Though blood flowed in my veins, it was not my heart that pumped it, but an ancient power. That same power now surged through me, claiming every corner of my being. When I lifted my hand again, frost coated my fingertips where moments before had been blood.
I was not alive. Nor was I truly dead. Not reborn, but remade.
A fragment of memory curled around the icy stalagmites of my mind. An old adage, a line of a faerietale, a whisper of who I’d been before. Uttered by someone who’d loved me, who I’d loved in return.
But new words forestalled the old. The same witch who’d stitched my wound lowered her hood, revealing a riot of black curls and an eerie but alluring countenance that matched her hand. “Welcome, sister.”
The words hung in the air. Then more joined them—the voices of the other witches echoing her greeting.
But different words filled my mind. Words that as a child I’d never fully understood. I was little more than a girl now, but I knew their truth in the same way that I knew my name. And knew what I now was.
A witch.
My mother’s voice whispered a farewell as the girl I’d been slipped away.Beware, sweet Koryn. Witches are not born. They are made.
PART I
MERCY
They bow beneath the weight of sin,
Still mercy’s light glows clear?—
To lift the low, restore the lost,
An act of faith and fear.
CHAPTER 1
Three hundred and seventy-seven years later…
Desperation had a taste.Some people tried to season it to make the flavor more palatable. They spiced it with anger or sadness or bravado. But it was a futile effort. It always tasted the same in the end.
In the last four hundred years, desperation had become the national dish of Velora. Though calling what remained of the continent a nation would be overly generous. Four hundred years ago, the gods sentenced the continent of Velora to death. She’d taken her time about it, but there was no mistaking it now. The once prosperous, viable land was in her final death throes. Those who lingered here were either stupid or desperate. Most were some combination of both.
Not me.
I was perfectly aware of the gravity of my situation. Alone. Abandoned by my coven. Unlike the humans mulling around the dark hovel of a tavern where I’d taken refuge, I would not starve to death.
I forced myself to eat a bit of the gruel that I’d purchased from the gaunt proprietor. His bluster was apparent even from the dark corner where I sat. He wore it like armor, glaring at every person who blew through the door, bringing a gust of frigid air with them. The skin around his face was loose, his neck even worse. The thick woolen scarf he wore wrapped around it did little to disguise the slack skin. Once, he had been a bull of a man. Muscular, strong. Intimidating, even. But the gods had stolen that vitality from him, leaving a decaying husk. It was not even a metaphor; the comparison to the landscape and continent beyond was too direct for poetry.
The gruel stuck in my throat, but I forced it down. Witches needed no such mortal sustenance; we were already dead, after all. My body was sustained by ancient power, not by nutrients. But I could still feel hunger and cold, even if they would not be enough to kill me. The gruel was noxious enough I would have preferred the hunger, but it comforted the humans to see me eat.
It was one of dozens of small adjustments that I’d learned to make. My hair was braided instead of loose around my shoulders, the way I’d prefer it. No part of a witch was meant to be constrained. My nails were trimmed to points, but they did not curl around to kiss my palms, like the witches of the ancient covens. I’d even softened my coven mark—though too soon, it would begin to fade. My connection to my sisters was weakening.
I forced down another bite of gruel, studying the other occupants of the tavern. I could tell by looking what most of them would ask for, though who would summon the courage—or desperation—to approach first was not as clear to me. Would it be the young mother in the corner, squalling child at her empty breast? She would ask for a spell to increase the supply of her milk so that her child might live another week. There was a reason so few children were born in Velora. The land could notsustain them, nor their mothers. Perhaps it was a bit of mercy from Seraxa, that instead of allowing the children to be born only for their mothers to watch them die, the women of Velora hardly ripened with child at all.
Or perhaps it would be the farmer. Two hundred years ago, farmers were easy to spot. They were lean, like all the others as food became scarcer, but they still had muscle. Even as crops declined year after year, they fed themselves and their families. Theyhadfamilies. But over the last century, that had changed. The crops dwindled to nothing. With neither crops to tend nor food to sustain them, their muscles disappeared. Their wives were now gone, their children unborn. Stolen by the gods.
A hundred years ago, I’d had a coven around me. My existence had been fraught in many ways, but at least I’d had my sisters. I’d hadsomething.
A hundred years could change everything.
The farmer in the corner ordered a watered ale instead of wine. He saw me waiting. He would spend his last coin on a spell in hopes of coaxing some bit of life from Velora’s fallow, worthless ground. And I would take it from him.
My shoulder blades drew together, my body protesting the decision my mind had already made. Any kindness died when I did, I reminded myself. My heart was too dead to protest the lies that I told myself in order to keep moving forward.
The fae were the first to leave, retreating beyond the mountains to their walled refuge. No one had seen or heard from them in more than three centuries. Good riddance. All of this was their fault. Not just the curse—all of it.
