Chapter 5 Toran
Toran
Despite the murky morning, the Drowning Square was packed with people. It was clear to Toran no one wanted to miss the chance to see the Witch drowned. No one could resist the pull to be a part of history.
One week had passed since Toran was recruited to the hunt. And it was one week since the guards at the Northern Gate were murdered. After the King’s issued response to the attack, the entire city now knew the Witch was among them.
This would be the third Witch drowning this week.
And it was only Tuesday. Everywhere he looked, people pointed fingers at their friends, neighbors, sisters, daughters—Witch accusations thrown about like birdseed.
It made Toran’s job of finding her all the more difficult.
But he was determined. He had already failed the King once. He did not plan on doing so again.
Toran knew he couldn’t fight the crowd. One word from him against the forthcoming drowning and they’d take him down, too.
Hysteria was its own kind of beast. A monster with no head to cut off, no heart to skewer.
But there was one person he could fight—a person who definitely had a head.
Though whether or not the man had a heart was up for debate.
He took the steps to the platform two at a time. In the center stood the opening for the Witch’s Well and, beside the circle of stones, a single guard.
Captain Embley Fell’s dark hair was slicked back to show the entirety of his forehead and his nose so high in the air it could have touched the clouds. But nothing beat the scorn in the older man’s eyes when he turned his gaze on Toran.
Though Toran had been just as tall as the older captain for several years now, Embley Fell still found a way to look down on him.
Fell was captain of the King’s Fifth Legion and praised like no other for being the one to kill the previous Witch.
Before Toran was promoted to captain at seventeen, Fell had been the youngest guard to make captain.
But the animosity they held toward each other had started long before Toran turned seventeen.
“You need to stop this,” he hissed to Fell.
Fell raised an eyebrow at him. “Why would I do that?”
Behind him, four more guards climbed onto the platform, a weeping, quaking girl between them.
“She’s not the Witch.”
Fell snorted. “Marnie Sorphel was found consuming magic. We don’t know where she got it, and she refuses to tell us.”
“That doesn’t mean it came from inside her.”
“It doesn’t mean it didn’t.”
Toran swallowed and brought a hand up to tap the engagement ring resting on a chain against his sternum.
Though the King had given him this mission, he did it for Loriana, and it was her conviction that would bring him courage.
“The King ordered me to find the Witch. Until I do, you have to stop the drownings.”
Fell stared at him like he was seagull poo on his shoulder. “Until you find the Witch, I will continue to do my job. Do you have any idea how many names have come across my desk since these attacks started? Hundreds.” Fell waved an idle hand in Marnie’s direction. “These are just the lucky ones.”
“I think you mean unlucky.”
“No. Lucky. Because when she dies, we’ll all be damned lucky to see a green spark light up the sky.”
The green spark everyone so desperately wanted to see: the Goddess’s stolen magic, leaving the body of the drowned only when the true Witch had been killed.
“So you’re willing to drown a bunch of innocent girls on the off chance one of them might be the Witch?”
“Watch yourself, Roada,” Fell snarled. “The Witch is pure evil. I will do whatever it takes to drown her again.” He gestured to the Witch’s Well.
“None of these girls are innocent. And if you think I’m going to put my trust in you—the man who, not a month ago, could be found passed out in a puddle of his own vomit—then you’re even more delusional than the Aeosch.
Now, step aside, or I’ll have you forcibly removed from this platform. ”
Toran remained still, but his eyes turned to the crowd. “She’s not the Witch.”
Somewhere out there was Marnie’s family. And when Marnie proved not to be the Witch, her family would be compensated for the loss. But it wouldn’t be enough.
Fell stepped close enough that Toran could smell grapefruit on the captain’s breath. When Fell spoke, his voice had dropped below a whisper. “She’s the right age and she was found using magic. That’s more than enough evidence against her.”
And Toran heard what Fell wasn’t saying. He’d drowned others for less.
With a flick of his wrist, Fell summoned two guards to his side. They took hold of Toran, escorting him away from the Witch’s Well. He did not descend into the crowd. He remained there, at the top of the stairs, facing the well.
Only finding the true Witch would make the drownings cease. Until he found her, he was just as responsible for these girls’ deaths as Fell was. He vowed to remember each and every one. Starting with Marnie Sorphel.
He stared at the pleading girl being dragged before the Witch’s Well, the King’s words from the other night resurfacing.
“Something changed in him after he killed the Witch,” the King had explained when Toran had again asked why the King hadn’t chosen Fell for this mission.
“I noticed it the second he walked through those doors, dragging you along behind him. His ambition had shifted. No longer did he care about the Guard or even, I suspect, serving his country. Instead, his every motivation, every thought, centered around the Witch and killing her.”
“All the more reason to have him hunt down the Witch now,” Toran had said.
The King had shaken his head. “You are more than Kohen’s Crown to me, Toran. You’re like one of my own sons.”
