the full power arrives and the responsibility comes with it. That's why I froze their biological clocks.

Ellowen will bend.

But she won't break.

There is an enormous difference between the two, and it's precisely that difference that defines who can truly be Suprema.

I switched off the hall light and went up to my room.

Through the corridor window, I saw the garden covered in a thin layer of frost.

Ellowen had passed through there.

I smiled alone in the dark.

She doesn't know what she is yet.

But she will.

And when she does, her cousins will finally understand what it means to have humiliated the wrong woman.

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