Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I had my eyes closed, long after the wall of fog dispersed. There was no explaining what magic had created it, but the one word that I kept coming back to was wrong . I was aware that Arwyn held me, his arms like bands of iron around me. He didn’t release me, not even for a moment. Even when the fog taunted me, screaming and laughing like creatures lurking in the dark, enjoying our terror. The fog was a physical thing—a monster. If Arwyn hadn’t been holding me to his chest, I had no doubt it would have snatched me away from him.
‘It’s over,’ Arwyn said, his mouth uncomfortably close to my ear.
How long had it been?
I slowly opened my eyes, taking in my surroundings. He released his hold enough for me to push off his chest and sit up. My immediate thought, before getting myself off Arwyn’s hips, was looking back to where I had last seen Romy. Except the view around me was different.
We were no longer within the forest outside the castle.
Panic clawed up my chest, blinding me. I jumped up, spinning around, drinking in every strange detail around me. Winds slapped against me, buffeting me from all angles. No wonder, because we were completely exposed. For as far as the eye could see was a rolling landscape of hills and deep, yawning valleys. Far in the distance, I saw the peaks of mountains coated in ice and snow, piercing the veil of the clear sky.
Long strands of wild grass shifted around my ankles, dancing in tandem to the torrents of wind. It was beautiful, no doubt. But the true horror came from knowing that the castle was nowhere to be seen. In fact, there were no other contestants arounds.
We were alone.
Only me and Arwyn.
I turned slowly, facing the man who I believed to be my enemy, a Witch Hunter until he proved otherwise. Arwyn was standing too, brushing himself down, seemingly unaware of the destructive force that was building before him. He briefly looked up, but it was a beat later that he truly locked eyes with me.
‘Well, this is unexpected?—’
I cut him off, refusing him another second to speak. ‘I know what you are.’
A single, full brow raised over his sky-bright eyes. ‘You’re going to have to be more specific, Hector.’
My body moved without thought. I took a step forwards, crushing loose stone and grass beneath my boots. With my hands flayed beside me, my Gift only a thought away, there was nothing else that mattered but him .
I had to shout just to be heard over the whistling winds. ‘You killed Jordan.’
Arwyn recoiled a step, finally recognising that I could be his damnation. ‘The Culling was a busy night. We both took lives, but I cannot exactly say I knew their names before doing so.’
‘ Stop playing games .’ Spittle flew past my lips and I felt my eyes bulge. The longing to thrust out a wall of energy, casting Arwyn far across the hillside, was almost impossible to ignore. ‘You’re the Witch Hunter. You’re the wolf amongst the flock!’
There was a long pause between us, filled only by my heavy breathing and the whistling winds. Arwyn just stared. I couldn’t work out if he was shocked into silence because I had worked out his secret, or if he was amused by everything that had just come out of my mouth.
I guessed it was the latter, given that he started to laugh.
Sharp rocks rose around me, the points positioning themselves in Arwyn’s direction. That stopped him, the realisation I wasn’t joking.
‘You’re serious about this, aren’t you?’
My jaw tightened, teeth grinding together. When I replied, I sounded like a hissing cat. ‘Yes.’
No.
Maybe?
I didn’t know. It was easier to blame him than Salem. I had to trust Salem wasn’t the Witch Hunter, because if he was, then him turning to the enemy was yet another thing I took the blame for.
‘You’re mistaken.’ Arwyn didn’t shy away from my open threat. He raised his hands up beside him, surrendering, whilst carefully stepping closer and closer to me. I didn’t want to notice that his t-shirt rode up over his navel, flashing familiar bands of muscle coated in thick black lines of tattoos. But I did. ‘Ask yourself, Hector, if I’m your enemy, why didn’t I just kill you last night? Instead, I sat outside your room, protecting your flock .’
My flock, being Romy and me.
‘I’m sure you could conjure an excuse,’ I spat, refusing to lower the stones. One second—that would be all it took for me to completely pierce his body with them.
‘Okay, trusting doesn’t come easily to you. Got it.’ He raised his hands, stepping closer. I held my ground.
‘Not that I’m surprised. What about the library? I could have taken your life then.’ He was so close now, just out of reach of my boundary of floating rocks. With two slender fingers, he brushed one aside, working even closer.
‘Stay. Back.’
Arwyn didn’t refuse with words, but his continuous movement forward told me he wasn’t going to listen. ‘If you’re going to accuse me of such crimes, then tell me what evidence you have. You blame me for Jordan’s death, but I don’t even know what you’re on about. What makes you think I was the one to do it?’
I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Because I had plans to use Jordan to see inside your thoughts. Funny how the moment he had a purpose, the witch was suddenly murdered .’
