Chapter Three
Sorcha traded her white silk capelet for a red cloak.
She kept one in an abandoned cottage out by the edge of town. The cloak was woven with a spell that would keep her unseen. A blur where her face was, something that the eye skipped over. No telltale red hair, or the Beauregard freckles. Just a witch in a red cloak.
She also kept a plain, serviceable wool dress and leather boots rolled up in the bundle she pulled from inside the cracked fireplace.
She stuffed her pockets with salt, rowanberries, iron nails, a dagger.
A pouch of more mundane supplies hung from her belt: bandages, healing ointments, scissors, needle and thread for sutures.
And a very old wolf’s tooth, marked with a Lycan sigil she had not seen before.
She might give it back.
Eventually. If the Winterwells treated their son better.
The paper birds hovered around her, wings fluttering impatiently.
She had made them wait too long already and there was the danger they would fall to the ground, magic spent, before they led her to where she needed to be.
Her crow familiar soared higher above, outlined against the moon being rapidly eaten by storm clouds. The air crackled expectantly.
This was the work she was meant for. Not vengeful thievery, which was lovely, and not searing kisses in the dark of a rose grotto.
This.
Disappointment lingered, like the taste of small, hard, unripe apples when she recalled how Aidan had looked through her. But it was irrelevant.
Especially now.
The birds led Sorcha over the hills and across a rickety bridge to the ruins of a castle. She had been here before.
That was not a good sign.
It meant they were getting comfortable. Usually the Cauldron moved with every demonstration. But never so close to one of the towns. They weren’t just getting comfortable—they were getting bold.
It was entirely too dangerous to enter alone. Or with an armed escort. A militia, the entire navy.
None of which she had at her beck and call. Not that it had stopped her before.
And it certainly would not stop her now.
Even with the not-distant-enough rattle of chains, the shouting, the thick scent of mud and blood and magic gone wrong.
Scorched fennel seeds, salt, lemon balm.
All marks of a warlock. Or several witches with a penchant for baneful magic.
The lily-draped mansion full of dancing aristocrats seemed very far away.
She might not have an army of her own, but she had a dagger, a monstrous spectral dog of a Black Shuck straight from nightmares who would answer her whistle—theoretically.
She had been feeding the monster raw, bloody meat for weeks now.
And playing fetch with him, which required an entire birch sapling for a stick. She liked to think they were friends.
But she would never take anyone else into the fighting pits of the Cauldron, regardless.
Especially not a magnificently monstrous beast she had named Shadow.
Briar claimed she was terrible at naming things, but her crow went by the name Elderberry, and he did not mind at all.
He had only requested the addition of his title when she was twelve years old and studying her Debrett’s because her mother made her recite the lineages of aristocratic families at every breakfast. He had become Sir Elderberry.
He liked to peck Aesop to make him bow with the appropriate flourishes.
Since Aesop was as gentle as Elderberry was decidedly not, he always complied.
But regardless, the very few witches, familiars, or monsters who could hold their own could not afford to be caught here.
And though Sorcha had friends down in the villages—Briar tending the enchanted rowan trees for the Iron Witches in Holdfast, and Pippa in Hallow, wandering the libraries of the magical universities—they were not near enough to summon, not with magic birds, not with the wind, or the echo of the sea in a shell.
Worse, they would answer a summons immediately and without question, and then they might be hurt. Would most certainly be hurt.
Better that Sorcha do this alone. She had done so before and she would do so again.
She watched the paper birds as they kept to the shadows, the overhanging branches, the edges of the parapet.
A gargoyle at the top of a crumbling tower shifted, wings extending.
Bits of rock stone tumbled down, rattling like seeds in a cup—or the teeth of some magical beast spat out onto the floor of the fighting rings, which was a more apt comparison, unfortunately.
They would fetch almost as high a price as the fight that had them scattering.
At any rate, no one was likely to be much concerned with the gargoyle.
There were guards, and they were watchful enough, but the gargoyles had been set there more than two hundred years ago.
