PROLOGUE
I died alonein a frostbitten forest.
It was not heroic.
I did not die defending an innocent or hunting to feed my loved ones.
I died because I was reckless and cowardly. I died running away.
Alone, half-soaked in a frigid stream with icicles in my hair, I slowly froze to death. The cold stole my last breath, no more than a wisp of frost in the air as my organs stopped pumping and my eyes turned unseeing.
And that would have been the end of my story.
A selfish girl who died alone in the wood, having spurned those who would have missed her.
Until the witches found me.
I was dead. I did not hear their approach, could not wonder or worry. My soul—whatever fragment of self remains when the body dies—was not aware of itself. I saw no afterlife. Nor did I linger above my lifeless body, contemplating my existence, as the poets would have us believe.
One moment, I existed. The next, I did not.
But then I did again.
Sight returned first. Dark figures lurked on the edge of an even deeper darkness. The only light filtered down from a mostly obscured moon. Yet I could see the outline of each cloaked body clearly.
Next came sound. They chanted, deep and low. Words—words I should have recognized but could not force my mind to parse. I felt the thrumming of my blood in my veins, surging in time with their otherworldly chorus. But how could that be? I’d felt my blood slow and stop in time with my heart…
Blood.
The scent of it flooded my consciousness until the smell was the color and the sound. Red, hot, demanding. I’d never spilled enough of my own blood to learn the scent of it. But as I felt my knees bend beneath me, lifting me out of the frozen creek bed, I knew the tang in my nostrils belonged to me.
It dripped from my fingertips as I stood. There was a cut on my left forearm, just above the wrist. The blood flowed freely, thick and unclotted. Mesmerized, I lifted my fingers, entranced by the pattern of scarlet rivulets that decorated my palm and knuckles. My eyes followed the path—over my skin, down to the snow-covered ground. A thick layer of frost coated the rocks and mud at the edge of the stream. Droplets of fallen blood spread over the ice, their shapes distorting as their warmth melted the thin top layer of ice.
But the blood did not end there. It was all around me. I’d been freezing, not bleeding… so much blood… how was I alive?
The blood was not in a pool around me. It spread out in purposeful, intersecting lines. Five of them. And I stood at the center.
It wasn’t possible. Unless…
Unless I wasn’t alive at all.
Five lines. Five points. Five figures chanting.
Except they were no longer chanting.
A lone hooded figure approached, walking a straight line from the point where two lines of my blood joined until she stood directly before me.
She. I knew without seeing the face beneath the hood.
A hand emerged from the layers of heavy fabric, its graceful movements at odds with its ten long nails, each sharpened to a point. It took my larger one without hesitation. As if she was entitled to touch me.
I didn’t catch her words. The silence around me was too loud. But I watched as her other hand produced a needle and thread and her graceful fingers stitched my skin back together. A few more words and a bandage appeared from the frigid air, winding itself around my wound.
She squeezed my hand, now suddenly clean of blood, before retreating to her point on the pentagram.
Five lines. Five points. Five witches.
And I stood at their center.
