Chapter I.6
Chapter Six
One Month Before the Wedding
Miria stomped toward the town gates, recklessly heedless of the traffic or any strange glances that might be tossed her way. The fury in her veins needed to be burned off.
There were no farms along the footpath between the woods and the town.
Just a field, currently thick with summer grasses and brimming with purple and white wildflowers that dotted the green like decorations on a cake.
It was as though everyone tried to maintain a buffer between civilization and the line of trees that marked the beginning of the Shadow Wood Forest. No doubt that was because terrible creatures lived in the forest. Witches, mainly.
The irony, of course, was that witches were everywhere if you knew where to look.
Everywhere except where Miria longed to be—at Adaline’s side, comforting one another, scheming together.
Miria had followed Yali that day she’d given Betra a full coin purse and walked her through the woods, watched as her nana had cast the portal spell.
It had been several more years until she learned that spell, longer before she mastered it, and yet for all that magic available to her, she was here and Adaline was several days away. Unreachable.
“This rock is a portal?” Adaline had pressed her hand against it, jabbed it with a finger, and finally flung her entire body atop it while Miria had laughed. “Sometimes I think you’re teasing me, you know.”
Miria pulled her up, and Adaline shrieked with surprise. “You’re lucky it doesn’t work that way, or it could have swallowed you, and you’d be on the other side of the country by now.”
That thought had seemingly never occurred to Adaline, judging by the startled expression on her face, and that was hardly a surprise. “You would have stopped me if that were the case. Right?”
“Oh no, I’d have let you fall through it. You might have learned a lesson in being more cautious.”
“Miri!”
She couldn’t hold in another laugh. “And then I’d have gone through and rescued you, as I have a tendency to do.”
Adaline scowled playfully and poked Miria in the arm. “You would have let me fall through it. I believe that. So does this rock—” she narrowed her eyes at it as though still questioning whether Miria was playing a prank “—take you anywhere? Could you visit me at home this winter?”
Adaline’s light tone faltered beneath the weight of the question, and Miria’s good humor faded within her chest.
“Not anywhere,” Miria said. She drew her finger down the rock face, and the spell hidden on its surface rippled gold beneath her touch before dissolving into nothingness again.
“There must be a similar portal on the other end, and not just any portal—one where I’ve already been so I can add my magic to the spell.
My nana’s taken me to many places, so now I can go to them on my own, but there’s no portal in Waeremund. ”
“But it’s the capital.”
“Probably why. Such overt magic around so much nonmagical power is dangerous.” Miria smiled sadly.
Adaline sighed. “I’d be angry that you witches are all such an antisocial bunch except I understand why you must be. I hate it. I don’t want to spend all fall and winter without you.”
Miria leaned into her then, and they held each other silently for a minute because the unfairness of it all was too much.
Being a witch had made Miria believe she should be able to find a solution to any problem, and being a wealthy lady had likely made Adaline believe the same.
Once. Before they’d grown up and discovered their power—all power—had limits, and theirs was especially small compared to that of kings and men and institutions.
“It’s only fall and winter,” Miria said, pressing her cheek against Adaline’s. “You’ll be back in the spring?”
Adaline nodded. “I hope. By summer at the latest.”
Only she’d been wrong. Instead of six or eight months passing, nearly two years had come and gone. Adaline still wasn’t here, and now the people who’d kept them separated all that time conspired with Miria’s family to keep her away forever.
She wouldn’t allow it.
Miria emerged in the cottage’s clearing not an hour later, her thighs and feet burning with the exercise and sweat running down her back, but her head clearer.
Tuli—as she’d come to call her golem over the years—was leaning against an apple tree, perfectly motionless beneath the first small signs of fruit.
Was he asleep? Did he dream? Did he even have a mind with which to think when Miria wasn’t addressing him?
She’d never gotten satisfactory answers to those questions from either Yali or her books.
Tuli had a bit of a personality, though, or so Miria chose to believe.
More than Aza did, or rather, more than Aza once had.
Her nana’s golem had returned to the earth along with her nana, and even now, just remembering that she was here alone, without the woman who’d saved her and raised her and loved her, made Miria’s heart ache.
