Chapter 18
She found a safe place for them to camp before the sun set, sheltered from the wind, near a creek where the water ran clear.
She let the trees guide her to it. She didn’t talk to them directly—not with Casrian watching—but she let her natural sense of them pull her in the right direction until he declared the spot acceptable.
They hadn’t talked much that afternoon as they followed the patrol’s trail out of that bad patch of woods.
Leaving what he called ‘the sphere of corruption’ was like waking from a bad dream, the boundary between the bad parts and the healthy so sharp her ears popped as they stepped from shadows into sunshine.
She could hear birdsong and rodents scampering through the brush.
The air was clear. The trees swayed in a faint breeze.
There were leaves on the branches in red and gold.
The soil smelled rich, not choked with decay.
She was safe. The witch was gone.
Sitting beside the fire, she sipped her tea and tried to still her churning thoughts. They jumped from the bear to the woods to Casrian flicking blood off his sword to the witch to the feel of his hands on her. A sick feeling settled in the pit of her stomach.
She was starting to think she’d gotten herself in over her head.
She looked up as the witch hunter returned from settling the horses. His gaze swept over her, assessing. “How are you?”
“My leg feels better. I added willow bark to the tea. Should help.”
He sat down beside her. Not too close. He was a respecter of space, the captain.
A moth drifted into the circle of light cast by the fire and she let her gaze follow its graceful, spiraling course.
It was lovely—one of the great moths, big as an apple, with a plump furred body and delicate wings marked with two dark circles like eyes.
It floated above her, lifting in the warm draft from the fire.
Toby’s father had told them that the moths navigated by starlight and were confused by firelight. She had enormous sympathy for the tiny beast. She felt like she’d lost her way too.
“Tell me about hunting witches.”
She felt the weight of Casrian’s gaze on the side of her face. “You don’t want those kinds of bedtime stories, I promise you.”
Probably not. But she’d already committed to this path and she needed to know.
“I thought this would be an easy job,” she admitted, glancing his way. “Find your men. Get you to the fort and collect my pay. It should have been easy.”
She could almost see the thoughts churning behind his eyes.
Guilt and determination and loyalty to his friends and doubt about her.
He was riddled with doubts where she was concerned, and she badly wanted to prove him wrong.
That was at least part of why she’d chosen to serve as his guide—to rub his face in the fact that he needed her.
It wasn’t nearly as much fun as she’d thought it’d be.
“I knew it wasn’t safe out here,” she went on. “There’s something wrong with the woods. There’s never been a bear attack so close to Toam. And you can feel it—the wrongness—the deeper in we go. You said we’re just at the edge of it.”
He nodded.
“So, tell me what I need to know, because I think it’s better to be prepared even if it scares me.”
He gave her a curious look. “What do you already know about witches?”
“I thought I knew everything. I’ve seen you work, which is more than most people can say. I live with a branded witch.”
“Your mother’s not a witch.”
“Now you say so.”
He didn’t have anything to say to that, just looked away to stare into the fire. Orange light flickered over his skin, highlighting the planes and hollows of his face.
“I’ve always wondered if there were really witches out there,” she said. “Like evil, baby-eating witches, the kind people whisper about in stories.”
“I don’t go around branding women for fun,” Casrian said.
“Of course you don’t. You wouldn’t even know how to have fun.”
“Cruel, Rowan,” he murmured. “Conversations with you leave bruises.”
She rolled her eyes. She hadn’t hurt his feelings. His skin wasn’t that thin.
“Consider me one of your new witch hunters, fresh out of the Academy, and tell me what I need to know about the witches you hunt because the witches I know sell charms in the market and tend gardens growing herbs so they can make medicine for people who can’t afford to go to an Academy healer.
That’s the whole of my experience with witches. ”
Maybe not the whole of her experience. There was her ability to use blood to track things and the connection she had with trees, but that wasn’t…
this. Those things were harmless even if the witch hunter would never see it that way.
Whatever she’d encountered in the woods earlier was different.
It was sentient and malignant. It tasted like poison on her tongue.
Casrian looked into the fire as if gathering up his thoughts. She didn’t think he was seeing anything. Or at least, whatever memory he’d fallen into wasn’t one he could easily climb out of. She had memories like that too.
After a time, he began to speak.
“Last month, we were sent after a young mother. She wasn’t marked.
It was a small village down near Quester’s Bay.
A fever had passed through there and her youngest, a daughter, had died in the night.
She had fae blood and her grandmother had kept a spell book.
She’d never even opened it until that night.
I don’t know why she kept it. It should have been burned.
She tried to heal the child, but the girl was already gone.
It was a simple healing spell, but she must have poured everything into it.
It called up something. When we got there, all of her children were dead. ”
Rowan frowned. “The healthy children too?”
“It was a blood spell,” he said. “It only required a drop from the caster, but it didn’t work because the child was dead. She drained herself down until she was half dead herself and when that didn’t work, she used her other children’s blood. She drained them all.”
“That’s terrible.”
“When we got there, all three of the children were laid out on the bed in their nightclothes. The sheets scarlet and their faces white. Babies really. The oldest only four.” He shook himself from the memory.
“The demon controlling the mother released her then. That’s rare.
Usually once they have hold of a witch, they ride her until she rots, but this one let her go.
I was there. My blade was drawn and I was looking right into her face when she came back to herself.
She saw the children on the bed and went mad with the grief of it.
She was young, pretty. There were flowers by the porch and food on the kitchen table.
I held the killing blow.” He fell silent for a long moment before shaking his head and pulling himself back.
“I’m still not sure I did the right thing. ”
“You regret not killing her?” Because she was a witch. A murderer.
“We took her out of there, away from the house, and brought her to the priest to care for. But I don’t know…” He turned his head to look at her, his eyes haunted. “Sometimes I think it would have been more merciful to kill her than try to bring her back.”
She frowned at that, and he tipped his head.
“That’s what witches do. That’s what they are.
Desperate women who are being used to spread evil in this world.
We brand women who start casting dangerous spells, who have already hurt people in their community.
The branding isn’t punishment. It’s mercy. ”
She drew her legs up and rested her chin on her knees. “There has to be another way.”
“We could slaughter everyone with fae blood, but that isn’t something anyone wants to do. It would be hundreds.”
Including her and her mother. They’d tried that during the cleansing. After Caetris fell, Ares decided to get rid of everyone with fae blood. Hundreds died before people lost their taste for blood. No one wanted to go back to those times.
“The witches are innocent, then, until the demon takes hold.”
Casrian cut her a sharp look. “They’re not innocent. As soon as they cast their first spell, they’ve broken the king’s law. But we only kill the demon-ridden.”
“What kinds of spells are you talking about?” She had to be careful here. “Glyphs and potions and incantations?”
“Any of those can serve as an opening, though charm makers are usually safe enough. They’re too weak to be of much interest to demons, which is why we generally leave them alone.
Those who can work blood magic are targeted more often.
There are very few humans who have enough fae blood to do more than that. ”
“What do you mean?”
“Witches work by will and word, the glyphs and incantations serving as the word. Full fae were able to cast spells by will alone. There were once humans with enough fae blood to do the same, but they’re all gone now.”
That couldn’t be right. She’d always been able to talk to the trees and both of her parents were human.
She didn’t even know any incantations and Tilly said she was hopeless with glyphs.
Besides, hearing the trees had nothing to do with casting spells.
Tracking something by blood was more of a blurred line.
She wasn’t really casting a spell when she did that.
It was more of a trick that allowed her to tap into her other senses.
“Is that what happened to the fae?” she asked. “The demons went after them first because they had more magic?”