Chapter 45 Wren
I’m standing in my childhood home, watching my mother kneading bread. Her skin is so much lighter than mine. Her hair is dark brown. She wears it in a long braid over her shoulder and hums as she works. It’s late at night. Shadows line her cheeks.
My grandmother sits at the table. “I could make that faster for you, you know.”
My mother sighs. “I quite like the task.”
“I’m surprised you have the energy, after spending all day with the little bird.”
My mother smiles. “Wren’s all right.”
“Wren is brilliant,” my grandmother announces, which is why I know this has to be a dream, because my grandmother has never called me brilliant in my life.
The room falls silent for a moment.
“Have you thought anymore about my offer?”
My mother sets her dough aside under a cloth. “Yes,” she says. “But I can’t. The woods are no place for us.”
“How much longer do you think you can keep her hidden? I’ve heard the rumours myself. Everyone knows she’s no mortal child—”
“But no one can prove it!”
“Maeve, she’s an accident waiting to happen.”
“You just said she was brilliant—”
“She is. She can be. She’s also dangerous. I’ve met some amazing, brilliant, dangerous people before in my long life. Wren is fire incarnate. It’s been centuries since I’ve known someone of her ilk. If we do not temper it—”
“She’ll learn—”
“She will,” my grandmother admits. “The question is, what will she have to lose before she learns to control it?”
I don’t want this to be a memory. I want it to be something I can fall back into, to shape with my hands. I want to grab my mother by the shoulders and beg her to let me go before I can hurt her.
I want to see her again, to wake to a world with her in it.
But already the scene is swirling, falling through my fingers like silt. The next thing I know, I’m waking up in my bed, and fire is all around me, licking at the windows, crawling at the walls. I can smell flesh burning.
But it isn’t mine.
I don’t burn.
I run for my mother’s room, but the door collapses before I can reach it. The entire house is crumbling around me. I know that fire can’t hurt me, but debris is another matter. My hands fall against it anyway, grabbing up fistfuls of flaming thatch. My throat burns from screaming.
Mama, mama, mama.
I try to snuff out the flames. I’ve been able to do that before. I used to trick my mother, snatching the fire out from beneath the pot and folding it in my hands like clay. I’d twirl it around my fingers, flatten it like a pancake, and vanish it before she could turn back.
Sometimes she’d laugh. Sometimes she’d sigh or scold.
I’d always give it back. I could still feel it under my skin until I released it.
I try to do the same thing now, drawing the fire into me. It works, to begin with. I snuff out tiny flames.
But the fire is growing faster than I can, the flames mounting, growing taller.
The house shakes with them. The walls groan.
The ceiling bows. A beam crashes down behind me, cutting off the way back.
Smoke fills my lungs, but I push forward, stumbling over burning wreckage.
My mother’s room is gone, nothing left but fire and cinders. There’s no escape inside.
“Mama!”
But there is nothing left of my mother to call back, and if I don’t get out, there’ll be nothing left of me, either.
I have to run.
The front door is an inferno, but I don’t stop. I throw myself through it, flames clinging to my skin, my hair, my clothes. The night air is a shock—cool, sharp, filled with the screams of the villagers as they run toward the house carrying buckets of water.
When they see me, they scream louder.
“Monster!” someone shouts.
The fire still clings to me, flickering along my arms like living things. I don’t feel it, but they do.
They come at me, abandoning their buckets, grabbing hoes and tools and pitchforks. I am a monster, after all, I am meant to be hunted.
I flee.
The woods are dark, the underbrush clawing at my legs. My breath tears from my throat in ragged gasps. Behind me, the villagers crash through the trees, shouting, cursing. A crossbow string snaps—
Something whizzes past my ear.
I plunge into the stream, sinking to my knees in the freezing water. The fire hisses, smoke rising in tendrils as the flames vanish.
The villagers follow after me, barely stopping when they reach the water.
I scramble up the opposite bank, but they are too close, their voices sharp, their hands reaching—
They still when the shadows move.
Darkness pours from the trees, thick as ink, swallowing the moonlight. A figure descends, black robes billowing, her presence vast and terrible.
My grandmother. A bastillion of darkness.
Something flashes. A scream shatters the night. One of the villagers crumples.
The others scatter.
Silence falls. My grandmother turns towards me, lifting me easily from the water. She’s as tall as a giant, her skin dark and stained with gold.
“No one harms my granddaughter,” she says, rubbing soot from my face. “Come with me, child. You shall be safe in the Moonhollow.”
“Mama…” I whimper.
My grandmother sighs. “Your mother is gone, little bird.”
“I… I killed her.”
“No, dear. Fire killed your mother, not you.”
I know she cannot lie, but that doesn’t matter. She can find a way around speaking the truth.
My mother is dead, and it’s all my fault.
She tucks me into her arms like I’m little more than a baby, and I sob and wail into her neck. “I’m never using fire again,” I vow. “Never, ever, ever.”
The fire curdles inside me, like the monster they claim I am. It lies in wait, biding its time.
I can feel it every time I draw breath.
In the Moonhollow, no one calls me a monster. No one is scared of me. They eye my rounded ears with suspicion. In magic classes, they scoff at my limited spells. They laugh at my pronunciation. They scorn my lack of speed and strength, frown at the scars on my skin, how rough my hands can become.
No one is scared of me, and sometimes I wish they were.
My grandmother takes over the task of raising me, but here in the Moonhollow, that means very little. There are only five children in total, ranging in ages, and everyone takes part in raising them. I spend most of my days being passed between tutors.
