“And what passed between you?”
Every eye in the room fixes on me.
I swallow. “He walked me partway home.”
A murmur ripples outward.
“He had no burns when last seen,” Ravik Keld interjects from the side, his broad arms folded over his chest. “Yet he was found reduced to ash. Care to explain that?”
Explain? I don’t even know what happened. I feel the edges of last night pressing inward, the memory threatening to spill free if I loosen my hold on it.
“I cannot,” I say.
The words hang there, thin and inadequate.
Garruk’s mother rises abruptly. “She’s always been strange,” she says, voice trembling. “Talking to herself over herbs and bones. My sister swore she saw smoke coming from her chimney at odd hours.”
“That is how one boils tinctures,” I reply before I can stop myself.
Laughter breaks from somewhere in the back, sharp and unkind.
“You think this is amusing?” another voice calls. “Men do not burn to nothing without cause.”
The room feels smaller. I sense it before I understand it, a tightening beneath my sternum, a pulse that does not match my own. Heat flickers low in my veins, subtle but insistent.
Matron Yselle’s gaze sharpens. “Have you engaged in any practices beyond herbcraft, Elowen?”
The accusation lands plainly now. Witch. My pulse spikes. I am aware of it with terrible clarity, the acceleration, the rush of blood in my ears, the suffocating awareness of being surrounded. Of being judged. Of standing utterly alone.
The bond responds. It is not visible, not yet. But it flares like breath against dry tinder, reacting to the sharp rise of helplessness I struggle to contain.
I try to relax myself the way I always have. Slow breath in. Slower breath out. Peace is safer. But this is not a wandering hand in a crowded market. This is a room full of eyes and suspicion thick enough to choke on.
“She brought this upon him,” someone mutters.
“She cursed him.”
My stomach drops. I don’t know what to do.
Across the village, something ignites. The sound reaches us seconds later, shouts from outside, startled and sharp. The doors of the hall swing open as smoke begins to rise in a thick column beyond the rooftops.
“Fire!” someone cries.
We spill into the street in chaotic motion. Ravik’s hay shed at the edge of the square is engulfed, flames climbing high and hungry, devouring dry thatch with unnatural speed. The blaze is not white-gold like the alley. But it is fierce. Too fierce.
And as I stand there, heart pounding, I feel the echo of it inside me.
The villagers turn slowly. Toward me. I do not need anyone to speak the accusation aloud.
The lifeline thrums once beneath my ribs, low and powerful, as if answering a question I did not dare ask. This is not over…
The fire does not behave like ordinary flame. It does not simply climb. It surges. The hay within the shed collapses inward with a roar as sparks spiral upward in a violent column, twisting in a pattern that feels horribly familiar. The heat pushes outward in a wave that forces several villagers back. Ravik shouts something I cannot hear over the ringing in my ears.
I taste ash.
Someone grabs a bucket. Another forms a line toward the well. Water arcs uselessly against the blaze, hissing into steam before it ever reaches the heart of it.
The flames pulse. My breath stutters. I feel each flare as if it were happening beneath my skin. The bond tightens abruptly, and for a fraction of a second the world tilts. The roar of the fire dulls, replaced by that second heartbeat I felt in the alley. Vast and watching.
