Chapter 46 Ditch
Ditch
Night of the Hunter’s Moon
“You rang?” Meera stepped into Ditch’s study from her new quarters below, eyes bloodshot, nose raw. Evidence of all the snotty sobbing she’d been doing of late.
Apparently Meera and Lowell played a stupid game called We’re not doing what we’re supposed to.
The wolf was supposed to take her no for an answer. He’d instead shown up at her house.
Meera was supposed to melt him with a potion. She’d instead fled her home, moving into the keep. She’d packed lightly, bringing ridiculous clothes and a hissing cat.
“I did ring,” Ditch said. “I’m surprised to see you’re still on duty.”
“Still on duty. Clearly,” Meera said without so much as a stutter. Misery made her bolder. Her reddened gaze dipped to the scroll in Ditch’s hand. “Is that a missive from Akelarre?”
Ditch glanced down. “It arrived this morning. Elder witches will be coming next week to assess my progress.”
“They’re spending the magic to travel here? It must be important to them.”
“Yes, and I intend to be prepared, which is why I summoned you. I plan to study your thesis on King Thane. It’ll keep me occupied while I fuel these spells tonight.”
Projecting her magic all the way across the Witchwood and into Craigdúr would take a toll. If Straegan fought her—all but guaranteed—he would drain her even further.
Meera said dully, “The thesis is at my house. I’ll get it.” Though she trudged off with a wooden gait, she utterly spewed power.
As predicted, heartache had come home to roost. The witch wallowed in it, moping around the keep with that odious cat following her through the halls. Also as predicted, Meera’s grief had supercharged her magic.
She was so powerful she might be the Queen of Infuriations.
Rage crackled through the Witchwood, punctuated by fights and screams, the coven swept up in her emotional storm.
Some were more affected than others. Ditch, naturally, was immune.
Should she tell mousy Meera that her magic now spread like a noxious fog over half the realm? It might attract fell demons or wake the Furies. Good thing I have my traps.
Was Thane feeling the rage in Craigdúr, even over Ditch’s own spells? Was he already in agony?
Laughter filtered through the night. Rosewyn’s? The young witch was healed now, more powerful and arrogant than ever. Always scheming. I’m vulnerable tonight, but I’ll have to deal with that Rider soon.
For now, restlessness prowled inside Ditch. She crossed to the window, tail lashing, Akelarrean scroll in hand. The moon glowed full and hypnotic over the Witchwood.
From her tower, she gazed out over the trees, their leafless branches glimmering silver in the light.
The strain of those containment spells seemed to peel back defensive layers within Ditch, letting her see the power flowing through the world: glowing threads of connection, a latticework binding the Skein. The interlocking pattern of magic radiated before her mystified eyes.
The leafless tree limbs looked like arteries. Like the veins the vampires worshipped. Like the Berserker ravines. Like lightning branching out over Valhalland skies. Like the forks of the pulsating Firis River.
Like fault lines of immortal battlefields.
If the energies of all factions fed this magic, must those factions also be…thriving?
Yes. Everything is connected. Power fuels power. Giving and taking. The exhale of one provides the inhale of another.
She’d once taunted Thane that they were all monsters. She’d meant it to needle him. Now she realized she might have stumbled into prophecy.
We all live together in some fashion. Or we all fall.
The Skein wasn’t a chaotic coil to be conquered; it was a nuanced tapestry. Pluck one thread, and the whole thing unraveled.
But someone had already plucked a thread. Something was deeply off-balance here, catastrophe rising.
Pemphre had said as much. Might that mad sorceress be more aware than Ditch had thought?
A ripple of knowing moved through Ditch: This Accession was the Skein’s final chance. One more All-Battle, and the immortals wouldn’t survive—victors and defeated alike.
If she seized the reins of this world, Ditch could stop the next battle. Vanquish everyone until their hostilities were a distant memory. Refashion the tapestry.
Had the elder witches of her home realm known how precarious everything was? If the Skein fell, so would Akelarre. So would all the immortal worlds.
Of course they had known, probably for centuries. They’d found Ditch in that secluded bog because they’d foreseen her.
Wait. How could Ditch understand all this with such certainty?
Unless…she was a seeress as well?
Her tail shot rigid. She had just brushed her fourth caste. Her “witchly intuition” was more advanced than she’d supposed—not like a dedicated oracle or a Valkyrie soothsayer but enough to claim a caste.
Which meant…
Great Hecate.
She was nearly the Awaited One. Such power!
The healer caste was the only one she lacked, the simplest of all to achieve. Maybe with her increased awareness, Ditch was supposed to heal this land, preventing that catastrophe. Most witches would give anything to surrender to duty and embrace their inner healer. Even angry Rosewyn would.
Had the House of Witches predicted that Ditch would become their Awaited?
So many pieces fell into place. They had located their prophesied leader, raised her, then positioned her here—a queen on a cosmic chessboard, tasked with saving everyone from apocalypse.
Ditch grinned, crumpling the scroll in her fist.
Idiots.
They’d failed to consider one important fact: She was only half a witch.
Ditch burned to dominate. To raze. To rule every denizen in the Skein. Enrage not a demon. Much less one sprung from sulfur to frolic with serpents. Fate had battered Ditch; her demonic grudge was against everything.
She could never be a healer with her destroyer’s heart. Hell spreads. Her influence would as well. She would rule this place as her personal queendom. All of it.
I will keep it safe.
But only in the palm of my hand.
She wouldn’t heal it. She would steal it.
Movement drew her gaze. A giant spider clambered by then, leg fur shimmying, his spinneret full and ready for action. “Hello, Webmaster,” she murmured. “Looking glorious as ever.” You too belong to me. She’d made sure to exclude wildlife from her traps—
Wait. She stared out the window. Blinked. Where in Hecate’s name are my traps? The wards she’d woven were gone. Weeks of work stripped bare.
Rosewyn. Had to be.
Stupid. Shortsighted. Dangerous.
Was Meera involved? Had they compromised anything else? The containment spells in Craigdúr—
A sudden blow smashed into her chest and drove her to her knees.
She sprang up, searching for an attacker, but the tower was empty. The blow had come through magic.
Straegan. He’d hit the enchanted bars, and the impact had blasted into Ditch like a siege ram.
What in the name of every dark goddess was happening in Craigdúr? Gritting her fangs, she clamped down on the spell, horns and tail sparking wildly. She felt another run at the bars, and then another, as Straegan hammered at his cage, a rabid piston.
Panting, she scanned the grounds around the keep. All that work sabotaged. All her traps.
Rosewyn, you fool.
The coven was now exposed to every creature in the Skein, many already sliding toward a murderous frenzy.
Ditch felt the surge rippling across the land—howling through the moors, rattling the seacoasts, unsettling the mountain clans, and stirring the demon borders to the south.
One witch’s pain. And the whole Skein was slipping into madness.