We looked around, searching for the person it belonged to. It wasn’t a voice I recognized, so I didn’t know if it was friend or foe. But it did sound... old. So I wasn’t sure I needed to be so on guard.
“Who said that?” Katrinka demanded, sounding bolder than I had ever heard her. But then she pushed her glasses up her nose and left a smudge of dirt along her cheekbone, ruining the effect.
There was a fluttering in branches overhead. It was abrupt and aggressive, so much so that the light flickered around us. We spun in circles, searching for signs of life, when suddenly an elderly woman appeared. She had arrived behind us, so when we turned around after sensing her, it was impossible to tell if she’d simply manifested out of thin air or walked around the corner.
“Who are you?” I demanded before she could answer Katrinka’s question. She looked as old and creaking as her voice had sounded. She was wrinkled everywhere and dressed in thin black cloth that I could see straight through. Although she’d been wrapped in layers from head to toe, so she wasn’t indecent. In fact, even her head was covered in black cloth.
Her skin was dark brown with white powder streaking over her cheeks and forehead. Her lips were painted a dark burgundy with a single line of white marking the center of both the top and the bottom. And she had small rings piercing the length of her ears and along her eyebrows. The little hair I could see had turned gray, frizzing where her head covering had pulled back over her forehead. Tightly coiled curls escaped around her temple. She was old, I could tell. But she held an heir of authority that put every royal I’d met thus far to shame.
“This is my land,” the woman said with a bob of her chin. For as old as she was, she did not stoop or hunch but stood ramrod straight. “So I will ask you the same question. Who is it that trespasses in my bog?”
“Your bog?” I gulped down a big breath and looked around, seeing it again from a different perspective. This was not the full forest near the Keep with its petal-like leaves blanketing the ground. This was, in fact, a swampy, marshy bog. How had we wandered so far from the castle in such a short time? “This... er, bog is your territory?”
“I’m the Bog Witch, child. Of course this bog is my territory.”
Katrinka and I shared another look. The Bog Witch? What did that mean?
“I will ask you one more time,” she said coolly. “Whoareyou?”
This time, it was not me confessing my identity impetuously. But my sister.
Kat burst with, “We are princesses from Elysia. Guests of your queen.”
If possible, the Bog Witch’s nose lifted higher. “She is not my queen.” Katrinka reached out and grabbed my hand. “As for the princess part... I have been under the assumption Elysia has no princesses. Not since they killed the king’s family. So you’re either lying to me or deluding yourself into thinking something entirely untrue.”
ChapterFifteen
Irealized all at once we were facing an enemy. And if not an enemy, then someone who could become one quickly. I wasn’t sure what Katrinka’s training had been like or if she’d ever been prepared for combat, but my entire body flexed and tensed in wait for what was ahead.
My sword was back in my room. Packed away thanks to Clesta, who always insisted that I did not need it. Well, Katrinka and I had found ourselves in the middle of a witch’s territory without a weapon or guard. I wished Clesta was here to witness it just so I could prove my point.
“We are true princesses of Elysia,” I told the Bog Witch with as confident of a voice as I could manage. “Our family was killed nearly nine years ago. But my sister and I were saved. We’ve grown up apart from the capital, but we have come home to claim our birthright.” I cleared my throat and added, “We have no reason to lie to you. We’re guests of Queen Ravanna. We had no intention to cross into your territory. We are here quite by mistake, I assure you.”
Her intense gaze moved over us as if measuring our worth and weighing the truth in our words. Shiksa had disappeared. But movement behind the surrounding dead tree trunks had me on edge, waiting for the attack.
“Daughters of Elysia?” she asked, considering. Katrinka and I nodded. “Then you’ve come to claim your mother’s birthright as well. I tell you, I will not give it up easily.”
I shared a look with my sister, unease unfurling inside me with wings as mighty and powerful as any dragon. “Our mother’s birthright? What do you mean?”
She began to walk, evenly spaced steps as she circled us, and it was like branches of a tree swaying in the wind. Her lithe body moved liquidly over the ground as if she was not even touching the soft earth. But the menacing smile in her voice made chills rise on the back of my neck.
“You’re like newborn babes. The two of you. Thrown into the middle of your destiny by fate yet uneducated in the ways of your blood. How will you take either of your thrones if you are so naïve to what lies ahead?” She paused, thinking. “Or what came before?”
Either of our thrones? What could she mean? A throne for me? And a throne for Katrinka, assuming she married a king? But what had she meant by claiming our mother’s birthright? More questions to add to the litany of others. And at the center, more mystery about our mother. What I wouldn’t give to ask her all these myself. “What came before?” I asked.
At the same time, Katrinka said, “What lies ahead?”
This made the Bog Witch laugh. “If you are home again, in Elysia, do you possess the Crown of Nine?” Neither of us answered her. We’d positioned ourselves back-to-back while she continued to walk slow circles around us. “You do. Of course you do. No one would accept your legitimacy without it. But you are still missing a crown. It is the one your aunt seeks even now. The Crown of Nine is only half of the puzzle.”
“Our aunt?” I blurted, hardly believing the words this strange woman was saying. “You can’t mean?”
She paused, turning to meet my eyes and, once again, search for the truth. She must have seen honesty in my face because her ringed eyebrows dipped over her eyes. “She has not told you? Do you really not know?”
“Know what?” Katrinka gasped, unraveling under the pressure of this meeting.
“There are always two to a family. Witches, I mean. There is one to wield the light and one to balance the dark. This has been true even after the Century War when magic was banned. But the night your mother was born, there were two moons in the sky. Rather, a full moon, cut in two. One side was much greater than the other side. A bulging sphere to a sliver of insignificance. It was said about your mother that she would restore magic to the realm and balance the opposing forces. The light with the dark. The land with the kings. The past with the future. But we knew another would come after her. And when her sister was born, the moon was absent from the sky. And the stars hid behind storm clouds. She screamed her way through the veil and shook her fist at all that would oppose her. Still, your mother loved her. Cared for her. Cherished her. They were inseparable.
By the time your uncle came along, they had already decided how they would rule the world. But the little moon did not like being outshined by the larger moon. She did not like having little moon power or getting lost in the light of the big moon. And no matter how much magic the little moon gathered, the larger moon always had more. If they had loved each other less, they would have seen the danger ahead of them. But their love for each other blinded the need for balance. And so it was all for naught in the end. There is no balance. The magic has not yet been restored. And the crowns that could save their mission grow dimmer and dimmer.”
