CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Catherine Weyer did not cry as she buried her fallen sister.
Agytha, who had always been the gentlest of them, had died in the night from no grand spell nor terrible hex, but from the injury sustained as her head had struck the street.
Agytha, warded from the city of Alliaster, had been cast carelessly back to Caelin Forest, and Cate and Moira had followed.
They pitched their tent once more between the bracken.
They made Agytha tonics and cast their charms as best they could, but when they awoke, Agytha’s grey eyes were open and empty.
It was Agytha who’d had the talent for healing, not Cate nor Moira.
After all, Agytha had been the one to intervene that night, so many years ago.
The remaining witches of Acanthi dug the grave, placed the slain witch in a white shroud, lowered her and sprinkled the soil.
Moira now glared. ‘The ungrateful sow. I will have her head for this, Cate. Hers and Liutprand’s. All of our misfortune draws back to her. The coven. Do you remember our coven?’
Of course she did. It was Cate who had chosen the name Acanthi, she who had recruited each member, she who had found the forest on Calléum’s northern coast, a two-day train ride from the capital.
It was she who, one by one, had saved each child from unloving, unmagical homes, she who had spared the young men fleeing the war, the pregnant girls, the old women abandoned.
The Prohibition had been the reason she’d begun Acanthi, but it was only once she had stood in the forest, teaching her father’s witchcraft, her grandmother’s witchcraft, her great-great-grandmother’s witchcraft, in defiance of the Royal Institute and the Prohibition on magic, that she realised how deeply she adored it.
Catherine Weyer’s second-greatest heartache was the collapse of that coven.
Cate looked about the forest and remembered the tents and New Year’s luncheons and the songs and the ceremonies.
They had once planned to be nomadic, like the witches of yore, but Cate had fallen in love with their temporary haven, and so Acanthi instead made its permanent home in Caelin Forest. She ached for that early era.
Once Agytha was laid to rest beneath the blanket of moss and soil, Cate and Moira returned to the city of Alliaster.
They pitched their tent on a hilltop behind the Ollianne Shrine.
There was a festival down in the street – what a heinous contradiction, the joyous cheers and the drums, the shaved ice and fireworks, while the witches of Acanthi mourned.
Only two of them remained, now.
Cate sat outside the tent, unpicking her threads with difficulty. The young witch’s wards were many. They expertly hid the tea shop. What a ridiculous name Theodora had chosen for herself. She kept on, trying to spot the young witch in some future scene that would benefit them, and found nothing.
At once, sat against the hilltop, she was struck with a vision – Liutprand, the knife, the blade wet with blood, her daughter dead. That old, false prophecy. It tortured Cate, that vision; it visited whenever she was glum or reflective, the ever-pervasive reminder of her threads’ failures.
Cate stuffed her traitorous threads away and rose. She threw open the canvas flap to their tent. Moira was within, winding poppets. The aged witch wiped at the tears upon her cheeks.
‘My patience is gone,’ said Cate, ‘and with it, any compassion I had left for that girl.’
Moira sniffed. ‘Perhaps we can try and speak with the daemon Salamander. They say he knows all that happens in the city.’
‘Even I am not so arrogant as to make deals with daemons,’ said Cate, shaking her head. ‘For all my distaste for the Prohibition, I would not risk bargaining with the only spirit to face daemotion in over two hundred years.’
‘So, we will invade the shop another way,’ said Moira.
‘Indeed,’ said Cate. ‘Let us forget about Lio and the blonde woman, and focus on the wards themselves. She’s playing a dangerous game, the little girl from the valley of the willows.’
‘What is your intent, Catherine?’ asked Moira.
‘Those wards are valuable,’ said Cate, pacing. ‘And valuable things can be stolen and repurposed, can they not? Her talent for wards makes her arrogant. She does not see how those wards could be used against her.’
Moira smiled nastily. ‘She is not the only one with a talent. Are you suggesting we use mine, Catherine?’
‘I am,’ said Cate.
Moira ran her fingers over the phials of blood at her belt, eyes glinting. ‘Agytha would be cross with us.’
‘Well, it was Agytha’s kindness that killed her,’ Cate said.
‘We will chip away at the witch’s wards, one by one.
We will steal them; we will reconfigure them.
Their number is myriad, and that is our luck – she may not notice what we mean to do.
Let us pray that Agytha will forgive us in the next life, Moira.
It’s time to hunt the customers. We will use your blood magic at last.’