It was that practicality that had led Maura to send us further and further afield each year to seek the herbs and ingredients that powered our potions and bolstered our spells. Those quests had allowed me to track Rylynn’s descendants when they left the once prosperous town where I’d been born.
Over the past hundred years, they’d all slowly left Velora. Most took the Southern Fate, the closest route to salvation. But a few traveled east or north. None again entered the coven lands, the warning that Rowellyn had whispered making its way through the generations until it became a family legend.
The Gallatins of Crenmea were protected by ancient witch power. Or cursed by it, depending on how fortunes went.
Only one of my sister’s descendants remained in Velora. And she was as stubborn as Rylynn had ever been. I’d had to do more than help from a distance. I knew her name, and unlike her predecessors, she knew mine.
“Are you hungry?” Kyna asked as I shed my cloak.
The cottage she’d inherited from her aunt was sparse but warm. The spell I’d left her with two years before kept the water and mist from the nearby sea from seeping in. She started slicing bread without waiting for an answer. She knew I did not need to eat. She knew I would protest that she needed the food more than I did. That would not stop her from spreading precious butter on the slice before presenting it to me.
“I would rather you eat,” I said, playing out the script. Shedding my cloak allowed me to access the leather purse strapped to my waist. Without preamble, I dumped its contents onto the worn wooden worktable.
Kyna’s hand froze over the brown seeded loaf, her grip on the knife slackening.
Satisfaction rose in my chest—a feeling that had eluded me for a long time, maybe forever. I watched as her brown eyes, twins to my own, estimated the value of the coins I’d piled on the table. The government of Velora had crumbled almost two hundred years ago. But precious metals and gems still held their value, especially when it came to buying passage across the sea.
“It is enough,” I said. “We finally have enough.”
For the last ten years, since the fever that took her parents, Kyna and I had worked continuously toward one goal—saving enough money to buy her passage out of Velora. I used my spells whenever possible to bolster her, saving her from spending on things like firewood or a new roof so she could save every coin.
She was as stubborn as Rylynn had ever been, but she was also practical. She knew there was no future in Velora, and shewanted to leave. With her departure, the last of my sister’s line would be safe.
Kyna did not speak. Her fingers tightened around the knife as she began slicing once again. One slice. Two. And then a third.
“I have invited a friend to join us,” she said.
My throat threatened to close. “Who?”
“He is called Merrick.” She kept her gaze down, avoiding my eyes as she opened the crock of butter and spread a thin layer across all three slices of bread. The crock was low. Suspiciously low.
“He owns the fishing boat down in the harbor,” she added, lifting her eyes over my shoulder.
I followed her gaze to the window, open to let in a slight breeze. The cold did not bother me, but I watched her shiver, the pain in my throat spreading into my chest. From the window, I could see the harbor and the small fishing boat—the only boat—floating there.
A small figure waded through the shallows up to the beach and started on the path that led up the bluff towards the cottage. Kyna tracked him with her eyes. She’d left the window open so she could watch for him. She’d exposed herself to chill, to danger, for him.
The block of ice solidified in my chest.
I forced myself to speak. “A fisherman. You know as well as I that the sea yields less and less with every passing season.”
“I am aware.”
I forced a swallow and then more words. “You will have to travel a day or two on the southern road to reach a port big enough to buy passage. I cannot go with you, but I can spell your traveling clothes so that they keep out the ice and snow.”
Kyna inhaled slowly, her thin chest lifting and then falling. The frame of her body was more like mine than Rylynn’s, but where my curves were always generous and full, the lack of foodkept her thin. Maybe one day, if Maura eventually let our coven leave Velora’s shores, I would get the chance to see Kyna’s body reach its full potential.
She set down the knife, no more butter left to spread, and met my gaze with her equally stubborn one. “I am with child.”
My mouth fell open. “How can that be?”
She pursed her lips. “I would have thought someone of your advanced age would be well aware of how a woman comes to be?—”
“That is not what I meant, and you know it.”
“It is a miracle,” she said softly.
And it was. Women in Velora so rarely quickened with life. It was the only way I’d been able to keep track of all of Rylynn’s descendants for nearly four hundred years. If they’d reproduced at a normal, healthy human rate, I’d never have managed to monitor them all. But then, if Velora was normal and healthy, maybe I would not have felt the duty to watch over them.
