Prologue
"You're certain you want me to try this?" The withering old woman clasped her wrinkle-etched hands together. "If her heart has already stopped, even magic won’t save her.”
The young woman at her doorstep placed a gentle hand across her barely bulging stomach. "I know. But I have to try. I can't lose her. I've already lost her father."
"You're so sure it's a girl?" The elder witch's eyes twinkled for just a mere moment with a revived vibrance.
The young mother nodded with confidence. Through pursed lips that had long ago shriveled into thin lines, the old woman let out a heavy sigh.
"I'll do what I can, Dyanna," she said. "Come forward."
Dyanna, unnerved at the mention of her name when she hadn't yet revealed it, stepped towards the figure in the middle of the dim cottage, surrounded by overflowing shelves of tomes, liquid vials, and jars of luminescent powders.
"One thing you should know." The witch began pacing around her, eyeing the bump of her belly. "Ifthe spell works, and thechild lives, she will be marked by the truth. You won’t be able to hide this from her—or anyone else.”
“I'll make sure she is protected. I'll keep her hidden."
"Your confidence blinds you to reality, my dear. This won't be easy. For you or the child. Things could become dangerous quickly. I myself fear I may not be safe even here much longer."
"I'll take care of her. I'll do what her father failed to do." Dyanna's heart quickened at the thought of him, how he'd vanished without so much as a goodbye, knowing she was carrying his sickly child.
“And when you no longer can?” The woman glowered. “Then what? Who will protect her?”
A breath caught in Dyanna’s chest, doubt flaring for a heartbeat. But then she pushed it down and gathered the courage to answer.
“The truth,” she said simply.
"Very well, then." The old woman nodded and held out her hand. "Just leave my name out of it if things don't go as planned."
Dyanna straightened her shoulders and placed a coin purse in the woman's crinkled palm. "You have my word."
1
The Witch
Caramyn
Twenty years later...
If she didn’t kill them, the Shadows would. It was much quicker that way. And much more merciful.
It didn’t matter where they came from or why. She’d learned by now that innocence was never called to these Woods. If they were here, they were a threat.
Nocking a feather-fletched arrow, Caramyn held her breath as she watched the three intruders below whispering around their fire. She was surprised they’d made it this long. Most were dead in less than an hour.
“We shouldn’t be in these Woods.” One of the men leaned forward, checking over his shoulder both directions. “What if the Witch knows we’re here?”
“Calm down.” The man next to him sneered. “We’re at least safer with her than in the Felhold prisons. Robbing that royal gravesite was the best idea you’ve had in ages, but we can’t spend the spoil until we’ve laid low for a while. Believe me, no one will look for us here.”
Another man tossed a twig into the fire. “He’s right. There’s no Witch anyway. It’s all made up horseshit to keep people scared. Witches, Shadows, those abominations with the haunted eyes—they’re all long gone with the last of the magic scum. And there’s probably such a spoil left behind at the Veil from the battle. Mark my words, they just don’t want us common folk knowing what treasures they’re hiding in these Woods.”
Caramyn’s pressed her lips together. It was almost comical what these people thought up. There was no treasure within these trees. Only an ominous force that loomed beyond where even she dared to venture. A great void of black mist where the forest abruptly ended and a wall of darkness began—the Veil. A barrier of Shadow where the last Shadowblood took his final stand against the Lightborn, banishing them into the abyss, and where the remnants of his dark power lingered over the Woods like a suffocating cloak. And now, Shadows haunted the forest as prowling wraiths, emitting ghostly whispers and deathly curses that would chill even the bravest warrior’s blood. And they certainly knew these intruders were here.
These fools were right about one thing, though. She was no witch. At least not the sort that once freely thrived in Evylere before it was a crime punishable by death.
No. Not a witch. She was something so wretched that only darkness defended her, and the Shadows were as real the cursed mark on her arm that bound her to them—that pattern of black,inky branch-like veins beneath pale skin that clustered in the hollow of her elbow and spread down her forearm in three delicate tendrils that all too strongly resembled roots.
The mark of a Shadowblood—though her half-Lightborn mother always swore it was anything but, that it wasn’t possible. But she’d heard the stories. She knew the horrifying truth of the marks that betrayed cursed blood darkened by Shadows.