Arwyn pointed to his chest. Genuine panic passed across his face, showing a hint at the real person lurking beneath. ‘You were prepared to fuck with my mind, after everything I have helped you with?’
‘Helped me?’ I barked, unable to control my own deranged laugh. ‘Careful, another pat on your own ego, and you might explode.’
‘Retract your Gift, little kitty .’ Arwyn was so close, the stones would be useless. I could have thrown out a pure blast of energy, but something was stopping me.
‘What the fuck did you just call me?’
Arwyn tipped his head to the side. ‘Hector, I’m not your enemy.’ He broke my gaze, looking around the scenery as though noticing it for the first time. ‘But use your Gift on me, and that will change.’
‘Then what are you?’
‘I’d say that for the foreseeable, we could’ve been allies.’
‘Until you killed Jordan?’
‘I didn’t kill him.’ Arwyn returned his attention back to me, just as a torrent of wind circled us. I inhaled deeply, recognising the scent of crisp amber and creamy sandalwood. That certainly had nothing to do with the hillside, and everything to do with the man before me. Of course he would smell like an expensive fucking candle. He was practically a walking ad for luxury, which only added to his infuriating aura.
‘Prove it.’
Arwyn laughed again. ‘How do you expect me to do that? Look around you. I don’t make the rules, Hector. You heard the bell, you saw the fog. This is the second trial whether we like it or not, and from what I can see, we have been placed together for a reason. Proof will have to wait. For now we’ve got to protect each other until we pass the trial.’
A reason? A fucking reason?
I closed the minimal space between us, rocks and stone falling helplessly back to the ground. I didn’t stop until our boots knocked together. My neck ached as I looked up at him, which only added to my urge to knock the smug grin off his face. ‘The single fucking reason we are together is because you held onto me like your life depended on it.’
‘You have a terrible habit of swearing, Hector.’
‘You don’t have the slightest of ideas at just how terrible I can be,’ I snapped back.
Arwyn smirked. ‘Forgive me for overstepping, but weren’t you the one who straddled me? I think I have a pretty good idea.’
My nails bit into my fists, my nails slicing crescent moons into my palm. ‘ Fuck you .’
Arwyn’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you offering, because I’m more of the giver?—’
I slammed my fist into his jaw. No thought, no care. It didn’t matter if I truly believed he was the Witch Hunter or not. He irritated the life out of me.
‘Wow,’ Arwyn rocked back a step, lifting a finger to his split lip. His tongue lapped up blood, smudging it over his mouth until the colour looked a vibrant pink. ‘So, I take that as a retraction of your previous offer?’
Even with a mouth coated in blood, he was still goading me. Testing me. For extra emphasis on my disdain for him, I cast a small bout of energy and knocked Arwyn on his ass.
Now, it was my turn to look down on him. ‘Careful how you speak to me, Arwyn.’
‘I’m Arwyn now, not your suspected Witch Hunter?’
I cocked my head to the side. ‘I have some other names for you, if you would prefer me to use them?’
The list was certainly endless.
‘Arwyn is good. I like Arwyn.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘I don’t.’
‘ Ouch .’
I extended a hand, to his surprise. Arwyn took it, wrapping those long fingers around my hand and tugging. Once I helped him up, I didn’t release him. I tugged him closer, relying on my Gift for the added strength. ‘If I find out you’re lying to me, Arwyn, I will kill you.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
I released him. Arwyn massaged the hand I had held, whilst keeping at a sensible distance. I didn’t trust him, nor would I. But for now, I’d be cautious. Arwyn was right—we were in the middle of the second trial. Anything was possible. Discovering the Witch Hunter could wait until after we actually survived whatever we were going to face.
‘You said you knew about the wolf in the flock. So tell me.’
Arwyn looked around me. ‘I don’t know a name.’
He was lying. The lack of eye contact proved as much.
‘Which witch is it? Come on. No point acting coy now.’ It was clear to me that the Witch Hunter was, in fact, a witch. How else would they infiltrate the Witch Trials? If Jonathan was in Father Tomin’s pocket, another witch could be too. Maybe it was Arwyn, maybe not. But if not, it meant the wolf was out there. With Romy.
‘Romy,’ I gasped, concern for her slamming into me. ‘I need to find her.’
Another scan of the expansive landscape revealed no other signs of life, not even the hint of a civilisation in the distance. And our vantage point certainly gave the perfect view for miles and miles on all sides.
Arwyn attempted to calm me. ‘I’ve seen her fight. I don’t think anyone is going to mess with a witch they can’t touch without being melted.’
