His colour drained. “You mean to tell me you have been alive for more than five centuries? How is that possible?”
I shrugged. “I did a good deed once. A long time ago. And I was rewarded.” I said it with a sneer, making it clear what I thought of the reward. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
“Can you—I mean, are you immortal?”
I smirked. “Can I be killed? Not in my experience, but you’re welcome to give it a try.” I held my arms out, inviting him to use that glittering dagger on me and find out.
He chuckled. “Perhaps later, once the bond has been broken. I wouldn’t want to regret it.”
I lifted a shoulder and turned to keep walking. “I was given eternal life, not immortality. I can be killed, but I can’t die of old age or natural causes. At least, I haven’t yet.” Let him think he could kill me right now if he so wished. Nothing good would come from letting him discover that the bond may have granted him immortality, too. A vision of myself chained in a dungeoncell for centuries while he enjoyed the power and status he so desired sent a chill up my spine.
I needed to change the subject before he got any ideas.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, sarcasm laced through my tone. “How did you come to be a witch hunter? Who was the witch you killedaccidentally?”
He sighed. “It’s a long story.”
I waited a few moments, and when he didn’t continue, I said in a bored tone, “I’m not exactly busy, but if you’d rather not share your story with a wretched creature like me, I suppose I understand.”
My taunting clearly worked, because he cleared his throat, pushed his hand through his hair, and said, “It isn’t something I’m proud of. I was young, and new to the force. You see, in Sicily, the witch hunters are like a local police constabulary. I was the fourth son of a lord. My father had no use for me; my brothers ignored me. Then my mother died in childbirth.” His voice broke and he covered it by coughing into his fist. After a moment, he went on. “It was a little girl, the child. A sister. But Death robbed me of a mother and a baby sister that day. Father was furious, he blamed the midwives. Accused them of being witches and had them tried and executed. I suppose that’s when I first came to believe witches were evil; I was only a child, and my mother had been taken from me. My father wanted someone to blame and I looked up to him at the time.”
I listened in silence, feeling the ice in my heart begin to crack a little at his tale. But if I’d had an apple for every person in Sherwood who’d lost a parent or sibling and hadn’t become a witch killer, I’d be eating apple pie until my final days.
“So, you joined the witch hunters?” I prompted. We were still a fair distance away from the clearing, and I hadn’t spotted a suitable vine or spied a raven’s nest yet.
Stefano huffed. “Not right away, but yes, eventually. My brothers left home one by one; to the army, the monastery. My father never left his study. I fell in with a bad crowd, until the chief witch hunter found me and took me under his wing. I didn’t know it, but I’d been looking for a purpose, and a strong role model. A real father figure. I’d been alone for years, and now I had found a whole new family in the witch hunters.”
I watched him as he spoke, the tension leaving his shoulders the more he shared. I didn’t know how much of what he’d said to believe, but I didn’t get the feeling he’d made it up. Why lie to me? I was no one; a witch. And after the bond broke, he never had to see me again.
“How did it happen? Your first kill?”
It was a few minutes before he spoke up again. I slowed, looking around for the right kind of creeping vine. There was a weeping willow ahead, maybe that would do?
Stefano realised I’d fallen behind and paused, waiting for me to catch up. In the dappled light falling through the leaves, he looked almost handsome. Shadows emphasised his strong jaw and lengthened his lashes, as he watched me walking towards him, a slightly bashful look on his face. He clearly felt vulnerable about what he’d shared with me; it was easy to talk openly when you weren’t looking someone in the eye, maybe he regretted saying so much?
“Here,” I said. “Help me with this.” I grabbed a hold of the willow’s branches and held them out, measuring a rough length. Stefano pulled out his dagger and began to cut through the supple wood.
“She was my friend.”
I looked up from the branches, but he carried on carving as he spoke, his eyes on his work. Up this close, I could see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes that glistened with emotion.
“She worked for us, at the manor house, as a maid. Her name was Alessia. We were around the same age, I’d grown up with her. I’d always felt drawn to her. But then I joined the witch hunters, and we grew apart. She pulled away from me, and at the time I’d no idea why. Until I found her in the kitchens with a book of witchcraft and various craftwares around her. She tried to deny it, explain it away. Then she begged me not to tell. But I was young and felt everything so strongly—the hurt and humiliation, knowing what she’d kept from me all those years. We struggled, she picked up a kitchen knife, and somehow, the knife ended up in her chest. It was an accident.” His voice had grown thick and I could see his eyes shining in the dimness of the forest. I almost reached a hand out to cover his, to comfort him. But then the vines snapped and the moment was over. He blinked away his emotion before looking up at me. “I became a sort of folk hero after that, people told the tale of how I’d killed a witch single-handed, as though I hadn’t just lost my oldest friend. And I couldn’t admit the truth; that I’d killed her by mistake. Everything changed after that.”
I swallowed an unexpected lump in my throat. “And now you’re here.”
He hummed. “And now I’m here.”
The air between us had grown thick and thrummed with tension. He stood so close to me, if I moved just an inch we’d have been touching. I could see the way his hair curled against his forehead, the lines at the corners of his eyes from squinting in the sun and laughing.
The warmth that flooded my chest as he gazed down at me snapped me back to the present moment. This couldn’t be happening, I did not care for humans. I didn’t care for anyone. Especially a man. I needed to put an end to this.
In an instant, I shrank down into a squirrel and scurried up the nearest oak tree. While I ran along the branches, peekinginto birds’ nests, I tried to calm my racing thoughts. I had spent centuries building up the ice around my heart; protecting myself from being hurt again. I couldn’t throw that all away now, just because a pretty boy told me a pretty story.
And in truth, he was an ugly boy. His soul, his heart, his past. All twisted and dark and painful. And it was an ugly story, a tale of another young witch dead by the sheriff’s hands, or at his command.
I clambered into a raven’s nest at the topmost tip of the tree and lunged for a feather trapped in the entwined twigs that made up the nest. My squirrel hands fumbled the feather, just as an enormous falcon appeared and struck out at me with its deathly-sharp beak. I squealed and tumbled out of the nest, falling several feet before twisting my body and grabbing onto the first branch I could reach. I scampered down to where Stefano stood and transformed, chest heaving and limbs groaning.
His shock must have worn off after seeing me turn into a squirrel and then back again, because all he said was, “Ah, so that is how you vanished at the cottage.”
