An Allwitch was a rare breed of light witch, the kind the Goddess blessed with all seven schools of light magic, whereas the majority of light witches only hadonetype of magic to spellcast. Creation, Elemental, Enchantment, Healing, Illusions, Mental, and Quantum. Allwitch meant my sister had all seven of them.
Where Alchemia was and how to get there was as mysterious to me as the location of the portal, but if Ash was there, it waslikely I’d never see her again. It should have been an honor to be so powerful, but it wasn’t.
I learned about Alchemia from Charley Starvos’s text on Allwitches. It was the island they sent Allwitches to once they got too powerful, a practice the Echelons implemented after magic started to wane, to put an end to the Allwitch wars. Wars that started because magic was running out, which, the Echelons said, was because the Allwitches took too much of it.
After the Echelons won the conflict, they would’ve eradicated Allwitches completely, but with half the mainland’s population being Dark Witches, the Council voted to maintain a small population of Allwitches in Alchemia, to bring back in the event that Dark Witches ever attempted to seize control of Everden.
That I hadn’t mattered enough to be told Ash was an Allwitch was an uncomfortable thought, but for the moment, I dealt with it the same way I dealt with Helen. I stopped thinking about it and thought about my current circumstances instead. Which involved — due to my reclined position on the bench, and the way Leland hovered at the end of it — being eye-level with his groin.
I glanced off to where a small brown squirrel held a chestnut in his small arms as he scampered across the narrow porch rail. Behind him, the grassy, low-sloping descent to town glowed greener as the sun continued to rise and brighten. It was just after sunrise, the time zone here three hours behind Pennsylvania.
“Arnie, no!” Trist scolded. “Those are the Echelon’s! Return it where you found it, or you won’t get any more at dinner.”
Arnie dropped the chestnut.A Familiar, I realized, at the same time as I figured out Trist was like my sister. Only Allwitches had Familiars, and Trist must be on the mainland because she hadn’t acquired all the light magics yet.
Trist swiped the hair from my neck, and a cold shiver ofdiscomfort coursed through me, leaving my shoulders feeling slimy and strange. There was nothing wrong with Trist or what she did. I just hadn’t been ready, even though I knew Healing was tactile and, I reminded myself, Trist’s vocation. Her hands moved without feeling, like, to her, all bodies were the same and nothing mine had to offer could possibly be interesting. Me? I found sudden physical contact jarring.
“NowI” — Leland paused until he had Trist’s full attention — “would’ve asked her permission first.”
“Would you now?” Trist said dramatically, and then, rather sarcastically, “Sincerest apologies. May I please put my hand over your heart to run this diagnostic? Mr. Mc-Stabs-A-Lot over there has informed me this is theproperway to provide your treatment.”
“Sure,” I consented. Not that I was looking forward to it. But she’d called Leland Mr. Mc-Stabs-A-Lot, which I happened to appreciate. Plus I needed my legs to work if I had any hope of running away.
Trist sighed and removed her hand from my chest a few minutes later. “Your vitals are fine, but you’re weak. Weaker than you should be at your age. You need to eat something. And you need to sleep. The eighty minutes you got last night isn’t nearly enough for a witch to function. You need eight hours. Every night. No excuses.”
I just nodded. That may have been true for Trist and Leland, butIdidn’t need eight hours of sleep every night, which — for me — wasn’t even possible. For light witches, channeling the magic in their blood and turning it into a spell required a lot of energy, and the eight-hour rest period was what light witches needed to refresh their spell counts, their maximum daily spells.
Spell counts were determined by the Goddess, and never went up. Some light witches simply just had higher ones. I’d read Helen’s was twenty-five, the highest of all the light-witchEchelons. At that thought, I bit the inside of my cheek and turned my head so I wouldn’t have to explain the change in my expression — that even the smallest thought of Helen dug up that hollow feeling in my heart.
Trist’s hand moved to my arm, injecting it with small bursts of heat around the same temperature as my old heating pad. The sharp smell of her magic accumulated and, worried I might faint from the overwhelming scent of iron, blood, and electricity, I forced myself to breathe shallowly.
Light magic leaves spelltracks, invisible identifiers that smell like flavors of iron, but only to witches who don’t have light magic. And since I’d never drunk any of the magical sap that gave light witches the power to be either a Creator, Elemental, Enchantress, Healer, Illusionist, Mentalist, or Quantum Witch, while Trist and Leland smelled nothing but fresh air, I drowned in the harsh scent of Trist’s spelltracks.
Leland pushed off the arm of the bench and paced to the front of the porch, where he pulled several lanterns out of thin air and placed them along the rail. Creators could do that: make things, store them in a pocket realm, materialize them at will.Hismagic, however, had no iron smell. It was supposed to. But it smelled like nothing to me. This time, it might have been because I was already drowning in Trist’s, especially as more of it flowed out of her as she moved her hands down the lengths of my legs.
I watched the way he lit the lanterns with a match then made the match disappear. His brown hair lightening as the sun shone brighter and highlighted it with streaks of honey. His hands, covered in those delicate patchwork tattoos, moving with efficiency. Hands on the porch rail. Hands Summoning nothing out of air. Hands sneaking a chestnut to Arnie. I wondered what it would be like to watchhimtend to an injury, how methodical he would be.
That was when I officially decided it. Lelandwasn’tregular. He had the look and confidence of a demi-God, not that they existed. The Goddess was the only deity, at least in this realm. I stopped thinking about the Goddess when Leland’s arm shifted, suddenly recalling where I knew his rose tattoo from.
Death Bonds.
Darkandlight, and Leland had multiples of both of them. A dark Death Bond meant he offered his life as collateral for some kind of agreement. A light Death Bond meant he offered someone else’s.
“You’re staring,” Trist said softly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “His arms — I don’t know why I was doing that.” There was no point denying I’d been looking at him. That I couldn’tstoplooking at him. How odd it was that he said he wasn’t an Enchantress.
If only to appear interested in something other than Leland, I returned to staring at the lines of the porch, appreciating rare, cleansing notes of cedar between bursts of iron, enjoying the view and shade and whatever else struck my interest, so long as it wasn’t Leland. In front of us, a giant tree with trailing white flowers swayed over a small bridge, a gentle stream shimmering opal beneath it. Puffs of small, white flowers floated in the breeze and settled like snowflakes in the grass. It wasn’t a terrible place to wake up in, even if it was odd that he’d left me on the porch instead of taking me indoors.
With the mobility returned to my neck, I turned to take in the rest of the modest cottage, its lemon-colored shutters, its fuchsia tulips blooming in flower baskets hanging beside small windows.
“Whose house is this?” I asked.
“The Echelon Helen Blackburn’s,” Trist said absently, causing Leland to turn. The thin line of his mouth made me wonder if I wasn’t supposed to know. “Andyou,” she said to Leland,catching her mistake, “didn’t tell her she was staying here.”
“No!” I scrambled to a sitting position, too focused on getting away to appreciate I could now move my limbs normally. I looked to Leland, pleading. “I don’t want to stay here.”
“Is there a reason?”