‘I’d suggest we start with finding some shelter. Daylight won’t last for long, and we don’t know what to expect when night falls,’ Arwyn said, stepping into my side. ‘This isn’t a trial we’ve had experience with or knowledge of before.’
I side-eyed him. ‘How would you know?’
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a stone. It was as small as his palm and had a flat surface on either side. My immediate thought went to the stone being perfect at skipping across lakes…
‘It was another reason I asked you to meet me. Something I felt that you deserved to know, which I’m beginning to regret since you’ve thrown a pile of accusations at me.’
‘A stone?’
He turned it over in his fingers, arching a brow. Carved onto the other side was two words.
The Enduring.
‘A clue,’ Arwyn corrected, handing it out to me. I took it, feeling the warmth of his body etched into the stone’s surface. ‘Recognise it?’
Frustration twinged inside me, like a cord pulled taut and plucked. ‘Are you trying to be smart?’
‘Yes and no,’ Arwyn replied, focusing on the stone with a smile. Then he looked up at me. ‘What about you, have you worked out how I know where to find these clues?’
‘No,’ I said, too quickly.
‘Think, little kitty ? — ’
‘Would you not call me that?’
Arwyn surprised me by tapping the side of my head. It should have been patronising, but my skin seemed to tingle, betraying me. ‘What could the library and the skipping stone possibly have in common?’
‘Just spit it out,’ I said.
‘It’s your mother’s story, Hector.’ I almost stopped breathing. ‘All the clues were left by her, for the next hopeful Grand High to find. The library, the lake she visited when she skipped stones with your father. It didn’t take a genius for me to study the documents depicting her time during the Witch Trials, to decipher the key moments that made her experience. It wasn’t a coincidence that The Witch Trials this time are hosted at the castle, the same place hers had been. She left them…for you to find.’
Arwyn watched me, carefully studying my reaction. I was hyperaware of his attention and tried everything in my power to steel my expression. I failed. Because holding the skipping stone in my hand grounded me to the truth of it.
Memories always weighed heavy when one held it.
Like most of the competitors, I knew everything about my mother’s time during the Witch Trials. I’d read her recount over and over, not for the purpose of ever thinking I’d partake like her, but because it made me feel closer to her.
The library was the first place she’d met my father. Where they made a similar truce like Romy and I had. A coven, which quickly became something more. The lake was the one we had passed when we ran from the wall of fog. It was where my parents allegedly stayed for the duration of the Witch Trials. The structure of metal and glass I’d seen, was that the place they’d used as a base? Although, as far as I remembered, the stories didn’t tell of my parents skipping stones, but the faded memories I had of my childhood certainly proved it meant something to them.
They’d taken me to a lake in the middle of the New Forest where we’d spent hours casting stones out across the water, whilst my father roasted marshmallows over a campfire. The memory assaulted me before I threw up my barrier and blocked it out.
‘Why are you…’
A pain lashed through my mind, silencing me. It was so sharp, so powerful, that I wondered if it was my body’s way of punishing me for feeling so weak. Between Arwyn’s gentle expression, and the reason he wanted to meet me, I was whittled down to a little boy who craved his parents, whilst feeling the closest to them he’d been in eighteen years.
Perhaps it was a little to do with that, until a voice began as a whisper in the back of my thoughts.
‘Hector…’
I whipped around, searching the landscape, wondering who spoke it. Arwyn must have thought I was crying, because he laid a soft hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve taken you by surprise, it certainly wasn’t my intention…’
My lips parted, a reply starting to come out when the whisper became more of a desperate scream. ‘ Hector, do not move. Stay here. I can feel you. I am coming…’
‘Caym?’ I spoke aloud, fisting the skipping stone as reality sunk in.
‘ Who else would it be, you fool ?’ My familiar’s voice filled my head loud and clear.
‘Are you talking to me?’ Arwyn asked.
Relief blossomed in me, like a flower in spring. Because in the distance, a speck of black speared through the clear sky. A crow— my crow. Which meant one thing for certain. Wherever the fog had deposited me was far from the boundaries of the castle.
‘Not you,’ I said, smiling to myself, knowing I needed Caym’s presence in such a vulnerable moment. I didn’t even care if Arwyn found out about my familiar. It wasn’t even a concern as I began running towards my familiar, leaving the witch behind.
We were so close when I noticed something else behind my familiar. A cloud of black. It was moving in pace with my familiar, chasing at his tail. And the closer it got, the more I noticed what it was.
Crows. A countless number of them. But unlike Caym, their eyes glowed a deadly shade of red, their wings blurring as shadow oozed from them.
Sinking dread dropped from my chest, into the pit of me.
‘Caym,’ I said, words captured by the winds. ‘What are those?’
‘ Run, Hector. Run!’