For years growing up, Toran had longed to hear such words. As a child, he’d always thought of the King as his father, though he had never dared say so out loud.
“But Fell—”
The King’s hand had come down on his shoulder, cupping it tight. “Captain Fell isn’t the one I trust with my life.”
In his detoxing state, he hadn’t been able to sift out the King’s meaning. “I don’t understand. What does one have to do with the other?”
“I want you to treat the Witch’s life like you would my own,” King Harkett had said. “That is to say, I want you to bring her to me alive. I’ll decide her fate from there.”
Her fate. As if a Witch could have any fate other than death. The last week of drownings was proof of that. The people of Orlonea would never feel safe knowing the Witch still lived.
Continent-wide famine, towns split in two, mountains flattened, lush land stripped of life—all disasters caused by Witches past. Even the current Witch had blood on her hands.
Twelve years ago, the Witch had used her power to create a crack in the Disputed Land between Orlonea and Aeos, large and wide enough to swallow more than a hundred soldiers whole.
The people would never trust the Witch.
Marnie screamed.
A guard with bright red hair stepped forward, official document in hand. The entire square recognized it, worn and ripped around the edges as it was. The Condemnation of the Witch. Its beginning contained the only words the Brotherhood was certain had come from the lost holy book of Nephele.
“The Goddess is good. She is powerful. Such power belongs to her and her alone,” the red-haired guard read aloud, her voice so clear no one, not even those in the very back of the square, would mistake the words from the holy text.
The guard paused a moment before continuing to read the additions the Brotherhood had written.
“For anyone else to use it is a crime. Not just against the people of this country but against the Goddess herself. For this reason, we hunt the Witch. For the Goddess, we find the Witch and bring her to justice!”
The guard gestured to the trembling Marnie behind her. “Is this the Witch?”
The crowd answered with a roar that shook Toran’s bones. People stomped their feet and raised their fists. The combined force shook the platform. Shook him.
“It’s not me!” Marnie cried. Her expression was wild, near hysterical. Her eyes bounced around the crowd, searching for an ally, but all that stared back were the narrowed lids of the fearful. She would have found more pity in the cobblestones under their feet. “I’m not the Witch!”
“Marnie Sorphel, you are accused of being the Witch. Of stealing the power of creation from the very Goddess who gave this land life, gave us all life, and using it for your own benefit. For this crime, like all the Witches that came before you, you are sentenced to death.”
“Please,” Marnie begged. Her pleading would do no good. No accused survived once dragged up to the platform. “Believe me.”
Toran did. But his beliefs didn’t matter.
“The water at the bottom of this well,” the guard continued, “will take your life. In doing so, may it also take the magic from your body and return it to our almighty Goddess.”
With that, the red-haired guard stepped back, her head bowed as she followed Fell off the platform. Two other guards brought Marnie forward. She was weeping now, her body shaking so fiercely she could have been buzzing.
Toran shut his eyes.
In his mind, he saw a woman drowning in a great, still lake—black even in the daylight—and then the memory shifted into his darkest imaginings.
He saw the roiling, storm-rocked ocean, bright against flashes of lightning.
He saw Loriana. She called for him, screaming at the death that hovered close.
At the waves that knocked her head against her knees, at the ocean that latched on to her and refused to let go.
The water waiting at the bottom of this well—having slithered through the ground from the sea—was no different from that which had taken his fiancée. It was eager, patient, hungry. It would swallow Marnie just as it had Loriana.
He opened his eyes. A blur of unshed tears covered them. He rubbed it away.
Marnie’s feet slid out from under her and she hung, still shaking, between the guards.
Toran was shaking, too. He couldn’t watch this. Not if he couldn’t stop it. He didn’t just want a drink anymore. He needed one.
But Toran watched as the guards dragged Marnie, her chained ankles twisting at odd angles as her toes caught the floor. Gripping her arms tight, they lifted her and hauled her over the circle of stones.
It took only a second for Marnie to be tossed over the edge. Her head went first, then her torso and hands, and finally her feet. Only a second for her fall, to vanish into the blackness of the well.
The sound of her body hitting the water echoed in his ears.
He turned away from the well, his face toward the crowd, and saw her there.
Loriana.
Lips, the exact pink he remembered touching, remembered kissing, quirked into a smile.
But through her stunning grin, Toran could see the framing of the Gash buildings.
They cracked her lips in the wrong way, and his heart cracked at the sight.
He dragged forth the word for what he was seeing, one he didn’t want to acknowledge even as fresh tears welled behind his eyes.
Ghost.
He blinked and Loriana’s face vanished from the crowd.
The King had banned him from the pub, forbidden him from having even one drink. But the King didn’t understand. It wasn’t about getting drunk. And it wasn’t about the way the alcohol kept him from caring.
It was about her. It had always been about her.
Because he couldn’t bear to see her anymore. For it was only when his veins were clear of alcohol that Loriana’s ghost appeared to him.