Chapter 5
leaving liska in the woods wrenches Brielle’s heart. As she follows Dreska back to the tavern, the moonlight casting a river of silver for them to follow, all she can hear is the quiet whimpering of Liska in her wither-beast form as she lumbers behind them at a distance.
Once they reach the very edge of the forest, Dreska says a quiet goodbye to her sister before they walk the winding road back to the tavern, and Brielle turns away, giving them a moment.
All she can think of is that no coven would touch this, not at this time of year when assignments from more affluent clients abound in the courts and mines, not with so little benefit to them.
Certainty fills her like a smouldering flame.
No other hunter would, but she can help. She can fix this.
‘I accept the assignment,’ she says formally to Dreska as they trudge along the packed mud and stones of the road. ‘I will help you free your sister from the form she is trapped in. But …’
‘But?’ Dreska says, eyeing her.
‘You are a witch, Dreska. You are not a human girl, even if you were born to human parents. ‘You are a witch, and right now you cannot control your magic. It is beginning to control you.’
Dreska exhales slowly. ‘I know. Maybe I’ve always known that I’m different. That I’m not like Liska. I’m not good like her.’
Brielle stops, turning to her. ‘Being a witch does not make you bad,’ she says gently. ‘You can still be good, still be true to yourself and be a witch. It’s what we do with our power that shapes who we are.’
Dreska bites her lip, bowing her head. ‘But I will become a wraith in time, won’t I? If I have no control. I’ve heard the whispers, the stories. I will become a creature of anguish and sorrow, and feed off my family, draining their spirits and forever darkening their days.’
‘No. It doesn’t have to be that way,’ Brielle says, shaking her head slowly. Nova suddenly appears beside them and Dreska starts as the familiar purrs, brushing up against Brielle’s leg.
‘Is this your familiar?’
‘Not mine,’ Brielle says. ‘My sister’s. But Nova is with me for now.’
‘You have a sister?’
‘I do.’ Brielle nods, her voice softening. ‘And I would do anything for her too. Anything to keep her safe.’
‘It’s odd – I feel calm around Nova. Like she’s taken the edge off.’ Dreska exhales, finally looking up at Brielle, desperation tinged with steel in her eyes. ‘Tell me what I must do.’
Brielle hesitates, weighing her words as an unseen creature shrieks like a cut through the woods.
‘You must survive the night of Clarus, out here in the darkest depths of the forest. You must face the very heart of yourself – your fears, your worries, your strengths, your magic – and you must gain absolute control over them all.’
‘And if I don’t? If I lose control?’
Brielle blinks steadily, taking in the girl’s slim frame, her knitted brows, the jut of her bottom lip, quivering slightly, despite how brave she is trying to be.
‘Then by morning you will have become a wraith, your own power consuming you whole, or you will have died. And you will no longer be able to reverse the curse you placed on Liska.’
When the clock strikes midnight the following night, Brielle meets Dreska at the tree line. A cool mist has rolled in, and it envelops them, turning nothing but thin air into wisps and the ghostly shapes of false wraiths.
‘Are you ready?’ she asks.
Dreska looks fearfully to the woods, then nods to Brielle, clutching her sleeves. ‘I don’t want to ever hurt my family again. Or anyone else. I must change Liska back, reverse the curse I placed on her. And I want more. I want to understand what I can feel, what I can’t quite grasp.’
Brielle briefly closes her eyes and sighs.
Dreska’s words are almost identical to what Lowri had said to her just before their Clarus.
For a moment, she can feel the ghost of Lowri here beside her, and her heart squeezes.
‘Then step into the trees. Keep walking for about an hour, until you find a clearing, somewhere far from humans. I’ll be nearby to make sure you are undisturbed. ’
‘How will I know when it’s begun?’
‘You’ll know,’ Brielle says thickly. ‘You always know. Witch or wraith, it’s down to you tonight. When dawn wakes, the rest of the world will know too.’
She waits as Dreska squares her shoulders and steps over the threshold of the forest. Then she counts to thirty, until she’s sure the trees have swallowed her whole. Brielle releases a charged breath before glancing down at Nova, staring far too intently at the trees. ‘After you, creature.’
Nova licks a paw and stalks into the undergrowth.
Brielle takes her time, aware of everything, the crackle of twig, the bristle of thorn and leaf, the birds watching her with gleaming eyes from the knots and whorls of ancient bark.
The mist coats her like a second skin, dew and the scent of moss clinging to the back of her throat as she follows the sounds of Dreska and her descent into Clarus.
She had to simulate it. It is not the night marked as Clarus on the witch calendar.
That night is when day and night are of equal length, so instead she ensured Dreska had a couple of drops of wyvern blood mingled with the hot berry juice she drank at supper.
This would draw her true nature to the surface, and with a few witch words, a spell cast over her in the clearing and a drop of Brielle’s own blood to thread a warding around her, Dreska would tip either way over the next few hours.
Witch or wraith.
Or death.
Finally, Brielle settles into the undergrowth, whispering the words umbra tuttela then, as she nicks the side of her palm with a small blade, allowing a couple of drops to hiss on the edge of the clearing, Clarus inquisitio.
The mist clears to the edges, as though the clearing is now a wide, pale marble, and in its centre stands Dreska.
The whole world seems to tremor, then hold its breath.
Dreska’s spine suddenly snaps straight, her head tipped to the sky, light and dark pouring from her like ethereal smoke. The light and dark whirl as a storm, tearing though the clearing, raking up leaves as Dreska’s mouth opens in a silent scream.
Then the storm takes the form of a wither beast, crying with her sister’s voice.
It grows huge and substantial, lumbering round her in a circle, and Brielle watches with gritted teeth as Dreska’s shoulders drop and a sob escapes her throat.
Keep it together, she wills her silently. Put yourself aside and figure it out.
As Dreska and the wither beast circle each other, Dreska wiping at her eyes with her sleeve, Brielle is dragged back to memories of her own Clarus, to the beast freed from the enclosure of her own mind, her own flesh.
A wyvern.
One of the murderous monsters that killed her mother, that split such a mighty hunter in half, merely for sport, when Brielle was far too young.
Brielle remembers how she shook with rage as the wyvern circled her on Clarus, how she used her cunning and her might to drag it down to the ground, then staked its wings to the cold earth.
She cried over it, she remembers that, cried for her birth mother, for the lack of warmth, lack of love in her life, all except for Lowri’s.
Then she bled the wyvern dry, the light and dark pouring back into her as she claimed the kill, and she knew what she would do, what she had to do.
That was the night the plan hatched in her mind to hunt down those wyvern in the Spines, the entire pack, and slaughter them all.
It was only when Lowri shrieked in pain and sorrow that she jolted back into herself, to see what it was that her sister faced.
Wraiths. Many, many wraiths, all swooping to claim her, their eyes shaped like the Malefant’s.
She couldn’t interfere, but she stood with Lowri as her sister swept them all away.
All her fears and sorrows, all her unworthy, poisoned thoughts were crippling her, but, in the end, Brielle and Lowri were together as dawn crested the land in the wild north of Arnhem. They conquered Clarus together.
She smiles at the memory now, how they grinned at each other, clothes torn and filthy, how they both knew at the same moment that they were witch and hunter.
Brielle, so lost in memories of her own Clarus, in monitoring Dreska’s, does not hear the soft pad of footsteps behind her, nor the sigh of brushed leaves as someone approaches.
Not until there is steel at her throat.
‘And what have we here?’ a voice rumbles in her ear.