They might snap at wayward magic, but witches had not lived here in over a century.
And bits of wayward magic, beneficial or baneful, were hardly rare in this place tonight.
And this was still better than a ballroom glittering with beeswax candles and jewels and polished shoes. Even if she was currently crouched behind a blackberry hedge, trying unsuccessfully to avoid the thorns and hoping the rain would hold off.
It did not.
The first drop hit her right on the tip of the nose.
Never mind Winterwell House—she could have been drinking hot tea and eating raspberry scones in Haven, or swimming with mermaids off the boardwalk.
Perusing bookshops and museums in Hallow, while avoiding professors and curators intent on correcting the historical provenance of some amulet or another.
Avoiding one curator in particular.
She could have been warm and dry in her own home.
Instead, thorns and mud and her familiar growing increasingly more anxious as he circled over her, feathers glowing fitfully, which was concerning. Elderberry was not the anxious sort.
The rain, though it tickled as it dripped off her nose and was already squelching underfoot, was helpful.
It would cover the sounds of her running, the clang of chains hopefully being broken.
But it also tattered her paper birds and tore them into pieces.
A tiny gargoyle launched off the tower and gobbled up the errant magic that remained.
His little stone belly instantly bloated, round as a plum.
But the spell had done its work. The birds had led her here, the temporary location of the fighting pits. They had never led her astray. She had used them to find countless animals, abandoned baby deer, a wounded fox, a donkey kept tied up outside in a storm. A Minotaur, a Black Shuck, a unicorn.
And now: the fighting pits of the Cauldron.
She did not know exactly what she would find there. She never did.
Elderberry gave a single, sharp cry: Get moving.
Sorcha got moving. When your familiar gave such an order, you followed it even if you had not obeyed an order of any kind in some years.
She kept low, darting from the hedges to a wind-worn oak tree with wide branches curving over what remained of an outer wall, choked with white roses.
This had been a rather grand castle once, with a courtyard large enough for a variety of outbuildings: blacksmith, brewhouse, bakehouse, chapel, stables.
The bones remained, rotting wood, broken roof tiles, posts.
And on one side, the main castle keep, where the sounds of the fights slipped through the arrow-slit windows.
Grunts of pain, raucous cheering. Torchlight flickered under the rain.
Sorcha clambered over the broken portion of the wall where Elderberry had led her, the stones mossy and slick.
She wrenched her knee slightly when she landed, but it was nothing she was not used to.
She pulled up the hood of her cloak to shadow her face and cast the spell.
There was a guard, but he was leaning in the archway into the keep, more interested in the fight going on inside.
No one was mad enough to sneak up on the pits.
She knew exactly what he was looking at: magical ropes portioning off the fighting area, sigils painted on the ground to keep the monsters in—or out, as the case may be.
The real monsters were the bookmakers who accepted wagers, the trainers who captured the animals and magical creatures forced to fight. The Collector who oversaw it all.
Sorcha stayed low, crossing the uneven ground of the courtyard toward the stables.
Mud spattered up her legs. She shimmied up the sturdiest post she could find, splinters digging into her hands.
The roof, once thickly thatched, was pockmarked with holes, which suited her purpose, if also making her progress slow.
And dangerous. She slipped, her elbow smashing down into a rotting crossbeam.
It creaked, sending bits of thatch and rain down into the stables.
“What the bloody hell?” someone barked below her.
She froze, rain running into her mouth.
When no one stabbed a pitchfork up through the roof or sent their familiar to investigate, she inched forward.
Familiars were as unpredictable as the witches they served.
Served was the wrong word, at least for Elderberry.
Assisted, maybe. A connection to and a representation of your magic. And a partner in crime, definitely.
Sorcha finally found what she was searching for: a hole large enough to wiggle through.
With a little help, it would also be large enough to fit a Minotaur or a wolf shifter or a bear.
She really had no idea who or what was down there.
Competitors did not survive long in these matches.
Aesop’s missing eye and Simon’s leg were proof enough of that.