In the mornings, I study with Eryndor, an elder whose voice is rough as bark and whose patience is thinner than autumn frost. He drills me on the old tongue, the cadence of spells, the weight of every syllable.
My accent is wrong, my vowels clipped, my consonants harsh.
He does not praise when I improve, only grumbles less.
Moira is next, the mistress of magic. She teaches me about the elements, how they live within us and the world. The fey can tap into them. Humans cannot. All fey have a natural element, one that speaks to them most. I know mine is fire, but that doesn’t matter. I’m never using it again.
My grandmother pushes me at first, but I hold firm. I learn other spells instead. How to lift leaves, draw water, make flowers grow. Simple, safe magic.
Willa teaches me rune magic. I like learning runes.
The precise symbol is of paramount importance, and how you etch them or what you etch them with affects their potency.
Anything easily rubbed away will be weak.
Blood is always a good one, if you can apply it properly.
Different blood can change the outcome, too.
Only the fair folk can activate runes, though.
There’s a word we whisper, but the true magic comes in channelling the elements around us. The word merely anchors our intention.
It’s a magic that can be learned, studied, memorised. No one can mock me for it.
After Willa, I go to Fallon. He’s younger than most of the others, barely older than Zephyr, but he moves with the quiet confidence of someone who’s never doubted where his next step would land.
Fallon teaches combat—not just the swinging of blades, but the rhythm of movement, the balance between strength and speed.
He says a good fighter reads the air as much as their opponent.
Sometimes we spar; more often, I end up flat on my back staring at the sky while he offers a hand up and a grin that’s equal parts apology and challenge.
In the afternoons, my grandmother gathers us in her study.
The walls are crammed with relics: maps drawn on tanned hide, carved stones, feathers in jars.
History lessons with her are never just names and dates.
She tells the stories as though she lived them, her voice low and steady, the everlight painting shifting shadows across her lined face.
Fallon sits beside me, half-listening, half-sketching in the margins of his notes.
Some days, the history lesson transforms into shapeshifting practice for those with the gift.
Fallon can shift. His shape is a fox—lean, sharp-eyed, the color of burnt copper.
I watch him practice with the others, the ripple of change flowing through him in an instant, as if his bones remember something his human skin does not.
My grandmother gives him pointers, adjusting a paw’s stance, a tail’s balance.
I take notes, though I’ll never use them.
The gift doesn’t run in me, however much I want it to.
She says every shifter’s first form tells you something about their soul. I wonder what mine would have been, if I’d had one. Something fast? Something fierce? Or something that hides in shadows?
But there’s no point in wondering.
After morning lessons, we head out into the woods, my feet unsteady on the twisting roots.
We are set to gather herbs, to track the faintest marks left by deer and foxes.
I am always the slowest, always the last to finish.
I do not speak of the ache in my legs or the tired sting in my hands.
Complaints are weakness. Weakness is human.
I learn to hunt, to fish. Not to stumble, but to flit through the trees. I learn the properties of the countless flora and fauna, the properties of the animals of the forest. I learn how to summon birds and how to sing the songs of the woodlands.
In the evenings, we head to the glade where the oldest fey sit in circles, their power humming in the air like the distant call of thunder.
My grandmother instructs me to watch, to listen, to remember.
I do. I learn how the Moonhollow bends magic like a branch in the wind, how spells are woven rather than spoken.
I try to follow, but my magic is stiff, unyielding.
It crackles and fights against my will. The elders do not tell me I have done well. They do not tell me anything at all.
I learn other things too. That even here, in the heart of the fey, I do not belong. The other children play without me. They do not push me away, but neither do they call me closer. Their gazes slide over me like I am a shadow on the ground, something half-there, half-forgotten.
But there is one who does not turn away.
My cousin, Zephyr, older than me by a handful of years, with dark hair in tight coils and a watchful gleam in his eyes.
He does not speak much, but when I trip over my words or stumble on a root, he does not laugh.
When I fail, he does not scoff. He has the patience of a saint with me—no, the patience of the stars, I am reminded. There are no saints in the woods.
The Stars enlighten. The Fates guide.
So does Zephyr.
For years, he’s my protector, my teacher, then my friend.
Zephyr’s element is water. He is almost one with it.
When he moves, it’s with the same quiet certainty as a river carving its way through stone.
His spells shimmer like sunlight on a stream’s surface, deceptively gentle, yet brimming with power.
He coaxes the water from leaves and stones, calls it from the air, shapes it with barely a flick of his fingers.
It obeys him not because he commands it, but because it recognises him.
I’ve seen him dive beneath the surface of the lake and rise without a ripple, as if the water chooses not to let him drown.
He doesn’t wrestle with magic the way I do—he dances with it. Fluid. Effortless. Silent.
Time and time again, I wish that I could peel the fire from my skin and replace it with water. I do not wish to harm.
“I wish I could heal,” I tell Zephyr, more than once.
Zephyr smiles, as if I am a fish who’s suddenly announced her intention to fly. “Some of us are made to heal,” he tells me. “And others, to fight. And you, Wren, are very, very good at fighting.”
He’s right, of course. Because fighting is something anyone can do, if they practise hard enough.
We cannot change our nature, and we can’t undo the past. So I throw myself into my studies.
I learn to fight so well I’m just as good as the rest of them.
I take lessons from Moira, too, learning to battle without relying on all of my senses.
I focus on that over magic. I believe what they whisper.
That I can’t do magic because I’m not made to.
And sometimes, sometimes, I forget what I’m capable of.
The fire still licks at my heart. It haunts me, like my mother’s ghost.