She had half a mind to rouse Tuli for the company, but the golem seemed peaceful doing whatever it was he did when he was like that, so she resisted. She did not need his assistance with the course of action she’d decided on during her walk, so she let him be.
Inside the cottage it was blissfully cooler than it was out, and Miria tossed off her layers, remembering how Yali had so often called her wild.
Not that her nana had dressed like a proper lady without cause, but Miria had always taken clothing as more of a loose suggestion than a strict rule, particularly during the hottest days of summer.
If a child was raised in the woods, no one should expect her to act civilized.
Stripped down to a loose linen tunic, her legs and feet bare, Miria settled at the cottage’s long table.
The red charm, dangling on its cord, bounced against her chest as she swung her legs beneath her, but Miria ignored it.
She’d dwelled much on her anger during the walk from town, considered deeply all she’d learned and the options before her, and she hadn’t made a decision regarding her family yet.
Now that she was home, it wasn’t her family that she wished to think about at all, but their lives were entangled with Adaline’s. She had no choice.
Somehow, she had to devise a plan that would help Adaline and serve her own vengeance without harming innocent children.
To do that, Miria needed more information.
She could write to Adaline and hope Adaline would provide it—and she would do that—but Adaline could not necessarily be counted on to provide exactly the details Miria required.
That was only partially due to Adaline’s faults as a correspondent.
The rest of the fault was Miria’s; she didn’t exactly know what to ask.
Fortunately, for that, there was magic. It could not solve all problems, but this was precisely the sort of problem it excelled at.
Miria pulled a shallow glass bowl closer.
It had once been Yali’s, and like so many of her belongings, Miria had inherited it.
The apprentice had become the witch, though there were many days when Miria felt far from qualified for the job.
Many times when she wished her nana were around to answer questions or provide guidance or simply to lend a shoulder to cry on.
Never was that more true than now, when the biggest act of magical work she had to complete was for the most personal of issues.
Taking a deep breath, Miria removed the bracelet with the pink charm from her wrist, recalling the day she’d given an identical one to Adaline.
“This is magic,” Miria said, tying the pink stone around Adaline’s wrist. “It will keep a piece of my heart with you at all times. Not literally!”
Adaline’s shoulders relaxed. “How am I supposed to tell with you?” She wrapped her fingers around the charm and smiled. “It’s warm. It … it feels like you.”
“Exactly. I put my feelings for you in it. Whenever it touches your skin, and especially when you touch it on purpose, you can remember me. It should also protect you because love is protective.” She felt her cheeks burn with the admission,
“Like I could forget you.” Adaline threw her arms around Miria and squeezed so hard Miria thought she might crack a bone.
“It’s perfect. It’s the best jewelry I own, even if I’ll have to hide it.
But what about you?” She released Miria and stepped back.
“Can you make one with my feelings in it? Would they protect you?”
Miria had hoped to do just that, but she smiled mysteriously since it amused Adaline. “I could do that, I suppose.”
For the moment, she snipped a lock of Adaline’s hair to keep with her. “With this, I’ll be able to scry for you. Find you. If you ever need me, I’ll come to you.”
The light on Adaline’s face faded at that, and she pulled Miria close again. “I’ll always need you, but I know what you mean. I don’t want to leave.”
Miria said nothing to that, for there was nothing to say.
They’d repeated the same words to each other time and time again, but words without actions rarely changed fate.
Instead, she held Adaline, pressed cheek against cheek, threaded her fingers through soft brown waves, tried to memorize every detail of Adaline’s face from the tiny moles on her neck to the curve of her hip against Miria’s own, to the honeysuckle and lavender scent that clung to Adaline’s hair.
Soon enough, words—though written on paper—would be all they had left.
Almost all, Miria amended to herself. She had this charm, and Adaline hers, and they were also a connection.
Adaline couldn’t use the one Miria have given her for the same purposes that Miria could, though.
Purposes that Miria tried not to use it for too often since they were rather invasive of Adaline’s privacy.
Under these circumstances, however, Miria assumed Adaline would forgive her for prying.